An emergency prompted I sit in a lawn chair on the Gulf of Mexico with my family this weekend, slathering layers of pink pigment from the Sun’s demand on to my shoulders and chest. I wore a shirt in four days the same amount I stood under the shower faucet — once total, to the agreement of my self and my what would seem the inner interlocution concerning my life’s direction, which is not as large and complex as I once thought it to be.
Ask a year ago — or to another extreme — two years ago, what I ought to be doing with my life, and surely some insecure pretense would say “I know exactly what!” though no actions embodied seem to provide a paralell verdict. Of course, much of that’s been discussed here and rather than repeating motions of awareness I only wish to build upon them and show some forward movement.
My family continues to be a strong source of scaffolding for my existence — not only a reassurance of who I am, but moreover a reinforcement of who I ought to be. My sister especially, for in our adult years all the shared experiences of she and I with our parents, whom I love deeply and understand more and more deeply that who I am is because of who they consistently have been for no less than some two decades and more than a half, her understanding of unintelligibly long sentences if this is an example.
I love them much that I find more and more my placement here is a man of Family — a man who understands his household is what best embodies who humans in general ought to be: the mutual selflessness, giving, benevolence, and well, ability to laugh at each other. And with burned shoulders and the curliest hair my mother framed on my face and the dimpled grin my father placed in my cheekbones, I’m sitting in bed, back in Dallas, hoping for so much, after years of what seems like missing out on it all.
Some things from this weekend have stayed, where as some were meant to stay with the weekend. And specifically how it ought to apply in my life. What ismost valuable?
I’ve spent the better part of the last decade resolving I was a single man, fit for the work of the Kingdom and what extra time singleness allows for study and for service. I searched deep and wide for whether or not it was that precise calling or my own anti-calling (that of selfishness and to control my own time, effort, and finances). I’m coming closer to the understanding that it’s indeed not the former.
These newfound (though not sudden) discoveries have also shed intense light on how I ought to live. I told my parents only a few months ago (on their extravagant back porch, somewhere aloof my memories of that very same space growing up though it occupies the same; lawnmower sounds and allergy attacks), that the next roommate I have will be my wife, to further solidify earlier statements.
Probably the best thing I have done in years is move in to this house — Maté — benefiting from and hopefully benefiting others by sharing this communal space to musicians, scribes, searchers, the depressed, the most burnt and bitter to the most reverent and rejoicing. If ever I have grown socially in such a compressed amount of time, it’s surely these past six month. And even after a few months living here I might have had the thought, “I am never living alone again.”
After all, I am quick to say things far too soon.
Tonight I spent a drive to Whole Foods in Lakewood, an equal distance from both Ellsworth and from Vickery as is Maté, and purchased a plot of goods I might dine on the steps of either/and. I had accumulated much in my silence on the beach this weekend, and when I returned to Dallas proper after the four days away, I wanted nothing more than to revisit past nights of unpacking I have hardly known but one night a week or less since moving here.
In so doing, I lead west up Abrams to Richmond, took a left and went on through Skillman, making a left at Matilda. A few minutes later I was at the stoop of Vickery in which so much clarification internally was reached about my time in New York — so much was spent with one I love — and so much searching was exercised in light of, well, what seemed to be the entire world staring. I sat with an Avery Seventeen and looked to You, great God, and thought how I had missed trusting you like I once did, and that thankful that I am now again learning more sincerely and truly than ever.
I spent a good thirty on those steps, before I knew the next stop was ultimately to take a right from Mockingbird and on down to the Williamson trail-mast swingsets. I didn’t swing, though at those picnic tables we know I sat and stared at the inertia above the gravel pit, the question “why would you tell me that?” & a smile I have not felt as genuinely since.
Snuggled in the corner among English-speakers and football loyalists among the cigar-soaked walls of the Dubliner, a place only years ago I frequented as “office” and of space efficient for writing such as this.
The last time I watched a game of the World Cup also was the eighteenth, when Germany faced Portugal. I had been in New York City as resident for no more than two weeks and sat across a table and a salmon brunch from my roommate, Allen, an alien before that day of audaciously hot summer city apartment-hunting walk we did (and to no avail).
God, I hadn’t met you yet.
Pulled out a seat at Think in the upstairs loft, looking out across the street and into the most beautiful green scaffolding that obscures one of what I guess to be thousands of ongoing construction projects in the city. This morning’s catch is a trippio trimmed to the top of the demitasse lip, served speedily by the summer-gripped ginger girl in the Mets cap.
Think is where I’ve come since my friend Esther told me about it a few years ago. Hidden away on Mercer in the basic center of New York University, I am typically the only one here not to work on a paper due the next morning, or to share heavy-handed opinions about my psychology professor. I’m this odd hybrid of outsider-in(sider-out), and know enough about the city to feel comfortable, and some of its nuance from having tapped to its rhythms for a year; while outside of an understanding of the context as more current than my time living here.
Each time I’ve flown into the city in the past four years, accompanied by the portion of motion sickness I inherited from my mother is an overwhelming shame or desire for reconciliation — to make right what I thought was so wrong, and that in part my purpose in some trips past was that. However, on Wednesday night my plane flew over Citifield near Jamaica, and already I could tell something was utterly different about the hue of this trip as compared to all the cyclically-caustic-carbon-copy colours preceding it.
The appeal of New York is gone for me in so many ways — at least in the ways that relate to my past belief that by moving back here I might be able to fix the failure I considered in leaving. But why did I feel the failure? And why did I let that shit seep into my every thought, trickle down my limbs, and surround every sinew and stem in the obscure corners of my brain?
In the way that the prideful man is at the center of his own universe, the victim too is at the center of his. Made less himself by entitlement, self-preservation, and self-seeking, while misled that it is actually these things which make him more himself. And the deeper one becomes in his entitlement (or misperception of it), the greater the victim he becomes. And through all this, the victim was never a victim at all — though the psychological framework he himself has constructed continually, subconsciously, fortifies it all, and layers and layers build up. And the cycle is terrible, if for the mere fact that none of it is grounded in reality, though for other reasons as well.
In the deep parts of this past fall, something remarkable happened. I began praying again — I began trying to believe that kind of thing was actually effectual, and that it actually had some function in my life. It wasn’t some existential-theological-battle to begin again. I didn’t start for selfless reasons — I started to pray again for therapy. But the activity itself definitely lends itself to a posture of selflessness — of admitting that I myself lack power to fix stuff. I started because it provided me cathartic satisfaction, and I didn’t – at that point – think that it was accomplishing little anything past that.
I’ve sung all the hymns. “My chains are gone,” and the Gospel’s power to do so and such and such and on and on. “But from what,” I’d always thought. Sure, I’d memorized the Answers, but had I ever come into an experience of slavery in need of liberation? From what was my Exodus?
It wasn’t until the fall of 2009, when I started to try to start to try to pray again that I realized how enslaved I was to so many things — of shame, guilt, self-seeking, and the behaviors allowed by all of those, and that also allow for all of those.
On my first night in the city only days ago, I called my dad from the thirty-second floor rooftop, looking out over Lower Manhattan — Wall Street, The East River, & the Brooklyn Bridge. Sipping a Brooklyn Lager, I told my dad about the consummation of these realizations, that I think only could really reach this point with the assistance of another visit, especially since I consider my last trip in August to be the absolute center of that low season.
I told him I was ready to be home, and that I no longer felt like I had to either visit, and, especially, move to New York to truly find the meaning of that word. I no longer have a need to fix anything here — not because anything was repaired, but because my perception of it was.
I want to believe the messy parts of me are being redeemed, and I’m learning that a big part of believing that is, well, believing it.