Change

The other reason I’ve withdrawn from social media is because I’ve already lost almost an entire year with my daughter and I don’t want any unnecessary distractions when she gets here. Already since leaving Facebook I’ve interacted more often and better with her than anytime in the last year. I guess I needed a year to wean myself from social media and back on to family. In a way, I’m grateful for this year apart for that very fact as I hope to be a better man to the people in my life as a result.

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As a young man I sought a good place for life. A situation of challenge, opportunity and interest. As an older man I want only a place of peace. Somewhere comfortable and out of the way. Where I can be forgotten by society, to be with my family, together with my thoughts. To die then with my eyes wide open.

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I think it’s possible to overwork the soil of life such that her yield and productivity diminish like the farmland of the Dustbowl. Better sometimes to load up the jalopy with what’s left, hoist grandpa on back with the kids and strike out for a new world. Do you remember that passage in The Grapes of Wrath when grandma burned the family photos?

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There are different ways of becoming lost. In the most common sense this refers to losing ones physical way, becoming disoriented and unable to discern the right path. Being lost can also describe the mental experience of losing faith in what was previously assumed true, of doubting our core principals and moving with cautious confusion into places where new ideas and ways of thinking threaten like exotic beasts in an unfamiliar land. That’s the sort of lost I seek. The explorer’s lost. The lost of moving away from the familiar, into regions of the mind where there are no landmarks or maps.

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Every day after work I get in my car and drive north. When my family arrives I’ll drive south. I dream of driving south.

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Confidence deceives
I’d rather have courage without it

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Dissatisfaction is such a powerful catalyst of change. I wonder where our species would be today if we never got fed up?

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Early in the novel The Grapes of Wrath there’s s scene when the man in the bulldozer strikes the Joad family home on the side, knocking the structure askew and off its foundation. It’s that moment when the family knows their world there is at an end, and they must look and move into the future. That’s a little what it’s like to go away and come back. The world here is knocked forward by time and different. I can’t expect the same life. And must instead hoist my bags and move again to the new life.

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Midlife Relief is the awakening gratitude that the dreams of youth never came true.

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Mental quiescence and physical ruin. A midlife juxtaposition.

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One of the best things about getting old is having a rich and deep pool of memories to swim in when there’s nothing else to do.

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When you can perceive
The slow dissolution
Of atoms
You may lose interest in
Building castles of sand

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It’s an ironic thing that both the best and worst part of new beginnings is the fact of starting over.

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Good living requires space and wide margins. Pages should be turned. Old journals put aside when the writer becomes someone new. How can I swear allegiance to thoughts which are no longer my own. Ideas I’ve outgrown. Move on from that page of cluttered nonsense. Begin again.

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The next generation’s mandate is not to continue what we left off, but to carry on where we left off. I think this distinction explains so much of the discontent I read from older Americans regarding the state and condition of the younger generation. They’re gonna do just fine without us, in a world we couldn’t possibly tolerate or understand.

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I left for Japan craving something. And returned to America craving nothing. Such a change.

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Our Japanese next door neighbors moved our. We’ll miss them. Even though we never met them.

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Living overseas I saw America as through the wrong end of a telescope. Everything was small, distant and indistinct. Eventually, what was happening here became hardly relevant. News of an alien world. Now that I’m back, events are full, crisp, lively and bursting with relevance, as well as a biting and immediate importance. But it wasn’t like that for me before I left. I wonder if it’s maturity, the fact of leaving, or both, which have made the difference?

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While riding my motorcycle to the beach just now, I passed an enormous mega-church holding a fair in their parking lot. There were dozens of vendors attending hundreds of happy people. I marveled at the fact of this large community, organized around a beloved and shared common belief. And then my mind expanded to consider that such communities, large and small, literally fill our nation, defining much of our shared culture, tradition and way of life. I thought to myself “this force is immense, definitive, and permanent. What could ever counter such an organized, well established system, grounded in tradition, rooted in faith?”