FOR YOUR INFORMATION
I'm working on a new book which is a collection of previously published essays and some excerpts of my books. As BB and I are proofreading this document, I came across this piece that I thought might interest my readers:
A FATHER’S TAKE ON ANXIETY
My da was an Irish Roman Catholic brakeman on the railroad, who managed only a seventh grade education. He was a wise man albeit life’s Job from the Bible. His mother died in Cook County Hospital in Chicago when he was born; his father took off for points unknown never to be seen again.
Reared by his Irish relatives in Iowa, he grew up into young manhood during the “Roaring Twenties,” and had difficulty settling down even after he met my mother. She was patient and would in time be his anchor and lighthouse. The 1930s were the years of The Great Depression, and then came World War Two, rearing four children on a railroad brakeman’s income.
He was proud of his work and loved the railroad. During the war, he carried wounded soldiers from the battlefields of the South Pacific from Boone, Iowa to Clinton, Iowa on his Chicago & North Western Railway trains heading to Schick General Hospital, a US Army hospital in Clinton, or hospitals due East. Often, he was so distraught seeing these wounded young men that he could not talk to my mother or anyone after completing his trip.
When the war was over, and life slowed down and became more manageable, he contracted multiple myeloma, bone cancer, and a form of leukemia, and died at the age of 50.
It was impossible to miss my da’s physical courage, which was on display to the end. He never complained although in great pain, and reduced to less than sixty pounds before he expired.
His cage was mental anxiety. Little as he feared death, he seemed afraid of life, afraid to push the envelope. He would give others the benefit of the doubt and not himself; cower to authority figures even when he knew they were blatantly wrong. To him, everyone was more gifted than he was. I often asked him why.
The incongruity of his humility with my arrogance gave me the courage to venture into the world of work believing no one more talented, only to drop out at the zenith of my career, and eventually, to reenter the much less certain world of words as a writer. Here are a few of his boilerplate observations that have become etched on my soul:
A man needs only three square meals a day, the roof over his head, and the clothes on his back. Everyone, no matter how high they fly, share this in common. Yet society can take away your table, the roof over your head, and the clothes off your back, but it must kill you to take what you put between your ears.
You are the son of an Irish Roman Catholic brakeman on the railroad. The day you deny that is the day you won’t know who the hell you are. That’s the only thing you have that is yours. I see college students boarding my trains leaving their parents at the station pretending they don’t know them. You cannot run from who you are, but you can lose who that is.
Don’t be too impressed with high flyers. Chances are they have connections you’ll never know about. You have no choice but to find your way with hard work. Don’t envy them; don’t copy them; and by all means, don’t pretend to be like them.
Money is not the root of all evil. It is what people make of money. Everyone likes money. Some will lie to get it; cheat to get it; betray their friends to get it; or steal it. But most people are content to have little of it. What separates us from the rich is that we are only capable of venial sins when it comes to money, while the rich have a great talent for committing mortal sins in pursuit of it. Don’t ever be impressed with the rich. Most fortunes are built on selling your soul for money.
Your mother expects you to be a big deal. That will never happen. What your mother refuses to understand is that our classless society has a caste system even in this dingy little town of ours. The haves decide who belongs and who doesn’t, while the have nots better know where they belong or they won’t be comfortable anywhere.
Whenever you have something to say about someone, imagine that person is standing directly behind you taking in every word. By the same token, when someone badmouths someone not there, be weary. Rest assured that when you’re not present you’re fair game.
His good counsel simplified his anxiety instead of giving him reason to venture beyond his self-imposed doubt. He was an honest man who stayed in his Irish Catholic conclave. We had an Irish grocer, two Irish doctors, an Irish dentist and Irish insurance man, two Irish pubs in the neighborhood, lived in an Irish parish, had Irish friends, and even an Irish undertaker. This was something considering the community was more than eighty percent Protestant.
ANXIETY & LIFE CHANGING EXPERIENCES
There is a saying that when the student is ready the teacher will arrive. This seems less true today. Students appear disinclined to seek pedagogic direction. Likewise, mentors, coaches and counselors in everyday life are less prominent. We are in the impersonal electronic age glued to a cell phone or a modem.
With so much information available, curiosity is being fed by solo flying on the Internet. Active life has been relegated to the back burner. Most experience is second hand or play station reality. If humanity is anything, it is a social group, and social dynamics at every level are critical to developing social skills. The irony is that as we are pushed closer together by the heterogeneity of the population, which continues to grow reducing the distance between us, only to become more insular, not less so, more secluded, and more guided by inappropriate stereotypes than enlightened interpersonal relations.
Self-awareness only occurs when we confront life’s obstacles, embrace them and move beyond them to new possibilities. To confront anxiety, it requires moving from the familiar to the unfamiliar, from reassuring safety to challenging freedom, from the content of meaning to the context of identity. Each life is loaded with such possibilities and situations. This was one of mine.
The incongruity of his humility with my arrogance gave me the courage to venture into the world of work believing no one more talented, only to drop out at the zenith of my career, and eventually, to reenter the much less certain world of words as a writer. Here are a few of his boilerplate observations that have become etched on my soul:
A man needs only three square meals a day, the roof over his head, and the clothes on his back. Everyone, no matter how high they fly, share this in common. Yet society can take away your table, the roof over your head, and the clothes off your back, but it must kill you to take what you put between your ears.
You are the son of an Irish Roman Catholic brakeman on the railroad. The day you deny that is the day you won’t know who the hell you are. That’s the only thing you have that is yours. I see college students boarding my trains leaving their parents at the station pretending they don’t know them. You cannot run from who you are, but you can lose who that is.
Don’t be too impressed with high flyers. Chances are they have connections you’ll never know about. You have no choice but to find your way with hard work. Don’t envy them; don’t copy them; and by all means, don’t pretend to be like them.
Money is not the root of all evil. It is what people make of money. Everyone likes money. Some will lie to get it; cheat to get it; betray their friends to get it; or steal it. But most people are content to have little of it. What separates us from the rich is that we are only capable of venial sins when it comes to money, while the rich have a great talent for committing mortal sins in pursuit of it. Don’t ever be impressed with the rich. Most fortunes are built on selling your soul for money.
Your mother expects you to be a big deal. That will never happen. What your mother refuses to understand is that our classless society has a caste system even in this dingy little town of ours. The haves decide who belongs and who doesn’t, while the have nots better know where they belong or they won’t be comfortable anywhere.
Whenever you have something to say about someone, imagine that person is standing directly behind you taking in every word. By the same token, when someone badmouths someone not there, be weary. Rest assured that when you’re not present you’re fair game.
His good counsel simplified his anxiety instead of giving him reason to venture beyond his self-imposed doubt. He was an honest man who stayed in his Irish Catholic conclave. We had an Irish grocer, two Irish doctors, an Irish dentist and Irish insurance man, two Irish pubs in the neighborhood, lived in an Irish parish, had Irish friends, and even an Irish undertaker. This was something considering the community was more than eighty percent Protestant.
ANXIETY & LIFE CHANGING EXPERIENCES
There is a saying that when the student is ready the teacher will arrive. This seems less true today. Students appear disinclined to seek pedagogic direction. Likewise, mentors, coaches and counselors in everyday life are less prominent. We are in the impersonal electronic age glued to a cell phone or a modem.
With so much information available, curiosity is being fed by solo flying on the Internet. Active life has been relegated to the back burner. Most experience is second hand or play station reality. If humanity is anything, it is a social group, and social dynamics at every level are critical to developing social skills. The irony is that as we are pushed closer together by the heterogeneity of the population, which continues to grow reducing the distance between us, only to become more insular, not less so, more secluded, and more guided by inappropriate stereotypes than enlightened interpersonal relations.
Self-awareness only occurs when we confront life’s obstacles, embrace them and move beyond them to new possibilities. To confront anxiety, it requires moving from the familiar to the unfamiliar, from reassuring safety to challenging freedom, from the content of meaning to the context of identity. Each life is loaded with such possibilities and situations. This was one of mine.
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