The Peripatetic Philosopher looks inside the Idea of Hope

REFERENCE

This is an exchange some ten years ago that still appears apropos to today. Sincerity is its own revenge.

This is revealed when we are in touch with ourselves and why we think as we do. It is work to think. To ferret through our emotions and discover the soundness of our views.

We are all reactive to a certain extent, but we are also tacticians and strategists. Tacticians deal with things as they are; strategists deal with things as they could be, not now, but in the future.

We live in a time when few if any of our leaders are strategists, and yet they don’t seem to be especially efficient as tacticians.

We live primarily in a passive society reacting to stimuli and circumstances (as tacticians) rather than anticipating them (as strategists) and dealing with them accordingly.

In my writing, I have endeavored with my discourses to move the dial to the active from our passive preoccupation by reminding readers there is no purchase to the “the what of things” because that business is done. But there is profit in the “the why of things” because otherwise we keep repeating the same sins.

JRF


The Peripatetic Philosopher wrote:

THE PROBLEM WITH HOPE!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© August 8, 2009

“He that lives on hopes will die fasting.”

Benjamin Franklin

AUDACITY of HOPE -- an oxymoron

Much is being made of the current economic meltdown but it can be shown that habits of the heart find people grasping for reality as if it were a wave. They hope for a long and durable life supported by imaginary points of bliss. Such people ride these waves to ruin, and then wonder why their lives are spinning out of control.

Credit card debt, buying houses they cannot afford and being puppets to Madison Avenue advertisers so that “the miserable hath no other medicine but only hope,” as Shakespeare puts it.

Main Street blames Wall Street for the crash but it takes two to tango, and Main Street has been a willing dancer to Madison Avenue’s tune. It goes deeper. It is easier to deny reality than to embrace it, easier to ratchet up hope than to find the courage to face despair.

President Barak Obama wrote, “The Audacity of Hope," which helped to launch him into the White House. Hope resonated with readers because hope rings eternal, but hope is a passive vehicle stalled without the engine of courage fueled by the spirit to make necessary change possible.

A better titled and challenge would have been “The Audacity of Courage,” which is always in limited supply. We cannot live on rhetoric, empty promises that matters will change of their own accord, or the consoling promise of optimism without courage.

The “other within,” which I wrote about recently, finds us more inclined to ladle our conflicting self with a dash of hope rather than a pinch of courage. The latter requires that we act differently, learn from our mistakes, embrace our failures, and take risks in order to climb out of our despair. There is no other way.

It is essential that we hit rock bottom, naked and alone, forcing ourselves to find the courage to climb out of the rut we have created for ourselves, shedding our personal baggage that sunk us in the first place. For that attention, we have better than an even chance of “growing up.” Otherwise, we most likely shall give credence to the Italian Proverb: “The man who lives only by hope will die with despair.”

IDENTITY and COURAGE

In Dade and Broward County, Florida, African Americans have been there for centuries. In the late 1950s, Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba with the Cuban Embargo following in 1962. Cubans fled to the Florida peninsula. Now, some forty years later, the Miami-Dade area is little Havana.

The dominant culture in Broward and Brevard County Florida is not American. It is not African American. It is Hispanic. It is so in language, architecture, religion, culture, values, music, food, dress, and expectations. Cubans are energetic, and have no existential identity crisis as described in the “other within.” They have not embraced the American culture. They have defied it displaying the courage to change the culture to suit them, leaving African Americans once again the minority group of the region.

There are as many Spanish speaking television and radio stations as there are those in English. There are as many books, magazines and newspapers in kiosk stands in Spanish as in English. Cubans have colonized the southern tip of Florida and made it their own. .

There are many reasons for this, but the one I am addressing here is that Cuban-Americans have had the courage to establish their Cuban identity irrespective of the wider American culture. They have been able to do this without relying on hope. Of course, they weren’t programmed in conflicting identity as have African Americans.

It is no accident that the Internet has become a conduit for people to live in nostalgia. People of a certain age made redundant by society live often in passive lives. The irony is these “golden years” have not always proven as golden as when they were working.

We are not a society comfortable with leisure. It is one reason in retirement we are constantly on the go. Traveling, I find, is harder work than I ever did on a job. We are programmed to associate work with economic necessity failing to realize it is equally a psychological necessity.

There is nothing wrong with venerating the past. The problem is when we live in the past and cannot escape its grip on us. Nostalgia played a role in the success of IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE (2003), which I wrote as a memoir of the 1940s when I was a boy. What spurred me to write the book was the early death of a boyhood friend whose memory I cherished.

The book was replete with real events in real time with the names of real people of the era, which piqued interest. Although I spent years researching the book, I found many contemporaries remembered the past far better than I did. I am not a nostalgia buff, per se, but wanted to capture a moment in time. Many I sense have not left that time.

Nostalgia in a possible reason hope is so dominant and courage so often an afterthought. Hope rides on the waves of fear (death and dying) and the delusions of misspent dreams. Hope requires no action or unforgivable consequences. Courage requires action and unforgettable consequences.

The generations of The Great Depression and World War Two were conditioned to boundaries and rules which provided identity. There was a line in the sand that once crossed brought about certain consequences with little give. Courage rose to the occasion for survival.

I remember in high school a boy was caught rummaging through another boy’s locker. He was sent to Eldora, the Iowa boys’ reformatory. It was his first offense. I saw countless students in college caught cheating and expelled without ceremony. A teacher or coach could hit you on the side of the head, and that would be the end of it. Parents could give you a good thrashing and nobody heard about it. Some actions had consequences; others didn't. Everyone understood. There were no soft landings.

Nearly everyone I grew up with, mostly lower middle class kids went on to college and have led productive lives. If they failed, there was no one to pick them up. If they got into trouble with the law, there was no one to bail them out. If they found themselves in debt, there was no one to cover their debts. Boundaries and rules were implicit, understood, respected. No one had to make a case for them. Hope wasn’t in their vocabulary.

The upside of this reality was that they were in control. They were not dependent on others for their well-being. They were free, freer than any generation since. They were grownups in the bodies of children. They had no choice. They have moved off stage now with only their children and their children’s children navigating the sandy turf without borders or sand marked boundaries. They are ruling the day, living on hope and fueling hope with sophistry as the main philosophy of the “Information Age.”

WHEN NO ONE is a "GROWN UP"

Longshoreman philosopher Eric Hoffer once said if you want to understand a society, study the games they play and how they play them. If they play them for re-creation and creative respite from the drudgery of life, it is one thing. It is quite another thing if play is reduced to spectator sport, or mainly passive celebration and activity. Or worst case scenario, play and games are taken more seriously than life and reality, and violence is added to this theater.

Oscar Wilde, author of “The Picture of Dorian Gray” (1890) gave a cogent analysis of his novel in which the portrait of Gray in the attic grows old, but the man remains young. The book was published 120 years ago, but human nature can’t seem to evolve beyond Wilde’s analysis. To wit:

“The moral is this. All excess, as well as all renunciation brings its own punishment. The painter, Basil Hall ward, worshiping physical beauty far too much, as most painters do, dies by the hand of one in whose soul he has created a monstrous and absurd vanity. Dorian Gray, having led a life of mere sensation and pleasure, tries to kill his conscience, and at that moment kills himself. Lord Henry Wotton seeks to be merely the spectator of life. He finds that those who reject the battle of life are more deeply wounded than those who take part in it.”
In our pervasive celebrity culture in which the few provide vicariously escape for the many, Wilde’s story resonates revealing the dangers to a second hand life. When hope is the window to the soul, when identity is a reflection of the success of our favorite teams, the people with whom we associate, or the prestige of our careers, then our authentic self is lost in second and third hand responses to life. Passion so displaced can grow legs to the irrational.

In July 1994, angry at Columbia’s elimination from the World Cup Soccer Tournament, a gunman shot and killed Andres Escobar, 27, the player who accidentally scored a goal against his own team in a match with the United States, which helped seal the team’s fate, losing to the US by a score of 2 to 1. Barely 48 hours after returning home from Los Angeles, the young man was shot to death outside a restaurant in Medellin.

Riots have broken out at sporting events across the globe when teams favored to win, didn’t, or when fans, angered at the officiating, became a mob with people injured or killed in the chaos. Recently, in China, players in a soccer match attacked the game officials, who were saved from serious injury by the intervention of the police.

A WORLD OUT OF CONTROL

Mayhem has been associated with sporting events since the days of Rome. Mock violence is the appeal of the World Wrestling Federation. Car crashes delight NASCAR devotees, while monster car crashes are the main attraction of demolition derbies. Visceral juices flow when destruction is on display. The brute in us has never died. Take the virtual reality mayhem of video games that delight my grandson. I asked him, “Where is the fun in this?” He looked at me as if I were senile. “Grandpa, killing bad guys is cool!”

Two thousand years ago, Rome used the coliseum to vent the frustrations of restless Romans. They lacked jobs and productive lives. Games were a way to defuse the crowd and avoid mass hysteria. People were bored to death so death became entertainment. Seeing Christians torn to shreds by wild animals starved for days made them feel alive, watching gladiators fight to the death made them feel as if they were shedding their own blood. Even the chariot races, often involving terrible crashes, delighted the fans. We think them barbaric, but actually, it is the same sensational paradigm.

Passive participation in the cares and sorrows of the world has found electronic escape by sitting in front of a computer for hours playing games or surfing the Internet, tweeting a BlackBerry, or talking on a cell phone to displace the anxiety of boredom. I sat next to a lady on a recent cross continental flight and she never took her head up from her laptop, not even to pee, as if she was carrying the weight of the world in her lap. I wonder if she will make it to age fifty.

Obviously, people in a doctor’s office are bound to be a bit anxious. I deal with my anxiety by never going anywhere without a book, not even to the supermarket. People sitting with their hands in their laps would look at me suspiciously as I would contently read on. Invariably, they would react in the same fashion – they would get on their cell phones. The place would come alive with the chatter of anxiety in white noise.

My wonder is crime not a function of boredom. Here in the Tampa Bay Area, murder, forcible sex offenses, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft are the staple of daily local television news. Perhaps one person in a thousand, or perhaps 10,000, or 100,000 is involved in some kind of crime, but crime is news. It titillates the souls of the good people in the larger demographic who have little else to do then devour these statistics, or so it seems.

If all the television stories were about these good people, there would be no television news because nobody would be watching. We are more interested in the exception than the rule. Besides, bad as things are, we want to see how much worse they are for someone else. And the shame of it all, well, that’s especially good copy when it is someone prominent from the larger statistics.

Too many people have too much time on their hands, filling the void with worry about something that is unlikely to happen, which is the definition of anxiety. It is demonstrated in talking incessantly on cell phones, tweeting, or checking emails constantly, which, at best, is mainly superfluous. Then bored to tears deciding to bring some excitement into their mundane lives, they do something stupid, and make the nightly television news, the front page of the morning newspapers, usually with their picture, and now they are somebody. Why is it people don’t realize the greatest freedom of all is anonymity. That is why I like a large city.

A PERSONAL ASIDE

For six years while I was a chemical sales engineer in the Industrial Division of Nalco Chemical Company, I serviced the Prison System of Indiana, doing engineering studies and power plant chemical testing, and of course dealing with and talking to those incarcerated.

In a maximum-security prison, for example, people in the powerhouse were all for some reason former murderers. They seemed just as normal as anyone you might meet on the street. In fact, most prisoners from high to low security facilities were representative of a cross section of American society.

When they would talk to me, and often they did with great candor, they had high hopes for the future, great plans to change their ways once out, but most of these high hopes went up in smoke. They were back in prison almost before you could turn around. That included the murderers, who had murdered again. They had hope, but little courage to change their profile. They claimed the “system” was against them, and to a degree they were right, but they forgot they were part of the system.

We are a “short cut” society, which is likely the modus operandi of CEOs as well as criminals, people on Mains Street as well as Wall Street. We are inclined to justify short cut behavior as if we are hard wired to be no other way. I’ve listened to convicts and corporate executives explained their faux pas and the only difference is the vocabulary.

We have seen this in the current economic meltdown as automotive executives and Wall Street investment bankers have explained their problems away. Some of them could take misdirection counseling from inmates who do it with style.

My nephew when he was in college was a pizza delivery driver using his own vehicle to deliver pizzas to customers. He was robbed several times, a crime of convenience. He was lucky he was never harmed.

Across the Tampa Bay area in recent months, there has been a rash of break-ins into newspaper machines to steal the nickels, dimes, and quarters in the machines. Newspaper vendors get up early in the morning to load these machines eking out a slim living. I wonder if this is a crime of the poor stealing from the poor, or someone else feeling life owes them a living. I’m not sure.

Recently, a luxury craft caught on fire in Tampa Bay and was moving close to shore threatening a Hooter’s Restaurant. The Tampa Fire Marshall ordered all people out of the restaurant to avoid possible injury should the burning vessels not be contained. It was. Scores of people who had been dining did not return to the restaurant. The Hooter manager claimed the restaurant lost thousands of dollars in revenue because people walked out on their checks.

You would think Hooter customers would not behave as common criminals. Now, why is that? Why are we surprised at this behavior? Studies have shown that law-abiding citizens have admitted on surveys they would steal if they thought they could get away with it. Morality takes a holiday when the common good, the sense of responsibility, and the desire to do the right thing is missing.

We have grown into a legalese society where the emphasis is on what is legal, but not necessarily ethical. Ethics be damned! Ethics are not germane to a short cut society.

There is no such thing as a little corruption. It has the same toxic impact on the walking poor for stealing silverware – remember Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables" – as it does when the rich steal from the company store. Both are equally guilty of corruption.

Nigeria is an oil rich country but one of the most impoverished on the globe. The people are blessed with this black gold yet petroleum workers make $50 a month or $600 per year, while those in charge live in luxury making millions. Across the globe this behavior is repeated. Why? Is it politics? Yes. Is it culture? Yes. Is it the political risk of change? No.

Nonetheless, people retreat into hope for change as no one in power has the courage to change.

You cannot hope for change. History has proven that. It takes action. People have been diverted to games, to fads and fancies, to fan worship, and to self-indulgence, and so the beat goes on. The problem of hope extends from one side of the globe in a boundless universe in a world out-of-control standing on its head spinning like a top with the calculus of change stuck in rhetoric.

THE PROBLEM WITH HOPE – 

ANOTHER POINT OF VIEW!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© August 10, 2009

“There is no such thing as a little corruption. It has the same toxic impact on the walking poor for stealing silverware – remember Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables” – as it does on the sitting rich for stealing the company store, yet both are equally guilty of corruption.”

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D., “The Problem with Hope”

RESPONSE FROM A READER

Hello Jim,

I hope you’re happy. Sorry for the passive wish that puts the burden on you to achieve happiness. Although, I believe your spirits are lifted when you receive a response from one of your readers.

You offer challenging and insightful thoughts on hope.

Actually, the Hooters patrons had no hope or faith. Think about it. If you were forced to leave a restaurant in the middle (or at the beginning or end for that matter) of your meal for any length of time, would you really want to return and resume eating what you left unattended? Would you pay for a service or meal you could not eat? It is unfair to include this among your examples of theft.

Even more revealing is the owner’s lament over the loss of several thousands of dollars. That’s not likely. At best, he had twenty tables filled at about $75.00 per table. That’s a gross of $1500 of which maybe $750 would be net income. Double it and it still is not a lot. He could recover the cost of lost food through his insurance.

More revealing still would be his concern for the waiter staff, busboys and cooks who lost a portion of their tip income. They are the victims of this “crime.”

I know the Hooters story is minor to the whole and meant as an example of a crime of convenience. I can’t say what I would have done as I don’t know all the details.

The other criminality you describe is not done out of boredom. It is born in desperation. When people are hungry, need shelter and are concerned for the well-being of their families, the stress of those worries pushes them over the brink. In a big city, confronted daily by examples of affluence, the stress of being unable to provide is compounded.

This empathy is not meant to excuse the crime. Crime is the “short-cut society’s” path of choice. You’re right. In many cases, it’s the poorer robbing from the poor. The real concern is that those people are hopeless.

That is why I have difficulty believing most people would steal if they knew they wouldn’t be caught. Thieves are created every day and not caught. It’s hopelessness that leads to compromised morals or situational ethics (which are not at all ethical). A majority of us harbor realistic hope.

A huge component of hope is belief. Hope is not blind. It is a view of the future in which you see attainment. Hope is the source of courage, not a weak surrogate. How does one gain the courage to forge ahead in dark times if not for the view that a good end is possible?

Incarcerated criminals rehearse their empty speeches of change and hope in preparation for the parole board. As you learned, many are verbalizing intentions they do not have nor believe. What is their better future? What has the system taught them? What trade have they learned to provide the vehicle to that better future? They are not given any reason for real hope and, therefore, never develop the courage to face the real world.

Your best writing makes me think as this piece has. Thank you for doing that.

Michael


DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Michael,

The rationale you provide would be fitting if the United States of America were it a Third World Country, like Nigeria. I reference that country in this piece where the best paid working class workers – oil rig workers – are paid $50 per month or $600 per year, whereas most workers make less than $1 a day.

Need and survival may be the predicate in such circumstances to steal, but not Americans, not anywhere for any reason. That is the psycho-pathological rationalizing their plight.

With regard to the Hooter’s Restaurant, and the interruption of the meal by a fire emergency that didn’t materialize, I have trouble with your logic. I, for one, in good conscience could not justify leaving without satisfying my bill. I just couldn’t. The fact that many did – and this is a very large Hooter’s Restaurant on the water – cannot to my mind be justified.

Criminal behavior is criminal behavior and law-abiding citizens are no less obliged to pay the consequences of their actions than are professional criminals.

You contend that crimes are not done out of boredom but out of need or desperation. Even in these difficult times, there are tons of jobs daily advertised in the newspaper that might neutralize such desperation. But so many people, thanks to being hooked by advertisers, cannot give up their cigarettes and booze, or keep themselves in a state of health pursuant to a job, but instead live a self-pitying existence moaning their lives away hoping for things to change.

The lady next door lost her husband not yet fifty years old to brain cancer, then the economy tanked, and now she is cleaning houses for a living. Yes, a lady used to an easy life has bit the bullet and righted herself by doing honest work without humility or complaint. She still smiles every day, and keeps a stiff upper lift.

As for stress, Americans have forgotten that stress is “the spice of life,” as Dr. Hans Selye puts it, for without stress we all would be vegetables, or dead.

It is distress that is the culprit and distress lives in the false hope that things will change miraculously, when they never do.

Some take a detour from hope by anesthetizing their bodies and closing down their minds with drugs or work or profligate activity to escape the reality of their situation. Nietzsche was right. We are all too human!

Americans have had a fifty or sixty-year cushion from reality and now it is breaking through and they don’t know how to deal with it. The short-cut-itis to which I refer is the incipient toxic character to the American disposition at all levels and in all institutions.

As for hopelessness leading to moral compromise, I prefer to see these in reverse. Moral compromise generates hopelessness. The Hooter patrons that rationalize they don’t have to pay their bill because of its inconvenience, an inconvenience that they did not cause, etc., are making a moral compromise.

Michael, you and I live in a society that has never grown up because it has never had to grow up, that is, until now!

We cannot hope that it will grow up nor can we play the semantic game that hope is the other side of courage because courage is that woman cleaning houses for a living when she never had to work before; courage is embracing our fears not justifying our anxieties; courage is getting off our asses and doing something, anything, and not complaining how much stress we have, or how wrong life has gone for us; courage is digging deep into our psyche beyond our fragile ego to realize time is passing and this is the only life we have to live.

It pleases me that this has made you think. My aim is that only that.

Be always well,

Jim

*     *     *     *

The Peripatetic Philosopher says, "To have a friend, you must be a friend, starting with yourself."

Be Your Own Best Friend

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© June 5, 2014

We are all authors of our own footprints in the sand, heroes of the novels inscribed in our hearts.  Everyone’s life, without exception, is sacred, unique, scripted high drama, played out before an audience of one, with but one actor on stage. 

James R. Fisher, Jr., The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend (1996)

A Little Philosophical Reflection

Greg Louganis, United States springboard diving Gold Medal winner in the 1984 and 1988 Olympics, suffered mightily once he admitted being gay.  This threw his personal and professional life into a tragic tailspin.  Observing this sad circumstance provoked author and critic Murray Kempton to write:

The Almighty is presumed to pass His judgments and dole out His penalties to individuals, which allows us to suppose that nations are spared painful sessions with the Recording Angel.  But if ours is ever so summoned, we may suppose that the inquiry into its cardinal sins might begin with the question: “And why, America, did you, in your arrogance, teach so many of your children to hate themselves?”

The first things we learn are the “shoulds” and “should nots” of acceptable societal behavior.  We don’t grow from the inside out, but from the outside in.  It is a long road from being the apple of everyone’s eye to being our own person, warts and all.  Some of us never make the transition or transformation.  We are programmed from birth as how to think, feel, behave and even wonder about the mysteries of life.  It is called “society.” 

Society is rigid and reluctant to take in new information about itself, or to deal with new contingencies brought on by drastic change.  Society worships control, harmony, and conformity.  Society resists change, and attempts to reconfigure new information to conform to established criteria, or to what society already knows to be true.  Society is rich in denial and impoverished of reality. 

Society is the cage we enter when we are born.  It is the cage we must deal with all our days.  Society is always looking through the rear view mirror as it moves ahead, and clashes with reality.  That is why society often becomes hysterical.  In the case of America, as Kempton points out, American society cannot accept deviation from its arbitrary norm.  Therefore, it must be the individual who is wrong.  The individual is meant to feel self-contempt for being out of step with the expected, as if the expected were written in the individual’s DNA.

The only safe haven in a world of constant change is to be your own best friend by asking:

How do I feel about Myself, not as I am supposed to be, but as I am?

How comfortable am I in my own skin?

Am I in control of my own Life?

Is my day from sun up to sundown an attempt to please Others because that is what is expected of me?

Or do I go against the grain and assert myself as I am? 

Do I take the risks that ensure my integrity, my authenticity? 

Or do I play it safe and accept self-hating as my inevitable baggage?

Finding and relating to oneself in this labyrinth of life, this cage, moved philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre to create this vivid imagery in his Situations (1965):

I have heard it sometimes said that man was the future of man; at other times, that he was his past; never his present.  We are all counterfeit.  For the second time, the Traitor has let the cat out of the bag.  

By the ardor which he puts into making himself human, he reminds us that our species does not exist.  The author of this book is a rat, how could we have doubted it?  And what is more, a rat possessed.  But possessed by what?  By another rat?  By the rat within himself?  Precisely not.  

This Other of whom a solitary voice speaks to us incessantly, this pure object, this disappearing line, this absence, is Man, our tyrant.  Here we are unmasked – rats in the prey of Man.  

And with this, the mad undertaking of the Indifferent becomes apparent.  It is our own.  We are all pursuing a phantom through the corridors of an experimental labyrinth, with Gorz in the lead.  If he catches and eats this parasite who, for so long, has fed upon his anguish and weariness, if he absorbs it into his own substance, our species is possible.  Somewhere, between rats and men, it is in the process of being born and we shall emerge from the labyrinth.

Sartre, who refused the Nobel Prize for Literature (1964) when it was awarded to him, never pulls his punches.  For him, life is like a tightrope stretched tautly over an abyss, a tightrope that one must negotiate alone and unaided.  The problems and difficulties that occur during that adventure are the themes that run through his writing.  He chips away at our sacred taboos as he rubs our conventions against each other causing sparks to fly.  This appears as natural to him as the incisiveness of his thoughts; no flat declarative sentences mark his writings.  Thought, he reminds us, has its own geography.

Sartre understands the dilemma of the cage in an age in which man has no discernible center and has lost his moral compass.  He writes:

(Man’s) problem is not to keep his freedom but to win it.  No true moral system exists today, because the conditions of a moral code worthy of the name are not present.  Men are not visible to one another.  Too many machines and social structures block the view.  It’s impossible to speak of any true moral system today; only of moral codes applying to certain classes and reflecting specific habits and interests.  The basic conditions enabling men to be available for a new social order are lacking.   

Clearly, to Sartre man is no moral abstraction, but a living, pulsing human being in need of his fellow man’s involvement and support, something he is unlikely to get from the society in which he finds himself.  Without disagreeing with Sartre, my premise is that before man can climb this mountain called “society,” he must first climb the mountain within before he can negotiate the abyss below, and the trap beyond.  To the question is there no hope, “no exit” from this labyrinth, Sartre replies:

Certainly there is.  You can take action against what people have made of you and transform yourself . . . It is not a question of knowing oneself, but of changing one’s life.  It is not addressed to us yet, but willing or not, it is of us that the fundamental question is asked.  By what activity can an “accidental individual” realize the human person within himself?  I submit the hope is by the individual being his own best friend.

Walking the Tightrope & Avoiding the Trap

It is a lifelong struggle from childhood through adolescence to maturity to establish a career, a relationship with significant others, and then should you have children, to go through the whole process again. 

Often, we do to our children what has been done to us.  We put a monkey on their backs that was put on ours.  We create the same self-doubt in them that was created in us. 

We blame ourselves while growing up by second guessing what we should and should not do, spending little time to understand why we desired what we actually did.  It is a monkey circus we play on ourselves. 

Like a spinning top, our life can spin out of control and come to rest exactly where it started without interruption or insight, denying us the freedom to experience life to the fullest.  Or we can become obsessively concerned with always looking over our shoulders to see if someone is watching or chasing us.

I have a friend who has had a very successful career.  He was at the top of his class in high school and college, successful financially and professionally.  One day we met after a separation of nearly fifty years for breakfast at the Country Kitchen Restaurant of our hometown.  Looking at him across the breakfast nook, I noticed his eyes had a haunting sadness that suggested a misspent life.  This seemed totally incongruous, so I asked him how he was. 

“Fine,” he replied, but his eyes told another story.  He asked me the same.  “Okay,” I replied with a smile and shrug.  “What can I say, I’m an old man still struggling to grow up?”

“You don’t look like you’re struggling at all,” he said, obviously a compliment that stopped me. 

“You think?”  Could he actually envy me?  Not possible!  Thinking of that, I added, “Don’t kid yourself, I’m still struggling to climb my mountain, or is it only a ant hill?”  It was meant to lighten the discourse but failed.

He looked at me with a seriousness I remembered of him.  “I always knew you’d be a writer.”  I waited.  “You know how I knew?”  Again, I waited.  “My mother told me.  Remember that time you had that long conversation with her?”  I did.   “She came to me afterwards, and said, ‘mark my words, that boy is going to be a writer.’  Did you know that?”

“No, but I remember our talk.  It was the only time I ever spoke to her.”  I grew thoughtful recalling the incident.  He had asked me to be his college roommate.  The conversation with his mother was actually an interview to determine my acceptability.  His parents didn’t know me, or my parents.  Their paths had never crossed at church or the country club.  Their boy was an outstanding student and a good Protestant.  I was this tall, blond kid who played sports, and rumor had it, was Catholic.  It was not difficult to imagine their concerns.

“Your mother loaned me a book,” I continued with a grin, “and I never returned it.  That was not the most auspicious move on my part.

“Em?  She never said.”

“Well, she did, and I’ll tell you something else, the book proved prophetic.”

“How so?”

“It was Alan Paton’s Too Late the Phalarope.  I read the book, reread it, and practically memorized it, and still have it.”  My mind turned dreamy thinking about the book’s imagery.  The phalarope is a small shore bird like a sandpiper.  In the story, it found itself in Johannesburg, more than 400 miles from the sea.  Who would have thought one day I would find myself a young executive in South Africa living in Johannesburg far from my cultural moorings of Iowa and the Mississippi River?  In my South Africa experience, I was to learn how powerful culture and climate can act on one’s character.  I could identify with Pieter Van Vlaanderen in Paton’s story.

Mentioning the book caused a sunshine smile to break across his stoic countenance. I could tell he loved his mother.  But it turned to shale when I said, “You look a lot like your father now.”

I could see he had the same conflicting memory of his father I had of mine.  His father was an executive, brilliant engineer, and my da was never invited into that success club.  I could see why my friend had been successful, but why had I?  Where did my drive come from?  Could it be the quick start I got mimicking his study habits?  

God, how he could crack the books!  He didn’t just study a subject; he devoured it.  I watched this in amazement.  He didn’t make love to a subject, he raped and ravished it as if it was something he hated but needed to possess.  

I think I lacked his passion.  My concern was the fear of flunking out, of being caught the stupid person I was, the fraud, the pretender, the flake, the jock.  Many nights I would lie in my bed hearing the gentle rhythm of his breathing across the room.  He slept the good sleep knowing the day had belonged to him.  He had conquered it and held dominion over it.  Then there was me.  I slept fitfully, wondering if I would survive the week.  I could envision myself an early Christian ascetic prostate on the steps of the cathedral in wanton humility.  I was messed up.  My religion was my disease. 

In high school, we had known each other, but not well.  I had admired him from afar. He was at the top of the class and I barely made the top ten percent.  Now in college, because we were both gunners, we were in the upper three percent of our class of 2,000 male students, courtesy of the United States Selective Service “Draft Board’s” statistics.

The Korean War, a war never declared by the US Congress, was going on.  Classmates were dropping out and resurfacing in Korea all the time.  Every six months, we would be reclassified with our class ranking.  We knew everybody above us with these rankings.  I think one of the reasons he accepted me was the fact that I was among them, obviously below him of course. 

When you are college roommates, and see each other every day, I suppose there is bound to be surprises.  Mine was to find he had doubts and insecurities, too, but with a difference.  He expected to succeed.  It was obvious there was no doubt in his mind.  I’ve come to believe in sociobiology, the idea that there is something genetic to one’s psychology, anthropology and physiology. 

I remember reading The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes (1953), who was Secretary of Interior in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration.  Ickes tells of an incident where the president as a young student at Harvard put his drunken friend on a train with $10 in his pocket, and a ticket to the West Coast.  Ten years later the president’s friend was a millionaire.  Of course, his father was already one, so it was in his genes, just as it is in the genes of baseball players’ sons to become major league baseball players.  

One time we had studied late at the library on a frigid Iowa night with the temperature hovering around zero degrees Fahrenheit.  My friend stopped in the middle of the bridge of the Iowa River dividing the campus.  Steam was pouring out of his stocking cap and his breath was a flume of icy molecules, and said, “Imagine what they would say tomorrow if we should perish in this icy river tonight.”  Stumping my feet to put some circulation into them, and pushing my hands deeper into my mackinaw, I must confess I thought he had gone a little mad.

Undaunted, he continued with rhetorical glee, “They would say, think,” dramatic pause, “what they might have been?”  Well, now we know.  No big deal, really. 

The fact that he included me in the “they,” at the time, was a little overwhelming, but all my cold mind could rev up was that “they” would say I couldn’t hit the curve ball.  

Thinking about that night now, with the perspective of 50 years, I realized what a huge mountain he had given himself to climb.  What was sad to see, as successful a climb as he had made, is that it seemed to have given him so little satisfaction.  It made me think of the Peggy Lee song, “Is that all there is to love?” 

My mountain was more like rolling hills, the difference between the landscape say, of Florida and Colorado.  Quite remarkably, he confessed to having never failed.  I admitted to a lifetime of bumps in that rocky road.  I kidded, “In my life’s Monopoly Game, the card I keep drawing says,'go back to start'.”

It was true.  Every time I was heading for the high rent district, something intervened, setting me back.  Also true, it was often by choice not wanting to compromise.  Some might say it was my hardheaded stupidity, and they may be right, but I never felt too bad about going back, and starting over.      

Sitting across from me now, it appeared he actually envied me.  He wanted to know more about my life, but in particular about me, the writer.  “Has anyone ever told you there is an aura about you?”

Sisyphus in Hades forever pushing the rock up the hill, only to have it 

roll over him and back down the hill, forcing him to repeat the exercise.

“I don’t know what you mean.”  Had he gotten weird, too?

“Let me put it bluntly.  You look like the success that I’ve had.  How do you explain that?”   

This made me roar with laughter, causing other people to look our way.  I have a deep throat laugh that shakes a building’s foundation.  “If I didn’t know better, I’d feel a con coming on.”  

“I mean it.” 

“Listen!  You’ve had a great life, major success, been one of those stratospheric contributors to the university, hell, to society, they could call you an idealistic philanthropist.”

“Hardly.”

“Okay, define one for me?”

“Can we move on?”

“You started this.”

“Okay, I’ll admit it, can we still move on?  I want to hear about you, about all these adventures everyone is jabbering about.”

“To start with, were it not for you, I wouldn’t be at this high school class reunion.  This is my first reunion ever, and it happens to be our 50th.  That said, I’m glad you wanted to see me.  My life has been a struggle, if anything, it still is.  If I’ve learned anything about myself, it is that I’m a very flawed man.  I’ve also discovered I’m an introvert, that I don’t like people, don’t like crowds, don’t like belonging, but have a passion for ideas.  I know I’m no genius, no more gifted than that guy building kitchen cabinets for rich folks' homes down in the valley. 

“The difference between the next guy and me is that I pay attention to ideas.  At the same time, and this may sound contradictory, I’m not overly impressed with the history of ideas.  By the accident of my birth, I live in an age when people are more interested in success than in living, more interested in what other people consider important than what they enjoy.  Does any of this surprise you?”

A wrinkle of a smile creased the corner of his eyes as he said with a quiet nod, “No.” 

“You wanted to be a giant.  Well, you are one.”  He said nothing.  “I owe you.  We haven’t seen each other for years, but I love you, guy.  Your life and mind have been salve to mine.” 

His face turned ashen and then red.  It was clear this made him uncomfortable.  “Hey,” I said, “I’m not going to jump your bones!”  

Why is it that we heterosexual males cannot love and admire our gender without being self-conscious?  I loved the purity of his pursuit; his selfless success; and his generous sharing of his wealth.  His greatest impact, though, was he didn’t punish me with his power, never did, although he could, and therefore his power blossomed into influencing me.  “It’s not that kind of love,” I added.

“I know that," he said, too quickly. 

“The word ‘love’ made you uncomfortable,” I continued not letting him off the hook.

He looked at me and said, “Did it?”

“Yes, it was written in scarlet creases on your forehead.”

“All right, Nathaniel Hawthorne.”

“No, I’m serious.  You’re an open book.”

“Maybe to you,” then seriously, “it’s always been your special skill, hasn’t it?”

“What?”

“Reading people.”

“Why do you say that?”

“You sit there processing data and reading me.  One day I’ll be in one of your books, and I know I won’t like it.”  Then, as if a concession, “and you know I won’t do anything about it.”

“No, you’re too nice a guy.  Writers are not nice people.  I qualify.  They write about nakedness and they don’t touch up the portraits.”

“Is that what it’s like to be a writer?  For God’s sake, tell me about how you became one.  That’s why I wanted to see you.  I wanted to understand what my mother saw.”

Journey to Self-Knowing

“You want honesty, I suppose?”  He nodded.  “Well, take my da.  Like you, I sense with your own father, I had to struggle with mine over his abbreviated life.  He died only three days past his 50th birthday.  The navy sent me home on emergency leave from the Mediterranean when he was dying.  Because I was a chemist by training, and a hospital corpsman in the navy, his doctor allowed me to administer morphine shots to him for pain as he requested them. 

“I bathed him and put ointment on his bedsores, changed his sheets, shaved him, and all the other things a nurse might do.  As he shriveled from a 160-pound man to barely 60 pounds, suffering from the bone marrow disease, multiple myeloma, which was ravishing his body, inch by inch, pound by pound, day by day, reducing him to little more than a memory, we talked. 

“Now, I thought, he will enlarge on what he first said to me before I went overseas. I asked him, ‘Do you remember what you said to me when I left?’ 

“His yellowed eyes just stared.  You said, 'you were more worried about me than my brother and two sisters, do you remember saying that?’  He still just stared.  ‘You said I didn’t even write a good letter and I’d starve to death as a writer, do you remember saying that?’ 

He blinked as if to say, no.  ‘You also said I thought I was so friggin smart and wasn’t smart at all.  Remember that?  Said I was a dumb bastard if you asked him.  Do you remember?’  He just shook his head weakly.  

“Well," I continued, “you did.  I’m not saying you were wrong.  I’d just like a bit of clarification is all.”  He turned to me and asked for some water.  After he drank it out of a straw, he smiled almost a wicked smile,

‘Isn’t Raw Hide on about now?’  I nodded.  ‘Can we watch it?’  I nodded again.  He got a morphine glow, waiting for me to turn on the TV.

“He had a little black and white nine inch television, the first he had ever had.  He loved the westerns such as Raw Hide and Wagon Train.  His favorite on Raw Hide was Clint Eastwood, whom he said looked like me.  I couldn’t see the resemblance, so I asked what he saw in him.  ‘He’s cocky like you, thinks his shit doesn’t stink, doesn’t like to take orders, and,’ I interrupted. 

“But you said he looked like me, how do you mean?”  I’ll admit I was fishing for a compliment.  Eastwood was tall and blond and so was I.  ‘He’s got asshole written all over his face,’ he offered with no rancor in his voice, ‘you can see that can’t you Jimmy?’  Wonderful.

“That told me I would have been better off to have left it alone.  I knew then that death was not far away.  He died more than 46 years ago.  It has taken me that long to understand that he wasn’t malicious.  I was too dense and self-absorbed to pick up his meaning.  So what does this have to do with my being a writer?  Well, everything, and nothing, I guess.  You decide.

“One day when I was writing a book about my early years in this town I came across something that stunned me.  It shook me so badly that I heaved such heavy sobs that I thought I was going to pass out for the lack of oxygen to my brain.  Describing it now may make little sense to you, but it knocked me on my ear then.”

“Let me decide,” my friend said, anxious for me to continue, “Just tell your story, don’t worry about how I’m going to take it.”  

“Well, it was something he had written in lower case cursive on a government handout.  The good Sisters of St. Francis weren’t too successful in teaching him penmanship or spelling.  Come to think of it the poet e.e. cummings was celebrated for his typographical tricks and lower case shenanigans. 

“What turned my insides out was this government publication for the newly born: United States Department of Labor, Children’s Bureau, Publication No. 8: Infant Care.  It was a book he received after I was born, and was covered with his adoring scribble, I suppose, waiting to take my mother home from Mercy Hospital.  I could feel my da’s heat as I traced my finger across his words:

(In cursive above INFANT CARE on the cover)

President James Raymond Fisher, Junior.

(To the left of INFANT CARE)

 it is Fri May 20th the sweetes little mother in the world Mrs. James Raymond Fisher

(Printed over the baby’s face in capital letters)

JAMES RAYMOND FISHER, JR.

(Arrow pointing to the baby in cursive)

little jimmie

(Over the picture of the baby in the mother’s arms on the cover)

James R. Fisher, Jr., J.R.F. Dorothy Mother (on her neck) Dorothy Fisher (from below the baby another arrow) little jimmie, baby is 22 days old Friday, (below under the caption CHILDREN’S BUREAU, he has written)

Mama is awful tired terrible baby kept her awake all night signing off  J.R.F.

(Along the side of the mother’s left shoulder) Blond hair blue eyes just like Mother the nicest mama in Clinton signed J.R.F.

(Then first page inside) Born to Mr. And Mrs. James Raymond Fisher April 29th – 5-22 a.m. a nice big baby boy 7 lbs 10 oz

(On back cover a picture of a little boy at a small table playing with blocks)

James Raymond Fisher, Jr. at play in the White House, Washington, D.C. age 2 yrs this book was sent to us by B. M. Jacobsen, Representative of the White House, W.D.C.

(Next to the picture of the baby is written)

Baby Fisher.  We have letters from the Mayor of Clinton Jack Dempsey of Reno on how to make your boy a champ in 3 lessons Ma Hat Ma Gandhi and a few others.

“Then I found a small sign, obviously professionally printed, Welcome Home Mama & Jimmie Ray. 

“I know telling you this, it must sound histrionic.  No big deal.  I assure you, it was a shock to my system, a man wrote this who was excited when I was born but never excited about me again.  He never came to my baseball, basketball or football games, never had anything to say about my grades, never saw me hold the highest honor of an altar boy at a Solemn High Mass, Master of Ceremony, celebrated by the Bishop of the Davenport Diocese, never saw me play baseball at the Review Stadium as a boy with men twice my age, never said anything when I was elected Secretary of State at Boys’ State, never congratulated me for making all-state honorable mention in football, or playing varsity basketball for four years, never said anything about my winning a Merit Scholarship to the University of Iowa, never attended my graduation when I graduated from the university Cum  Laude, Phi Beta Kappa. 

There I was, confronted with how he saw me as I came into the world, then nothing.  When I had regained my composure, I reflected on what he had told me over a lifetime that I had conveniently forgotten, but have had to internalize. 

“He said they can take the clothes off your back, the roof over your head, the food off your table, the money in your pocket, but they have to kill you to take away what you put between your ears. 

“On another occasion, he said all any man needs to live is a place to throw his hat, a roof over his head, three square meals a day, and the rest is gravy.  If you’re into gravy, and measure who you are by how much gravy you have, you’ll never stop running until you die because you’ll never have enough. 

“Then I thought of other things he said that my mother tried to soften the sting to, such as ‘you’re the son of an Irish Roman Catholic brakeman on the railroad.  That is who you are.  The day you forget that, you won’t know who the hell you are.’

 “What amazed me is he never read anything but sometimes his admonitions had a distinct Greek sentiment: ‘You want to fly high into that sun Jimmie, but I’ll tell what, they’re going to clip your wings the moment they see you’re flying too high and mighty, and a threat to them, then you’re going to fall so hard it could kill you.  You’re not one of them, never will be, they’ll never accept you, sure they’ll use you, but don’t let that stir your shit too much, because as soon as they use you up you’re gone.  Never get too comfortable around them, Jimmie, never drop your guard, or they’ll find three ways to Sunday to destroy you, do you hear me, Jimmie?’

“It always made him uncomfortable to see me reading.  He saw it as a feminine inclination.  Once he said, ‘you have such a constipated brain I don’t think there is an enema that could clear you of all that shit.’  Another time, ‘all of us are little criminals, Jimmie, but I’ll tell you one thing, poor people’s sins are all venial sins, rich people’s sins are all mortal sins, there’s no way to get wealthy except dishonestly or on the backs of the honest.’ 

“Of course I didn’t hear him, then, but much of what he warned me about came true.”

During this long soliloquy, my college roommate of decades ago sat there with his sad eyes and said nothing.  “You are as I remember you, remarkably so, paranoid still, but the reader of people. I remember your memory.  God, how I envied it!  You don’t seem to forget anything.  Your father was right.  You probably have a pretty constipated brain.”

I laughed.  “You think? “Then I continued, “True, I take in everything and file it away to be used later, possibly in a book.  I suppose writing is my enema.   In any case, as my da was dying and taking his last breath,

“I was filling my memory bank, taking in the room, the smells, the stillness, the darkness, the feeling of it all, the furnishings, the huge hospital bed in that little room, a bed loaned to us by the American Cancer Society, the “paid-in-full” handwritten note on the nightstand from Dr. Joseph O’Donnell who hadn’t been paid a dime, the smudged doily crocheted by my mother on a little medicine table with a morphine syringe and bottle of camphor, the grief and relief on my mother’s face as she moved her lips saying the Rosary silently, her refusal to believe him gone until I put a glass to his lips and there was no condensation, my inability to shed a tear, but to calculate how I could finesse the church from the Mass offerings and give it to my mother, the approach I would use on my da’s Irish mortician friend to get a bargain basement price on a casket, the need yet to call on the railroad to determine my mother’s benefits, the value of the house, and how much mortgage was left, the best way to handle my one sister who was devoted to him and him to her, the mystical meaning of passing to the other side, and how I might use this, the emotional state of the family which was always an open wound. 

“Would it heal now, or be a permanent sore?  How could I escape from here with all this to face?  It never occurred to me until much later what a hero he had been in a long, painful and protracted illness without complaint or self-pity.  I think the reason I couldn’t cry, although I wasn’t conscious of it at the time, was my disappointment that he was so much more courageous in death than he had ever been in life. 

“What would remain most vivid would be the way his eyes in death locked on me, followed by a tremendous sigh, then the inevitable death rattle, and finally, as the soul left his body as if it could be seen, his face transfigured from pain to benevolent peace.  He was now with the angels, and I was certain of it.

The feeling of working hard and going nowhere.

“My mother suddenly became hysterical as she wrapped herself around his body, and kept saying, ‘Jimmie, is he all right, is he all right?’  This was after I had proved him gone.  I pulled her away and put her head on my shoulder, ‘Mother, he’s gone.  He’s at peace now.  There’s no more pain. He’s with God now.’  She started to cry, not hysterical tears, but moist sighs of honeydew like a child who has been forgiven a slight transgression. 

“It was a perfect time to cry, to let go, and let all of this anxiety evaporate, but I couldn’t.  I was stoic, almost cold, analytical, and lost in what had to be done.  My goal was to give him the funeral of a saint, simple, elegant and sacred, and I did.

“It was in the succeeding weeks that I would run into his railroad cronies and find some liked him and some didn’t.  When they would describe his misgivings, I imagined them their own.  He was not one to badmouth others, or to relish in their misfortunes.  He was generous and kind.  At the same time, he was cocky and pugilistic, and would fight at the drop of a hat.  Physically, he never met a man who could bully him. ‘Bullies, Jimmie,’ he said, ‘are afraid of their own shadow.’  He wasn’t afraid of men; he wasn’t afraid of death; he died like a saint.  And like most saints, he was afraid of life.

Jimmy Fisher, with baseball uniform in hand, heading for Riverview Stadium. three blocks away, to catch for Clinton, Iowa's Junior American Legion baseball team.

“The unconscious is never a force that bubbles up to the surface too frequently, leastwise with cue cards and loud whispers as to the hidden meanings stirring below.  It didn’t for me then.  

"What did happen is that I changed.  I knew I wouldn’t be a lab chemist anymore.  I wouldn’t sit there doing titrations and paper chromatographic analyses.  I wouldn’t sit in technical meetings and here consultants chirp about what we already knew.  I wouldn’t spend hours in the research library studying competitors’ patents to circumvent chemical processes and duplicate their proprietary products.  I wouldn’t remain in that cloistered world of envy, animosity and small thinking, that world of big brains and little power.  I would venture out into that world that so intimidated my da.

“But life sometimes plays tricks on you, doesn’t it?  The words I heard so many years ago from that uneducated brakeman rattled my cage.  Success found me one day in South Africa forming a new company, a country with unfathomable beauty in people, topography and culture.  Yet, I wasn’t prepared for apartheid, the policy of the separation of the races, a policy in which the white minority imposed draconian conditions on the black majority. 

“Suddenly, the easy climb to the top of my little hill brought little satisfaction.  Suddenly, I saw myself no different than the trapped Bantu tribesmen.  I was shanty Irish, after all, not lace curtain Irish, out of my depth.  Suddenly, I saw the Afrikaner trapped as well in his policy of apartheid.  Afrikaners were good people who had allowed ignorance and fear to drive them into this cage. 

"Then I saw my Church up close and personal, both in Rome and South Africa.  It was a shock to me to realize a tacit agreement existed between the government and the church to maintain the status quo.  I identified with the Bantu.  My da often spoke of how the British subjugated Northern Ireland.  I identified with the Afrikaner or Boer, too, as I was from a farm state, and was used to being considered unsophisticated.  Well, Afrikaners played into this bias as well.

 “But I couldn’t identify with my Church.  My church had always been my anchor.  I never questioned its authority.  Now, my faith started to unravel, a faith that I thought was as solid as South African diamonds and sparkled with the same radiance. 

“It was clear that in this game of life I had lost my momentum and needed to take a ‘time out’ and regroup.  Once this was clear to me, good coach of myself that I was, I didn’t hesitate to resign.  Sure, there was flack.  I moved my family to Florida from South Africa, and my boss came down to try to understand what was going on. 

“You say I can read people. That’s not true.  Most people read others in terms of themselves.  That was the case of my boss.  He couldn’t understand how I could give up so much when I was just getting on the ‘gravy train.’  So incredulous and persistent was he that I became blunt.  If I weren’t doing my job, I told him, you’d have grounds to fire me.  Well, the company, no fault of its own, is not meeting my needs.  I’m firing the company. 

“It was that simple.  He didn’t believe me.  For the next two years, some ways subtle others not, the company checked to see if I was selling company secrets or if I had gone rogue with a competitor.  I was reading and writing, and playing a little tennis.  That was it.  When I was nearly broke, I went back to school full time for the next six years.  Not what everyone would do, but what I had to do.”

My friend’s fists were clasped under his chin, his face pensive.  “Go on!” he declared.  “That’s not all of it, is it?”

“No, I did write one book early on to explain this so-called ability to read people.  It took me only six weeks, and it stayed in print for twenty years.  It is my all-time best seller and I wrote it off the top of my head, which should tell me something, but unfortunately it hasn’t.

“What was it like going back to school after being out so many years?” he asked.

“I was coming to that, but thought in all fairness that what I have to say may sound a little harsh.  There is a questing in me.  I guess you could say I am searching for the real parents of my soul.  Obviously, I expected too much from my church, failing to recognize that it is the most human of institutions.  The same could be said of the university.  These are flawed institutions created by flawed men looking for answers, and only finding more flawed questions for the exercise.

“How could it by any different?  The atoms of my brain were bouncing against my cranium as if in a cyclotron without splitting into revelation.  I expected from the university the same thing I expected from my church, to do all my heavy lifting, and of course that is not neither of their function nor competence. 

“Those who are in the business of labels call this the Postmodern Era, but nothing has successfully supplanted the factory mentality.  Everything is packaged for disposable use, and I mean everything.  That was hard for my mind to accept.  Dropping out, as I did, would have offended my da, but he would have seen it consistent with how he saw me.  A half lifetime ago, I abandoned my life as it was, and have been on this uncertain path ever since.  I went out of my way to find my way.”

“Do you think you’ve found it?  Have you realized closure?”  My friend asked these questions with such emotion that I immediately understood there was another agenda for this meeting.  He was looking for an Oracle.  I’m sure I wasn’t the first man he sought out for this role, and certainly I wouldn’t be the last. 

“I hope this doesn’t disappoint you,” I confessed, “I haven’t found my way because I’m still on that same aimless treadmill, and now realize there is no such thing as closure.”

All the life seemed to drain out of his face.  He removed his glasses and polished the lenses.  His eyes were red and moist, perhaps from the lights.  He hastened for me to continue waving his handkerchief as he put his glasses back on. 

“What I have learned and the reason I shared this story with you is that the hardest thing is to like ourselves.  We hear a lot about self-love and how damaging it can be, but we never hear anything about liking ourselves as we are.  Another word for liking ourselves as we are is self-acceptance.  

"This is not accepting ourselves as we should be, but as we are, not as others choose to see us, but as we see ourselves, not in terms of arbitrary standards such as success and failure, but as our own best friend. 

“I don’t say this lightly.  I think now after all the books I’ve read, studied and devoured."  I smiled.  "I’ve highlighted passages in them, written on the sides of the text, even kept logs and manuals of them for future reference.  What I discovered was that I was still, in the end, left with me.  That each one of these people I read was in fact writing about themselves.  They were struggling with their own questions.  All gave off a common echo, the echo of a person running from himself only to constantly run into himself ad infinitum, ever hoping that the last collision would not reoccur. 

“I finally reached the point of recognizing all my sins, realizing all my little successes and failures were only tiny blips on my personal radar screen, and knowing that my passing would differ little with that of my da’s. 

“Each of us as we come to our journey’s end must realize we come in alone and leave alone, and that the portrait we paint can be either like Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray or it can be an honest reflection of a life well lived.

“One day when I was consulting, I sat down at my desk and thought of an African American young man in the group who was terribly talented but had an attitude.  I wrote a short article that started with this line: To have a friend you must be a friend starting with yourself.  It became a prize-winning article with tens of thousands of requests for reprints.  It also became the seed of the book The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend.

“So that,” I said, in surrender with my hands high above my head, “is that!  You now know something of this writer’s cage.”

We rose together.  He gave me a bear hug, and said, “Thank you.”  He didn’t look back as he left the restaurant, his shoulders drooping in deep thought.  We never spoke again during the weekend.

*     *     *

THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR BEST FRIEND is available from this blog: $12.95 plus shipping & handling, which is $5,95 (within the continental United States), and $10,95 outside the US.