On September 11th, 2009 I turned 30 years old. The morning of, I went to the doctor’s office to have a stitch taken out of my neck. The stich had been put in after a biopsy incision had failed to cauterize. I sat there reclining and staring up at hot air balloons he projected onto the ceiling (presumably to pacify any nervous patients) while he prodded at the wound on my neck he’d put there a week earlier and informed me that the skin had an infection he’d have to give me something for.

He left the room to get his prescription pad and returned with a manila folder instead. When asked, he told me that apparently the biopsy results had come back. He flipped open the folder and scanned it’s contents. Then followed 30 seconds of silence which he decided to end with a punctuating, “Hunh.”

I squeezed the edges of the couch reflexively. “Something wrong?”

Well, he said, it looks as though you’ve got some cancer cells in there. Nothing to be too concerned about. This is a very common form of skin disorder and it doesn’t tend to spread to organs. You’ll just have to stop spending a lot of time in the sun from now on as this is very much related to sunlight. We’ll have to schedule another appointment to have it removed.

...maybe it

I considered the prospect of going another week with this on my neck. An image came to mind of Ian Holm telling John Hurt what his stomach ache really was and making him schedule an appointment for later in the week to have it removed. “Do you have any other patients after me today?”

Uhm…no but…isn’t it your birthday?

16 new stitches later I was driving the five blocks back home.

Cancer. Non-deadly form of cancer. Doesn’t tend to spread to the organs. Doesn’t tend too. If I were more a Woody Allen-type, I thought to myself, I wonder if I would distill something clever from this? A funny anecdote that I could tell people later. I didn’t feel clever. I felt sleepy. Lethargic. Like I was swimming in warm mud. My common physical reactions to impending depression.

This wasn’t any irrational fear of death or hypochondria. I believed the doctor when he said non-deadly cancer.

It was that the word cancer had been spoken at all. There had been a lot of words like cancer spoken recently: tendinitis, fiber, minoxidil, bad cholesterol, high blood pressure. A growing vocabulary of terms that I didn’t remember coming up in conversations 5 years before. A list which painted a portrait of someone who, if not old, could distinctly no longer be classified as “young.”

I wondered, when did that happen? More importantly, what did I have to show for it?

When I was in high school, I was told that I would go on to do big things. Charismatic, articulate, and outspoken I had a way with adults that won most of them over easily. They weren’t sure if I was going to be a writer, a director, an actor or an artist but they were sure that I would be at least one of them. And I believed them. These were my plans for the future. I just had to graduate and get started and it would…just happen.

At 30, I’m now a recovering alcoholic living in a small town in Colorado. I’m overweight, have little or no savings, and I work as a telephone tech support agent for a company that resells conferencing services to different businesses. I spend most of my day in a cubicle surrounded by other “support agents, ” answering on average 40-50 calls a day from panicky angry employees of other companies who have just spent 5 minutes on hold pressurizing their levels of frustration to red-line before venting it on me, the first person available to them. Of those 50 calls, 90 percent of them are the same 5 problems, all user error. Actual technical knowledge isn’t necessary to be a “support agent.” My exchanges with the employees of other companies consist mostly of me deflecting their complaints while rereading them the directions they failed to closely enough. I do this long enough until we discover the road block they ran into and I push them over the top of it. They disconnect in a huff, and I move on immediately to the next call. I do this for 8 hours a day.

My free time is spent with my close friends and girlfriend, entertaining ourselves and making plans for the future. Plans for future trips, possessions, and events that, at the moment, we have no way of paying for. But then, it’s the fantasy that provides my necessary anesthesia to bear the mundane.

Even Durden was played by Brad Pitt.

Plans, I thought, squeezing the steering wheel. Plans for the future. When I was young I was going to be a movie star. Now that I’m older I’ve traded that in for the dream of owning a house and having a job that won’t slowly petrify my soul. As I pulled into my apartment complex I began to wonder what it was in my past that had made me the way I was? Why is it so hard for me to act? Why is it so hard to move forward? My intellect began peeling into the layers of my memory – divorce, rejection, sadness. Considering the possible repercussions of my first female rejection and the ripples it caused along the time line of my personal growth. Was it the embarrassment of being caught by my Dad with a dirty magazine when I was 13? Was it that time I got drunk and paraded naked in front of Serena and Lucas? Is that why I’m 30 and stuck?

As I turned these things over in my mind, searching for the knot in the rope that I could untangle and make myself happy again, something began to penetrate my fog. I said it before the thought had fully revealed itself to my mind.

“This…isn’t action either.”

Disassembling the past and blowing out the dust is just as potentially masturbatory for people inactive such as myself, as making plans that are never put into motion. It provides you the illusion of progress, in place of actual struggle and hard work – results which are completely intangible and unmeasurable.

My self-analysis broke down.

“So…what do I do?”

Well…that was a month ago and I have been puzzling over that question since then. What do I do and why? I’m still not entirely certain but it seems to me that meaning and substance in life occurs through action, not intention. Who do I want to be and what does a person like that do? Some things are still the same as they were when I was 17 – I would love to be a writer and have been calling myself one since I was 17. But a writer is someone who writes, not someone who plans to. There are many areas in my life that I would like to address with action, from health to career.

As this is beginning to sound dangerously like a plan without any accountability, I would like to propose an exercise. Starting November 1st I intend to begin a daily reporting of my actions taken which forward progress in five specific areas of focus. I will make these posts on Brain Flatulence. I’m not going to put any criteria on what constitutes a daily post as the only purpose of the daily post is a slap in the face to stay present to this exercise BUT for every daily post on Brain Flatulence I miss between November 1st and December 1st, I’m going to donate ten dollars to a charity that I’ll come up with later (I invite your suggestions). Should the lethargy mosquitoes feast on me and I somehow manage to go the whole month without a single post, that means that I could potentially be donating 310 dollars to charity on December 1st.

Later this week I’ll provide a more detailed post on what those areas of focus will be and what tools I’ll employ during this process but there are certain criteria on what is going to constitute a successful action. For instance, it can’t be something that I was going to have to do anyway. If one of the five areas of focus is “Finances,” paying a bill would not be an action that forwards progress in that area according to this exercise.

Now I have no reason to request an audience for these daily posts (though they will be there for the record.) Potentially they could be dry and boring. However every Monday morning on Brain Flatulence there will be an article discussing the exercise so far and any impressions or insights gleaned from the doing of it. Additionally you’ll be able to find the product of much of this work on Everybody is Human.

I invite your participation. Check back. Join in. Read. Comment.

If you like, take the opportunity to think about your own life.

Are there any plans of your own that you have let lay dormant for too long?

What’s one action you could do today that would move you a step closer to its fulfillment?

What’s stopping you?

So I’ve been dealing with financial bankruptcy for some time now. For us, it’s not been a quick process, but a very slow one. I left my cushy corporate position with Xcel Energy, a major power company in the US, because I wanted to spend the majority of my day doing something that I felt benefitted more than just a few individuals riding atop a structure that was soon to topple. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not one of those standing in the street saying “Repent, for the end is near!”, because we’ve still got a few years; maybe even a few decades. But I do feel that western civilization has taken all the ground it can and that a new paradigm for living that makes more room for the spiritual element in man is about to take root. This time, I see it as coming from across the globe rather than any one country, so wherever you are reading this, prepare your keyboards to participate in revolution!

Anyway, bankruptcy. I left with no clear idea of what I would do next, just a clarity that it wouldn’t be another corporate job, unfortunately, I’m a creature of extremes, and no normal job looked like it could scratch the itch either. Then my Mom passed. Then my wife and I had a miscarriage. Then we realized that we were going to loose the house. Then despair hit. I’m an exceptionally positive person. The type that finds the silver lining no matter how great the cloud. I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t even reach out to friends. Most of my friends valued the life I’d just left and would think me crazy.

One crisp December morning, I was taking a neighbor friend to the airport. I shared a little of my story, we had no money, were losing the house (that’s what started the conversation), and all about my Mom dying, my sister separating from her husband, the miscarriage, etc. I expected him to get very uncomfortable and not ask me for a ride to the airport again, but he surprisingly reciprocated. He shared about his downfall and how his life had hit bottom, and told me that when it did, he ended up in Seminary. Wait, what?? He’s the biggest looser in the world, but God will take him on as a leader? I waited for the punch line, but none came. He said that he’s not perfect now, but he at least knows Who to take his problems to before they destroy him. I started crying loudly inside my head, but managed to get him to the airport without any loud emotional outburst. Could God really want me? Could he handle my problems? I didn’t think so, but I figured if He was willing to take me on, I’d let Him try. Like Janice Joplin said, “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to loose”. So that’s what landed me in Seminary. Now what?

To anyone who thinks you find God and it gets easier, are listening to people who aren’t really finding God (yes, this means you Osteen), or people not telling the whole truth. My troubles got worse. We had another miscarriage. I didn’t know how to pay the bills on student loans. My wife got depressed. I prayed all the time. Deep heartfelt prayers that, by all accounts of the contemporary Christians I’d heard from, should have gotten God up and flying to my aide. Nothing. Sure, He’d throw us a bone to keep us afloat, but not at all what I expected from all the salvation stories I’d heard. When they’re trying to convert you, why don’t they tell you about these times??!!

We continued faithfully like this until the house went up for foreclosure sale. Or so we thought. We pulled all our funds together to rent a small house nearby because we were sure the house was going into foreclosure. It was a cute house and we thought things would get easier, or at least even out now. Meanwhile, we had gotten pregnant. This time the doctors think they figured out what was causing the miscarriages, which meant Heather had to take 2 shots a day to the abdomen. Better than loosing the baby, I guess. But there was something wrong with the house. I started having stomach troubles and difficulty breathing. My breath would be horrible every morning, but as soon as I left the house, all of this would subside. The landlords who were also Christians, hired someone to come in and do air quality testing. Great! But they found nothing. (Could be because they left all the doors open before the tests, but I’m not the expert!) They offered to let us out of the lease with a $500 lease-breaking penalty as long as we paid rent until they re-leased it. How generous! Since I didn’t have thousands of dollars to pay toward nothing, we (me, the pregnant wife and the 2 and a half year old) moved back to the other house, which hadn’t sold yet, while I spent my days trying to find something.  Found a natural gas leak by the furnace and they fixed it. So we came back. But the problem persisted. Found a mold problem and we fixed that. Still feeling crappy. Finally the sewage company came by to flush out the lines in front of the house. Bingo! The house filled with an obvious sewar smell. The sewer guys came in and after some investigation told us that we had a sewer gas leak. So is that bad? Well the baby had stopped growing for the two weeks we were living there, and people have died from one of the components in the gas Hydrogen Sulfide. We moved back to the other house and told the landlord. But they came and investigated and couldn’t find it! They wouldn’t let me help them find it either. I was amazed. They said they’d let us out of the lease free this time. We took this option and moved back into the other house waiting for it to sell. So now I have a pregnant wife about to deliver, and the rest of us (including my 19 year old who’s still in the old house) living in total disarray. My back is shot, having moved us back and forth so much. I have to get the house ready for the baby, we have no money, school is about to start again, and did I mention we have no money?

Into all this, a life is born. Silence. She’s beautiful. I have no words.

I know most of you will not get this at first pass, but meditate on it, because it’s a big one. The Buddha got this one. Christ got this one in a big way. The point to life is not to avoid suffering. We all claim we know this, but we don’t live like it. Sure, we’ll avoid suffering in the hopes of attaining a later personal gain, but to suffer for someone else is rare, especially someone who’s not a family member. Buddha thought that the best way to deal with this reality was to have people understand that suffering is an unavoidable part of life, and that we are to pursue enlightenment by practicing and meditating on suffering and acting for the betterment of others. Jesus simply demonstrated extreme personal suffering for the sake of everyone so what we might be reconciled to God and choose to love as He did.

I think the point of life is to pursue suffering like the points you get on the way to winning a video game. I never thought I’d use a video game as a metaphor for life, but it fits. The more points you accumulate along the way, the more able and prepared you are at the end to win. But you have to risk danger and death to accumulate these points. These are your suffering points and they bring great reward. You can earn more life, or longer life. You can use them to acquire new tools. But you can’t amass any serious number of these without significant risk. And usually, the larger the risk required, the bigger the suffering points you receive. I know some of you are saying, ” Yeah, but you’re supposed to get these points without getting hurt or dying”. My answer is, “But you never do”. That’s the suffering.

So I say, go after the suffering points. Get used to that steady risk and the suffering that goes with it. If you don’t, they’ll still come after you. You’ll still have some danger in your life, and you’ll still get suffering points, but they’ll be the little ones that aren’t worth much and don’t get you big enough to win.

What’s the goal, you ask? That’s between you and God.

Happy Gaming!!

Blog?

Well Luke and I have clearly hit the skids for a bit. As is so often the case, and I forecast in my first post, life will occasionally step out and get in the way of the best laid plans. For my own part that has meant finding a new apartment, moving, and spending time getting to know my girlfriend again.

Luke has a crazier story that I will leave to him to relate.

Now that the dust appears to be settling for both of us I have a strong feeling that things are about to get back on track. For the person who may still be reading this out there, stick with us. We’ll be getting back on track shortly.

…probably.

“Thank you for calling tech support. I’m going to be here when I’m forty aren’t I?”

Now that thirty IS the new twenty, hopefully this also means my life expectancy has also gone up by ten as well. Death realizes that 30 is the new 20 too . . . right?

Why am I so bothered? Well, regardless of the fact that I haven’t found “it” yet, I can feel with certainty that “it” is out there. Destiny. She’s a lover I haven’t seen in the flesh yet; I can’t tell you exactly what she looks like but I can still describe her to you. She’s important. She valuable. She’s a contribution to everyone around her. She might have made a lot of money but that isn’t want matters to her. What is important to her is waking up every morning and knowing she’s making the greatest contribution she can, the best way she knows how, according to her principles. How do I know that destiny is out there? Well I don’t for certain, but I have a strong feeling because of the cavernous void her absence from my present life has created.

And by destiny I don’t mean fame. I think fame seems, at least in part, a matter of coincidence, which is why I’m seldom star-struck. When I was a teenager, Mike Tyson bought every seat in the theater I worked at for a showing of Saving Private Ryan. He watched the movie with two friends and all the employees took turns checking out the back of their heads from the projectionist’s window. I was tearing tickets and, as he walked by me after the film flanked by these two huge men, the only thing that occurred to me was,  “Hunh…he’s kinda short.”

This has proven true in nearly every case except for one.

I had been working for a month in San Francisco as IT support for a television station. At the end of that first month, the company had it’s anniversary party on a yacht called the “San Francisco Spirit.” Three floors, 4 bars, and several loops around San Francisco Bay – it was a tradition that a few of my fellow IT members referred to reverentially as, “The Booze Cruise.” I still had yet to make even a proximity friend with anyone in the company and I was apprehensive about the party. All day I had been fighting with a light case of social anxiety. I’m not one for parties and usually will only show up out of politeness to the host, making a fast exit in the first hour or two. The thought of being trapped on the boat for the duration of one had my stomach twisting lightly, hardly soothed by the prospect of, “meeting new people.”

It was a typical fall afternoon in San Francisco and when we headed out on the water the low clouds were moving in quickly. I was standing on the upper deck of the Spirit finishing the first of a family of drinks I would go through that evening. I downed the last swallow and turned to head towards the bar. That was when I saw Al Gore standing amongst a group of people from the television station, smiling and posing for pictures with them, the remaining tufts of his hair blowing around in the Bay air. I felt the blood drain from my extremities, my heart start hammering, and my stomach began oceanic gyrations of it’s own.

I ducked down the stairs away from him as quickly as I could and found the bar on the second floor. The bartender refilled my drink while I babbled helplessly into my cell phone at some close friends about how Al Gore was on a boat I was going to be on for the next two hours. After I was refilled I spent the next 30 minutes circling the upper deck where he was, like a vulture. I was trying to figure out why I was so damned star struck. After all I’m ashamed to admit it but it takes all the energy I can muster to care about and follow politics, even in an election year.

Writing this now, I think I understand more clearly.

Whatever you think of his politics – whether you agree with him or not, Al is a man who, at least in appearance, has found Destiny. He obviously has a set of principles that he lives by and they govern his pursuits. He has found his meaning but not only that, it has rippled beyond the limits most people never see their whole lives. He represented everything to me that I’d come to California seeking and I wanted to tell him my whole story and share with him how passionate I was about… something… I just hadn’t figured out exactly what it was yet. Lost in the midst of these thoughts, I had completely stopped paying attention to where I was standing, I didn’t realize that I was now within a few feet of Al staring at his shoes. He however did notice and, apparently used to awkward introductions from perfect strangers, walked right up to me.

“Hello there,” he said.

“I uh…I…hi there hi. I’m Ian.”

He smiled, “I know. I’ve seen you around the building. How’re you doing?” he asked.

I gulped, honestly having no idea how exactly I was doing but I was pretty sure the boat was sinking from under me. Instead of answering his question I gestured to the clouds out on the water, now shrouding the distant hills. “Wow this is uh…this is amazing. Beautiful I’m so…uh…I’m so. Wow.”

Al raised an eyebrow at me, probably wondering how I’d managed to get drunk ten minutes into our voyage.

I reached desperately. “I mean uhh… I mean I’m from some podunk little town and this is just…this is really amazing to me.”

Al smiled, “Oh really? Where are you from Ian?” A quick search of Wikipedia right now tells me Al Gore spent much of his childhood growing up in Carthage, Tennessee, population 1700.

“Uhm..” I swallowed. “Duh… D… Denver.” That’s Denver, Colorado. Population at last count 598, 707.

Al Gore, again, looked confused. “I’d hardly call Denver a podunk little town.”

“NO I uh. NO I guess not. Just you know… compared to this boat.”

The two of us stood in silence together another 20 seconds, both wondering what I’d just meant by that, before Al cleared his throat very graciously and said, “Well uhm… I hope you enjoy the party.”

“Oh you TOO!” I shouted, my arms flying up anxiously and nearly tossing my Jack and Coke across his jacket. He smiled and backed away slowly.

"Hm...This drink has hints of desperation."

I spent most of the rest of the evening at either the uncrowded bow or the stern of the boat, avoiding any possible area I thought he might be.  For the next two hours those two minutes next to him played through my mind in a loop. I wondered shamefully if Destiny had been standing there with us, rolling her eyes at me while I struggled to form complete sentences. I wondered how many normies like myself wondered that after meeting a celebrity. I wondered how many normies a celebrity meets daily, who look to them the way I did – their every gesture begging that the celebrity use their mutant super-power to validate and fulfill the normies very existence. How must the celebrity feel seeing that question in the normies eyes, “What must it feel like to be complete?”

And somewhere in the process of wonder, I lost track of how many drinks I’d had.

The night wore on, sometime that evening the Captain announcing over the p.a. that we were making our last loop around the Bay. I started to make my way to the main deck, hoping to be first up the gangplank when they let us off. The main deck was the largest part of the boat and was absolutely packed with people. The temperature was a good 20 degrees higher than any other part of the boat. I was doing my best to maneuver through the crowd when I ran into my boss Jessie. Jessie’s face was completely aglow. This was a striking thing because he bic’d his head and from the crown of his head to where his neck disappeared into his shirt he was beet red.

“HEY man! How’re you enjoying the party!?!”

“Oh…it’s all rig..it’s good. It’s good. Thanks man.”

“Did you get a picture with Al yet!?”

I shook my head, “No that’s ok. I think I have a memory that’ll last without it.”

Jessie caught no and nothing else because he started in the opposite direction before I’d finished my sentence, pulling me through the crowd of people that had jammed the main deck. Before I knew it I was once again standing in front of Al Gore. VERY in front of Al Gore. In order to hear anything in the crowd we needed to stand within inches of each other. By this point in the evening Al’s collar was undone, his hair completely disheveled, and his face flush and sweating from the heat of the crowd.

“AL,” Jessie screamed in the ex-vice president’s face, “This is IAN. He’s a new guy on my staff!”

Al, his arms around both of us looked from Jessie to me and smiled, “I know! Ian and I met earlier. We were having a fascinating discussion about population statistics of midwestern cities.”

Jessie looked down and held the power button on his camera. It illuminated his face, “Ian knows a ton about Mac’s and Apple stuff! If you ever need help with your iPhone he can come up and help you.”

Al leaned in toward me and shouted, “What did he just say?”

I cleared my throat as Jessie backed away from us and leveled his camera, “He said if you ever need help with your iPhone I can help you out.”

Al shouted in my ear and what he said never made it all the way through.

“What?!” I shouted back.

Al leaned in closely, “I said, the fucking iPod is fucking broken! Fucking thing doesn’t work!”

It wasn’t completely clear, but I understood something profound had just happened, and I began to smile uncontrollably.

Jessie shouted at us, “SMILE GUYS.”

...and somewhere Destiny giggled at me sweetly.

But what of the New Age movement and various religions who say God is everywhere? Jason Morant typified this in his song Love Song with the lyric (about God) “where can I run from You, You’re everywhere”. If this is so, how can both co-exist? I’m not asking this in a Theological sense, but in a real sense. How can my body be a simultaneous conduit for both good and evil. Various religions attempt to resolve this apparent paradox using their fundamental assumptions and methodologies, but none do with satisfaction. I think it’s, once again a matter of our context surrounding the conceptions we have of this world (See my previous Post “Twisted”). We attempt to operate, out of necessity, from our conceptions, but no one context can account for all the experience.

So why does globalism foster terrorism? Because when we shine light on and begin to effectively govern all the places evil can agglomerate, it diffuses, spawning small cells of radicals known as terrorists. This is just one conception, so don’t get stuck on it, but consider that this is just a beginning.

Here is where the New Age (or New Spiritual Movements) and religions diverge. The “New” movements propose that good and evil are just contextual constructs used by those in power to control the masses. But if this is so, why do we all respond with a sense of injustice when someone we love deeply is brutally murdered? Call it what you will, there is something that each of us, if pressed to the limit, would refer to as evil. Take the word away, but you won’t be able to remove the reality of the impact it has on us.

Good is the same. If you doubt it, try now to remember the time in your life when you felt most surrounded by love. Now, try to separate that from “good”. If you succeed, you’ve accomplished what those who have perpetrated evil and called it good have managed to do; fragment yourself (you should now go see a councilor for help).

So what’s the point, you may now be asking (or may have asked at the outset). The point is, there are powers here among us which are beyond our current paradigm’s ability to absorb and account for. Many people, in response to modernism’s attempt to dominate it’s world through knowing, are hoping to create a new paradigm that re-incorporates not-knowing. In doing so, we are re-inventing the wheel. With each new “invention” comes the next generation’s confining construct because each sees the world through their own generation’s experiences.

Christianity is a paradigm that has for centuries encompassed knowing and not knowing, but most people rile against it because it’s actual practice is, firstly, hard to find (with all the self-righteous, comfortable ”christians” out there), and secondly, EXTREMELY RISKY! You may have to exit the known worlds of interaction with others and approach relationships with people completely from scratch with only two foci: Love God completely (as your real, alive, active aware primary focus), and love others as you love yourself (in your real life, not just your spiritual life). If you dare try this, wherever you go, shining the light of God, darkness will flee, but in response, you will not be unnoticed by it. Life will cease to be comfortable, but start being ALIVE! Do you want to be AWAKE??! It’s hard sometimes dealing with life in the Matrix, but it’s real, it’s close, it’s what you’ve always yearned for in secret. Which pill will you chose? Either way, you serve: yourself(ishness) with comfort, or Go(o)d with joy. Choose, or you will be chosen.

I think at this point I’ve just resigned to living as best I can, navigating the waters of life attempting to glean wisdom and share it when I feel it will be true for another, but I find this only moderately satisfying and can’t help but wonder if I’m not missing something important.

Who cares if I can lift it or not? That's not the point!

So I’ve decided to open it up the forum for comment.  Take a moment and share with me what (context or way of operating, or conceiving of things) you’ve found to be particularly satisfying in life. Help me to understand what you find satisfying in it, and if you’re willing, suggest a way that you think I might apply this to my life to find some greater fulfillment in the journey. I hope someone out there can help me to see some blind spots and apply a new way of operating or some new context I may have missed. Show me that life can be more than this.

Working it Out,

Luke

Mental Wha?

While our itinerary this time through China has been much fuller than I’d anticipated, I’ve no doubt that I have been procrastinating sitting down to write this as I had been waiting for some traveler’s clarity to spring into my conscious mind which would help me tie a neat little bow around China and serve it up in something concise and palatable. Perhaps four days in one of the most complex and historically diverse countries in the entire world will not be enough for me to understand yet the implications of what this trip means to me. This may occur as something more of a travelog then, but since the point is to keep writing…

A few nights ago I hopped on a plane at Denver International Airport and flew from Denver to LA, to Tokyo, to Beijing. 22 hours of total travel time. Asking someone, “How was THAT flight?” is a little like asking somone, “How was your root canal?” There really aren’t a lot of other interesting ways to describe something for which the only reward is getting where you’re going. Despite the multiple transfers and 20 minute window in Tokyo to get off one plane, get through security, and get on another plane, my bags and I arrived to Beijing in one piece. Upon landing there was a strange moment when 5 Chinese health inspectors boarded the plane dressed like extras from “Outbreak,” pointing little devices at peoples heads and clicking a button. The objects looked a little like plastic guns with lenses at the end of them. When they were done going from passenger to passenger they hustled an Asian business man off the plane and we were allowed to disembark.

That's my Mao!

After collecting my bags, I met up with Jen and we proceeded to the hotel. Thursday morning, Jen and I got on a double decker bus and rode to Tianenmen Square. The heat was oppressive. Beijing is at the height of it’s summer, and the temperature was a brutally humid 101 degrees. Tianenmen Square is, as the name suggests, a vast open stone square dotted with occasional lamp posts and political statues, with few places to find shelter from the sun. What places there were people would cluster together in the shade like animals in a desert heat. No doubt because of the volatile nature of it’s history, entry to the square has been limited by the government to certain tunnels that go under the streets on all sides. Within every tunnel now is a security checkpoint of 2-3 guards scanning the bags of people entering and exiting. The square itself is flanked by the communist headquarters, the resting place of chairman Mao, and the Gate of Heavenly Peace (the entrance to the Forbidden City) where a portrait of Chairman Mao gazes across the square at the pedestrians.

The Summer Palace

The Forbidden City itself covers 7 million square feet, much of it vast open courtyards and outdoor stages. After that we headed to the Summer Palace, essentially a former exclusive resort for Emperors and Empresses. The palace is built on a sprawling piece of land that stretches around Kunming lake.

Of course it’s close to impossible not to take great photographs in places like this but what I found most enjoyable was watching our fellow tourists. For instance I’m thinking of bringing this look to the States when I get back. Everywhere we went we found men whose solution to beating the heat was to roll up the hem of their shirts and let their sweaty bellies (no matter the size) hang out in the breeze. I think I could pull it off. Similarly, while touring the cultural exhibits has been fun I’ve found modern Beijing to be much more compelling. I’m informed that the Chinese approach to cultural antiquities is to rebuild them rather than to preserve and restore. While the Great Wall is still a site to behold, for me there is something diminished knowing that many of the sections have been torn down and rebuilt over and over again in the last 100 years. But just walking through even a market in Beijing is a singular experience. There are entire malls dedicated to knock-off clothing and souvenirs. Each floor is jammed with booths of items (none of which have a price on them) and there is a sales person to “help you.” As I walked through the aisle, sales people would yell to me to come and check their stock and that they would give me the best price of the market. Some would even grab my arm and pull me in. For an American who is used to a very different concept of what retail service is, the experience is an intense one.

Only a couple days left now, including a visit to the Great Wall. My reaction to the trip has not been quite what I had anticipated. I understand that I am a person who travels in search of Traveler’s Clarity. It’s that sparkling moment of insight on your own life that being a new place often provides you. I have been to China before, briefly. The last visit was two years ago in Shanghai and the experience was overwhelming. The moment I stepped off the plane everything was blindingly intense – from the smells and sounds of the street to the texture and tastes of the food. There are massive floods of people everywhere you go, flowing around street corners and up subway stairwells, each one of them with a vastly different concept of personal space than my own. While the country is much more open than it used to be, people still find the site of a pasty 6′3″ American unusual, and stare with open curiosity. In the military museum the other day three young men stopped us and it took a few confused moments for me to realize that they weren’t requesting that I take a picture of them, but rather that they be allowed to take a picture with me. You can’t help but be challenged by the experience – let it reach into your mind and play with your world view and preconceived notions (though in just what way depends on the person of course.) I found the first time it melted the boundaries of my world and allowed me to expand them before they were rehardened by the inevitable return to my own personal grind back home. Regardless they are still changed.

I had expected that experience again this time, but it seems that the first time you come to a place it acts on you whether you want it to or not. Thanks to our capacity to normalize any experience no matter how extreme, the second time you come to a place it’s innate ability to shock and surprise you is greatly reduced and the experience becomes much more subject to what you’re committed to getting out of it. Showing up is no longer enough. There is something I can do with all this but just what it is I’m not quite sure yet. Being here represents an opportunity to consider my world from a much larger perspective and than implement changes accordingly.

I’m still giving myself some time though I know there is a deadline. The first day back in Colorado these experience will still be accessible. By the end of the week, the grind will have set in again and the opportunity lost.

More next week. Leave a comment below and tell me about a travel experience that you found helped changed your view of the world.

At the request of my friend Gene, I have disabled comment moderation so your comments should show right away.

Late last night he called in tears because his beloved pet died. He was very close with his ferret, spending time with him each night, but what I think compounded matters is that he’s on his own for the first time and everything seems to be breaking down. His aging car, dwindling finances, and even some promising dating possibilities.

I remember this time myself when I realized I was on my own for the first time. I had just left the USAF, moved to a city where I knew no one, leased an apartment I wasn’t sure I could afford, and started job hunting. I had just enough money to last until I could get a job, no more. One cold night, finances running low and job prospects abysmal, I attempted to light a fire in the fireplace. I realized, a bit too late, that I had forgotten to open the flu. As the flames rushed up the wall to the wooden (highly flammable) mantle, I reached for the only thing I could think of in my panic that might quell the burgeoning fire, my sleeping bag. No luck. Remembering the fire extinguisher in the hallway, I managed to put out the combustion, and as I sat surveying the powdery, charred mess, I realized that I was all alone. Not just alone, but in real danger of failing to launch successfully. To a young person this is life-defining. I decided that I probably wasn’t fit to survive and was inevitably going to prove this to the world.

Looking back, I can see the folly of this decision, but in that moment it was suffocating. I still find areas of my life where this decision has a stronghold, and work to remove them as I become aware of them, but it’s a daunting task requiring courage and consciousness even at 36.

I’m now a praying man, so I can suggest this practice to those approaching this fulcrum in life, but even this can seem insufficient, so I humbly offer myself as a resource to anyone going through this. I may not have an answer, but at least we can gasp for fresh air together. As for my son, we’re learning to swim together and it’s healing us both.

For the rest of you reading this post who’ve made it past this crucial crossroads, be willing to go through it again with someone in your life. You may discover for yourself an old scar waiting for fresh pavement and be privileged enough to dress a bandage with someone you care about.

I'm really not this deep...

It seems a right of passage for all good nerds to try, at one time or another, and blog. We’re a strange bunch, we techies (or tech-ers if you prefer.) Normally by trade, many of us amass volumes of disconnected technical knowledge and ability in a range of many powerful creative tools. At first glance than, it must seem a natural fit to take that step onto the internet and apply the knowledge to a medium like blogging. Invariably though, knowing how to use a hammer and being able to build a house end up being two different things. My friends tell me too, you may not realize that you didn’t WANT to build the house until after you’ve started.

I guess I’ve just held out about as long as I can, and now take my turn behind the keys to indulge in that (hopefully only a little) narcissistic impulse which tells me I might have something to say that people are going to want to hear. Perhaps that’s the pitfall, in that the process won’t sustain itself unless I’m writing for myself. Fair enough. Still there has to be a reason to think this is worth putting on the internet. What do I think I can add to this global conversation, already deafening with so many voices?

That was the question that kept me from taking my turn for this long. After all,  I always thought  the things that move people to value their lives are generally divine or dramatic in nature: a pastor speaking to the congregation or a philosopher writing about the nature of the universe. Perhaps even something life threatening.

Thank you for calling tech support. Somebody shoot me.

Then it occurred to me that perhaps these things suffer from the inverse problem: they aren’t average enough. Many of us will never get to see a real biblical miracle and the God-on-cloud concepts of life after death aren’t making it any easier to bring home the groceries today. If you’re an atheist like I am, you may not be holding your breath for Jesus (sounds like a Christian academy swim team), but feeling the crushing sameness of daily life still needs to be dealt with, and unless you’re a pure hedonist you still need to find a reason to put your shoes on in the morning. Life may be a feast, but we’re still stuck eating it one measly grape at a time. There may be beauty and poetry in the construction of the universe but where the hell is the beauty in rush hour traffic, loneliness, a car insurance bill, or that root canal I’ve been putting off for six months?

Well I’m not actually sure, but as the world gets smaller and flattens out, I think it’s these things that will bridge nations and not the political ideology of our leaders or the canned idealism of our cultural philosophers. A global interconnected economy means that now there are people in China who hate working at Starbucks as much as I hated working at Blockbuster. That’s a connection. It’s a tenuous one, but a start. Heck, if it’s never anything more than that, misery loving company is still an act of love.

So…Why not someone like myself to open that conversation? Being an average specimen makes me uniquely qualified to speak to and understand that experience. I am not a politician, or a movie star, or a celebrity, or a billionaire.

I’m Ian. Pleased to meet you. Stick around. Give us a chance. We’ll get better.

I promise.

Oh and please, introduce yourself below.  See you in a week.

I’m not a blogger. I get things done the old fashioned way, I call people, meet them for coffee, and make descisions to do things face to face. But i’m realizing more and more that this is where things are getting done these days. If I want to continue to be productive in the eyes of my friends and associates, i need to get things done where they see productivity happen.

OK, so I’m sitting here trying to be productive and my 2 year old daughter just came in and dumped pink glitter all over me. Had this happened in a public meeting, it probably would be much more disastrous, so I’m taking this as my first onliune triumph!!