The Enlivened - jeffdegraff.com · An unwilling conscript in the Great Angling Crusade, I learned early that our world is as alive as we are, animated by the dynamic signs of energy

THE JEFF DEGRAFF INNOVATION L IBRARY

JEFF DEGRAFF

The Enlivened

Copyright © 2018 by Jeff DeGraffAll rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. All inquiries should be addressed to the contact information listed on this website:

www.jeffdegraff.com

ISBN 978-1-7328295-0-3

Jeff DeGraff Innovation Library601 E. UniversityAnn Arbor, MI 48104

CONTENTSFOREWORD o1

CHAPTER 1 We Are Beings in the World Trying to Transcend It o5

CHAPTER 2 We Are Both Created and Creating 11

CHAPTER 3 We Are Moved by Invisible Forces 19

CHAPTER 4 We Seek Wholeness but Grow from Our Incompleteness 27

CHAPTER 5 We Tell Our Story Until It Tells Us 37

CHAPTER 6 How We Create Is What We Create 45

CHAPTER 7 Our Emptiness Reveals Our Fulfillment 53

CHAPTER 8 We Make It up as We Move Along 63

CHAPTER 9 Knowledge Is a Passage and a Prison 73

CHAPTER 10 Reality Ripens Our Creativity 81

CHAPTER 11 Our Identity Is Our Hypocrisy 91

CHAPTER 12 There Is Poetry in the Mystery 99

In the Middle Ages, before the printed word, the art of memory was employed by poets to conjure up abstract images in the theatre of the imagination and connect them to architectural features in the halls where they performed—a majestic spire, an ornate column, a gilded door. Through this technique, the teller could recreate their verse by deconstructing the design of their mind and reconstructing it in captivating imagery, sound, and meter. These elaborate mechanisms were the craft of the keepers of the well-told tale, in a world where the narrator was always God and the teller just a whisper in the glorious silence of the big story. Memento mori, “remember your death,” the authors warned us so that we might conjure up our character while there was still some drama to be performed. As such we are revealed.

Foreword

FOREWORD 1

THE ENLIVENED SELF 32 JEFF DEGRAFF

We are the mapmakers, navigators, and captains of our fate. Many travel with us. Through the transformative magic of our creativity and energy, and a little luck, we get to help the young take flight and the old and infirmed land softly. We guide our beloved institutions to be made anew or wander slowly with them to their confused demise. Yet, we seldom observe the most basic and fundamental dynamics of the animate world moving all around us, though we see its vast and generative power every day, everywhere. Instead, we deconstruct our own lives into an overwhelming array of things-to-do that when all checked will

1Everything is both part of a greater system and a whole thing unto itself.

—Immanuel Kant

We Are Beings in the World Trying to Transcend It


somehow be reconstructed as our great work. The bullet-point and check-mark are the opiates of our deluded age.

Alternatively, we desire a transformation so complete that it spans the map of our psyche in search of some utopia such as wealth, or happiness, or love. We would rather toss our affirmations like pennies into the wishing well of the eternal ocean than construct a worthy craft that can move us from our moorings to the undiscovered country. It is the unrealized possibility of the voyage that blows us about and pushes us forward where the future we seek is ever becoming and emerges along the way.

What we want and what we do to get it is built on the foundation of what we believe to be the purpose of our life. We seek different things: everlasting glory, perpetual youth, spontaneous enlightenment, and even salvation. Yet, under closer examination, there are some common patterns to how we seek them. While we are infinitely diverse in our characters and desires, our strategies and methods for achieving them are remarkably similar. Of course, we may be better or worse at implementing our plan, and there are always mitigating factors like culture, language, and liquor; we share some inescapable beliefs about how our world functions. Our interpretation and experience of the world is personal, but their origins are collective. That which we believe to be most unique to ourselves is that which we inevitably share most with others.

Our inheritance, our treasure, is our incompleteness and our awareness of it. It provides us with the impetus and the opportunity to grow. It pulls us forward. The totality of the human endeavor may be simply summarized this way—We seek to grow into wholeness.

We grow in all variety of genus and flower—physical, psychological, social, financial, and spiritual. Yet the creative principles that govern the structure and dynamic growth for all things, and the equities they produce, are only visible when made manifest by our actions. We are the gardeners of Eden. We did not create the energy or majesty that grows the natural world, seen or unseen, but through our mindfulness, care, and skill, we may nurture our plot to some desired paradise. We till, we plant, we weed, we harvest—we matter. At our best and worst, we deviate, the thesis and the antithesis, to create the synthesis, the better and the new. We are part of the structure and dynamics of growth. What we know and what we do are reciprocal. They move each other. This is the essence of enlightenment. Intelligence is the ability to perceive the hidden order while wisdom is the ability to act accordingly. We are existentially aware of our place in the world—free and responsible. Yet, we are neither the lords of creation nor their unwitting servants. We transform our world from within the world.


Angling for Awareness

My first memory as a child involves wrestling with a rebellious orange life-vest that smelled like an unfortunate combination of grass clippings and Lucky Strikes. In my Grandpa’s trusty old wooden rowboat, my older brother John got the enviable lookout point while I was relegated to the lowly rear bench. Armed with only a cane pole, I fished for all of the variety of leviathans in what I remember as a perpetual torrential downpour. Through the rain, I transfixed my attentions on the bright yellow tip of the bobber; for when it moved, it was a call to action in the anticipation of an acquisition—frisky bluegills and the occasional foul-tempered bass.

My Grandpa preferred to pursue his quarry by more sophisticated means. He had a bottomless tackle box of bedazzling lures in colors even Kodak had never imagined. They spun or floated or rattled like my Aunt Betty’s jewelry, and to my amazement, the most monstrous of walleye and pike pursued them with the zeal of a famished boy maneuvering for the last donut.

An unwilling conscript in the Great Angling Crusade, I learned early that our world is as alive as we are, animated by the dynamic signs of energy at work. All life continues from life and gives chase to that which is most active. Nature pursues

what moves and derives from it power, progeny, or pleasure. This is the essence of fishing—and meaningful creative endeavors. My Grandpa taught me that a successful outing starts with wishful thinking but is contingent upon our ability to anticipate, attract, and act on that which is already animated. To believe otherwise is to be victim of coincidence or perpetrator of outrageous fortune.

Sometimes the fish just aren’t biting, and wishing it to be so doesn’t change it. It only changes our experience of the situation and how we make sense of it. Growth comes from developing a deeper understanding of the interplay of the forces and how to manage the tensions of conflict and cooperation. That’s why there is no magic lure or secret checklist for landing the big ones. Our opportunities to become better and new—to become whole—to succeed, are discovered in the places where the world around us is growing and calls us to do the same.


The term “cosmology” is usually taken to mean a theory or model of how the universe works or doesn’t depending on the kind of day we are having. It suggests that this set of principles can be applied to everything worth explaining from the orbiting planets to why our computer only freezes up during important presentations. The great Hungarian novelist Arthur Koestler called the study of whole entities as the fundamental components of reality holism—the idea that all of the elements of a complex system not only work in concert but are contained within each other. As with a hologram, each piece, no matter how infinitesimal, contains a complete image of the entire

2Man is a piece of the universe made alive.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

We Are Both Created and Creating


object. Not only is the whole greater than the sum of its parts, its parts are also, in themselves, whole. This view suggests that it is best to understand something by studying it as an integrated system in its entirety. Forms of holism appear in most disciplines of inquiry: evolutionary biology, chaos theory, systems thinking, osteopathic medicine, and cultural anthropology, to name a few. This also explains why our abhorrent table manners are partially derived from Great Aunt Tanya who believed that she was, in reality, the lost Romanov Princess Anastasia. It is the study of the collective system that best determines how the individual parts behave.

Pythagoras, founder of Classical philosophy and mathematics, espoused a similar view in what he called the “music of the spheres.” Oft misunderstood, the Greek mystic saw reality as embedded in a series of concentric and invisible domains he characterized as crystal spheres that were in a dynamic but harmonious relationship with each other. He saw alignment not as a fixed state but one in motion. This concept can be seen in a temporal framework in the celebrated passage from Ecclesiastes, “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven” and again as a spatial concept in Dante’s Divine Comedy when he ascends from the lower rungs of hell to the summit of the celestial realm. The concept that we are contained in a multi-leveled, functionally restrictive yet growing system, and have the choice to align with it or rail

against it, has a multitude of new names like macroeconomics, cultural anthropology, and emergence theory, each with its own prerequisite jargon and other accouterments; but the foundational idea of a naturally embedded system remains essentially the same.

Just as our thoughts and actions are affected by our parents and children, they too are moved by us. We are self-authorizing beings that can control and even change some things in our environment, but we must also adapt and respond to it as well. To better understand how we grow into wholeness, we must first understand how our world is becoming complete, and how we fit, or don’t fit, with these dynamics. Let’s call this study of the structure and dynamics of how Man becomes whole within the larger system of his world Wholonics, to suggest the reciprocal nature of our relationship with our circumstances—both mover and moved.

Like putting a jigsaw puzzle together having never seen the cover of the box, we sense that there is a clear and complete picture of our self, but finding and fitting all of the pieces together requires us to make sense of emerging patterns to discover the simplicity hidden within our complexity. To complete the puzzle, we progress simultaneously from all directions. We spot the specific pieces that contain enough of a complete image to be discernible as a cardinal or a flower or some other discrete element. Conversely, we also recognize the


colors and shapes that merely intimate that they may be a small part of a larger motif, like a blue sky or a snow-covered hill. Puzzles require us to be mindful all around and intentionally integrate our foresight and insight until an implicit design is made explicit. We do not create the puzzle, but our creativity helps us find the image and bring it into view were all can appreciate its splendor.

A Leap of Faith

The universe of my soul was poured out in the incantations of my childhood every evening—“Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name.” The poetic flow of words wandered vaguely familiar through my mind searching for an erstwhile image of the Almighty to befriend. I poured over parable and picture books where colorfully robed shepherds followed the righteous path to glory, where alluring angels sang in exaltation. At the end of each chapter, the Father of all fathers would finally appear as a white colossus great as the boundless sky. Even at my tender age, I knew this was more imagination than substantiation. So, seek as I might, I could not find my hiding God.

My Catholic family attended mass regularly and observed most of the plentiful holy days of obligation, which perpetually arrived at the precise moment any form of personal enjoyment

was beginning to materialize. Irregular Latin, eternal Lenten penance, and choreographed Medieval altar boy maneuvers were accessories to the prescriptive lifestyle that came with the faith. In my neighborhood, to belong to the Universal Church was to be foreign and idolatrous. I was a reluctant accomplice in a world of explicit order and hidden meanings.

The blond-haired ingénues at my elementary school talked about Jesus as if he lived down the block. Perhaps they even jumped rope together before sharing a lunch of Kool-Aid and Sno Balls. They feigned felicity and knowledge of the absolute, and called me out as an infidel wandering among their own lands. Though I conspired to captivate them with my reverie and recollections of the divine, it was really all a bit beyond me. Still, it was better to be a silent heretic than to confess to the blasphemy of doubt.

And then it happened one summer morning. My brothers and I were discussing the legitimacy of a story told to us during a catechism lesson about Italian saints who were reported to regularly fly between holy shrines and stupendous acts of kindness. As a test of our own piety, we decided to take flight from the top of the stairs that led to the cavernous and foreboding basement. Miraculously we soared down the steep stairway to its depth without as much as a jostle. A ponderous number of stairs were traversed in a single sinuous bound. This was not an illusionary flight or a metaphor, but actual aviation.


We were astounded and concluded that our holiness had surely contributed to our newfound extraordinary powers. After all, the parish priest regularly reminded us that in Jesus all things are possible, including acts of superhuman ascension. We rushed to tell our mother about our imminent canonization, but she was unmoved by our accounts. Perhaps she did not understand that we had successfully communed with the copious canon of saints and embodied our favorite member of the Fantastic Four. We were unceremoniously marched off to bed where Hail Mary’s were quickly dispensed in dedication to relatives we had never met.

Even as a young lad, I have been watchful and wary of true believers who have traded their reason for the reification of their own personal experiences. Their way becomes the right way, and all other unbelievers are wrong, or sinners, or vaguely unworthy. They seal themselves inside a web of hermetic beliefs to remain invulnerable and unmoved by the wicked world where compassion is bestowed, love is consummated, and growth is attained. As in my childhood, I am still a stranger who walks along the foreign places; but the doctrinaire demagogues, so saintly and certain, are now exiled to their own lands.

I am propelled to move by the forces around me, but compelled to act by the forces within me. In the moments when I confuse the two, my insight stems my foresight. My opportunities appear in the mystery of chance, but I seek them

out with vigilant anticipation. My memory and imagination are a happily married couple. Without the former, I have no experience to draw on. Without the later, I have no experiment to draw forth.

I wonder if incredulous St. Thomas was instantly assured when he skewered Jesus, or if the event rolled over and over in his mind in search of some greater meaning. Maybe our faith is like a good story or a dirty joke where the punch line is as much a matter of timing as it is of phrasing. My unorthodoxy still compels me to jump down the stairs where the monsters of doubt dwell and sense is made from random bumps and existential bits of sacred awareness. The way is unsettled and vague as is language and life.


Near Santa Cruz, on beautiful Monterey Bay, there is a marvelous place called Steamers Lane where the accomplished and novice surfers test their skills of balance and timing against the temperamental Pacific Ocean. The rookies jump on their boards too early, and the skulking waves pass underfoot before cresting behind them and gently roll them along as if in a wading pool. Other unlucky amateurs rise too late when the towering wave is in full decent and plunges them with indifference to the craggy rocks below. However, the master surfer dude, by some combination of skill and intuition, recognizes the potency of a wave in the distance and times its

3What is essential is invisible to the eye.

—Antoine de Saint Exupéry

We Are Moved by Invisible Forces


ascent perfectly to propel them effortlessly to the shore. “Ride what moves…and move your feet” is rightfully the surfer dude’s mantra for becoming part of a greater generative force. Action is the interplay of these forces, the ocean and the surfer, and on occasion unwelcome intruders like tiger sharks, operating in an ancient dance where all participants are beings within a common ecosystem looking to prosper in an environment that decidedly moves toward a greater form of balance.

We cannot control the ocean, those ubiquitous and unseen forces are more compelling and powerful than ourselves: science and technology, politics, conflicts, economics, social mores, and such. If there is a storm on the water, or the market, your puny little surf board will be thrashed about until you make landfall intact or not. The ludicrous believe that they will outwit the totality of nature by some special providence, while the naysayers are certain that all maneuvering is futile, for in the end, we inevitably succumb. Though we see these perspectives as oppositional, they are delusional in the same way. We can engage our ingenuity to make our situation a positive one, but we have a limited ability to change the circumstances. Yes, we must acknowledge the power and presence of the ocean, to ride what moves, but we have our agency, our ability to navigate, to move our feet.

If we are to ride the choice waves that propel us to our aspirations, our thoughts must flow with the twisting

torrents that surround us but are so often missed, or even worse, dismissed. We must take a higher point of view while never forgetting our precarious and temporal presence in this marvelous and dangerous world.

We all have the capacity to become the surfer dude or dudette with a unique ability to recognize the force and trajectory of our circumstances and employ them for our betterment. We harness these powers by shifting our beliefs, developing new skills, making better plans and choices, and ultimately, taking more effective action. We are the cleverest of adaptors, albeit mostly avowed pedestrians, we walk on water. Still, we have little ability to change others. They too are aquatic dancers looking for their own choice waves.

To advance ourselves, we must first recognize that which is progressing around us and harness, to the best of our opportunities and abilities, its vitality—to surf where the big waves are rolling in…or will be soon.

Fast Tracking

My Dad was an All-American in every sense of the term. He briefly battled for the indoor half-mile world record while attending college classes, working the night shift in a perilous paper mill and keeping his three rambunctious boys in line. My Dad never stopped running. The week was a series of


drills performed with military precision—“Do it now” was the standing order. With his hustle and ingenuity, he could do more with less than that clever old Franciscan William of Ockham. But the weekend was something altogether different. It was a time to venture out into the natural world and witness the wonders that most miss.

Jim DeGraff was raised along the St. Joseph River in Elkhart, Indiana. Part Potawatomi Native American, he moved among the underbrush like a character out of James Fennimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales. Camping in the sleet in a leaky, old grey canvas tent used in the Korean War, fishing for mercurial crappie at midnight, or hiking across frozen lakes with a merciless Alberta Clipper chafing across your face, were all opportunities to indoctrinate his sons on the book of nature. He would call out, “What is that?” I would see an indistinguishable jumble of green leaves. He would see “toxicodendron”—poison ivy to the uninitiated. I would see corrugated furrows of dirt. He would see where a snapping turtle had buried her eggs. I would see drab charcoal stones. He would see flint knapped arrowheads. I overlooked everything. He saw it all.

My older brother John was Cub Scout and ardent rule follower. My younger brother Joe was an avowed miscreant and only to be followed to see what mischief he was up to. I was a daydreaming child. Lying under the old Sugar Maple amongst the violets, I conjured up fanciful creations in cloud

and concoction. I lived inside-out imagination first. My interior life was my sanctuary. I was sickly. I didn’t know. We were poor. It didn’t matter. I was failing. I didn’t understand. My lack of awareness of the objective world sheltered me from the disappointment I must have been. I didn’t have many friends. I conversed with my psyche and consorted with my muse. I was safely ensconced inside myself.

My father rousted me from my airy-fairy fantasies and pulled me out into the distant deep wilderness where the Great Spirit usurps the soul. These excursions widened my dreams and heightened my hopes. Chaotic thunder, petulant wind and imperious sun demanded attention. Our plans were created with these elements. We made it up as we went along. What’s happening now? What does it mean? Where should we pitch our tent? In this sylvan setting, I became accomplished, competent, and real. He was the naturalist Thoreau to my mystic Emerson. I was the poetic Whitman to his woodsman Muir. Though we blew in opposite directions, we both witnessed the amazing and astonishing in the water and wood. Out there my Dad saw me, understood me, and believed in me.

Experience was his true religion. God lived outside and could only be seen by those who were willing to walk the rugged road to enlightenment. Shangri-La was for sissies. Awareness brought the real Utopia. “Get your head in the game” was his mantra. He understood that from survival to science, our


miracles lay just beyond us in the places where we must seek them out.

As with my Dad, intuition is still my scout, and reason follows fast. We are afraid of our own authentic sight—our divine gift—for fear that we will see the unfamiliar or uninvited. Our one defense is to claim it unreal. Perhaps we all see our Christ on the road to our private Damascus but cannot believe our own evidence. Maybe the avatars, prophets, and messiahs, still walk among us, beside us, and within us. We just fail to see their tracks.


Central to the Western consciousness is the concept of progress, where our growth is made manifest through our ingenuity and industry with a couple of lucky bounces thrown in for good measure. American literature, music, and political philosophy are steeped in this idea of Manifest Destiny where it is assumed that the favored fate of the Nation is divinely ordained. But what if there is no “there”? What if our vision of where we are going is quixotic and changes as we trudge along? What if our game doesn’t have a final score but only offers the opportunity for us to play on? The concept of wholeness

4To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.

—Henri Bergson

We Seek Wholeness but Grow from Our Incompleteness


implies that there is a state of completion, a destination, and redemption at the finish line. It presumes the idea of finality. Our poets, sages, and lovers, remind us of the temporality of our condition and the unavoidable tradeoff we must make. Through the process of becoming, we grow through all of our days but forfeit our ability to ever fully become until our journey is interrupted by death.

Even in our completion, when we trade our essence for our finality, there is transcendence from the lesser to the greater. That is, where the “I” miraculously grows and eventually fades away, the “We” endures in many forms: family, community, and civilization itself. Over time the “We” wanes and the “It” emerges in the guise of our collective view of the world operating per its own laws of nature and beyond. Complex and unbound by the will of Man, they remain even when we do not. To imagine something as complete, fully realized, is to see it plucked from its rightful place within the system that created and sustained it. The well-traveled, both pious and infamous, leave traces of their odyssey in the lives of others who use them to navigate their own pilgrimage. The whole is indeed greater than the sum of its parts.

My heroes have always been the multifaceted masters—da Vinci, Goethe, Jefferson, Tagore—but none provide a more illustrative blueprint for the multifarious life than Benjamin Franklin. From penniless runaway apprentice to founding

father, Franklin moved through many lives in succession—author, printer, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, activist, statesman, and diplomat. Ever exquisitely incomplete, he was pulled forward to the next potentially fulfilling endeavor. It’s easy to forget that he too was subject to the same comprises we all face. He wasn’t much a husband or parent. Had Franklin become whole or satisfied as such, he would have stopped growing somewhere along the way. Instead, the man who created the American self-help mythos moved beyond his own personal you-topia and into the realm of the greater good where destiny dwells.

The negotiation between what is inside us, the essence of our self, and what is beyond our control, is the place where our growth occurs. We are an unruly amalgam of the genetic lottery, the environs from which we spend our lives trying to alternatively escape and embrace, and the experiences we accumulate as either evidence of our manifest destiny or prolonged penance. It is not enough to know the situation or the self to grow. We must become aware of how we function as a being in the world—how we affect others and how we ourselves are affected. It is human nature to read one’s own horoscope first even though the fortunes of the day are just as likely to be found in someone else’s stars. It is through the observation of our actions and reflection on their meaning that we come to understand ourselves both intimately through our subjective


experience and objectively through an awareness of how our character, our personage in the über story, is influencing others in the cosmos, that we can readily experience. The authentic self is more than just a narcissistic construct of personal desires and preferences; it is a prime mover of the world by the power of our will. We are co-created by our own hand and the hands of many others who will help us make our place in the world. This integrating process is unending as we transit through the world and the lives of others in search of a personal utopia that cannot exist if we are to grow. We are by design incomplete, but that is what moves us along.

Getting My Story Straight

My mother came home from her conference with my second-grade teacher and announced, “Jeffrey, I don’t know if I should be angry because you tell such tall tales or proud because you tell them so well.” She wasn’t particularly surprised or upset that I had convinced my teacher and classmates that I had spent my formative years in Ethiopia. The details of my meeting with his majesty, Haile Selassie, and how I encountered a pride of lions while doing missionary work in the savanna were particularly spellbinding. This scene would be repeated several times in the next few years like when I assured my sixth-grade teacher that I had lived in the wilderness for months subsisting

only on acorn pancakes. My Mother knew I was a romantic stargazer and had serious concerns that I couldn’t distinguish reality from daydreams. My Dad called me Walter Mitty after James Thurber’s fictional character and cautioned me about the perils of becoming a confidence man. Apparently, he had met quite a few in his time. As for me, I have always felt open to the world, chaperoned by some kindly spirit, and free to re-imagine with it.

Going to school in the 1960s in Middle America was an exercise in conformity and obedience. For the imaginative and offbeat, it was only slightly better than indentured servitude. So, my lack of enthusiasm and participation brought me perilously close to being held back a grade. To compound matters, my gifted younger brother, Joseph, was only a year behind me. My fourth grade “do it the right way or else” instructor felt that something needed to be done regarding my careless slacker attitude, and she was just the gal to do it. Early in the school year, when the other children were reading their self-directed SRA modules in the proper sequence, I committed the ultimate transgression by reading the final gold module first and then audaciously passing the commensurate exam. She was sure I had cheated when in fact my passionate penchant for comic books had elevated my reading skills far above the fray. This was an affront to her sensibilities. So, I was sent to the school district psychologist for a week to undertake a battery of IQ tests. Much


to everyone’s surprise, particularly mine, I scored in the top five percent across the board for children my age. Apparently, I hadn’t failed—she had. In a single day, I went from the slow kid who couldn’t keep up to that eccentric kid who needed more of a challenge than his peers. Neither was ever true. This wouldn’t be the last teacher to confuse my unorthodox ways of learning with my abilities.

Junior high school was a mélange of misery. I failed everything from algebra to zoology. My only goal was to stay eligible for athletics where I excelled—football, wrestling, and baseball. High school would have followed the same “aim low” strategy had it not been for two flamboyant and engaging instructors who changed the trajectory of my life. One taught humanities and the other choir. What made them so extraordinary to me was that their method of teaching corresponded to my unusual way of learning. Humanities class took weekly excursions to exhibits, symphonies, theatres, and restaurants, where we supped on French crepes and other exotic fare. My choir teacher sent me to music school and gave me the lead in the high school musical production of Carousel. These experiences were electrifying, hands-on and horizontal—I got to connect what I was learning to my own life, and I had to make my own meaning.

While many of my classmates were lost in the ambiguity of it all and simply wanted to know how to get an “A” grade, I

discovered how I learn and why I create things the way I do. I needed to have a vision for the whole before I could understand how the parts worked together. Listening was more compelling than reading. Creativity was accompanied by a surprising sense of symmetry and structure. From experiments, insights emerged. My ability to remember facts was extensive. The Encyclopedia Britannica and The World Almanac became my dear companions. Fathoming philosophy was easy but following fiction wasn’t. English class made Shakespeare impenetrable, but I was moved to my core when I saw King Lear performed on stage for the first time. Math was a hermetic code of abstract numbers and letter designates until I translated it into outlines and graphs where I could interpret its meaning. By cracking the code to my own mind, I could learn from the lies I told and, more importantly, escape the lies that the purveyors of power and custodians of truth would have me believe about myself.

Though my grades were well below average, my college entrance exams were not. I tested out of my freshman year at university and graduated early with distinction all the while working as a Teamster on the night shift. Fewer than four years later, I earned my doctorate.

Whatever success I have enjoyed can be traced back to those rare moments when I became self-aware of how I learn and create. The same attributes that made me strange and irregular in the eyes of the rule-makers became my special gifts.


I had finally gotten my story straight.


The kitsch headline of the American story might read, “Grace, Space, and Race.” These three words nearly sum up what is both noble and disgraceful about our collective experience in the New World.

In our mythologized beginning, drab and humorless, European castaways went looking for a theocratic utopia where they could practice their faith freely, and persecute others who didn’t totally comply with their own beliefs. Tolerance for the intolerant. Others soon followed, not nearly as worried about their souls as their financial redemption. The land was

5To truly know the world, look deeply within your own being; to truly know yourself, take real interest in the world.

—Rudolf Steiner

We Tell Our Story Until It Tells Us


free, unless you were a native inhabitant that happened to be homesteading on an acre or two of someone’s manifest destiny. Living off the land required a strong back, resourcefulness, and tireless industry, to fell the trees, break the plains, and bring in the field. So black slaves where purchased at auction to do the miserable work without recognition or suitable compensation.

While the description may be accurate, it’s not the story we tell ourselves because it doesn’t take us where we want to go as a culture. Instead, our narrative emphasizes religious forbearance and charity, stewardship of nature, and racial inclusion.

We trust the teller, not the tale. In one version, we uphold the First Amendment in the face of a refugee crisis, we explore the limits of outer space, and enforce anti-discrimination laws. In another version, we continue to witness religious persecution, commercial exploitation, and social injustice.

These stories tell us as much as we tell them. Sociologists call this confirmation bias. It’s a mild form of delusion because it blinds us to the negating evidence of the facts, as well as our own experiences. We are captured within their implicit ideology, mawkish amalgamations we take to be a relevant point of view. While some escape the big story, most do not.

In the age of social media, where most of our friends believe the same nonsense we do, free and independent thinking is scarce, and even treated as strange. The more one

wonders from the script, the more likely they will be deemed an apostate and quietly unfriended with all the grace of the Spanish Inquisition. Our own story is either unwittingly a subplot to a larger narrative, or the narcissistic apotheosis of the autonomous man living in his own private Idaho.

While there can be no absolute freedom from the chronicle of the human condition, we can choose to revise and retell ourselves until we approximate something both authentic and transcendent.

The story of the late Corazon Aquino is one such example. Her ascent to the presidency of the Philippines reads like something out of Shakespeare where heroines “have greatness thrust upon ’em.” The convent educated mother of five, and wife of Benigno Aquino, the brilliant Philippine senator murdered by the Ferdinand Marcos regime, found herself entangled in a tragedy. She had planned to leave the country for the safety of her children, but realized that her story was the same as many widows who had lost their husbands to a corrupt and unjust government. At great risk, and with the aid of others, she prevailed to become the hero of the big story because she realized it was more important than her own drama.

When we tell the tale of Cori Aquino, or Moses, or Gandhi, or Martin Luther King, we start from the outside-in. The people were in need. But, our story can only be lived from


the inside-out. We understand the part we play, and the role of our own character in the larger plot. It is in this moment that we realize we are both the teller and the tale.

Heads and Tails

When I was in the third grade, our dog, Mitzi, ran away, or at least that was the story my Dad told us. Mitzi was a high-strung mutt, part Labrador and part Setter, who was terrified of everything, but of my Dad in particular. She wasn’t especially bright or well-behaved and was prone to fits of barking for no apparent reason. My brothers and I were disheartened when she left, but my Dad seemed both resigned to the matter and somewhat relieved. Almost a year had passed since she had escaped on a warm summer night and it was assumed by all that she had perished in the unforgiving throes of a Michigan winter.

One Sunday near Easter, while leaving a junior high school several miles from our home where we were attending mass while our new church was being built, Mitzi miraculously appeared from underneath our old Dodge. She was a mess and even more scattered than usual. Even at my young age, the symbolism of the black dog rising from the white car during the season of resurrection was unmistakable. I put her in the car before my dad could say anything. He looked on in disbelief as

this uninvited and unwanted relative returned. The wagging of her tail kept an ominous drumbeat all the way home where she was quickly penned until we could get her to the vet for a good going over.

It’s at this point that the story becomes very vague. Though I have very clear memories about my life when I was nine years old, they are quite cloudy regarding what eventually happened to Mitzi. Did she run away, pass away, or simply fade away?

My story of Mitzi is incomplete in three places: when she ran away, when she returned, and when I tell it now. It is an apt illustration of how upon reflection, the whole of my life, feels episodic. Making sense of it is a bit like editing a video of a trip I took to some exotic locale. I have dozens, if not hundreds, of little clips that can be woven in any combination to make a coherent narrative. The problem is I never know what to include and what to leave out when it comes to the story of my life. Major attractions fade from memory quickly while small events linger: a songbird at the window, a smiling child playing ball, or a surprising sunset. But for me, the greatest challenge is that I’m never certain when things begin and when they end. Both the flow of life and the stream of consciousness make these didactic distinctions arbitrary, especially when viewed as a cycle where starts and stops are the same thing.

I ignore my own inner-knowing here for I view my


own life as one grand project comprised of many smaller ventures with definite goals and well-wrought plans. Though I understand these to be illusory, I chose to follow the initiatives of my ambition because it provides me with a sense of destiny. It is easier for me to make sense of my life and act willfully upon it if I betray my authentic mystifying experiences for those that provide some semblance of continuity and good continuation.

Consider how I became a top-flight public speaker: high school forensics champion, college speech instructor, university professor, and host of a PBS program. When looking backward, it all seems quite organized and even ordained, as the divine hand of providence works to progress the story. But what if this is just my own need to mythologize my life and I have picked the pieces to fit a story that I have already created? My concern is that this self-deception produces a fatalistic view of life that imprisons me in a tale that I have told.

Most people I know fail to see the future because they aren’t looking for it in the right place. The enigma of growth is that you need to look backward as much as you do forward. This is the only way to estimate the trajectory of what could happen next and act upon it with sufficient time. But I too resist acknowledging the uncertainty of the world all around, for it raises my insecurities about the instability of my own life. My faith, family, and fortunes are all tied to my past while my resilient growth requires that I free them. Such awareness could

move me closer to wholeness as a person or split me asunder. Is it worth awakening if you find yourself in pieces? So, I go on as the narrator of my own life, and tell and retell my tales until they make sense and are true, at least as part of the plausible fiction.

When I reflect upon the whole of my life, it occurs to me that most of my stories are incomplete, particularly the ones I tell myself about myself. More so, the stories that I have shelved as previous volumes or chapters of my life have a funny way of finding their way back into the narrative—just like Mitzi. Our truth is plural and active. There are many constantly rearranging themselves to help us make sense of our lives.


A trip through the MET, or the Hermitage, or the Louver reveals the history of western civilization in the color and form of paint and plaster. Renaissance artists like Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael used scientific instruments and employed the laws of perspective passed down from classical antiquity to create realistic representations of significant religious and secular subjects. Conversely, impressionist painters like Monet, Renoir, and Pissarro emphasized the experience and changing effects of light and color on the subjective perception of nature and ordinary life. Abstract expressionists like Picasso,

6Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

—Oscar Wilde

How We Create Is What We Create


Kandinsky, and Pollock, moved away from representation all together in favor of the spontaneous moment of creation, the surface qualities of the paint, and the destruction of convention.

While these artworks hang in the same halls under the general subject heading of painting or sculpture, the methods used to create them, and the ends to which they were created, couldn’t be more different. Imagine the Mona Lisa painted with the wild palette knife and exaggerated strokes of Vincent van Gogh. The same holds true in our own lives where we perceive our reality, interpret our circumstances and craft our art via a wide array of experiences and techniques. Through our unique mix of imagination, brush strokes, color, and line, how we create is what we create.

From ancient astrology to modern critical theory, we recognize the mitigating effect of types. Our style and propensities attract us to patterns of behavior. We explain our preferences, actions, and foibles by connecting them to a variety or situation—Sagittarius, ENTP, or second oldest child. Theories of type often point to the origin or device that produces our categorical differences. These range from our personal experiences to our biological disposition. Assigning an origin to our personality type speaks as much to our worldview, how we believe the cosmos operates in our life, as it does to our perception of the type itself. Was it our hard work and diligence that created this attribute, or our innate talents, or the hand of

God guiding us along…or all of the above? So, while we are unsure as to what produces the mosaic

of the self, we can observe how recognizable types influence our propensities and corresponding actions. Typologies don’t reveal much about our competency or range, but rather if we are more prone to use our right or left hand under duress. For example, we might be an artistically inclined person who has few realizable skills to paint, or write, or perform. These preferences of type reflect deeper views on alignment and balance, and influence everything from the way we think about ourselves, and the world et al., to how we are most likely to act.

The mythologist Joseph Campbell famously urged, “Follow your bliss.” He didn’t mean we should do what we want to do. He meant we should do what we are designed to do. This is the journey of the hero. To discover where our unique talents meet the needs of the world.

By placing the individual at the center of a passive universe, we regrettably animate the debilitating effects of the designation of type without due consideration of the active role that the situation plays. This produces stereotypes, typologies driven by our prejudices, which mistakenly connect cultural differences to attitude, aptitude, and disposition.

It cannot be said with any certainty that we are the product of our experiences as Locke and Freud suggest. Nor, can we be sure that the greater situation molds us as Marx and


Jung propose. Genetics avoids the issue all together by offering only assurances as to our biological composition. All we can do is to consider the artifacts of our creation, from artwork to progeny, and interpret what they tell us about us.

Not My Type Casting

I couldn’t help but notice him standing in the rain. The bedraggled middle-aged man looked abandoned. I went outside the café and asked him if he would like a cup of coffee. His raggedy clothes were wet and smelled of beer and piss. We went inside. Warming his hands and calming his nerves, he looked as if his wits were slowly finding their way back into his body. Composing himself, he stared at me as though trying to compose a perfect sentence. I thought he was looking for a way to say thank you, but instead he asked if I had accepted Jesus Christ as my lord and savior. The question made me very uncomfortable, especially in such a public place.

After a moment, he doubled back and asked me where I went to church. I replied St. Francis of Assisi. You could almost see the steam rise above his head as he tried to put it all together. Finally, he remarked, “Would you be interested in attending a real Christian church?”

Well, I understood the unsaid point that I was Catholic, and that made me something other than a true Christian. I had

endured this kind of provocation throughout my youth. I was tempted to remind him that St. Peter’s church was the only one mentioned in the gospels, but I followed my better angels and simply let the man talk.

I was astounded at how a presumably homeless person accepting the charity of others found the temerity to suggest that his church, and apparently, his beliefs were somehow better than my own. And then it occurred to me that I too was looking down at him just like everyone else, except for the church where he is affirmed as a cherished member of the congregation. This was his only real connection to a caring community. He was sharing the only thing he had to give. I smiled and pushed on.

I have always had a contradictory relationship with groups. While I strongly identify with my church and state and greatly value these affiliations I also find it exceedingly difficult to operate within their constraints when their rules are arbitrary. I need real reasons to comply. Not the softheaded committee babble that passes for deep thinking or practical action. My creative psyche is the existential child of freedom and responsibility.

The innocuous comment of the homeless man brought a revelation. I identify myself more by what I am not, than what I am. As if the entirely of my existence were a process of elimination, it is what I exclude that clarifies what I value. While I love typologies, it is at their limits that I find my resemblance.


Through the act of creation, I can pour out my inner paint to reveal who I might be.


We are bound up and packaged within our stuff. Not just the expensive shoes in our closet that we never wear but refuse to depart with because they are of good quality, but also our outmoded beliefs, tired rituals, and ancient grievances. Most of us realize that these unnecessaries linger like annoying acquaintances or implausible New Year’s resolutions, but keep them on because they have become intractable as they mediate and consume our real experiences and push out our hallowed memories. We appear thoughtful to others, and at strange moments perhaps even to ourselves, but upon reflection, we

7The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.

—John Dewey

Our Emptiness Reveals Our Fulfillment


become entirely aware of our precarious delusion that we know who we really are and what we truly seek.

Real thinking is difficult. Sense-making devices constructed to tease out the subtleties of sublime truth are perverted by the manipulative that use them to segregate us as true believers or infidels. The manipulators reduce all that is complex and astonishing to the nihilism of the either-or bullet points. It is so much easier to mouth the buzz and blather of the infomercial sponsored by family and friends, church and state, that runs repeatedly in our minds, than to find our authentic images and edit them as free and responsible artists. While rudimentary labeling and decision-making methods are both important prerequisites to more advanced reasoning, we cross over them like bridges as we enter the lands of our own nous. A child learns the Bengali alphabet before advancing to write beautifully, and later still reads the poetry of Tagore where he slowly realizes that language itself has come to master his ability to experience and reason. Growth requires that we take our lives out of syndication and reimagine the plot and narrative.

Clarity does not come from simply emptying the mind. It comes from understanding and organizing it so that it can enlighten. Knowing what we really think is a difficult if not impenetrable challenge. Our compelling customs, provincial parents, and erstwhile coworkers whisper in our ears and dictate to us what is righteous and real until it morphs into

something that appears to be cogent and taken as true. Over time this hodgepodge of assorted aphorisms, blessed precepts, and unacknowledged prejudice are experienced as deeply and uniquely personal. Add to the mix campaigners and admen that troll for schooling bottom-feeders as hucksters perform their magic tricks in the late night circus where disenfranchised and angry gather under the shelter of the big top. False choices, misinformation, and pseudo-journalism distract us like a shill while they steal from us our only possession of real worth—our self.

Trace a thought down the sinuous path past the teacher, and the preacher, and that first love who knew what was best for us, and we come to the solitary place where Willy Wonka closes the gates to his chocolate factory and mumbles passive aggressive aspersions under his breath to the unsuspecting and unworthy everyone. The only substantive difference between productively participating in civilization and being indoctrinated into an intimidating cult is that we may still chose to explore and exercise our cherished options in the former while we willingly surrender them in the later. The catch is that to be truly free, we must first free our thinking.

There is a management concept aimed at improving efficiency and quality called “first-in first-out.” The essential idea is to keep the oldest inventory fresh by turning it over first so that nothing ever goes bad. We are aghast when we


see this practice in reverse such as at the airline baggage claim where the first people to board the jet are usually the last to get their bags. But this reversed order is basically the way our consciousness works. Through the process of assimilating and accommodating our experiences and structuring them into heuristics, or recipes for sense making, we store our proverbial baggage deep in the cargo hold where they are taken for lost luggage. In times of trouble and triumph, we reclaim our earliest belongings which are really never forgotten or forgiven, for all subsequent travel precariously moves in relationship to these patterns. We are most likely Catholic or Protestant, Democrat or Republican, because of our family background and contemporary community. We typically either continue the pattern from our ancestry or intentionally reverse it as a defiant reaction to it. Obedient or petulant children, we are all are adjoining or disengaging our history.

If we are to make room for our prospective vision, we must first create the capacity for growth. Just as one clears their schedule to free up the necessary time to take on a momentous project, we pour out our hidden images to make way for the new and keep them more explicit. These are not replacements for our untouchable past, but rather a rereading and reinterpretation of its meaning that will give our character confidence and greater definition with each successive chapter. We must become deep readers of ourselves if we are to

understand how we move along the story. There is a necessary narcissism in our task, where we become willing witnesses to our own lives. Since memory and imagination are so entwined, the past can easily be mistaken for the future if we are not careful to decorously divide them. While we may sublimate our pain so that it may be concealed, we may also conspicuously bring it forth as sublime pleasure.

The decision to grow requires tradeoffs between what was and what will be. Even Santa Claus has to empty his sack each Christmas so that he may fill it anew every Yuletide. We can have it all because we do have it all, just not all at once. We all grow regardless of our efforts. As the yogis suggest, the mustard seed really does contain the entire tree, but it still requires favorable conditions and glorious time to fulfill its potential. How we align and fit our growth with our aspirations of greatness is what needs our clarity and industry.

Anthropologists have two complimentary theories regarding how innovation spreads from one civilization to another. The first is called “diffusion,” which means that one group trades or battles with another and the said innovation is transferred. The second is called “polygenesis,” which suggests that an innovation appears simultaneously in multiple civilizations because the conditions and time are ripe. We may take these two views to suggest that we may have concomitant opportunities to both reclaim our invisible past as the visible


future and create something altogether new. In either case, we must make the implicit explicit first by doing some personal prospecting.

The Painted House

Every day, on my way to the office at the university, I would pass by a stylish hipped roof Italiante home with an angular eastern white pine and sprawling golden oak in the yard. The building was tastefully painted in gradations of grey as if on its way to an elegant soirée. Yet, whenever I encountered this charming house, it seldom failed to bring a melancholy moment. I would speculate that there is a magnificent brownstone just under the surface wishing to be freed. Perhaps, the owners preferred the cultured qualities of dignified shades to the raw and earthen attributes of kilned clay. But, I was inclined to believe that they too would love to see the real character of their home, but stripping away the layers of paint had become a practical impossibility.

There were days when I felt like the painted house. I too had covered myself in distinguished colors to show my nobility. But, in the process, I had hidden the better qualities of my true nature. I too occupied an impressive corner on a well-traveled thoroughfare. A visible place far better than I could have ever wished for in my youth.

The adjoining properties were tedious or kitsch. The staid monochrome manor was never lost in the neighborhood or confused for some nondescript tri-level. Somewhere between the temperate ethos of beige and the dazzle of electric blue, the subtle art of the simple yet elegant palate was displayed with temperate esprit de corps, pious and in judgment of all. The painted house stood out, but stood alone.

Some time back, I noticed a crew of able artisans working on the painted house. Byzantine scaffolding surrounded the structure and towered above a curious array of muscular machinery. I was overcome with anticipation. Finally, I would see under the drab veil and discover the genuine character of the stately dwelling. But, to my astonishment, when the staged contraption was disassembled, the house had been tastefully repainted in currant red with basil green trim. The new masquerading as the true.

I am ever astonished by friends who believe they have failed at life. Their homes are not so grand. They live far from the watchful eye of the knowing aesthete. Dignity is often lost to drink, dance, and dalliances. Their redemption, a bellicose belief in something so simple as to provide honest shelter from all vulnerability and treasonous reason. And yet, their homes are clean and shine with a reflection of love. They are not fortunate. They are not fine. But they are not false.

We are the painters who paint ourselves. Perhaps it starts


with a light coat on the baseboards or casings above the doors to liven things up. Look sharp. Then on to a tasteful tile backsplash in the galley. Look smart. Next the arches and rooms are redone like a haughty boutique in ghost white and gray. Look up. And in a flash, we are covered completely in the opaque pigments and thick hues of our aspirations made manifest. Look at me.

The way back to our bricks requires nothing. We simply stop the maintenance and embellishment. Nature restores all. A picnic table in the front yard. A confused and neglected hedge. The primitive art composed in crayon and oatmeal slathered on the arcane walls of the study. And as for the painted façade, life strips all things away. In the end, there is no choice.

Our tenancy is temporary. Soon, others will dwell here without us. Perhaps the old will remember and report how the house was once glorious. Or, how the owners became occupied otherwise and let it all go.

As for me, this I know. We are here to build to the best of our abilities and circumstances. To toil and trust that we may improve our lot. It is easy to wish for less. It brings the consolation of rest. But, what are we truly if not the creation of our own work? I celebrate the grandeur of the fine house, but not the paint. Knowing that the sun shines upon all of our neighbors, we are revealed by the light of day. Our authentic color and form uncovered.


Politicians use the term revisionist to label both challenger and foe as a liar or as inconstant as a horse midstream. Of course, this claim is absurd given that most intractable wars, intolerable religious practices, and counterproductive laws are the result of sticking to a tired idea or outmoded philosophy. History is pocked with politician and commander who have dug in and kept on to the grave. Revisionary should not be taken here to mean that we cover up the truth of our past inhumanity or indiscretion, but rather that we incorporate all experiences, virtuous and otherwise, in the hope that they may do us good as

8If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.

—Lao Tzu

We Make It up as We Move Along


we learn anew and venture forth. French Enlightenment philosopher and impecunious

renegade Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s emblematic bon mot, “Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains,” was not just an observation on the state of pre-Republican Europe but also a commentary on our self-imposed servitude. Questioning the authority of the monarchy and clergy brought liberté, égalité, fraternité to the common Man while the revolution that frees the mind to think authentic and original thoughts and dare to keep its own counsel is still most uncommon.

The long held axiom, “seeing is believing,” and its whammy zammy cousin, “believing is seeing,” are both slightly aslant. Scientist and spiritualist alike know well that “unseeing is believing.” While vision holds us constant on the path to growth, ignoring all signs and detours along the way speeds us along to our ruin. Our certainty blinds us to our opportunities. The Oracle at Delphi was given to confounding general and mage with structured ambiguities by which they witnessed only what they wished to perceive. One may see the new with old glasses but not without keeping watch for it. So we are charged with the most difficult task of remaining true to our aim yet adaptable to adjust more than just our course—to change our destination and begin again.

When we are confronted with something unfamiliar, we often either reject it out of hand or contain it by categorizing

it as something either bizarre or unnatural. Because these intrusions make us uncomfortable, we may chose to avoid them altogether or in some extreme cases, even attack them ad hominem. It is a basic impulse to destroy variation and thus stunt our own growth. However, another option is to investigate and consider the unfamiliar, and assimilate or accommodate it into our thinking. This approach encourages us to build upon our most useful and inviolable ideas while remaining open to new ones that give us a view into the unseen places.

Modernist painting, theatre, and science fiction writing all employ an artistic technique called “defamiliarization” intended to force the audience to see the ordinary in surprising and unusual ways. For example, in Bertolt Brecht’s musical play The Threepenny Opera, cutthroats, hustlers, and strumpets are the protagonists while the clergy and civic authorities are the villains. The satire raises real issues about the social conditions of the disaffected poor and the culpability of the indifferent rich. By disorienting our expectations and assumptions, we witness our own biases and are given the opportunity to develop a wider and more robust perspective.

Sometimes the best way to find our authentic thoughts is to gauge the emotional potency of our responses when they are challenged. While these emotions may reveal our thinking, it is just as likely that the opposite is true. Our thoughts are often formed by our feelings. Simply being aware of how this


connection functions in our beliefs may be of value in itself.The London Cholera Epidemic of 1854 turned

Dickensian streets bleak with the death of over six hundred residents in the span of just two weeks. The prevailing “miasma theory” posited that the disease was caused by polluted or “bad air” and brought about a host of remedies that involved everything from chemical treatments rung out from censers like myrrh and frankincense at high mass to an assemblage of large fans to blow the noxious vapors away. In the midst of the panic, while others were devising new ways to move air, physician John Snow made a rather macabre map of the City, marking the spot where each victim perished. The data soon revealed that the disease spread from the contaminated Broad Street Pump. The handle was promptly removed from the apparatus and the epidemic quickly dissipated. Unhooking from conventional wisdom, Snow postulated the poison as a waterborne pathogen, and the science of epidemiology followed.

The heliocentric cosmology of Copernicus and the special relativity of Einstein are both celebrated examples of game changing theories that came from lionized figures who trusted neither their senses nor accepted wisdom. But such illumination requires more than a satori flash of sudden awareness or kindly synchronicity. It also demands that we change what we see and believe to be true.

Unmoved, our situation may conspire to turn us around

so that we may face a new direction. Things look different after the divorce. There is an aura of growth that can only be seen when we look for paths to the secret places in our own lands and become strangers to ourselves. To truly believe is the same as not believing at all, for in either case, we are not open to what we encounter along the way. Growth travels with us in our age to change our view, our mind, and our destiny.

Talking the Walking

When I was a schoolboy, I would escape to the woods and marshes at the end of our street. Walking for miles, I would listen for God in the penetrating winds. I was restored by nature, not through some deeper understanding, but rather, simply by moving through it. Still, the experience was never truly transcendent, for motion brings with it emergent insight but not communion. Such accidental perceptiveness can only consume the mind with momentary reflections. To be self-aware is to be strange. It is an irony that our attempts to create meaning and familiarity in our lives achieve the opposite. We realize how little we actually know about ourselves and how most others travel through this hallowed ground perfectly unaware that they too are alone.

I continued to walk by circumstance or choice through the travails of my youth. When I was a young graduate student, I


was profoundly lucky to have a celebrated professor as a mentor. The great man was a Holocaust refugee who had come from Berlin at the advent of the Second World War with nothing but his elegant mind. If you wanted to meet with him, it was wise to wear your traveling attire. As was customary in provincial Weimar, he took an afternoon constitutional to clear his mind and pose imponderable questions to his overly ambitious protégés in tow. Maybe it was just the pumping of my heart or the ideas pushing and popping as I tried to keep up, but these walks energized my ability to think creatively far more than sitting in a musty office or some clamorous coffee shop or tavern. The walking and talking synchronized my body and mind with clarity and comradery. These short rambles brought unexpected attractions and astonishing discoveries. The simple phrase “walk with me” initiated my journey to terra incognita.

To truly travel is to be lost and alone. To leave country and crown for some enigmatic desire. When I first lived in Europe, I stayed close to the verge as if walking along the side of a pool, for fear that some authority would reproach me for my coarse conduct. Motorized gadgetry buzzed by in Asia animating my gate as I swiveled and swerved. As I trudged along in Africa I would chant American songs as if saying the rosary in an effort to ward off an infection of the exotic. Yet, no one really noticed or cared. I didn’t matter to them. I was just part of the mise en scène in their little movie.

I have always been a seeker but have never found my Shangri-La in the easy platitudes of ideology or the comforting psalms of a bygone age. Motion has always been my mantra, my mindfulness, my muse. Making it up as I go along, I have navigated unmarked routes, crossed the unpaved passages, and unearthed all manner of imagination. Yet, in the end, it is I who remained undiscovered and unfinished. A foreigner to my own lands. An infidel to my own beliefs.

Pity poor Nemesis who lured Narcissus to the reflecting pool to languish away wistfully longing for his own reflection. For those who stand back and see things in their true form are vilified or missed entirely by those who see only themselves. As the appellation implies, guardians with real knowledge of the world are miscast or forgotten. Meaning is an agreement between our subjective reason and what it is subjected to.

Untrammeled thinking is difficult. Finding our true beliefs often means realigning and reprogramming our minds and our lives: A change in occupation, a different spiritual community, acceptance of an unorthodox lifestyle. In the end we must free our self from our self.

I remain vague as I amble through the autumn of my life, and know well that winter awaits before the end of all seasons. A northern man, I seek the clear ideas that come from cold air. So, I walk among the water and woods, and confer with myself. Not the chatter that passes for conversation, but rather


the random thoughts that fall like vivid leaves before slowly descending to dun and umber. Some take these florid patterns to be revelation, as if an oracle for the divine. Others believe they possess the impenetrable truth. But these explications leave me unmoved. For in the changes to shade and shadow, I see the mystic poetry of chance. Tomorrow they will be the reaching boughs of creation, and I will wander on.


How we come to know a thing is a curious amalgam of experience, perception, interpretation, and its assimilation with what we believe we already understand. Though we assume our worldview to be comprised of astute observation and cool rationality, it’s just as likely to be the product of magical thinking about how the car keys teleport themselves into the fridge, or mitigating factors like why one attracts more than their fair share of idiot drivers on the way to an important engagement. Some theories posit that there is an absolute reality that we can

9The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.

—Bertrand Russell

Knowledge Is a Passage and a Prison


come to know in its basic forms: like time, space, and energy. This view suggests that these forces intersect and reveal some representation of “reality” to us. Scientists sometimes refer to this act as “unlocking the secrets of nature.” That is, the world shows itself to us if we are paying attention.

Yet, other views suggest that it is our biases and predispositions in our encounters with the world that determine not only how we come to know, but what we know. So, for instance, if a person is raised in the countryside, they may view city life as chaotic even though urban centers typically accommodate much larger groups of people in much smaller spaces than rural areas. In this view, we project our own biases onto the world. “Reality” is a product we manufacture in our minds and cultures. As the New Age gurus say, “You will see it when you believe it.”

To integrate these seemingly antagonistic perspectives, we must re-view them in the context of each other. While we may safely assume the existence of an objective world, it is at best difficult to comprehend it in its totality given our precarious subjective experience of swimming in the middle of it. Conversely, to assume our own subjective experience determines the reality of the objective world is to presume that we may walk on water just by believing it so.

What is needed is a way to integrate the subjective with the objective—our self within our world and vice versa. Let

us suppose that both are in perpetual process of being and becoming from evolution to revolution. While our world is in such flux and flow that we may not step in the same river twice, we may represent these dynamics with fixed and eternal structures to describe and define them: numbers, directions, and physics. These oppositions or pairs of contrary properties, North or South, East or West, are not the unified reality of the world, but they do provide us with the ability to make maps and make sense of our journey in it. They guide us from here to there.

We name the imperceptible forces that move through our world and describe them with structure and rules, but they are not tamed as such, for we have limited powers to make them better or worse. We give these ambiguous and ubiquitous forces names like the Market, the People, and the Spirit of the Age. The enigmatic philosopher Hegel called this creative power Geist, a German term that roughly translates as “spirit-mind,” because self-aware, it progresses through the acts of Man across history toward its own freedom. We characterize these forces as anthropomorphic because we experience them as a living and conscious presence in our lives. When this view is taken too far, the result is necromancy or primitive superstition where everything appears to be a sign, and faith and folly become indistinguishable. But when tempered with reason, we can discern the authentic patterns and energy that flow around and


within us.

The Structure of Ambiguity

I was in Singapore raising capital for a new business with an old friend from Ann Arbor who had been living with his family in the compact city-state for a few years. He introduced me to some young people he had recently baptized as part of their progression in the Church of Latter Day Saints. The conversation took an unexpected turn when he asked why my religion, Catholicism, baptized infants who could not consciously declare themselves for Christ or Church. I was initially taken aback by his comment, but more so by his assumption.

I asked him if he had been to a Catholic baptism. He said he had. I asked him to describe it. He recalled how the priest blessed the child with water, anointed it with oils, lit a candle, and asked the godparents and the assembly a series of questions to which they responded in unison. I asked him if he understood the reason for the symbols and the questions. He didn’t. Again, this was a surprise.

I explained that much of our spiritual traditions are not literal. Catholicism uses rituals and sacraments as symbols fraught with greater meaning. They are structured ambiguities to bring the uninitiated into contact with the mystical divine. As

we say in the Profession of Faith, “all that is seen, and unseen.” Baptism for Catholics is a public affirmation of beliefs by all the celebrants. The role of the godparents is to assure that the infant will be raised in the faith. For Catholics, baptism is about the renewal of the devout community as much as it is an individual initiation into a spiritual tradition.

What bewildered me about my friend’s innocent observation about baptism had nothing to do with spirituality. What astonished me was the way he viewed the self. He assumed that the self has complete agency over its decisions and actions, even as an infant. As a Catholic, I viewed the self as an active participant within a community, defined by its relationship to others. Concepts like self-serving or self-interested were discouraged by our parents, teachers, and clergy. Even the use of the personal pronoun “I” was to be avoided if possible.

After the baptism conversation, I became more aware of how those around me saw their relationship to the world. People from the same culture, who speak the same language, can have a completely different worldview. I don’t mean politics or economics, but rather, how they conceptualize the world and their own place in it.

I started to reflect on other examples I had experienced as a young man. A business woman once gave me an impromptu lecture on how Catholics could not talk to God directly because


we had to use an intermediary like a priest to pass along our prayers. Similarly, a coach once informed me in a matter-of-fact tone that Catholics were polytheists because we believed in the intercession of saints. In high school choir, a girl I liked explained to me that Catholics did not accept Jesus as their savior because we had lost him in the confounded idea of the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

While most of these comments displayed a certain degree of ignorance, for the most part, they were well-intended. Their worldview was far more existential and objective than my own. From birth to death, it was up to the individual to find some form of personal salvation. For Catholics, like Jews, our redemption is found in our devout participation in our family, church, and community. Both enliven self and soul, but some are moved from the inside-out, while others from the outside-in.

In the classic film Citizen Kane, Mr. Bernstein, Kane’s loyal friend and employee, reminisces about a girl in a white dress, with a white parasol, he once saw on a ferry crossing the Hudson River when he was a young boy. He remarks that the encounter only lasted a moment, but not a month has gone by when he hasn’t thought about that girl. This is the banality of my life. An innocent comment becomes a holy moment when the sublime makes its presence known.

I can feel my worldview spread out like a map somewhere below my deepest thoughts. It guides me to the open spaces of

the transcendent, or the dim confines of the habitual. It only reveals itself when I encounter the other, the foreigner, the stranger. Just like a baptism.


Is it possible to be too optimistic? We’ve all seen the signs. Irrational exuberance in the stock market becomes unemployment and foreclosures, a caterwauling audition for some amateur hour variety show becomes humiliation in syndication, and that guy in the next lane who thought that he had room to merge, becomes our next insurance claim. Whatever happened to “hope for the best and plan for the worst”?

Researchers suggest that while optimism is a discernible

10The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.

—Albert Camus

Reality Ripens Our Creativity


characteristic of high performers, excessive optimism is a distinguishing attribute of non-performers. Why? Optimism is constructive when it creates an affirmative sense of possibility that inspires us to take productive action, but destructive when it encourages the careless sense that our fortune, good or bad, is a foregone conclusion. While pretending that everything will work out for the best alleviates us from the anxiety of personal responsibility, it also takes away your essential freedom to act upon our circumstances.

The great French savant Voltaire was concerned with this exact issue of unfounded positivity when he wrote his satirical masterpiece, Candide: or, The Optimist. The prevailing feel-good wisdom of the day was provided courtesy of German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz who’s “plentitude principle” supposed that because nature is perfect, anything that can happen happens for the best. Or as Doris Day put it, “Que sera, sera, whatever will be, will be.” Voltaire saw this “just think good thoughts” view of life as dangerously fatalistic because it requires us to resign our personal power and simply accept our destiny.

To demonstrate the absurdity of this perspective, Voltaire creates one of the most memorable characters in all of literature, Dr. Pangloss, the idealistic tutor of the hero of this tale—the feckless and naive Candide. Sparing all a synopsis, suffice it to note that Candide is the Forrest Gump of this great

book. Pangloss tells Candide, in every imaginable situation, where they are subjected to misery, misfortune, and depravity, that, “All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.”

Voltaire confronts us with a contradiction that optimism taken too far becomes a fait accompli. Let us call this the Pangloss Paradox: optimism is useful in as much as it extends the range of our reason and purposeful creative action, but when used as a substitute for either, it becomes a means of self-deception.

This issue of excessive optimism is of importance when it comes to personal growth, where a sense of possibility is essential. The more radical the idea, the less likely we will have any meaningful experience to guide us along. Simply put, it is dissatisfaction that drives us out of our complacency and into the nebula of the unknown.

All learning is developmental and requires that we accelerate the failure cycle if we hope to master any skill of real value. Speak a foreign language, play a new instrument, or sketch a picture of the family pet, and a casual observer can tell us at what age we stopped learning to draw. So, here lies our challenge. When we are truly creative, failure is inevitable because our ambition initially extends farther than our talents. We do indeed need optimism to carry us through this difficult stage and keep our momentum. But through these failures, we adjust, learn new skills, and perhaps even develop new


competencies. Whether driven by hope or dissatisfaction, it is our will that compels us to act. As Voltaire reminds us at the end of Candide, “We must cultivate our own garden.” Our acreage and yield is the communion of our natures both all around and all within.

My Fortunate Misfortune

The Renaissance essayist Michel de Montaigne astutely quipped, “My life has been full of terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened.” From the malaise of childhood to the commotion that was my coming of age, I saw myself as maneuvering through a gauntlet of adversities. While I thought my story to be akin to that of clever Odysseus, it bore a greater resemblance to the bumbling escapades of Don Quixote. Such an exaggerated sense of the adventure could only invite the fates to visit real misfortune upon me, and test the veracity of my ingenuity.

In a mere five years, I had ascended from the loading dock to the board room. Through yet another series of chance encounters and brazen moves, I had passed on a faculty appointment at a top medical school in favor of an ambiguous position at a pizza delivery franchise. My faculty advisors, of my doctorate, were astounded by my reckless decision and stopped talking to me altogether. But my unconventional choice proved

auspicious. Within a year, I had developed a variety of innovative

strategies and methodologies that helped the company surpass much larger competitors. Soon afterwards, I was promoted to a senior executive position. During the next three years, the company would become the fastest growing restaurant chain in America. Visiting commissaries and stores, I came to see every city and berg of this vast land. Reporters asked about the secrets of my success, and I happily obliged with a winsome assortment of platitudes. I paid off all of my debts, bought a beautiful house for my wife, and a Cadillac for myself. I was the golden boy. Life was good. There was only one problem. I hated it.

It had never occurred to me that I might achieve my grandiose goals only to learn that they were not what I wanted at all. While building the company into a world-class, multinational corporation played to my creative strengths, running it accentuated my administrative weaknesses. The bureaucracy of executive life was stifling. I had passed on an academic career to escape the interminable meetings, relentless infighting, and prodigious reports, but here they were just the same in the corporate world. More so, I was appalled at how we as leaders had changed from upstart game changers, to staid monarchs of virtue and decorum. It was time for me to leave my job, but there was just one little issue. My wife and were expecting our first child.


Her pregnancy was difficult, in many ways, and required me to disengage from my very demanding position to take care of her. Working incessantly and efficiently was a matter of personal pride, so I just added this new role as a caretaker to my schedule. After all, it was only a temporary position, or so I thought. Within a month, I had maxed out all of my capacity. This had never happened to me. I had limitless energy and boundless creativity. Surely, I could figure out how to fit it all in and make it work for everyone. But this time, I just couldn’t do it. Days descended into nights, and my life became a blur. Things were falling apart quickly no matter how I tried to keep it together.

The other members of the executive team came to visit me at my home and demanded that I step up my efforts or step down from my position. I knew the truth of the matter and resigned the next day. With remarkable courage and fortitude, my wife pressed on until our healthy daughter was born. Try as she might, she was overwhelmed by her new role. The stress of the ordeal was sobering and had taken its toll on our marriage. Shortly afterwards, she left to start a new life, and I became a custodial father with little preparation for parenthood or the constant concerns that come with caring for a child.

For the better part of that first year, I seldom left the house except for a few trips to the hospital for the severe asthma attacks my daughter suffered. Anxiety was a new emotion for

me, and it didn’t agree with my high-spirited disposition. So, I learned to meditate from a wise middle-aged housewife at a community center. The place attracted the most interesting assortment of characters I had ever encountered: doctors, hippy-chicks, body workers, firefighters, and all manner of the walking wounded. What they had in common was a desire to be their true and unique self and be accepted as such. That was me too.

By now, my daughter could walk, talk, and bamboozle candy and teddy bears with the best of them. A father-daughter ensemble right out of Disney, we were both a broken and a functional family. Love, it turns out, does indeed conquer all. Our life found its rhythm. My success in building a company sparked the interest of a leading university. Soon I was creating and teaching a sequence of graduate courses on leading creativity, innovation, and change. Why not? I had learned a few things along the way. Exploring new ideas with young people was exhilarating, much in the same way it was building a new company. After years of wandering digressions, I was welcomed back to academic life on my own terms.

For me, like Montaigne, somehow everything that was wrong turned out to be right. I understand it doesn’t go that way for everyone. Maybe it was luck, or blessings, or just coincidence, but I awoke from the dark night of the soul and found my way again, again.



11Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world

—Arthur Schopenhauer

Our Identity Is Our Hypocrisy

From the precipice of the self, we look down with ease on the errors of others. But we dare not look up for fear that we too live below the truth. We are rather free with our optimism. Seldom do we truly know best. Still, we play on until nature or circumstance reveals us to ourselves.

Epistemology is the study of what we know and how we come to know it. When we are self-aware, we realize that we come to understand things in different ways and that these biases lead to our enlightenment or prejudice. Many of our most spectacular blunders as individuals, as well as humanity


in its totality, can be traced directly back to either acting on incomplete or incorrect information or misinterpreting its meaning. It’s the error of the novice who is moved to action too quickly and inadvertently solves the wrong problem, often exacerbating the real one in the process. Sound sensemaking precedes all effective action.

Our identity is a work in progress. That is, it doesn’t manifest until sometime in the future. Our neighbor may believe that their bright little three-year-old is going to an Ivy League University when they grow up, but over time may come to realize that they are bound for a career as a quasi-entrepreneur selling handmade toe rings at the beach. Like growing children, our potentiality is yet to be revealed over time. This dynamic produces the fundamental quandary of our existence—if there is a time in the future when our sense of self congeals, it is the moment we stop growing.

There is a chasm between what is known, what is unknown, and what is unknowable. Of course, the essential circular problem is that we can’t distinguish between the latter two possibilities unless one of the twins reveals itself to us as distinct. As the Danish existentialist Søren Kierkegaard put it, “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” Yet, the path we take from where we are now to where we must be is well lit by our own hypocrisy, for we know that we do not know the way. Only those who are willing to be

lost can see beyond themselves. Our identity progresses from the complacency of the

known, into the anxiety of the unknown, where our destiny dwells. While gathering data and meaningful speculation are essential qualities of our progress, when it comes to the unknown future, they can become forms of resistance that distract us from taking purposeful action. The greater the speed and magnitude of the change from the present to the future, the less the information we currently possess predicts it. What’s going to happen to me next year? When will I find a new job? How will I get over my affliction? Will I find love? We consult the stars and talisman because the ambiguity of it all is unbearable.

When we don’t know the answer for tomorrow today, we inadvertently collect more data and attend more meetings, and tick by tock, the future arrives without us. The more incremental and familiar the change, the easier it is to detect because it bears a similarity to the present. The more radical and anonymous the dislocation, the more it plays out like a wildcard. Fortune calls our hand at the most inopportune moments.

Becoming ourselves requires that we suspend our need for complete control. Like plotting directions on a map, we know where our travels start, and we know where they ultimately end; and while we don’t know what happens in-between, we can surmise that the route doesn’t lead us in a straight line.


The roads wind, the tides shift, and others on the journey bring peril and prospect. So, why we may know many things about our world and ourselves, we cannot know who we will be in the end. A monarch butterfly or common moth? If who we are is predetermined, no amount of creativity will change us. But if our identity is left to us, at least in part, we must gather provisions for a wide array of possibilities and take the dark roads where we are guided only by the light of our own hypocrisy to show us the way.

My Dazzling Charade

I was thrilled to be the keynote speaker at the annual conference of top business school deans. Ever the outsider, this was vindication for my recalcitrant approach to higher education. They had finally seen the light and invited the loyal opposition in through the front door. My speech was entitled The Future has Come and Gone and You’ve Missed It. Admittedly this was a pathetic attempt to play the rebellious provocateur to what I occasionally imagine to be a well-connected secret society, intriguing cabal, or at least, the staid establishment. Other than my obvious hypocrisy, I do teach at a top business school, and I am of sufficient age and circumstance to be deemed the Man that is holding you down; my best intention was to awaken the intelligentsia and disrupt

this universal order before it was too late. The revolution will be podcast.

As if fearlessly protesting some social injustice, I threw every rock I could gather at their windows, spray painted their Beemer, and chained myself to the entrance of their favorite sushi joint: I reported how even the best business schools treat creativity as if it were an amusing elective, even though they well know that numerous studies cite it as the most important skill for 21st Century leaders; why MBAs are dropping out of contrived action-learning projects and tuning in to a real vibe of crowdfunding; how all of the best faculty are cheesing it up on massive open online courses and social media; the way the cult of micro-financers gather during the full moon to levitate investment banks off their foundations through small kind acts of derring-do. The grumble turned to a rumble, and finally, a full-out coup d’état. In a feverish trance, these deans generated radical ideas, swore an oath of allegiance to upstarts everywhere, and sang Woody Guthrie folksongs for the small children in the villages. We were innovating our way forward, or at least that’s what I thought at the time.

And then it happened. From the quarry of my conscience came that coursing voice that grinds my reason to dust and calls me out as a great pretender—“You will never make way for the new, the deviant, and the subversive until you are willing to destroy the very things you have spent your career


creating.” Surely, I wasn’t talking about myself. Didn’t these deans invite me to speak to them because of my history of breakthrough accomplishments? And there it was right in front of me. The hypocrisy of the creative self, the perennial outsider, who inevitably becomes an insider once they succeed. It took decades of arduous and highly competitive work to climb to the top of my profession. How could I expect these deans to kick the ladder out from under them when I wasn’t willing to do the same myself ? This was the real price of success. It was a flashback to my youth as a Teamster on the loading docks, where such a challenge meant throw down or stand down. I chose the latter and disappeared into the elevator.

I said I wanted things to improve, to progress, to become better and new. It’s for the next generation, or the earth, or eternity. I did my best to walk the talk. I gave my time, toil, and treasure to the noble cause. I wanted these leaders to do the same, but I didn’t believe them. They too hung on to their beliefs well past the expiration date, or the lauded position years beyond their commitment to it. And then it hit me, no, it scared me. I was them.

Freeing myself from my hypocrisy would be perpetual Lent. Giving up my serenity, my authority, and my prosperity. And I thought chocolate abstinence was a hard penance. Everything costs something. Not just in crass materialist terms but in all ways for we make emotional, intellectual and spiritual

payments as well.I could only see myself clearly in the harsh light of what I

was unwilling to do. My aspirational words faded when darkness and judgment fell upon me at the end of the day. While my ideas were transcendent, I was not. Through my insincerity, I almost saw myself as myself. Mercurial, energetic, and creative, yes. Concerned, collaborative, and compassionate, no. The problem wasn’t my hypocrisy. It was the deception that I was someone that I could not be. I reclaimed myself, took a deep breath, turned down the light, and slept well.


12The world is its own magic.

— Shunryu Suzuki

There Is Poetry in the Mystery

We give counsel to kings, boom to the voice of the wizard, and call the blue hot fire of the universe, to dance. We are the golden child that has come into our inheritance in every age by seeing anew, and delving deep, and finessing the fantastic. It is in entrusting the world to see with us that we come to find our new places—the things that were there all along, but overlooked or unrecognized for want of a frame. When years cloud our eyes, it gives us a better line of sight, and with any luck, the high angle of the sun brings us wisdom and comfortable shoes. But faith without sister reason is lost, and leads us into the realm of the irrational where the projected phantasms of hope and despair


haunt our dreams. Synthesizing sight and muse reveals the real magic where we find inspiration and science and the sacred entwined.

Age over age, we build our beliefs like new cities on top of the old ones, and we cover our gods until we cannot see them imprisoned in our own mythologies. Poor Odin and Minerva who answered many a prayer in combat and labor, and blessed the names of the first born, and kept the hearth warm are now broadcast in syndication as cartoon characters—outrageous, trivial, and amusing. We now stand on Olympus and lord over them with the same indifference and impunity they once enjoyed. Nothing substantial has changed, only our effect of looking up or down.

So what will be said about our most hallowed beliefs? It is a sad irony that we see the divine face styled in brush and bronze, but cannot see it in the mise-en-scène of our own kind. We must begin again and rejoin those very things we have torn asunder, starting with the miasma in the morning mirror. We are neither cause nor effect, subject nor object, but a portion of both. We are self-aware, not self-created.

The seasons between lunacy and illumination, error and enlightenment, are short. It is in improving our imperfections that barber becomes doctor, alchemist becomes chemist, and bicyclist becomes aviator. Our explanations of creativity at work advance as superstitions, to be replaced by science, only to be

overtaken, in turn, as ignorance. Though we may now find the botany, flawed the blossom is not. While we may contemplate those heavenly places beyond time and space to gaze upon Dante’s pure white rose, we must plant our bulbs in the fall and tend to them in spring, and make do with the beauty and symmetry that brings our amazement. Nothing is ever perfect or complete, only constantly becoming. All grows with us to conjoin possibility with reality. Perhaps the most essential part of the garden is the loving hand of the gardener who sees himself as both benefactor and beneficiary. Growth is all we are, and all we can give to others, for it is through the generative act that we keep on after all else falls away.

Is That All There Is?

When I was ten years old, at the end of the mercurial 1960s, torch singer Peggy Lee had a popular song called “Is That All There Is?” that somehow made its way to commercial radio, between the psychedelic anthems of the day. Though I was aware of the war, the political tumult, and the cultural chaos, it was this existential dirge about disillusionment and disappointment that penetrated my placid suburban consciousness. Even then I knew I wanted more than my small world could offer. Maybe that’s what lifted me above and beyond, or at least my mistaken belief, that I had transcended


the conditions of my youth. Now no longer on the sunny side of the hill, when I look back at all of the places and faces I have known, I count my blessings; but when all is quiet, I still hear Ms. Lee’s lilting voice ask that most disturbing question, “Is that all there is?”

My life is a tradeoff between time, energy, and ambition. To have more of one is to possess less of the others. Do I have dinner with the client or my family? Balance, a worthy goal, comes at a cost. Having it all is something people suggest to sell you on their fantasy, join their cult, or deftly put you in your place beneath them. No one has it all, or at least, not all at once. Ask any working mother or successful entrepreneur. Inadvertently and inconspicuously, I have surrendered the easy pleasures of my life—playing the guitar, hiking in the woodland trails, or kayaking down the river. My aspirations for power and influence—degrees, positions, books, companies, television —demanded imbalance. God and family made the cut, along with a few friends and pets, but that is about the extent of the roster.

On long, dark plane trips, out to some foreign place, I think of Willy Loman, the tragic character from Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, who has spent too many nights on the road trying to be a successful someone only to discover that he has become a dim shadow of a man. After the thrilling applause of a speech well-given, I consider the fate of sentimental and melancholy James Tyrone from Eugene O’Neill’s Long

Day’s Journey into Night. The character is based on O’Neill’s prosperous, yet unfulfilled father who was the most promising Shakespearean actor in late nineteenth century America, but chose instead to play the Count of Monte Cristo in the stage adaptation of the Dumas novel in over 6,000 performances. The point is unmistakable. To get something we much desire, we must give up something we hold dear.

I want the new; but I hate change. Though regrettable, my hypocrisy is both useful and highly functional. It seems that the people who like change the most are the ones that have accomplished the least in life or are avowed thrill-seekers of questionable temperament. Though I seek to feast at the cornucopia of new experiences, I try to keep my equilibrium, my center and gravity, through some contrived combination of discipline and ritual for fear that I too will become just another narcissistic and peripatetic dabbler. My ego provides the push and punch needed to turn my flights of fancy into authentic achievement. So, I transform the ambiguity of my aspirations into grand plans and projects, fully knowing that I have traded the miracle of the unfolding present for the attainment of the well-imagined future. Proactively moving toward an ideal destination, I am free to introduce the variation of experiences that will fuel my growth. Ironically, these same experiences impose upon me from a change beyond my control, placing me in an anxious and reactive state. Though my distinction between


growth and change may appear to be merely a semantic rationalization for my fear and greed, it wholly changes my experience of my own life as moving forward or backward—growing or dying.

The gift discontent gives me is the realization that my incompleteness, my ennui, my dissatisfaction is what moves me beyond myself, only to more fully realize myself. Perhaps that’s how it works. The spirit of the age, or greater good, or God gets things done in our world through those who are mindful that the only way to be more, is to be more, for more. And maybe that is all there is.


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The Enlivened - jeffdegraff.com · An unwilling conscript in the Great Angling Crusade, I learned early that our world is as alive as we are, animated by the dynamic signs of energy