The Unexamined Life...

You can go look up the rest of it, if you don't know it.

This one is going up real time for what will be obvious reasons.

I have at least three dear friends who are regular readers and I think I got a little scold sent lovingly from one of them yesterday. ".. break out of that Freud induced coma..." she says. Meu esposa (we're trying to learn a little Portuguese for an upcoming trip) says "She just thinks you should stop talking about your parents and all that stuff (not sure I have been all that much, though this has clearly been an introspective venture), and talk about something else."

Hmmm.

Write about something else? I have a bit.

I started this primarily to sort myself through this transition after a conversation with a therapist. It has proved useful that way. Also, I am an INFP (Introverted Intuitive Feeling Perceiver) and we NFs are prone to look for the meaning, and Introverts look for that inside. And it's not that I am not doing out there in the world. A couple of volunteer projects, teaching, writing this is actually doing, and getting ready to direct a public staged reading of a friend's script. Not to mention one of the best flyfishing days ever on the Yakima and wounding myself twice on my bicycle.

Okay. It's a little "me" oriented. Reminds me of an old Lesley Gore tune: "It's My Party..." I'll let you finish that one on your own, too.

This day when all available media are "All 9/11, All the Time" one can't help but look back. The public events one looks back to often are self-defining. My parents referenced Pearl Harbor, FDR's death, and Hiroshima. I reference JFK's assassination, 1968 (more here in a sec), and now 9/11. (1968 gave us MLK Jr.'s and Bobby Kennedy's assassinations, and with "the whole world watching" the riots at the Chicago Democratic Convention.

For the first event I was newly married and still in college in one of those very large urban universities with large buildings of multiple classrooms. The hallways were abuzz. The sweet man teaching us American History tried to distract us by leading a conversation about succession but gave up after 20 minutes. That Sunday singing in the choir a verse of Tagore set to the most difficult music full of sharps and double sharps had most of us in tears.

"Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake."

Seems even more relevant to 9/11.

In 1968 I was working for a very conservative financial institution and a boss whose political acuity consisted primarily of identifying the realtionship of any given person or event in cold war terms. So while MLK might have been at some point a "card carrying commie" when he was killed it was "a plot by the communists to cause a breakdown in our society." I at least had the stones to go ahead and wear my (Gene) McCarthy button during that campaign season.

At the time of 9/11 I was making more money that I ever had (or would), doing work that for the most part I enjoyed and meu esposa and I were in the middle of having our whole first floor torn up for a remodel. So after getting sent home from work, noticing the eerie silence because no planes were passing overhead, I got into old clothes to paint the dining room and listen to NPR. I was as upset as anyone about the images of Palestinians dancing in the streets. (BTW, the media really does do some nasty shit to our heads.) As aligned as anyone in outrage and commitment to my country. Lovely how long all that lasted, as we watched what unfolded.

Sometimes this doesn't feel like my country anymore and I don't have a clue of what to do about it. I've been a delegate to two state conventions, I've participated, I've been engaged... and I must admit, I've been disengaged, more interested in what I thought I needed to acquire, blase and annoyed at my fellow man, and engaged in partisan screaming fits at the televison.

I feel in someways driven back onto myself as the only place I can look for meaning.

My dear friend has supplied a reading list. I've just finished Christopher Buckley's "Losing Mum and Pup,"--delightful, sweet, very funny, illuminating--so maybe I'm ready for something with more meat on it's bones.