Maslow's Ladder, Father's Day (Intro to a Larger Work)

I was never very good at taking advice, especially from older people, like my father. The curriculum of the young is not that of the old. The young are warriors, on the move, achieving; the old are moving inward and taking stock of the life they have lived, coming to peace. 

As a father now myself, I have to remember that when I think of writing something for my sons. The oh- so- patronizing-and- axiomatic tones of elders talking to young people makes me cringe a bit. I don't know if aging, by itself, constitutes wisdom. Experience can, if we learn something from it, knock off some of the erroneous ego-based assumptions we all carry about what is the best way to travel through the time given to us. 

That is what I hope to achieve with these scribbles to you both, my beloved sons. 

I have lived a life of searching. I did not (much) chase fame or wealth and had little ambition for those things. What I did listen and look for was something very elusive, a kind of quality of experience, of being more engaged with what was happening. My worst fear was that I would pass though this life numb, void of convictions or empathy, untouched by the troubles and delights of this earthly journey. 

That meant that I had some work to do, because before I knew better, I had been hammered by a trauma that I had no idea how to process or digest. As an adolescent whose father was at war in a time of great turmoil, I was already wounded and had crafted for myself a shell in which I hid away from the world as a form of self-protection. 

People called me "shy" and I stood only on the periphery of things, sitting out because I did not know how to handle pain. 

My path lay in turning that wordless tangle of trauma into some kind of art. My greatest desire was to get what was inside, out, literally to express, like mothers express milk from their breasts, that boiling mess I had churning in my heart. 

I had to go alone, an a path that almost always was the back way, through the woods, around the places where people gather. Most people interfered with my search; they distracted me from what I was looking for. No, it was solitary, mostly, this path I had to follow.

I got lucky. Life did not lead me into a despair so great that it would destroy me. I had helpers along the way -- friends, teachers, familiars, and just blind circumstance -- that diverted me back onto the path right when I needed it most. 

I was poor. I was a student. I was lost. But I escaped being prey. And for that I am very grateful, because this life led me to where I am, a place where I can look back and tell a bit of the story. 

I have learned not to avoid pain, and, as a bonus, have learned to feel joy. The two are braided together. What a surprise to find hidden inside greatest fear, the windfall of my greatest desire. I have won by surrendering.