True home

What Bowen's text got me thinking about is his intimation, the implication, that "home" is not to be found here, but only once we die, in the afterlife, in Heaven, if you will.

My trouble with this is the fact that it is precisely this view of "home" that has been perpetrated by organized religion for as long as I can remember, and it would seem - if you read even just a little bit of history - for a long, long time. What bothers me about it is the fact that it provides too much "justification" for our miserable lives here. Granted, we've made all kinds of "progress" and we are drowning in creature comforts, but oddly enough, even in this day and age, in the very straightforward, down-to-earth mind of the singer, we still haven't managed to have Heaven on Earth. There is still something missing, there is still the loneliness, the isolation, the alienation ... all those sensations that are the opposite of what we consider to be "home".

Oh, I can hear some of you already: but it's always been that way (the "way-it-is" fallacy, again), and who is little ol' me to change something that big (the "I'm-just-me" fallacy, also again)? We're just always getting in our own way, it would seem.

I can't be the only one that it might have occurred to that maybe that's why we've been put here in the first place: to make this place our home. We're all in this together folks. The history of DNA shows us that we're all somehow related, if you go back far enough, or if you take the Adam-and-Eve story seriously. What we do is just limit ourselves in the oddest kinds of ways and we do so with an energy that could just as easily be redirected to something a lot more constructive.

No, folks ... I hate to be the one to break it to you (OK, not really), but it's just us, right here, right now. You can believe in a Creator, something greater than ourselves, and you can believe that there is nothing but the matter we encounter in this particular reality. It doesn't matter. All of us on this planet, whether we like it or not, or whether we can satisfactorily explain it or not, are simply all faced with the same, common fate. In other words, if we don't do it, it just isn't going to get done.

If things are bad, if things aren't like they should be, if things aren't like what we would like them to be, there is nobody to blame but ourselves. This is our home, and it seems to me that it's high time to start treating it as such, and treating each other as the family we actually are. If we did, we wouldn't have to wait for death before we had our togetherness. Instead, we're just killing ourselves with a loneliness that is self-induced, because we apparently can't see the obvious.

Home

Home, I suppose, is a lot of things to a lot of people. Home is

... where you hang your hat (or, as Groucho Marx put it, where you hang your head).
... where the heart is.
... where your bread is buttered.
... the place where it feels right to walk around without shoes.
... where you can scratch where it itches.
... where you can say anything you please, because nobody pays any attention to you anyway. (Joe Moore)
... the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. (Robert Frost)

Yes, it is a lot of different things. But, what all of these ideas - serious or humorous - have in common is a feeling of being accepted, a feeling of being where you belong. And, all of these different ways of saying it is that "home" is a place where there is a certain amount of peace (even if it can be hectic at times). Home, for perhaps the very same reasons (which is also, just a tad schizophrenic), is something that we too often just take for granted. Home, going home, being home ... are all so self-evident that we simply overlook how important it is and how meaningful it is to everyone who has ever experienced it.

But, another idea is that it's somehow related to the family, too. Granted, not everyone gets along with their family. Lord knows how many these days no longer deserve to be even called that, but this also makes it small, but above all, personal. Yes, home is a very personal idea, one that is personal to each and every one of us.

For some reason, though, our singer appears to be having trouble finding his ... or at least finding his way there, or perhaps back there. This is also a common theme. Home is sometimes where you spend half you life trying to get away, and the other half trying to get back. Again, that's part of the low-end schizophrenia that so characterizes too many of us these days. But you don't have to have run away to get that feeling. "Hansel and Gretel" is as power a fairy tale as it is, not just because of the witch or the gingerbread house, but because it's a tale of being lost from home.

No, home is a very powerful, very pervasive, and very personal idea. This is one that we haven't necessarily made up, but it is certainly one that we color in many different ways. What makes it so strong, though, is that although the individual ideas of home may be different, we all immediately know what everyone is talking about whenever the notion is invoked.

Togetherness

There are two things about Wade's little ditty, the first of which is the idea of "togetherness".

Of the song's eight stanzas, four of them (1, 2, 5, and 6) are context-setters: they ask questions or make statements about the singer's feelings about life. The other four (3-4 & 7-8) constitute two two-stanza refrains in which he presents his solution to the problem. Unsurprisingly, the "problem" is the sense of pain and frustration caused by loneliness; the "solution" is, in a word, "togetherness". It is by and through others that we become whole. And there's nothing new about this either. So what about the song got me thinking?

The theme addressed in this simple song is one that forms the heart of most modern music (and by that I mean rock & roll, country & western, rhythm & blues, and all their many variations) for as long as I've been listening. This theme has been stated, sung, spoken, crooned, warbled and shouted so often that I'm beginning to think we have simply tuned it out. I mean, how hard can it be? We all feel better when we feel and know that there are others - just one significant other - who care about us. We all feel better when we know and feel that we care about them in return, and even when it involves people who aren't even aware of our feelings. This is, in other words, something I'm sure practically every single one of us have had a some, several, or many points in our lives. In fact, I would be so bold as to maintain that it is a universal human experience, for I've seen it and felt it everywhere I have ever been.

Why is it then - and now we're getting to the reflection part - that the world's still such a nasty place at times? Why is it that so many people too often feel just like the singer of the song? Why are feelings of isolation, solitude, and loneliness so widespread? It doesn't seem to make much sense. In fact, to me it doesn't make any sense at all.

Maybe that's what's so difficult about it: it's so simple. Like the Golden Rule ... easy to say, straightforward as all get-out, and seemingly impossible to put into practice. But, I don't find that such a satisfying explanation. If we simply can't, we won't, and if we don't, there's no hope, and that's what I'm trying to avoid.

But, there is something else about the song that got me thinking, and it's what the singer sees as a pre-condition for the solution. Next time ...

If we ever make it home

OK, so making things up is a big part of our lives, that can't be the end of the story. We do this in many more aspects of our lives than just business or economics. It's actually something that we do more often than not, and like is so often the case, we do it without really even thinking, so let me take another example:

A reported-deceased-but-still-much-alive fraternity brother from long-times-past turned me on to a Wade Bowen song (with the same title as this post) that I decided to share with you, for it got me thinking. It's not that I'm going sentimental on you, rather, there is an ultimate point to all of this. Here are the lyrics (with some help from Weldon B.):

Is anybody out there searching
Has anybody lost the way
Am I the only one who’s hurting
Today

Must have got some bad directions
How’d we ever end up here
All this pain and desperation
And fear

If we ever make it home
They’ll be peace like we’ve never known
Nobody’s gonna walk alone
We’ll be leaning on each other

Every wall that we’ve built up high
Is gonna fall right before our eyes
Love will surely conquer hate
If we ever make it home

There’s darkness in the daylight
As the devil works his trade
He’s the first one to the gravesite
With a smile on his face

There’s a flicker in the distance
Where a single candle glows
And another walking with us
Who knows

If we ever make it home
They’ll be peace like we’ve never known
Nobody’s gonna walk alone
We’ll be leaning on each other
Loving one another

Every wall that we’ve built up high
Is gonna fall right before our eyes
Love will surely conquer hate
If we ever make it home

Oh if we ever make it home

You see, it's just a simple, straightforward, red-dirt text. It's neither high-end poetry, nor profoundly philosophical, nor should it be. It is, like any good song, though, one that should stimulate us to reflection.

The reflections are next.

Surprised?

It's been a long journey, when considered in terms of blog-miles, that's for sure. What we can see, however, is that there is still common ground for believer and non-believers, for the politically and the socially inclined. If we're willing to accept that the others may -- even in their own way -- be right, we still have a chance. It is not cultures that are important, not nationalities, and certainly not religions. No, what is important is only what binds us as humans: similar desires.

What I like about this approach is that there are no absolutes, but the willy-nilly relativity that drives all of us crazy is not there either. In other words, it is possible to find common ground for discourse, discussion, and debate ... if we want to. That's the key element in the whole equation, though: whether we want to.

I haven't been everywhere, by any stretch of the imagination, but, I'm pretty sure I've been more places than many people who may be reading this. I'm not bragging, I'm simply reporting -- and all of you who have traveled extensively and who have seen a bit more of life than your own slice of reality will certainly agree: deep down, at base, fundamentally we humans share much more than separates us. No matter where I've gone and whom I've talked with, some common themes kept and keep appearing: food, shelter and clothing; something meaningful to do; a certain degree of safety and security; the ability to celebrate the happy moments of life; the comfort and support of others when things go bad; something better for the children than we had; a simple, fruitful, relatively happy, safe, and healthy life. What is so hard to understand about that?

Yes, there are fanatics of all sizes, shapes and colors; they speak all different kinds of languages and they all share the same delusion: that whatever they think it better/more important/more right than what others think. These people are a minority. A loud, vociferous, boisterous, and often aggressive minority, but a minority nevertheless. We need to spend more time thinking about all the things that we have in common instead of focusing on what is different about the others. We need to find more opportunities to engage others who are different from ourselves, if for no other reason than to experience that the reality-pie can be sliced any number of ways. We need to want for others what we want for ourselves. And, we should be ready to admit -- to ourselves and others -- that we don't have the exclusive right to wisdom or morality. We humans are all in this together, and the sooner we realize that, the better off all of us will be.

The road to perdition

For those of you who have been paying attention, you will have noticed that the theme of the last few posts was about selfishness. Many of the problems with which we are confronted, either as an economy or a society (should we still have one), are because of what some think they should have and who we believe should be able to have what. It's all about having, nothing more.

It's so simple when you get right down to it, but it's having that is going to be our undoing. When we are born, we have nothing. We hope we have at least a mother, because if we don't, we're not capable of living on our own, but we have absolutely nothing. When we die, we take nothing with us; nothing physical that is. We may have amassed a huge fortune, but we can't take it with us. We just go. We have nothing at the start and nothing at the end, and that makes me wonder why having plays such an important role between those two points. Does what we have say anything at all about who we are? I don't think so.

As long as we buy into the illusion that having is more important than anything else, we're going to continue having the problems that are plaguing us right now. By making having the be-all and end-all of existence, we have created this illusion, however. We feed it every time we think we have to buy something and that buying things will make us happy. But they don't. I saw a statistic yesterday about how many things the average person (and we're talking about people here in the industrialized West) has/owns: 60,000. Yes, I was amazed, too, but we have all these things and we're as unhappy as we've ever been, so we're going to go out and buy some more ... but for what?

What you have says absolutely nothing about who you are. This applies whether you are just a single person or whether you are a company, a community, a society, an economy, or a country. What is important is who you are, and who you are is determined by what you do.

So, what are you doing to stop us all from going to Hell in a handbasket? Consuming? Talking? Complaining? Or are you really doing something?

Tighter tomorrows

Whether we like it or not, we've got to tighten up our relationships with others. I know I sound like some goody-two-shoes, but if I'm wrong about this, I'd be more than happy to entertain contrary thoughts. No opinions, of course. You can keep them to yourselves. If you've got a well thought-out argument, though, I'd be happy to take it into consideration.

All I'm trying to say is that being together and cooperating with others is as natural as anything can be. All we need to do is accept this simple fact and other things start to follow. Don't get me wrong. If there is anything capable of aggravating you till you're ready to tear your hair out, it's other people. I'm sure we agree on that. But in the end, at bottom, we can't live without them, so if there's anything we need to start doing – and I mean all of us – it's learning to live with others. Yes, everybody has to do it, and since everybody's waiting for the other person to start, we'll never get started. You know that part of you I said was your own self? Well, now's the time to call upon it: you have to start. Not the other person. You. Some things are up to you, and this is one of them.

This isn't a trivial matter, you know. If we don't get started on this, we'll end up killing ourselves off, and the planet will simply breathe a sigh of relief that we're gone. No savior is coming down from heaven to instigate the change. Nobody has a front row seat in paradise. It doesn't matter anyway, most of us still have a bit of time to spend here on this plane, and it is precisely on this one that we need to get our ducks in line. I'm here to tell you: it doesn't make a hill of beans of difference what you think you believe or how fervently you believe it. The only thing that makes a difference, now, later, and if there is one, in the afterlife is what you do here. This is it, folks. This is your only chance. Don't blow it.

Toy boxes

One of the few pleasures of living away from home is the times I return to see how things are getting along without me. Last week I decided it was time to make the pilgrimage again. After being there just a short while, I realized that everything was in good hands, and, as usual, my five year-old brother dominated the scene.

Five-year olds have such an unconscious insight into adults and how they live. Sometimes it is frightening, to say the least. But, dodging the paranoia, I thought it would do me some good to talk to the boy to see how things had been while I was away.

He was not in sight when I got home, but deducing that he would more likely be in the playroom than the library, I went in there to find him. I came very close to breaking my neck as I stumbled over the toys which were strewn about the room. At first, I thought the room had been ransacked, but then I spied my brother in one corner frantically going through his toy box. "Hey," I called, "you're gonna kill someone if you don't quit throwing your toys around here!" He just looked at me as if I had committed an unforgivable sin, but being ignorant of the ways of a five-year old, and determined, with all my adult naiveté, to find out what was going on, I persisted.

"Whatcha looking for, sport?"

"My fire truck."

"Any particular reason?"

"No, I know it's in here though, so I wanna find it."

"You sure you didn't leave it somewhere? Outside maybe? Or up in your room?"

"Nah, all my toys are in here."

"It must make things pretty rough to get at – all those toys in one box and all. No wonder you can't find anything. Everything is just piled in here on top of each other. You're gonna break them all, if you keep this up."

"Well, Mommy says I gotta keep them all here. She says if I don't I'll lose them. But I still can't find my fire truck."

"Want some help?"

"No. Oh! I found it! I found it!"

Sure enough, out from beneath the ton of debris in the box, he pulled his fire truck. It seemed rather small and not worth the search, but I guess to him it was, and off he ran, leaving me sitting there amidst his mess. Many people think that young children can teach adults a great deal, and my experience with my brother bears this out. It was a lesson well worth learning. But I'm going to have to sit and rummage through my mind though and find out exactly what it is.

Simplicity

Max sat hunched over his paper. "Gawd, it's hard to put anything down anymore."

He sat for while looking out his window, but it quickly degenerated into an empty gaze. There was never anything to put down on paper. All that is never was, and all that was not ever wasn't either. It all seemed so simple.

The trees were swaying ever so slightly, being restrained, however, by the fact they were leafless. The lack of leaves made them unable to whisper those same truths Max had been so desperately trying to translate into words that everyone could understand. It was so simple in theory, but it was obvious that too many people were afraid of what the trees might say. It's not an uncommon problem, but a chronic one.

Max got up and went to the window so he could get a better view of those same things he had been looking at for so long now. They never changed, or so it seemed. He couldn't imagine why no one ever saw that. It seemed so obvious, yet here he was trying to get it across to those vast, unseen, faceless masses who really couldn't care less if they knew about it or not. Stagnation oozed through the window.

Everything he saw was saying the same thing at the same time and all those voices quieted themselves into a hushed chorus of unimaginable harmony.

"It is all too simple," he thought, "when taken as a whole, it is beyond expression, and when taken one thing at a time, it becomes garbled. No wonder so many artists decide to shoot themselves."

Max never entertained suicidal thoughts himself. There didn't seem to be much point in it. Disillusioned drunks were a dime a dozen. Lonely people went for half the price. Max knew which category he fit into.

"It's not so bad being lonely," he figured. "Hell, there must be millions of us out there – somewhere."

Contentment from fear

The first time that I can recall visiting my grandmother was when I was about five years old. The only thing I remember about the visit was her half-smiling and asking me if I had gone to Sunday school that morning. Being so young, it was difficult to describe what I felt, but I remember I was very uneasy. Now, I know I was frightened.

The house looks the same now as it did the first time I remember it. It is an old frame house covered with gray, imitation brick. The porch was painted a darker gray, and on it was gray swing which never failed to squeak when it moved. To the left of the house were two old pine trees, with branches so thick they kept the sun from shining through. The grass over their roots was always dry and dead and covered with brown needles that had fallen from the lower branches. The grass in the small backyard was always untidy. Every time I saw that house I felt a twinge of fear. It seemed very old, very desolate and it never changed. It reminded me very much of my grandmother.

I recall how reluctantly I walked up the steps to the front door. I knew exactly what I would see and hear each time I walked into that dimly lit, drab living room: my grandmother sitting on the gray couch just to the right of the door, my grandfather in the recliner to the left of the door, but he never frightened me. He moved about and talked, but my grandmother didn't. She just sat there on the couch in the same gray print dress, staring blankly out the front window, as if waiting for someone to come. This was odd, I thought. She was healthy enough so why just sit and look out a window? Even though she was old, I thought she could find something better to do. Maybe I was just afraid of my grandmother.

I always asked my mother if I could go out an play. I had to get out. Outside, I'd head straight for the car and jump in. I'd to sit behind the wheel and play bus driver. I wanted to drive away as fast as I could. Each time I had to stop for a traffic light, though, I would think about my grandmother. I wondered why I wanted to get away from her. After all, she had never been mean to me, but I just couldn't bear to watch her look out that window. I wondered what she was looking for. When I got out on the front porch, I would look far down the street, but I never saw anything. Everything always looked so normal to me.

I think I played bus driver every Sunday afternoon for the next seven years. Every time I went to see her she sat in the same place, looked the same way, and caused me to feel the same way too. But one Sunday, we left to see her, but we did not go to her house. This Sunday I did not feel so uneasy and I had no desire to flee. This Sunday we went to her funeral.

As I stood there and looked at her, I was finally not afraid. She lay there peacefully in a pretty pink dress and seemed more content than I could ever remember. When we went to her house after the funeral, I stopped before going in. I paused and looked once more down the street where I had seen her stare so often. I still saw nothing strange, but I felt content. I was not happy that she had died. In fact, I now missed her a little. Yet, I could not help but feel she had finally seen what she had been looking for, for so long.

A confused calm

Twelve of us huddled around the small, black table in the center of the room upon which were a Bible and one unlit, white candle. A single incandescent bulb glowed while we sat silently listening to the instructions for the séance. Crippled shadows danced on the dirty, replastered walls. An uneasiness filled the air and the faces around the circle. The laughing, disrespectful faces I once knew were now mere morbid, morose masks.

The window behind me rumbled and the circle jerked in closer. It was only the wind. It had been windy since the day we decided to have the séance, and that night wanted to be the highpoint of that dismal weather. The day had been gray and overcast, and the cold rain that had started in the late afternoon hadn't abated. The bare trees snapped wildly in front of the street lights whipped our own crippled shadows into deeper submission. The bulb extinguished, the candle was lit. We were ready to begin. We closed our eyes, bowed our heads and mumbled the Lord's Prayer, then silent concentration in an attempt to make contact ...

The room was exceedingly dark. The walls receded into the darkness. The faces of our little group turned into photo negatives those sitting to my right and left began clutching my hands ever tighter. My heart raced, adrenaline pumped, bright flashes shot through my head, my ears started ringing, throbbing as the blood rushed through them. I was flailing, falling through a void, the air stale, musty, used ... the silence was broken:

"I doubt if we'll make any contact tonight."

A barely audible sigh seeped from the circle. We bowed our heads and again repeated the Lord's Prayer. Someone reached over, fumbled with the switch, bringing the bulb back to life. An uneasy gaiety returned. No one looked at me strangely for I had not budged since started. We got up and walked quietly from the room. Downstairs it was business as usual.

Who's Hamlet?

The last couple of weeks have been rougher than usual. Oh, it's not that I'm taking one for the team or anything, but there have been a number of smaller incidents that just all seemed to be related to the same theme. Life's like that sometimes. There are stretches when it seems you're confronted with the same ideas, the same issues, the same problems even though you're in different environments and situations. That's what it's been like lately.

The theme? Oh yes ... having and being. Yeah, I know: "Not that again!" But yes, that again. It has struck me that I'm not going to be able to move on until more people "get it".

Why has this been so prevalent? I don't know, but I do know that I had an interview for a new business course and it all centered around what I thought about business and having. OK, it wasn't that direct, but how should I understand that not adhering to the mantra that the purpose of business is the maximization of profits places me squarely in the minority? Or, what am I to make of the recent and hefty Greece discussion ... in or out of the euro, who pays and who saves? Or, what about the recent Republican presidential debates about taxes and saving and just letting people without health insurance die? Or, wondering why my daughter's job is at risk because higher education doesn't have the funding it needs to fulfill its mandate? Or, why if productivity has increased by over 90% in the last 50 years do I still have to wage-slave for 40 hours a week? Or ... well, I think you get the idea.

Though I hate to say it, we've been screwed (again). It's all about what you have, and who and what you are just doesn't matter any more. Being a good person doesn't matter if you have to slave away at more than one minimum-wage job in order to make ends meet ... if that's even possible. Being a caring person and mother doesn't matter if you're single and have to give your child to someone else to raise while you figure how to make the rent. Being optimistic is almost a waste of time if you know that you're kids are never going to have it as good as you had it, even though what you had was really nothing to brag about. For all we have to brag about is how well our (football/baseball/hockey) team does, how high-paid our star players are, how much our company grew last year ... or our new ride, or the fancy, all-inclusive package tour we were able to take, or an upgrade on the house.

No, it's no longer who you are, it's what you have. The little tent community in New York will soon be disparaged as rebels, do-nothings who want something for nothing, but in reality they are just unfortunate people, like you and me, who ended up on the wrong side of a mortgage. They have come together, formed a community, established their common rules and we only now have to wait till the media brands them as communists, socialists, or worse. How dare they rub our faces in the fact that the top 0.1% abscond with all the goodies while the rest of us just dream about the birds in the bush.

A recent article in the New Scientist made clear that there is a growing body of sound evidence that cooperation trumps competition in evolution. In other words, while competition may bring short-term benefits to individuals, in the long run, these are secondary to the benefits that the group acquires through cooperation. Having traded our society for a mere economy, we've lost sight of who we are as a group. And moving a step away from society, we have lost sight of our own biological roots. Homo sapiens has become Homo voratens.

Hamlet was a troubled soul, and that's why we remember him. He had everything: he was Prince of Denmark, he had money, wealth, power. Yet, he still found the time to ask the question that haunts us still: To be or not to be/That is the question. Too bad most of us don't believe in ghosts anymore.