It's the middle of 1993. Working in the cell phone industry which was just becoming huge, I was a top sales rep, making top commission, having just won top prize in a three month sales contest. I was in tight with the Vice President and played the part. All the bills were paid, I traveled on a regular basis, was in great shape and had no problem with the ladies. I had it all.
Yet my soul was restless. I was miserable. Having recently quit drinking, I had taken up smoking weed. Lots of it. Loved it. Calmed the nerves, mellowed me out. It may have had a lot to do with my decision later that year to quit my job cold turkey with no real plan other than to go. I'm not sure it was the factor or if smoking the weed put me in a frame of mind where I was no longer afraid to do what I had already planned on doing. But I announced it in late 1993.
I can almost guarantee that more than a few folks thought I was a bit insane.
In short, I packed up my car full of way too much stuff and hit the road. I had plenty of money saved and enough weed to last me a while.
Leaving out more than a few details (which will hopefully come back as I continue digging...), in early 1994, I had made my way to a youth hostel in Kellogg, Idaho. Even back then I was exploring abandoned buildings having spent quite a bit of time looking through an abandoned school and abandoned hospital next door to each other. Sadly, I took no pictures. In fact, of my whole year on the road, I have about four rolls of film, very few of them of people. I had some serious, serious issues with relationships.
Anyhow, I spent a night or two at the youth hostel, venturing up to Sun Valley to see about skiing (which I can't remember whether or not I did...).
One of the evenings, I was sitting on rocking chair on the balcony of the second floor reading a copy of Tom Cleary's translation of the Tao Te Ching, looking down a long with a granarie on the left and nothing but empty road beyond it. The sun was setting and it cast a rather peaceful glow on a quiet evening in a small town in Idaho.
I had picked up this book several months prior, prompted by I know nowt what but I was compelled to buy it. Might have been because I had found the Yin Yang symbol to be quite cool and was attracted to the philosophy behind. Might've been because it was exotic, somehow 'other' than what I knew. Could be that the drugs had been expanding my mind in that bent, gravitating toward the 'eastern' worldview, the exotica, the off the wall films and music that permeate drug culture.
I had left the heavy/hair metal music behind me and was drawn to such bands as Mazzy Star and Morphine, branching well beyond the usual fluff that makes its way into small town Midwest America.
So I have this book that I've been reading and it really doesn't make much sense but I try it and keep revisiting it periodically. I'm exhausted, having been on the road non-stop for months at a time, staying with friends, youth hostels, rest areas or camping. And I'm reading, rocking, staring off into the sunset, and all of a sudden I get it. Insight. The book makes complete sense. The entire thing. At once.
It was as if my entire soul just opened up and I stepped outside of myself and could see clearly what the book meant. It was the openness that enable me to grasp it. Once I was back inside myself and sought to understand it, the moment was gone. I was able to make sense of it now, the seed had been planted, but it was not the awe inspiring awareness of the totality of it that had come for those few moments while rocking in the chair in the sunset.
It was a pivotal moment. Something had changed in that instant. Having always been a "deep" thinker, I had never really been spiritual/religious, somewhat repulsed by the whole charade with the hucksters and jokers that inhabited the media landscape. But here I was, drawn to this little book, and my entire world changed.
But, as with many things in the spiritual walk, life did not get better from this point. We are often deluded into believing that somehow when we get 'religion' our lives will suddenly become betters, like waving a magic wand to remove all the troubles.
No, sometimes when we get such insight our troubles really begin because we see clearly. The openness leaves us vulnerable to change. We can no longer hide as we once did; we are no longer so innocent. We are now responsible. And we must face what it is from what we once hid.
But this is hindsight. It would be more than a few years until I would really "get it" and take the necessary steps to begin to change my life. But that moment was one that provided fuel and strength in order to do it. It was something of a "born again" or "new is creation" moment in the sense that I suddenly had a differnt lens through which to filter information and thus see and interpret the world.
At the time, it was sheer joy, total and complete bliss. And I was sober.
No comments:
Post a Comment