Asking Why

Little kids don't seem to have any problem with the simple question, “Why?” Once they learn to talk, and learn how to ask, it becomes the perpetual question. Lately my why has been, “why haven't I been writing?” I haven't written anything more substantial than a 30 second VO kicker in months. I don't really feel that much of an obligation to write, and except for school, I never have. I wrote because I wanted to write.

Writing has been my confessional, my psychotherapy, my way to mourn, to vent, to celebrate life, to show my love, to escape, to face my fears, and many, many other things. I am certainly not done with any of those things, but this silence still remains. This lack of desire sits on my brain, like a skin of oil, blocking out the sunlight. Part of it has been a shift in how I think, I am trying hard to move away from the internal conversation, and create opportunities for more external dialogs. But I am, as I have always been, quiet, observing, thoughtful, and noncommittal, trying to change that has been a slow, and sometimes painful process.

I am not sure where I am going from here, I strongly suspect that I will focus less on writing and talking to the faceless masses, and communicating directly. So, for now... that's all I've got.

Changing Directions

Emerson writes, “The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.” I’ve thinking about my circles recently, both as a primary function of existence, like the circle of life, and as a mundane fact of life, like the turning of day into night and back into day. The days pass into weeks, into months, into seasons, into years and we live through all the revolutions or we don’t.

My own circular logic brings me back to this place, at the start of something new but along the same worn paths I will walk and find myself thinking and feeling many of the same things. Occasionally I’ll catch sight of a novelty that I hadn’t noticed before, but mostly I trudge along from one day to the next, content that at least I know where I am going.

That path, however, well never lead me to my center. There may be a fundamental discord in the search for self and the search for god. While the search for self requires shrinking the circle down to a point to find the center of a man, the search for god requires a circle of infinite radius, a circle where the circumference encompasses everything, and the center is everywhere. Perhaps the singularity of the one and the infinity of the other connect directly to complete the circle, I don’t know, I have been to neither place.

I’m not sure that I am ready to collapse my circle, and I’m not sure I’m capable of extending out to the edge of existence. A long time ago I became convinced that I needed my circle to be big enough to include one other. I’m not sure when or where that idea took root, but it has stayed with me, and now I wonder how to shake that thought free. I wonder how to get that idea to spread its wings and expose all its beauty and all its flaws so I can reexamine my own nature, and find a way to put my center at my back and walk to the horizon.

Emerson starts the final paragraph of his essay on Circles with this thought:

“The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory and to do something without knowing how or why; in short to draw a new circle. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. The way of life is wonderful; it is by abandonment.”

Zen Delusion

“The most important point is to establish yourself in a true sense, without establishing yourself on delusion. And yet we cannot live or practice without delusion. Delusion is necessary, but delusion is not something on which you can establish yourself. It is like a stepladder. Without it you cannot climb up, but you don’t stay on the stepladder.”

- Zen Master Suzuki

The problem I continually have is that I get to the top of the stepladder and find my expectations for what was up there far exceed reality. And then when I try to climb down I find that the rungs were removed as I stepped off of them, so all I have is to sit there or jump off and start over. Sitting there becomes very painful after a while, starting over is just depressing.

“Zen practice is a style of discovering what the right way to act is. It does this, as it must, by being without presuppositions, without expectations, without knowledge of end.”

- Jeffrey C. Ruff and Jeremy Barris

So it would seem that I need to have delusions, and use them, but not have any expectations, or at least no expectations based on those delusions.

Space

I’ve been interested in space travel and NASA since I was a kid. Largely due to sci-fi like Star Trek, I attended Space Camp in grade school, and I even got to see a shuttle launch live. Right now I’m sitting in the newsroom watching NASA TV after hours waiting to see if weather is going to scrub the Discovery launch.

At this point I’m more of a casual observer, in the same way I am interested in severe weather, and really, science in general. But I also am fascinated by adventure and exploration, and space is what’s next. Think about the raw excitement of strapping yourself to hundreds of thousands of pounds of liquid and solid explosives and launching yourself into the air. The very idea is absurd, except we’ve been doing it for nearly half a century.

And the last point I’ll make is this, watching a shuttle launch is just, awesome. The lights and sounds, the raw power, the acceleration, it’s just fracking awesome. My pulse starts racing at T minus 1:09 and counting. Pretty much anytime I get to watch a rocket go up I’ll take it.

Finding Balance

The funny thing is, I don’t remember the last time I had both feet under me. I’ve been leaning one way or the other for a long time, and a lot of that time I’ve been floating off the ground entirely. If I were addicted to drugs or alcohol, I would gladly seek treatment, but there is no 12 step program for the “hopeless romantic.” The nice thing, is I have haven’t really lost much, if anything, to my insanity. But in order to move on, I have to find balance.

My twenties started off right where they are going to end, right here in this building. I’ve been gone and back again, willingly and not, I’ve been hurt by people I thought were friends. People close to me passed away, and some people close to me were, and are going to be, born. I have developed great friendships, and let some great friendships slip away. I have loved and hurt, laughed and cried, sinned and repented, fired and re-hired, and in all of this there has been some balance, but I only seem to find it at as the pendulum swings through the bottom of its arc.

Now I’m off again, to search outside and within, perhaps looking for intrinsic parity that may already be part of my system. I’m going to plant both feet on the ground, and if I fall over… well then I’ll pick myself up again.

Twenty: Part 12 Running Quiet

Some days, I really just don’t know what to write about. Today was a rather eventful news day early, we had a river rescue, some flash flooding from torrential rain, and the sentencing for a man convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend. But with all that, everything went smoothly, and the rest of the day was pretty quiet.

The newsroom has felt especially quiet the last few days, I’m not sure if the quiet is just in my head, or the result of the rotations of summer vacations, or maybe it has just been quiet.

Twenty: Part 11… All the lonely people…

This post is at least partially inspired by a guy I know who passed out in his truck listening to Polka tapes. And also in a small way to the guy that killed four women in a fitness club last week.

I truly believe that everyone can find companionship, friendship and love, and that there is someone for everyone. It seems though that lately I’ve noticed an epidemic of loneliness, and the resulting extremes have been in the news. Now, they guy in Pittsburgh seems, by many reports, to have been a psychopath, I know I probably wouldn’t have wanted to hang out with him, but I wonder how his life went so wrong. The line, “[he wasn’t] born wanting to do this” keeps repeating in my mind. The problem is, I know just enough psychology to think that maybe he was born with the capacity for psychopathology, if not the desire to go into an exercise class turn off all the lights and open fire.

But it’s interesting to me, how different people handle the same basic situation. Like the guy who is passed out in his truck. I know him well enough to know that he’s probably clinically an alcoholic, and that’s something probably caused by both genetics and environment. He’s been “alone” for as long as I’ve known him. I don’t think he’s had a steady girlfriend ever, and I don’t think he’s been the recipient of any kind of physical affection as an adult. But he’s not violent, or even angry. Depressed, and self medicating, probably.

Now, here is the happy ending. While the first case ended violently, tragically, stupidly, there is still hope for the second case, because anybody can be a friend…


P.S. Perhaps appropriately, as I was getting ready to post this, Heuy Lewis’ “It’s Alright” started playing on my iPod…

Twenty: Part 10

It's been enough days that I have to check now to see which number this part is...

I wonder how people in other jobs unwind while at work. In the decade since I've started here we've played music in the newsroom after the rest of the building leaves for the day, we've played “newsroom baseball” between shows and pick-up basketball games behind the station. Mostly though we talk about the day's stories, or sit and chat, with an ear to the scanner to listen for breaking news.

I really enjoy the people I work with, so even on the most frustrating days we can usually find a way to laugh and smile. I like the work I do, editing video and creating graphics, but what really makes the job is the people. Without them I wouldn't work here.

Twenty: Part 9… Post hoc ergo propter hoc

One of the surprising things about life is the process through which events progress. Event A leads to person doing thing X which causes event B… and so on. I think about some of the major “events” of the last few months. LA Fitness shooting, a couple of plane crashes, the midair crash over the Hudson River this week, all the result of a confluence of events, some obvious, some not, I would love to be able to look at a time line and mark all those points.

When I was young, and naïve, I remember asking my math teacher if there was a way to mathematically predict the importance of any given event. I still have a dream that I might find such an equation… I don’t know if I would share it if I did…