One day later

One day later: self-portraits, February 5 & 6, 2010

Friday, 10:29 a.m., my home in Lohwinkel was unsold. At 10:30 we were told that the deal was done and we will have to move in six short weeks.

History: I work two hours away in the town of Eldorado and my dear wife and I have been cleaning and staging our Lohwinkel home for potential buyers since July 2009. Our plan is to move to Eldorado so I can spend less time driving and more at home. (Eldorado and Lohwinkel are fictional names for real places.)

This change is a big deal. I felt like marking it somehow, so I shaved my beard and cut my hair. It felt like a ritual, like an offering to the Gods, a symbolic cleansing. Thus cleaned up, I poured myself two fingers of 18 year-old Japanese whisky and celebrated the night away with my dear wife and children. We are excited for this new chapter of our lives to begin.

The day after we celebrated our house sale, I fired up my treadmill and had a good, long sweat. More symbolic cleansing. I've come to feel like there's so much I want to leave behind, as if this isn't just a two hour move to a new home, new neighbors, and a new arrangement of channels on the television. I've had time to invest much thought into how this move fits in with the rest of my life. I'm perpetually reinventing myself, evolving, improving, moving away from what isn't good for me (i.e., working in Lohwinkel) and reaching towards what is good. What I believe is good.

I would like to stop moving away from the bad and questing after the good. I'd like to stop and say, "yep, this is good." Break free from the "ideal" treadmill and instead of planning, calculating, and measuring pro's and con's, just do what is best to do and be content with myself just the way I am. But old habits die hard.

What I'm starting to understand is that I attach too much meaning to life. It's fine to celebrate special occasions like selling a house, but I'm getting too caught up in conditions and shoulds. Life should be like this and in order for this to happen I have to do that. And more importantly, if I don't do that, then I will be failing at some aspect of life. Letting myself down. Not achieving my potential.

There is no ideal potential. There is me living through a continuous series of passings and becomings. Some are small like finishing this post and others are huge like packing up my family and moving to a new town. I'm not so important. I'm not at the center of a unique life. I'm an accident of DNA that randomly assembled when my parents conceived me. Bigger that that even. I am part of a family, part of a community, part of a species that shares planet with a multitude of other life forms that are all made of the same chemicals. This big swirl of DNA that codes all life could have turned out a cabbage or a sheep just as easily as it made me.

Earlier this week I visited a man who had end stage cancer. His muscles were wasted, but his bones spoke of someone who was once over six feet tall. His oxygen sats said 85 and to compensate, he breathed through a gaping O of a mouth. Agonal gasps. Dry lips and a tremulous tongue formed his words. His body was overcome by tumors: a large one that I could see pressing from his abdomen through the bedsheets and dozens of invisible ones that had clawed their way through the rest of his body, working their dark business in the lightless realm of his cells, tissues, and bones. His hands and forearms were crooked and stretched over with thin, cyanotic skin that was spotted dark as if he had held his hands up to a splattering puddle of black ink. We talked a little about swallowing, the purpose of my visit, but it was clear that more important changes were going on. He died that night, not long after I had gone home, had dinner, and put my boys to bed.

Life is a series of changes that lead without exception to old age, illness, and death. We pay attention to the changes, try to control them through avoidance or induction, but to that end we try too hard. We think too much. Through all our efforts we miss the point that it is possible to find peace with life despite the fact that we are all born to die (or even because of it). There are so many ways to do this. All it takes are eyes willing to see and a mind to accept and understand.

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