Freedom in limbo

Good help ain't cheap (four year-old helps move his toys), March 2010

We've schlepped our last box and marred our last narrow hallway with an unnoticed table leg. Accumulation is easy. Moving that accumulated stuff is painful. And the 500 lb. treadmill! I burned more calories getting it out of the basement and onto the truck than I ever did running on it. It's an albatross to my unfulfilled dreams of a fat-free belly.

Today, there's a new family in our old house and an old family in our new house. We don't get possession of our new home until the middle of May and won't move in until the middle of June. That adds up to two and a half months of limbo. Theoretical homelessness. We have a place to stay (a very nice home) thanks to my kind parents, but I'm an uncomfortable guest. Something about my homesteader roots makes me twitch at the thought of dependence. I envy the naturalness of some of my Asian friends who happily live with extended family. They do it just because. I'm getting an ulcer and I only have to do it for two and a half months.

Living away from my "stuff" is harder than I thought. My parent's guest bed is supportive and warm, but it's not mine. I don't have my basement cave to hide out in any more: meditation, writing, reading, surfing the net ... all are compromised by the busy-ness and caution of living in another's home. Watching our TV shows is extremely difficult. My wife and I are used to the TIVO hard drive video recorder. We've grown accustomed, thank you very much, to watching our shows when we have time. Now we're slaves to the network schedule. Seriously, it sucks. If we want to watch something, we have to be in the living room when the show is scheduled. There's no more zipping through commercials and we can't pause the show when one of the boys comes down for the eighth time looking for a snack or a drink or someone to fix a wrinkle in the sheets. (I know, boo hoo.) The final hardship is that my parent's internet connection is slower than a movie line-up on Good Friday. I'm constantly getting up to do something while waiting for a page to load. Bye-bye photoblogs!

The TV show Lost is winding down this spring. My wife and I stressed for a moment because we missed last week's episode. "We won't know what's going on," we cried with bulging eyeballs. Then we gave each other a shake and reminded ourselves that this show is all about milking plot and selling ad space. Missing one episode is like skipping the salad in a 20-course meal: it's nice to have everything (in an OCD kind of way), but we'll still be full when the meal is done.

I'm quite hooked on this show. Turns out the characters are dead (perhaps) and are living in limbo, purgatory perhaps, where their essential evil fights with their natural good and the victor will decide where they go after the struggle. Heaven or hell I presume.

I'm particularly attracted to this theme of limbo. I can feel the flames of suffering it stokes. Not only now as I settle in for a long wait between homes, but for as long as I can remember I've felt like I don't know where I am or what I'm supposed to be doing. I've always wanted to move on to something better. I struggle, strive, romanticize my ambition, and use my brain to "understand" and learn my way to freedom. It's like I'm trying to think my way out of a maze and the more I think, the bigger the maze gets.

The thing is -- and unfortunately I'm still "thinking" here -- I've come to understand that the maze, the trap, this life, is my own creation. One way or another, I am the cause of my suffering. (We all are.) I'm writing my play with my thoughts and the actions that stem from those thoughts. I'm a one man show and the audience is me. And the kicker is, all I have to do is turn on the house lights and leave the theater. The freedom I seek is just there, but my delusions and habits are keeping me from reaching it. The show must go on.

There were a few minutes this week when I felt that elusive freedom. The packing and moving and cleaning were done. The quiet after the busy storm descended and I looked at the world with untinted vision. It was like I had packed up my SELF and was left with something, someone more basic, less complicated, somehow made lighter without all the burden of a material life. The real me under the invented me. With new eyes, I witnessed lilac-grey clouds that rolled with new thunder and smelled of a distant sea. I scanned the horizon from pole to pole and watched the springtime sun set in a calm mirror of magenta lake. And then three geese, lets call them the three jewels, flew directly over my pivoting head. They flapped in unison and I heard their wings cutting through the sky with neat flicks that reminded me of fresh sheets being snapped out over a bed. They were unencumbered by heavy thinking and moved with natural ease. They were free. And for a minute or two, so was I.

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