The Lives We Lead

March 31, 2013

“People pay for what they do, and still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it simply: by the lives they lead.” – James Baldwin

This is the quote that Dorothy Allison chose to put on the opening page of her novel, “Bastard Out of Carolina,” the page that comes before the first chapter, but after the one where she dedicates the work to her mother. Rummaging through a used bookstore last weekend, I came across a copy of this book and bought it. Though I knew it, I’d never read it. It takes place in Greenville County, South Carolina, the locale close to where my own mother grew up.  In keeping with the tone, I should probably say, “Where my mama’s people come from.” This, plus the fact that it’s a continual presence on the American Library Association’s “Banned Books List” was more than enough to want to read it, and so I began this morning with a couple of mugs of coffee and the beginning of the story of Ruth Anne “Bone” Boatwright. Four chapters in, I’ve no regrets in picking it up.IMG_6925

The Baldwin quote, however, was the reminder of what today is and thus served as the impetus to sit down here in my studio this afternoon and write this post. Today is the last Sunday in March. (Yes, it is also Easter Sunday, but I’m not much of a celebrant of that holiday. It means little to me.) The last Sunday of March is the Sunday when, for many years, I picked up a chip at the Alcoholics Anonymous meeting that I regularly attended in Portland, Maine – the group that I considered my “home group,” in the parlance of AA. For a bunch of years; the 14th, 16th, 18th, years – the “in between, go along, live life” years – I assumed that today, I would pick up my chip to mark 20 years of sobriety. But I’m not in Portland today. And I’m not picking up that chip.

I was sober for 19 years and about 4 months, give or take. After all of those many days, I took a drink one afternoon last June. I’d share the story of picking up that drink in a meeting, except that for several reasons, I know it’s not the right place for such. For every good reason, AA meetings are about sharing and learning how to stay sober. They are most effective, in my opinion, when they stick to that single purpose. My story doesn’t stay on that track and for someone simply trying to get through a day without having a drink (an important, admirable, and really difficult thing for a number of folks), it’s a message that doesn’t help. But that said, it’s something I felt that I needed to put into words and share here, where over the past years, I’ve shared a lot about the story of me figuring out my path.

Last spring, I made a series of unwise decisions. I chose to open the door on some parts of me, to talk about some things that were of concern in my life, with the wrong person. They were things that I needed to talk about, for sure, but I could have picked a better time, situation, and person to share them with. One poor decision led to a couple more that ultimately led to nothing short of (pardon the expression) a clusterfuck of a mess, internally and externally. You’ve got to wonder why we do these things to ourselves from time to time, why we make decisions and choices that we know full well aren’t the best for anyone, ourselves in particular, but it happens. There we go. Down that road again.

After almost 2 decades of concentrated work on myself, building a life that is more in line with who I am and wish to be, I’ve developed a very full toolbox of skills to help me stay healthy. I know how to sit with myself, to talk to myself, to change the thinking that leads to behaviors that lead to negative thinking that lead to out-of-character behaviors that lead to emotional upheaval that lead to … well, you probably get the picture. Thinking and feeling and behaving are all intimately intertwined, and we can, if we wish, learn a whole host of ways to tackle thoughts, feelings and behaviors within that cycle that help us get back on and/or keep on a healthier path.

I’ve been a good student of these practices, over the years. I learned early on in that 19 years of sobriety, that not drinking was in many ways the easiest part of getting better. Figuring out why I chose to drink instead of deal with the life in front of me was a lot harder. I have been incredibly fortunate to have found a few professionals along the way; a couple of therapists who were excellent in their abilities to help me move emotionally, and a primary care doc who doesn’t believe that medicating someone for depression, alone, is the answer to mental health. After a year of taking a prescribed antidepressant, after I couldn’t quit crying daily in my cubicle and the thought of being involved in an airline crash was kind of appealing, my doctor said, “I do not want to just give you a pill that allows you to get through the days. I want you to be well.” And so he gave me the names of several therapists and I found the right one for me and I began the work of getting better. (This was all a few years ago and if you’re so inclined, you can read the longer version in the “Ordinary Year” tab of this blog.)

It wasn’t the first work, of course. It was just another chapter of work. Life is work, particularly for those of us who live in such a way and in such a society that affords us an awful lot of comforts. It’s ironic, isn’t it? When you live in a society where your biggest concerns are to have enough food to eat, to have a shelter over your head, to not contract some disease that will kill you before you’re twenty, to not be killed or raped or tortured by others who have nothing more to work towards than evil, you really don’t have the time, energy, or inclination to “suffer from clinical depression.” However, when you live in a society that affords you opportunities for education, work, friends and family and relative safety, it becomes incredibly easy to make life difficult. And that’s just what we do. We work at finding every sort of way to make life hard work. And then we get extremely pissed off when we have to do the work to make it not so. If it didn’t make for such a truly painful experience for a lot of innocent folks, the irony would be quite funny.

And such is where I was last spring, toiling away at making things much more difficult for myself than they needed to be, leading myself to a place that all of my “good thinking” tools stopped working. No matter what I tried, I could not get my mind to stop saying really awful, negative, pile-on and beat-down stuff to myself over and over and over. The interesting thing is that I didn’t feel depressed, not in the airplane crash/black cloud sort of way. I was just angry and hurt and really, really mad at myself – and I couldn’t shut up inside my head long enough to think it through and do some positive things to get back on track. So I made a decision. One more decision. There are legitimate arguments to be made to claim that it wasn’t the best decision, but in my heart and my head, I honestly believe it was okay. I would do it again, though in a different way, but given the same situation, I would choose those two shots of bourbon and a coke all over again.

The reason is simple enough. It worked.

My mind quieted of the negative thoughts and I immediately sat down and wrote out pages of thoughts and feelings and words that I needed to share with the person I was closest to in life, but hadn’t. I got the thoughts out of me. Literally. I put them onto pieces of paper, so that they would stop going around and around and around in my mind. It was hardly the end of working through everything – in many ways, it was just a start – but I needed something to open the door and at that moment, the alcohol served a medicinal purpose and allowed that to happen.

When I confessed my decision with my therapist, she said, “That is very normal behavior for most people, but you have a history of the behavior of drinking too much, of drinking rather than dealing with your feelings. You cannot forget that.” And I haven’t.

The science behind whether or not alcoholism is a disease alone that can be diagnosed and treated remains debatable. It isn’t my area of expertise or anything that I’ve studied and/or read enough about to have much of an informed opinion. What I do know, though, is myself. Because I have (and continue) to do the work to know me. I know when I’m healthy, when I’m okay, when I like myself. And I know when I’m not and/or don’t. I know the me that is constructive and creative and gives of myself to make my place in the world a positive, good place. I know when I treat other people and myself in the ways that are best.  I know the me that goes to sleep content and happy, and I know the one who cannot sleep for being so sad and hurt. I’ve lived with both of these people, these parts of myself, for good stretches of time. And I know the one I prefer.

When March 3rd rolled around a few weeks back, Lynn gave me a card to mark the anniversary that wasn’t. She reminded me, as I’d reminded her earlier but maybe forgotten, that without that original date of March 3, 1993, that first 24-hours that started a journey of many sober days, we would not have the life that we have today. I can’t begin to imagine the past twenty years without all of those days. I don’t want to.

I believe that if I did celebrate at a meeting tonight, I’d share that what I learned in my 19th year of sobriety is that I’m not an alcoholic, but that I’m a person who once didn’t want to do the work that I needed to do to be the person that I really wanted to be. I probably needed to be sober for those many years to get to today. I am stubborn and not the fastest learner. I’m grateful that I’ve lived 40+ of my 50 years on the earth in homes and relationships that were healthy and happy. I’m grateful that I’ve endured only one really horrible and life-altering tragedy. I know that I’m fortunate in countless ways.   I know full well that it’s the combination of these things and many more that landed me here in this chair at this desk in this studio today. As they say in those meetings, “I’m here to claim my seat.”

“People pay for what they do, and still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it simply: by the lives they lead.”


Sketchbooks on Parade

March 17, 2013

I have several sketchbooks traveling the country (and Canada) this year through projects of the The Sketchbook Project (Art House Co-op) of Brooklyn, NY. If one comes to your town, I hope you’ll take the chance to seek it and its many friends on the road trips.

The Memoir Project

500 handwritten books from writers and illustrators around the globe.

  • Brooklyn – June 28-30
  • San Francisco – July 26-28
  • Washington, DC – August 16-18

The Mysterious Maps Tour Mobile Library Tour

The Mystery Maps Tour asks you to make original maps of real and imagined places.

  • Providence, RI – June 13
  • Portland, ME – June 14
  • Montreal, Quebec – June 17

The 2013 Sketchbook Tour

11,000 sketchbooks on the road starting March, 2013. Check ’em out!
Brooklyn, Austin, Atlanta, Toronto, Chicago, Portland (OR), San Francisco, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

Far from the Madding Crowd

July 23, 2012

A Quiet Place: Our sailboat, Grace, moored in Brickyard Cove, Freeport, Maine

Mark 6:30-34; 53-56

First Baptist Church, Worcester

July 22, 2012

It is not a special morning. It is fairly routine. It’s the kind of morning that happens once every couple of weeks or so. It’s the morning when I have some meeting scheduled for 9:00 and I stay late in bed reading and then my dog, Zeb, takes a little longer to do his business during our walk; and then I can’t decide what to wear and I absentmindedly pick out a linen shirt that takes an extra 10 minutes to iron. I finally get ready and get in my car only to realize that I don’t have my ID badge. I can’t get into the parking lot without it, so I climb the three flights back up the triple-decker to our apartment and frantically look for it on my dresser, on my desk, in my jacket pocket from the day before.

Back in the car I have to wait for a line of cars to pass before I can pull out onto Pleasant Street. Then I miss the green light at Park; and then again at Main, and at McGrath, at Franklin, at Plantation, at Route 9. Every light turns red before me. Every pedestrian who can, steps out in front of me. Every driver who can, pulls out in front of me. The parking lot at work is full by now and I’m forced to park on the far reaches of campus.

And so now I’m angry. I’ve sworn at people on foot and people in cars. I’ve called them names. I’ve cursed the traffic light gods. As I pull into a parking space, I notice the time on my dashboard clock – not the time of day, but the time elapsed since I pulled out of my driveway. 14 minutes.

Now here’s the thing… on the days when I remember my ID badge, when I pull right out onto Pleasant, when I make all of the lights, when I pause to let pedestrians or other drivers go in front of me, when I pull into a parking space in the second row… on those mornings which are also not special, but fairly routine, when I note the time elapsed from when I pulled out of my driveway to when I pulled into the parking space, it is – wanna guess? – 13 minutes. Maybe 12.

The point is that it takes me, under any quote-unquote “normal” circumstances, between 12 and 15 minutes to travel by car from my driveway to the University Campus of UMass Medical School where I work. That’s a mean of 13.5 minutes, +/- 90 seconds.

It’s a funny thing, isn’t it, time? It dictates our lives like few other things and we collectively suffer the insatiable need to fill it – every cotton picking single last minute of it – with something. From meetings to errands to phone calls and surfing the Internet. To texting to gossiping to driving kids here and there, to planning menus and grocery lists and cooking meals; from eating at our desks to eating in our cars; to Zumba classes and detailed training schedules for road races, to watching talent shows on TV to doing homework begrudgingly to finding the right summer camp; talking while we’re walking, on the phone while we’re ordering coffee, reading emails while we wait in line…

It is GO! GO! GO! Go dog, Go! Because the difference between 12 minutes and 15 minutes is…

3 minutes.

Jesus said to his disciples, “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest awhile. For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat.” Crowds followed them everywhere, sun up to sun down; always wanting something of them – of Jesus – fix this, heal that, tell us again that story about the shepherd. They had a lot of demands upon them. They had no time for themselves.

And so Jesus said to them, “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest awhile.” Perhaps he says to us, “Put down your smartphone and follow me. Follow me up here to a quiet place for a while. Disconnect. Go offline.”

I fear that this message from the Gospel reading too often gets overlooked. It comes, after all, as a prelude to the story of the feeding of the 5,000. It’s just a couple of lines and we hardly see the period of the sentence before reading, “Now many saw them and recognized them” and chased after them and formed the great crowd that eventually had to be fed and had to be healed. It’s this great crowd that we focus upon, the crowd that Jesus looks upon with compassion; the crowd that he sees as lost, as sheep without a shepherd.

If you read this same story in John’s gospel, you’ll see it’s presented much more clearly as a metaphor – Jesus is the shepherd and it’s much less about feeding people with real loaves of bread, and more about feeding them with Jesus, the bread of life. Either way, it’s a great message – whether we’re called to feed people literally or to let Jesus feed our spirits – likely, both – it’s a message to give some attention to.

But rather than rush right over those first verses while preparing this sermon, I settled in on them, because I think that there is something very important in them, a message that you can’t do the latter; you can’t take care of others, teach one another, help one another; you can’t look upon others and the world with compassion without regularly going away to a quiet place, a deserted place, an un-harried place where you can think and meditate and pray; for it’s in the thinking and the meditating and the prayer that we find the energy we need to then return to the world and do all that it requires of us. As Henri Nouwen, the French cleric, wrote, it is “In solitude we discover that our life is not a possession to be defended, but a gift to be shared. It’s where we recognize that the healing words we speak are not just our own, but are given to us; and that the love we can express is part of a greater love.”

Yet, we live in a world that praises busyness much more than quiet solitude. Work makes us busy and being busy makes us important. The cartoonist and author, Tim Kreider, wrote an opinion piece in the NY Times last month that went viral on the Internet. It was called “The Busy Trap” (June 30, 2012) and in it he didn’t hold back when describing his beliefs about how and why we’ve come to cling to this mantle, this “Badge of Honor” of busyness:

“Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness (he writes); obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day.” He calls it “institutional self-delusion. More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scary book, I’m not sure I believe it’s necessary. I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.”

His thoughts struck a chord. Funny, I heard him interviewed by Tom Ashbrook on “On Point” last week and Kreider said that he wrote the piece mostly because he was mad at his friends who couldn’t seem to find the time to have a cup of coffee with him. Maybe the reason the piece resonated with so many people is because we’re all a little put off by the busyness of our friends. Maybe we don’t always see it in ourselves, or we don’t hear ourselves saying it, but when someone else says to us that they’re too busy, we think, “Well yes, my feelings are a bit hurt, too. Why won’t anybody come out and play with me today?”

The title of this sermon comes from a novel by the British author, Thomas Hardy that he originally wrote as a series of stories for a newspaper in 1874. Hardy borrowed the line from a poem by Thomas Gray, published more than a century earlier, in 1751, called “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”:

Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife
Their sober wishes never learned to stray;
Along the cool sequestered vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.

Gray was writing to a friend who had died, reminding him that there is a place beyond the busy, frenzied, madding crowds and their tendency towards meanness and bitterness and violence; it is that place, the quiet place, that helps us stay on course. Perhaps that place for Gray was the country churchyard where he wrote the poem. For Jesus it was “a deserted place.” For Jesus it was also 40 days in the wilderness after his baptism by John. It was the Garden of Gethsemane the night before he was crucified. Quiet places, far from the crowds. Without them, we cannot do all that we are called to do in our lives.

But where are they? Where are our quiet places? We seem to want them so much, we want to get away, but we just don’t know how. We don’t know where? Or do we?

Have you noticed the rise in international movements devoted towards slow living? They’re out there. Have you seen more and more stories of yoga classes booming, mindfulness seminars being sold out, stress reduction classes offered, life coaches all around? You know what these things have in common – besides their popularity? They all promote time out. In our society that leads the industrialized world in lack of vacation time, we’re scrambling to find other ways to get what we intuitively know that we need. Whether we’ve heard Jesus’ message before or not, we do seem to know that we absolutely must have some time to ourselves, some time away in that deserted place to rest a while. “A life without a quiet center easily becomes destructive.” Henri Nouwen

When I first thought of this topic and started to put the pieces together for this morning, I thought of the horrible spate of incidents in the 1980s that garnered the phrase “going postal.” Several workers, most notably for the US Postal Service, went on violent rampages in their respective workplaces, killing managers and colleagues. The thought was that their work – the never ending, day after day after day nature of mail – drove them literally insane. When I heard on Friday the horrible story of the young man in Aurora, Colorado, a med school student earning his PhD in neuroscience, so much like a bunch of young people I see every day, I couldn’t help but wonder what drove him to this break of sanity. And knowing nowhere near enough details to even begin to factually state anything, I can only think of this world that we live in – this society that we’ve created – a non-stop pressure cooker to do and to be; to constantly push towards measures of success that are either realistically unattainable OR completely beyond our reach under our current circumstances. We cannot help but become sick.

What happened to that young man, we do not know, but we do know – we empirically know – what happens to each and every one of us when we neglect and/or refuse that quiet place. We get high blood pressure. We gain weight. We develop heart disease. We develop clinical depression. “A life without a quiet center easily becomes destructive” to itself and to others.

It hardly comes across as a warning like some of the other teachings of Jesus, but maybe these words to his disciples were just that. Maybe “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves” was Jesus way of saying, “You are NEVER going to make it in this disciple business unless you take care of yourselves, too.”

You’re not going to make it – not as a teacher or a student, not as a doctor, an accountant, a salesperson, a social worker, a librarian or a minister. You’re not going to make it as a parent, a spouse, a friend, a caregiver or a coworker. Unless you take that time away, says Jesus, you simply cannot do those jobs or fill those roles – not to your best.

Along with being a librarian at the Medical School, I also work as an exercise physiologist on some research with one of the obesity docs there. A couple of years ago, I worked with her on a study where I led some exercise groups for women who were both overweight and depressed. You’re probably not surprised if I tell you that the number one reason people give for not exercising is lack of time. Across the board. You ask anyone if they exercise regularly and for 9 out of the 10 who tell you no, they’ll say the reason is that they can’t find and/or don’t have the time. Time. There it is again.

Where that time goes, for women in particular, is interesting. So many women will tell you – as many in that particular study told me – they don’t have the time to exercise because their time is given to others; to their children, to their parents, to their husbands or partners. They also give time to work, as do men, but it’s this other piece where they leave guys behind. Women, far more, give up their time to others.

The sad thing – the damaging thing – about this trend for women (and men, too, of course) is that same irony that Jesus himself was telling the disciples. If you don’t give yourself the time you need to take care of yourself, eventually you won’t find the time to give to anyone else, either – in the saddest and harshest way – because you’ll be too unhealthy and/or too sick to do so. Maybe Jesus hadn’t read all of the writings of Jon Kabat-Zinn, our resident guru of mindfulness, or have the years of data the Mindfulness Clinic at UMMS has to prove the point, but he surely knew as much – stress will kill you and before it does that, it will keep you from doing so many of the things that you want or need to do for others, and for yourself.

And so I go back to time and the fact that the difference between 15 minutes and 12 minutes is … 3 minutes. Again, it’s a funny thing. Sometimes that 3 minutes seems like forever. Sometimes it’s just 3 minutes. And as we rush through all of those 3-minute segments of our days, what are we doing with them? Do we even notice?

Maybe noticing is where we start. Jesus reminded his disciples to take a break. We can remind ourselves. Some of our young folks and their chaperones are heading off to DC this week. They’re going to immerse themselves, figuratively and literally, in a different environment. Think about it – they might not be going off to that deserted place for quiet – it’s a youth gathering after all – but they are purposefully stepping away from a life that they know, one filled with so much – to something with a different focus. And I do bet that there will be time set aside for them during their stay when they can be quiet. When they can stop and think and reflect and listen. And I say to you now, those of you going, Lindsay gave you journals this morning to take with you. Take them and use them. Write down the things you notice and the things you’re thinking and the feelings you’re feeling.

Fill up every page with words and pictures – I say pictures, too, because I started drawing in my own journals a couple of years ago and it’s an amazing thing to do. It doesn’t matter if you can draw or not. The purpose is to give yourself another way to express yourself. And that’s the goal. Express yourself in your journals so that when you come back home, when you find yourself back in the every day busy life of classes and practices, of church and sports and music and art and volunteering and friends and family and all of the things that fill you up until you about can’t take it any more… you see that journal on your shelf or the table by your bed. And then you can pick it up and you can find your quiet place in it, because you will have to stop in order to look at it. You’ll have to pause.  And then hopefully you’ll see in those pages something that gives you the boost you need; you’ll remember something of the days at IMMERSE that means something special to you. And it will stay with you. And you’ll be better for it.

For those of us who will go to work this week – or errands or meetings or retirement or vacation or doctor’s appointments or whatever fills our lives – we can do the same thing. Maybe we’re not going to an event structured to help us focus on our spiritual lives, but we can make such for ourselves. We can go away for those few minutes here and there as we find them. We can carry a journal. We can take notes. We can take a walk to that place where we, too, can rest awhile.

“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off – then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”

~ Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Whether we are Melville’s Ishmael the sailor or Thomas Gray in a church courtyard; whether we are a young person or adult off for a spiritual immersion, or we’re running late for a meeting that may or may not make any real difference in the grand scheme of things; wherever we find ourselves today in our lives, may we each hear the words of Jesus to “Come away to a deserted place, to rest for a while.” And may we do just that.

AMEN

(Audio for this sermon will be available soon on the website of First Baptist Church, Worcester, Massachusetts.)