Learning is Change

My year hasn’t been about numbers. It has been about ideas. And thoughts. And change.

The curving mark that punctuated each day and made it memorable and archived was both the simplest and most incredibly difficult thing I have ever done. I would caress that mark and try and find the words that should go in front of it. Sometimes they would lay themselves out in front of me and sometimes I would have to seek them out. Sometimes my memories from childhood would call to me and sometimes the objects I was holding would provide the story. Each time, though, the mark would beg me to answer and I would obey, however reluctantly on some of these days.

These questions are my friends. They have kept me sane. They have shown me that I can reflect on the chaos of life without having to fully give up on participating in it. They reflect the drama and tension of figuring out a career or two. Of dealing with the death of a mother. Of sacrificing old dreams for new ones. These questions have seen me through the most important year of my life. And I will always love them.

I used to collect movie ticket stubs. I had this enormous stack of them sitting in my bedroom and any time that I wanted to, I would reach over and think about each one of those movies and the experience I shared in watching it. I would think about all of the people I saw them with and the moments of listening to music in the car while I drove to the art house movie theatre. I would fondle each one with care and look at the date and try to conjure up the weather and my mood and everything else that made the day special.

Each of my questions are better than ticket stubs. They aren’t reminders of the days events. They are the days transcribed through call and response. They are how I squeezed out meaning from the disjointed days that kept on coming. I don’t have to stack them up to know what they meant. I can read one and see just what made sense that day. I don’t have to re-imagine or put myself in those shoes. Those shoes slip on easily with every reading and I can get in and walk around. I will, too. As often as my new set of 365 days will let me.

And although my year has not been about the numbers, I am proud to have made it to the end. If I split up my journey into twelve chapters, these are the numbers that mean something:

Quite often we do not know when we are about to experience the last of something. The last day on the job comes as a surprise sometimes. The last moments before a child wakes up in the morning are a complete mystery. Even the last time that we see a loved one is not forewarned. So, in those moments that we do know that something is going to happen for the last time, we should treasure them because we have been given that knowledge and we know that it is a rare thing.

I believe in the penultimate because of how it feels to almost finish a project and know that only one more piece needs to be placed. The minute before the last minute of a workout is so sweet because you know that the cooldown is coming and you can turn on the afterburners and give it everything that you have just one more time.

I am powering through, knowing that tomorrow is the last day that I will be writing for such a specific purpose. Tomorrow will be the final installment of reflection, the one that I couldn’t see clearly until today.

My penultimate purpose is catching the ball just one more time before I throw it away forever. I want to make sure that I see the ball all the way into my glove and feel the heavy weight of it as I clasp my thumb hard against the rest of my hand. And as I check to make sure that it is still in there, I know that all I have to do is toss the ball back and I will be done. I can go inside and have chicken noodle soup and think about what a wonderful game of catch this has been.

We used to fold our clothes on the dining room table. Once about four loads of clean laundry sat in their baskets for four days or more, I would finally make it a point to start putting the underwear on the table. I would clear spaces for the towels. I would lay flat each and every child pajama. I would then put the things that were to be hung up on hangers and carefully dangle them from the chairs. By the end of the four loads, the dining room table looked like a christmas tree on its side, ornaments strung all around with plenty of tinsel and ribbons for good measure. Because we had laid out our clothes on the table, there was only so long that we could leave them there. Eventually we would have to eat. So, whether we wanted to or not, we would gather up all of the different piles and walk them to the right spot and put them away. It was something we couldn’t avoid, and that made the drudgery of it okay.

We don’t put our clothes out on the table anymore.

Now we just leave them in the sunken seating by our fireplace for a week or more. They are just as clean as before, but they seem so much more daunting. It seems as though they have multiplied five fold and there is no longer a reason to move them. We don’t generally eat next to our fireplace and the only people that use that seating for other than sitting next to a fire are our children who constantly want to jump into the sunken area. And a huge pile of clean laundry isn’t exactly a deterrent to jumping around.

The problem is that we no longer have made this one unrelenting thing into a prerequisite. We don’t have to fold or put away the laundry before we eat. We can leave it in the “pit” even after it becomes an eyesore because it still isn’t in the way of us doing anything. Sure, we can push it around, and even move it up to our bedroom. Even then, it can just sit there as we pull different things that we need from the piles.

Folding and putting away our laundry hardly seems like a prerequisite to having a well organized closet, now. Before it was something essential, and now it is something optional. It is a casual reward that we could take or leave. Eventually one of us will get fed up with the mess and just do it to be done with it, but it comes back with a vengeance later that week.

I believe that there are too few prerequisites in our lives now. We aren’t doing the things that need to be done because they don’t seem like steps toward something better. As children, our lives are filled with prerequisites. My children know that if they use “good listening ears” they may be able to watch a show after they wake up from nap. As unsatisfying as good listening ears are, they still take part in it because they see it as a necessary step to the good stuff. Everything they do is getting them one step closer to a dessert or to time reading with their stuffed animals in their bed. These things have meaning because they are part of a process.

This is not being punished by rewards, it is making things that lack order and importance into interesting games with rules that make sense. As an adult, I can eat the dessert before the dinner. I can look at Facebook for an hour instead of editing a spreadsheet. I can drink a beer in the afternoon instead of waiting until the evening. There are almost no prerequisites that we self-impose because that would be like admitting that we are not adults. In fact, we scoff at those who put those prerequisites in place. We malign those who do weight watchers as limiting their possibilities. We scoff at anyone who has not tried to watch a complete television series in a few nights. We are our own worst enemies when it comes to setting boundaries.

So, here is what I want:

A single system that I can plug in a list of things that I want to do and a list of things that I believe to be complete drudgery. I would like this system to then spit out an order for all of these things to be done in, complete with a series of prerequisites for the things I would like to do.

In short, I would like something to parent my life without it feeling like my choices are being judged. I would like to know what should come next with the knowledge that if I do that one thing, something better is coming down the line.

If I had that, I could justify even my most unproductive moments as the just reward of some pretty serious prereqs.

I have never understood card catalog systems. Every time that I look at the series of numbers and letters in front of me on the cute little slip of paper that a kind librarian has given me, it is as if I am seeing it for the first time. I have to relearn the order and the classification and as soon as I get the book off of the shelf I forget how I got there immediately.

I never minded finding obscure passages in long forgotten manuscripts. In fact, I found the idea of looking at works that could not be found on the Internet and had probably only been checked out a handful of times to be invigorating. I loved the feeling of the old paper as I turned the pages that would never be creased from use.

And yet, the conclusions I came to by reading these tomes would be seen by even fewer people. A teacher, my wife, and maybe a handful of people online if I decided to post it. The research was good. The process was sound, but I’m not sure that matters.

I’m not sure that researching and proving your value as the connective tissue is going to move anyone to tears or to action.

The gathering of resources, no matter how good, is an act of keeping the status quo. No matter how well you glue them together or how much your community needs to hear the words you have written around your obscure references and impeccable quotations, you will never be aiming after something bigger than engaging those that are ready interested.

In a way, that is why those books I found through the hieroglyphics of the card catalog in the basement stacks or libraries will never see a wider audience. Those that care to look, will. Those that do not, must be given a reason to care.

Research will not change minds or create lasting change, it will only support or refute a change that is already taking place.

In other words, no. We cannot research our way out of our problems. The things we find can only help those that are already looking.

So, we must tell stories.

We must tell them to our children and to our friends. We must tell them to strangers, too. We must talk about today, not tomorrow. We must tell our stories, as they are the only ones that we truly know.

And then we must trust hat everyone else is doing their own research. We must believe that people will put together the stories and find their own way forward. Because we can’t focus someone else’s attention.

We cannot be the glue for someone else’s reform.

So, here is my story.

Today I asked a question. I answered it too. I did it so that I could figure out just how my wife is going to go to nursing school while I work from home. I did it so that I could be present while my children learn to swim. I did it so that the overwhelming voice of creative thought won’t creep in on me and strangle whatever focused attention I have left.

I did it because the reflection of my life is my life story.

I have never know where the fork and knife are supposed to go. I have been told this information many times but I have never known it. I have never owned that bit of information because it never seemed to me to be essential.

Sure, the manners required for eating with others are a valuable asset and being able to help around the house with setting the table (especially when I am not capable of cooking mix more than french toast) is nothing to malign. I just prefer the ambiguity of a napkin on the wrong side. I prefer to remix the table setting so as to make sure that we are having an entirely original meal.

So, set the table any way you like. I will see to the music.

For me, this is the only kind of prerequisite for a perfect meal: thoughtful food, my family or close friends, and ambient but purposeful music.

If you are so inclined, I recommend Ratatat’s self titled album, Safe Away by Denison Witmer or anything by Miles Davis.

I lift m glass to wrongly placed utensils and perfectly placed music and people.

My girlfriend would read my poetry in high school. I would write it for her in study hall and then show it to her during lunch. It was the quick of a turn around. I would write and she would read. Sometimes the poems would upset her because they were about her, and sometimes they would make her blush for the same reason. This feedback loop was easy as well as easy to understand. I didn’t get hung up on where all of it was going or how everything fit together because I knew that the only person that mattered would read it in a few minutes.

It’s not so easy now.

Now, I look at everything and try to find a common thread. Now, I look for the principles that guide the writing and the thought process. I try and figure out just how the pieces are supposed to fit together. Do they at all?

Am I writing for a businesswoman, an educator, a technology specialist, or just a father trying to cope with newly found breadwinner status? I know that at this point, I should have figured it out. I should be able to say that a given demographic is my target. I should be able to write for that voice. The direction should be assured.

And yet, I find myself looking for balance and not absolute coherence. The words aren’t coming out as a well wrapped thesis with the benefit of organized support. They aren’t the same today as they were 100 days ago or 100 before that. The audience isn’t a girlfriend filled with passion for the immediate gratification of reaction. It’s too important to be only that. It is too fulfilling to try and only pursue one point of view.

The audience is my wife, who lived each day with me.

The audience is my children, who will one day ask these questions too.

The audience is my closest friends, who motivate me with their own writing and send me longform articles about the way in which Mr. Rogers prays.

The audience is the teachers who first asked me to put pen to paper and prove something.

The audience is my parents, who never told me I couldn’t finish something.

The audience is my  entrepreneurial mentors, who made me see every question as an opportunity.

The audience is each person who told me to leave my job and for each person who tried to convince me to stay.

The audience is the geeks who spend their time figuring out how to print from their cell phones or jailbreak their eBook readers.

In short, these audiences are my inspiration. They are the people that have given me purpose. And now that I can see the end, I wonder what the love note will be like to thank them. I know that they are the only thread that has carried through. They are the unspoken rhythm to each sentence.

But, they are not singular. Each one gets some of my voice. The stories are mine, even if they are a bit schizophrenic. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I didn’t know Santa growing up, or more accurately, I didn’t know him the way that other kids my age did. They were all convinced of his reality, and I was never taught to imagine a world in which a single man could deliver millions of presents and consume even more cookies on a single trek throughout the world. I was asked to think about the origination of Christmas and the gifts were always an added bonus to the season.

I did not believe in Santa then. But, I do now.

I believe in him more than I think I ever could have as a child. A child believes because of what they experience. They are skeptical and logical to a fault. They believe what they see, and because they only see the part of the story that supports the existence of Santa that is what they know.

As an adult, I see the whole story. I know where every toy came from and what it took to earn the money to buy that toy. And as I sat there eating the cookies that my children had placed on the fireplace hearth, I knew that I was not Santa. My wife wrapped the last of the presents and we laid them all out by the tree, knowing full well that those labeled from Santa in the “different” wrapping paper had the same telltale taping strategy as the rest of them. We knew that the handwriting didn’t really look that much different and that our children could wake up at any moment and catch us in the act.

None of this lessens my belief.

I believe in Santa because of the way my daughter’s eyes look when she saw her new pajamas right outside her door, representing the closest that Santa ever got to her while she was asleep. I believe because my daughter wanted to leave out syrup for the Elf on the Shelf’s ride home to the north pole now that his work for the year (of watching to see how our children behaved and reporting back nightly) was complete. I believe because I know I am not the one giving those gifts. Some other part of her brain has engaged and told her that something magical has just occurred. Which, it has.

Santa is the best kind of fairy tale: one that is much more fun to tell when you are in on it, when you are helping to create the story every year and add your own traditions. Somewhere in the middle of realizing that the Disney princesses could be seen by a four year old as an empowered female and seeing just how important stories can be for making sense of the world, I found my belief in a figment of our collective imagination.

It isn’t that I want to lie to my kids. It is that I know the truth. I buy the gifts, but the story of Santa takes away all of the need for reciprocation. He is the way in which we can all be altruistic and giving. We just want to see the glowing eyes shining back at us. And if you believe in Santa the way I do, it can happen every year.

Related articles

• The Other Side of the Santa Debate (wired.com)
• Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Lie To Your Kids About Santa (businessinsider.com)

We secretly all want to eat glue. We wall wonder what exactly it will taste like and just how it will react in our bellies. We are envious of those who have tried, even as we put them down for being so unthinkingly gross. We want to believe that they are less intelligent than us who do not eat the paste, but we really want to be in the club. We would, if it were more socially acceptable, take the lids off of those kindergarten glue containers and pour it over our hands. We would let the fake skin dry and peal it off and then lick our fingers clean. We just wish that were possible, that we felt justified in the experiment.

We do not profess this wish. We do not even hint at it. We keep it hidden with our hope for people to break out into song and choreographed dance in the middle of a walking mall. It isn’t one that we have to constantly think about, but when we are presented with an opportunity to taste that milky white liquid, we are tempted to dip our fingers in and touch them to our lips. Perhaps the need is not even a conscious one, but still it is there. And we should give in to it. We should eat the glue when we have a chance.

We shouldn’t do it because of the taboo or because we would like to finally know just how gross it truly is. We should eat glue because of how fleeting our time is to do spectacular and peculiar things.

When I add up the time that I spend retelling the days events to my wife and working on things I have been assigned and playing with my kids and watching incredible television programs like The Wire and the hundreds of other important things I want to fill my life with, there is so little time left for strange instincts and courageous inclinations. If I don’t follow those then they will never be done.

Perhaps, some things should never be done. Perhaps those instincts from our childhood should not be indulged. But still, they persist. They are too pure and precious to give up so easily.They don’t represent what we used to be or what we desired before we knew better. They are the raw curiosity that is bred into each one of us. They are the complete submission to a question that is required to find anything great.

Here is how I know:

My 4 year old daughter said today: “I don’t want to ever die.”

And I replied, “Let’s see what we can do to make sure that it never happens.”

And I mean it, too.

The only way we are ever going to find the cure for cancer or the key to making a copy of our consciousness is by taking the glue bottle in hand and taking a huge and completely satisfying swig.

I went back to the places I grew up and played music for a friend of mine. I played the best songs that I knew with the new chords that I had just found and owned. He called them beautiful and he felt inadiquate. I told him that he wasn’t and asked him to play for me, which he did.

He played me something sad, and then I played him something even sadder. He showed me the stories he had been working on in his head and I showed him the ones that were being tattooed on the printer paper that only ever saw my block letters.

We shared those moments on a dark winter night and we mourned the loss of the freedom we knew in high school. His sister, who knew me longer than just about anyone kept asking me to play more, so I did. I played the song that questioned her god and she got quiet and reflective. We both knew that we had become someone different. That our scars had taken us to different places in the lonely college nights.

I remember how their house always smelled like rain, and how the sadness of their father’s death always hung around the kitchen and the family room. I remember how we would talk about books and movies and music and always end up somewhere more meaningful.

The winter holidays are melancholy if you let them be. And they are giving and hopeful if that is what you feel.

I don’t wish to be back there or to know who those people were back then. I do miss the music, though. I miss staying up late and talking about the things that I have written that only a few other people had heard before.

Every time I go back to the beginning of the year, I feel as though I have to own it. I feel as though I have to commit it to memory as the year that was mine. And every year, I make a promise to be honest and hold up my end of the bargains I commit to.

I kissed my friend’s sister once, too. Just one night, and it was not something we ever talked about again. I went back to my college and she went back to hers and we knew that if we were different people and needed different things that we would be perfect for one another. As it was, though, she was just the one that knew what was in my voice. She knew when I held on to lies and when I let go of the truth.

These special spaces I make now and think through aren’t the warm ones of my youth. They are calculated and spacious. They have enough room for anyone, and they don’t fold in on themselves when given half a chance and disappear.

When I was young, I pursued the cold reality that I knew was somewhere else. Now, I know that everything I care about I can hold in my hands. It wasn’t a mistake to leave the guitar in the corner. I am singing out these songs without the need to fret my fingers.

When what you are watching is more beautiful, dramatic and filled with purpose than your actions would be at this very moment.
When the words being said are more potent and filled with truth than yours can muster tonight.

When you know that if you don’t, you will be missing out on an experience that you can never get back.