Gorgeous Synchronicity
A book about the interconnectedness of human lives.
By Joe Guse
In loving memory of Sam Mayfield and David Gimelfarb.
Copyright 2009
Introduction
It’s been two years since I’ve really written anything. I’ve been scrambling around madly trying to officially become a doctor, and along the way something had to give. Unfortunately that was the thing that is nearest and dearest to my heart, which is my writing, which is a form of self-therapy for me that nothing else quite measures up to.
But this is also kind of a lie.
Because the truth is in the hustle and bustle of everyday life, I also kind of lost my motivation. I knew I would write again someday, but just kind of kept waiting around for a great idea to pop into my head. That’s not how it works. Writers write, even when they don’t feel like it.
Then one painful day last March I got a terrible phone call from one of my friends letting me know that another of our friends had died in a car accident. I was frozen by the news, and felt numb thinking about the magnitude of the loss.
Because the friend I lost Sam was absolutely larger than life, and embodied a kind of living that I had always really admired. After his death I put together a number of tributes to him, including several videos, some essays, and other things that I thought would help commemorate such a large and sprawling life. It was I hoped a way of showing how much his life meant to me, and a reminder of the power of honoring and remembering friendships.
But then something strange happened.
Although I felt like I was the one doing something for Sam, in the end it was he who was doing something for me. After his death I reconnected with a number of old friends, and also made some very important new ones who added a great deal to my life. His death had set in motion a series of events that would alter my life dramatically, and in a way became a gift as well as a lesson to my own life about how to embrace the time I have left with a lot more passion and awareness.
So much of what transpired afterwards is included here. This book contains a number of my own stories and musings, but also some stories from friends whose stories of synchronicity added a great deal to my own understanding of the subject. This book will not be for everyone, and some will be perhaps irritated by its haphazard kind of format and the way it jumps around. I can’t apologize for this because that’s the way it was intended. For those of you that did help me write this book, a million heartfelt thanks for being in my life.
Joy and Pain
“I have liked remembering almost as much as I have liked living”
William Maxwell
In Marcel Proust’s book In Search of Lost Time, the narrator bites into a Madeleine, and the memories from his entire youth come rushing into his troubled mind. He is flooded with memories of things he had forgotten, and the novel begins with him describing these recollections.
I had a similar experience yesterday when I found out my friend Sam had died in a car crash. I thought back on so many crazy times we had over the years, and took a very bittersweet journey into my own memory bank, which resulted in a great deal of both laughter as well as tears. Like the old song said, Joy and Pain, opposite sides of the same coin. When we choose to really pursue this adventure
we choose both. That’s the rub.
About a year or so ago something hit me, and that was that I always seem to appreciate things a lot more when they’re in the rear view mirror. I complain about insignificant details, neglect to nurture friendships, and dream of my future escape into the next episode of my life. Then six months later I wax poetic about all the good times and great friendships I had ‘back in the day”. My memory becomes magically transformed ...I’m quick to forget the bad and remember the good. Maybe it’s my way of rationalizing that the time I invested had value. But a year
ago I started to rethink all of this.
You see, I was living like the lead character in the incredible Hulk. Wandering from place to place, getting involved in people’s lives, forging significant bonds, and then leaving as fast as I came. Always starting fresh, always making wonderful new friends, until the cycle repeated again. But then as I say, I had an epiphany. I realized that nearly half of my life was over, and I had left nothing but a big beautiful wake. Lots of memories but no lasting relationships. Here is when I started to change. I’m still struggling to change. To tell people what they mean to me, and that our time together had value. That they will be remembered. That they added something significant to my life. That I was forever changed from having the privilege of having them in my life. Christ this made me squirm. But
I forged ahead
So my friend Sam knew how I felt about him when he died. I told him. This is weird for guys.. We are creatures of the playground and you can get beat up for things like this.. But still, I did it, and it was something that gave me a great deal of comfort yesterday as I thought about the things
he had added to my life.
So I guess the moral of the story is, tell people what you have to tell them. The only thing stopping you is the policeman in your head, and really, fuck him.. That is fear, and if you go to the grave with it, a lot of your life will have been wasted.. Say the funeral stuff to people while they’re still alive, I guarantee you they’d love to hear it…I did…it was hard.. But I did, and I can tell you it provides a great deal of solace… Life is fleeting and impermanent. My friend did not know last week when we were exchanging jokes about St. Patrick’s Day that he would be dead in less than a week. But he had slain a lot of his fear, and my last memory of him will be a happy one…There’s no what ifs between us, and I have learned a great deal about friendship
as a result of this experience.
Guardian Angels
There is no such thing as chance; and what seem to us merest accident springs from the deepest source of destiny.
Friedrich Schiller
I wanted to share something that has been on my mind lately, and I hope I can find the right words to share it. It’s about making sense of suffering and an idea called synchronicity, which suggests that perhaps there are no coincidences in life, and that all of the people that come into our lives are perhaps sent to us for a specific reason.
I began thinking about this a couple of months ago when my dear friend Sam died. After I heard about this I thought a lot about the kind of life he lived and all of his fearlessness, and I began to channel his spirit and live a little more fearlessly myself. So in a sense, I had taken a tragedy, his death, and truly changed the way I was living. It was a powerful catalyst and an important discovery.
But what I want to say goes way beyond this and way beyond me. What if my friend’s death had unlocked a massive amount of doors I hadn’t even fully considered? Here is what I mean. When he died I reconnected with dozens of old friends and also made some significant new ones. Could this have all just been coincidence or even convenience?
Perhaps. But what if it was something more? What if his death set a strange and wonderful course of events in motion that helped hundreds of other people like me reconnect? What if someone made an amazing transformation in his life as a result of reflecting on how little time we really have here? What if someone met back up with a friend who they were dying to see, which pulled them out of a terrible sense of loneliness?
All of these things are possibilities along with hundreds of others I haven’t even thought of. My point is that we all need to pay close attention to the people that come into our lives, because maybe, just maybe, they are supposed to be there. Whatever religious or spiritual beliefs you personally subscribe to, it’s become clear to me at least, that the term “things happen for a reason” is not simply a cliché’ but perhaps the secret to a greater mystical and magical understanding of how we all fit together in this world.
So for me I’ve started paying a lot closer attention to the people that come in and out of my life. I hope next time it doesn’t take something as powerful as one my oldest and greatest friends to die to make me understand this lesson.. I can’t bring him back, but what I can choose to do is honor his memory by listening to and thinking about what the universe has to tell me….I’ve come to believe that strange guardian angels exist all around us…Perhaps WE are someone’s guardian angel who can provide a laugh or a comforting word at just the right time…We never really know how we are affecting each other in this world, but it is my opinion that it is a great deal more than we perhaps give ourselves credit for.
Is Love a Feeling?
"We only regard those unions as real examples of love and real marriages in which a fixed and unalterable decision has been taken. If men or women contemplate an escape, they do not collect all their powers for the task. In none of the serious and important tasks of life do we arrange such a "getaway". We cannot love and be limited."
Alfred Adler
This is a question that confuses me a lot. I work as a therapist and I see so many lonely people every day, men, woman, teenagers, elderly people, it doesn't matter.. Loneliness is an epidemic, and the stories I hear always
break my heart just a little bit..
Because I am a lonely person
too. I find myself telling people that finding a partner is
ultimately up to them...The first step is I believe being able to
have a sense of regard for ourselves. Until we are able to do this,
we embody Groucho Marx's Line, "I would never join a club that
would have me as a member." The issues that we have not resolved
about our own self-worth creep into our relationships again and again
and again. That's why 2nd marriages have a failure rate of 65%. For
third marriages it's 75.
So what do we do? I think we start
with thinking about our sense of readiness. Are we in a rush to be
"in" love? If so we're probably not ready... that feeling
is a set of chemical messages, much like an addiction...Don't get me
wrong, it's a wonderful feeling to have that rush of excitement, the
sexual attraction, the mystery, even the anxiety. It's all part of
the process.
But that's not love...Love is sitting by the
bedside of your partner day after day who has Alzheimer's Disease who
no longer remembers you....Love is a continuing commitment and
assessment of the choice we made to share our life with one
person....That takes work.. Hard work....We start to see flaws, start
to get disappointed when someone turns out to not possess the magical
qualities we had assigned to them. Our passion comes back down to the
earth with a thud.
Here is where we have a choice.
We can accept that, like us, our partners are flawed creatures just exactly like we are. We can accept this...We MUST accept this...We can't assume we can change anyone. It's unrealistic and even arrogant. People have deeply habituated patterns of personality that go all the way back to their earliest childhoods. We’re not changing
that. Not even us therapists.
What we can change is our behavior./Our choices are presented to us day-to day and it's up to us as to how we will respond to things.....To chose to take responsibility for our own lives...And if we work hard enough and long enough, a new feeling emerges...That feeling is freedom. We come to realize that we are the authors of our
own lives, and THIS is an incredible feeling..
An Invincible Summer
"In
the Midst of Winter, I finally found there was within me an
invincible summer."
Albert
Camus
Today is the first official day of summer. For those who live in Chicago it is a long time coming. I’ve already had a pretty busy summer, I became a reverend (online) and performed a wedding ceremony for one of my old friends, I’ll also be on national TV later this week. These are big
things for me.
But life has not always
been full of sunshine. I moved to Chicago many years ago thinking I
was going to be the next big thing. I remember the first day I moved
here. There was an article in the Chicago Tribune called “The
Gift of Summer’ it was a good read, but at the time I didn’t
think much of it. I was on my way. My life was going to be nothing
but summers, and I certainly didn’t need some newspaper
columnist reminding me to seize the day.
But Jesus was I
wrong. I have failed in every way a person can fail. As a student,
comedian, partner, employee, boss, friend, writer, and on and on and
on. I have also had some success in this city, but still, I’ve
taken some big blows…..I’ve had some moments where I was
so low I had no desire to keep going.. That’s the rub of taking
risks with your life. When you fall down you wonder what the fuck you
were thinking. You cower back to safety, a little more cautious, and
a little less willing to let it all hang out….
And
yet….It is only by letting it all hang out that we find our
path. Joseph Campbell said ‘It is by going down into the abyss
that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies
your treasure.” Having lived long enough to examine some of my
own choices and experiences, I know that this is unequivocally true.
Today at a concert I looked around at people with a kind of
grateful melancholy. I watched friends laugh together, dance
together, and share private jokes over glasses of cold Sangria. I
watched them closely and took it all in. I thought about the rewards
of friendship. When you have enough experiences together you begin to
develop your own language and your own private worlds with a history
that it unique just to you.
These unique worlds we build with others, they are the key to happiness, I’m sure of it. We all get a little lost along this journey, but having our own historians to bear witness to our follies is strangely comforting. We all fall on our asses, but having someone there to break the fall makes it bearable. So much laughter is created by being comfortable enough with others to observe our own foolishness through the eyes of someone we can really trust. That’s what occurred to me today. I’m looking forward to creating more of these worlds and to expanding the one I already live in. So yes, I have found my invincible summer and it has very little to do with the weather. It has to do with other people. So at the official beginning of this Chicago Summer I vow to broaden my life a bit more. There are worlds waiting to be born, if I just have the courage to find them.
Unlikely Heroes
"everybody has something noble inside of them waiting to get out. If you catch them at the right time, you'll see this to be true. At other times, people are less noble and heroic. When the media spotlights one individual over another as a hero, they're simply showing the goodness that's in all of us. In other words, we're all heroes if you catch us at the right moment."
From the movie “Hero”
Today I received a letter from a woman who I used to know when I was working with Alzheimer’s patients in 2006. Her mother was a patient at the hospital I worked at, and a very difficult patient at that. Even still I always tried to keep in mind that she had been ravaged by a terrible disease that had likely drastically altered her personality. Some days I was better at remembering this than others.
This woman had a daughter who was exceedingly difficult to deal with. This is the woman who called me today. She would come to the hospital at all hours barking out orders to the staff, and would hover over her mother to no end. We dreaded when she came to visit, which was often, and, because I was the Activity Director I was the one that often had to deal with her the most.
I tried my best. She was terribly impatient, had awful listening skills, and talked in a loud voice that induced anxiety in virtually everyone she spoke to. I considered it a personal challenge to try and calm her down, but often she was inconsolable. I learned from her brother that she had been through a divorce recently and that she had a very strained relationship with her mother for most of her life. I had more compassion for her when I found this out, and tried my very best to listen to her despite her difficult personality. Over time we got to a point we could talk in a much calmer and slower pace, and she used to bring me candy sometimes during Christmas and Easter other holidays.
One day when she was particularly harried, she really overstayed her welcome, and I turned to my partner and said, “thank God the bitch is gone.” She wasn’t. She was standing right behind me.
The look on her face was one of the saddest things I had ever seen. I was one of the only people in the world that listened to her, and I could tell by the look on her face I had broken her heart. I went home that day feeling as low as I ever had..
As time went on she came by less and less. I tried hard to explain I had just had a bad day, but trust had been badly damaged. As the months passed I did my best to listen and try and understand her, and very slowly she began to soften. Our relationship was much better, and I often found myself talking to her about her relationship with her mother, and how much I admired her dedication towards her mom now that she needed her the most. We had several long talks during those months, and over time even developed a kind of friendship.
So today I received a letter from this woman telling me that her mother had died. Although she was sad about this, she was writing me for another reason. She wanted to say that I had helped her get through the most difficult time in her life. That she felt so disgusted with herself during this period of her life that she had contemplated suicide, and that her visits to the nursing home were at times the only thing that kept her going. She said she was happily remarried now, and that she truly felt like a different person than she was when I had known her. In short she wrote to say thank you. It was a thank you I’m not sure I deserved, but wow did it make me stop and think.
I guess the lesson is this. Everything we say and do is important, especially when we are in positions when we see people at their most vulnerable. When you see a person who is extremely difficult to deal with, it’s likely this person is deeply hurt and they have no other way to deal with it than to take it out on the world. We have all BEEN this difficult person at one time or another in our lives. We didn’t always know the things we know now. It took some falling down, some broken hearts, some time and reflection to get there.. And we’re still going to fall a bunch more times. One day we make look back at the things we know today and be amazed by how little we really knew and how much we have grown and changed. It’s something I hope I can remember. Truthfully I had totally forgotten about this woman, and today was a cosmic reminder that our words and actions ripple much, much deeper than we ever truly comprehend.
A small thing
Factual information alone isn't sufficient to guide you through life's labyrinthine tests. You need and deserve regular deliveries of uncanny revelation. One of your inalienable rights as a human being should therefore be to receive a mysteriously useful omen every day of your life.
Rob Brezsny
I feel like my eyes have been opened lately and I am coming out of a very deep sleep. Suddenly I’m having all of these chance encounters with people that I no longer believe are coincidences.
I was riding home from work today on the train, when I heard a loud booming voice yell, “Joe” and I was immediately alarmed. I was on the far Sough Side of Chicago and I was pretty sure I didn’t know anyone in this neck of the world that I wanted to see again.
But I was wrong.
What I saw astounded me. There in front of me was a strapping, well-dressed 200 hundred pound Black man dressed like he was going to a movie premiere. I couldn’t believe it. When I knew this man he had a major addiction to crack and was also a pretty serious alcoholic. He lived on the streets and weighed about 120 pounds. I truly couldn’t believe it.
When I knew him I was managing a large nightclub in downtown Chicago. This guy was like our own personal bum at the time, who would park our cars, run errands, and basically do whatever we needed him to do. In a strange way he was very trustworthy. He basically spent his days and night working one scam after another trying to get money for more alcohol and drugs. Even still, I liked him, and actually most people in the neighborhood liked him.
So cut to years later and I’m working as a therapist on the South Side, and here he stands before me. He explained that one bar owner in the neighborhood took a chance on him and gave him a job, and the rest just feel into his place. He was now managing the concessions at several bars, and looked like he was truly a different man. He credited it all to God, but I knew there was also more to the story. Something about someone taking a chance on him again had seemed to awaken something that had lain dormant for quite some time. He had been invited back to the human race, and this time he had decided he was going to do things a little differently.
So we had a nice little chat, and I told him I was proud of him. Eventually we reached my stop, and he yelled “Hold on.” He ran over to me, pulled out a wad of money, and peeled off a fresh 5 dollar bill and handed it to me.
“I wanted to give you the five back you loaned me.”
Now over the years I had given him hundreds of dollars, but that was beside the point. I explained to him that I didn’t really need it, and he looked a little hurt.
“I insist”, he said..
So I took it and he gave me a hug…
”You were nice to me even when no else was Joe, and Ill never forget it.”
And so I exited into the night, thinking I would take that five and frame it. I couldn’t believe the transformation this guy had made, and I was once again reminded that often all we have to judge the majority of people’s lives we intersect with is a snapshot. We make assumptions about them and where their lives may be headed, but we really rarely ever get to know how the story ends.
And that was not the end of this story….I still had to jump on one more bus to get home, and there was a long line of people waiting to get on. I put my card into the machine and found, to my dismay that it was expired. I didn’t like to carry cash on this trip as I went through some dangerous territory. The thought of walking after a long day was immensely irritating, and I scanned my pockets one last time for posterity.
And there it was, a crisp, clean, 5 dollar bill….
A small thing.
But in that moment, in that time…It mattered a lot to me…..
Staring down Your Fear
Synchronistic events offer us perceptions that may be useful in our psychological and spiritual growth and may reveal to us, through intuitive knowledge, that our lives have meaning.
Jean Shinoda Bolen
After the death of my friend I received a letter from one of his good friends who I did not know. She said something that really struck me and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head ever since. She said “Sam's death will make just as much of an impact as his life did.”
That one sentence summed up so eloquently everything I’m trying to get my head around right now. The chain of events all of our significant actions (and many of our seemingly insignificant ones) set in motion. I am paying so much more attention now I am starting to observe where I once turned a blind eye.
One explanation as to why we turn this blind eye is that we are simply too busy to go around noticing coincidences and paying attention to mystic omens in our lives. Joseph Campbell, a great believer in synchronicity and a kind of disciple of Carl Jung, referred to this as “the refusal of the call.’ He explained that,
“The Refusal of the summons converts the adventure into its negative. Walled in boredom, hard work, or 'culture,' the subject loses the power of significant affirmative action and becomes a victim to be saved. His flowering world becomes a wasteland of dry stones and his life feels meaningless. All he can do is create new problems for himself and await the gradual approach of his disintegration."
In essence when we refuse the call, we are trying to avoid the suffering that taking risks may bring, but in this avoidance we bring another kind of suffering on ourselves. Jung said, “Nobody, as long as he moves about among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble.” All of us will grow old, get sick, lose loved ones, and die.
So although that sounds rather morbid, perhaps by truly seizing this adventure we can beat back the mundane, the boredom, the pain, the illness, and all the rest of it for the short time that we have been given. Hemingway talked about making love as “beating back death” and I think that’s a good metaphor for life’s grand adventure.
So all of this leads me back to the idea that my friend may have as much of an impact in his death as he did in his life. Something about his dying sent a little existential shock wave into my life that I haven’t been able to fully comprehend. Part of this came from contemplating my own mortality. Whenever someone close to us dies, at least some of the grief we feel is thinking about the fact that one day we will be gone as well. One quote that always reminds me of this comes from J. Furniss who reminds us,
“Never forget that you must die; that death will come sooner than you expect... God has written the letters of death upon your hands. In the inside of your hands you will see the letters M.M. It means "Memento Mori" - remember you must die.”
I’ve always loved that quote but I’ve rarely lived that quote. Until recently I’ve really felt a creative spark that was ignited by my friend’s death. I haven’t done comedy in years. My writing has very much been on the shelf for the last couple of years, but now, well, I have been massively creative. But why? What was it about someone dying that lit this fire?
I do know that I saw the outpouring for my friend when he died, and I thought to myself, what is the secret to being remembered like this? What are the qualities of this kind of life? What does it look like?
And I kept coming back to overcoming fear. My friend was pretty fearless, and whatever energy he left behind, I know I somehow absorbed a lot if it. Perhaps that is what the afterlife really is. The goodwill, laughter, friendship and wisdom you leave behind becomes a kind of energy that those you left behind can use as they wish. That’s what it means to me anyway, and I’ve been getting some daily reminders of how this is true..
Reflections on Spirituality
The First Insight Theory: Mysterious coincidences cause the reconsideration of the inherent mystery that surrounds our individual lives on this planet.
James Redfield
My journey with religion
has been a long and winding road…I went to Catholic school for
the first 8 years of my life, and just by the process of Osmosis I
learned a lot about the Bible and all of the major players in it. I
fainted once on Ash Wednesday…I dreaded the idea of someone
putting dirt on my head and my body just shut down…I was in
fourth grade…Another time the Bishop of our dioceses poked me
in the eye and then went right back to working the room…He
knew he did it…That was the end of the religious chapter of my
life…I was about 14….
The next 7 years or so me
and spirituality kind of broke up….Books became my salvation,
and these were the years I did some serious discovery, most of it in
the hammock of my own back yard…One day when I was 21, I was
reading the book “The Sheltering Sky” by Paul Bowles and
came across this quote..
“Because we don't know
when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well,
yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very
small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain
afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part
of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it?
Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more
times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it
all
seems limitless.”
And that was it for me. I hit
the road…My first stop was Yellowstone park for a summer…It
was incredible…I remember watching the movie Field of
Dreams…..One of the characters said “We don’t
realize the most significant moments of our lives while they are
happening.” I didn’t know it at the time but that was
incredibly prophetic…That summer was my first taste of so many
things…Somehow the time spent out in the wild had also
reignited an old spark…I felt something when I was wandering
in those mountains. I don’t know what it was, but it felt like
what I thought religion should have felt like. Plus no one was poking
me in the eye or trying to rub dirt on my head…Something was
stirring, but I didn’t know then what it was………As
Soren Kierkegaard said, “Life can only be understood backwards;
but it must be lived forwards."
A year later I was
working at the Grand Canyon…One day I went hiking all the way
to the bottom with a couple of friends…We got separated and I
would up all the way at the bottom of that place with not another
soul around for
miles…It was Dusk….
I took it all in…All of
this had been around for millions of years, yet at this time, in this
place, it belonged to me…This was my moment. This was my time.
And then I felt an energy. An incredible energy, rise up inside of
me. I knew. I knew that whatever energy existed in this world I
shared a piece of it…I was connected to it…I had access
to it…I also knew that I was supposed to add to it….That
I had been given gifts that would help me add to it. Improbably,
against all odds, I had defined at that moment what spirituality
meant in my own life…
This experience would lead me to
the study of what Carl Jung called Synchronicity, which defines how
there are really no accidents in our lives. If we can break though
the noise, the apathy, the laziness, I discovered that we just might
find there were incredible secrets to unravel as to why people come
into our lives when they do…..This is a lesson that has been
presented to me over and over again…. I still don’t
understand this in real time…I need to stumble, to fail, to
push people out of my comfortable world, before I really realize
their importance….I am humbled by this….But it has,
finally, after many years, made me a person who likes to listen…It’s
why I love people’s
Stories. They are transformative.
So for me the interconnectedness of human beings is the spirituality we have in this world…We all need each other so much, yet we find a million little ways to push people out of our spaces. I do this too. People that come into therapy do it a lot as well…I am well-equipped to advise them because I have fallen down all the same stairs. We all have little parts of ourselves that loves to sabotage our happiness. Like a Big Blue marble of misfit toys, we are fallible and we are flawed, but we can come to appreciate and even love each other’s imperfections because we have them ourselves…That is our shared legacy….That is what spirituality means to me…..
Sliding Doors
“When
you look back on your life, it looks as though there were a plot, but
when you are into it, it’s a mess: just one surprise after
another. Then later you see it was perfect.
Arnold
Schopenhauer
I’ve thought about this quote a lot in my life. My life feels like a chaotic mess about 90 percent of the time. And yet, often when I look back on other messy periods of my life, I realize I emerged from these experiences a much wiser man.
The first truly astounding “coincidence” in my life occurred when I was 24 years old and road tripping across the western United States to work in Glacier National Park for the summer. It was a glorious time in my life. I had a Volkswagen bus filled with so much beer I could barely fit my luggage in there. I brought along dozens of books to read for the summer. I was young, I was single, and I was free.
So I took my time getting out to Montana that summer, stopping every hundred miles or so to camp, to drink, to meet the locals in little towns, and really just relax. At one point I pulled into a little KOA campground in Idaho and set up shop for the night. I began icing down my beer when I noticed a young couple doing the same in the campground across the way.
As was my custom, I walked over to them and invited them to come by later and hang out and drink some beer. They were a couple of years younger than me and were traveling across the United States for the first time. They were a little lost as to where they were going, and accepted my offer to come and hang out with great enthusiasm. The offer of free beer of course didn’t hurt..
So we talked well into the night. I gave them some advice on places to go, and they told me about their lives back home in Kentucky. We talked about books, philosophy, sports, beer, and everything else people in their 20’s talk about as we watched the sun come up as the fire slowly dwindled. Eventually they returned to their campsite and I fell into a very deep and contented sleep.
When I woke up they were gone, apparently eager to hit the road and check out some of the places we had talked about. I envied them, seeing this beautiful part of the country for the first time. At 24 I felt old, not knowing that I was in fact in one of the most wonderful and adventurous periods of my life.
I had the most glorious, wild, reckless, amazing, summer of my life that year. From the little bars in strange corners of the state, to the Calgary Stampede, to road trips, and hiking and drinking, it was a summer I would never forget, and yes I even fell in love. I met a Southern Belle, and cut to two years later I moved down south to be closer to her.
I never pictured myself living in the South, but I actually adapted pretty quickly. I was working as a bartender and trying to figure out my next move in life as I continued to get a little older. Although I loved traveling and adventure and being free, I was starting to think that maybe it was time to get a little better plan together as to what I actually wanted to do with my life.
So one day I was at a party at my girlfriend’s house when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I didn’t know to many people there at the time, so when the kid asked me, “Is your name Joe?” I was definitely a little surprised.
It turns out it was the kid from the campground who I certainly thought I would never see again. Certainly this was a small world kind of moment and kind of an amazing coincidence, but simply seeing him again was not the end of the story.
“This may sound weird man, but I want to tell you something that’s pretty important,” he went on. “Talking with you that night and hearing how passionate you were about all of these books you’ve read really sparked something. I guess what I wanted to tell you was, I decided to become a teacher because of that night and that conversation that we had.”
And I was blown away!! Here I hadn’t even scratched the surface on my own career and I was altering people’s lives with a one-night conversation. I can still remember that conversation as if it was yesterday. It was the first taste I really had that people paid any attention at all to the things I had to say. I always felt a little like an imposter, dispensing advice, discussing literature, and pontificating, when at the time I didn’t even have a college degree.
And looking back all of these years later, I realized that conversation did in fact send me on a long road to becoming a kind of teacher. I’m a therapist now and a writer, and while I’m still not totally convinced anyone really listens to what I say, I do know how much power even one small conversation can potentially have. In this particular story I met this man twice, but somehow we had improbably each altered one another’s destiny in a profound and powerful way. It still amazes me really.
The death of my father
The death of the father is the most important event, the most poignant loss, of a man's life.
Sigmund Freud
The dream shows the inner truth and reality of the patient as it really is: not as I conjecture it to be, and not as he would like it to be, but as it is.
Carl Jung
It started out to be the kind of day like any other day. At the time I was managing a large nightclub in Chicago, making good money, and living a hedonistic, carefree life living in the city. I had been doing this for a while and was pretty content if not a little bored.
I had fallen into managing nightclubs almost entirely by accident. I had moved to Chicago to become a comic, and often worked as a bartender to actually pay the bills. I was so bad as a bartender that eventually they just kind of made me a manager, and soon I had given up my dream of being a comic and instead spent the majority of my time doing various chores running a bar.
Something was nagging at me though and I didn’t totally know what it was at the time. I knew I wanted more out of life than what I was doing, but I had gotten very comfortable and at the time I couldn’t see too many other options than to continue to do what I was doing. I had developed an interest in Psychology, and had taken to analyzing my dreams in pursuit of this interest.
One night I woke up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. I had dreamed that my brother and I were wandering through the woods in ragged clothing, terribly impoverished, and searching for our father. I woke up with a tremendous sense of loss, foreboding, and pending doom. I opened one of my books on dream interpretation and found a passage interpreting a dream similar to the one I just had. It said this kind of dream may be indicative that one would be called to a deathbed soon. I dismissed this interpretation as fatalistic. One hour later my mother called, informing me my dad had died during the night.
At my father’s funeral the priest read from the book Tuesdays with Morrie. Sitting in that church and hearing those words about loss and regret, I vowed to change my life. Upon my return home I enrolled in school and began my personal journey towards being a Psychologist. And my first assignment in my first class? Read the book Tuesdays with Morrie and relate the concepts in the book to a loss in my own life.
I could have simply dismissed all of these events as coincidences, but I knew from my experiences that the universe had just hit me with a thunderbolt, and that I had better begin paying attention.
So years later I’m a therapist. It’s an incredibly gratifying job and one that I feel totally energized doing. I get lazy all the time and forget to listen to the signs that surround me. I’ve become convinced that everyday the universe is trying to tell you SOMETHING… Most days I miss the sign. Jung said one of the fundamental drives of human beings is to be lazy, and I am as guilty of that as anyone. But when a person has experienced these kinds of things in their lives they start to pay a lot more attention, and right now, I can say, in this period of my life, I’m awake…
An Interlude in Ireland
Looking back now I am noticing all kinds of connections I hadn’t before. Today I found myself thinking about a trip to Ireland I took last year and some of the things that happened to me while I was there.
I’d hit kind of a rough patch in my life and was struggling to figure out where I was going. I decided a trip to Ireland where my grandmother was from might help me make sense of where I came from, and maybe even offer some clues as to where I was going.
I had a deeply transcendent moment when I was in Ireland. High in the Wicklow Mountains I climbed to the top of the highest peak and looked around. Miles and miles of green hills, beautiful mountains, and clear skies surrounded me, and something just came over me. I knew that there was something bigger out there than just me. That I had been given a gift to get to dance here on this beautiful planet for however long, and that I was called to do something bigger than gratifying my own selfish needs.
So it was with this newfound awakening that I returned to Dublin to finish the rest of my vacation. I was staying in hostel that weekend, and my roommate was a girl from Spain who spoke very little English. I tried to talk to her but it was difficult, as I spoke predominantly busboy Spanish from my many years working in restaurants. Even still, we tried to talk over dinner in the bar downstairs. Then I looked at her and saw a single tear fall down her cheek.
"Yo se que la vida es dificil" I said, (I know life is hard)
And with that she began to
chuckle. She studied me closely and looked deeply into my eyes,
apparently wanting and needing to convey something extremely
important. Soon her smile faded though and she looked back down into
the napkin that was folded in her lap.
"I am alone in the
world," she said in broken English as she
wiped
a tear from her face.
"Me too," I replied, and she
looked up with understanding eyes, this time patting my hand as she
tried to comfort me.
"I know life is hard" she said.
And
with this we both smiled, having discovered, in this odd little
corner of the world, the power of making a small human connection.
So we spent some time together over the next couple of days, neither one of us speaking the other’s literal language, but both very much strangely attuned to something the other seemed to need. We drank, we ate, and we danced over the next couple of days, and in a sense it was one of the most intimate connections I had ever made with another person, despite the fact we were virtually unable to hold a conversation. We were two lonely people, who made each other a little less lonely by trying very hard to understand each other. This is exceedingly difficult with someone who knows the same language as you do, as often the words just keep getting in the way. Yet here, in this time, in this place, we had found a language that was unique just to the two of us, It was wonderful.
Eventually our trip came to an end. My last memory was the bus ride together back to the airport, where miraculously I remembered I had the song ‘Guantanamera” on my ipod. We both took an ear and sat and listened to the song as our time together came to an end. Both of seemed to sense that, although we had made an intense human connection, we both had to return to very different lives. It was sweet, it was sad, and it was perhaps the most melancholy moment of my life.
So we exchanged information and wrote back and forth a few times, but in the end, neither of us had the patience to continue to translate the other’s language. I hadn’t thought about her for a while, when a couple of months ago I got a postcard from her saying simply.
“Life is not so hard now, thank you for being my friend, it meant more than you know.”
My heart was deeply touched. I thought about her a lot after that. Was she my lost love? Should I have pursued her further? Tried harder? But in the end I think we were just supposed to have those few days together. In those few days we found a way to give each other something we both seemed to desperately need, and for me, it was an experience that will remain in my memory forever.
The High Priest of Happy Hour
“The Road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. “
William Blake
A couple of months ago I reconnected with a good friend from a few years ago. At the time we were both working in a bar in a downtown Chicago. It was like working in a war zone at times, and the stories we accumulated over those years were truly priceless.
I first met this guy on an elevator when he was applying for a job. That was almost ten years ago now but I still remember it well. He was 21 at the time, and we went through more than our share of passages as we tore through these years together.
Eventually he became a cop and I became a therapist. At the time nobody who knew either one of us would likely have predicted that, but life takes unpredictable turns. The point is we put that part of our lives to bed, knowing that we had a pretty wild run that we emerged from miraculously still alive and kicking.
A couple of years passed, and then he found me online. It’s always nice to catch up with old friends, but it’s something I’ve been terribly lax about. Anyway we went out for drinks a couple of times, and he told me he was getting married. I was in for a shock however when he asked me if I would consider getting ordained online and performing and writing the wedding ceremony.
To back up for a second I was not only not religious, but so hedonistic for so many years I thought I would start on fire if I stepped into a church. Even still I was intrigued, and accepted the assignment with great gusto.
So I set about writing the ceremony. Which I have included here-
Hello everyone and welcome…..We are here today to celebrate the union of Emily and Kevin ….It’s a sacred day a wedding day…..And these two may only have 2 or 3 more of them in their entire lives…So let’s everyone try and pay attention please.
I never would have guessed when I bumped into this guy in an elevator 10 years ago that I would be performing his wedding ceremony….At the time I would have placed odds we would have met back up in jail….But here we are….He a cop and me a priest…Well an internet priest anyway……My license expires in a half hour so lets get this show on the road…
In all seriousness…….We are here today because two people solved life’s most perplexing mystery and fell in love…I take that back…..Not two people…Three actually…Any conversation about these two has to include their beautiful daughter Nola, who I know Kevin has fallen in love with as well…….I’ve never seen him so happy and so filled with a sense of purpose, and I know that having these two ladies in his life is the best thing that ever happened to him….
When I’m not faking being a priest I work as a marriage counselor…I see a lot of couples that have lost their way…And often a big part of what they’ve lost is their senses of humor….I can’t imagine that ever happening to these two…..They are two of the funniest people I’ve ever met, and after spending a little time with Nola it’s clear that there will soon be a third class clown in the family……Jean Houston said “At the height of laughter the universe is thrown into a kaleidoscope of new possibilities.” My guess is that laughter will be the lifeblood of this family’s interactions, and that they will grow and thrive as they laugh their way through life together…
I know for these two, there is no job they take more seriously than being parents, and I can’t imagine Nola being in finer hands as she makes her way through life….So Nola, to paraphrase another high priest like myself named Bob Dylan,
May
the good lord be with you
Down every road you roam
And may
sunshine and happiness
Surround you when you’re far from
home
And may you grow to be proud
Dignified and true
And do
unto others
As you’d have done to you
Be courageous and
be brave
And in my heart you’ll always stay
Forever
young, forever young
Try and remember these words as you grow older….But on the other hand bear in mind that their may be times you’re the only adult in the house…..I’ve seen your dad whine when the White Sox lose
So although this is a wonderful day and a happy time, I would be remiss in my duties to suggest marriage is easy. As many of you here know, it may be the hardest yet most rewarding thing a person can ever do. Ruth Bell Graham said, “A happy marriage is the union of two good forgivers.” Seems pretty accurate…Marriage is the ultimate test of cooperation, and cooperation is pretty hard without forgiveness….Deep down we are all a little broken and miswired…As you go through your life together please keep this in mind.
And marriage is also unpredictable… A favorite quote of mine on this subject comes from Gilda Radner who found her own true love Gene Wilder later in her life…
“I always wanted a happy ending… Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity.”
And so guys, remember that there’s a lot of stuff you can’t even see right now…You will argue, you will fight, and you will do the silly, petty, and ridiculous things humans do.. You will survive this because you have learned to laugh together…..A simple look around should show you how many of us are rooting for you 3 to have a wonderful life together…..I know I speak for everyone in this room when I say we love you and wish you the best on this terrifying rollercoaster you are about to jump aboard…You may scream, you may protest, and you may even feel like yelling at the deranged Carrny to stop the ride….But in the end, the fun you have together will I’m sure make it all worth the trip.
The reason why I have included this vignette is to demonstrate a point about friendship. So often we get lazy about putting in the time and effort to maintain friendships and they just kind of wither away and die. Because my friend took the time to find me, I am now a part of one of the most significant days of his life. The fun we had that day and the story of me performing his wedding ceremony will I’m sure be something we remember when we are old men, and it happened because he was willing to do a little extra work to stay in touch.
So perhaps the lesson is to work hard at maintain these friendships, as the dividends echo much longer than we may realize. I have attended several funerals where person after person says the most glowing things about the deceased, while also acknowledging that they had unfortunately lost touch with the person over the years. What a shame this is, that people often go to their graves not knowing how everyone felt about them.
So looking back now as an officially ordained “reverend” I realize again that there is a strange serendipity in the fact that I was ordained to help bring people together, when this perfectly describes how I am trying to make sense of the world right now. How and why do we al fit together like we do? How is it that you can bump into one guy on an elevator and perform his wedding ceremony, while you walk blindly by others who may have been a doorway to some other fascinating new experiences? I’m not sure I know the answer to any of these questions, but what I do know is that I want to know as many of my fellow travelers as possible while I try and figure it out.
An Adoption Story
“For when the heart insists on its destiny, resisting the general blandishment, then the agony is great; so too the danger. Forces, however, will have been set in motion beyond the reckoning of the senses. Sequences of events from the corners of the world will draw gradually together, and miracles of coincidence bring the inevitable to pass. ”
Joseph Campbell
"Maybe these are miracles. Maybe we don't have any experience with miracles so we're slow to recognize them."
From the Movie Grand Canyon
Not everyone is immediately aware of the power of synchronicity in their lives. I was having this conversation with my friend recently, who seemed a little stuck in her life and was having a hard time seeing where her own path was going. We talked a little more, and she acknowledged that there was “one” powerful event in her life that seemed to indicate some grander sense of design. This story truly knocked me out, and it really helped me better understand how the rhythm of synchronicity can exist for generations before truly clarifying itself properly.