Change Needs Understanding

There is this helpless spot in everyone’s life. I have it. You have it. We all have it. It’s that part of life where you decide what you are going to do and it drives you. You are a hapless, helpless schmuck who wonders what the hell is going to happen next.

This very instant of helplessness is what sets people apart and is the subject of this week’s column. I see this instant as pivotal for every person. There are two ways to deal with this instant, which is entirely affected by your personal belief system. The way you deal with this instant, and this instant happens over and over by the way, depends on how you see life and what you internalize as you progress through existence. The two options in this case are simply to take action in the form of new behaviors and personal experiments or continue with what you always do and essentially change nothing. If you change nothing you still possess the knowledge that you just passed up the opportunity to change but didn’t.

Actually the subject of this week’s column is a person’s personal belief system and how it affects their actions in life. I see people’s actions in a positive/negative way, black and white, yes or no. I say this because the act of changing your life or situation is one thing, which can subsequently be comprised of many little things. I realize this gets rather ethereal but it’s just how it is. The overall effect is simple. You either do or you don’t and that’s huge in a person’s life. You either change or you don’t.

The problem comes from a person’s ability to make change and whether they choose a new course of action. I maintain that change can only become possible when a person understands what they are doing at a deeply personal level. Take this for example, what makes fat people lose weight? I mean there are tons of stories of people who were huge who lost weight and there are tons of huge people who continue to either grow or just stay huge. Both these types of people know that obesity is an enormous problem (pun partially intended). Yet what makes one person change and the other not. I think this comes down to personal understanding.

What I mean by personal understanding is how deeply you comprehend an idea. You can simply know something or deeply understand it. Here is another example. Everyone knows that everyone has to die. Everyone knows that it will hurt emotionally when someone very close to you dies. Yet the person who has never experienced that does not understand that concept nearly as deeply as a person who has lost someone very close to them. This understanding consistently affects the outcomes of our lives and our actions. In order to make personal change you must understand things at a deeply personal level. Take the weight loss example again. Some people lose weight when they have a heart attack or become diabetic. Their lives are changed whether or not they chose to acknowledge it. Their understanding has become more personal because their environment has forced understanding upon them. Yet some people, despite this greater understanding refuse to change.

I talked with my mother, the drunk, a couple of weeks ago and she told me that at 57 she finally gets that she doesn’t have to be the way she is anymore. She no longer has to put up with the bullshit of her life and she needn’t be what others think she is. She can choose to be a drunk or not. She can choose career success or further downward spiral into financial failure. This realization is the pivotal point. Her understanding is now deeper than it ever has been before when she was busy crapping on my existence with her drunken nude scenes and obsessive behavior. Before she always knew on the surface that she didn’t have to get drunk and act poorly. She knew that she didn’t have to sleep with men who were abusive. She never acquired the level of understanding she needed to change. Apparently now she has. I won’t hold my breath but I do believe she does understand this concept on a level new to her. With this new understanding comes new perception and this perception makes old behaviors kind of pointless. It’s like our life works in a linear and circular fashion at the same time. We get older in a linear fashion and yet can do the same things over and over in an endless circle no matter how destructive. In order to move forward we must become linear again and start trying new things. It’s like you start walking down a path instead of just standing there doing circles. If you have a goal you must get there, and to get to that goal you have to understand deeply how important it is to get there.

I’m not sure if this column is exactly fair. I tried to encapsulate an idea in 1000 words what some people would take an entire book to do. I’ll boil it down to this. We all reach these helpless points in our lives where we don’t know what’s ahead and are not completely sure what to do. We either move forward in an attempt to reach our goals or we stay in the same place. Our decisions whether or not to change come from our understanding and how deeply we understand ourselves, and the issues at hand. Until we can look at our true selves and our true situations and see life on its deeply personal level nothing really changes. We stay the same. Nothing will become real for us and we remain circular beings.

I’ve spent the last 6 years expanding my understanding of life in order to change. I realized that I had to own all my gifts and faults in addition to my circumstances. Then I had to decide what I wanted from life and decide whether or not it was worth it to try to go after what I want. Personally I’m scared but I try ever day to move further along my path because I understand what’s at stake and I don’t want to move in circles ever again.

As always, thanks for reading to the end. Talk to you next week.

I Now Need A Break

Hi Everyone,

After the last couple of weeks I'm going to take this week off. See you next week.

There Comes a Time When You Need Someone

Sometimes life takes an interesting turn. Sometimes it feels like the turns life takes are far from desirable. It decides where you go and you don’t have a whole lot to say. You only decide how you act. I guess that’s what makes it interesting.

I sit here in Hamilton, Ontario. Two days ago, Sunday, I had no idea I would be here until we received a phone call from my wife’s sister. My father in law went into the hospital and the family wanted my wife to get to Vancouver as soon as she could. My wife’s father finally died yesterday morning. We got her and our daughter to Toronto and on a flight to Vancouver as fast as we could. Yet we were too late it seems. Around 7:00 a.m. Monday morning my father in law left this world for the next. My wife missed the chance to see her father one last time with the light of life in his eyes. She was probably in at the Winnipeg Airport when it happened.

She called me and cried a little. My daughter was not allowed to see her grandfather’s lifeless body. I’m not sure how I feel about this but in the end it wasn’t my decision to make. I listened on the phone from over 2000 miles away and felt lost at heart. There is nothing in the world I could have said. When she told me they didn’t make it what was there to say? Nothing, you just shut up and listen. Listen with all your heart and hope the person at the other end of the line can feel you listening.

My wife told me the wake will be held this Saturday and that her and my daughter will stay until then and come back the next day. For some reason I feel like this is home. I’m not sure why. I guess Canada means something to me now. Canada to me has accepted me more than any other place I’ve been.

You see there is a funny thing about this place. I met my wife’s family in this country and although I don’t like Vancouver all that much and think the people there are a bunch of posers, I still felt more like a person there than anywhere else. My father in law was a big part of that. I remember just getting together with him to watch the Grey Cup, the Canadian version of the Super Bowl.

I remember how that man took care of our daughter and did what he could in his own special way to help me get my shit together when I needed it most. Just like my wife he was there for me in his own unique way. I’ve never actually had someone do that for me. When I think of it now I could really care less if my actual parents die. My loser-drunk mom will never really change. She still calls me drunk sometimes and it doesn’t really matter. I either have her in my life and live out this boring, useless drama or I don’t. I’ve lived without talking to her for years but that actually takes effort more effort than it’s worth. My father has been busy making sure his gonads were taken care of before me for a long time. After he fucked my aunt in the sleeper of a semi at an oil well when I was seven my life changed unalterably with no input from me. He is married now and I’m pretty sure I’m not even mentioned in his will. It happens I guess, but it didn’t happen when I went to Canada.

My father in law didn’t do that to me. He didn’t do that kind of thing to us, not at all. All he did was try to help; and he did that because he cared. I’d never met someone like that. Now that he has passed I rather find myself surrounded with such people.

I’m here in Ontario staying with people I barely know. One person is a friend that I met online about 8 years ago. Sometimes we go a year without talking to one another. I’ve only met her in person 3 times including now. I’ve never met her family before. Yet her father let me stay here for 6 nights in Hamilton so I don’t have to make the 500 mile round trip to pick my wife and daughter up on Sunday in Toronto. My friend’s sister has welcomed me and went grocery shopping with me this morning. We made dinner together. Everyone has done nothing but help me and offer their home to me and let me enter into their lives on almost no notice.

I can’t wait to get back to Canada and live here.

No matter what I think, my father in law finds his body on the way to the crematorium and will soon take its final form on this planet. His ashes will spread on his parent’s graves and the rest will get cast into the water. I miss the man already. I miss all the little things that he did. I miss the phone calls and I miss him as a friend.

As always, thanks for reading to the end. Talk to you next week.

The Guest Room is Not My Room

This week I thought a little more family history was in order. I had to think pretty hard to come up with something out of my past. Actually nothing is further from the truth. There are plenty of things to write about from my past. I just needed to pick one.

Now it’s time to tackle my father. He was an interesting man prone to extramarital affairs, at least when I was around. I guess one vagina just wasn’t enough. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t that my mother lacked the ability to accommodate him. She had no self esteem and was pretty willing to sell her soul to anything. I remember the day she appropriately told me that my father came home and thought they ought to check out the local swinger scene.

We lived in a pretty small town; I’m talking around 12,000 people. The local swinger scene meant they pretty much banged their friends.

My mother, of course, couldn’t handle what she agreed to. My father did what every man in the 70s did in his situation. He nailed everyone he could. Apparently that included a couple men too.

There was this one day when I was asked as a seven year old child to not sleep in my room. If my recollection is accurate, it was so “guests” could sleep in my bed. Well the only guest there was this guy who creeped me out in a big way. It’s funny how I have no idea now what he looks like, but I can remember what he felt like. Well there I was in the “guest” room, which is where the “guests” normally slept. It was late at night. My parents had Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon blaring in the living room. I couldn’t sleep and they insisted that I have my door closed. This was new too. Usually I slept with the door wide open.

Here is a word to parents. Children at seven years of age are pretty smart. They can tell when something’s up. I could tell something was up. I felt sick to my stomach. I tried to sleep for some time and couldn’t. The music was too loud and I could hear occasional grunts from the living room. We lived in a 40 foot long modular home, so the living room was a thin wall away from the “guest” room. Finally I couldn’t take it anymore and opened the door and everything was dark. I thought this was strange because when “guests” were over the lights were usually on. I had to call out a few times before one of my parents answered. It was my dad. He came to the door and he was naked.

This was a new development for me, especially since I was a little boy who loved to hang out in my underwear and run around naked. Whenever company came over I was ushered into my room to put on some clothes. When my dad answered the door in his birthday suit, my stomach dropped a little lower.

I asked him why he was naked. I don’t remember his exact response but it was a sad excuse for an explanation. He mentioned something about some drinks and music. I asked him where our “guest” was and he said he was out in the living room. Since that’s where my father had just come from I was seriously disturbed. My father tried to console me while it was obvious he clearly wanted to get back to what he was doing.

I honestly cannot say whether my mother was out there involved in this transaction of drunken bodily fluid exchange. My intuition tells me that she wasn’t, that she had gone to bed and probably felt about the same way I did. Heck maybe she left for the night. All I know is that I never saw that guy again.

After that my mother continued to sink into drunken stardom. We were shunned more and more by our neighbors. The lady who ritually beat her son next door moved out and the yard became a mess. My father never provided an adequate explanation about that night. I know now what was going on. It’s unfortunate my parents suffered such lack of judgment. My behavior turned more and more toward a child acting out. My parents smoked more and my asthma got worse. I think the worse thing of all was that I no longer felt safe. I didn’t feel like my parents would protect me.

It wasn’t a cognitive realization but I felt it all the same. To me this is the worse kind of abscess a parent can allow. I know people who were sexually abused as children and beaten but it comes down to the same thing. They weren’t truly taken care of and were left to take care of themselves in a lot of ways. I think this is a shame.

There isn’t really a whole lot more to say on this other than my life since then has been one shakedown after another. I’ve had to learn how to grow up on my own. I’m still learning. I’m happy to do it, but some help before my 29th birthday would have been nice. I thank my wife for the patience to stick with me as I grow up. The last six and half years haven’t always been easy, but they were worth it.

As always thanks for reading to the end. Until next week, enjoy life to its fullest and cherish someone every day. It really makes life worth living and there’s no substitute for when you feel really great about someone.