Twenty Years

I don't tend to believe in accidents. Things happen for a universal reason, and I suppose that reduces to a religious belief, because what else is God but a sense of universal reason? That probably reduces to a rather bleak world view, too, because it implies that we have no control over what happens to us, but to me, it's how we react to what happens to us that shapes us. Circumstances are nothing; perspective is everything.

Anyway, due to a belief in cosmic reason, I thought it significant that I finished reading Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer's story of Christopher McCandless and his starvation in the Alaska bush, on the anniversary of my mother's death. His story is the perfect metaphor for her addiction. Addiction is a simultaneous running away from and running toward: fleeing a life that's too disappointing, that somehow doesn't measure up while running toward some ideal of self or existence, running toward something that explains or negates your current reality.

McCandless was a brilliant young man, disillusioned with the world, taking journeys that left him feeling isolated and dislocated from society when he encountered it. He was loving and compassionate, generous with his feelings and his possessions, while at the same time excising his parents from his life with a cold, calculated gesture. That was my mother's story as well - a brilliant young woman whose journeys with alcohol and drugs left her too raw to function in day-to-day life and leading her to make more distance journeys into their realm. She gave freely of herself, worked tirelessly to help her students, and at the same time, lashed out in ways that left those of us closest to her with scars, both mental and physical.

Like the McCandless family, I struggled to understand what would compel someone to retreat in such a fashion, to reject what seemed so obvious, to search for something that seemed so elusive and fleeting. After twenty years, I still don't really have answers, don't understand why the life she had was so uncomfortable, why she seemed to move through the world with raw skin, or what drove her to leave us time and again for something that never seemed to comfort her for long. The story of addiction remains as alien and inexplicable to me as Chris's story. While I can intellectualize the individual decisions and choices, can rationalize the thought process at work, I can't seem to reach a place where the whole process comes into focus, where the parts fall into place and become equal to the sum.

Searching for meaning is a complex concept. It's occupied the minds of philosophers through the ages, and perhaps we're not any closer to an answer, because the answer is different for all of us. Some people don't seem to search; they seem to abhor the effort, to lead the unexamined life in the ignorance we're told is bliss. Some people seem to know exactly what they're looking for and exactly how to get it, while others stumble around for awhile and find contentment, sometimes genuine, sometimes just out of the awareness of the alternative of continuing to search. Some people seem to have a sense of where a path will lead, while others don't seem to care, blazing new trails heedless with both awesome and awful results.

At the end, I suppose it doesn't matter. Both Christopher McCandless and my mother ventured into a place fraught with danger, a place where their families could not reach them and a place they could not have been called back from anyway. I've learned that I can't explain the results. I can understand the motivation, the search, that set their feet on that journey, and I have to accept that the path led out of sight, through terrain I can't follow, through a thought process I can't reconstruction. To understand that initial need to search is all I have, and in the end, all possible human stories are reduced to the same process - seeking and finding or seeking and failing. The inherent joy and tragedy in both deserve respect. We only hope that at some undefined end the seekers find satisfaction. After all, we're seekers too, and we need to hold onto that belief - that our lives will make sense, if only to us.

Woohoo!

I've been struggling for words since last night, which seems odd, considering how many feelings I've been bombarded by in the last 24 hours.

I believe we've elected a president that I actually feel proud of. Not the guy that was just less terrible than the other guy, not the guy who won by default for lack of real opposition, not the guy with great policies but a messy personal life, but a guy that I believe in.

We've elected someone other than the traditional white male. And that's huge for African-Americans, huge in a way that I don't even think I can understand, but it's huge for white folks too. We've developed a picture of racism in our country, a picture of ourselves as people we needed to be ashamed of, and last night proved that wasn't true. We're not who we've been told we are, we might not even be who we thought we were.

I've heard someone in politics talk about honesty and unity and hard work and make me believe that he meant it. Last night, I didn't hear someone who was trying to tie himself to a past in order to lift himself, but someone who was trying to tie us to our own past in order to lift us.

We've elected someone out of hope instead of fear. We've been in a dark and hopeless place, and worse, everyone keeps telling us that it really isn't dark and hopeless. Finally, someone shows up, acknowledges the truth, but says that there's a way out, that together we'll find it, that it isn't going to be easy, but that it WILL happen.

Everything seems trite, but I just can't express how proud I am that so many people opted to believe in the process, to believe in hope, to believe that the world can be a better place. We can be the version of ourselves that we want to be and the version of ourselves that we believe we once were, and I think we're all ready to do the work.

The Process

Our tiny little backroads township hall was packed this morning. Before the polls opened, the parking lot was full and the line stretched the length of the building. One man said in thirty years of voting there, he'd never seen so many people. We all stood around in the dark and the cold, making conversation with people we didn't know, and as the sun started to come up across the fields, I couldn't help but get a little teary. It's an amazing process, this election business, and after all these years, it still works. Americans can be oblivious and self-absorbed, but when push comes to shove, when we really believe it matters, we still come out, stand in line and participate in an orderly process with surprisingly little direction.

I find that the polls always make me confront my assumptions. There are guys in jeans and quilted flannel, John Deere ballcaps, women dressed for factory work, guys in ties - people getting ready to head off in all possible directions for the day, white collar, blue collar, unemployed. That's the beauty of the American election, that everyone has opinions and they're not always what you'd expect or at least not always held by the people you'd expect.

You can't vote if you don't have hope, if you don't believe in the future. Voting means not only that you care, but that you believe that something can come of that caring. As jaded as we are, and after such a battle, it's hopeful just to know that so many people still believe. And yes, this is sappy and idealistic, but so is the belief that people everywhere will think and care and do their part if you give them the chance. Idealism is worth celebrating at least once every four years.