Introspective 20 | unobtrusive lucidity

Changing the Changes

There was a time in my life at which I embraced change with much enthusiasm. I ran toward it whenever I had the opportunity, because change is opportunity, I reasoned. It occurs to me now that this was likely driven in part by the fact that I was unsatisfied by where I was at the time, either geographically, professionally or personally. I think that I would have identified it as being “driven” or “motivated” to success then, but, at the end of the day, I was unsatisfied.

And, I think, change is almost always a good thing. I’m just beginning to realize that, as I get (cough) older (cough), I have a bit of a more difficult time in adapting to that change. The funny thing is that this difficulty is because of change. When I started this blog a long time ago, I was a single grad student with no clue what life would look like by the time I was out of school and in the “real world” again. I’m somewhat surprised by the fact that it looks like having a wife and a daughter and being back in school at this point in my life.

I’m not complaining about any of the above…like I said, change is still a good thing.

The motivation for the change is what I call into question these days, though. When we were first married, one of Karen’s favorite phrases about difficulty spots in life was, “It’s an adventure!” And indeed, it is. I lose sight of this, though. I lose sight of the adventure and how our family grows stronger together through the adventure because I become so easily dissatisfied when faced with a life predicament.

It turns out that I may, in fact, be a bit optimistic in considering myself optimistic. Let’s call me a realist, then, shall we?

Because I really don’t want to be a pessimist, but I drift dangerously close to crossing that line at times. All because I become dissatisfied. As we near the end of Advent and enter the Christmas season, I can think of few things more troubling than being dissatisfied, because that is a result of a consumer-driven Holiday mindset. I don’t want a Christmas driven by what goodies I receive, or even by what goodies I may be able to give. I want a Christmas driven by thankfulness for what I have, and I don’t necessarily just mean goodies. I mean people. I mean kindness shown, and grace shown. I mean opportunities, as trying as they may be.

I mean the positivity of change, as difficult as it can be for me to cope with its process these days.

That could even lead to a most wonderful time of the year…

A Socially-Acceptable Identity Crisis

While this may not be any huge secret, I’m one of those people who could never decide what he wanted to be when he grew up.

The issue with that is that…well, apparently, I’ve grown up. It happened when I wasn’t looking, I swear. You wake up one morning and all of the sudden you’re eating breakfast and going to a 9-5 job. I mean, who knew?

In case you missed it, I’m in school. Again. This time, an arts school, just a quickie, to do some technology certification work. This harkens back to my New Year’s goal of changing my day job, because I needed something more creative. While I’m having a bit more difficulty than I had anticipated in adapting back to the life of a full-time student, I’m noticing that I have the flexibility to be very creative a lot of the time. I’m juggling two writing projects, brainstorming design ideas for two different websites, and doing theatre work with students who are on the Autism spectrum. Life is hectic (as you may have guessed, what with my writing a Friday post at 12:30 on a Sunday morning, and all), but its good.

The problem with my having so many interests is that there’s always stuff for which I don’t quite have time. I wish I had more time to read fiction, to study theology, to get back to my two-books-monthly reading schedule (textbooks and technical manuals on things like Javascript not included).

Ultimately, though, I need to learn to be content with where Karen and I are in life’s adventure, and to focus on doing what I do have time to do well. That’s a hard lesson for me to learn, because I don’t do contentedness well…and I say that much to my own chagrin.

The good thing about the stressful life of a student is that stress forces you to grow. So does paring down your lifestyle for a while. If I can learn these personal and spiritual lessons along with what I need to learn for career-change purposes, I’ll be really have come out of this situation a better person.

Illumination by Laser

I grew up in a rural area. I have always wished that it were otherwise, but its one of those things in which you really have no say. While I wouldn’t trade my family environment for anything, there were parts of growing up in the 80’s that I always wanted to experience, but was only able to experience from a sort of peripheral perspective…the outside looking in, if you will.

When Laser Tag exploded onto the scene in the mid-80’s, I wanted little else than to own a set of the equipment and play with friends. I even got a strategy book complete with exercises to improve your skills, and different games that you could play with different sizes of groups. Ultimately, however, none of my friends’ parents would invest in the equipment, so, no matter how many of us wanted to play, it just wasn’t an option.

I became acquainted with Photon through the short-lived television series (not really such a great piece of small screen history, but it remains supremely exciting in my memory as it was viewed through middle-school boy eyes), and was even more enamored by having a set of equipment for that game. I was attracted by the large arenas, complete with mazes, catwalks, smoke and lights in which teams played tournaments of Photon, and the rougher, more swashbuckling aesthetic of that game. No such arenas existed anywhere near me, though, and this game was a bit too geeky for the area. No one else was interested. So, I pined in secret, watched the television program, and even bought the book series to read further adventures. Playing “capture the flag” with friends and fully automatic water guns just wasn’t the same. It missed the essential geeky ingredient.

Ultimately, I did what I frequently did and still do: I imagined wild stories based around my dream, and I wrote them.

Of course, Photon no longer exists today, but Laser Tag does, in various iterations. When an arena arrived in my college town, I jumped on my first chance to play. Since then, I’ve played various times, and attempted to recognize that its a nostalgic wish of my childhood that I’m now getting to fulfill, and attempted to resist the urge to make it a full-blown hobby.

Honestly, though, there are times when its more difficult than others. Recently, while playing for the first time in months at a local arena, I listed my name for the scoreboard as Bhodi Li, and was simultaneously struck by how easily I could do this every weekend, and how no one else understood my reference.

What’s always been missing from the experience for me, though…either in childhood or in the years since college…is that, in these sporadic encounters, I’ve never been around a group of people interested enough to play with any degree of regularity. The game still attracts mostly teens, and showing up solo at an arena to play when nearly everyone else there is in high school…well, I’ve never done it, but I imagine it would be awkward.

Since our move, I’ve played at a local arena once, and then discovered that a family member here owns some equipment. Its not the original Lazer Tag or Photon equipment from the 80’s, but neither is the equipment at any arena in which I’ve ever played, and here’s the thing: once you’re playing, it doesn’t matter. It’s about the experience.

So, last night, we went to the park after nightfall with a group of four of us, and played several rounds. We won’t discuss how I fared in these rounds, but what’s important is that I had more fun than I’ve had in a long time. I’ve never played outside of an area, before. It was very different, challenging in a different way, and I love both equally.

And, I’m even more dangerously close to making it a hobby if I thought for a moment that there were enough adults around who loved it as much as I do. I see how easily it would be more about the camaraderie than the game, which is the case with much of what geeks like me love.

When I’ve played, I sometimes become the kid who wanted to play the game so badly for a few seconds (this usually occurs in the briefing room as everyone is putting their gear on and getting ready to enter the arena). I wonder if, had I lived near an arena and played Photon seriously then, would I love it as much now? Would I love it in a different way? Is there a difference between re-living a nostalgic love and experiencing a childhood desire for the first time? I’m not sure what that difference would be, but I love every second of the random occasions when I get to play this game.

The light shines.

Rough Beauty

A few months ago, Karen and I were on a road trip, and Pandora was set to (I’m about to date myself and/or cause you to laugh at me…likely both) my Def Leppard station. Whether it is because she is genuinely interested or just wants to make me feel smart, I can’t tell, but my lovely wife, knowing that rock history is one of those strange interests of mine, will ask me here and there about bands and songs and that sort of thing. A lot of times we talk about lyrics, and, eventually, she’ll ask me to change the station. That last part is inevitable.

Periodically, I return to a specific collection of songs from my head-banging years. One of those is a classic ballad by Guns N’ Roses called Sweet Child O’ Mine. In my iTunes library, this song is classified as metal. I’m picky about my genres…another conversation that Karen and I sometimes have during road trips…but Guns N’ Roses’ work falls firmly under the broader heading of metal in my mind. What makes this odd to some is that I find this song to be one of the most beautiful pieces of music I’ve ever heard. Slash’s guitar line is melodic, entrancing, and nearly brings tears at times (listen to the full-length album version, not the radio edit). The love for another person that’s contained in this song pours through those notes, even when the guitar work becomes more “dirty” and distortion-driven at the end of the song. Now, I certainly have a bit of nostalgia attached to the song: the memory of the music video…witnessed not long after my parents first got cable television and I had access to MTV for the first time, with Slash’s face completely obscured by his hair as he leaned into his monitor and let the passion flow from his guitar…is a very strong recollection for me.

I think, though, that, beyond that nostalgia, this song points out something about the way that I perceive beauty.

When I was in undergrad, I remember being drawn to plays that were different, odd…to playwrights that were quirky and raw. I like fiction that has a raw component to it, so raw at times that it is difficult to read, but that carries a poignancy that causes to you see something in life that is better, that rewards you if you force yourself through to the end.

I guess what I’m saying is that I see beauty in really rough places. Art that would often be considered rough, edgy, or even offensive to some, is the art in which I find these hidden moments of breath-taking beauty. I can’t articulate why…I suppose we could psychoanalyze my childhood insecurities, but I doubt that anyone, including myself, would really want to read that here. I just know that I do.

A little while ago, I was struck by one of those impulses to be spontaneously romantic. I wanted to let Karen know that I was thinking about her, and I decided to write a post on her Facebook wall. I could have said something poetic, or quoted a poem or something. Instead, I quoted four lines from a Warrant that I heard one afternoon on that same Def Leppard station, and that suddenly found new meaning at this point in my life as I thought of my wife.

This isn’t about old 80’s hair bands, despite my previous examples (and the fact that you really can’t beat those ballads). Just, for some reason, I find beauty in unexpected places.

Perhaps this is because I also often find Divine experiences more readily accessible in the rough moments of daily life than in intentionally carved, so-called sacred moments. Embracing the imperfect sometimes seems the only way to get a glimpse of the perfect for me.

The beautiful is sometimes hidden in the rough if we take the time to look for it…just as the princes and princesses of fairy tales were disguised as things that might initially prove repulsive…almost as if there’s a reward intended for the patiently seeking.

Autumn Recollections

I’ve had a lot of things on my mind as I’ve plunged into the weekend, one of which was that I was really intending to write this post on Friday, as I normally do. I’m glad that I waited, though, because there’s something that I was missing on Friday, and that was the realization that I miss things.

Fall is a beautiful season in New England. The oranges and yellows of the canopies of leaves are quite striking. I took some time late Friday evening to just stand outside under the tree in the back yard and appreciate how cool that was. The scents and warm breeze (uncharacteristically warm for this area in mid-October, which would have made it just about right for where I grew up) took me back to childhood memories of fall festivities. I had the good fortune of a big back yard when I was young, and there were many piles of leaves in which to jump and play.

I’m glad that I paused during the hectic, emotional race of a day that Friday turned out to be to let those sensory-experience-triggered-memories occur, because I think it’s very healthy to give ourselves time to have those moments. The appointments and to-do lists can wait for a bit as we let ourselves be taken back. Especially with our daughter growing so amazingly fast, I realize that my ability to provide secure, happy memories for her now are contingent upon my ability to recall my own safe and happy memories from my own childhood.

A beautiful fall day was a wonderful vehicle to take me back, and there are others waiting all the time, if only we notice. Here’s to hoping that I notice more. I hope the same for you.