Pick A Destination
If we have any chance of getting somewhere in life, we need two things, and they’re directly connected.
We need to have some idea what our destination is and we need to know from where we came.
That’s what this obit is all about. It’s about where I came from and in that sense, I’ve been writing or at least thinking of this for many decades.
I’m guessing I’m like everyone else and floated through decades dreaming about what tomorrow might bring. What guided me through these years wasn’t anything profound like a faith in god. In fact, there were times when the opposite was true, at least during my atheistic period. This continues to this day but without the enthusiasm I felt in the early days. No, what guided me was in some ways, a directionless series of instincts. “Did it feel right” was my beacon.
As a young boy, peer pressure being what it is, this presented some serious challenges when temptation appeared unannounced - the offer of a ride in a fast car with 3 teen boys I didn’t really know and certainly didn’t feel comfortable with; the pretty girl who was feeling loose and easy in the back seat of the Meteor; or the offer of a little blue pill that would remove me from my boring life for a few hours. I had many opportunities to veer into the unknown.
I’m here where I am, I think, because my good judgement spoke louder than the potential reward at the end of the car ride or the heavy petting or the psychedelic high. That’s not to say I didn’t do some dumb things that I regretted but I’ve often wondered what kept me out of trouble.
Now that I’ve been a father for over 40 years, I can say with a great deal of certainty that the answer is clearly based on the early years of my life when I resided in the small house at 3 Pumpkin Point Road. It was there where I learned to become the person I am today.
My model was simple - a loving family and most importantly, parents who lived lives that were the example I’ve relied on for most of my life. The benchmark for living a safe and hopefully good life resided right there in Laird Township.
Whatever model each of us uses to get though our short time on this planet comes to us haphazardly. Call it arbitrary, shit luck, fortuitous…and so on. Whatever it is, we’re stuck with it and if we want to do anything to alter that course in life, we have to figure out how to do it ourselves, and then, and this is the hard part, implement these changes all by ourself. No one can do it for us.
I heard a psychologist from North CArolina University of all places talk about this on a radio interview one tiem. He described three ways to make profound changes to our life. Pharmaceuticals, meditation or cognitive behaviour therapy.
In my case, I use, or have used, all three.
LSD triggered the quickest and most significant attitudinal change when I first dropped in 1969. Nothing in my world was the same after that first psychedelic experience.
Then my first encounter with existentialism and humanism at York University in 1972 kick started decades of self challenging and discomfort which in turn altered yet again my attitude towards life. In some respects, these two philosophies (disciplines?) mirrored the life I lived at 3 Pumpkin Point Road - the responsibility to lead an ethical life of personal fulfillment with the end game being the greater good.
These two world views left me open to the influences offered by mediation. It was near the millennium when I was first moved by the silence mediation offered me. Whatever internal noise I had endured the previous 50 years came to an end, almost overnight.
I no longer drove or flew or ran through life, rather, I began to walk. Stroll even, stopping now and then to actually see, smell and think about what was going on around me. Not unlike my first LSD experience.
If I hadn’t slowed my internal life down to a crawl, I would never have learned the specific details of what the previous decades of my life were all about. I became a Jungian analysand.
In some respects, I began this journey when I first read The Courage to Be by Paul Tillich. That would have been 1972. It was only one book in a curriculum of existentialism literature but it was the only one that made any sense to me. The Antichrist by Nietzsche was the first book we were asked to read but I didn’t understand those concepts until Tillich. This course created my reading list for the rest of my life…and that’s when Jung’s name first came up. Erich Fromm, Victor Frankl, many books by Nietzsche, Heidegger, Colin Wilson, Carlos Cantenada and so on were also added to that list.