Roads Not Taken
About a year ago, an old friend asked me a question that fired up my imagination. In light of the many pursuits and interests that have consumed my life – community involvement, teaching essential skills to persons wanting to return to work, teaching grammar to persons wanting to return to university, writing and publishing poetry, hanging on to a couple of my carpentry customers, stage managing and building sets, studying pre-calculus algebra and economics – he asked me, “What would you do and study if you were starting over, at age eighteen, knowing what you do now?”
Instantly, off the top of my head, I answered, “I’d study Leonardo da Vinci; he did everything. I’d avoid specializing in any one thing.” Bit of a glib response, I know, but it holds some element of truth.
But seriously, had I not dropped out of university, hit the road, put thumb and fate to the wind and surrendered to insecurity, what might I have done rather than spending the next twenty years more or less permanently stoned on weed and psychedelics, with the added stress of alcohol addiction in the last seven of those years?
I sometimes joke that I was either so out of it (or so much into it) that I didn’t realize the sixties were over until 1980. It took me seven more years as a devotee of the ‘Church of the Three Day Drunk’ to bury the pain of that realization. I had my very last toke and drink on April 7, 1987.
Yet despite all that youthful folly, or perhaps because of it, it was during those years that I realized the possibility that there were ways of being and seeing that
were alternatives to consensus reality. Running into a Buddhist community taught me that one could achieve enlightenment via meditation and compassion, without delusions of faith.
It was also during those years that I encountered a community of stoner scientists and developed a love of science and math. Needing money, but too irresponsible to pursue a teaching career that had begun when I was nineteen years old, I became a carpenter, falling back on building skills I’d learned growing up on a farm.
So through all of that time spent oscillating between psychotropic enlightenment and drunken depression, I emerged as a tradesman, a somewhat lazy Buddhist meditator, and a student of empirical science and math. And, defying the chaos of those years, I was always seeking a better path. I never stopped reading, never stopped learning, and even did a bit of writing.
Now, some thirty years later – clean and sober – I’m a healthy old guy, happy most of the time.
So the question remains, “What other path could I have taken that would have brought me to an equally happy place without those twenty years in the academy of ecstasy/depression, my rocky-head-beating-against-a-stone-wall journey?”
That’s a tough challenge. Those years included hippy idealism, a genuine conviction that dropping out, turning on and tuning in, as espoused by Leary and friends, was a legitimate response in opposition to a life of meaningless acquisition. And I continue to believe that; even though I’ve now dropped into a neighborhood I love. I’m tuned in to voices from the street and the community, turned on enough to be serving and connecting with the world in any way I can.
Those wild years also bonded me to beat sensibilities, a love of bebop jazz, poetry, art, and philosophy both existential and spiritual – and nurtured a passion for reconciling science and logic with spiritual perspectives.
Even though I’ve arrived at a happy/poetic/rational way of seeing and being, with a quiet heart and an ongoing enjoyment of peace of mind (most of the time – I do still have moments of losing it); even though I’ve found a community I love and am wealthy beyond all expectations in connection and friendship, I still find myself asking, “What could I have done differently that could have brought a similar happy result?”
Had I known I could study creative writing, or had somehow stumbled into the information when I was younger, that might possibly have made a difference. Maybe finding as a young man the voice I only discovered later would have led me to similar explorations and discoveries, without those years of drunken delirium and depression. But recovering from that lunacy and learning to live in deep gratitude as a result, can that be found without suffering?
I don’t know. It’s interesting to contemplate paths not taken, but excessive time spent in ‘coulda been, woulda been, shoulda been’ isn’t all that productive. Looking back, I learned the lessons I had to learn – many of them through the College of Rocky Hard Knocks – but at least I learned them. For that I’m grateful, and while with some small caveats, no regrets.