“My life, my life has to be like this. It has to keep going up.” – Jay Gatsby

In our 3D world populated by 2D lives, it was no surprise that Gatsby drew us back in again.  Whether you loved, hated or haven’t even seen yet the Luhrmannian whirlwind that was this year’s Great Gatsby, we all must sit down, tighten our collars, shine our shoes and consider that we were primed for the mythological creature, for Gatsby.  As with most of my film responses on MO, my thoughts stray not so much to what of the film ought to be critiqued, that has been done ad nauseum and by better writers than me.  We all know the sanitarium device failed miserably, the whole film scented too heavily of Moulin Rouge, Toby Maguire’s Nick Carraway was dull to the point of being pathetic… we all know the film’s flaws and I don’t necessarily like to write these things with the expectation that you’ve seen the picture.  If you have, of course, you will resonate more directly with some of the character allusions I’m about to make, but if you haven’t you will perhaps all-the-more intrinsically resonate with their inferences.  For it is not the men and women of Gatsby that we care deeply for, it is for what they represent and who they call out in us.

For those unfamiliar, The Great Gatsby, is one of the great American novels which like many of its peers has struggled in its translation to film.  It is a cautionary tale of 1920s excess which couldn’t help but make it to the screen now.  In our invariable now of so much excess and so little caution.  Luhrmann (the director)’s 2013 version wishes to make it a modern day parallel, shining light on Wall Street robber barons and the nouveau riche.  He also wishes simultaneously to make it a celebration of chemical excess and the power of alcohol and hallucinogens to make the world a happier more frivolic place.  But the story is really none of these things at its essence.  At it’s core, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby is a study in projection, it is a calling out of how quickly we are to make men (most specifically ourselves) into a glittering image, a glowing green light, an sign looking-over designed in every detail to distract us from the mundane grey realities of a life that must be lived in its entirety.  We are wanting to be men who need not live, who need only shine.  Emanating from their tower of excess.  Be it excess glory, excess goodness, excess beauty, excess hope.

Gatsby is such a man.

He is a creation of his own most fantastical dreams and he sets out on a search for the hollow accoutrements of the Daisy Buchanan at his side.  He is a manchild who invented a shining city on a hill and then did whatever necessary to inhabit the world with his most wonderful dreams.  He was designed to draw the attentions of the world to himself, to attract the watching smaller men’s highest illusions and to project onto the screen of his fantastical self.  In short he set out on the narcissist dream and nearly achieved it.  Drawing the eyes, the ears, the love, the contempt and the fears of the world to himself all along the way.

In his efforts as rising above the grey landscape, he both succeeds and fails.  He succeeds in so much as the fantasies of all that whisper his name are realized in the illusions he creates.  The parties, the booze, the laughter, the escapism, the aspirations of a boundariless, consequence-free world is nearly made full in the safe confines of Gatsby’s mansion.  His failure is in his inability to control the fantasies of those that surround him.  He can make them want him, but he cannot make them want him for the reasons he prefers.  The imaginations of his watchers and wanters are not so wonderful has he might have hoped.  To some he is a murderer, a swindler, a war profiteer, a gambler, a fiend.  To others he is a benefactor, a gentlemen, an entrepreneur, a great man of the people.  He, in some ways, both all and none of the above.  As all men who choose to live by fantasy are.  They don’t have the strength to inhabit their great vision, but are never as crooked as their deepest frailties may expose.

So it is certainly with Gatsby.  Particularly as inhabited by Mr. DiCaprio.  Has their ever been a man so suited to reach for the green light?

But Gatsby is not alone.  We are all made-up men.  We are all trying to capture the world’s best impressions of us, while some how belaying the ugliest assaults that may come in tow.  We are all assembling the image of a life lived to our version of enlightenment.  We are all building a fantasy of ourselves, hoping one day to embody our greatest dream.  Along the way we attract and collect those who will agree.  Those who will call out the best adjectives of imagined lives.  We will find for ourselves a Daisy Buchanan.  A stand-in for personhood.  A woman who like the moon has no light of her own, and only exists to reflect the light that shines across the way.  We will gather a Nick Carraway, our sergeant-at-arms, brushing off the worst accusations against us and polishing our best glittering images.  Happy to be nearby as the throngs passionately adore.  Nick claims it was Gatsby’s “hope” that enamored him.  “Hope” is Carraway’s word for illusion.  His world on its own is too practical for happiness, and so he must live by Gatsby.  The little butler’s house an extension of the mansion.  The little butler’s life an extension of the master.  His great foolishness is in believing that only in Gatsby’s hope illusions can happiness be found.

Men: money, power, fame, the accoutrements of success, may not be your glittering image.  But I guarantee one lurks in the corners of your imagination.  You will know it by the perseverating voice in the head which calls you to obsess about one thing or the next.  Perhaps it is the sound of the intellectual, the look of the warrior, the shadow of the benefactor, the soft grey frame of the priest.  You and I are picking our pantheon as Gatsby picked his.  We are selecting that white tower from which we wish to be recognized and (when we are more honest) adored.   Along the way we are assembling our chorus, the cynical few who are willing to telling us what our itching ears wish to hear… all to keep our best fantasies alive.

Perhaps you resonate with Carraway’s fantasy of himself.  The good-hearted Midwestern man.  The one who is too upright of the worldly world.  Carraway’s smallness, his willingness to play the valet makes him susceptible to the Gatsby scheme.  In the end the one bearing the eulogy for Gatsby’s lost world is the one who should have been most immune to it.  Instead he stands at the end of it, no more enlightened than when he began.  Instead enamored by “hope,” a fool’s hope where the dead Gatsby is a martyr to love’s great cause. Gatsby is no more a martyr than Charles Foster Kane, but you dare not tell Carraway that.

Or perhaps, Tom Buchanan.  A man whose long line of achievers somehow should have made its way into his bloodstream.  A man who–unlike Gatsby–did not attempt to sail against the rough waters of the past, but rather demanded that the present bask in the glow of a past not his making.  That the long line of good men around him shroud his cruelties.  He emits the glow of a leftover nuclear reaction.  He was once privy to the kind of men that made the future, and their radioactivity of their light comes off him only by proximity.  Perhaps you are Tom’s dream.  A man who is big enough to hold his enemies at bay, but whose only aspiration is his own pleasure.  He needs not the recognitions of the world.  Only their movement, the blur of their activity, to mask how rancidly he rots in the middle of what could have been a powerful life.

In the world of illusions, of the stark characters we create, Carraway had it right: “There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.” Too bad he didn’t find himself in such a sad plot before it was too late.

All great stories are mirrors.  They are such sheen reflections of reality that we can look deeply in them and see truths about ourselves which the real world keeps at bay.  As so many great writers have said, only fiction can tell the truth.  As such is Gatsby.  A dreamweaver’s fiction.  A story of men who  live large only to die small, and warn us of the imagining, the imaging, the frivolous dreams that leave us face-down, underwater, murdered by the world’s imagination of us.  An imagination that lived so easily because the truth was too impossible to find.

“No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”  - The Great Gatsby

I am overwhelmed and grateful for the response to Monday’s Rules for the Young Single Man. From its inception, Martinis Optional was (at least in part) designed to be a place to talk about the real issues of 21^st century masculinity, often by making light of just how silly we all have become.

But what I loved as much as the warm reception the article received, was the resonance we all felt with its underlying social critique: The conventional wisdom around modern masculinity is absolutely numb-nuts crazy, and we must do something about it. I love how many women were forwarding it on to their single friends on Facebook saying: “Hey, idiots! Do what he says!” We can all, for the women’s sake, only hope they oblige.

But in the process of the comments and shares and PMs, I observed another interesting strand to the discussion; one that begs for further address. I heard the woeful cries of the “nice guys.” They are the ones who, by their own evaluation, have always done right by women and have watched as their true loves get caught up by handsomer, scoundrelier men. I can see why—by the tone of the YSM Rules—a friendly, well-mannered YSM might hope for me to come to their defenses and say, “You’re right! How unjust! The world is against you, but soldier on! Your martyrdom is for a cause!”

Well, bad news guys, you may have misread me. Nice guys finish last.

And I don’t mean that in redemptive super-spiritual way of the last being first and the first being last and all that jazz. I mean something much more invasive and challenging to the self-talk of the nice YSM. An invasion that I could have used fifteen years ago, saving me a wild amount of heartache. Niceness, that soft, glowy, indirect blandness which keeps all too many would-be good YSMs in the shadows is no virtue. It is a vice. In fact it is the mirror image of the same vice that we explored at length in the Rules for YSM. It is the social-accepted doppelganger of the scoundrel’s narcissism. For the nice-guy, it’s still all about worrying about how people see you, you just don’t want anyone to know it.

Niceness is that inane skill to get others to like you. Or at least to not dislike you. It’s a weak-voiced lack of clarity that causes the man to live a life avoiding offense, smoothing out impressions, keeping everyone happy, never causing complaint.

You cannot be both good and nice.

Goodness (greatness is even worse) will cause you to have to not be nice. You will have to offend some people, take a stand, live by risk and work toward worthy goals. You will have to stand up inside of your own skin, tell yourself and others dangerous truths. Live in ways that compel a reaction.

In the world of women, you will have to make your intentions known. Ask for the date, make the move, risk enormous rejection. You will have to, at least for brief moments push back your shoulders and show that you are worth attending to, worth listening to, worth the cost of romantic love. A woman will put her whole heart into the attachment to the one she loves. You must show her the weight of her heart will not crush your nice-but-fragile frame.

In the world of profession, you will have to work up against your limits. Break down preconceived notions, defend yourself against stereotypes, rise above the bland mean of the nice guy’s existence. Your employer and potential employers are risking the future of their own career by allowing you to work in their place. Your actions, your sense of self, your willingness to take on challenges uninvited will require something antithetical to niceness. You will have to be truthful, strong, risky and agile.

You will have to make a thousand mistakes at relatively high speeds. You will have to live by the rule of scraped knees. Your niceness will cost you the chance to fail aggressively, apologize regularly, and learn from a life of best efforts.

In short, your niceness will cost you the prize of existence: gratitude. Gratitude comes as the pleasure of a man who reached across barriers, engaged others, strove the heights, and was rewarded with growth, loyalty and the occasional unexpected kindness of others.

The self-safety of niceness keeps all the world’s possibilities at bay, and only allows you to fester that Chandler-like bitterness which wears too easily on the faces of today’s modern men.

Through several drafts of this post it has become clear to me at which this degrades into a parsing of words. What does “nice” really mean? I know some of the politeness police will be on me like white on rice for defaming the glory of niceness. But niceness is too close to people-pleasing and too far from greatness to wear well on a man who wishes to live his life to the full.

So to all you YSMs whose self-saving scoundreldom is only shadowed by a slick veneer of nice, I challenge you re-read the Rules. There is no space for passive pathos there. There is only risky action: generosity, kindness, intention, trust. And for heaven sakes…

Have you taken a shower yet?

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I have loved all the responses I received. I would love even more if you would take the time to click the “Follow Me” button on this blog so we can continue the conversation together. I am made better by your thoughts, critiques and questions. And we are all to enjoy, build and scuff the edges of that dangerous creature: The modern man. I take your reposts, your comments and your follows very seriously.

Nick-MO

The time has come. After endless conversations with all too many men both younger and singler than me, it seems that some concise, friendly coaxing is not doing the job. Subtlety will not suffice. The pandemic of the Young Single Man (YSM) cannot be contained. How I have come to know and be in pointed conversation with so many is a discussion for a different day, but suffice to say, I have enough experience with the YSM to come to this blog with near absolute authority on the subject. Women, forward this to all your female friends and hold the men in your life accountable. Married man, hold your younger brothers, hopeless single frat boys and lost business associates to this. YSMs, here's the deal. You're not going to want to hear this. You're going to fight me on everything I'm about to say. And I will still be right. So. Just. Listen. Just. This. Once.

20. Shower. No, I'm serious. Take a shower. Right now. #1-19 are really good, but you will appreciate them more with less… aura. This hipster thing has gone too far and really, seriously, the world is not better for having to experience the perfect blend of your natural body scent (read: odor) and Axe Body Spray (See #15). You're still reading?

19. Work Really Hard No Matter How Much You Get Paid. If you don't have a job, find one. And I don't want to hear about how you can't find one and no one will hire you and all that. SOMEONE will hire you. Possibly the shift manager at 7-Eleven, but someone will hire you. Whomever will do it, take them up on it. And then work really, really hard. Work at the level you would work for twice or three times the pay. Imagine the effort you would put in if this was your dream job. And then double it. Stop worrying about what your degree is in or what will look good on your resume or (more likely) whether this job is somehow connected to your “true self” (yikes)… get a job and then work really hard. What do you do after that? Keep working.

18. Have a Female Friend. (That you are not trying to sleep with). In a perfect world I wouldn't have to put the second part, but in a perfect world this entire list would be obvious, so perfection is out the window. You need someone strong, feminine and completely repulsed by you romantically. She is going to be critical in helping you decipher all of the women-signals you are getting wrong. If the thought that just went through your head, YSM, was that you don't get women-signals wrong, then you are a special breed. You probably need two female friends.

17. Always Wash Your Car Before a Date. Dating exists so that perfectly sane women can be coerced into being just enough insane to be willing to let a man live with them for the rest of their lives. It is the responsibility of the man in the dating formula to make this very unlikely decision easier. Much of the rules for YSM focuses on how to do this, but I'm going to start with a simple one. Don't take dates in a dirty car. Women want to be with someone who can take care of things (not because they need to be taken care of… mind you) but because they are someday going to let one of you YSMs live with them for a very long time and the risks inherent there are obvious. Once I have convinced you to shower regularly (See #20) then the next step is to convince you to take care of your things. Every date should happen in a clean car. Then, once you starting going on enough dates, a magical thing happens: you always have a clean car. And this is a very significant step in not becoming a drain on society.

16. Don't Be a Chandler. I have learned that some of you are too young (gasp) to know what this means, so let me explain. A long time ago in the 1990s there was a television show on NBC (You may have not heard of recently) called Friends. The show was about six twenty-something friends who all basically grew up together and then started having kids and getting married. One of them was a man named Chandler. (Yes, there is such a thing as a man named Chandler.) Chandler was a man who found fault in every woman he dated until the only person who would put up with him was a woman whose voice was reminiscent of getting hugged by razor blades. Then he eventually ended up marrying a woman named Monica who he did not deserve and likely only put up with him because he never questioned how categorically insane she was. Most YSMs I know are Chandlers. They think they are a really big fish. And they think that the woman they are with, or the woman that they are thinking about being with is “Ok…but-” This is foolishness. I'm not saying that a solid, upstanding YSM (of which there are a few) shouldn't be discerning about life partner. I am saying that 90% the YSM should look in the mirror and realize that he is sabotaging the relationships for reasons all his own, not because of what ever Ok…but- he's come up with this time. Spend the next six months trying to figure out how to support and inspire the best in your partner, then we can discuss her flaws and why they are probably as good as you're going to get.

15. Women Who Are Attracted to Axe Body Spray Are 1 of 2 Things: (1) Alien or (2) Lying. This is less of a rule and more of an overall statement about reality. Please stop buying products that were marketed to you for the purpose of getting laid. I'm sorry for being so explicit, but if the idea came to you for buying a product from an ad that was clearly taken right before people removed their last piece of clothing, it is not for your benefit. The company that invented this has developed the perfect formula of scent and imagery to attract YSMs whose primary thought-organ lies below the equator.

14. Have Friends Who Are Happily Married. If all of your male friends seem like one more character out of one more uncalled-for Hangover sequel, then you need new friends. One of the best things that helped me marry the right person was by spending a ton of time with people who were happily married when I was single. None of them were perfectly married. In fact, nearly all of them allowed me to be close to the fire when difficult times came. And I saw how great marriages handle adversity. And it is beautiful. I told someone not that long ago who was going through a troubled marriage spot: Learn to utilize commitment. Lock the exits. Commit to never thinking about getting out, and only thinking about staying in and who you need to be to make that work. If at the end of that giant experiment you still cannot imagine being with this person, then try again. Some marriages need to end, but learning and experiencing the power of marriage that thrives against all odds will send you down the aisle faster than anything you can possibly imagine.

13. Take 10 Minutes and Think About Someone Other Than Yourself. Lucky number 13. This is really the one that all the other ones come down to. And it's the hardest. Because all you YSM out there know how to look like you are thinking about someone other than yourself, but actually doing it is a real challenge. You can't think about how someone else affects you, compares to you, thinks about you or acts in relation to you. And it has to be a real person. Don't think about “poor people” or “short people” or “people who have cancer.” Pick a person. Think about what their life is like. Consider all that makes them happy and all that stands in their way. Consider their life completely distinct from you. If at any time your actions, your ideas, your feelings come into the picture, reset the timer, and START OVER.

12. Do It Again.

11. Stop Wearing Tight Pants. I know it excites you to think about drawing complete strangers' attention to you-know-where, but don't. It's gross. I recently saw a man with pants on so tight that you could see the seams of his underwear. I almost threw up a little bit in my mouth.

10. Don't Schedule Dates Via Text. I was recently asked by a YSM to help him find a restaurant for what he suggested was an important date. In an attempt to find out just how important, I asked him when the date was. He said, “We're just going to text each other later on when we're both free. Let's just clarify: a late night text when you're both free is not a date, it's a booty call. See #5.

9. Pay. I don't care how much she makes or how little you make. And you shouldn't either. Someday, much farther down the road when you decide to start making shared financial decisions then you can consider these things, but if you did the asking then you do the paying. Period.

8. No One Cares About Your Workout, Particularly If It's P90X. Hear that? It's the sound of a thousand wounded egos. But its true. Talking about your muscle gain, your new triathlon time or how great your trainer is only causes one of two responses in listeners: competitiveness or embarrassment. The first ends up with you having to listen to the other persons much lower BMI/much faster triathlon time. The second ends up with them staring off into space thinking about how much they both love and hate Cool Ranch Doritos.

7. Defy Your Feelings. In this age of feelings-first living, most YSMs I know are constantly analyzing how things make them feel. They are guardians of their own self-worth, and in the process are honestly sad little princesses. Every man should spend his 20s doing things that make him afraid. Things that challenge his confidence, things that make him feel unworthy of the task. Every time you choose to defy your need for positive self-affirmation, you give yourself the opportunity to grow. Besides who really likes people with high self-esteem?

6. Manscaping Is Essential, Within Reason. Men don't lose their hair. It moves. Generally into the nostrils, out the ears and down the back. That treasure trail that you were once so proud of will soon take Indiana Jones and a sword to find. There are two lessons in this: (1) YSM, you are today likely to be as good looking as you will ever be. George Clooney is the only man in the world that gets better with age, and he is not human. (2) You need a new tool in your toolkit. It is called a nosehair clippers. You will use it on your nose, ears, and if necessary, eyebrows. And if you continue to have hair movement that is out of control, I introduce you to the most terrifying word you've ever heard: wax. Just remember that the goal is not to look like you are 14 again. At the other end of the spectrum is the Sasquatch line. Your job is to find that happy and inscrutable place in between.

5. Don't Act Like a Scoundrel (Unless You Are One, Then Move to France). Remember how a long time ago they used to send all the criminals to Australia? I think we should start doing that with bad men and France. Now, back to the YSM. Too many YSMs complain about women not taking them seriously while simultaneously behaving in ways that should not be taken be seriously. Scheduling last minute dates, making booty calls, not opening doors, you name it. Pretty much anything that is standard practice in dating today puts YSM in a position where they should not be trusted. I was giving a version of this advice to a YSM several months ago to little avail. While a walked away shaking my head, his friend whispered to me, “Don't worry, she already let him know she'd go home with him no matter what.” I responded in the only logical way I could. “Seriously, never say anything like that to me every again.”

4. She's Not That Casual. No woman wants to go to dinner with you at Chipotle. No woman wants a T-shirt for her birthday. No woman wants hang out with you while you watch hockey. “No, really, she's super casual. She's easy-going.” No, really, she's not. Pick up the phone, make a reservation, and then RULE #9.

3. Practice Asking Three Consecutive Questions. Curiosity is the most powerful personal skill set in the world. If you can learn how to ask a question, listen to the answer, find something interesting about it, ask a follow-up question, listen to the answer, find something interesting about it, and then ask one more open-ended question and do it over and over and over again, you will have the power to rule the world.

2. Call Your Mom. I don't care if she makes you feel bad about yourself. Just call her. Your low self-esteem in this case may just be good judgement.

1….. Picking the number one rule for YSM was—in a word—challenging. But I leave you with this, YSMs, have rules. Have standards. Hold yourself to things. Have expectations for yourself. Try hard. Fail. Feel bad about yourself and the do whatever you can to rise to the occasion. You can retrain your mind and your feelings with principles worth living up to. And with any luck you will then find yourselves among the functional pantheon of the modern men.

What say you webosphere? Any advice?

My wife has 2.77 sons.

1) Evan Keith:

2) Grant Thomas:

.77) None of Your Damn Business Until He is Born:

They are these little, volcanic, elemental, pre-evolutionary men.  Evan is intense, cerebral, inflexible, brilliant and curious beyond a fault.  He is the engineer in our world whose sole purpose most days is to destroy things only to fix them, tear the world apart only to piece it back together again in a way that suits him.  There is always collateral damage to his experiments, shrapnel left in the world from his scraping against its sides.  Some of that shrapnel resides forever in the gentle skin of his mom.  She absorbs his challenges, his skepticism, his inability to comply with any world but that of his making on a moment-by-moment basis.  I know on the best days he inspires and exhilarates her, reminds her of the endless nodules of her own expansive mind.  But on the worst days he wounds her, cuts through her patience like a hot knife through butter, and makes everyone wonder if he should be permanently examined for scientific purposes.

His first brother, Grant, is in so many ways the polar opposite.  He gregarious, casual, affectionate and intensely demanding of the world’s notice and approval.  His not-so-subtle requests for the universe’s applause are often winsome, laughable and deserving of the “You did it!” that he so desperately requires.  While his brother will unwind long-form algebra without another’s notice, Grant will draw the world into his plot, into the strange and wonderful weave of laughter, geniality and affection that he exudes like the rest of us exhale CO2.  He is his mother’s Velcro-boy.  Attached, hanging, wanting of her, but all the while absorbing every look or love she so consistently gives.  Some days he is the light of laughter our often-overly serious family needs.  Some days he is the small and not-so-subtle miniature of his father’s need for attention, approval and the world’s “You did it,” that performer’s like Grant and I so readily wish for and too often demand.

To the nuclear fusion of the two of them we add a third in just 11 short weeks.  Without reservation we can be confident of one thing: he will draw something wonderful and brilliant out of his mother that even she didn’t know she was capable of.  In the process, he will cost her.  He will sap daily and minutely from the bank account of her reserves, only to at just the right moment rise to the unexpected occasion of refilling her with the irrepressible joy that mothering so clearly brings the woman I love.

But I am not just the observer of a genius woman with my complex sons.  I am also a son.  I am son who has dragged my mother on a thousand emotionally costly journeys.  I pulled her through a first decade of intense emotion, endless demand for attention, affirmation, conversation and engagement.  She grabbed my hand through a second decade of puberty, anxiety, acne, isolation and exhilaration.  The world was always bigger, harder, more complicated and more costly to me than the world she wanted for me.  And the brutal and sometimes irrepressible way that I faced it pulled from her.  Probably costs her still.  The third decade was no easier: risk, loss, failure, soul-search, identity-crisis, marriage, fatherhood.  Nearly halfway through the fourth…only time can tell.

The engines of these women push against the headwind of their sons’ challenges all the while running on the hybrid fuel of their sons’ unreliable love.  Tomorrow is Mother’s Day.  I did not send out to write one more homage.  I set out to write the truth of mothers and sons.  At least the ones I know the best.  Their hearts are the Eisenhower tunnel, winnowing a shortcut through the firmness of the world’s peaks of resistance.  Their sons driving through, so often incognizant of the explosion, the ripping through that creating such a path for safe travel required.  And with every evolution, every event bursting on the threshold of their lives, sons live it as the waking of a new dawn.  But their mothers will always be calculating the cost of wonderment.  Measuring the possibilities of the lives their sons may unfold, all while withstanding the weight of the mountain.

Sometime from now, in 5 minutes, 5 days or 5 years a son will turn to his mother and tell her of the next thing.  The next vision, the next risk, the next love, the next adventure that will take him far and away from what she imagined.  And she will say to herself something like:

“I feel like I’m being blown open again.  Like when you were born… You’re working me hard.”*

She will stand up.  She will grasp him fully.  And she will lose something of the world she’s known.  With each evolution she both loses him and loves him more.  And though most times he doesn’t know it, the smooth highway to the mountain top of his dreams is paved through the safety of her strength.  He will never know what he cost her, because keeping that secret too, is part of the labor she only knows to provide.

* This quotation (which inspired the theme of this post) was taken from a beautiful piece done by PRI’s This American Life.  You can find the webcast of it here.

I was angry and didn’t know how to put words to it.  15 minutes after I posted it, I deleted it.  It’s still imperfect, but I think I’m closer to what I wanted to say.  We are either fully alive to all of our choices or our actions have no meaning.  And with all the good that has happened since Boston, it is more important than ever that our actions in all their diversity be full of meaning.  I hope you engage and enjoy:

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We’ve had a lot of those days around here lately.  Those horrific days when the truthy underbelly of the world slithers out into our collective purview only to remind us of what we work so hard to ignore.

Another bomb goes off.

Beyond the cavity it leaves in the streets or the mangled wounds of the victims it hollows, the shrapnel of automatic magazines and roadside bombs echo around in the all-too-familiar emptiness within.  And the silence of our meaninglessness only grows deafening in the boom.

Another bomb goes off.

The vacuous nonsense of the talking heads begins to fill the open air with the pollution of self-indulgent noise.  Saying the simplest and foolhardiest things to rattle around in the human mind:

“Why does this always happen to us?”

“What did people do to deserve this?”

“What’s gone wrong in the world?”

“Shouldn’t we—in all our modern accoutrements—be able to keep this from happening?”

You see, too often, it’s not that the world is violent that bothers us, it’s that the world is violent while we’re watching.  It’s not the harsh, unequal cruelties of the human existence that shudder our skin.  It is the unequal cruelties of which we have spent so much time trying to be immune to.  With all of our so-called progress, shouldn’t have we progressed beyond this by now?

Another bomb goes off.

It is only a matter of minutes until some well-intentioned head of state will prattle their way in front of a slew of microphones and talk about this, one more string of “senseless” violence.  Proving again that the only one without sense is the one who is talking.  To call acts of malicious cruelty and war senseless is steal from the victims the exoneration of the truth.  It is to promise the world one more ridiculous time that if we just got around to making “sense,” guns would stop being fired and bombs would stop going off.  There is no senseless violence in the world.  There is no randomness to death or suffering.  It is part of our truth.  Our collective way of lostness.  And in order to be found, we must accept it for what it is.

To be clear in the nuance, there is no righteousness to the violence of the world.  The world is loaded down with layers, lifetimes and magnitudes of injustices, of which only a few are even capable of being rectified by human hands.  The truth is the violence we observe has great sense to it because it is one horrific side to the natural outflow of multifaceted human existence.  An existence battered by a thousand small wounds every day.  Cruelties enacted one upon the other all in the name of the righteous right of the actor, be the actor your boss, your spouse, your unreliable friend, your neighborhood terrorist, yourself.  The wickedness that human beings are capable and willing to enact upon each other is louder in sum than in parts, but it is the extreme parts which draw our attention.  Draw our prattle.  Draw our defenses in an attempt to say, once again, that things like this shouldn’t happen.  Or at least shouldn’t happen to us.

Another bomb goes off.

Whether or not these things should happen is a question in the ridiculous.  These things do happen and have happened and will happen.  They happen loudly and quietly, explosively and incisively.  The wounds of human cruelty slice indiscriminately about; sometimes against the innocent, always against the undeserved.

The lie of the modern world tell us that somehow we are too progressed, too right-minded for such signs of human degradation.  “In the richest country in the world??”  “In the 21^st century?”  “With all of our advances?”  What right do the Wicked have to enact their wickedness on the friends, neighbors, family, countrymen of the Enlightened?  I’ll tell you.  They act on the right of every human to choose.  To make choices that create consequences, consequences for themselves and for us all.  And if we disembowel some choices as “senseless” and separate from the human heart, then we run the risk that any choice doesn’t count, isn’t “who we are,” is disassociated from the choices that our lives demand we make.  We can not hope to claim as our own the wisdom we gain from life, if we plan on disowning the foolishness we enact upon it.

And while the foolishness of this writer or the readers he endears may never blow up plazas or fire rounds into the innocent, our collected acts of cruelty might just sum up to something as malicious if the accounting were being done.  Our attacks may not be so sudden, so loud, so immediate in their killing, but we—like all human actors—are killing our enemies softly.  With our words, with our well-timed hate, with our subliminal malice toward anyone who dare question what we think or believe.

My heart breaks for the losses of Boston’s victims and the many who have gone before them and the many who will follow.  This will not be the last of these acts of cruelty.  The suffering of the victims and their families is only accentuated by the lies of a world which promised people “like us” shouldn’t have to suffer “like this.”

The sense of this violence, like all others, is not embedded in any justice for its victims (though such justice ought to be served), but in the sense of the goodness it reveals.  If we continue to convince ourselves that we live in a world where darkness is random and mindless, then too the acts of generosity and selflessness that arise from them are equally random and “senseless.”  If the acts we make in evil are disembodied from our conscious will, then so much be the acts we make for the good.  And this syllogism is something which destroys us from within.

To take it out of the extreme, I so often hear people describe someone else’s worst behavior by saying, “It just wasn’t them.  They weren’t themselves.”

Oh, but they were “themselves.”  And they have to be.  Because if our worst behavior is disassociated from who we are, then what is to keep us from doing the same about our best behavior?  When the next bomb goes off and you are the one that goes running toward the victims.  When the next Texas grain bin explodes and you are the first responder on the scene, for the sake of who you see in the mirror every day, I hope that you can include the best of you in the way you define what you see.  To have confidence in adding the best chapters of our lives to our storybook, we must be willing to capture the worst of us in the same plot.  If our choices are senseless at their worst then we will always wonder if we are equally senseless at our best, and that wondering will poison who we could become.

We are a wounded race. And by our wounds we unfortunately justify the wounds of others.  But we must face with open eyes the truth of our tragedies.  Not simply the tragedies of lost limbs and lost lives, but more complexly, the tragedy of a culture of people, our people, who have been lulled to believe that we can disavow ourselves from the darkness of the world.  Particularly when the seeds of that same darkness lurk within us all.  When we embrace our capacity for smallness and cruelty, when we write with firm hand the past chapters of our worst selves into the permanent plotlines of our lives, we become integrated people.  People who abdicate the disassociative lie that our good is otherworldly and our bad is not of our selves.  In the human heart the evil of the world and the hope of existence meet.  The voltaic fusion of their meeting is the place of our greatest power: human choice.

Another bomb goes off.

It is our bomb.  Created in our world by the hands of our making.  We are not to blame but we are responsible.  And because we are responsible, we can do something about it.  Together.

I close with some words from one of my favorite plays, a play of equal controversy, Angels in America. 

“My whole life has conspired to bring me to this place, and I can’t despise my whole life.” - Tony Kusher

We can be “whole life” people.  And through life’s conspiracy woven between darkness and light, we can with each choice become something closer to who we wish to be.

My answer is almost always a variation of a singular theme: “If I have anything to offer you as a leader, if any success has come to me professionally or otherwise, it is because of one repeatable thing: I have failed more often, more aggressively and more consistently than almost anyone I know.  I run into walls.  I break things.  I swing and I miss.  I have scraped knees.  Some of these scars don’t heal.  I have attempted more to less result than most people dream of.  And then I do the unthinkable.  I wallow for a while, dust myself off, look in the mirror and remind myself of the most dangerous belief I have ever espoused:

“This is all your responsibility.”

Now before you get yourself in a huff, let me make a critical distinction for you.  I do not say, “This is all your fault.”  Fault is about blame and blame is a waste of time, energy and resources.  Responsibility is about opportunity.  Because you can never solve a problem that you don’t fully own.  If it’s someone else’s problem, then only they can solve it.  For every problem, stumble, weakness, failure that I fully own I have an opportunity that I couldn’t have any other way.  Two opportunities, really: the opportunity to become the person who is capable of fixing the problem, and the opportunity to fix the problem.

The first is the most important.  Failure is data. Mistakes are chock full of information you cannot get from success and you definitely cannot get from living life on the sidelines.  Anything I’ve learned in life about how to make relationships, strategies, campaigns work, I primarily learned by experiencing first hand everything that didn’t work.  This experience gives me my favorite tool in the toolkit: It gives me the “Why.”  Lots of people can tell you the “What.”  They can teach you a script, a technique and trick of the trade and if you repeat that trick enough times, success can come to you.  But revolutionary opportunity never comes to people who only know the “What” that works.  The real power is in the “Why” it works, and you can only learn that through repetitious self-mutilating failure.

Much of what I have written so far in the post you can read in any respectable self-help book.  If you haven’t read it, John Maxwell’s Failing Forward, is a good place to start.  But this belief in the power of failure is not really what got me sitting down to write today.  Today I am more cognizant of the long-term costs.  If you’ve been reading my posts lately you’ve probably caught the theme that I am a little fogged by the ramifications of so many my failures.  Those recent and those in the long-distant past.  I am making a lot of mistakes lately.  Pushing too hard on fragile relationships.  Fighting when I should be conceding.  Engineering the new at great labor when the facileness of the old will suffice.  I am too loud right now.  Too fast.  Too serious.  Too full of demand on myself and every trickling of the world that dare make its way to me.  Too cavalier.

In short, I am full of data.  The mirrors of the world seem to have been recently polished, dusted of anything that might skew their truthiness.  And in their endless panes I see myself all too clearly.  A man full of so much risk and mistakenness that he is a little difficult to bear.

It is in these eras where the collection of this scar tissue begs for some kind of self-help supercomputer.  A giant tera-processor that can consume all the truths that life is feeding me, sequence it, produce the mapped code of my genome of errors.  Discover in perfect detail those genetic proclivities where the seeds of some future cancerous error does reside.  Alas such a machine does exist.  But it is not fast and it is often not kind.  It produces, over time the acute map of who we are and what craven errors we are uniquely prone to create.  It is the least efficient but the most righteous of all human maps, it is my life.  And it is telling me the truth about myself, one error at a time.

Today there were some signs of relief.  Some gaps in the fog which suggest a sum is presenting itself.  There is the promise that the most recent failures have the potential to do what so many mistakes have done for me before them: awaken something new.  Awaken opportunity.  Awaken a broader, smoother, more stabilized man who can face the scope of what challenges inevitably lie ahead.  The kind of challenges that will require a whole new brand of failures.  A brand that I am not yet mature enough to even make.

I come from a generation of people whose whole lives have been designed to be protected from risk.  We were the “Caution: Babies-on-Board.”  I have lived my life to challenge the flaws of such a view.  I have run full speed into walls which would have been avoided by wiser, more cautious men.  But life has proven that the only way to become that wiser man is to scar myself there.  One giant risk, one giant mistake, one unadulterated failure at a time.

So what’s been keeping me so busy?  Well, I could rattle off a thousand things that make me sound both busy and important, but primarily I have been distracted by the visiting of an old friend.  Not a good friend really, but one that I have known for nearly three decades now and one that seems to find me wherever I go.  My old pal anxiety.  One could argue that I have any number of a thousand reasons to be anxious.  The forthcoming birth of my third son in a few months, trying to sell a house, staring down my long-avoided taxes and the astronomically frightening bill that comes with them, dealing with a whole variety of work problems and of course not the least of which facing the resurgence of the demons of my past.  (See last months post: A Cynic’s War, Unwinnable.) Oh yeah, and I’ve been on a cleanse.  Not one of those weird ones where you do nothing but drink lemon juice and cayenne pepper, one of the pricey ones where they mix you up a shake of evil that you have to take 5 times a day to wash your system of all the crap you’ve eaten the three months before.  I know mine’s good because J-Lo uses it.  And Robert Downey, Jr.  Nothing says clean living like Robert Downey, Jr.

And then this afternoon Facebook recommended me a wedge sandal from Nordstrom.  What on earth have I been posting on Facebook that says espadrille? Probably simply the fact that I know that wedge sandal is really called an espadrille.  Epic Fail.

Anyway, these historic bouts of low-grade panic are always good fodder for introspective thoughts, but most of them are quite self-disparaging and erratic, not the prototypical fodder for universally-shared blogpost writing.  And yet, I think I missed you.  Blogpost writing is, in itself, quite anxiety-creating as I have now eternally published myself for public comment, and what’s worse… being publicly ignored.  Blogging exposes one to the typical narcissist’s dilemma, not that you think badly of me, but that you’re not thinking of me at all.  And yet, returning to catalogue of Martinis Optional, I am reminded of my own advice (which is generally the most necessary kind): Today is the only today you get, so steward it well.

Anxiety makes one waste a lot of time.  Mostly you waste it thinking about all the things that could happen but will likely never happen.  Let me give you some examples from the past few weeks:  I have been wondering what will happen if for some reason I end up in a 30% effective tax bracket and can’t pay my taxes.  (Trust me, that this is not going to happen.)  I’ve been wondering what happens if the house I’m trying to sell randomly starts falling apart at the seams after it has successfully stood for over 100 years.  I also was wondering for a short bit about whether or not some very wealthy people in my life were conspiring against me.  But this (if you follow @NickRichtsmeier on Twitter you will know) is clearly from watching all too many episodes of Revenge.

Despite all this random brain distraction, there does appear to be a thread fighting its way through.  Like that loop of yarn on your favorite sweater that no matter how many times you push it back into the indiscriminate fabric of its surroundings, up it pops: a stubbornness of award-winning proportions.  In this case it is the admonition of a virtual mentor of mine, a man whose message was actually introduced to me by my father, Andy Andrews.  His video The 7 Decisions has affected me greatly over the years, and I–not-inconsequentially–found myself thinking about it again these past weeks.  I won’t illuminate all the content here, I will save that for Andy, but one of the 7 Decisions is to Persist Without Exception.  To make a way when there is no way.  Now this is not new news.  You have heard it said to never, ever, ever quit.  But to persist without exception is something else.  It is to believe that in every situation and in every circumstance, the power and opportunity to change something for the better is just ONE IDEA AWAY.  One burst of creativity, one revelation from a friend, one stern correction from a critic, one outside-the-box risk that no one else dare do.

To persist without exception has all kinds of applications in the world of work and even in the world of relationships, but the place that I find it pressing me is something larger and not so easily put into boxes.  I sense myself being pushed to persist in living.  Living largely, somewhat dangerously, living truthfully.  Staying alive to my deepest and most grandiose instincts, and even once in a while following through on them.  I feel pushed to persist against my own smallish tendencies.  My own need to not offend, not expose, not connect, not inspire.  I hear the whisperings of an assault on my own underplayed engagments–the moments where I could have done something to make things better, but the betterment cost me too much.  A challenge is rising against my weaker intentions that life can be lived tightly contained and still be called living at all.

How did I know this was what was pushing up inside me?  Well, ignore that fact that Andy’s voice saying “Persist Without Exception!” kept chiming in my neuropathetic cathedrals.  It was that and reminders of the challenges, the assaults and  the well-structured reasons to small living were burgeoning about me.  The litigators for scaling-back and believing-less were assembling their case from within and without.  And to hear their voices made me angry.  Angry the path of least resistance, the simple life, was so winsome to me and to others… and that society seemed to be conspiring to lull all of us into its throes.

• I heard the story of a thirty-something man with a law degree and 200k in student loans, who decided that in order to get the government to pay his loans for him, he was going to stay at home and smoke pot, letting his wife work, until his loans were forgiven.  I was enraged.
• I watched as a business professional I knew had the opportunity to build a bridge and expand his loyalties by taking the risk of investing in the lives of others.  I also watched him as he chose to focus on saving face instead.  I was morose.
• I stood beside as a friend of mine wavered on the brink of enormous professional upheaval, in the end choosing the status quo because he feared the punishment of so-called friends should fight for the necessary change.  I feared the cost of his apathy.
• I listened as I heard my oldest son (age 4) reason his way around his fear of heaven and God and why he wasn’t sure that God was good at all.  And two nights later was stunned by the words in this song: “I’ll hang the moon forever, so that you’ll never fear the darkness… the darkness I’ve known…“  I had heard my own darkness in the questions of my son, and violently, unwelcomely, I was awakened.

Tripping over that old thread that kept jumping through the rug.  Calling me, reminding me that the sidelines of things will cost you everything even if the losses of the game might cost you some.  The darkness of fear has plagued me all my life.  The anxiety of events I couldn’t control, outcomes I couldn’t foresee and losses I couldn’t forestall has been the voice in head as long as I can remember.  And if I had the power to hang the moonlight beacon in the night to protect my sons from that darkness I would.  But Noxious Dread, like all our demon friends (Insincerity, Triviality, the Threadbare Excuse, Overbearing Hindsight, Gross Exaggeration…), is referred forward through people and the only hope is to stop the chain without by stopping the chain within.  The only way to stand between my sons and life of riskless living is to Persist Without Exception.

To recognize the annoying distraction that I’ve been tripping on, that loop in the rug, that loose strand of the sweater is not a mistake, it is my life.

It is that irrepressible possibility that one could be something more than just the sum of one’s experiences.  More than a writer of the future as formulaic sequel to the unforgiving past.

This post is, in and of itself, that one idea, an opportunity to persist without exception.  To write this all out and to force it into interlacing sentences is a way of persistence.  Writing cannot be the solution, but it can be a way of stringing together the next idea.  Writing is how we reach into the bookshelf of our minds and find the ideas, the vision, the courage, the encouragement from centuries past to look ourselves firmly in the eye.  To find the admonitions required to stop wondering and waiting and start wandering.  Start beating back the oppressive threats of the worst-cases so that the field may clear for rich anticipation of the possible.  It has been the catalog of worst-case imaginations I’ve known so well.  So thorough my study of them over the years that I have often been calcified and innocuous to the casework of life that stood right in front me.

It is so easy to make imaginary things.  Imaginary businesses.  Imaginary families.  Imaginary lives.

What is so much harder is to build something in the real.  To persist in the real is to see one’s distorted image always in life’s  fun house of warped mirrors.  To experience the ripple effects of all that you know and all that you ought to have known.  The challenge of living is not in the mistakes, it is in the regret of the mistakes and the fear of their reliving.  The mistakes of life never cost us as much as we imagine.  But the years we lose fearing them will cost me/us more than we can dream.

This post, like the last few, is not the most eloquent I’ve ever written.  But it is closer to being true.  Every once in a while we write so that the words will smooth out the world for a moment.  Meltdown the jagged unfinished edges for an instance and leave us with the momentary light of the untarnished looking-glass.  In the words of our lives and the words of those wiser we look ourselves squarely in the face and say the risking things:

This is your life.  It will be full of hardships, inefficiencies, failures, injustices, disloyalties and general cruelties, more so than you can possibly imagine.  Written a certain way it will be a biography of cancer, betrayal, financial hardship, loneliness and strife.  But written another way it will be the story of someone who faced those obstacles and made choices that only he could make.  Took risks which were solely his.  And built a legacy of irrepressible lights among the gathering dark.  In short, despite the guarantees, if not risks, inherent; this is your life.  Live it anyway.

“Here is the world.  Beautiful and terrible things will happen.  Don’t be afraid.” – Frederick Buechner, Beyond Words

Thank God.

I, like many of you, go through the bulk of my adult life patently unaware of how holistically I am judging people by their first impressions. I like to think of myself as astute! A reader of people! A seer through fogs! But lest I forget, I am a slave to my own fog and in my slavery am all too quick to decide that seeing is believing.

I had two very real experiences this week, one that came upon me quite unexpectedly, and the second I saw in the making, in part because of the back-handed slap that came to me through the first.  In the first instance, I was engaged in a long series of meetings with a business professional that I had only known in a distant and mostly-social light.  We had mutual business dealings and because of this often found ourselves at similar sales seminars or events or the like.  I had decided all too many years ago that because I had seen this man so many times drunk and the butt of others’ jokes, that this was his preferred state: a joke.  Even to write this out feels utterly harsh, but I’ve got to tell the story true-true (for those of you that haven’t read Cloud Atlas you won’t reocognize that reference…).   To tell the story true, I have to be honest about the heaping amounts of pre-judgments I felt rightful claim to, long before I had any real personal dealings with this man.

To be straightforward, my interaction in my series of meetings with him all but shocked me.  He was genuine.  Kind.  Deeply thoughtful and at times painstakingly vulnerable in his loyalty, fervency and commitment to his deepest relationships at all costs.  He spoke of business associates as long-standing brothers and sisters.  Contracts as unions of the heart.  He was what you so rarely find in business, a man with very little skin, whose scar tissue didn’t show.  Most men in business are all scar tissue.  They are as I too often am: a prideful mass of sealed-over wounds that justify a cyncial and arms-length existence.  But not this man.  This man laid it all out, and the risks in his exposure were not lost on me.

As the meetings wore on, it all started to come together for me… This man spends the bulk of his days with highly aggressive type A personalities in sometimes highly contenscious situations.  This man, in all these years of such dealings, still carries himself heart wide open, believing that we are all one good trusting relationship away from our greatest opportunities, our greatest strengths, our deepest satisfactions.  And then I imagined all the shots he must have taken over the years.  All the times harsher characters (like myself) didn’t slow down to understand his sensibilities.  How many men and women took him for granted.  From that vantage point I saw how safe being the class clown in social settings must be.  Unwilling to put on the bullet proof armor, at least the scotch and the laughter abate the barrage of the viscious for a time.  At least it buys him long stretches of the camraderie that he has sought to build in a lifetime of loyalty.

I realized in the sad aftermath of my day that I was on my way to being one more person he would lay himself out loyal for, and one more person that would likely see that loyalty only in its most transactional form.  I was embarrassed.  Angry, really, at the decay of my own judgment and the rigidness of my all to pragmatic heart.  And somewhere in the anger I felt toward myself and my potential actions, I felt grateful.  Grateful that I’d had that slim chance to see a man from all sides and not take it for granted.  Grateful to have been so gently proven so painstakingly wrong.  It was an act of unnecessary grace to me this week–to be proven wrong by such undeserved kindness.

These realizations carried me into a second set of interactions.  Another good man who I knew through a completely different set of circumstances.  A deeply religious person, by all appearances.  Or, at the very least, one trained in the skill of sounding religious.  I have my own baggage with organized religion and I have particular resistance to the words.  It is not the heart of the card-carrying Jesus-people that I fear, it is their words.  To explore the psychosis behind this will require a different post, but for now, just trust that it is true.

In my interactions with this man this week, he was particularly clear-headed about his deeply-held religious positions and objectives.  He was not preachy in any way.  In fact, it was the genuineness of his passion and his total lack of prosthelytic coercion that made him so disembalancing.  I found myself caught up again in the one-dimensional quality of my original first impression.  Caught by waves of self-consciousness thinking: “Yikes, I am really messy character who has chosen as one of the highest goals to stop saying f**k for no apparent reason; this relationship is not going to work.”  The nice thing about my meeting with him this week was that he was in a talking mode and I could just listen, all the while avoiding the wave of snap judgments and need to escape that was welling up within me.

It was only at the end of our interchange that I was talking a little bit and telling a few stories of my own–some of my messier ones at that–when he turned to me and said, “Nick, this is something I’ve been wanting to tell you for a while…”

“Oh, God,” I thought, “here it comes… I’m in trouble.”

“From the moment I met you I could see that you were a person that wrestled with things, that you were deeply unsettled and that you didn’t accept simple answers for the complexities in your life.  And I really want to know more about that.  It is a quality that I only find in the people who interest me most in the world.  And I think that’s why I’ve wanted to get to know you.”

I was too shocked to be composed.  I think I said something stupid, like “Thank you.” And attempted to allow the conversation to turn.

But it was not the conversation that turned, but rather–my perspective.  He, too, was a man who I needed to see from all sides.  A man whose first impressions did not tell the full story.  In fact, like most men, his first impression was pre-designed to simplify a story, to tell it in a way that the religious world could understand.  And it took us some time to learn that I was not a part of that world, and he didn’t have to simplify his story for me.  In fact, if we are to be friends, I need it in its rawest most conflicted and contradictory form.  Otherwise, I won’t know how to believe it true.

I, too, I’m sure, am a man who needs to be seen from all sides.  I have scripts I’ve written over the years to dumb-down the story, to simplify it for religious ears or business ears or children’s ears or whomever.  I, like so many, give such a terrible first impression because I am trying to mask the complexity, hide the frailties, contain the loud vulgarities, sepia the technicolor.  I attempt to tell you a sitcom version of a telanovela life.

But will I give you a chance… as these men did me?  Will I give you just a window to see this man from all sides?

And will you do the same–though undeservedly–for me?

What follows here is not particularly well written. And unlike past writings it is not particularly “for you.” Now, the truth is I hope that it is meaningful to you, because I like anyone (or perhaps more than nearly anyone) likes to be well thought of, and the more revelatory the material, the more your liking of it is desired. But your liking of this post is not the purpose of writing it. This post is for me to tell the truth. I apologize that there’s nothing particularly salacious here, it is more of an existential truth that I’m after. I decided to wrestle with these things publicly because it may force me to consider them more deeply. Your knowledge of these words holds me to them, binds me to their inferences. And that is dangerous. The exact kind of danger that I am increasingly believing I may need.

I am finding myself nearing the end of my own Seven Years War. Some of you may not know that my life took a drastic and painful turn seven years ago.  A turn that I have at times been flippant and glib about, in rare private moments been quite penitent about, but mostly been entirely silent about. 2006 represented the ending of a person I thought I was meant to be, and the making of a smaller more controlled entity in his stead. I have been working to convince myself of the virtues of this smallness for some time. A convincing, a war against reality and my own convictions, that appears to be in its last throws. A war of cynicism about the possibilities of things that may very well be unwinnable.

Let’s go back for just a moment. I came to Denver in 2004 for a certain kind of a life. The details are not particularly important, only to say that my closest friends in life and I were moving across the country to do what we considered to be a great work we called Radius. It was both a spiritual and a social work and one that believed would not only alter our own lives, but also had the possibility to alter the lives of many others. We had raised tens of thousands of dollars. We had recruited team members, we had leveraged everything for this one chance. We were beaming with indefensible certainty of our cause and its likely celebratory conclusion.

I remember the road trip out here as if it were yesterday. Mostly because not long after that road trip I froze my waking life, leaving it calcified in time. But I suppose I’m getting a little bit ahead of myself. As I drove over the horizon into the mountain west I had the recently minted soundtrack to Wicked blaring in my car, and I blared with it with shameless disregard for the grandiosity of the anthem. Words that seemed true to me rang within and rang without: “If you care to find me, look to the western sky…and nobody will ever bring me down…” I was in search of my own Emerald City, an Oz of my own making. A world of unrelenting belief in God and in the human spirit that was worth giving one’s life to.

My fingers nearly lock up in the typing of this. My nerves fray with contempt as I think about where all of that unmitigated grandiosity would take me. It is the seeds of contempt for that young man singing in the car that gave rise to a war. But again, that is a portion of the story to which we have not yet arrived.

Then, I dared to embark what I believed to be a new life. A large life, one with risk, meaning, wrought with potential pitfalls, but theoretically sturdy with the trappings of the twenty-somethings great hope: friends, fantastical dreams and the belief that who we were was something special and that our specialness could change the world. I suppose it is the age-old tale of what we all dare to believe before life proves us otherwise. But I believed it so very much. I believed that my life was endowed with something as large as purpose and that the days of a lifetime were spent out in the calling of a cause where little by little the world could be made new. And I believed that the making new could begin in me.

To fast forward, by the fall of 2006, everything I came to build, to live, to aspire to, to cling to was gone. Not the least of which my foolish belief that I was to make something of myself. That I was to live a life worth telling. The details of what happened between the opening of the western sky and the closing of the curtain on those days is not a story I wish to recount here. Only to say everything that propelled my 1998 Honda-CRV across the skyline into the Front Range’s open arms was gone. Destroyed in an intersection of avarice, self-aggrandizement, delusion, fear, revenge and a healthy dose of loathsome foolishness, much of it mine. The world I came, with my friends, to build imploded in on itself for a 1000 reasons and in its rubble I was left with all that I thought worth fighting for… gone.  Vision—gone. Relationships—gone.  Support systems—gone.  Purpose—gone.

But the gone-ness of things was the least of my worries. We come to expect that we must eventually lose what we love. And if you haven’t come to that conclusion than it is either the gentle weight of innocence or delusion that you labor under, neither of which will get you very far. I believe this so much so because even to this day the gone-ness of things is not what quakes me deep in the unforgiving silences of the worst nights.

It is the why of it I have lost a hundred night’s sleep over. I have done more work than most to unwind everything that has gone wrong in the buildup of my young life. I have unraveled all the findable ends, pulling the loose threads in this ball of tangled hideous yarn. I have wondered about causality more than one person should, and in the wondering began to see the ends of all strands finding their root in me. I have tried to decide whether the man who rode into the west was a miscreant or a fool, fearing he is some combination of both.

The search for why has not led me to answers, only conclusions, which are answers without the luxury of facts. The conclusions I have lived for the past seven years have been succinct: I am too dangerous to attempt a large life. Where once I believed the purpose of things was to catalyze my God-given existence for all its possibility, I have seen too clearly the dark side of unencumbered possibility, and truth be told, I am better left…encumbered. I have been holding on to the failures of the past with ever sinew of muscle. Like a bunker on a bomb I have attempted to absorb the impact of everything that has and could go wrong, and I have made a promise to the world: I will stay away—for your safety.

What happened seven years ago hurt people. People I loved more than I thought I was capable of love. People that trusted me. I made arrogant mistakes that because of their size, their over-confidence and their clarity carried a wake wider than they ought, and therefore had an affect beyond what I should have been capable of. I played it too big. Or so I have been believing.

Why am I writing all of this? What am I trying to say? I’m trying to get something out, something that I haven’t been able to put words to… something I have been fighting for.

I have been fighting to contain my life since. I have been fighting to use it up in the smallest ways that I can, the most inconsequential ways. Because consequential efforts lead to consequential failures. And people get hurt, and contrary to popular belief, the dust never settles. The dust only becomes the fog. The fog that slows you down, makes you careful, commits you to the small arduousness of a purely pragmatic life.

When Thoreau said that most men live lives of quiet desperation, he failed to mention how.  I know how, as I have been doing it these seven years. We do it by holding the noise inside. The noise of our undulating hopes, the awful din of our winsome possibilities, the palpitating cries of our catalogued mistakes. The quietness of life doesn’t come upon us by the slow beating of wasted years; it is calcified within us by the hardening of a bomb shelter. We are the concentrated pouring of a concrete form designed to protect the world from our more dangerous and technicolor selves.

I have too often refused to become a great father because the engine that produces greatness may just inadvertently produce monstrosity in its stead.

I have too often withheld the hope of being a great husband because to raise the hopes of my wife only to dash them would be an uncommon kind of cruelty I can’t allow.

I have cognizantly abandoned the cause of great leadership because out of the same veins that a leader’s blood flow, run the oxidized fuel of a villain.

I have been a distant friend as the last people I chose to be near to were only hurt in the nearness.

It is only in the largeness of life that we risk the possibility not of failure but of cruelty. Not of loss but of destruction. These are too large of words for a blog but they are the words that may be true.

I know it because I lived it. I lived those moments when what I built with my hours only ended in shouts, profanities and tears. I lived those moments when the friendships of years ended in complete and uninterrupted silence. I lived the moments where the last thing I could do for the last man I loved, my father, was to convince a doctor to take him off the machines. I have spent nearly a decade perfecting the skill of ending things. Containing messes. Absorbing disappointments. Because I had come to believe that this was all there was left to do.

It’s funny as I read this to think about how silly and defeatist this sounds coming from a 33-year-old man with nothing but life in front of him. But if I’m honest, most days I don’t see a long road of life, but rather a long road of opportunities, opportunities to relive the same old mistakes I know so well. Some of you who don’t know me at all may read this and wonder how this can possibly coalesce with the man who writes so vociferously about the wondrous possibilities inherent in a man’s great life. You may wonder—rightfully—about the apparent hypocrisy. Let me at least reassure you this. I have believed everything I’ve ever written. I have believed it for all of you, but rarely believed it for myself anymore.

I am accustomed to blogging about things I am certain about. Things like how disappointing Lincoln was or how much I hated the Superbowl Halftime Show or how much I dislike Oprah. In short, it has been easy to write about everything that’s wrong… to write the playful cynic. It is easier to write about what’s wrong when one believes that is where their expertise lies. I know very little about what is right in the world, because the man who knew such things was frozen in time, chained down as the enemy of a Seven Years War. In his opposition has risen a warrior poet, a wordsmith of sarcasms and tongue-in-cheekiness, the cynical patriot, fighting off greatness in his own life, but counting on it in everyone else. I have been counting on all of you to be great in my stead. I have been counting on the TV producers, the movie makers, the bosses, the politicians to live something surpassing derision. But this outsourcing has only fed the cynic’s war.

A cynic’s war… unwinnable.

To call for the greatness of the world while ensuring the smallness of oneself.

But you, you all out there (no offense), I now see will never live meaningful enough lives to justify me not living mine. I cannot fight for my nihilism while calling for your ascension. If we are required to greatness, then it is the inclusive “we.”  The “we” myself included. The myself unchained from the shadows of the past.

So here I am. In the last throws these seven years. If you care to find me, look to the western sky. I am dismantling my armies. Bringing down my armaments. Surrendering my WMDs. It is time to end the cynic’s war, to armistice the fight against my past gone awry. It is a war unwinnable after all.  I am not so naïve to believe that 2500 little words will somehow absolve me of the past.  That a late night rant at the keyboard will somehow set in motion a string of unstoppable releases of grace.  But the cold war between a man and his past must end somehow.  Something most begin in order to dismantle this aging wall.

I share these words with you because I have been so loquacious about my requirements for the world.  It is time for me to face the complex web of requirements set for myself… and to wonder whether in the light of some great forgiveness, they are the right requirements at all.

I have had a sense for these years that I needed something from God that I had never felt the need for in the past, but I did not know its name. God has been a past source for hope, for kindness, for vision, for wisdom. And while my need for these has continued in these years, it was something else that I have been lacking. Something I can’t, even in the writing of this, find on my own. I believe that something may be forgiveness. A release from the punishments of the ever-distancing past.

For those of you who were touched by Radius, I am sorry.  I cannot claim the responsibility for everything that happened, but the fact remains that I was its leader, and my leadership failed you all.

For those of you who knew me before Radius, I am sorry.  I am sorry that I allowed the failures of those days to coerce me into seclusion.  I have cut myself off from nearly all of you for these seven years, other than by the casualness of social networking.  If it is any consolation, know that in my distorted thinking, I thought I was doing it for your own good.

For those of you that post-date the Radius events, I am sorry.  I have been trying to keep you at bay by running an arms-length life.  I was trying to contain what I believed to be a dangerous man.

And lastly, to the man I once knew, I want to forgive you.  To forgive your youthful exuberance.  Your boundless optimism.  Your unmitigated need for others’ approval.  Your systemic weaknesses that adversely affected so many.  I hope you will forgive me the years of this war, and the punishment of isolation I have lavished upon you.  I hope that in time, the story of a life rent in two can be reseamed into one consolidated work.