Photo of the author in early 2019 on his land in Farmington, Maine
and before his return back from The Faraway Place.
They say that “sentimentality aint what it used to be.” I couldn’t agree more! Here in my new life (since bypass surgery) I meditate occasionally upon why I feel so different. I have said in several of these essays that I am the same person, but a different man. Maybe I can use this post to clarify that just a little more for both you and me. Writing is one of the most effective ways for me to unscramble the omelette that is my overthinking brain. The more I search for what I am now, the more I crave those new ingredients.
I have the memories of my original human self (c. 1968-2019) without being so burdened by the power of the former emotions around those memories. In my memory I see childhood Christmases, all the many times I played music with friends, college magic, the three four-year romantic relationships that formed my personal philosophy about intimacy, the employment at a range of jobs for other people’s businesses, before the stress and anxiety of those jobs began their merciless destruction of my heart. Leaving that shit was absolutely the smartest decision the first me ever made!
Then came those IWALLK years as A Living Magazine, the purchase of a forever-piece of land. I feel that I gave that former life pursuing the mission of demonstrating that simplification can lead to true liberty... Those days are over now. That life is over. That part of the story is written and sealed.
THIS new life is a tough love gift from the Universe to me. It will last approximately ten to fifteen years, and I will have a chance to fulfill a new kind of work, probably having to do with assisting somehow in the current pandemic.
The past is all just as clear, as I recall it. I simply don’t have any overriding feelings about those things at all anymore. It’s not that I don’t care. I do care. But not in the way you might think. I miss being able to smile briefly at the memory of some transiently successful thing, and/or luxuriating in the awful emotional pain of my losses and failures, over and over and over again-----NOT.
You see, being prone to what I would best describe as some kind of chronic Ruminative Thinking—replaying negative scenes but never resolving my feelings around them, has lightened up significantly. It is a real blessing to have these perpetually outsized emotional responses pretty much eliminated.
But, like I said, I AM the same person and to some degree I have begun ruminating anew. But this time the initial prick of negativity that starts the destructive part of the cycle seems to be counterbalanced by a new ability, one that I keep focusing on.
This new ability appears to be based around retraining some part of my subconsciousness to see how clearly my assumed disparate concerns are interconnected parts of some very fundamental problems. Now that the distraction of 50 years of stressful bullshit is nearly gone, I can do real positive work in what Terence McKenna called, “the felt presence of immediate experience.” It is so much more obvious to me now; where completely separate problems in nearly any context have threads that relate them to each other.
I am still new at this, but it appears that there may be ways to find out how one crucial cut in the thread connecting two difficult problems can solve them both and catalyze a chain reaction that then solves a whole bunch of other problems—even ones I am not aware of.
So, I have begun to fight my personal habit of rumination, by now--in quiet times, exploring my own mind in any way I can, and testing this strange hypothesis on the little things. The doable things are the important ones. Then, in the active, everyday world of full consciousness, I notice real changes to my perception of the world around me. I am developing the new man that I am.
It seems I’ve grown up a bit in some very specific ways and not in others. My temperament is more slow to fall in line, that's for sure. Nevertheless, I found a stronger pragmatic streak inside myself than I’ve ever felt before. “Just the facts”? Yes. That’s what makes me happy now. Objectivity may be an impossible goal for anyone. But the striving for it should at least be worth every second.
I think I know what John Lennon meant when he said there are “only solutions.”
