ExploreTruth

I think I was high when I first seriously asked the question. Stared it in the eyes.  And no, this was not a Mary Jane induced conversation where all existential questions were fair game.  I’d had my share of those.

This was just me, alone, on a sleepless night, almost 7 years ago.  Probably up at 4:30 ish am, watching some corny infomercial with a peculiar sort of half baked interest.  The other half wondering what the point was.

On that night I had just come back from a party we hosted at a local club.  There was a lot of people there for a change, however, I got screwed out of most of the cover earnings by a shady club owner, and this, me sitting with Philly in hand, was my consolation prize.

Things seemed pointless.  Life seemed like I was sitting in the middle of a planetarium, and the artificial pixels streaming through the pin holes, were just not sufficient anymore.  I wanted the real.  I wanted to see what was on the outside.  How the whole thing really worked.

I wasn’t depressed.  I don’t think. I was almost done a bachelors degree in communications, and in a relationship that I thought was going somewhere.  I had finally started to make some real money at this party promotion thing, but my heart wasn’t in it.  All the people dancing, smiling, vomiting, and I couldn’t even go out anymore unless I was fairly tipsy or high myself. Usually both.

So on that night, while melting into my couch, watching a super ninja knife set on HSN, or obsessively channel surfing, I can’t quite remember…I started thinking.  Yes…really thinking about life.

And I guess, in all honesty, I cant really point only to that particular night, like one cant recall the exact time of the dawning sun.  It sort of sneaks up on you.

Who knows, it may have been the class I took that semester called “Writing Lives” that woke something up…

It was pretty much a writing class, mixed with group therapy, or the sort one unfamiliar with therapy, might imagine it to be.  We would sit around and discuss the short stories, memoirs, personal essays and poetry we had written for homework.  Some people cried.  The honesty was raw.

A group of 15-20 college seniors can share warm and fuzzy moments.  It’s possible.

I remember one woman in particular, who had just lost her fiance in a car accident. She was the driver and had fallen asleep at the wheel.  He was next to her in the passenger seat, when they careened of the road into a tree.  Her view on life contrasted ours in the room.  She knew the truth that tomorrow was not promised to her.  Her tears bled with urgency.  Her perspective on what mattered in life was crystal clear.  But she also held guilt and had not fully forgiven herself.  She also had some sharp questions for a God she no longer felt she fully understood.

She wasn’t afraid to ask why.

I still have a large stack of writing from that class that I hold on too.

Maybe the questions came much earlier for me.  Maybe it was when Hallie, so full of smiles and life, died while we were in the 8th grade year from cancer.

Or maybe it happened when listening to the Lauryn Hill MTV Unplugged that night in college.  Her song, reading my thoughts.  Or those long drives up and down Route 60, and the setting sun, and endless fields.  Or it might have just been the fact that I was now open to listen to the questions that had always been speaking to me.

Staying In The Moment & On The Surface

I think I smoked for the same reason Jay Z recommends in his song Forever Young…

“So lets just stay in the moment, smoke some weed, drink some wine…”

Isn’t that what being young is about?  Living in the moment can be a blessing and a curse, especially when its lived on the surface.  Away from the past, future, and even the present things we would rather not deal with.  And most importantly away from the deeper things that make sense of everything else.  And a life lived like this, perpetually lived on the surface, is a lie.  And we find ourselves majoring in minors, and denying the point of it all.

For me, I think I was subconsciously prolonging the inevitable.  I was running from the big hairy philosophical questions old white men have been wrestling with for lifetimes.  Those are much easier to deny than confront.

Sometimes I wonder if what I was ultimately trying to forget were these questions.  These questions that burn deep within the soul.  The ones referred to in The Matrix as “the splinters in your mind driving you mad.”

“The aim of education is to shift people from the surface to something substantive” – Dr. Cornel West

Both bars and churches are full with these questions.  They fester in damp pillows, and sleepless nights. Pharmaceutical and cosmetic companies profit, and plastic surgeons fill their schedules.  And we conspire together as a society, not to speak of such things: like death, meaning, and the point, the whole stinking point to this piece of dirt hurtling around the sun, while so many stare intently at a million other shiny objects we can drown ourselves in, trying to extinguish that burning curiosity that makes us fully human.

So this isn’t so much about the pros or cons of marijuana.  I don’t smoke anymore for a number of reasons.  Overall it was both an agent of existential procrastination and short term escapism for me.  For with one short term benefit came a much more sustained and long term ability to avoid any deep and systematic reflection.  And I guess in some ways, we probably all smoke a little of that…

For whatever it is we choose to numb us, however necessary life’s pain may demand of it, we risk trading in the very thing that separates us from the instinct driven herd of animals, who don’t appear to engage in deep reflection, or critical analysis.  They just exist.  And we’re not animals right?

I guess now, I want to make those sort of questions my business….and hopefully yours as well.