When I Look At The World

It doesn't fill me with sorrow.

Who really cares? 
Who's willing to try? 
To save the world, 
That's destined to die 
When I look at the world 
It fills me with sorrow 
Little children today 
Are really going to suffer tomorrow 
-- Marvin Gaye, 1971

I can remember crying to myself alone in my expensive Brooklyn Co-op 30 years ago listening to the late Marvin Gaye singing on what many Americans believe to be the best album of all time. It’s hard to be a person of any sensitivity and not be profoundly moved by everything this album is. Yet when I look at the world, it doesn’t fill me with sorrow.

Aside from the fact that I was one of those children in 1971, and I suffered, my suffering was neither traumatic nor chronic. Yet it took quite a while to discover a mindset in which I was not a seduced into adopting the pessimistic outlook of that tragic sentiment. Yes we are all destined to die. The world we have created, our societies, our Jungian sense of humanity as a whole is temporary. Climate change is a good way to think of it. As humanity moves from one climatic epoch to another, we will evolve at the same pace. The sadness of the 70s, in the fullness of time, was just one rainy night in Georgia. It’s understandable that we felt like it was raining all over the world.

These days, I am extra sentimental. I have just emerged from a period of loneliness that ended with the Spousal Unit’s return from Detroit on a 10 week mission. So I have begun reaching out to the people I have known for the longest time in my life. Along with that comes a healthy dose of self-examination which engages the question of how we become separated from our pasts. For me personally, it boils down to ‘Why am I a monkey and not a tree?’ That is to say, why have I lead an itinerant life like that rover named Rambo. Not the one who immediately comes to mind, but the character from that song by Manhattan Transfer.

As I become a non-racial absolutist, it leaves me with a complicated set of concepts having to do with cultural belonging, and a reconciliation between what creativity is born of suffering. So how does one deal with the racial absolute of “All black people suffer horribly in America.”? I can’t accept that common, simplistic characterization of black life. Even if we get down to blatant, brutal racist violence, every person deals with it differently. As I say, some people are traumatized by 6 ounces of racist microaggression, others pour it on their breakfast sausage like hot sauce.

Perhaps there is a sweet spot between the damage of trauma and the impertinence of not suffering fools that sparks the nerves of creativity. Life has to spit enough dirt into your eyes so that you turn your head around and learn to see another way. Not too much, lest you become cynical or nihilist. Not too little, lest you pretend everything is AOK. You have to want to move. Change yourself. Change things around you. Change people in your vicinity. But first you have to discover the peace required to compose yourself and then compose your creations.

It is becoming a bit tiresome for me to say that ‘I come from a small town called black, and maybe I was never supposed to be there.’ But it fits so well into my own story. It needs the ‘maybe’ because as cliche as an exit from the ghetto into the light of mainstream success or the spotlight of upscale achievement, it’s a story worth celebrating. What I know for myself is that looking up and seeing the stars and being able to identify them by name was real. Working in the warehouse at Fedco La Cienega with the Vietnam vets and gazing up at the Winter Triangle gave me a sense of peace. Telling Wanda next door that swallowing a watermelon seed was not going to grow one in my belly even though I couldn’t name the enzymes that turned lunch into turds. Science was real. Wealth was real. The mountain trails 30 miles from home were real. I chose those realities rather than the ones of my neighborhood. Before they called it the ‘inner city’, I knew I had other destinations. My neighborhood became known as the ‘hood, because of a Hollywood movie produced for a USC Film School student who probably knew his own Wandas. What a small fraction of the world that was.

When I look at the world, it only pisses me off that I cannot live longer to discover all of its wonders. I face my own mortality figuring out how best to spend whatever amount of time I have remaining. In front of me are a selection of hills to die on. I’ll probably climb halfway up a few of them, write some essays, slide down and pick another. My father always told me that a little bit of everything adds up to a whole lot of nothing. Well, maybe my life doesn’t add up to much, but at least I own my own words and writing. This is not nothing. It’s a breadcrumb trail I expect nobody will consume whole, but I gave the whole loaf, even for the ants to carry off my monkey trail.

It is that sense of wholeness of having a whole literary bakery in my mind that I can create delightful donuts of discovery. There wasn’t enough trauma to derail that sense of self. I’ve been poked in the chest, but I remembered checking back through life that I never lost a literal fistfight. I’ve been sucker punched. I’ve been bent over double with no wind left in my gut, but came back the next day. I didn’t step on the line and my mother does not drink wine. I refused to fight Diana White. I didn’t step back from Patrick L. I didn’t back down from Harry B. But yeah I did rat out the football lineman that outweighed me by 50 pounds to the dean. I did feel the immediate remorse from smashing Danny H. for cutting in line during the sockball game. I was not an angry kid, but I faced the Crip in the alley, and boxed the other Crip at the playground to a 12 round decision the coach finally called. Technically, if you don’t quit you don’t lose. That’s why the gang of kids couldn’t steal my brother’s bike from me. I stood up to them at Crenshaw and Exposition and I never let go of the bike. I was scrappy. I could not be made to doubt myself. Only I could doubt myself.

I realized at some moment in the middle of my junior year in highschool that I was solving my own teenage angst. I did it without much assistance. I felt crazy but I knew I wasn’t. Lionel Ritchie helped.

Well, I've shared so many pains
And I've played so many games
Oh, but everyone finds the right way
Somehow, somewhere, someday.
-- Lionel Ritchie, 1977

So there was the world. Not laid out before me, but a massive puzzle of unknown dimensions where interestingly bright lights filtered through cracks and corners of the small boxes I lived in. There was beauty and adventure in that world. You didn’t have to tell me twice.

A Stoic Bottom Line

I am happy with my accomplishments in the moment.

I know that when I do 100 pushups, I know that when I fix the bug in the algorithm. I know when I cook a perfect steak. I know when my daughter tells me she loves and admires me. I know when I sit in the window seat of a plane on a trip that I deserve. I know when I clip the apex of the curve of a canyon road.

I look forward to doing things I’ve never done, and continuing to do things I enjoy. What else is there?

If you are unhappy because you haven’t climbed Mt. Everest, is your garage full of climbing gear?

I will repeat some of the best advice I’ve heard about this.

If your goal is to search for buried treasure, fall in love with your shovel.

There is no X on a map where you go and find perfect satisfaction. When you get there, you’ll find another X. There’s always another X. The X should be yourself. After all, you have the hands that grasp the shovel. You have the muscles that move the dirt. You have the eyes that search the land. Celebrate your ability to choose, to plan, to act, to fail, to learn, to persist.