Mind Set Go

Each of us comes equipped with a story to share of how we feel today and how we think we got here, marked by up’s and down’s and people we’ve met along the way.  Those who know me know that I love telling stories—not lies, but the truths as I remember them.  I often pepper the stories with accents and anecdotes.  Today’s musings are about who you and I are and how we got “here,” wherever you might imagine here to be.

I have chosen this forum to connect and to widen the circle.  Choosing to be a lifelong learner doesn’t take a conscious choice, but action: daring to live here and now with the same heart and soul you possessed at age three.  If you can but let go of your adult traits that pull you down and define you, you can start to let your inner smile and curiosity guide you.  If, at some time along the way you made a conscious decision to grow up and fit your, perhaps preconceived, notion of what an adult is, what it looks like and how it behaves—or if that progression has “just” been some ever so gradual transformation, it doesn’t matter.  You’ve arrived.  Somewhere, perhaps, you were never even meant to be.  You are, afterall, here.  Aren’t you?

Firstly, imagine this.  You are not a victim of your environment.  You are part of that environment.  You can reimagine who you are, and in doing so, realize that that is not the fallacy for… you might, in fact, be living a fallacy of living a self-fulfilling prophesy that is so far removed from reality.  Only your mind can make you believe you are a victim of your environment.  Wake up, pull on your boots, strap on the damn saddle you’re not sure you know where it is or that you even have or ever had, and, for once, go for the ride of your life.  What, you might ask, am I talking about? 

I am suggesting that you have everything you need.  We can blame people for a box we put ourselves in if we would rather, however.  But what if… what if… for once (and for all) you stopped doing that.  Stopped envisioning who you are by what you think you’ve become over x number of years.  What if you could live like you were at age three, full of curiosity and wonder, where days lasted years and years melted into a lifetime?  What if instead of trying to say yes to something, you said no?

You are not a victim of your environment.  And, you can simply say no.  No to the self-incrimination.  No to injustices.  No to the limitations you, yourself, set for yourself.  Take a moment to embody that “no” and then reshape it into a “yes.”

Yes, I am imperfect: I am whole just as I am. 

Yes, I belong: I am part of this environment.  It’s not happening to me, but through me and with me as my guide and my friend.

Yes, I can breathe.  It’s free, and my breath is my own.  It lets the earth into my body where I absorb it, and it becomes a part of me.  A living, breathing part, grounded by feet rooted to the crumbs of the earth I can attempt to claim as my own.

When I was seven, my family’s station wagon pulled out of New Orleans and turned left.  (I have written about it before.) The trip consisted of a mother and father, a cooler and an amateur radio in the front seat, an almost seven year-old in the middle seat, and a ten-year-old boy in the far back.  Strapped on top were suitcases attached to a rack. 

My parents were both born in New Orleans, and they liked to travel.  But travelling with two kids, while not new, had its challenges.  What with me constantly asking, “Are we there yet?” and my brother mumbling over and over, “Does it have a pool?”  “It” presumably meaning, the motel.  You know, the motel where we did not have a reservation and that we just sort of assumed would be there when my mother or father could drive no more.  And, it always was. 

Sometimes the car would creep over gravel until we found one motel out of three with an available room; or, if they all had room, we’d make a choice of which one would be best based on the ratings in the AAA book, what it looked like from the outside and what rate had been quoted.  And, yes, okay, and whether it had a pool  Often it was just pure luck that there’d even be a room, any room, before, if not, we had to venture to the next town, seemingly never turning back to retrace our steps.

It was usually my father who was driving.  My mother had perfected the art of making sandwiches filled with deli meats and mayo, somehow keeping all that we didn’t eat cold in a Styrofoam cooler that squeaked and drove my dad insane.  (Well that, and the “Are we there yet” and Does it have a pool” retorts.)  When we’d stop for gas, guys, often clad in khaki or navy uniforms, would run out and fill the tank and “stare my dad down” for him to open the hood. Yes, these guys would open the car up, and check the oil, slam it shut and then wash the window. 

We’d all sit there watching him (it was always a him, by the way) wipe the squeegee over the bug-splattered windscreen.  It would make that squeaky sound as horrors of dirty water rivulets would melt into some unknown crevice at the top of the car, at the bottom of the windshield.  All of us would have already visited the bathroom, complete with a key suspended from a dirty wooden spatula or hand carved rectangle of wood or a dangling metal ring you could hang over the doorknob while you crouched and looked around at the tile, the dirt embedded in the corners and the grout, the dripping sink, the same pink powder dispenser with the same pink powder you had at school and a thing attached to the wall that somehow miraculously dispensed a clean towel in a circle of fabric you pulled on. 

I never once saw anyone refill one of those things.  Yet, there it was.  Another one.  You’d touch the corners you hoped were clean, and you’d pull and there, miraculously, in front of you would be clean, ironed, starched fabric you would crumple in your hands, removing the water but not the scent of the pink powder you just scratched into your palms.  You’d run back to the car, looking for cars that might hit you along the way, but there’d be none.  Just bottle caps and gravel and eventually tumble weed and the ever-evasive carbons ripped out from the credit card holder that had already moved from the office, to the car, to under your parent’s scribble of a signature.  The guy would rip off the carbon and the receipt, and hand the card and receipt back to your dad in a window rolled down by hand.  Those carbon papers that made the copy beneath it by having ink on one side never made it to the big garbage barrel next to the car between the pumps.  Or if it did, when the barrel would be emptied, it would be another chance for it to escape and whirl in the wind.

And then the station wagon and our family would continue down the path to unknown in the almost same fashion we had started.  We’d be on our way wherever that was. 

Back when I was seven, I could remember being three years old, by the way.  (I still can, obviously, or I wouldn’t be sharing the memories today.)  I remembered being three and walking around and seeing papers for Kennedy stapled on telephone poles filled with old staples and little scraps and corners of paper ripped off.  I remembered my parents being very sad when my grandmother died.  I remembered riding my tricycle around the block and my father attempting to get some fresh air, to clear his head of the injustices of losing both a president and a mother to things that seemed preventable: an assassination for one, and emphysema for the other.  But “now” was different.  We were on an adventure and those old rubber tires were taking us somewhere new.  Somewhere we had never been.

The intent, I’d later learn, was to go to the Grand Canyon.  But we made it as far as Colorado.  We made it to the corners of four states.  We swam in the springs in Colorado Springs.  I marveled at the signs showing the curvy path of the road ahead, much different than rectangular grids of city streets.  And I had asked when we started the journey, “Is this a hill?”  “How about now?”  “What does a mountain look like?”  My brother seemed to know, for he didn’t ask.  He was in the back chewing on some beef jerky, seeing how long he could make his stash last, weaving some leather moccasins he had purchased in the last stop.  And we’d beg after seeing teasing signs.  “Can we stop to see the dinosaur bones?” or the rock shop, or the Indian reservation. 

For me I was mesmerized by the native Americans.  I danced their dances.  I somehow felt the powerful energy and yes, perhaps even pain, in each pulsation of lndian drum.  I had, after all, been the kid who didn’t think it was right, all the one-sided views of interactions between cowboys and Indians on black and white screens.  But I was awarded some brown cowgirl boots I treasured from that trip and the little round silver and turquoise ring I picked out from a piece of foam covered in slits and rings, handed to me by a wrinkled and chapped native American hand.  I treasured the gold cross I received even if it didn’t match my ring.  It was a birthday to remember.

For years ahead, I’d dance in the bell-encrusted fur I strapped on my ankles by leather “strings” that seemed to pop out from either end, remembering meeting new people with new songs not new at all.  Just new to me.  But first, I would dance those dances until the next year when the car would come out of New Orleans and turn right and introduce me to Cherokees, the time in the Great Smoky Mountains.  I would sip spring water.  Hold rocks. 

We didn’t have rocks in New Orleans.  We had rock shows.  But no unpolished rocks.  Just black fertile soil at the base of a mighty river. Rocks, to me, are treasures, something my mother taught me.  My dad would teach me the names of some of the rocks at rock shows that came to town, where my brother and I could each have a soft bag that closed with a cinch you’d pull at the top, filled with various colors of stones magically polished, soft, cold and smooth.

Yes.  I was there.  And you were, too.  You were where you were.  You may have forgotten a lot along the way.  Maybe some of my memories conjure up some memories of your own.  Maybe you don’t remember what happened when you were three or seven, but it doesn’t matter.  You have a history.  It is yours.  Your memories of it, or lack thereof, are your own.  You can’t hold them in the palm of your hand.  And they do not define you.  What does, however, may surprise you.

You may mistakenly believe that you are defined by your own expectations of who you perceive you should be and are at this moment.  I would challenge that, myself, and if I were you, that who you are, the who and what you believe you are, is not so limited and clear-cut.  You are much more.  We all are.  But like a vise grip, we choke out possibility, we sprinkle that with bias, we murder it with poisons, we laugh at it like our group-think proves it to be so, and we blame “it” all on others.  And we don’t even know what “it” is. 

So why three years old, you might ask?  What is so magical about that age?  And why seven? 

I ask, “Why not?”  Why not jump into cowgirl or boy boots.  Why not take them off and jump rope, barefoot on damp moss-covered bricks?  Why not fall down and get back up?   Life is not a rat race run by a conveyor belt we generate with human-made energy.

So, you are not a victim of your environment unless you allow yourself to be.  You have everything you need if you just open your eyes to see, open your ears to hear.  If you just reach out and realize you are not alone and have never been.  The days come and the days go, and you are with them, every ebb and flow.  Your senses are powerful.  Your mind can be open and opened.  You can laugh.  You can cry.  You can fall.  You can get up.  Your body wants to heal.  The little round wound you inspect on your knee will get better.  That dirt the Band-Aids made eventually wears off, perhaps with a little coaxing.  You will make friends along the way.  You will say hello, and you will say goodbye.  And one day, when you are at the end of your life, you will breathe one more breath, taking in the earth’s air and moisture, and your heart, too, will cease to beat. 

You are not a victim.  You are whole.  You matter.  You can smile knowing that your journey was your own, however marred by your bias of it, and that each of us is equal, equally worthy, capable of kindness and joy, of grace and gratitude. 

Live the good life.  You’re not reinventing yourself.  You’re allowing yourself to be the whole person you have always been but perhaps stumbled and forgot along the way.  So sip your tea or your sherry or whatever floats your boat and let the droplet of refreshment fill the depths of your soul with worthiness and purpose.  Find the beat of your drum, and dance to it.