What are we doing?

Many of us are readers, who will open a new book, read a blog post every morning and through all of the reading have a desire to find.

I remember when my business was plummeting, my life was full of pain, struggle was my existence.  At the time I was working at an airline as a baggage handler where I would work back to back shifts for two and a half straight days so I could get 5 eight hour shifts in and still have four and a half days to work at my failing business.

The job was manual labor and I would wear cargo pants so I could carry around a book in my pocket.  Anytime the work would pause, in between flights etc, I would just sit where I was and read.  I read a lot of Grisham, a lot of the Bible, Machiavelli, and much more.  In an ironic turn, I read the Four Hour Work Week there for the first time there, and then a few more times!

I remember diving into a new book hoping there was an answer.  The Four Hour Work Week was brand new and I thought maybe I was catching a wave before anybody else.  Machiavelli was not new, but I thought maybe there was a jewel inside that was now powerful in a changed world.  The craziest part is all of the books I read did have the secrets, did have the nugget I needed.  It just turned out that it was like finding a check for a million dollars while stranded in the woods, it's worthless.

So much of our lives are spent searching and yet what do we do when we find?  I remember sitting at the kitchen table looking Kelsey in the eyes and deciding to close down our business.  I knew it was the answer, the right thing to do, it would give us freedom and the ability to succeed so much more than if we kept it alive.  That being said, two nights ago, probably three years later to the day, I woke up bathed in sadness over the closing of the business.

I was vividly dreaming of the faces I used to see everyday, and my heart slumped over the side of the bed, its face in its hands.

Many of us are looking for an answer, but not many people are advising us to pay attention to what we are doing.  If you are taking a pill to feel better that just means you are taking a pill to feel better, it doesn't matter if a doctor prescribed it to you.  If you are living without purpose do you really think that having sex with somebody will help with purpose, your just having sex with somebody.  And on the other side, if your whole world hurts and you are still closing down a business because that is the right thing to do does it matter how you feel?

Pay attention to what you are doing.

That being said, I've hidden inside of a lot of things because I refused to admit what I was doing somewhere else.  Sometimes what I was hiding inside of was the thing I needed to change... but all I care about now is the doing.

To the best of my knowledge there are a few people out there who get this, but very few of those few people are Christians and that bothers me.  It bothers me because we should be the ones who know what to do, we had a pretty good example.  And it really bothers me because I could use the help personally.

Quitting Christianity

Seth Godin had an amazing post recently about those people.  The idea is that many leaders believe there is a chunk of society destined to be those people, or as Seth describes them:

You know, the people who will flip burgers or sweep streets or fill out forms all day. The ones who will be brainwashed into going into debt, into buying more than they can afford, to living lives that quietly move from one assigned task or one debt payment to another. If they're lucky.

The truth is that the group that is the worst at this is corporate Christianity.  Christian leaders who think the members of their church are only capable of paying down debt so they can tithe more, serving by helping park cars at the most and sitting quietly in the pews one day a week.

Do you realize in the Bible they voted a guy in charge of the canned food ministry named Steve and this guy kicked so much ass that somebody who later wrote half the new testament murdered him.  That is a heck of a canned food ministry.

When England had gone too far a small group of people split off and eventually started the United States of America, when the Catholic church had gone too far a guy named Luther split off and and eventually the 500 Club was started.  The question for today is, is it time to quit Christianity and start following Jesus again?

To the best of my recollection, Jesus only used those people, Jesus was one of those people.

Suburbanites and why I'm special

This idea of individuality in the United States right now is amazing.  The vast majority of people between the ages of 30 and 60 live exactly the same and pride themselves on individuality.  I know a really sweet couple that are living in Portland, fighting the system, being individuals.  They are vegan and very cutting edge.  I know another couple that live deep in the burbs in Colorado who are extremely dull edged, eating lots of refined white carbs and processed meat-like substances.  They are extremely worried about how they are doing as parents and love doing work on their house because it really spotlights who they are as individuals.

All of this to say, both couples would probably be upset if you told them they were the same.  I think the one couple in Portland fights against the current sometimes and the other couple seem to be just letting the riptide take them out to sea but both are heading in the same direction.

The question I am wrestling with recently is that intentions mean very little.  If you intend on fighting the system but you wake up at forty with two poorly behaving kids, a late model car, three hundred thousand dollar house, a job you don't enjoy going to, only consuming with very little contributing, does it matter how you vote, what cool tattoos you have or what drugs you did in your twenties?

If you end up in a box in a row, driving an audi instead of a Cadillac, consuming fixed gear bikes (heavily used in artistic cycling) instead of bed bath and beyond does it matter?  And I say it in a very general sense, does it matter?

I don't understand why the hipsters of our generation are completely ignoring the hippies of the last generation?  Hippies who are broke, ailing in health, leaning heavily on the system they fought and generally coated in a great malaise about how things used to be.

This all being said, I am not sure what we are supposed to do in our twenties and thirties to fight this outcome, but I'm working on that and dammit, that makes me an individual.

Riptide

I took a roadtrip this past week down from Olympia to Portland and then across to the 101 all the way to San Francisco.  The trip was long, fun, slow and an intensely American experience.  One of the stops we made in Oregon had a warning sign about what to do if you are caught in a riptide and being pulled out into the ocean.  The advise is to swim sideways, because if you do nothing you could end up miles out to sea and if you try to fight the overwhelming current you will only exhaust yourself.  Swimming sideways is counter-intuitive, but getting out of the overwhelming current is all that is important.

The current that is society pulls so strongly on us that we often feel the need to fight against it, or to just give up and see where it takes us.  Both are bad ideas.  We must exit the current all together, swimming sideways.  I'm not totally sure how to do this practically but tomorrow we will dig deeper into Portland, fighting the current and hipster suburbanites that are just part of the system.