When Twenty Meets Fifty
“Dad, I’ve been invited to go to Japan and dance for a year.”
Japan. Dance. Year. I must not have heard her right. It almost sounded little my daughter had just told me that she had been invited to go to Japan to dance for a year. That she was, by extension, actually thinking about doing this. That she was thinking about dropping out of University, after having attended for just one quarter, so she could go to some far off land and dance. For a year.
“Dad, I’ve been invited to go to Japan and dance for a year.” My brain struggled to catch up with the second and third order implications of what my one and only daughter had just told me as she and I were driving from San Francisco to the University of California, Irvine where she was due to start her second quarter the very next day. It was like she had said, “Dad, I’ve been invited by NASA to be the first woman to go to Mars, and I won’t be back for a really long time.”
“Really, that’s very exciting,” I heard my mouth saying. “How long have you known about this?”
“I got an e-mail from Dax two days ago.”
Dax is a former dance partner who had gone to Japan the previous year to dance at Universal Studios. At that time, he had asked Emily if she wanted to skip out on her final year of high school to go dance in Japan . . . something we were tentatively willing to support, but something Emily had finally declined to do. We know Dax, and actually think he’s a swell guy . . . even if was trying to spirit our daughter away to Mars.
“They really need me.”
“Well, where’s the surprise there? You’re a fabulous performer, a Swing Dance champion. You’re beautiful. You’ve got it all going on. Of course they need you.”
“So what’s the deal? When would they want you to go?”
“February”. The word reverberated in my brain. Febbbbbbbbbbbbb-ruuuuuuuuuu-aaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrr-yyyyyyyyy.
“Really, when in February?”
I was hoping against hope here. The school quarter is ten weeks. End of February was eight weeks. Wiggle and waggle a bit, and she could at least finish the quarter. That would be two out of three quarters. Almost a whole school year. That would be good. She’d practically be a second year!
Best of all, I wouldn’t have to think of my baby girl—the one I held in my arms not more than, well, nineteen years ago but it seems like about 20 minutes ago—heading off to the next nearest M-class planet twelve billion light years from here for nearly three months!
“I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure it’s the first week of February.”
“Really?” That was four weeks. That meant no second quarter. So much for that.
Hearing the Call
It’s not like I didn’t understand the draw. It’s not like I hadn’t heard the call of adventure myself. Indeed, for the past year I have thought of little else other than finding and being true to a life calling, my own private heroic journey, my own true purpose. But I hadn’t expected my daughter to be so eager to get her own journey started. What about school? What about academic angst? What about a leisurely stroll through an exploration of philosophy, psychology, economics, history, science, and all the rest? What about it?
Even in my semi-shocked state, I couldn’t miss the ironic juxtaposition of my own middle-aged, life-purpose musings, and my daughter’s coming-of-age yearning. It was like two voices of one being arguing for a soul’s destiny.
“Dad, I’ve been invited to go to Japan and dance for a year.” Beneath her words, I could hear Joseph Campbell intoning . . .
A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man. (Campbell, Hero With 1000 Faces)
The fact that my daughter was keening to “venture forth” and see what the world of dance might hold for her was not only understandable, but entirely predictable. We’re all wired for this sort of thing. Whether we admit it or not, we want to see the panoply of our lives stretched upon a canvas of heroic proportions. While the mind loves outcomes and nice orderly, packaged results, the soul craves experience and discovery. The soul demands that we head out of town where everything is familiar and well ordered, and go down to the dark scary lake and dive in. At the end of the day, we want to tell ourselves that we did something of consequence. That we found our purpose and followed it. That we found a passion and fed it.
Listen to the words from the epic poem Beowulf, the tap root for modern day heroic tales like Lord of the Rings and Star Wars. The hero, having vanquished the evil monster Grendel, finds he must meet yet a greater challenge, the mother of the monster that lies in wait at the bottom of a lake.
A few miles from here
A frost-stiffened wood waits and keeps watch
Above a mere; the overhanging bank
Is a maze of tree-roots mirrored in its surface.
At night there, something uncanny happens:
The water burns. And the mere bottom
Has never been sounded by the sons of men.
On its bank, the heather-stepper halts:
The hart in flight from pursuing hounds
Will turn to face them with firm-set horns
And die in the wood rather than dive
Beneath its surface.
The mere—the lake of the soul—the bottom of which no man has ever seen. A wellspring that burns. What lies beneath the surface of this water that is so foreboding, that a stag in flight will turn and face death at the hand of the pursuing hunter rather than dive in and swim to safety? Passion? Adventure? Desire? Desperation? Most of us would rather live in the deadening world of the intellect than dive into the depths of our soul and find our real purpose.
These are wonderful words when spoken in the abstract; when read in a book from the safety of a comfy chair. But how much different they sound when they take the form of, “Dad, I’ve been invited to go to Japan and dance for a year.” From where I sat, driving down Interstate 5, my daughter was headed for that lake outside of town, and I was afraid. Afraid that she might not come back. Afraid that she might not finish school. Afraid that she might like dancing so much that she would follow that passion and never get a “real job.” Afraid that she would doom herself to a life of artistic poverty and ugly toenails.
But it was worse than that. At a deeper level, her restlessness felt like a direct challenge reaching across time from my own past. Although this adventure was clearly about her, the reverberations stirred the surface of my own personal mere. The voice of her youth, filled with the promise of a life just beginning to find its timber, welled up to challenge my own life-journey reverie, to sound my own depths. “Am I following my bliss?” In Joseph Campbell’s words:
“The heroic life is living the individual adventure. There is no security in following the call to adventure. Nothing is exciting if you know what the outcome is going to be. To refuse the call means stagnation. What you don’t experience positively you will experience negatively.
You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path. Where there is a way or path, it is someone else’s path. You are not on your own path. If you follow someone else’s way, you are not going to realize your potential.” (The Joseph Campbell Companion)
Am I following my bliss? There’s the question that was really haunting me.
Following my own Path
Time has a way of softening the edges of memory, but I don’t think I’m stretching things to say that I have never wanted to do things the “normal way.” I put those words in quotes in full recognition that there is no such thing. My journey hasn’t necessarily been blissful, and I can’t say that it has always felt purposeful, but it has been mine. So the fact that my daughter was proposing to go her own way comes as no surprise. All I have to do is think back to hear my own youthful sensibilities echoing in her words.
During my sophomore year in high school, I realized that I would have enough credits to graduate after three years, not four. Most of my peers intended to take advanced placement courses their fourth year, or perhaps work. I decided to skip the whole thing and go to college at the age of 16.
To my long-suffering father’s amazement, I applied to only one school, was accepted, and went. The amazement wasn’t that I did all that, but that I declined to test myself in one of the top schools. I had the standing (top ten in my class), grades, and test scores to have gone almost anywhere. Instead, I picked a tiny school on a bluff in Southern Illinois that about 22 people had ever heard of. It had a lovely campus, had a religious affiliation that worked for me, and afforded a lot of interaction with the professors. That’s what I told myself as I gave the lake outside of town a wide berth. In truth, I think I was afraid of what I would find if I really put myself to the test. I wasn’t ready to dive in.
Two years later, bored out of my mind and looking for a bigger challenge, I transferred from that little school to a much bigger school in Washington D.C., there to be closer to the action in my chosen major . . . Political Science.
Poly Sci was and is a major for people who don’t know what they want to be or do. At the time, it seemed somehow more virtuous than being an English Lit or History major, but didn’t require the commitment of engineering or one of the hard sciences, or the practical thinking implied in taking courses in business or accounting. It also felt like a good holding pattern for my proclaimed interest in following my father’s footsteps into the law. Why law? Big Game Hunter had fallen from favor and I had somewhere lost my grade seven interest in becoming an architect, or my passing fantasy of becoming a famous photographer.
My time in Washington was well spent if academics were the measure. I haven’t checked in awhile . . . and will if I decide to run for public office . . . but I distinctly recall graduating with summa or magna honors, having covered my report cards with “A’s” and a couple of rogue “B’s”. I also spent far too little time carousing and experiencing whatever it is that Washington had to offer. Instead, I spent nearly every waking hour in the library or staring at a succession of unyieldingly blank pieces of paper glaring back at me from round the roll of my Olympia manual typewriter.
My matriculation brought me front and center with a question I might have given more thought to prior to donning the old cap and gown. “What am I going to do with my life?” At that moment, and for many moments afterwards, the thought of going to law school for another two years just seemed more that I could bear. I can remember thinking to myself in a moment of youthful hubris that a person with my talent, drive, and education ought to be able to make it in this world.
So I decided to open an outdoor store, a glorious fantasy given the times and the burbling interest in getting back to nature that had been brought on by the oil shock a few years before. In truth, I didn’t much care for backpacking, having done it about four times one summer as a camp counselor, but there was gear involved, I am a guy, and you know how it is with guys and gear.
My letters to the various manufacturers generated very little direct interest, but led me in a roundabout way to a small chain of outdoor stores headquartered in Williamsport, PA called “Nippenose.” It turns out that the company was to open a store in Rochester, New York. As I had grown up in that very city, and was able to demonstrate some small aptitude for the grosser points of retailing hiking boots, backpacks, tents, sleeping bags, and all the related clothing and paraphernalia., I was hired as an assistant manager for the staggering sum of $800 a month, which was about $800 more a month than I’d ever earned up until then. I chucked my plans to open my own store and joined the ranks of the full-time employed.
Once again, my exceedingly patient father was left in complete amazement, but was nice enough to keep his opinion to himself while he watched four years of college go off to work selling down vests and freeze dried Chicken a la King.
But I was having an adventure. I was going my own way, finding my path in a world of my own discovery, far from the madding crowds of academia and most definitely not along the path that my parents, or their parents had chosen (my father was an attorney, my mother a teacher, her mother a teacher and father a university professor, my father’s father an immigrant turned accountant turned self-made millionaire). And I wasn’t afraid. Maybe not challenged either, but not afraid. I had entered the woods at the place of my own choosing. The mere was still waiting.
Adventure Beckons
In the middle of all this happy underemployment, the phone rang. It was one of my chums from college days. After a year working for some worthy cause in Washington D.C., Ron had decided to move to Alaska to work on the crab boats. He had bought a Ford Bronco and intended to drive it first to Seattle, then put it on a boat up to Alaska, and then disembark and drive to Kodiak and catch on with a crew for a life of adventure and high wages. It was like a three decade precursor to “Dad, I’ve been invited to go to Japan and dance for a year,” with the word “Alaska” substituted for “Japan,” and “crabbing” for “dancing.”
This was practically a dream come true. My relative antipathy to backpacking notwithstanding, I had read more than my share of outdoor adventure stories as a kid, had loved Jack London’s Call of the Wild, and had spent more than a few spare moments at Nippenose reading about one epic outdoor adventure after another in the various books and periodicals we carried.
Alaska had its own topical allure, as construction of the North Slope to Valdez pipeline was going full bore, and every young man from far and wide had heard tales of the fantastic paychecks to be had. The crab boats offered similarly grand promises of personal wealth if you could get past the part about long hours, dreadful working conditions, and getting tossed about by thirty foot waves while vomiting your guts out for days at a time.
I thought, I dreamed, I schemed, and in the end, I clutched. It wasn’t the high seas that did it. In fact, I’m not really sure what it was that kept me from jumping in. Maybe I was scared. Maybe it just wasn’t my path, as exciting as it sounded. The upshot was that while I declined to go all the way, I did sign up to drive across the country in that wretchedly uncomfortable Bronco as far as Seattle, there to see my friend Ron off for his year of adventure.
On the plane home, and for many weeks thereafter, I vowed by all that was holy to me, that the next time an adventure came along, regardless of what it was, I was going. While kicking myself for having chickened out, assuming that’s what I had done, I steeled myself for what I dearly hoped would be a second shot at the brass ring . . . continued >
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Last modified:
05/03/06