Own your typhoon

“For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin – real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way. Something to be got through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.” – Alfred Souza

I found that quote by Alfred Souza in the most-read magazine in my mother’s house many, many years ago – way back in the 80s, that wacky decade of my youth now depressingly the subject of retro parties on college campuses (retro! the nerve!)

Being quoted in the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, New York Times, Fortune magazine—all that fluff and business blah-blah was nothing compared to the thrill for my mother when my name appeared in print in Reader’s Digest.

“Aunt Estaleen showed it to me at the beauty shop, and there you were!” she fairly well yelled into the phone on the Big Day. “I called Uncle Charles to tell him and he just cried,” she called back to say later. To merit two long distance calls in one day, you know the Reader’s Digest is big news in our family.

So, way back in the 80s, I was doing the absolute unthinkable when I found Souza’s quote about life’s obstacles in “Quotable Quotes” on one of those small pages near “Points to Ponder,” “Life in These United States,” “Day’s Work,” and “Humor in Uniform”:  I tore it out, a travesty, a Sin, an unforgivable selfishness.

Thinking fast, lest I be discovered disfiguring the Holy Grail, I slipped the wafer thin page into my passport where it remained as I flew around the world, ostensibly speaking at conferences but really just meeting interesting people, doing the polka at an Australian hoe-down with a British professor in his velvet smoking jacket, learning how to order beer in Serbian, Italian, Hebrew, and Czech, watching gorgeous sunsets over Wellington while eating delicious miniature stuffed pumpkins at the home of a high-ranking official in my Clearness Committee there, and forging lifelong friendships with Israeli tank commanders.

Every time I got on a flight, I found myself unfolding that page again, trying to remind myself that those flights weren’t an obstacle, they were my life. Then I lost my passport in Asia, along with Daddy’s last grocery list and Souza’s quote, its wisdom misplaced for years.

En route from Oregon to North Carolina recently, while in an airport gift shop searching for the newest People magazine (for my continuing research on the epistemological and phenomenological assessment of core American values, yeah, that’s it), I happened upon that favorite quote on a magnet. It was like finding an old friend, seeing that philosophy of life spelled out again.

What I’ve come to realize in the life I’ve lived since that inglorious moment of defacing my mother’s Reader’s Digest is how significantly and how powerfully we try to make life nice and neat, moving with surgical cleanness and methodical rapidity to our goals, feeling like everything that gets in the way (messy, messy) is just an obstacle rather than life itself, the process. That if we could get past these inconveniences and errands, if we could keep up with mowing the lawn, putting the new swing set together with its missing screws and bad instructions, cooking nightly dinners for our family, and getting the car inspected – if we could get past all that, then we could (if we just had that atelier in Paris or on a Greek island and a beautiful laptop with a 17” screen and one of those iPod Nanos with a lovely, handcrafted wooden case to listen to Joan Armatrading full volume while writing, and some significant amount of cash and good fountain pens and letterpress printed stationery), then we could finally write that great American novel, solve world hunger, and get a poem published in The New Yorker. I mean really, have you seen some of those poems?

We have an urge to get past the messy, messy once and for all. To get to that point of clarity where the “obstacles” fall away: the desk is clear and there are no toddlers running around with diapers half off, no teenagers remembering at breakfast that they need to make a full-scale plaster model of the universe by tomorrow morning—to clear the decks and make nice, make everything clear and nice and uninterruptible. Yes! When we get there, we will indeed be recognized as a genius! Then, our work in the world will be powerful! We will be on Oprah! Our ship will finally come in! We will save lives! We will miraculously be able to make a soufflé! We will know the difference between poison ivy and ivy, how to pronounce Csikszentmihalyi’s name, and fit into those jeans! All our plants will live and thrive, proving our mother-in-law wrong! If only all those pesky obstacles would go away.

When I worked on the Semester at Sea program, we hit rough weather (can you say typhoon?) three days into the ten-port voyage around the globe. As a result of damage to the ship, we were delayed going into several ports, which meant that in-country programs were altered or cancelled altogether. “I want my money back,” wailed one student. “We’re missing trips and that’s not fair,” he went further. “This isn’t the real Semester at Sea.” (“No,” I thought to myself, “we weren’t supposed to do emergency surgery in the Lounge on Promenade Deck to reattach fingers after the storm either, but tell that to those wayward digits.”). “Interesting perspective,” I replied. “but this is your Semester at Sea. This is the one you have, the only one, yours. There isn’t a more real one.”

The more he measured his Semester at Sea against the ideal one—the four-color brochure one—the less content he was, missing in the meantime the experience of this real one, the one he was actually experiencing, this trip of a lifetime, his. The obstacles were his Semester at Sea. (And, I might add—just as a fairytale becomes more interesting and engaging when bad things happen, just as Story needs Conflict to move forward, so too a four-month voyage at sea takes on an energy of its own when a typhoon provides the story spark. Talk about community building…but I digress).

The daily moments of decision and errands, all those trips to the grocery store and dry cleaners, those delayed and cancelled flights, the seasons of cookie dough sales to raise money for the band, the messy desk and less than ideal writing conditions, all those nights on the road sleeping under depressing hotel art depicting Mount Vesuvius and Bad Apples—they are all my life, not obstacles. I need to own my typhoon.

~*~ 37 Days: Do it Now Challenge ~*~

What is your perfect storm, those obstacles to achieving your dreams?

Own your typhoon; it isn’t an obstacle, no. It’s your life, that one wild and precious one, your only one, it.  You’re the eye of that storm.

(And throw away the four-color brochure. It’ll only make you miss the real thing.)