I’ve had my share of adventures. Long hitchhiking, backpacking into the Sierra Mountains of Mexico to find the artistic Huichols, several years in the Venezuelan Amazon to live with an assortment of Indian people, as well as a slew of sometimes stupid mind-altered celestial navigations – all more than the Ozzi and Harriet path to sublime middle-class bliss. These have been nothing compared to many others: imprisonment in the Russian gulag, battles of war, and much, much longer travels that have taken large chunks of people’s lives. Just down the road, some neighbors have a son who leads white-water expeditions and works in Antarctica in the off-season; then there is a friend who hitchhiked to Columbia from Boston, only stopping when he happened into a congenital war zone; those others who have rowed across the Atlantic, skied to the North Pole, lived years with monks in Tibet – the list goes on and on. Many adventures were planned, while some only intuited. Some of the most fearsome, however, just happened. That would apply to many incarcerated or caught in war zones. But many others of this nature happen to many of us every day, and more or less right at our doorstep.
Divorce. I could say proudly that I have never gotten a divorce, but that would be nit-picking, and really only a reflection of a particular life-style. Because I was something of a bum and perennial student, I was not really marriage material for any mentally stable woman, but I have had my share of long-term relationships gone wrong. Some were devastating, but none had the rupture of property and the responsibility of children that many undergoing divorce have. I have seen this up close, as all of us have, and it would be an understatement to say that this is one of those not-wanted adventures that is truly life-altering. Like many adventures, such an experience can leave one broken, or forever partially broken, or, ultimately free to find a better course of life. I have witnessed all three results, as far as time will allow, and thus I feel that I can truly categorize this as an adventure that steps beyond my own paltry offerings.
In chosen adventure, we are often looking for a path to growth, even if we do not realize it. In the unchosen adventure of divorce, we might find even greater growth, in part through our realization that, unwanted as it may be, we have somehow contributed to its cause. But still, the greatest adventures are those that come to us without our wishes and beyond our past actions. They are not only for those who are caught in a war zone, like some hapless Pole in 1939 Europe. And they happen eventually to us all.
This adventure is called “disease,” which has a curiously neutral base: dis-ease, as if it were some mild discomfort like jock itch. It is that, but someday, that word will mean much more to each and every one of us. Often it happens in old age and, since we cannot cure old age, we shrug such stuff off (when it happens to someone else) and call it “normal,” which it is, although it isn’t. Regardless of age, that last death-carrying illness changes almost all of us – some are comatose in the final stages – in the most fundamental of ways. It is the greatest adventure to the sick and dying, but often to those close to the sick and dying as well. This many of us also have experience. When it involves the very old, we eventually carry on. When it involves those that it shouldn’t, it is often nearly as much of an adventure to the care-taker as it is to the sick person.
In the book A Path Revealed, by Carlen Maddox, we find a successful man (the author) in such a situation. A former high school quarterback and varsity basketball player, we can assume that Carlen had a better sense of self-esteem than most of us. He was smart as well, graduating from a good university and eventually landing a job as a journalist in a major Florida newspaper. Not long after graduation, he met the girl of his dreams and was married less than a year later, with little drama and heartbreak as far he lets us know. As children came, success matured and he was able to start his own periodical – which, like most else in his life, was a success. His wife worked for political campaigns with great success as well in between raising the three kids, and all, it seemed, was going as a good life should. And then a gash appeared in the glossy exterior of their lives.
Martha, Carlen’s wife, began to forget things. Her ebullient mood began to change to depression and lethargy. After appointments with the doctor, it was concluded with certainty that she had Alzheimer’s. The shock in it was that she had just turned fifty.
I am just under half-way through the book, but we find all the tell-tale signs of unwanted adventure almost immediately.
Adventure is a rupture of the everyday to bring in something new. For the Maddox family, this happened immediately. The relationship changed from that between equals to that between the terminally ill and the caretaker, which was perhaps the hardest first shift, but soon after they began travelling to try to help – or even cure – the disease. We find that the latter was impossible, but the former…
One of the first trips was to see a nun in Tennessee who was noted as someone particularly good with terminal illnesses. One of the most stunning things that she said was, “Now you are on a spiritual journey.” One might say that we are always on a spiritual journey, but the good sister was very accurate, for we seldom see regular, plodding life as a journey. That is why we seek adventures. By saying what she did, she exposed the reason behind the great unwanted adventures: to make us realize that we are on a spiritual journey, not just because of the disease, but in spite of it. But it is the disease that makes us realize it.
And realize it they do, with all the hardships that a real adventure has, times 10 (I have long bastardized Thomas Edison’s famous quote, “genius is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration” to “adventure is 10% excitement and 90% misery.”) It is real, as any real adventure is, with terror, disappointment, despondency, anger – and the occasional insight. It has, so far, made for a thrilling story.
Having already read the book flap, I know that the two discover something great and true in this trial. I await tonight’s reading with great expectations. But this is what the face of adventure really is – this challenge that strips us of all we thought we knew. It is awful, and unlike an “adventure” in a popular movie, the ending is not happy, at least as we might hope. We know before reading the book that Martha worsens predictably and dies. What kind of adventure is this? We might ask. Give us “Pirates of the Caribbean”!
But fun adventures eventually ring hollow. We are real stuff in a hard world and we demand – something in us demands – the real thing. No more BS, as some might say. And this is it, this dying, our real adventure, no BS, no joke. It is what we were made for, because we make of ourselves something else – something, like Ozzi and Harriette, that is not real. Oddly, we convince ourselves that the real – the spiritual – is the fantasy and the fantasy – the normal life – is the real. And then we pine deep in our soul for the real. And we get it, but not as we would wish. Like growing up in the normal world, we have to go through hard knocks first, but the jump between the normal, as we call it, and the real, becomes too great for mild lessons. The normal becomes too normal. All must be broken and rebuilt. And all eventually is.
Carlen Maddux understands this far better than I, for he has been through the whole thing (and still awaits his own real thing). For me, there is more fear in this final enlightenment than joy, but I see from the first half that he is finding that his Christian God (he allows for other faiths, but this, as he says, is what he knows) is one of love. This still eludes me, and so I will read on and will read others who know more than I. But I do know of the hardship, and I do know that it is necessary. I do know this because of my own impenetrable ignorance as to what living a real life really means. I feel the lack. I have adventured because of it. Still, I have to learn the love which those who come out the other side say there is, after all the pain and the terror of this very real adventure. FK
Divorce. I could say proudly that I have never gotten a divorce, but that would be nit-picking, and really only a reflection of a particular life-style. Because I was something of a bum and perennial student, I was not really marriage material for any mentally stable woman, but I have had my share of long-term relationships gone wrong. Some were devastating, but none had the rupture of property and the responsibility of children that many undergoing divorce have. I have seen this up close, as all of us have, and it would be an understatement to say that this is one of those not-wanted adventures that is truly life-altering. Like many adventures, such an experience can leave one broken, or forever partially broken, or, ultimately free to find a better course of life. I have witnessed all three results, as far as time will allow, and thus I feel that I can truly categorize this as an adventure that steps beyond my own paltry offerings.
In chosen adventure, we are often looking for a path to growth, even if we do not realize it. In the unchosen adventure of divorce, we might find even greater growth, in part through our realization that, unwanted as it may be, we have somehow contributed to its cause. But still, the greatest adventures are those that come to us without our wishes and beyond our past actions. They are not only for those who are caught in a war zone, like some hapless Pole in 1939 Europe. And they happen eventually to us all.
This adventure is called “disease,” which has a curiously neutral base: dis-ease, as if it were some mild discomfort like jock itch. It is that, but someday, that word will mean much more to each and every one of us. Often it happens in old age and, since we cannot cure old age, we shrug such stuff off (when it happens to someone else) and call it “normal,” which it is, although it isn’t. Regardless of age, that last death-carrying illness changes almost all of us – some are comatose in the final stages – in the most fundamental of ways. It is the greatest adventure to the sick and dying, but often to those close to the sick and dying as well. This many of us also have experience. When it involves the very old, we eventually carry on. When it involves those that it shouldn’t, it is often nearly as much of an adventure to the care-taker as it is to the sick person.
In the book A Path Revealed, by Carlen Maddox, we find a successful man (the author) in such a situation. A former high school quarterback and varsity basketball player, we can assume that Carlen had a better sense of self-esteem than most of us. He was smart as well, graduating from a good university and eventually landing a job as a journalist in a major Florida newspaper. Not long after graduation, he met the girl of his dreams and was married less than a year later, with little drama and heartbreak as far he lets us know. As children came, success matured and he was able to start his own periodical – which, like most else in his life, was a success. His wife worked for political campaigns with great success as well in between raising the three kids, and all, it seemed, was going as a good life should. And then a gash appeared in the glossy exterior of their lives.
Martha, Carlen’s wife, began to forget things. Her ebullient mood began to change to depression and lethargy. After appointments with the doctor, it was concluded with certainty that she had Alzheimer’s. The shock in it was that she had just turned fifty.
I am just under half-way through the book, but we find all the tell-tale signs of unwanted adventure almost immediately.
Adventure is a rupture of the everyday to bring in something new. For the Maddox family, this happened immediately. The relationship changed from that between equals to that between the terminally ill and the caretaker, which was perhaps the hardest first shift, but soon after they began travelling to try to help – or even cure – the disease. We find that the latter was impossible, but the former…
One of the first trips was to see a nun in Tennessee who was noted as someone particularly good with terminal illnesses. One of the most stunning things that she said was, “Now you are on a spiritual journey.” One might say that we are always on a spiritual journey, but the good sister was very accurate, for we seldom see regular, plodding life as a journey. That is why we seek adventures. By saying what she did, she exposed the reason behind the great unwanted adventures: to make us realize that we are on a spiritual journey, not just because of the disease, but in spite of it. But it is the disease that makes us realize it.
And realize it they do, with all the hardships that a real adventure has, times 10 (I have long bastardized Thomas Edison’s famous quote, “genius is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration” to “adventure is 10% excitement and 90% misery.”) It is real, as any real adventure is, with terror, disappointment, despondency, anger – and the occasional insight. It has, so far, made for a thrilling story.
Having already read the book flap, I know that the two discover something great and true in this trial. I await tonight’s reading with great expectations. But this is what the face of adventure really is – this challenge that strips us of all we thought we knew. It is awful, and unlike an “adventure” in a popular movie, the ending is not happy, at least as we might hope. We know before reading the book that Martha worsens predictably and dies. What kind of adventure is this? We might ask. Give us “Pirates of the Caribbean”!
But fun adventures eventually ring hollow. We are real stuff in a hard world and we demand – something in us demands – the real thing. No more BS, as some might say. And this is it, this dying, our real adventure, no BS, no joke. It is what we were made for, because we make of ourselves something else – something, like Ozzi and Harriette, that is not real. Oddly, we convince ourselves that the real – the spiritual – is the fantasy and the fantasy – the normal life – is the real. And then we pine deep in our soul for the real. And we get it, but not as we would wish. Like growing up in the normal world, we have to go through hard knocks first, but the jump between the normal, as we call it, and the real, becomes too great for mild lessons. The normal becomes too normal. All must be broken and rebuilt. And all eventually is.
Carlen Maddux understands this far better than I, for he has been through the whole thing (and still awaits his own real thing). For me, there is more fear in this final enlightenment than joy, but I see from the first half that he is finding that his Christian God (he allows for other faiths, but this, as he says, is what he knows) is one of love. This still eludes me, and so I will read on and will read others who know more than I. But I do know of the hardship, and I do know that it is necessary. I do know this because of my own impenetrable ignorance as to what living a real life really means. I feel the lack. I have adventured because of it. Still, I have to learn the love which those who come out the other side say there is, after all the pain and the terror of this very real adventure. FK
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