The Writing on the Wall

The Writing on the Wall

I can’t believe what I’m seeing.  I’m looking at the screen of my computer, and on that screen, above my furiously clicking fingers; letters are hastily lining up along the horizon of the page.  I know it’s my fingers that are typing it, and I reckon it must be my brain telling my fingers to do it, but I still can’t believe what I’m seeing.  The words say, “…And I realized that I probably owe you an apology…” Am I writing an apology letter?

If someone had asked me this morning whether or not I would spend my evening writing an apology letter to a girl I dated years ago, I would have answered with an emphatic no.  But now, here are my fingers typing just such a document.  Against the glow of my computer screen, I watch the cowardly letters obey my fingers’ commands and leap into position.  Am I typing this?  “…I sure wish I didn't drag you through 2 years of rottenness on my way to this point in my life, but I did - and I'm sorry.”

The admission of guilt I’m penning right now is addressed to a girl who I’m certain would prefer to never hear from me again.  But here I am - allowing ten rogue digits on my keyboard’s home row to compose an apology letter to her. 

My fingers order another string of letters into a row that says,  “…I want you to know that I acknowledge my previous shortcomings, and I am sorry for them.”

I shoot a glance down at the SEND button and wonder if I’ll really send this correspondence or if I’m just writing it to sort out my own thoughts – my own thoughts concerning why I was so unhappy back when we were together and why I was such a terrible partner.  Is this really the kind of thing I will send, or is it simply me reflecting, in print, upon the things I accused her of back then? 

What was it that I accused her of?  I accused her of making me unhappy, of making my life unfulfilling.  Of course, I can see now it wasn’t her fault.  She wasn’t the reason I was unhappy and unfulfilled.

 So, what was responsible for all my discontent back then and why did I feel disillusioned?

I take my fingers away from the keypad before they have a chance to align any more unsanctioned sentences, and I think about my student Saeed and his black magic marker in class today.  Somehow, I think Saeed, and his propensity for magic-marker graffiti, will help me understand what my problem really was all those years ago. 

*********************************************************************************

Saeed is an adorable, gap-toothed hellion in my English class who loves nothing more than sabotaging my lessons with his charming misbehavior. As bad as he often acts, his dark eyes and singular mouth make him hard to dislike.

In Saeed’s classroom today, I walked through the rows of desks and placed a black magic marker in each of my boys’ hands.  One for you.  One for you.  One for you….  Clad in their white kandoras, the students, Saeed included, held out their hands and accepted the markers carefully with upward turned palms and smiling faces, as if they were beggars receiving alms. 

Even as high schoolers, these boys haven’t been exposed to many artistic tools.  Any enterprise requiring markers, glue, or scissors triggers a bit of excitement in them.  These supplies are not readily available at our rural, desert school, so I brought them in with hopes that they might increase their receptiveness to an English lesson.

The wide eyes and upward-turned mouths I saw whilst I divvied out the markers indicated that my hunch was accurate.  They were excited.  Forty brown eyes twinkled up at me, among them Saeed’s.  With earnest gazes directed up at their beloved teacher, the students unsheathed the black markers, enthusiastically ripping off the little plastic caps.  The room took on the smell of bittersweet blackness.

Saeed flashed a gap-toothed smile at me that told me he was ready to sling ink – eager to go toe-to-toe with the English language.  Armed only with his marker, he was excited to stab black-print wounds into the oversized, white paper on his desk. 

I, on the other hand, was not ready for the showdown to commence. 

I hadn’t given the students proper instructions for this project yet.  I had given them the proper supplies, yes.  Big sheets of paper.  Black magic markers.  But still, I had not yet explained to them what to do with the supplies. I should have waited to pass out markers until after I gave instructions. But I didn't wait, and I paid for my mistake.

I had a clear picture in my mind of what I wanted the art project to look like.  I wanted the students to use their markers to draw two huge overlapping circles, and inside the circles I imagined pictures and words written in English.  I had a template for Saeed’s art project in my own head, but he hadn’t seen it yet.  I had given him the tools to create, but still there was no blueprint.  No outline for him to follow.

I knew that this could be a problem, so I turned my back to him, pushed my own erasable marker to the marker board, and launched into a hasty instructional session.  I drew two huge circles. I drew large buildings in the circles as example pictures.  I wrote words in English.  I scribbled furiously and sloppily, hoping to expedite my instructions so Saeed would soon be able to utilize his treasured marker. 

Finished with my directions and excited to let the students begin, I turned around to see if anyone had any questions. What I saw instead were thirty-eight eyes watching Saeed as he made quick work vandalizing, with permanent black ink, every blank space within his reach.

The classroom was his canvas. 

He had already scribbled on his own desk and two neighboring desks.  Ornate Arabic text was scrawled into the wall adjacent to him - full sentences of it, and the window above his table now displayed a life-sized, black stick figure.

In just two brief minutes he had transformed the classroom into a graffiti-splattered, Arabic ghetto. Even his own white kandora was inked up with a frantic, Ed-Hardy looking design.

“Nooo! Saeed. Nooo!”  I ran over to his desk and ripped the marker from his fingers.   “Saeed, this is bad! Bad!”  I watched the wide grin melt from his face as he realized that he had really upset me.  Of course, he couldn’t see what was so bad about what he’d done, but he could tell that I wasn’t happy about it. 

“This is NOT good, Saeed. This marker won’t come off.”   I was angry but mostly with myself.  Sure, it was Saeed who used his marker to vandalize, but it was my fault.  I had given him the tools to do something good but no blueprint to help him use them successfully.  I had handed him a marker and paper, but I hadn’t told him what to do with them yet. 

********************************************************************************

Back at my computer screen, I’m thinking about how much I used to be like Saeed – At 24 years old, I’d been given a permanent marker called adulthood, but I didn’t know what to do with it.  Instead of creating a life that suited me, I started damaging my partner's life.  Things could have been different had I had known what to do with my newly acquired status as an adult, but, like Saeed, I had no blueprints to follow.

I hear my clicking fingers commence their unsupervised dance on the keyboard again.  And I watch them, in a loose alliance with my wandering mind, carry on with the apology while I reflect on the days for which I am now apologizing. 

The words on the screen read:

“…It’s hard for me to believe it now, but I think I was scared back then.  I knew I had to grow up, but every version of ‘grown up’ I’d ever seen looked nothing like the version I wanted to wear. I didn’t think it was possible to be a grownup and still be myself…”

When I turned 24 years old, I knew it was my time to start acting like an adult.  I was done with college.  My band wasn’t together anymore.  And yet I had no idea how to be an adult and still be myself.  All the blueprints for maturity looked mind-numbingly boring to me. I knew, deep down, that I was creative – that I craved adventure and big risks.  But I’d never known an adult who lived the way I wanted to live. There was no template for my kind of life.

The adults I knew shuffled kids onto school busses at 7:30 in the morning and then lumbered their way through 8 hours of work at loathsome jobs.  The adults I knew came home and watched television, wandered into bed early, and then repeated this drudgery again and again. They concerned themselves mainly with weather, the sports their kids played, and lowering the interest rates on their home mortgages. 

That was the template for adulthood that I was familiar with, and it was time for me to become an adult.  I didn’t know what else to do, so I joined the throngs.  I quit playing music and let my guitar hang lifelessly from its stand in the living room.  I stopped writing, and for two years the pages in my notebooks stayed white and unmolested by my thoughts.  I stopped taking social risks.  I stopped feeling passionate.  I adopted a lifeless new way of life, and all the while, my partner encouraged me to continue following my heart - to do the things that made me happy and forget my concept of adulthood.  I didn't listen to her.

I bought a house and got a job teaching near my home.  I purchased a new vehicle.  I mowed my yard on weekends.  I did what I was supposed to do as an adult, but it didn’t make me happy.  Still, this girl pleaded with me to start being creative again – she knew why I was unhappy.  But I didn't.  “Let’s do something adventurous,” she’d say.  “Let’s take a trip!”  She knew why I wasn’t happy.  It was because I wasn’t taking risks anymore, because I wasn’t being creative, and I wasn’t being adventurous.  Instead of looking inward to find the problem, I lashed out at her. I insisted that my unhappiness was her fault. 

I had built my new life around the pattern for adulthood that had been modeled for me, because I didn’t know what else to do.  I didn’t want to be this kind of adult, but I’d never seen a template for maturity that I felt suited me.  I thought this is what one did when adulthood came knocking.

Life had handed a permanent, black marker called “adulthood,” but there was not a proper template for me to follow – so, like Saeed, I felt lost.  No one could give me proper directions, so I started marking up what was closest to me – in this case, my girlfriend.  Saeed and I both would have created something better had we known how, but we didn’t, so we damaged something instead.  Saeed bled black ink onto everything near to his seat in the classroom, and I scored black wounds onto this girl because she was the closest thing to me.  

My fingers roam freely on the keyboard:

“…I was scared, and I suppose there is nothing more repulsive than a scared man who is trying to act like he’s not.  And that’s what you dealt with every day.  I took a great deal of my insecurity out on you, and I apologize for that…”

I can see now that cold fear had crept into the core of my being and snuffed the fire that used to propel me.   I was scared that my adult life would be a steady decline, full of disappointments.  Still, I insisted that she was responsible for my dissatisfaction.   I maintained that she was the culprit who had sucked out my former love for life.  I denied my personal responsibility.  I blamed her.

Of course, the real problem was that I was insecure in my adulthood.  I didn’t feel the way I thought adults were supposed to feel.  I still had a burning sensation down in my gut that told me to create, to take risks, and to pursue adventure  - but I squelched it.  She told me not to, but I did.

My fingers continue to click away at the keys.  They’re on autopilot now.  

“… I thought that to become an adult, you had to get secure, get settled, and give up adventure…”

And what my freewheeling fingers have typed is true.  At 24, I had suffocated my adventurous spirit.  I had sacrificed my creativity.  I had settled down.  I’d never seen an outline for adulthood that allowed for adventure, high risk, and creativity – so, feeling dejected, I adopted the blueprint for maturity that I was familiar with.  I knew I had the tools to create a more authentic life for myself; the black magic marker and oversized white paper were in my hands, I just didn’t know what to do with them.  

************************************************************************************

 

Saeed obviously didn’t know what to do with his tools for creativity either, so I yanked them from his hands and threw them in the trash.

“Asif, teacher, Asif!”  (Sorry, teacher, sorry!)  Saeed launched into an Arabic apology that breezed through his toothy smile, but I could tell he wasn’t sorry.  He couldn’t see what he’d done wrong.  To him, this was just a good crack, and all of the other students had gotten a bang out of it too, so what was the harm? 

And yet, even though I could tell he wasn’t sorry, he continued to apologize.  “Asif, asif! Ana asif!” (Sorry, sorry, I’m sorry).  Over and over again he said sorry.  He couldn’t quite wipe the smile off of his face, so it was clear enough that he wasn’t sorry - and yet he persisted. 

Why was he saying sorry when he wasn't?  He sure didn’t feel sorry.

He was saying sorry because that’s what I wanted to hear.  He was saying sorry because of his love for me, and because he knew an apology is what I wanted.  I wanted to hear him say sorry.

He wasn’t apologizing because he felt guilty about what he’d done.  He wasn’t trying to absolve himself of a guilty feeling.  He just knew I would feel better if he said sorry.  So he did.

***********************************************************************************

My fingers have slowed their tap dance on the keyboard, so my apology letter must be almost finished.  And even though my rebellious fingers have tap danced this letter into existence completely without my endorsement, I sign it with my initials, AS, and slide the curser over the SEND button.  The little white arrow steps gingerly unto the SEND icon on my computer screen and threatens to stomp down on it, but my trembling finger stops just shy of pushing the cursor down.  I can’t send it yet, because I think maybe I’m apologizing to this old girlfriend of mine for the wrong reasons.

Maybe my fingers and subconscious mind have typed this letter because they know that I feel guilty, and they want to help relieve me of my guilt.  Maybe something deep inside me wants to rinse myself clean of that guilty feeling.  Maybe this whole apology business is just me trying to absolve myself of sin so I can sleep easier.  Maybe my apology is an act of selfishness.

But aren’t all genuine apologies selfish?  When we feel really sorry, don’t we apologize mostly to alleviate our own guilt - to wash our hands clean of our misgivings?  Don’t we essentially grovel at the feet of the person we wronged so that we can stand up straight and proud once again?  I think maybe we cower at someone’s feet when we seek forgiveness - just so that, once forgiven, we can assume the proud stance we had previously.

I can't read Arabic, so I couldn't understand the permanent black script that Saeed scrawled on my classroom wall.  And nevertheless, I think there was a message that I do understand.  I'm unsure what Saeed's graffiti meant, but his writing on the wall helped me to see "The Writing on the Wall."

We make our biggest mistakes when we have no direction - no suitable template to follow.

Saeed and I were both given tools for creation, but no suitable model to follow - no proper direction.  I was born with an innate appetite for creation and challenge. Saeed was given a marker and paper.  But neither one of us knew what to do with what we were given.  There was no appropriate blueprint for success, so both of us took to wrecking whatever was closest to us.  Saeed vandalized his classroom, and I vandalized the heart of a woman who tried to help me. I adopted a life that made me unhappy, and blamed my unhappiness on someone who was just trying to help me. Saeed ruined some perfectly good desks.

And while we are both offering up apologies for our actions, I feel genuinely sorry for what I did and he doesn't.  Still, I think maybe his is a nobler apology than mine.  Saeed’s apology is a selfless one, while mine is selfish. 

He wasn’t sorry for what he’d done, but still he didn’t want to see me upset.  He didn’t feel an ounce of guilt, but because of his affection for me, he said he was sorry.  He didn’t feel guilty for tagging up the entire classroom, but he knew he had disappointed me, so he apologized.  I do feel guilty, so my apology is more about absolving myself of that feeling.  Saeed knew that the word “sorry” is what I wanted to hear, so he told it to me – not to make himself feel better, but to make me feel better.  His apology was selfless. Sure his apology was insincere, but he offered it up for a noble reason. I suppose my apology is more about making me feel better.  It's more sincere, but it's for a less noble reason.  

Perhaps it comes down to this: either you’re sincerely sorry for something - and you offer an apology for the wrong reasons.  Or you’re insincere in your apology, but you offer it for the right reasons. 

Either way, there are things I have learned from my freewheeling fingers and the message they’ve typed to my old partner tonight.  According to the message on my screen, I’ve come a long way since those trying years.  I’m letting myself get creative again.  I am writing and playing music.  I’m taking risks again.  I’m doing the things that make me happy.  My letter puts it this way:

“…I’ve figured out how to make this whole ‘adult’ thing jive with my personal ethos – to stay true to myself and still cut it in the adult world.” 

Still, I know I’ve wronged this girl.  And while it took me a couple of rough years to manufacture my own blueprint for adulthood, I suppose there is already a perfectly good blueprint for admitting you were wrong to someone.  It’s called an apology.  So right now I’m going to let my finger get heavy on the curser and send one, even if it is for the wrong reasons.  Selfish or not, this apology needs to be sent.

Tomorrow, I will go back into Saeed’s classroom – and inevitably there will still be permanent ink on walls and desks.  The black scars Saeed made will be there the next day too, and the next.  I just hope that the black magic marker that I used to scar up my partner all those years ago was not so permanent.

SEND  

The Roots

The Roots

I’m exhausted.  My legs are numb and sweat is cascading down my skin, gathering in puddles near the collar of my t-shirt.  My Adidas sweatband is saturated with the perspiration flowing from my scalp.  But I’m so close.  So close.  So I keep going – throwing one leg in front of the other. Thud…thud…thud.

I’m at what runners call “The Wall.”  That damnable spot where your physical inadequacy and your mental weakness team up on you and demand that you stop running.  “This isn’t right.  It hurts.  Can’t breathe.  Stop! Stop!”  It’s an abstract divider that separates people who love to run from people who don’t.  If you’ve never made it through the wall – if you’ve never pushed through that barrier, and you always stop running, put your hands on your knees and heave in defeat, you hate running. 

However, for those of us who muster every ounce of resilience in our bodies and clumsily scale that Wall, we have found a thing on the other side called “Runner’s High.”  Just across The Wall, the Runner's High is the place where the body and the mind say, “Well, shit I guess if we can’t beat him let’s join him.”

When this happens, rather than working against you, your body and mind begin working with you, aiding you, showering you with a rush of endorphins.  You’re still gaping for air, but suddenly there is an invisible smoke in the air that gets you high.  

Thud…Thud…Thud…I’m almost there, but there’s one thing in the way.  And it’s not a weakness in my body or in my head. It’s a palm tree in the road.  What was once a 50 foot, towering palm tree shading the road is now tropical road barrier.  It obstructs both sidewalks and the road in front of me.  

At this point my legs are far too docile to jump the colossal tree, and if I slow down and crawl over it, I’ll lose my momentum and never get over “The Wall.” How do I get around this?  I decide to veer off in the direction of the tree’s base, leaving the comfort of street and sidewalk for the loose sand in the roadside ditch in an attempt to bypass the fallen palm. 

Still heaving for breath and a good minute or two away still from breaking through The Wall, I pass the uprooted trunk of the tree. My feet fight the thick sand and trudge through the ditch when I see them.  The roots.  I’ve never seen the root structure of a palm tree before, and I’m shocked.  I figured a palm would have deep roots.  Thick roots.  The kind of roots that foraged about in all directions under the parched sand searching for water deep below.  I expected a sturdy foundation of woody orange roots swerving off in every direction from the tree’s trunk.  How else would the tree get water?  But that’s not what they look like at all.

I didn’t really want to run today. In fact, I’ve been putting off running for three weeks.  The thing about running is when you are not doing it yet, but you’re thinking about doing it – it sounds insufferable.  When my alarm clock squeals at me in the morning, and I start thinking about running, it sounds dreadful.  So for three weeks I’ve neglected running, opting instead for twenty more minutes nuzzled against my pillow.  Every day for the past three weeks, when I’ve returned home and buried myself in my lounger to read a book – I’ve considered taking a run.  But the consideration sounds terrible.  Pretty much any time I’ve asked myself “Do I want to go for a run?” The answer has been no. 

I never like running until I’m actually doing it.  I know it’s good for me.  I know I should go for a run.  But the more I anticipate the act of running, the less likely I am to do it.  I never want to run until I'm doing it. 

Once I’m out running, defeating my demons with every step – once I’ve hit The Wall, shimmied up it, and I’m enjoying the euphoria of the Runner’s High on the other side, I love it.  I really love it.  A good run is one of life’s finest physical pleasures.

The roots.  Back at the trunk of the massive, fallen palm tree, I’m struck by just how short and gangly they are.  They’re about two feet long, stringy looking, and thin.  They look like the hairs on a Raggedy Ann Doll.  Just not at all what I would expect from a once-towering tree growing where there is so little water. 

Back home in rural Missouri, the trees have massive root systems – thick hearty roots forge proudly through the rich black soil until the trees they support are propped up sturdily enough to handle Missouri’s heavy summer winds and icy winters.  You can stick a spade in the ground and dig a hole twenty yards from a Missouri tree and suddenly the spade will hang up on a thick orange root.  Often, the branches reach out as far underground as they do above ground.

And the people in rural Missouri, my people, they mimic the root systems of their beloved trees.  They stay in one place and sink their roots deeply into the fertile ground.  They forge proudly into the earth until family names are part of the very makeup of the soil.  My Great Grandfather, Grandfather, and Father all lived within the same five-mile radius of rural Missouri land.  The Showalter root system is almost 200 years old and extends three generations deep.  That sort of thing is not uncommon there.  In the Midwest, there are thousands of families just like mine – their roots so firmly planted into the ground that it would be near impossible to uproot or move them.

Thud…thud…thud.  I’m still gaping for air and refusing my body's demands to quit running when I pass the palm tree, literally on the other side of the earth from my Missouri home.  It’s here that I realize that this fallen tree and I are not so different.  I don’t have Missouri roots.  I didn’t let my roots sink deeply into the earth.  I am not firmly planted into one place.  I lack those thick, hearty roots holding the ground below in a headlock. 

My roots are sinewy and mean.  They’re thinner than they probably should be.  I'm not where I grew up.  I'm not with people I've known all my life.  I have no wife.  No kids.  And I suppose that means I’m susceptible to falling over.  Like the tree that has made a barricade on my running path, I don’t possess the stability that comes with a root system that has been clinging to the deep for hundreds of years.

But thudding and gasping along, now half a mile past the palm, I’m feeling okay with that.  Maybe it’s because I know that the kind of stability most Missouri residents and trees have scares me as much as instability scares others.  Or maybe I feel at peace because I’ve just crossed the threshold from Wall to High, and a warm wave of comfort has sprung from my scalp.  I’m no longer subject to the pain in my legs or the voice in my head telling me to stop.  My body has given up its fight and dumped a pink bucket full of endorphins on me.  I’m high.  And just like any high would, the Runner’s High has me feeling fuzzy. Giddy. It’s wrapped my thoughts in a warm towel. 

What I’m dreading, though, is that when I finish my run and I’m wringing out my Adidas sweatband and the warm towel of thoughts in my mind, I’m going to think about how much I really loved Missouri.  I actually never felt the need to leave. I never pined for travel like some people do.  In fact, when people would talk about having the travel bug, I never quite understood what they were talking about. 

Thinking about traveling stressed me out.  The anticipation of booking flights, packing bags, standing in lines at airports, readjusting my internal clock, abandoning my routines – none of this sounded appealing to me.  Especially considering the money it costs to travel.  Why would I want to leave my friends?  Why aren’t travel-bug people just happy where they are?

I figured I took after my father who, like his fathers before him, was perfectly happy to stay put - to let his roots wander about underground and keep him secure where he was.   So how did I end up living in the UAE where I just booked a flight to Japan for Christmas, and made plans to visit Ireland in the summer?

What happened?  How did I catch “the bug?” I was comfortable where I was and, frankly, thinking about traveling was almost insufferable.  Anticipating a move or even a vacation to a distant place frazzled me mentally. I'm not like that now.  How did I catch the travel bug? What made me decide to shirk those thick, hearty Missouri roots?  

I think it all happened because I like to run. 

Runners know that the things in life that are really good for you, those feelings that end up being the finest pleasures in life – like the Runner’s High – those things are always the result of doing something that is unbearable in its anticipation stage. 

And traveling is running.  When I hadn’t done it yet - when I was just sitting around thinking about it - the anticipation was dreadful.  And the more I anticipated traveling the less I wanted to travel.  

Just like sitting in my lounge chair and thinking about running was counterproductive, thinking about traveling was counterproductive.  Some things you have to stop thinking about and do.  I’m a runner, so I know this.  The best thing to do is usually the thing that requires you to stop thinking and start doing. 

But just like running, traveling has a Wall.  When I first reached the UAE, my mind and body fought me.  They said, “This isn’t right.  These people are doing things differently than they are supposed to.  You don’t belong here.  Why are the days and nights backwards?!”  Many people who came to the UAE like I did left within the first month.  They hit the wall - but those people who left when things got hard, they essentially pulled up on the side of the road, stopped running, put their hands on their knees, and heaved in defeat

But I stuck it out and eventually my mind and body said, “Well, shit I guess if we can’t beat him let’s join him.”  And suddenly - see where I’m going with this? - I hit the Traveler’s High. 

That’s where the bug comes from.  The Traveler’s High gives you the bug.  Suddenly my mind was being expanded.  I was cramming new information, new ideas, new concepts, and new life rhythms into my paradigm.  I was tasting new things.  Smelling new things.  Hearing new people.  Changing my ethos to fit new people and new situations.   I was running along in a new place and suddenly my brain and body found an elasticity that wasn’t there before.  Suddenly, a newfound endurance was realized.  I felt mentally in shape.  A mental marathon.

There are two things that keep people from running and traveling: The anticipation and The Wall.  But when those two things are trampled, there is the High.

Thud…Thud…Thud.  Thoroughly sopped in my own sweat, I round off my path at a stop sign and head back in the direction from which I came.  I’ve been running for almost an hour and it’s time to head back.  Partly because the high has gone away, but mostly because I want to see it again, that palm tree.  Even with its tiny roots, that fallen tree was a towering 50 feet tall before it fell over.  It’s branches saw the world from their perch in the air.  It didn’t have deep roots.  It didn’t have thick roots.  But still, that tree managed to reach a High, and I respect that.  That’s what I want for myself - to reach ambitiously upward even if my root structure is not so ambitious.