This past Saturday, my eyes opened due to a horrible muscle spasm firing through my back as my body revolted due to the position it was in – which was basically a backwards question mark.
This might be a good time to point out that my body wasn’t in this position voluntarily.
Our seven-year-old daughter had nestled into one side of my body, our four-year-old son the other – and somehow – at an angle across the top of my head, was our red-haired 18-month-old son (see visual evidence captured by my wife in the photo at right).
I had become a body pillow.
Not exactly what I pictured myself growing up to become as a young boy.
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It occurred to me recently that the world is filled with irony.
We’re not really evolving as a culture or a society, and mainly because we’ve been duped (we’re easily tricked, frankly). The longer we live, the more we forget the point of living.
You start out as a young child with hopes, dreams and aspirations of doing great things in the world. You play, explore, learn, imagine, dream, draw, paint, color, love. You find what you like, a game, a book, a friend – and you throw yourself into it. There is no set agenda, no one way of doing things, no orderly fashion to life – which allows aspirations of what you want to do seem less like hopes and wishes and more like “someday” possibilities.
Slowly, we become task masters. We get our schoolwork done on time; we go here, we go there, we act like everyone else. And we’re led to believe that acting like everyone else is exactly what we are supposed to do – because being like everybody else means you’re accepted as one of a civilized society.
So you become more focused on what you can realistically do, given a variety of factors like where you live, gender, race, religion, intellect, aptitude. You begin to place things in a box. Instead of asking why, as we did when we were young and curious, we start focusing on the how.
Once we stop asking why, the how doesn’t really even matter.
We’ve become a world of task checkers and project managers: once one thing is complete, check it off the list and it’s on to the next thing. I’ve been terribly guilty of this. It removes spontaneity. It removes the wonder. It removes the why.
How do I pay my bills? How do I make dinner, give the kids a bath, get my work done, mow the lawn, help with homework and still have time for my spouse? How do I have time for my friends? How can I be in three places at once? How am I so busy?
This task-oriented action is what drives us around and around, day after day, year after year. And we go around and around until someone tells us we can stop, or a bank account verifies it, a some point much later in life.
And suddenly, in our advancing age, it will occur to us, as we have nothing but time and no tasks, that we were asking how instead of why. We spent our lives asking the wrong questions.
Why did I do so much to pay so many bills? Why did I do what the world told me to do? Why don’t I know how to operate without a To Do list? Why don’t I give more time to my spouse and children? Why did all those arbitrary deadline matter so much? Why did the grass need to be mowed so much? Why do I need be in three places at once? Why did I allow myself to be so busy, so bothered, so stressed?
Forget the To Do lists. They serve no purpose than from keeping us from doing what we were meant to do.
We’re led to believe that this task master lifestyle is accomplishment. Of what, exactly? We think we’re getting things done, but we’re not. We think we’re working hard, because why? Is all work hard? Should it be? We even love to talk about how hard we work as a society. Good for us! We’re the best worker bees out there!
And we’re completely missing the point. For the record, I don’t know what the point is either, I wouldn’t pretend to.
But I’m always learning more about what it is not. Turns out, I’ve actually become much of what I always wanted to be, all because I’ve been given the chance to be a husband and a father of four.
I am a poet, a writer, a reader, a thinker. I am a historian, an artist, an actor. I am a pirate, a doctor, a cook, a mechanic. I am Santa Claus. I am a coach, a tour guide, a guardian, a granter of wishes.
In a way, I became more than I ever could hope for.
I am a human body pillow.
And the question isn’t how, but why.
Scratch that. The question is…why not?
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