To Not And Hold Seek

On June 2nd, 2000, I was a 19-year-old youth in Sligo, Ireland, a seemingly inconspicuous locale nestled somewhere between bucolic poverty and urban promise. Inconspicuous as it was, however, unintentional it was not. This 19-year-old resonated with the language of poverty and the language of promise, and was seeking to scribe a bilingual experience that would portend his transition from youth to adulthood. The poverty he understood was that of an undernourished childhood, leaving his insatiable ambitions feeling starved within an invisible identity. The promise he understood was, ironically, that of his insatiable ambitions empowering his identity to seek its own nourishment. Deciphering this babel was the challenge that, if overcome, would grant him the liberating advancement towards adulthood and thereby advancement towards a nourished identity. Little did he know that the translation of these languages would take 10 years.

On June 2nd, 2010, I am a 29-year-old adult in Portland, Oregon, a seemingly inconspicuous locale nestled somewhere between bucolic poverty and urban promise. Inconspicuous as it is, however, unintentional it is not. The language of this land in Portland is in many ways the same language spoken to me 10 years ago in Ireland and in Wales, and so perhaps my unconscious mind seeks the environment for which its personal language is best translated. The faculty of language is, after all, an invention by which species interact with their environment, and so intention would naturally hide the primer to decode a language within the environment in which it describes. Regardless of its specific agenda, intention is certainly at work as my youthhood transitions into adulthood. Ten years following my juvenile steps towards understanding the language of poverty and promise, my identity is -- finally -- opaque with nourishment. But, like any language, it is the context that gives this nourishment meaning.

Tomorrow i will age to 30 years. To some degree, fixating upon this even number is arbitrary. Our society has chosen a denary numerical system somewhat arbitrarily, and so i may as well celebrate my 31.4th birthday in april of 2012 had we chosen the number pi as our base system. But in many other ways 30 is not arbitrary. We are commandeered to circumnavigate the sun in the amount of time it takes Earth to rotate about its axis 365.25 times, and we are commandeered by biology to experience these phenomena in finite repetitions. We have, then, in many ways engineered our society to adopt a “language” that effectively interacts with these inexorable phenomena, from our (largely) diurnal activities to our seasonal crop harvesting. And so this denary environment by which I’ve seasoned my personal language -- whether arbitrary or methodical -- is signaling momentous change tomorrow as I exit my youth. Reflective, of course. I wouldn’t be writing about this impending transition if it were void of reflection. But the nature of that reflection -- that context; that opaque, adult identity staring back at me -- that may require 30 more years to decipher. It is as though my youthful babbling has finally refined my language of poverty and promise into a literary body, save that the words and page numbers are scrambled. But it is an opaque, corporeal body nonetheless.

Syntax errors aside, there certainly are themes that can be plucked from this word salad. At 30, I have learned how to love. This is surprisingly the most recent theme (see below blog entries for evidence). I was engaged at -- GASP -- the green age of 24, and consequently claimed the hubris that I knew how to love despite the failure of this relationship. But then at age 28 I met a very special person and was humbled to learn that i had actually never loved before. Upon losing the intimate presence of this person in my life recently (and being destroyed as a result), i now know how to love: allow vulnerability in oneself such that one is defined in someone else, not with someone else.

At 30, I have also learned how to fail: allow humility in oneself such that failure is only seen as smaller fragments of broken success. I have failed at many things in my youth, from trivial burnt cookies to scarring lost relationships and friendships. But each failure, so that I picked the scattered pieces from the ground, was made of fragments of success that could be re-glued into something new -- something successful. Ironically, learning how to fail is learning how to succeed.

And at 30, I have learned the language of poverty and promise -- that is, what it means to overcome. At 20, I was a Christian; at 30 I am agnostic. This is an important contrast since, despite my vacillations through the identity of my “faith,” my core connection to The Creation, as I call it, remains. It always has. During most of my youth, my environment simply prescribed the context of “Christian” to this inner belief system. But as I matured and began to see this as the human invention that it is, I became more and more comfortable leaving The Creation as a nebulous, sacrosanct entity. In fact, the only chapter in my youthful dissertation that reads in syntax may well be the one discussing the subject of spirituality. Yes, poverty and promise -- a familiar, even trite theme in many religious disciplines, is indeed among my youthful themes. But at 30, that language tells a story of process, not acquisition.

Every line of the above musings could easily be naive illusions of “knowledge” that only seemed to be actualized as I approach the magical 30 figure. Perhaps upon age 40 I will restate how it is to love, to fail, to succeed, and to satiate my voracious identity. Yet, it cannot be heresy if knowledge is found in the process by which it was sought and not the acquisition of knowledge itself. Abandoning the quixotic quest for the finish line of enlightenment is perhaps the only enlightenment we can ever acquire. In other words, to “know” the process of love is only to know that one seeks the process of love, not that one actually acquires the knowledge of how to love. And so The Creation that lives within me, that drives me daily in my quest to fulfill my oft pellucid identity, may in fact be the substance by which that identity is embodied, and not the treasures themselves that are acquired along that journey. The same could be said about failure. Since there can be no perfection, what then would success ever truly look like but larger pieces of less-broken failure? As such, at 30, what would The Creation -- or dare I say “God” -- look like other than the process by which we seek it?

Ten years from June 2nd, 2000, I indeed have gathered the lexicon of my poverty and promise and finally nourished my identity in adulthood. But despite learning that lexicon, the only context I can decipher from its voluminous, cryptic vocabulary is that of process. Love, failure, success, and The Creation -- and thereby perhaps my next 30 years -- define my identity through their processes, not their products. Such is the preface of my new journey, “Adulthood: Live by how you acquire, not by what you acquire, for what you acquire has no context removed from the process in which it was acquired.” If after 10 years one sentence is all I can decipher from my youthful script, then it truly must be about the process -- the beautiful, satiating processes of love, failure, success, and Creation -- and not the acquisition.

With this as my only context, I embark on my journey into adulthood with no pockets to carry, only my naked self equipped with the complete vocabulary of my personal identity.