Up, Up and Away!

In the space of three days, Lance's wife went to England for three weeks, a son went to New Orleans for five days with his church group, another son went to Barcelona, Spain as a reward for his graduation from college, and still another went on a three-day junket to a rock concert, followed by a gig at the beach, followed by a day in Delaware. Lance was also on the road, leaving only one college-aged daughter at home with her best friend and a bewildered dog, Scout. Never had this family been spread so far and wide. The shock to his karma was palpable. An overwhelming sense of not being needed was a foreign concept to Lance. It was an unexpected byproduct of his self-imposed sabbatical. Why, from all reports, his colleagues, family and friends were all getting along just fine without him. Ain't that a kick in the head, Lance grumbled.

Let's face it, there is a secret longing in everyone hungering to be missed. We want to be told that without us, life is bleak and unlivable. That just wants to hear the plaintive cry of "Please, I beg you, DON'T GO!!!" No such luck this time. At Lance's dramatic sabbatical announcement, almost everyone urged him to go ahead and have a good time. Some even praised his bold initiative and sighed about how they wished they could do it. And then, the moment over, they went about their daily routine, perfectly confident that life would go on just fine without him. And damn it, it did.

When, for 30 years, he had felt so burdened everyday with the overwhelming responsibilities of job and family, of being provider and father, of serving as counselor and commander, it always seemed far too important to just walk away from it all. How many times had Lance turned away from whimsical side trips and invitations of every kind to escape, all because "I just can't abandon my responsibilities!." Well, apparently, one CAN just walk away. Or at least, now Lance found he could. He had to wonder if this is the beginning of senior obsolescence?

Lance was somewhat comforted by the fact that today, cell phones and email provide a magical link to anyone, anywhere at anytime. But Jesus, LIVES were being re-shaped on these trips. Whole new narratives were being imprinted on memories, none of which could ever adequately be conveyed even in the inevitable catch-up conversations soon to come when the family gathered in Maine in August. Just as Plato conjectured that we can never directly see reality, but merely the shadows of it dancing on the opposite walls of the cave, so Lance knew he would never know the new reality of their lives lived so far beyond his sight. Nor could they ever really know his new insights, pondered Lance. Already, he understood from his own travels, something profound happens to people when they measure themselves against unfamiliar places and people. In every moment, they constantly evaluate, compare, test, and edit their own values and assumptions against this new set of behaviors, beliefs and customs surrounding them. He and his family were now swimming in new oceans of foreign cultures and whoever they were before, they would never be quite the same again. But then, that IS why they went out, isn't it. To both go somewhere new... and come home as someone new.

Strangely, in the small towns of Pennsylvania and West Virginia, Lance met people who clung to a genuine loyalty for their hometown, bore very modest dreams about their futures and exhibited a fierce desire to retain the predictable nature of their lifestyle. For them (at least the ones who stayed) change was not highly valued and news of political, economic or societal events beyond their observable horizons, held relatively little interest. At Chautauqua, the pace was slower (because the age was higher?) laughter more reluctant, conversation more measured, and the urgency of anything was highly suspect. Knowledge was highly valued, but action seemed to be academic. In Erie, Cleveland, and on the campuses of Penn State, Virginia Tech, the University of Virginia and Oberlin College the pace was fast, the anxiety intense, and the urgency to be first/best/tops was overwhelming. But above all, there was a desperate need to be constantly connected to the flow and to be always the one in the know. Here, Road Kill was the last person to find out...anything. They got run over by the herd.

Looking back over what he had just written, Lance became self-conscious about the pejorative way his thoughts sounded about those places...like Town A was better than Town B. And truth be told, that was truly the way he felt about them if he were judging where he would choose to live. But the lessons of importance here were about the effect the culture of a place has on its people. His business, after all, was all about socio-engineering the culture of a community. Creative enterprise requires people to value self-awareness, be open to investigations of new thinking, and be tolerant of the inherent ambiguity of diverse cultures engaged in productive discourse. Lance had preached that institutions must exist in every community to encourage, develop and reward minds that stretch and bend. Creativity needs to be taught and spoken somewhere in every community.Lance felt it was his mission in life to discover how the skill sets of the arts could be brought to bear on the daily enterprise of community building in ANY town, city or country? How do you break the arts out of its own prison of elitism to give voice to the expressive, creative soul born into everyone before the stern voice of "You can't" steals their initiative and hope?

Thankfully, there were many more days ahead of him on the road to figure it out. And now he took solace in the fact that there would indeed be many more stories to share in Maine in August.