In my last post, “Believing and Belonging,” it begins with a narrative about another “B”: Becoming. I explained that becoming is that moment, somewhere splashed in our formative years, that “is as if a new sun has risen that reveals something we have never seen before. It is our whole self, mind and body and spirit as one unique offering—as a fully differentiated being. A self that is just us.” Further, becoming can either be cause for jubilation, or trepidation, depending on whether our self-confidence had been established, or not. As Paul Murray described in his novel of an Irish family, The Bee Sting, “Whenever you think this is your life now your heart bangs against your chest like you’re on a rollercoaster.” Like that rollercoaster ride, for some becoming is thrilling and for others, terrifying.
I also explained the significance of becoming to the balance of our lives, which is something I realized the hard way in my own life with the challenges of dealing with a partner in a two-decade marriage who suffered from depression anchored in self-doubt that had been with her since her teens. I observed, “If we have not had our self-worth ticket punched in these early years, our destiny will be fraught with the pain of self-doubt resulting in a fragility of ego that becomes a trap of cyclic self-destruction and suffering; inevitably also visited upon those we purport to love.” Several readers commented as to how resonant the reality of becoming was to them; a turning point for better, or worse.
I won’t evangelize the point further other than to say far too little attention is placed on this moment of becoming in the parenting and general development of our young ones. If we understood both the multitude and magnitude of its effects, we might deal with a whole spectrum of mental issues much better than we do; issues that absent significant therapeutic intervention haunt many people until the ends of their lives. Some become chronically depressed while others keep chasing external solutions—constantly reinventing their lives—that often becomes a churn of one calamity after another. Among other things, when one doesn’t fundamentally like themselves it makes it impossible to form a secure and durable bond with anyone else.
This idea of becoming for me occurred in my own bucolic summers spent at my mother’s family’s farm and ranch operations in South Dakota. Becoming was indeed a jubilation that occurred in the crossings I would make from my family’s home in Seattle to the Dakotas on the Empire Builder of the Great Northern Railway in the late 1960s and early 1970s; a two-day trip of western wonder where my train friends were kindly black gentlemen porters and the occasional young man headed west to ship out to Viet Nam from Fort Lewis in Washington. I would arrive in Fargo, North Dakota with a bellyache after two days of eating whatever came out of the deep-fat fryer in the dining car to be met by my favorite uncle, C.T., and driven south to Bruce, South Dakota. Then, I would spend weeks in the alfalfa-bloom scented fields of Brookings County before returning for school a tanned fit boy with saddle sores that had toughened into the calloused lessons of hard work.
If you are a regular reader, you know that I toggle between narrative and poetry in my practice of writing to utilize form as a tool to broaden and deepen my perspective. In this case, the poem, “That Boy Grown Gray,” which I wrote in 2022, preceded its expression as narrative in the more recent “Believing and Belonging.” Hopefully, I have rendered it into Substack properly to get the varied line breaks correct, but if not, I expect you will get the idea. This post can also be accessed at ameritecture.com.
That Boy Grown Gray
In my youth, I roamed.
The sea, then woods, mountains, the prairie
and back again.
My eyes transfixed on the telephone wires,
undulating from pole to pole,
as the Empire Builder sped eastward
through tunnels burrowed in granite.
A clackity-click, then a clickity-clack;
my train rumbled on
from Seattle, to White Fish, to Fargo.
It mattered who I was, mostly just to me.
Few thought I was worth an obligation,
fewer yet a worthy dependency.
Ah, freedom.
Youth; penniless and pure.
Me just for me.
No one’s prospect, no one’s cure.
And now here I am, that boy grown gray.
Just one shadow to cast,
just one meal to make.
I carry my own fire again.
Slower in both breath and stride,
I pause more than hurry.
No cards held; none to be played.
Quiet mind, I now see with my soul.
Embraced by the wisdom of eternity.
The arc of our lives, from becoming to just being (the last “B”), is a journey of both triumph and failure that hopefully ends in a state of peace. As the world today is as perplexing as it has ever been, we must always take care to rise above all moments of immediacy—whether joyful or painful—to contemplate our higher selves as we cast humble eyes across the expanse of nature and humanity that, while confounding at times, remains our domain of responsibility—at least until our last ticket of departure gets punched when we are no longer “embraced by the wisdom of eternity”; rather, we are tendered to it.
