The Search Begins

It seems like some people are willing to try anything, no matter how extreme, as long as it’s not for good. Say, a year.

Lately, a whole new genre has popped up in the book and blog world around the one year life-altering experiment. They range from the extreme to the mundane. One fellow “unplugged” for a year to understand how constant internet accessibility was affecting his life. There was a professor who went back and became a freshman for a year to better appreciate the student perspective. Then there was the lady who spent a year cooking her way through Julia Childs’ magnum opus, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, later to become the motion picture Julie and Julia. There’s Eat, Drink, Pray, and another dozen books that go: I got sick and tired of my dead end job so I went off for a Year of Travel and ignored social mores books. One woman wrote about her year of celibacy, another about her year of the exact opposite. One woman wrote about her year of dressing modestly. Finally, two books, one by a man, the other by a woman, about a year of biblical living.

The message is clear - we love the adventure and experiment of life. Somehow or other, however, most of us get trapped in the mire of daily living and we somehow become too busy, scared, or lame-o to go and do something crazy. Alternatively, who has a year to drop everything and go hang out in Tibet? 

Okay, I guess he does

Yet we know that there’s that remote possibility of some life altering experience beckoning us from greener pastures.

Perhaps we would prefer the comfort of our lay-z-boy, living vicariously (in a reclining position) through the world of these brave (and, we tell ourselves, eccentric or mentally unwell) individuals. Our hope – a taste of the exotic, and perhaps we’ll even learn some amazing, hidden secrets about all mankind which we may have never unearthed in our day to day life of office drudgery living in Delaware (until someone writes Drudgery: My Year of Living in Delaware).

Yipee!

The biggest question we have to ask ourselves is: What happened when the book ended? Did they glean any great lessons from their year? Did those lessons stay with them? We could also ask, why be so extreme? Why not write a book called, “My Life of Living a More Fulfilling Life” where people try all the standard approaches to being more fulfilled, and not just for a year?

The answers are probably obvious. The post-script of each book probably had more to do with the author than the subject, and the subject was probably chosen because it needed to be exciting enough to stay motivated to do it for a year, and more importantly to read about. Or maybe, as the old bumper sticker goes, “If you reach for the stars, at least you may get the moon.” (We won't even discuss the implications of "My other car is a Porsche")

Are we, the hapless reader unwilling to turn our lives upside down for these quests, doomed to mediocrity? Not only can most not afford to be weird for a year, but most of us won’t get book deals. (How bad do we feel for all those people who did crazy things for a year just to get turned down by the publishing houses…”Sorry, Walter. I know you lived with cockroaches for a year, but we just don’t think people really want to hear about it. Frankly, and don’t take this the wrong way, we think you’re a bit gross.”)

Oh, Walter.

I first became aware of this interesting trend of One Yearing from my source for all interesting trends. TED talks. I watched a video by a fellow named AJ Jacobs. He had previously written a book about a year of trying to learn the entire Encyclopedia Britannica. This time he was speaking about his wildly popular book, The Year of Living Biblically. When I heard the title of the book, I said, “Hey, that’s my book! He stole my book.”

I had also been experimenting. I was also deeply curious what it would be like to live a Biblical Life. Look, I was 22 years old and, let’s face it, a bit eccentric. Not that I wanted to be eccentric. I resented the appellement. When I thought of an eccentric I pictured the little tycoon from the Monopoly board with his bushy, white mustache and his monocle jumping out of the board, flapping his arms and winking at people. It was just that the longer I observed my family, my friends, and my superiors looking for some order and sense, the more confusing I found the whole ordeal. Is this the life we were intended to live? Can't we do better than this?

 I would see people living their lives in a flow, naturally grasping the social order and simply enjoying the tides of life, and I would stand agape, sometimes in awe, sometimes in indignation, and wonder how I missed the train. Everyone else seemed to be on it and somehow I didn’t even show up at the station. That would also occasionally happen to me in real life with non-metaphoric trains. The combination of those things landed me in the eccentric camp (where the tents are paisley).

Then one day I went from spectator to participant. In the thick of the crowd I had been handed a ticket for a train heading in the opposite direction. I was young. I was eccentric. I could care less what you thought of me. I got on the train and saw where it would take me. The difference is, unlike Jacobs, my train ride kept going. It wasn’t a one year experiment only to return to life as usual when the calendar was all checked off.  I had found order for the first time in my life. People were still confounding. But at the least I had discovered a system which appeared consistent, idealistic, and noble.

The experiment became my life, or perhaps, my life became an experiment. At first (I only found this out much later) many of my family members thought it was a cute but passing phase in my life. I couldn’t help but wonder the same. Could I really keep at it? Would I want to? When it kept going, they were sure it was a joke of Andy Kauffman-esque proportions. 

Nice hat

Then I got married, and if it was a joke, my wife wasn’t in on it. Slowly, reality set in, this was not a joke (even if I was laughing).

As I listened to Jacobs TED-ding away, summarizing his year, I was disappointed by how simplistic most of his approach to the subject matter was. No person who really cared to tackle a topic as multi-layered as “Biblical Living” would wear a tunic and tout a camel. Obviously he was trying to keep it light to appeal to a broader audience, and perhaps to keep it appealing to himself. Yet here was an intelligent person, someone who found enough appeal in the concept to try it for a year, unwilling to give this experiment real weight. Why did his experiment end and mine didn’t? I don’t have real answers to that question, and I generally prefer appreciating the questions than giving haphazard answers.

10 years ago I embarked on a certain course in life but I remain very sober of the fact that the overwhelming majority of the world views me as a curiosity, something to behold but not to understand. As I got older, and maybe more mature, I began to wonder more and more as to the mechanisms which shape our choices.

In recent years, I’ve begun to think back to my college days and to reflect on how at the time I was disturbed by the societal dissonance on college campuses: well to do, educated young adults espousing the need for humanitarian development, joining social protests of all sorts, and yet treating themselves and their peers on an ethical level generally associated with the worst form of degenerate riff-raff. Did anyone just shrug their shoulders and say, “Yeah. That’s pretty much college”?

It's just tuna water. Go for it, little dude.

Lately, I have had occasion to teach college students on the topics of philosophy and religion, and it has been very eye-opening. I find the following visual very powerful: any land animal that falls into a river will automatically begin to swim against the stream. Why? Because an animal knows that downstream lies uncertainty and possibly danger, and the only way to guarantee your survival is to try to maintain control, and that can only happen by swimming against the stream. So why have we lost that instinct? Why doesn’t your average college student go apoplectic or at least become dismayed when they awaken to the notion that they are living a life which may even be in total juxtaposition to their personal beliefs? How come so many people live a lifetime flowing downstream, never questioning what lies ahead? 

I look at my own place in life as tenuous but stable; as sober but exciting. I’ve spent countless hours mulling over everything from God proofs to human psychology to the Higgs-Boson particle and how they all make us who we are (and why we care, or don’t). I don’t intend to create complete theses or to proselytize. I hope to open pathways to deepen the questions and broaden the topics. I hope to challenge and to stimulate and never to condescend. Maybe we’ll even laugh a bit. The questions are many and difficult, and the answers are never straightforward, but life is an adventure, and I’d love for you to join.

So what is it? What keeps us plowing ahead without questioning? Why is it so hard to change? How can we view other lifestyle's as attractive but not worth changing for? How is it that we all wish to be good people, but end up more focused on other minutiae?