My Time as a Human

As a human I am naturally endowed by my creator with certain unquenchable desires and primary directives, among these are the quest for food, safety, and reproduction (both sex and co-nurture of young). Additionally my particular model has some kind of a novelty and artistic creation directive that can be quite insistent and will, at times, overpower other basic survival directives like food and sleep.

In order for our society to develop and advance, we have learned that we must band together and combine resources, often necessitating the use of extreme measures to overcome our primary objectives. These stiflings come in the form of religious or governmental laws that tell us not to reproduce every time, and with every one, we can get our hands on. They also tell us not to kill anyone who tries to spread their genes in our place, or who cuts in front of us when waiting in line for a Wii. Some even restrict eating, perhaps as a way of training and “keeping in shape” for the resisting of sex.

Now that I have been single again for a while, I am reminded of the many ways the primary directives are compromised by the limited ability of our primal brains to understand the bigger picture. When single, the most powerful motivating force in my known universe is cute women. They are like curvaceous chunks of P-238, and when I get near one I start bouncing and wriggling with all of the extra energy. I write more creatively. Music pours out of me in my isolated moments. What I’ve learned, however, is that for me they often have a great deal more potential energy than kinetic energy. Unrequited love produces far more artistic output than a stable isotope. This means that my directive to produce art is in conflict with my directive to maintain a stable relationship (stable relationships being necessary for the care of young).

As it turns out, this works out in a practical manner as well. Through experimentation, I’ve learned that there is a cycle of response to a lengthy absence during a long term relationship, typically taking place in the span of a month:

• Week 1: “This such a great opportunity for you. I’m so excited for you! Have a great trip!”
• Week 2: “Wow, I really, really miss you!”
• Week 3: “You know, now that I have more time I’ve really been exploring more of myself, discovering who I am and what I want out of life. I feel like I’m really growing as a person.”
• Week 4: “Who are you and how did I let you ruin my life?!”

Now, it’s useful to have a few humans with this novelty directive in your gene pool, because they’re the types to hop out into the cold without a towel, jog over the next hill, and find out that there’s a hot tub over there. They also provide amusing sounds when everyone is back in the pool again. You just don’t want to have too many of them, or let them mate with your daughters, potentially leading to unstable offspring.

So I’ll keep poking my head over nearby hills, bouncing up and down when girls get near, and try as I might to avoid it, end up in some form of relationship again. But it gets rough being built like a pinball machine, designed to bounce back and forth forever. At some point the magnets will refuse to fire, the lights will flicker, and the last ball will trickle through the unresponsive flippers and rattle into the pocket for the end of my game. I can only hope that at that point I, and everyone around me, had some fun along the way.

I wasn’t sure when I started this public forum blog how much I would write directly about people and situations in which I was currently involved. The trouble is that, like any human, once I get the sense that anyone is really listening, some lever deep in the human construct clicks into place with a quiet kerschnap and, like the huge boulder unleashed on Indiana Jones, a distant rumbling builds to a thunder as the unstoppable force of my inner thoughts roll out. It can be terrifying or thrilling depending on how you see these things and which side of the boulder you’re on, but I became a documentary filmmaker because I so love mental archeology and the rush of standing directly in harms way, coaxing out the next chance to be flattened. Go ahead. I’m listening.

Quite a few years ago I went to see a play at Fronterafest that featured a man dying of cancer. He did a whole series of bits, including a short and terrifying magic act with knives, a musical performance, and a poem. In the end, he talked about finding one’s purpose in life by thinking about this question: “What is the one thing that you do so well and so naturally that you don’t even realize it’s hard to do? In fact, likely the only way you found out about it is that at some point other people were astounded and asked, ‘how do you do that?!’”

I went out to lunch with my friend CC and her friend of many years a few months later. During the course of conversation CC’s friend began talking in depth about how she fought with a long period of depression and what it took to work her way back to owning her own life. As CC and I were leaving together she kept saying, astounded, “I’ve known her for ten years and I’ve never heard her talk about that. She’s never opened up like that before…” and then she stopped and spun to face me. “It’s you! It’s that thing you do!’”

Over the years I’ve tried to understand what it is that I’ve picked up from my mother and grandfather that has caused complete strangers around me to spontaneously burst out in the song of their greatest struggles, triumphs, and fears. On a flight from Alaska to Chicago I met a middle-aged business woman and started chatting. This built to a sudden breakthrough and she decided that she was going to quit her job the minute she got back and travel europe like she’d always wanted. A young Philippino woman on a bus told me the story of how she had been abused as a child and began reflecting on how this still affected her daily interactions. Sadly, it’s shocking how many women have revealed rape or near rape stories to me, and how often it is the first time they’ve told the story to anyone.

Listening seems like such a simple task, but I’m still trying to understand it, as it’s something I do so unconsciously. I at first feared that thinking about it at all would be like trying to drive a stickshift car after attempting to explain it to someone– impossible. At first it appears to be nothing more than doing nothing at all. Simply not speaking, however, is not enough. For someone’s lever to trip, I have to also stop wanting and, most importantly, stop being me.

There are several impulses and desires that lie behind “wanting”. I have to not want to respond, or jump in with, “wait, I have a story just like that!” I have to stop wanting them to respond in a certain way, or wanting them to be anything other than who they are in that moment. I have to stop expecting them to tell me anything, and, in fact, genuinely not want them to tell me anything at all. Yes, I know, very zen. Well the zen gets even worse. I think that when I’m most effective, I am not myself at all. I become egoless. For a little while, I become this person before me. When the cab driver tells me how he wants to stab every black man that gets into his cab before they stab him, I nod and listen and feel what that fear and hatred must feel like for him. By feeling through his experience, I can respond to what he says without judgement. I’ve noticed that when someone talks for long enough without feeling judged, they often find themselves with their defenses down and not only willing to say more, but listen to themselves for the first time. In fact, in the absence of having to defend their beliefs against the judgments of others, I’ve seen people begin to re-examine and bring their own fresh observation and judgement onto themselves.

Of course, the byproduct of this process is that afterwards I have to remember to step back out of that person’s skin, re-enter my own and make use of some of my own judgements. This cabbie is not, for example, someone I need to introduce to my black friends.

There is one more side effect, too. I sat interviewing an amazing older woman as part of a documentary project. As is typical she started out the two day long interview with repeated glances to my eyes, to be assured that I was still watching and listening, and to be sure that I still cared. By the second day, she so trusted my interest that I don’t think she looked at me once. There were tears of joy and sadness, times of reflection, and wonderful stories. In the end… I was in love. Maybe we both were, I’m not really sure, but it created some strange moments as the reality of our situation slowly re-emerged. Her age, the physical distance, and the fact that she didn’t know much at all about me, sank in as we stepped out of the bubble that is created by this listening magic.

Powerful and dangerous. That’s listening.

I got the text message at 5:00 AM this morning. “I am alone with M. and she just took her last breath. What a sacred moment… pure light.” My friend has been sitting with her dying grandmother, whom she loves dearly, for several weeks and I have been honored to share moments during the process. Despite being 90 years old, her grandmother was fairly unprepared for death. In a very short period of time she went through a whole cycle of fear and denial before ultimately accepting and understanding what was to come. The early days were extremely difficult for her family, less so because she was leaving them than because she was so afraid and unprepared. When she ultimately faced her situation head on, she was able to transform the terror of thinking it was her last chance to laugh into the opportunity to share one more laugh, and that with a family that had already received an abundance in their many years together. In the end she went gracefully, beautifully, and those who loved her were able to feel joy in her peaceful passage. I imagine her stepping through a door proudly, confidently, waving to those behind.

It’s so easy to get caught up in the ending. The final minutes when Weishi handed me the last of our relationship and drove away to California were so intense they sometimes felt like half of our four years together as I held them in my mind. At the same time, the relationship was not its ending. Over time those last moments have shrunk back down to take their proper place among memories of sailing in the rain, long bike rides, photographing bears in Alaska, and eating pineapple beside the pounding surf and smiling moon of Maui.

My grandfather was a pastor, and an incredible example of faith like I have never seen before or since. It was a quiet and unshakeable part of him. When his time came he welcomed it, having prepared his whole life a belief that he was moving on from his time on earth to begin another in heaven. The effect that this attitude had on my mother and her brothers was inspiring. Of course they grieved losing him, but their grief was for their own loss and for him there was only joy.

When I go I want the response to be, “wow. We got everything we could outa that guy.” At my funeral I want everyone to be handed a tiny film canister (if film canisters still exist!) of ashes and told that they have to spread them over the soil of a country they haven’t yet visited. I want my death to be a moment that inspires anyone who hasn’t already faced mortality to wake up and run out of the morgue screaming, “More life! More intensity! Bring it on!” Of course, that’s only possible if I live my own life the same way, so I’d better leave this laptop and get after it.

Goodnight M. I never got the chance to know you but your energy spread through those you love to reach me thousands of miles away. Thanks.

“You’d better get used to that smell”, Manmeet said as he opened the door to our little truck. I stepped outside into the Punjab countryside for the first time and took a deep breath of the country air and its signature flavor: cow shit. I grinned and turned to him. “That’s the best smell in the world,” I said.

The last time I remember having that experience was climbing out of a minivan as my parents dropped me off for my first year of college. Despite being the birthplace of the HAL 9000, the University of Illinois is buried in miles and miles of corn fields. That day the wind was blowing up from the south and my dad and I shared a moment of mutual understanding. It felt like home already.

While I myself grew up in the sterile confines of the Chicago suburbs, my dad spent all of his early years on a dairy farm in Mantua, Ohio. My sisters and I spent many summers back on that same farm, climbing over mountains of hay bales and feeling the giant sandpaper cow tongues lick feed from our hands. The first vehicle I ever drove was a tractor. The second was a motorcycle that I used to tear up bean fields for every hour of sunlight I was given. The farm had its own gasoline tank and so I could roll up, fill the tank, grab a sandwich and head back out. Somehow those bits of farm life, mysterious and magical adventures, put a little bit of silage in my blood forever.

My family moved into a new house in a new town when I was in fourth grade. I remember having the bizarre experience of recognizing every kid from my old school in the body of someone at the new. As one big guy held my arms back and two others took turns punching me, I was thinking, “wait, I know you!” The guy holding my arms was identical to a friend of mine back home, and only a month before I had been sitting on the twin of the guy who was now punching me. They dressed and talked a little differently, but I quickly became convinced that the world was, in fact, a stage play put on for me by a limited assortment of actors who changed faces whenever I changed sets.

My experience in the Punjab countryside was the same. The women wore silken scarves and the men had turbans the brilliant yellow of mustard flowers or the deep green of the wheat fields. They had darker skin and spoke in a language I was only beginning to understand, but despite all of that I knew them for who they were: the same actors I’d met years ago around the farm in Mantua, Ohio. I could see it in the way everyone waved at me from their ox-drawn carts. Replacing the tractors with carts wasn’t enough to disguise their familiar smiles. They were just as quick to offer me a ride, take a moment to pause from hard physical labor to laugh at me, or teach me how to eat sugar cane.

As a kid I watched my dad explain his physics research to a room full of curious older farmers. They reclined and relaxed around the room, but listened intently to everything he said. Now I was welcomed into people’s homes to tell them about America and my equipment and experiences in exactly the same way. Even the houses felt familiar to me somehow. They were built of brick and cement instead of wood, and there were often cows living in courtyards, but the general relaxed bustle of the place and the extended family that filled them made me feel right at home.

Our few commonalities are so often more powerful than the many things that make us different. I dated a Chinese woman for more than four years who, like me, was the child of nerds. Despite her having grown up in Beijing, this fact made us far more culturally compatible that I was with most American women. I never felt any experience of culture shock in those Indian fields of papaya and farmers until Americans joined us, one of whom was from LA. The shock of experiencing such a radically different view on people, cultural sensitivity and life itself was incredibly intense and proved, once again, that home is not a place– it’s a way of being.