I have been alone for ten days. Heidi and the boys are in the Midwest visiting her father and friends leaving me with the freedom to do anything. It is so rare to have time entirely my own. I spent the first day driving to Milton Freewater to train with Jim Keating. Time well spent but the drive is arduously lonely, and it is hard to fill the openness of the landscape with an internal monolog. But the time alone and the emptiness of the landscape reminded me of something essential: it is only possible to live when we love another.
I have been very productive while Heidi and the boys were away – training, cleaning, working, organizing, thinking, reading – but at night my weaknesses were revealed. During the day it was easy to always do something, easy to survive, and perhaps even sometimes enjoy the time alone. But at night I found myself unable to sleep; no matter how far I roll or flail a limb, Heidi isn’t there; I strain to hear any sound of Kyrian getting up or Adin walking about downstairs. Nothing save darkness and silence. And I realize – my life is on ‘pause’ waiting for them to return.
I watched Intersellar (2014) last night and cried harder than I have in years. Trite and sentimental though it may be to find catharsis in a movie (and not a particularly great one), thinking of never seeing my children and wife again – separated by impossible distance and irretrievable time was too much for me to process. Ridiculous as it was I cried uncontrollably missing them. And again as trite as it is to find solace in a movie, the message that love is the one aspect of our human condition that can transcend space and time hit me. And it made me think of the last movie that made me cry: The Road (2009).
We strive so hard to prepare. Train, save, plan, observe – always trying to stay ahead –prepared for survival. And yet, I think to the wife in The Road who gives up – “this isn’t living” – and walks out to die alone, leaving her husband and son to struggle on. She teaches an important lesson – yes she made a selfish decision to leave – but she was focused on what she knew as living and to her living was more than survival.
Being away from my family – and it feels like they were taken away from me since it is they who left – makes me feel as if a part were removed. At first a surgical removal; the pain was anesthetically numbed, but as time has gone on the wound is ragged, more raw, more open and obvious.
So I have spent the empty hours only by filling them with projects: cleaning the house, working late, training every day at the dojo, organizing my books, doing all the laundry, installing cabinets. All very productive, but only meaningful when my family returns. Otherwise, none of it matters. The clean house and new cabinets are insignificant without them to appreciate it. Bishop Berkley mused about a tree falling in the forest – without an observer, does it make a sound? – only to conclude that it does because God is always watching. And to me my family is God. Their happiness is what matters most to me.
I have no idea what will make them happy. Every day I try – and often fail – but work, training, preparing, everything has one goal: making them happy. It may very well be the engineered end is neigh. The financial system looks in dire need of a hard reset and Islam is certainly tearing at the fabric of sane social values – but I refuse to let my happiness be dictated by fear or (as I have come to realize) too much attention to particulars.
Augustus issued edicts trying to reestablish virtue within a Rome grown effete, debauched, and indolent – dependent on plunder and warriors from abroad. He failed despite his foresight, wisdom and power. Rome as a Republic never returned and the Imperium died a slow death at the hands of Germanic warriors in the west and through Islamic integration in the east. Rome was abandoned and Constantinople became Istanbul. Such are the vicissitudes of history.
Please do not mistake this as sanguine resignation. I plan to observe, orient, decide and act upon the social conditions that are apparent. But I have also decided to prioritize my family’s happiness foremost.
Protective Arts 