Lost

Last night I watched a documentary on Henry Miller (Henry Miller Asleep and Awake, by Tom Schiller) in which an eighty-one year old Miller is interviewed in his bathroom, dressed in his pajamas and robe. The walls are covered with various pictures and photos, and Miller reminisces and tells stories about several of them in his raspy Brooklyn-ese. At one point he talks about a recurring dream in which he doesn’t recognize his own face in the mirror. He ends up in an insane asylum, eventually escaping over a great wall. When he tries to talk to some people he meets in town, he realizes they can’t understand him at all, as if he’s speaking a foreign language, and the feeling sinks in that he must still be mad. At this point, Miller says, he usually wakes up with a gasp.

I went to bed shortly after watching the film, feeling particularly clear-headed and alive. I dreamed that my brother and his wife had another child, a third son, and they entrusted me to keep an eye on him for a while. He was very small and, in fact, kept getting smaller as the dream unfolded. I wasn’t particularly alarmed by this until he got so small I could barely see him. He was playing on the floor beside me, but soon he was the size of a tiny spider or flea. Eventually I lost sight of him, and a sense of panic set in. I had lost him, and I’d have to face my family with this unforgivable failure.

I’ve been preoccupied lately with fears, self-doubt, and confusion as I enter into another major life transition. I’m wrapping up a three and a half year stay in Kentucky, during which I have often felt like I was doing little more than waiting for my wife to finish her PhD program. As I search for a new job and place to live, I have had to face the fact that, at the age of thirty-six, I still don’t have a clue what I want to do with my life, in terms of a career. In my clearest moments, this doesn’t concern me much, as I sense that such matters carry little weight in the grand scheme of things. Whenever my mind takes me for a ride about this or that career path, I eventually get the sense of being on a wild goose chase, of pursuing a meaningless question, of being lost in a distraction from matters of spiritual substance. But then again, a man has to eat and pay the rent you know, and what a man does for a living shapes his body and soul in ways that are hard to fathom sometimes.

I have been working in the human services field for fifteen years now, and it has taken its toll. I’m no saint, as my career path has been more about the limitations of my experience, skills and education, than about a compassionate desire to help others. Don’t get me wrong — I have had many deep moments of connection and compassion, and indeed I have expended a great deal of energy helping people in dire need. It’s just that I would have dropped all that in a heartbeat had my band been signed, or had some college given me the opportunity to teach.

I am, once again it seems, at sea without a rudder, about to head off in another direction with little to guide me other than the compulsion to survive and the hope that this time I will live up to my potential. Perhaps that’s what the tiny child represented in my dream — my potential. Hope. It’s no wonder I felt so sick when I lost sight of him.