My father once said to me: "I'd rather be cold than hot. You can always put more on, but you can't always take more off."
I have perpetually found his wisdom to be
admirable. He seemed to slink through many of life’s troubling situations with
a fluid-like adaptability; always denying the end as the final end. Wisdom is
found in options. It’s better to have a choice to make than to allow fate to
make it for you.
Even still, we
can make bad or non-ideal choices. For example: a series of foolish choices in
the fall of 1993 led me to a place where I found myself forced to face the
recesses of my bitter, tired, damp, confused,
restless soul. Despite my father’s perspective on climate mitigation, my personal
comfort was void of the required more to put on. Should
you ever find yourself outfitted in a single layer of clothing comprised of over-sized navy seafarer bellbottom jeans, generic black faux leather tennis
shoes, a burgundy loose turtle-neck sweatshirt, a green army issue field jacket
you picked up along the way and nothing more, then you lack provisions for
warmth. My long, straight, tangled light brown hair and scraggly, unkempt beard
provided little (if any) extra relief. I guess I could have gone to where
the heat was, but lost was I in the wilderness of Shawnee National
Forest. The hour could have been anywhere between twilight and dusk. In early
October, it didn‘t have to be freezing outside to feel miserable, especially if
rain had poured down the night before.
My biggest fear upon
graduating from high school was failing to realize my rock star dream and
ending up cold, hungry, and homeless. Yet here I sat; right in the prelude to a
nightmare. I tried with all my might to look beyond the squalor and once
again embrace that something more esoteric than I fully understood was
taking place, but my confidence and courage ran low. All along the way, I
kept expecting a big visionary moment of inspiration.... but it never came.
Instead, I sat cross-legged on the cold, dank ground staring into a dying
campfire. I could have gotten up from where I sat and scoured through the dark woods for
fallen stove-lengths, but there were other campers
sleeping all around. Unlike me, they came prepared with either a sleeping
bag, a companion, or both. I did not want to be the unsettled, fidgety jerk
who disturbed them throughout the night. Even here in this counter-culture
naturalist hippie community, I felt as if I imposed.
As I journeyed to the end of the world, I stared into a barren
frightening crevasse and wondered: What do I do now? Where do I go from here?
How long can I keep this up? Despite my father’s good advice, I discovered it
was possible to exhaust all options.
Rainbow culture
requires little to find a seat at the "soup kitchen". Just show up.
But you can prepare yourself a welcoming advantage by bringing something to share.
For me, it was a six ounce round blue tin of Bugler tobacco and a pack of
rolling papers. Even in this enviro-friendly atmosphere, no smoker would have
objected if I showed up with a carton of Marlboro Lights. There was something
far more palliative about not being able to taste the pungent, bitter
earthiness of the tobacco yet still receiving that inoculation of nicotine. But
nicotine is nicotine. Even if it was roll-your-own. And though a single
tin might go a long way, it was sure to eventually run out. I
would then need something else to carry me a little further. This
mental wall stunted me once again. I saw no route of escape. I remained at the
total mercy of... fate. And fate can be cruel. So along with a void of any
clairvoyance, my optimism continued to fade. I did not know what the
day may bring, but the pattern became one of misery.
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