Here & There
By James Kullander
What do you want? I ask myself that question a lot and expect the answer, like some magic password, to open the gate to eternal happiness. Sometimes I do find the happiness I seek. But sometimes (ok, often) I find myself dissatisfied with what I imagined would make me happy, and the question comes round again.
Sometimes a third thing happens: I don’t know what I want. This is more unpredictable and more frustrating—not just for me, but for others, too. Perhaps it’s not always the answer that’s so important, especially with the big things in life, like love and work, but finding out who inside me is asking the questions. And that can take some time to figure out.
Over the past several years, I have been speaking with my supervisors to dramatically change the way I’ve worked at the office for nearly 18 years. I was not unhappy at work, but I did want to change something, to try something new beyond the corridors of the office, the narrow miner’s light of my own routine. At first, I didn’t quite know what to do or how to go about doing it. I’ve been doing what I do for so long—writing and editing Omega’s catalogs and brochures—that I found breaking the routine was like jumping up on a wall to climb out, but the wall was greased, and I just slid back down. Sisyphus and his rock.
With modern telecommunications and the nature of my job as an editor, writer, and program researcher, I spend most of my working day online or on the phone. I can do most of what I do in my office at Omega, in my living room at home, or in a hotel lobby in Tahiti. I began experimenting with telecommuting 10 years ago with a laptop and dial-up service when I was dividing my time between Omega and Union Theological Seminary in New York City, where I was a part-time student. On and off for the past couple of years, I began telecommuting from my home one day a week. More recently, I’ve been telecommuting two days a week. On the days I work at home, I try not to get in my car to save gas and do my tiny part to save our ailing planet. And telecommuting suits a part of my temperament; writers and editors often work alone, and like it that way.
What I have decided I want is a chance to telecommute even more. I want more time to develop some long-neglected writing projects for Omega, to reduce the money I spend on gas and decrease the carbon emissions the times when I work from my home, and the freedom to live and work in two places, which is something I’ve wanted to do my entire adult life but could never figure out how to pull off, both because of my daily responsibilities at the office and my own nagging fear of trying something so new and bold. I talked about it with people but never asked. Finally, in April I made a formal request to work two weeks out of the office followed by a month in the office. Nothing like this had ever been done before at Omega, but in my mind it had become now or never.
***
A few months ago, I noticed a small brown spot on my upper right arm. It was late at night and I was exhausted after a stressful day at work—I’d nearly fallen asleep in the bath before going to bed—but this startled me. I leaned into the mirror for a closer look. I had no idea what melanoma looked like but what I saw looked like something I needed to pay attention to. And I did. I looked at it every morning and every night. I wanted it to go away. But it didn’t. One day, I went online to look at some photos of melanoma moles. Mine bore a frightening resemblance to what I was seeing in those photos. Damn. About two months after I’d first seen that small brown spot, I decided to have a doctor check it out.
It’s Friday morning before the start of the long Memorial Day weekend. In the cold dermatologist’s office, I am sitting on the patient table, shirt off, the white sheet of paper crinkling under me as the doctor looks at my arm, once with the naked eye and once with a magnifying glass. I am thinking about how I am going to treat myself to a chai latte after this. I love chai latte and on my way to the doctor’s office I’d noticed a fancy coffee shop that I’m sure has this on the menu, and that’s where I’ll be heading in just a few minutes. Then the doctor sits in a black plastic chair across from me, puts his thick hands together up in front of this lips in an attitude of prayer and says, “Jim, melanoma is a very serious disease. And I think you have melanoma. In fact, I’m quite sure of it.”
When I arrived at the doctor’s office, I had expected to be sent home without a care in the world. It’s nothing. Go home. Have a nice life. A half-hour later I have melanoma. Jesus. He explains to me the nature of the cancer, how it works its poison into your body. I try to pay attention while at the same time I see myself not sipping blissfully on a chai latte. I see myself dead. This is where the end begins, I am thinking. My maiden voyage into a world I’ve dreaded for years and no amount of back paddling is going to stop it. I’ve been with two friends when they learned they had cancer and both of them were dead six months later. One of them I saw dead; the image is seared into my brain, and I don’t want to look like that anytime soon. Okay, focus. Be here now. The deeper it is, the more lethal it is. I remember the doctor saying that much. Since mine was small and new, the doctor says, it is likely the melanoma on my arm is not deep or lethal. A moment of relief, a change in the wind. I take a breath. Still, he wants the mole off me and tells me to come back at the end of the day so he can remove it and have it biopsied. Dazed and frightened, I drive home, call my father, cry probably for the first time with him. Then back to the doctor’s office, then home with an arm full of stitches, sans the mole.
Here in Upstate New York, Memorial Day weekend was one of the most extraordinarily beautiful three-day stretches we have had in months. I have a cheap chaise lounge under a floppy leafed catalpa tree in my back yard, where I read and write and nap when I get drowsy. Nursing my wound, I spent Memorial Day weekend doing just that. And worrying. It would be a week before I would learn the results of the biopsy. I had no idea if the cancer I had was isolated in that small mole or if my body was riddled with it.
There were moments I stopped doing whatever I was doing. I stopped reading or writing or even worrying, if only for a moment, and looked around me at the beautiful day, the birds flying, the rabbits hopping, the deer running, the chipmunks scurrying. In those moments, I felt good just to be alive, ever more appreciative of the life I’d been given. And I did my level best to finally accept the impermanence of my life. It’s been a nice ride. Now it’s over. With so little emotional armor, there were times when I had a light, fragile feeling that was inexplicably pleasant. Then the pleasant feeling would pass and I’d find myself brooding upon the hard realities of human existence, imagining that I was going to die a slow, painful death; my long, happy life hemorrhaging like a full can of paint that’s been kicked over. And when I thought of that I lifted up like objects of adoration all the places I would rather be to live out my last days. Italy, Greece, Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Island, Ireland’s Connemara—beautiful places I’ve been and suddenly wanted to get back to again—all came to mind like travel stickers on an old suitcase. The incongruity of these two states produced an awakening of sorts. The Buddha said: “It is better to spend one day contemplating the birth and death of all things than a hundred years never contemplating beginnings and endings.”
***
The following week, I e-mailed a friend, who has also looked at death squarely in the face, to tell her about my weekend. She wrote back confirming what I had been contemplating those three difficult days: “All you got is this moment, bud. So instead of wanting to be somewhere else, just feel into that good heart of yours, feel the life force pounding away, forget about writing or a certain place where you want to be writing, and just be that life force that needs nothing, nowhere, no one. I know it sounds hokey, but it will help as you go through all of the fear states. Feel your pounding heart and dwell as peacefully as you can in the mystery of it all. Wanting to be somewhere else, thinking you SHOULD be somewhere else, hating where you are—especially right now, is just going to add more pain to the fear.”
My experience that weekend taught me something I already knew but always forget: Life is short so don’t waste one more precious moment not doing what you really want to do. Since I needed to work, telecommuting suddenly rose to the top of my bucket list. This might not seem like a big deal, I said to myself. But, I thought, is it any less a big deal than jumping out of an airplane like Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman do in the movie, The Bucket List? Telecommuting now appeared in my life as the personal fulfillment of a long-cherished dream.
The melanoma turned out to be minor; I’d caught it early enough, before it had gotten too deep and the cancer cells into the rest of my body. And at work, my request was approved. I am writing this in my living room at home.
Recently, I’ve been thinking about the lesson here. Perhaps when we are aligned with our true self, then the rest of the world mysteriously conspires with us to make things happen. What we want and what God asks of us are “one and the same damned thing,” as a Union professor once paraphrased St. Augustine, a 4th-century philosopher and theologian, because for St. Augustine our true self is written in God’s memory. As we plumb the mind of God, we get ever closer to finding the person God wants us to be and our place in the great scheme of things.
When one person makes a step for change, and that change is what’s wanted most not just for our own individual fulfillment but also for the greater good, suddenly there can be a shift in the old patterns, a breaking of habits. The greased wall comes tumbling down and the gods release you from having to push that rock up the hill. The same can be said for organizations and institutions. While my request was being considered, Omega’s directors were already looking at ways to further its commitment to sustainability—not just with a nod to reducing our carbon emissions, but also as a way of recognizing the quality of an employee’s life when we can align our passions with our work and the way we work.
Instead of relegating the search for self to the list of things we will do later—or perhaps, because our culture makes it seem so selfish and silly, never do at all—it’s really something we are born to do each and every moment of our life. There is, in fact, no higher calling. Finding out who is doing the calling is, says St. Augustine, the deep calling to the deep.
