Me Version 2.0

Three years ago today I lost the most lucrative job I’d ever known and hours later similarly lost the girlfriend of six years I imagined I’d one day marry. For months leading up to that day my world had been crumbling, courtesy a long and growing admixture of anxieties, outright phobias, and physical ailments. So when those two events struck and within 24 hours, no less, it was as akin to the  final straws placed atop the camel’s back. Down I went.

Three years later I cannot imagine the life I’d lived for those previous 43 years. In essence I’d been given  a second shot at life, a Dickensian chance to fling open the shutters and announce myself reborn. Or, to put it in a more modern vernacular and with props to the friend who coined it, I was entering Doug 2.0 and saying good-bye to Doug 1.0.

I do not intend here to act as if the intervening three years weren’t difficult. Far from it, they were the most difficult three years of my life. Journeys were undertaken to low and high desert alike, to the Amazon, to mountain tops, to my own soul, etc. I bid adieu to long-time friends who pined for Doug 1.0 and I recalibrated the rest. I read and prayed and meditated endless, hour after hour, and I did not work full-time at any point during those three years. I burned through savings, 401K plans, home sale receipts and the odd dollars I earned. Nothing was more important than the journey I’d embarked upon and even today that remains the case. In point of fact, I cannot understand how the rest of humanity continues to march to the drummers of vocation, education, relationships, television, etc., when the spirit calls out to them. All else is so utterly inconsequential. And then I remember that the “real world” provides them with haven against the inevitable: death. Easier to worry about the economy, the job, the mate, the kids, than to recognize death may call during tomorrow’s commute.

This is not the majestic posting I’d imagined it to be at the three-year mark, but my ramblings here somehow feel perfectly appropriate. Ultimately, none of it really matters and I write to, for and by myself. But as Robert Adams famously declared to some of his students, “We have to do something while we’re in the dream.”