Absurdity

I am sitting in the Atlanta airport waiting for a flight to take me back to Ohio and my other life. Earlier today I was driving to an airport in Kansas with my spouse and youngest son and I made the remark that I felt schizophrenic. It was probably an improper use of the word, but it effectively communicated my feelings of having two different lives. I had just finished two weeks of being reunited with my family and I was trying to prepare myself for six weeks or so of being separated from them once again. 

The trip to the airport was generating feelings of being disconcerted as my emotions were in once place and my physical being was on the way to another place with a separate place of residence, a different time zone, with different sets of routines and responsibilities. My mind needed to be refocused on my life as a professor and researcher who is on a tenure clock, who is facing a lot of grading as the end of the semester approaches as well as articles that need to be written. But doing so was painful and something I wanted to avoid as long as possible.

As I sit here in the midst of this parade of humanity that is a busy airport on a Sunday afternoon, inundated with a head-splitting cacophony of sound, I am struck with the realization of this absurd aspect of my life. It is in the time I spend with my family that I am able to create a life with clarity and meaning that is emotionally fulfilling and comforting. However, to provide for the economic security and well being of my family, I live another life that separates me from them by 900 miles. My other life is a time of working for clarity and meaning in the midst of uncertainty as a new professor and researcher. It is an adventure which a part of me wants to liken to the explorers of long ago who set forth into the unknown, wondering if they would ever see home and loved ones again, but I know that my adventure is much safer and certain than was theirs.

I look forward to the time when this geographical and chronological split in my life is bridged, but there is also a part of me that realizes that this emotional turmoil is somewhat healthy in the search for intellectual clarity and meaning. Holding too tightly to the emotional clarity and meaning would require foregoing the opportunity for intellectual adventure.

Like Kierkegaard’s Absurd Man, I choose to embrace the absurd and create my own meaning and clarity. I am thankful that my family seems to be coping with this absurdity as well. It was great to spend a couple of weeks with them and summer vacation will be here soon.  

What Comes After?

It has been a good weekend for me, for which I am thankful. I spent some quality time with good friends and got to know and appreciate them even more. I made a new friend, got to hold a newborn baby on his second day home from the hospital, and made my first visit to the Akron Art Museum. It is so exciting to be living just a few miles from such an excellent museum.

A good deal of the weekend was spent in pretty heavy conversations about life and death, love and betrayal, selfishness and selflessness, the present moment and eternity. I found myself reading "The Hound of Heaven" by Francis Thompson aloud to my friends. It is a favorite poem for within its words I somehow find reason to believe in an eternal dimension of life that defies my preference for objective rationality. It is a poem that moves me to believe in the eternity of Love as the power of Life. The poem is made all the more powerful when one also reads about Thompson's tragic life. 

There are no words, however, for the powerful experience of holding a small bundle of new life in ones arms, especially one's own son or daughter; knowing you would sacrifice your own life to protect this little one from any harm and recognizing the presence of an emotional bond that I want to believe transcends life and death. It is a bond with the timeless dimension of life that I also find evidence of in humanity's awesome capacity for art. 

I went to the Akron Art Museum today to see an exhibit of the photography of Edward Weston. Weston is known for his very sensual photographs of vegetables, especially peppers. I have included a picture of one that I found amusing in that it reminded me of the wrinkled face of a baby or elderly man with a pacifier. Weston saw patterns in nature that affirmed his belief that all of life is one.

While I went to the museum to see the works of Weston, I fell in love with the works of Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson. Her extremely moving and innovative works document the life of a community from earlier days in Columbus, Ohio.  Ms. Robinson will be speaking at the Akron Art Muesum on Sunday, March 22, 2009. I regret that I will be out of town, but I hope it is a standing room only opportunity. 

I was especially struck by the large hands of the people in Ms. Robinson's works. Large, strong hands, seemingly for the necessary work to hold one another up in love and community in the present moment and also patiently waiting for what tomorrow brings. The use of buttons, shells, and thread are also very powerful in her work and speak to me of holding things together, one for the other, today, tomorrow, and for what comes after.

Thanks for reading.