The Open Question
On May 25, 2020, a few weeks after I started at Bay Path University in the MFA Creative Nonfiction program, I wrote this in my journal: One of my first assignments was to answer twenty questions about my “process.” The last question was what I hoped to get out of the course/program. I had no idea how to answer this, so I wrote “internal peace.” A few students commented that they liked that answer as did the teacher. And it was true. I want internal peace.
Further into that day’s journal entry, I wrote: If I do finish this degree, and there’s no reason why I shouldn’t, I will feel validated. I will have enhanced a core attribute of myself. That is the internal peace I want. I will be living for myself, not searching for the approval of others to accomplish this goal.
When I was eleven years old, I dreamed of becoming a writer. My earliest stories from that age were based on my own fantasies - nothing crazy, just nerdy me being an unrecognized superhero solving crimes for the local police. Even decorated the pages with real school photos of me proving my unassuming criminal-capturing genius.
The nerdy eleven-year-old me working as a US spy in Russia (according to my story).
During my mid-teens, it was my chore to burn the household trash in the basement incinerator (what young teenager doesn’t like to play with fire - especially one sanctioned by my parents who gave me the matches!). One day I slipped in all the journals and notebooks of my youth and watched my words disappear in the inferno of burning newspapers, crumbled napkins and food waste. “The stuff was stupid,” I thought with the cocksure wisdom of a teenager. Destroying the writing of those early years is a regret I still hold onto.
Over the ensuing years, I never lost that unquenchable desire to write, eventually filling more volumes of notebooks with family history, descriptions of life’s events, and personal thoughts. But it was never something that anyone suggested I do for a living. It was the 1970s and I needed to attend college to eventually get a “real” job so I could raise a family, buy a house with a white picket fence and a long driveway, and become one of the “haves” in a nice neighborhood where we’d complain against the “have nots.”
Society, for the most part, does not promote following the dreams of our youths, like the one I had of becoming a writer. As an adult, writing was something one did in between doing something else. What I quickly came to realize, though, is that we are trained and expected to be nothing more than two-legged squirrels, running around in a constant state of fear from being swallowed-up by those higher on the food chain, and to store nuts, as many as we can, to hold us through uncertain futures. I never did warm up to the excess of corporate America or desired an overflowing 401K plan as much as I lived under these constructs.
This past May, five years after I started the MFA program, I participated in the Bay Path University graduation ceremony in Springfield, Massachusetts. I walked to the stage when they called my name and received my diploma. In a sense, this was closure for a five-decade internal struggle of mine. And yet, it will not be the end but the continuation of who I really am. The only difference between the past and the present, really, is that the eleven-year-old boy living inside of me has been validated, and the sixty-three-year-old inside of me has found his peace.
There will be no more regrets.
“What did you do as a child that made the hours pass like minutes? Herein lies the key to your earthly pursuits.” Carl Jung
