THE HAND OF FATE?

Shortly after I got out of the Army in the spring of ’95 I ran across a book in Borders, across from Water Tower Place in my hometown of Chicago. It was called “The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success: A Practical Guide to the Fulfillment of Your Dreams.”

It shifted my entire perspective. After years of feeling as if I was a under the whims of a force outside of myself, for better or worse, I began to feel as if I could really affect my own life through spiritual means. I read the book repeatedly and began to work the suggestions and philosophies that it espoused into my day-to-day existence.

By the beginning of the new millennium my life had been completely transformed. The major part of the transformation, or at least the most obvious part, was that I found myself a father and husband. This was a strange new land for me and left little time or energy for the self-examination and spiritual practices that had marked my life in the previous few years. As a result, I feel that a lot of the spiritual growth that I had been experiencing and that, ironically, I feel led to me where I was, came largely to a halt or was substantially slowed.

Now, ten years later, I find myself sometimes feeling almost as lost as I felt back in 1995, fresh from the military and still trying to cope with the deaths of my parents, particularly my mother. Their passing had meant the death of my previous life, not entirely a bad thing, but it had left me roaming aimlessly in a frightening, virtually unknown world.

In 2000, with the birth of my first child and the advent of my first (and only) marriage I found myself, in an unknown (and sometimes frightening) reality.

I think the first part of my life, the part that ended when my mom died in January 1990, could be classified as the Completely Irresponsible Period, or CIP. Because my siblings, three sisters and my brother, were 12 – 24 years older than me and were all out of the house by the time I started kindergarten, I was, for all practical purposes raised as an only child. In addition to that, my parents were pretty much old enough to be my grandparents and, I think, had been worn down raising their other children. The strict parents that they describe that raised them don’t sound at all like the parents that raised me.

After dad and mom passed in ’88 and ’90, respectively, I found myself truly on my own for the first time in my life. I was twenty-seven years old. I had spent most of my teens and all of my adult life thus far waiting to be rich and famous behind my musical exploits and it wasn’t happening. I had no idea what to do and little idea how to provide for myself – so I joined the U.S. Army.

Through the grace of God I managed to blunder my way through and escape with an honorable discharge, despite being the black, 90’s version of Beetle Bailey. I came back to Chicago with only marginally more life skills than I had when I left. Shortly thereafter I discovered the aforementioned tome and many other “new age” books and began to feel that I had a measure of control over my life, as it were.

In my humble opinion, those few years after 1995 – in particular the summer of ’96, during which I became like Grasshopper from Kung Fu, selling most of my possessions and spending my days taking walks, reading and meditating – led to the period which began in December of 1999, when I got a place with the woman who, within a year, would become my wife.

So the period from January 1990, after my mom passed, to December 1999, when Rachelle and I moved in together, can be thought of as the Wilderness Years. Those years were split cleanly down the middle – the first five when I was wandering aimlessly in the forest of my own confusion and misery, still mourning the deaths of my parents and my former life, and the last five when I began to find my way out.

By January of 2000 I had embarked on the third period of my life – the Mostly Responsible Period, or MRP, also known as the Comparatively Responsible Period. I had gone from a grown man who had little idea how to care for himself, to a grown man who had to help care for an entire family!

It has not been easy.

However, I think that it was the route that I was meant to take.

I look at life as a street with intersections. You can make turns at any given time. But I think that there is a general direction that you are supposed to be going in. Sometimes you get lost and find yourself in places that you don’t recognize at all, or you find yourself in the same old messed up neighborhoods that you’ve been through too many times. At other times you find yourself in an unfamiliar area, but with the near certainty that you are heading in the right direction. It’s a combination of what some would call fate or preordination, but with the free will to go where you want.

For instance, I had no intention of being in a serious relationship with my wife when I first met her and neither did she with me. When I recognized that things were getting serious… quickly… I tried to stop it. But I believe that the direction that we were heading involved more of the hand of fate than usual – much more. I tried, but it would have taken a powerful effort, an effort that, at its heart, didn’t feel right, to resist the preordination at work with Rachelle and me.

Today, I feel that I am about to embark on yet another phase. Right now it is mostly just a feeling. It could be just wishful thinking, but I don’t think so. I have been in another kind of wilderness for the past ten years and I feel that the forest is clearing and I am about to feel truly comfortable and free of fear and discomfort for the first time in many years.

We shall see.