This came as one of the many responses.
My father’s small business was founded in November of 1929, a month after the stock market crashed, and my parents were both marked by the Great Depression. I remember well the respect my parents exercised toward older people, their church, and their bank. Sharing a life of continual hard work and thrift, my parents also shared lighter moments with many friends, who entertained each other in their homes, at little cost. Our family went out to restaurants two or three times a year, at most. My father was an extraordinarily hard working and versatile businessman who rolled up his sleeves to work on every piece of equipment in his small plant. I never met, and will surely never meet, anyone who worked harder to amass a million dollars than my father.Just as young people now overestimate the ranges of possibilities open to them, my father underestimated the range of possibilities open to my generation. He saw a narrow gate at the same time the American gate was growing wider. Born in the late 1930s and early 1940s and taught to “buckle down” and “keep your nose clean,” by the 1960s my generation had the winds of prosperity to its back. A young person could experiment, flounder, stray off-track, and still return to an orderly life. While many stuck to the straight-and the-narrow, that was but one option.In 1962 I graduated from a state university in Ohio without any notion of what to do for a living. Having married just out of college—at that time a pregnant girlfriend spelled “marriage,”—I was surprised when a rural high school near my university was willing to hire me as a teacher. My young wife turned out to not be pregnant after all, and a walloping shock struck a year later when she left to visit her parents for a few days, never to return. Knowing I had failed dismally as a husband but not understanding how, this blow and responses to it gradually stirred new feelings and interests. Inner realignments began touching an inarticulate quality of search.While teaching in the rural high school, I came to see that even the dullest students knew more than I did about life. Most could subsisted through a barren economy by growing and harvesting crops, fixing farm equipment with bailing wire, raising and slaughtering animals, and by being good neighbors. Although I liked the students and probably did relatively little harm, I was a terrible teacher. Moreover, next to most of the students, I knew nothing.After two years in that high school, single again, restless and unwilling to pretend to “teach” for another year, I drove to California, to a place someone extolled once over a glass of beer: Big Sur. How appealing it sounded and how extraordinary it was. A summer there awakened me to the infinite depths of nature, and to pot.The Vietnam war was in full swing by that time and, needing to avoid the draft, in the fall of 1964 I enrolled in graduate school in the same university in Ohio from which I had graduated. This began a period of great confusion—“What am I doing here? What is anyone doing? Why do we exist?” A series of crises involving the law, a broken ethical yard-stick, and ongoing inner mayhem led to a siege of sleeping sixteen and eighteen hours a day—surely “clinical depression”—that only lifted with an inner experience proving beyond doubt that something inside us knows more than we do.* A week later, on the heels of this revelation, I took LSD for the first time, experiencing inner and outer dimensions beyond words and concepts. Even “God” was too small a word.I managed to get through the spring term before returning to the place that made the most sense to me, Big Sur, where I participated in the memorable summer of 1965. What sublime, unearthly realizations, and earthly dissolutions, awaited me along the coast and among the redwoods. For months I stayed stoned on pot, sleeping in a sleeping bag in the forest, and trying to re-evoke my first experiences under LSD.Also, I tried to write.My stable upbringing provided unseen moorings to which I began to turn in 1966. Renting a thirty-five dollar per month one-room house in Sand City, California, just north of Monterey, I wrote, walked among sand dunes, and began reading the writings of P. D. Ouspensky and G. I. Gurdjieff. Called by my draft board for a physical exam and likely induction into the Army, once inside the induction center I handed leaflets I had written, questioning our engagement in this war, before being stopped. The commanding officer and I negotiated an agreement leading to a handwritten note of his, which I still possess: “I will not permit you to hand out your leaflets in this building!”(What an amazing nation, in which a young “nobody” can confront military power in this way.)With nothing publishable to show for writing efforts, in 1967 I moved to the Bay Area and began substitute teaching in inner city schools in Oakland. For several weeks, I sat in a high school hallway, by my presence keeping students from breaking windows in classrooms facing the hallways. Soon I was hired full-time in a junior high school where, during off hours, I continued to read books by and about Gurdjieff. Influenced by his autobiography, Meetings with Remarkable Men, Islamic architecture and Oriental rugs began to interest me and in the summer of 1970 my second wife and I traveled to Iran, attracted by the mosques of Tabriz, Isfahan and Shiraz.Returning from that trip, weeks later all the rugs we had purchased were stolen from our apartment and I immediately wrote to a dealer in Shiraz, asking if he might help me replace them. He surprised me with bundles of rugs sent through the mails, trusting me to pay for the goods after they sold. This exceptional act of trust placed me on the fringes of the Oriental rug business and by 1973, with extremely little money, I was making annual buying trips to both Iran and Afghanistan.By 1974, my second wife and I had a “family.” with two wonderful children, but, we agreed, not a workable marriage. An amiable divorce was arranged.In 1982 I published my first book, Tribal Rugs of Southern Persia. By that time a retail rug store in Portland, Oregon provided a bare living, along with opportunities to learn about the merchandise I bought and sold, and the cultures producing these objects. Slowly, funds needed to operate a business of this nature began to accumulate.My father and I, having suffered a tense and distant relationship for many years, came together in a surprising way during the final weeks of his life, in 1984. His final words to me were amazing: “Jim, have fun.” In the decades since my father’s final breath I discovered that relationships do not end with death. Love for him grows in me still.By 1980 a third failed marriage led to self-confrontations and the need to understand this pattern, with help from a therapist. Ongoing engagements with the Gurdjieff teaching aided this process, given Gurdjieff’s emphasis on incrementally strengthening the capacity to face the truth about oneself. (There is so much we resist seeing.)My business struggled through years of preoccupation with a line of study that, while fascinating, was never remunerative. I invested great amounts of time and travel money in tracing the origin of the oldest tribal rug motifs and—seeing this period from another perspective—trying to make myself “famous.”In 1991 a publisher in London and I co-published my second book, Tribal Rugs, which shared conclusions from my study within broader thematic frameworks. (This book was translated into three other languages.) While years of research and writing nearly broke me, the book was an exceptional success. Within several years I invested several hundred thousand dollars earned from publishing profits in new qualities of hand-woven rug merchandise then coming onto the market. (Many younger rug dealers worked to encourage a return to the use of vegetable-dyed yarns in rug weaving. Renewed standards of quality in our field, and highly saleable merchandise, developed.)How many fourth marriages thrive? In 1988 I met a wonderful woman and we married in 1991. Succeeding years have been prosperous, creative, and happy. A solid home life may not be absolutely essential for a rewarding life, but this marriage has made a tremendous difference for me. My fifth and sixths decades have been the most fruitful of my life, and the seventh begins wellHow could such an ordinary person, who toyed with ruining his life, be so very fortunate? Life is full of meaning, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually. Inner doors that remained shut for decades now appear to be opening. My wife keeps me on an exercise routine and at 72 I am in good health, enjoying shared interests in a community of people who also respond to life’s deepest inner challenges. Recently I began work on my first novel with a clearer goal than ever: to understand more as I encourage others to search for unexpected resources within their own natures.
“Jim, have fun.”
Leonardo DaVinci said: “Simplicity is the ultimate form of sophistication.” Is it ever.
This phrase, though so small and so simple, caught me off guard. Goosebumps covered my body and tears slowly made their way down my cheeks.The slightest and strangest moments have these effects on me.
Our parents want the best for all of us, yet, sometimes their fear and their expectations are the biggest hurdles we face. Your parents always WANT to give you the best advice, but this does not necessarily mean they WILL give you the best advice. They are not you, and you are not them.
This is the best parenting advice I have read to date: 'HAVE FUN'.
“When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.” - John Lennon
James Opie shares a remarkably interesting and courageous story. His ‘inarticulate quality of search’ is a quality many never feel, not because it’s absent, but because they lack the will to look. His quest for meaning and love was far from perfect, yet that’s what made it extraordinary.
“How many fourth marriages thrive? In 1988 I met a wonderful woman and we married in 1991. Succeeding years have been prosperous, creative, and happy. A solid home life may not be absolutely essential for a rewarding life, but this marriage has made a tremendous difference for me. My fifth and sixths decades have been the most fruitful of my life, and the seventh begins well.”
Happiness is only real when shared. This movie changed my life.[Into the Wild]
Essays, columns and short stories, like this one, give us all perspective. We can read them, appreciate them, and go on, or we can really think about them.
Opie realizes that his journey, though far from ideal for the majority of us, is one that brought him to a state we all aim for: a state of happiness. Struggle, experimentation, realization, creativity, love, loss and perseverance. A realization that two is better than one. A realization that life does not diminish with age. A realization that the “Inner doors that remained shut for decades now appear to be opening.”
I hope you find the same satisfaction from this piece. Enjoy.
