Take a deep breath.

I used to get very angry. Most of it was the self-righteousness of the young, of course, but some of it was a deep-seated personality flaw, by which I mean that I was unaware that my “green”ness was not actually an unflawed way of looking at the world. The fact that greens are “98% right”, and it is a fact… trust me…, doesn’t mean we’re 98% correct.

It took me a long time to realize that other solutions to problems I encountered could be as valid as the one I proposed. In other words, I realized that what I thought was the way things were supposed to be was just my brilliant evaluation and only that.

Eventually, I became aware that sometimes the best way for others to realize the weakness of a plan was not for me to point it out but to allow them get it wrong. Enough times of that happening, and one builds a reputation for reliability, if not outright infallibility in some circles.

And of course, if things went well, that was fine, too. There would always be time to refine the process if necessary. Successive approximation became my modus operandi, and I was able to expunge a major source of my anger, in that I could relax if my solutions were not the ones adopted by whatever group I was involved in.

What makes me angry now? Waste, mostly, people wasting time or energy or talent. George W. Bush wasting our nation’s reputation and standing in the world, not to mention our treasury. Me wasting my time and talents in regards to my music.

But my anger these days is self-contained. I don’t direct it outwards, because I don’t like the way that feels. Instead, I focus on it and allow it to dissipate into a sadness over things I cannot directly affect or to become the determination to change the things I can.

What anger has to do with “masculine meditations” is a bit of a puzzle to me. My wife has a much fiercer temper than I and is not averse at all to releasing into the atmosphere. The assumption that men have an “anger problem” is more than a bit sexist, although I realize there is a connection between testosterone and rage. As always, these things are more of a personal problem than a gender issue.

This is an easy one.

I am grateful to my wife, the very fact that she is my wife. One reason I fell in love with her was her ability to keep my ego in check, but the fact of the matter is that she is my biggest supporter, often rising to my defense even when I don’t. She has kept me laughing for more than 30 years. When I look at who I was 30 years ago, I am constantly amazed that she was even attracted to me.

I am grateful for my son. Children teach you many things about life, the most important being that you are temporary. I am grateful that my son is smart, witty, and kind. I am grateful that teaching at the high school level for as long as I did, and working with young people in the theatre and GHP, taught me about letting go. I think I have done a lot better in that regard than many parents.

I am grateful to my profession, where I get to go to work every day and do battle with the forces of ignorance. I get to take a child’s mind and help it realize there’s an empty shape inside it, and how to fill it. I am grateful, you can’t know how grateful, that my school is a good school, full of smart, competent teachers and smart, supportive leadership. I’ve been where that’s not true, and I will never tolerate that kind of evil again.

I am grateful for the role theatre has played in my life. It has brought me great joys, great frustrations, and great triumphs as we worked together to make the thing that is not and share it with an audience. I am looking forward to Coriolanus for that very reason. Yes, my heart sank a bit as I wrote in all those Wednesdays and Saturdays between now and October 25, but I know that it is going to be a marvelous adventure.

I am grateful to my friends, the Lichtenbergians, the Lacunians, the GHPers. One of my true concerns about leaving the theatre behind was that I had no friends in my life outside the actual production of a show. This has not been the case, as this and other blogs go to show. These people have kept my mind working, served as audience and kibbitzers for my work, and have been supportive in ways I don’t think they realize.

I am grateful to music, for everything it brings to my life. I am about to plunge back into my own music, for better or for worse, and I tender that gratitude as an offering to the gods to take it easy on me.

I am grateful to GHP and the role it has played in my life, for over half my life. From attending as a student, where Diane Mize changed my life forever by showing me exactly what the creative process was and could be; to teaching in the program, where Lonnie Love, the director, taught me how the program is deliberately put together to produce its effect on students; to heading up the instructional program itself, a life-altering experience and responsibility indeed: the whole time has been the most incredibly enriching and challenging process in my life. Every time I think about not doing another summer, I realize that I’m not through with GHP yet, nor GHP with me.

In a similar vein, I am grateful for the life of the mind. Ideas are important, expression of those ideas is important, and sharing of those expressions is important. Books, music, theatre, film, the web, these blogs, all are part of the Great Conversation, and I am grateful to be invited to take part.

One of my favorite educational consultants, Heidi Hayes Jacobs, snorts, “Change? Nobody likes change! Change is bad! Growth, on the other hand…”

I don’t like change myself. I am suspicious of it, especially change instigated by other people. Part of that is my innate green-ness: can they possibly have given this change the thought that I would have given it in order to make sure that the consequences are not unduly horrible? Years of experience have confirmed my suspicions, generally.

I suppose, too, that my dislike of change is largely responsible for my having decided years ago that a career in education, completely in my hometown, was a better option for me than pursuing a career in theatre in New York or that other coast. I was always envious of guys like Wayne and David and Helen and Paul (and Mike and Bailee!) who just headed out and worked job to job, from city to city and apartment to apartment, and who along the way built careers of one kind or another. Envious, but not enough to follow their example.

Even now, eligible for retirement, knowing that I could probably make a lot more money as an educational consultant, I shove that idea to the back of my mind. My entrepreneurial spirit barely registers on those aptitude tests, because my tolerance of risk and change is minimal. Trying to track down people to hire me, staying on the road half the time, constantly having to assess my status and the status of those for whom I’m working: too much change. My stomach rebels at the very thought.

It is ironic then that I have so often been an agent of change. At school, at GHP, at the theatre, in Masterworks, I push(ed) constantly for a re-examination of what we do and whether making a change might be beneficial. Doing the same thing over and over, resisting change for no good reason, drives me as insane as change itself. I suppose that this is what Heidi would call growth, and I’m OK with that.

Resistant to change as I am, it’s important to ask the question: Have I changed? Absolutely. I’m sure everyone in my life would tell you I’ve gotten “nicer” as I’ve gotten older. I think they mean that I’m more tolerant of other’s foibles. I’m not sure that’s true, but I have gotten more interested in finding explanations for the idiocies of others. I still think they’re idiots, though.

I’m not as single-minded about most things in my life as I used to be, and I even am able to let go of personal disappointments in what I hope is a healthy way. (A common myth in my family is that I always get my way; it might be truer to say that they don’t realize when I don’t get my way because I don’t mention it.)

I don’t think I’m as disciplined as I used to be, which may be the same thing as the previous paragraph. I find that I mostly require a deadline to be extremely productive, which is one reason I’ve ginned up this series of meditations. My failure to work on any real music since April 23 is another example of this difference in my life. Change, but definitely not growth.

A change I’m hoping to make in my life is the ability to examine it more thoroughly, another reason for this series of essays. Of course, a blog is not the place to do a lot of airing of dirty laundry, so I’m not sure how effective I’ll be in making this change in myself, but as I scan through the topics in the book, I can see some that will require me to do some deep thinking before writing about them. Forced change. It will do me good.

LATER:

I think one thing about the word change that leaves me wondering about myself is that I don’t really see myself as fundamentally changed since I became an adult. I’ve learned more stuff, naturally, and my understanding, and perhaps tolerance, of the world has broadened, but then I was never very narrow in my judgments anyway.

I do change my hair. I got tattoos. I just got my ear pierced. Those are changes, but external. Internally, I think I’m the basically the same, just bold enough to get my ear pierced.

Yes, I’m already a day behind, but it’s okay because I’ve cheated with the timestamp.

Part of my condescending irritation with the little book I’m using to generate topics for this series is its wide-eyed naivete about its essays. None of them are revelatory in the least. I mean, “many lives, one man”? Who hasn’t realized that he’s more than one person, at least anyone over the age of thirteen?

However, I’ll be bold and agree with the main point of the essay and say we’re not talking the external roles we play. Yes, I’m a husband, a father, a teacher, a friend, but that’s not what we’re confessing here. Within us we harbor more than one actual person.

To begin with, I am a sensualist, which should shock no one who knows me. (Well of course, some would say, you’re a Taurus.) I seek delight for all of my senses. Pretty things enchant me. Well-prepared food is a constant goal. Silk, cotton, skin, against my skin. The sight of a beautiful human body, male or female. Music of almost any kind. Well-designed type. Shakespeare’s language. Wooden boxes.

I am a creator. I seek to make the thing that is not, whether it’s music or a blog post or supper or a new lesson plan. I look at the chaos that the universe presents and I organize it into something new. With any luck, and years of experience, the new thing is something coherent.

I am a leader. It’s hard to write that. I don’t know why, other than I have taken hits in the past from those who resent my ability to lead. But even though modesty does not permit one to brag, I have to recognize that I have an almost magnetic leadership ability. As the years have progressed, my leadership has become more and more what I call “permission giving,” in that I simply make the decisions that allow others to come together to accomplish things. Yes, Coriolanus and the Lichtenbergians are good examples of that.

Now I am thinking very hard and trying to come up with other personae, but I’m drawing a blank. Warrior? Not so much. Fool? Not the same as a wit, I hope. Lover? See sensualist. Wanderer? I am not, as evidenced by my entire life. “Wounded man,” as Quiet strength concludes in its maudlin fashion? Pshaw. The hurts I have received in my life are as nothing and do not hamper my other selves. (‘Tis but a flesh wound.) I don’t think that’s braggadocio, truly, but then perhaps I am not an analyst, either.

I know, I know. Right off the bat we have a vomit-inducing title. Bear with me.

First a few words of introduction. Having decided that this blog sucks, I’m going to punish everyone by embarking on another year-round project. I will still write about music and theatre and other life concerns, but my daily impetus for writing will be A quiet strength: meditations on the masculine soul , by various authors, including one named, I kid you not, Shepherd Bliss.

Why I am in the possession of such an Iron John-y book, I cannot now remember. I must have been in search of something. Remember that I also have Affirmations for artists, and at some point I used to have some kind of daily taoist stuff too. I don’t think I ever read any of them straight through.

So what am I doing now? Am I seriously going to take up the meditations of this little gem and issue a sermon every day on what it means/takes/hurts to “be a man.” Who knows? I’m just going to write every day and see what we get.

Excelsior!

“Being a man.” What does it mean to “be a man”? This is always posed as if it were a Big Question, and the very posing leaves those of us who are if nothing else male feeling inadequate because we don’t in fact know the answer.

Shouldn’t we know the answer? On the one hand, we should know the answer because we are men, yes? On the other hand, what if we don’t know the answer? What if we are something less than men because somehow we have never measured up? Our failure is painful and secret.

Many years ago, at GHP, one of our CommArts teachers, Errol, arrived in Valdosta with a raging sinus infection that landed him in the hospital the Sunday the students arrived. On Monday night, I was asked to take over his classes for the week.

One of the classes was on Faulkner, and that was a piece of cake. I took a mythopoetic approach to the bits we read, and the kids ate it up.

His other class, though, was Hemingway, and I didn’t really know a lot about him as an author. But I plunged right in and took Hemingway’s manly manliness by the horns by posing the question to my students, what does it take to be a man?

All week we both read Hemingway and researched gender roles in the library, leading up to our final discussion. I asked the class to generate a list of attributes of manhood, and since they were GHP students, they suggested that the girls and boys generate separate lists and then we could compare.

The two lists were nearly identical, of course, and about two-thirds of the way through, as I was writing the attributes on the board, one of the girls pointed out that there was nothing on either list that was not simply part of being a sane, productive adult of either sex. So said we all. We never did untangle what old Ernest was on about, although we suspected it had something to do with causing oneself pain. And liking it.

Perhaps we may discover more in the coming year.