Adventure – Page 3

Over the next horizon

June 16, 2014 by Billy Coffey 2 Comments

"The Wanderer" image courtesy of google images — “The Wanderer” image courtesy of google images

I’ve read that when it comes to compensation, benefits, work environment, and time off, college professors have the best job in the United States. And since I spend so much of my workday around them, I can’t argue with that assertion. The ones at the college where I work seem happy, are productive members of their community, and have enough extra time on their hands to string together words no one understands to publish books no one reads.

Still, I was curious. Did these people know they had the fortune and blessing to have the nation’s best job? That all of their hard work had paid off to get them the lifestyle of a lifetime? I wasn’t sure. And to me, it felt like something they should know if they didn’t. So I took a few days and asked around.

Two math, one music, three English, a history, and four philosophy professors later, and I was convinced of two things. One was that they knew exactly how blessed they were to have their particular occupation. The other was that it didn’t matter.

Because while all eleven enjoyed their work and got plenty out of it, in their heart of hearts they would still rather be doing something else.

One math professor expressed a lifelong desire for crab fishing, and the other just wanted to run off to Bora Bora. The history professor admitted that she’d always wanted to open a florist shop. Two of the philosophy professors wanted to be farmers, and the other two missionaries. All three English professors wanted to be famous authors rather than ignored ones. And the music professor? “I’ve always wanted to be a bounty hunter,” all one hundred and twenty pounds of him said. (And it’s okay to laugh at that. Because I did).

Those little confessions didn’t surprise me.

Despite what we say about being happy with where and who we are, deep down we’re never where we should be. No matter how hard we chase after our bliss, it always remains just a few steps ahead. Close enough to see, almost close enough to touch, but not quite. There to both inspire us to keep going and taunt us because we haven’t gone far enough.

Psychologists say this difficulty in finding what makes us happy is inborn. As much a part of us as the desire to love and be loved. I want to disagree with that and say that faith can bring us both happiness and a sense of place in this world, but the truth? I have faith, have a sense of happiness and place, but there are still many times when I look at my happy life and think there’s more out there. More happiness. More better.

Whether this makes me any less of a Christian is something I haven’t figured out yet.

There’s a lot to be said for being content with what you have, a sentiment echoed by people from the Apostle Paul (“I’ve learned to be content in whatever circumstances I am”) to Thoreau (“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone”) to a country song I heard on my way into work this morning (“…I look around at what everyone has, and I forget about all I’ve got…”).

Wise words, all. And true. Yet here I sit, still wanting more anyway. More dreams, more happiness, more peace.

I suppose we’re all stricken with wanderlust. Deep down we’re all explorers who cannot rest until we reach the next horizon, if only to see what’s there and what’s beyond. The ocean we’re all adrift upon is vast, it’s waters deep, and it’s wonders breathtaking. And though we sail onward, ever searching, our spirits whisper this truth:

We are meant to sail upon the waters of another ocean, where the seas are calm and the winds are fair. And that our happiness now is but a shadow of the happiness that awaits.

The Swing

May 29, 2014 by Billy Coffey 2 Comments

I’m pretty free during my lunch hour at work, which is usually spent running errands or roaming the majestic aisles of wood and tools at the local Lowe’s. But sometimes my mood calls for something a bit more soul-soothing and I head to the park across town. The park is a nice place. Lots of green and trees and open spaces. Ducks and fish and the back edge of the golf course. It’s quiet there. I’m relatively unbothered too, which is a plus. The squirrels and the occasional jogger are my only company. Also the occasional child.

Yesterday I sat at a picnic table under the shade of an ancient oak and watched a child swing. His mother sat motionless in the swing beside him immersed in a novel, pausing in her reading to utter a half-hearted “That’s great!” and “Don’t go too high.”

It struck me how often I’ve done much the same. Instead of watching my kids live life, I read books on how to do the same thing. Seems odd. Especially since when it comes to living life, my kids seemed to be experts. In fact, as I took in the sight of his little feet kicking in and out and propelling him ever upward, I decided most kids were experts at living. Common wisdom stated that was due to their utter lack of real responsibility and knowledge of the world. I guessed that’s true. But that certainly wasn’t all.

No, I thought, they knew how to live because they knew how to have fun.

I used to swing. I thought about that. Thought about the swing set we had in the backyard and the hours I’d spend on it. There was a simple sense of magic in that act, of being tethered to the earth and yet rising above it. Of leaving and coming home. And there was the sheer joy of going as high as you possibly could and then jumping free, floating in the air where there was nothing and you felt you could go forever only to land in the soft grass and laugh.

I loved swinging. And I missed it.

Of course, things were different now. I was an adult. Responsible. I had a mortgage and bills to pay. A job and a life. And when you had all of those things, you forget about the simple pleasures of childhood. You have to. There comes a time in everyone’s life when the great traffic cop of time walks by and orders you to linger no longer. “Nothing to see here,” he says. “Move along.”

And so I did and we all do.

But I wondered then.

I wondered if there was as much wisdom in the notion of growing down as there was in growing up. I wondered if the world of florescent colors that every child sees really has to gray with time and experience.

I wondered if our joy really had to be lost along with our innocence.

I wasn’t sure. But I knew I had to find out, if only a little.

“Excuse me,” I said to the boy’s mother. “If you’re not going to swing, would you mind trading me seats?”

She put her forefinger into the page of her book and looked up at me, wondering.

“Um,” she said, “okay.”

She took my seat at the picnic table and went back to novel, which from the cover told me it was a love story set in the Dark Ages. I paused to think that maybe that’s where most of us adults were, stuck in our own Dark Age of angst and desperation, searching in vain for something we thought we never had but did all along.

I swung with her boy for about ten minutes. We laughed together and raced. We saw who could dare to go higher and who lean back further.

And when I was done, when the world called back to me, I kicked one last time.

And I jumped.

An Invitation to Hell

March 24, 2014 by Billy Coffey 3 Comments

For the last three months my buddy Kirk has sequestered himself in a rented cabin deep in the Blue Ridge mountains. As far as I can tell, he took with him only the barest of essentials to complete his stated purpose—a dozen bags of deer jerky, four cases of MREs (that’s Meal, Ready to Eat for you non-military folks), three cases of beer, and two dozen protein bars. That should get him through, he says. If not, he’ll just go hunting.

Get him through for what, you ask? Well, now there’s a story.

Kirk is an old high school classmate and friend. Back then he was awkward and shy and always had his head in a book—three characteristics that guaranteed he’d have a tough time until after his senior year. But he sat in front of me in freshman English and, well, some friendships are born of compatibility and others location.

Even then Kirk wanted to be a writer. A published one. But as both his talent and his confidence were lacking, he always qualified “I want to be an author” with “Probably won’t, though.”

Like a lot of high school friends, Kirk and I lost contact after graduation. But then I ran into him at the mall three months ago.. Well, not him. Not the Kirk I knew. This was New and Improved Kirk, and version 2.0 was quite different.

He had found a cure for all that awkward shyness.

Kirk had become a Ranger in the U.S. Army.

Now that he was out, he was back to pursuing his goal of writing a book. And in the spirit of his down-and-dirty Ranger training, he was locking himself in a cabin in the middle of the wilderness to do it.

And you know what? I bet he will. I can almost guarantee it.

There were a lot of reasons why Kirk wasn’t ready to be a writer in high school. You have to grow some and learn some and fail some and hurt a lot first. But more than that, you have to be trained. Kirk told me he’d had his training now. He was a Ranger.

I’d never considered special forces training and training to be a writer to be one and the same, but he was adamant. They’re exactly alike, he said. Both are a process that tests you, then breaks you down, and then shows you whom you truly are.

But to Kirk, his Ranger training gave him one very big advantage—he’d been taught how to be comfortable in misery. He knew how to embrace the thirst and the hunger. How to endure the cold and the heat. And above all, he knew he was being readied for war and that war was hell, which is why his drill instructors trained him to, in his words, “Get the damn job done. Regardless.”

I think he’s onto something.

Because you can (and should) read all the books you can about the craft of writing. You can learn about plot and character and point of view, learn to kill your darling adverbs and adjectives, and speak in present instead passive voice. But until you learn to be comfortable in misery, you will not succeed. Ever.

There are times when sitting down to write is an invitation to pure bliss, when the words leap from your fingers virgin and perfect and you know without doubt they come from the very best part of you. Enjoy those times. They will be few.

Because for the most part, it’s just the opposite. The writing life is not bliss. It’s roaming through the desert of one submission after another, searching for whatever scrap of food or drip of water you can beg, borrow and steal in order to stay alive. It’s enduring the cold of having nothing to say and the heat of knowing you must write anyway.

And above all, writing is war.

It is a war fought not against agents and publishers, but against yourself. It is a war in which the enemy isn’t acceptance, it’s surrender. And yes, it is hell. No doubt about it. But you know what? A writer, a real one, wouldn’t have it any other way.

I haven’t seen Kirk since. For all I know, he’s still up in the mountains writing his book. I like to think he is. I like to think he’s pounding away at those keys and fighting his war.

That he’s getting the damn job done. Regardless.

I like to think that’s what you’re doing, too.

Taxi cab confessions

September 23, 2013 by Billy Coffey 4 Comments

Screen shot 2013-09-23 at 10.10.16 AM I had the honor this past weekend of flying to New Orleans to attend the annual Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, where I signed a few books and listened to people much smarter than myself. It was a great time with great people, and I left with more stories than I know what to do with (I spoke with friend Karen Spears Zacharias and a man she introduced as “Paul” for nearly half an hour, only to find out when they left that Paul was William Paul Young, author of The Shack. To me, he was just Paul, the guy in the jeans and polo shirt who said he liked my hat).

Yes, lots of stories. But for now, I want to tell you just this one about my cab driver:

She grabs my bag at the airport and chucks it into the trunk, smiles and calls herself Antoinette. It’s a pretty smile that’s all white teeth and kindness, and when I tell her I’m Billy she says, “You ain’t from nowheres around here, is you?”

“No’m,” I say.

She looks at me up and down and gives a sad shake of her head. “Careful child,” she says, “this town’ll chew you up and spit you out. Good thing Antoinette’s here.”

And even though I don’t know this lady and have never seen her before, I think that’s right. I think that’s exactly so.

She settles me in the backseat and climbs in behind the wheel, all arms and legs and long, braided hair. We exchange the bustle of the airport for the bustle of the freeway. I’m gawking like a tourist, trying to see everything. She’s watching in the rearview and shaking her head.

“Just you, son?” she asks. I say yes, that my family’s back home. “Well, ain’t no thing. It be just me and my cab.” She nods and gives me half a smile in the mirror, as if what she’s just stated makes her happy only because things are what they are. They are what they are, and there’s no changing them. “Kids gone, man gone.”

“Gone where?” I ask her.

Antoinette says “One in the ground” like she’s saying the hotel is just up the road a piece—all fact, little emotion. She makes the sign of the cross. I don’t know if it’s for the kids or the man. “Other’n done left.”

I don’t say anything. Buildings blur outside the window. Beyond them the sky touches the ground in a straight line that ends at my eye level. A crazy thought enters my mind that if Antoinette takes a wrong turn somewhere, we may just tumble off the edge of the world. For not the first time today, I miss my mountains.

“Man gone, too,” she says finally. Another nod, a bigger smile. This time, she really is happy that things are what they are. She’s happier that there’s no changing them. “Done took off with some floozy. She can have’m. Twenty year we together. Twenty year.”

She looks at me again. I bend my head down and study the hat in my hands, not knowing what to say. I’m sorry seems too petty, even though I am just that. One in the ground, one more done left. Another taken off. Just her now. Antoinette and her cab.

“You learn,” she tells me. Her eyes are still in the mirror when I look up. Still looking at me. The cab is cutting through traffic at over ninety miles an hour, but Antoinette’s eyes don’t have to see the road because the cab knows the way.

“Learn what?” I ask her.

“You learn to get by. Keep goin. Dream on. You got the faith, son?”

“I do.”

Now she looks away (and just in time, another second and we’d have met the back end of a dump truck). I can’t see her mouth, but Antoinette’s eyes wrinkle at the corners.

“There you go,” she says. “There . . . you . . . go. You might be alright, Willie. Cause all we got’s in the end’s our faith. This town can get hard on’ya, but you be alright. I be alright. One in the ground, one gone, one shacked up with Susie-spread-your-legs. We all got pain, don’t we?”

“We do.”

“We do,” she agrees, then rubs the silver cross dangling from the mirror. The front of it is dull, almost the color of pewter. I think to myself that cross has been rubbed a lot over the years. It’s like Antoinette’s faith—beautiful because it’s so worn.

“I’m sorry for your trials, Antoinette.”

The words come out sudden, so fast that I can’t pull them back in even if I want. I think maybe I should. Antoinette doesn’t seem the sort of person who’d take the pity of another, no matter how well-intentioned that pity would be.

She shakes her head. “No sir,” she says. “Don’t you be sorry no way. I ain’t. I know the secret, you see.”

“And what’s that?”

She looks at me again. “Ain’t no trials, Willie, no matter how much we call our troubles that. Hard times, they just God’s mercies in disguise.”

Packing Light

September 6, 2013 by Billy Coffey 2 Comments

I always wanted to run away as a kid. Wait. That came out wrong. What I mean is that back then, all I ever wanted to do was leave home. No, that isn’t it either.

Let’s start over.

Growing up, there was a cornfield across from my house. On the other side of that was the railroad track that cuts through town. The train still comes through twice a day. More, if the freight is good. I remember standing on my front porch as those trains rolled through, staring at the open doors on all those empty container cars, wondering where that train was going. How long it would take to get there. How easy it would be to hop on.

I wanted to see the world. Chuck it all. Run away. I wanted to leave home and see the country.

Never happened, of course. But it did for Allison Vesterfelt. She left her home in Portland at age 26 with a friend, some bags, and a single plan—to visit all 50 states. The chronicle of her adventure (and that’s what it turned out to be) is found in her book, Packing Light.

Ally’s book caught me. She tells her story with a refreshing honesty, including just how frightening it can be to do something extraordinary. Imagine leaving everything behind—your job, your home, your family—and lighting out into the territory. Thrilling? Yes. Scary? Absolutely.

And yet Ally did it anyway, and on the other side found blessings that will comfort her for the rest of her life. That, really, is what this book is about—the lessons she learned along the way.

Things like embracing the unexpected. Changing your expectations. Losing your way. Choosing your path. Hers is a reminder that the great and mighty More a lot of us want in life really won’t bring us happiness. Most times, the peace we crave comes in having less.

“Knowing how valuable you are,” she writes, “and acknowledging your tiny role in a larger story is a difficult balance to strike. It’s easy to see one or the other, but it’s difficult to hang on to both at the same time. It stretches us, like a kid reaching for the next rung of a monkey bar, until eventually we find our arms stretched out wide.”

To me, that’s the best part of what Ally accomplished. Like all adventures, she went looking for the world and found herself.

Packing Light is a great read, and I highly recommend it. To learn more, visit the Packing Light page on Amazon.

The walk

May 6, 2013 by Billy Coffey 3 Comments

“I like walking with you, Daddy,” my daughter said.

Her tiny hand slipped into mine and stayed there. Our joined arms moved back and forth in a soft cadence that echoed our footfalls.

“Me, too,” I said.

“Let’s play I Spy,” she offered.

“Okay. You go first.”

Our game began with the obvious—black for the truck in the driveway we were passing, red for the mailbox on the other side. Yellow for the sun. Gray for the dog that just bounded out from the field.

But then things began to get a little more difficult. On my part, anyway. I missed the orange on the robin that was pecking its dinner from the grass. And the brown on the rabbit that sat nearly invisible on the side of the road.

Missed the yellow hair bow on the little girl who was playing with a balloon in her backyard.

Missed the white on the rocks that scrunched under our feet.

Even missed the black on the very shirt I was wearing.

No father wants to be beaten in a game of I Spy by his daughter. Especially when that father happens to take a lot of pride in noticing things that others maybe wouldn’t. But as we walked and talked and swung our arms, I had to admit the obvious.

I was losing it. Slipping in my noticing.

It had been imperceptible rather than sudden, this change in me. That’s the worst kind. Change that comes sudden is painful, but at least you don’t go around wondering what happened and where you went wrong and how it got to be this way.

My thoughts were broken by the approach of a married couple taking that strange gait that is more than walk but not quite jog, puffing and sweating against the summer sun.

My daughter waved with her free hand, and I offered a “How ya’ll doin’?” in their direction. The man managed to nod weakly and gasp a “heeep,” which I took as hello. The woman was oblivious to us, transfixed on her goal of putting one foot in front of the other.

I looked down to see her gazing up to me, wrinkling her nose. I shrugged—beats me. We walked on.

A few more losing rounds of I Spy later, and we were greeted with another pedestrian. Younger woman, very fit. Decked out in Spandex and and armed with an iPod and a watch that looked as though it could not only count calories and measure distance, but split the atom as well.

She zoomed past our wave and “How are ya?” as if we were just more gravel and blades of grass. Just two more obstacles to avoid in the pursuit of a flatter stomach and firmer butt.

My daughter and I walked in silence a for a few steps, our game suspended. Then, “Daddy?”

“Hmm?”

“How come people walk so fast?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Most people around here use walking as exercising. But it’s only exercising if you go fast.”

She looked down to the road and kicked a pebble with her flip flop, thinking.

“Exercising’s good,” she offered.

“Very,” I said.

“And walking’s good, too.”

“Yep.”

“But,” she said, “walking shouldn’t be exercising.”

“It shouldn’t? Why?”

She threw her arms up (and one of mine in the process) and said, “Look! Everything’s so pretty! These people are missing it all because they’re going too fast!”

I looked down at her and she up to me. She said, “Those people would be really bad at I Spy, Dad. They would lose every time because they can’t see anything.”

They’d lose every time. Because they’re going too fast.

We continued on then and resumed our game. The result was both inevitable and expected. She won without much of a contest.
But in a way, I won too. I learned something that evening with my daughter. Something important.

In the end, life should be a walk and not a run. We fool ourselves into thinking that the point is to get somewhere as fast as we can. It isn’t. It’s to have somewhere to go and then enjoy the trip to it.

There will always be a gap between where we are and where we want to be. In our deepest hearts we are all wanderers in search of something. That’s okay. Even wonderful. Just as long as we wander in wonder and hold the hand of someone we love.

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