endurance

Empty years

August 17, 2015 by Billy Coffey 3 Comments

You reach a point when there’s enough behind you that it warrants a looking back. I’ve caught myself doing a little of that this past year. I’m forty-three now. That’s the sort of age that lends itself to a certain amount of introspection. I figure if all goes well, I’m somewhere close to the fifty-yard line of my life. It’s important to know from where I’ve come and to where I’m going.

The problem with looking over my shoulder is what’s staring back at me. If I’m honest, I’ll say I should be a little farther along than I am. I couldn’t imagine forty when I was eighteen. It was an age I painted in broad strokes and mixed colors. And yet even with that in mind, I’ve fallen short.

It’s all that empty space, you see. Giant chunks of years I spent doing large amounts of nothing. My past seems a waste for the most part, a long string of failures best defined by equal amounts confusion and ignorance.

I worked down at the town gas station for ten years after I graduated.

Spent five more at the factory.

I’m on year eight of an occupation that offers little in things like pay and advancement, but those shortcomings are more than made up for in stress and labor.

That’s twenty-three years all together. No wonder I walk around feeling like I’m playing catch-up.

I’m not alone in all this. I know plenty of other people who feel much the same way. We work hard and save what we can and still feel like a gerbil on one of those wheels that spin and spin and never go anywhere. Makes you wonder what it’s all about.

I was talking all of this over with a preacher friend of mine the other day. Smart guy, as most of them are. He’s older, which meant he knew exactly where I was coming from. And when I was done talking, this is what he said:

Jesus didn’t do much of anything for about twenty years. It doesn’t really feel right, saying that. I don’t mean to imply the Lord was lazy in any way. Bu the preacher supposed that if Christ had done anything worth mentioning between the time he left his momma and daddy to head home from Jerusalem without him and the time he called his disciples, someone would’ve said something. But the Good Book is silent on such things. No one knows what exactly Jesus was doing all those years.

That’s why you’ll find all those legends and lost gospels saying how he went to Egypt or India, or how he liked to make living sparrows out of mud. And while I can understand the allure of such things, the preacher thought it better that the Lord simply lived a quiet life back then. He rose up every morning and went to work. Helped his daddy build a door or a chair, maybe, or did his part with the household chores. He went home at the end of the day and broke bread and talked and laughed, and then he went to bed knowing the next day only promised more of the same.

But the preacher also told me all those empty years weren’t for nothing. Sure, the three or four years after were more exciting. Those were the ones filled with miracles and intrigue and a rising from the grave. But none of those things could have happened were it not for those quiet years before. That was the preparation. The getting ready.

I like that.

That’s why I’m going to try and reconsider my own missing years. I’m going to try and look upon them in a new way. Because really, is there anything quiet when it comes to God? Any moment without purpose? Anything in even the smallest life that could be considered as lost or missing?

I think not.

No less precious

August 13, 2015 by Billy Coffey 1 Comment

It was a little over sixteen years ago when Ken Copeland’s wife woke up feeling a little queasy. It was a Sunday, he remembers. The big deal that day was the football game later that afternoon. Redskins and Cowboys.

Ken never saw that game, because his wife decided to take a pregnancy test later that morning. In the two years they’d been trying to conceive a child, she’d gone through dozens of those tests. All had produced nothing but a disappointing minus sign. On that day, however, a vertical line appeared and bisected that familiar horizontal one. It was a plus.

Ken and his wife celebrated that day with tears, fears, and a steak dinner at the Sizzlin’ in town. They told everyone (even the waitress, who discounted their steaks as congratulations). Everyone wanted to know if Ken wanted a boy or a girl. His answer was the usual one. Ken didn’t care, just so long as the baby was healthy.

Matthew Brent Copeland was born nine months later at the local hospital.

Fast forward sixteen years to the playground at the local elementary school. Father and son are at the swings, Ken pushing Matthew. It’s the younger Copeland’s favorite activity, one that somehow calms the storms that rage in his mind. Ken thinks it’s the back and forth motion that does it, that feeling of flight and peace. He takes Matthew there every evening.

There are smiles on both their faces, though that hasn’t always been the case. The Copelands went through a tough time when Matthew was diagnosed with autism at age four.

In quiet conversation, Ken will tell you that almost killed him. He’ll admit the anger he felt toward God and the despair over his son, whose life would now never be as full and as meaningful as it should have been.

And he’ll tell you that deep down in his dark places, if he and his wife would have known what would happen to Matthew, he would have preferred abortion over birth. There would be less pain that way. For everyone.

Yet now, twelve years later, he smiles.

I watch them from the privacy of a bench on the other side of the playground. See him push his grown son and yell “Woo!” as he does. I see the perfect and innocent smile on Matthew’s face as he’s launched out and up. Hear his own “Woo!” in reply.

When they’re done, Ken takes his son’s hand in his own and together they walk across the soccer field toward home. Their steps are light, they take their time. It’s as if their world has stopped for this moment between father and son to marvel at the bond between them, proof that the hardships life sometimes thrusts upon us don’t have to break our hearts. They can swell our hearts as well and leave more room for loving.

Ken has made his peace. Peace with God, with his life, with his son’s condition. It hasn’t always been easy, but nothing that is ever worth something is easy. There are still times when he looks at Matthew and wonders what his son’s life would be like if he were normal and healthy. He’s sixteen now, that age where a boy’s world should expand in a violent and glorious eruption of girls and cars and sports. But Matthew’s world will never expand. It will always remain as small as it was when he was four, and just as simple.

Ken says that’s okay. That it has to be. He’s learned that in a world that seems full of choices, there are really only two—we can hang on, or we can let go. Ken has let go. Of his anger and his disappointment, of his despair. And he’s found that what has replaced those things are peace and fulfillment and joy, things he’d always chased after but until Matthew came along never really found.

If Ken would change anything, it would be what he said to all those people who’d asked him if he wanted a boy or a girl. His one regret is what his answer always was, that it didn’t matter as long as the baby was healthy. Because an unhealthy baby is no less precious, no less valuable, and no less life-changing.

For when you’re weary

May 25, 2015 by Billy Coffey 7 Comments

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I’m not sure how long I’ve carried this picture, tucked inside the little notebook I keep in my back pocket. I no longer remember where I first stumbled upon it, or how, or the number of copies I’ve worn out by unfolding it and folding it again whenever I need the reminder. It’s served me well over the years. Kept me going. When you have a dream that sometimes feels close enough to embrace as fact and other times feels so far that it seems the two of you will always be destined as strangers, keeping on becomes the hardest thing and the most important. Victor Hugo once said that each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet. I would imagine that sentiment applies to women equally. The picture at the top of this post is a reminder of my own future hour. It makes me see that I’m not alone in what dreams I have. There are others out there—you, perhaps—whose aim in life reaches high. There always have been.

The picture was taken in 1961, at a place called the Aldershot Club. Where the club was (or remains), I cannot tell you. I suppose it’s enough to say it wasn’t a very popular place with the day’s younger folk, or perhaps it was the club’s entertainment that night wasn’t enough to draw a larger crowd. According to the note I scrawled on the back, a total of eighteen people spent that night dancing. I would imagine few of those cared to admit they were in attendance after the fact. It does seem to me, though, that they’re all enjoying themselves. I’ve often though that despite it all, that’s the most important thing.

Look close enough, you can make out three-and-a-half of the four faces on the stage—singer, guitarist and bass player, and part of the drummer. I doubt the photographer intended to make such a strong point in leaving the band to the shadows, but the result is poetic in a way and not at all ironic. Those four were surely in the shadows, lost among a sea of other bands with aspirations just as lofty. They are too far away for me to gauge their expressions. I like to imagine them fully involved in their music, feeling each note as it courses through with a precision that indicates not only inherent talent, but unending practice.

That’s how we all start out, don’t we? Doesn’t matter if your goal is to be a musician or a writer or a professional _______, this picture represents the beginning. Obscurity and under-appreciation. Playing to a crowd that barely reaches double digits or writing novels or short stories or blog posts read by about the same number of people. We toil under the assumption—the hope—that it won’t always be this way, that the hour Victor Hugo expressed when fact meets dream will surely come. We do this even as the inner critic, that realist to counter an almost holy optimism, shouts that you and I are only two of many, that our dreams are no less than the dreams of billions more, and how is it that we are so special to warrant fulfillment? Ours is a hard world, after all. Often enough, the goal becomes not to rise above but merely not to sink. Forget about overcoming, sometimes all we can hope for is to simply get by.

Worse, if we are strong enough to dream we must also be courageous enough to admit that dream rarely, if ever, truly arrives. A part of us already knows that no matter how tall the mountain we climb, at its peak will lie another, taller one in the distance. That is the cost demanded of those led beyond the doors of a boring life, an existence frittered away with passionless work, the only light a coming weekend or those seven summer days of vacation. There is an allure to the life of the masses that the life of a dreamer cannot match: that sense of being settled—that, good or bad, this is how you will spend your remaining days. It is a rut, no doubt, but at least one that is straight and relatively smooth and travels over no mountains.

I wonder, looking at this picture, if the four men on the stage are thinking about a life in one of those ruts. The men and women on the dance floor look happy enough. They are all perhaps married, all gainfully employed in jobs that offer steady pay to balance out mortgages and bills. A better life, perhaps, than that of an artist, living gig to gig and wondering if it will always be that way. Or maybe it is that those four men understand what many of us do—a life of settling hurts no less than a life of dreaming. Its pain is merely spread out, constant enough to dull us to it but there. We would hurt if we gave up just as we would if we keep going, because the world is made for bruising. That’s why I think in the end it doesn’t matter who chooses the ruts and who challenges the mountains. We are all extraordinary just by making it to the end of our lives. We all deserve a measure of rest after.

Maybe that’s what Paul is thinking. And John. And George and Ringo. Maybe they’re thinking that some people settle and some never do, and you put them both together and what comes out is music. Regardless, they kept on. And a year and a half later, the world would know the Beatles.

Maybe—just maybe—that’s you up on that stage. Standing away from and above the smattering of some crowd, vowing to play as if it were millions. If so, I say let’s keep on. Let’s play and sing and not grow weary. For there’s a mountain to climb, friend, and another on ahead.

The game of life

April 20, 2015 by Billy Coffey 1 Comment

Work at a college around a bunch of teens and twenty-somethings long enough, and you will begin to ask yourself some questions. “How can anyone wear flip-flops in December?” is one. “They actually call that music?” is another. And then there is the biggie:

“Was I really that stupid when I was their age?”

The answer, of course, is yes. Absolutely.

For instance. When I was twenty, I believed:

That life was simple.

That the future was set in stone.

That love was all I needed.

That there is good and there is bad and there is nothing else.

That faith would make everything better.

That the young had more to offer than the old.

That the new held more promise than the tried and true.

Twenty-two years have passed since then. Twenty-two very long, very frantic, and at times very painful years. Whichever of the above beliefs were not proven ill-conceived through marriage and children have certainly been proven so through experience. I know better now. Much, much better.

For instance.

I know that life is not simple. It is hard and scary and tiresome, but it is not simple. If you think it is, then you’re not really living it.

I know that the future may well be set in God’s eyes, but it certainly isn’t in mine. What happens tomorrow is most often a direct result of what I do today, which is most often a direct result of what I did yesterday. The choices I make this day, this second, reach further and deeper than I can possibly realize. Every moment is a defining moment. Every moment is a moment of truth.

I know that love is not all I need. I know that without such things as grace and forgiveness and effort love will crumble upon itself. Love is not the all-powerful cure that poets and dreamers have crafted it to be. It must be nurtured and fed and tended to. Love is not a firm rock that can withstand anything. It is a delicate rose that can wither without attention.

I know that there is good and bad. But I also know that there is more, and I need to look no further than my own heart for proof. For there resides the good man I could be, the flawed man that I am, and the man who must choose daily which he will become.

I know that faith alone is feeble, that only when it is polished with action does it truly shine. Too many times I have prayed for things to get better but did nothing to make them so. God may move mountains, but that’s because mountains can’t move themselves.

I know that the vigor and strength of youth may power society, but it’s experience that drives it. Life has rules, and unfortunately they are not given all at once, but bit by bit as we go. That’s why parents and grandparents are so important. They’ve been there. And because they have, they know a lot more than we do. Time changes. The times do not.

And lastly, I know the new may be exciting, may be revolutionary, may even be promising, but I also know they may not be that way for long. The very things that have sustained us in the past are the things that guarantee us a bright future, things like the importance of family and God, things like the virtues of kindness and loyalty and forgiveness. Such things are woven into us. They are the foundation of who we are and who we will become.

That’s what I know now. Will those beliefs change? Maybe. Check back in twenty years and I’ll let you know.

The DNA of our humanity

February 19, 2015 by Billy Coffey 1 Comment

Screen Shot 2014-02-16 at 7.37.44 PM The article from the Associated Press is headlined, “Human genes reflect impact of historical events,” and goes into some detail of how researchers used nearly 1500 DNA samples to map genetic links going back 4,000 years. What they found was surprising to some. To others, not so much.

Science has never really been my strong suit. Whether it was earth science in elementary school, biology in junior high, or a brief but thoroughly disastrous flirtation with chemistry as a senior in high school, a solid “C” was all I could ever hope for. But as the years have gone on, I’ve found myself drawn to the subject. Physics helps me better understand the universe, biology the world. And while much of it still flies straight over my head, that small article from the AP truly struck me. It made sense. And more than that, it helped confirm what I’ve considered a strong possibility for quite some time.

These researchers managed to link certain strands of DNA to historical events. They used samples from the Tu people of China to show they mixed with the ancestors of modern Greeks sometime around 1200. They confirmed that the Kalash people of Pakistan are descendants of Alexander the Great’s army. They showed how African DNA spread throughout the Mediterranean, the Arab Peninsula, Iran, and Pakistan from A.D. 800-1000 due to the Arab slave trade.

Interesting stuff to be sure, but on the surface maybe not that interesting. Truth me told, I clicked off that article and moved on to something a little more my style (it happened to be a recap of this past week’s episode of Justified) before hitting the BACK button and reading it again, slower this time. Because buried beneath all those dates and facts was a reminder I sorely needed, something magical and amazing, though for the life of me I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

And then it hit me that too often we consider ourselves merely in terms of the physical and temporal. I am a mass of flesh and blood and bone with a soul hidden somewhere inside. My thoughts rarely extend past this present moment and rarely beyond the things that have a direct impact on me—what I need to finish now, what I need to do next. Sometimes the future will pop up, and I’ll think about tomorrow and the next day and the day after that. Oftentimes the past will rear its head as well, and I’ll ponder how far I’ve come and how much I’m still stuck in it.

That’s all, really, and I’d venture a guess that your life is much the same. We all live in the same world, and yet in that one world are billions of smaller ones. There’s my world and my wife’s world and my children’s worlds. There’s your world, and a separate world for everyone you know. And every one of those smaller worlds are marked by a kind of inherent selfishness in that we really don’t care what happens unless what happens interferes with us—unless it enters our own orbit.

But there’s much more to us than our own past and present and future. There’s more than our own individual worlds. Imbedded within the very fiber of our being is a record of all that has gone on before us, millennia’s worth of wars and droughts and migrations, ages of histories long lost and forgotten. I am not a single person, and nor are you. We are instead the product of countless generations who came before, who settled and lived and struggled through hardships we cannot fathom and yet found a way to continue on. Our ancestors may be nameless and inconsequential to history. They were very likely poor, unknown. And yet they live on as microscopic strands of our DNA because they managed to do one incredible thing: endure.

There is something wholly magical and noble in that. We are unique and special, and yet no more so than all who came before us. The struggles we face were once theirs, as well as our fears and our dreams. That makes me wonder just how separated we all truly are.

The cost of failed dreams

February 12, 2015 by Billy Coffey 2 Comments

I don’t think of him often, only on days like today. You know those days. The kind you spend looking more inside than around, wondering where all the time is going and why everything seems to be leaving you behind. Those are not fun days. In the words of the teenager who lives on the corner, they’re “the sucks.”

I had a day like that today. It was all the sucks. And like I often do, I thought of him.

I’ve been conducting an informal survey over the years that involves everyone from friends to acquaintances to strangers on the street. It’s not scientific in any way and is more for the benefit of my own curiosity than anything else. I ask them one question, nothing more—Are you doing what you most want to do with your life?

By and large, the answer I usually get is no. Doesn’t matter who I ask, either. Man or woman, rich or poor, famous or not. My wife the teacher has always wanted to be a counselor. My trash man says he’d rather be a bounty hunter (and really, I can’t blame him). A professor at work? He wants to be a farmer. And on and on.

Most times that question from me leads to questions from them, and in my explaining I’ll bring him up.

Because, really, he was no different than any of us. He had dreams. Ambitions. And—to his mind, anyway—a gift. The world is wide and full of magic when we’re young. It lends itself to dreaming. We believe we can become anything we wish; odds, however great, don’t play into the equation. So we want to be actresses and painters and poets. We want to be astronauts and writers and business owners. Because when we’re young, anything is possible. It’s only when we grow up that believing gets hard.

He wanted to be an artist. I’m no art critic and never will be, but I’ve seen his paintings. Honestly? They’re not bad. Better than I could manage, anyway.

His parents died when he was young. He took his inheritance and moved to the city to live and study, hoping to get into college. The money didn’t last long, though. Often he’d be forced to sleep in homeless shelters and under bridges. His first try for admission into the art academy didn’t end well. He failed the test. He tried again a year later. He failed that one, too.

His drawing ability, according to the admissions director, was “unsatisfactory.” He lacked the technical skills and wasn’t very creative, often copying most of his ideas from other artists. Nor was he a particularly hard worker. “Lazy” was also a word bandied about.

Like a lot of us, he wanted the success without the work. Also like a lot of us, he believed the road to that success would have no potholes, no U-turns. No dark nights of the soul.

He still dabbled in art as the years went on. But by then he had entered politics, and the slow descent of his life had begun. He was adored for a time. Worshipped, even. In his mind, he was the most powerful man in the world. Because of his politics, an estimated 11 million people died. I’d call that powerful.

But really, Hitler always just wanted to be an artist. That he gave up his dream and became a monster is a tiny footnote in a larger, darker story, but it is an important one. He didn’t count on dreams being so hard, though. That was his undoing. He didn’t understand that the journey from where we are to where we want to be isn’t a matter of getting there, it’s a matter of growing there. You have to endure the ones who say you never will. You have to suffer that stripping away. You have to face your doubts. Not so we may be proven worthy of our dreams, but so our dreams may be proven worthy of us.

He didn’t understand any of that. Or maybe he understood it and decided his own dream wasn’t worth the effort. Painting—creating—isn’t ever an easy thing. That blank canvas stares back at you, and its gaze is hard. That is why reaching your goals is so hard. That’s why it takes so much. Because it’s easier to begin a world war than to face a blank canvas.