California Dreaming

I was raised in California during the 1970's when the California "way of life" was essentially a watered down religion based loosely on a mix of principles from Eastern Mysticism and Western Hedonism. Several spiritual movements started to take shape from the burst of challenges to the norm of American social order in the 60's and a few began to flourish in the 70's. My parents were hip deep in one of those movements and I was raised, essentially, as a fatalist. In my parents world view, all decisions past and present were always made according to God's will. They used to coach me in the process of making decisions that it didn't matter what I chose, the choice had already been made by God. I merely needed to look within to discover what it was that God wanted me to do and follow that instinct.

I think that kind of logic would have been great if I had been brought up in the Mid-West with a fairly strict moral social fabric as a back drop. Perhaps that advice would have been the perfect foil to a young mind agonizing over the right thing to do. But we weren't in the Mid-West. My parents had moved from Richmond, Indiana to Los Angeles, California when I was 5. The advice my parents offered me was probably a wonderful balance to pressures they experienced in their upbringing, but Cali offered very little of the same structure. In fact, the advice my parents offered acted more as an accelerator to my rather single-minded pursuit of the California Dream in which life was always easy and smooth if you only yielded to it. The result was a kid (me) that began at a very early age to believe that nirvana was not only possible to obtain on earth, but that if you just let go the stresses of the mind, it was literally right around that corner.

So I set about divorcing myself of stresses, of external distractions. I focused looking inward and trying to find the path of least resistance to my own life's story, which, according to my parents had already been written. Do you know what a teenage boy does when he follows the path of least resistance to his own inner callings, especially inner callings shaped by the images of sexuality in media and marketing that screamed out from every corner of the greater Los Angeles basin? Yeah, don't think too hard about that, it might make you sick. But hormones weren't the only problem. The hedonistic tendencies of California life fueled a larger, broader commitment to being stupid. Very little in pop California ethos speaks of personal integrity, of commitment to others over the satisfaction of the self, of financial planning, etc. etc.

Sure you can find gurus all over California who bring and incredible wisdom and commitment to each of those areas above. Several of them led the religion that my parents followed. But inevitably, they moved to Cali from New York or some other high pressure environment in search of balance and found it in these kinds of pursuits. For a kid growing up without that counterweight, my parent's encouragement only served to launch me into the stratosphere of ego gratification, relatively ungrounded.

Depending on how you look at it, the good news or the bad news was that I had talent in more than a few areas. So I succeeded in spite of my complete lack of attention to the basic principles of success in life. I drifted, per the instructions provided, from one situation that felt "right" to the next. For a while things went fine. But by my early 20's, I was already racking up debt, hurting people who trusted me, acting without integrity, etc.... all justified in my mind because "God had directed me in these directions and it was all pre-determined anyway".... I was just following what God was telling me.

The principle question that I never asked myself until later is: "How do you tell the difference between intuition and strong emotion?" Theoretically the former is a deeper form of knowing. The latter can be driven by a whole host of toxic crap. The answer that I've got so far is that its really, really hard to tell the difference. So you need things like ethics, personal integrity, honesty, etc. These constructs are critical to checking your own instincts and impulses and keeping you on some sort of moral ground, even if it isn't the high ground.

But with the birth of my daughter, again the spectre of making "right" decisions seems more important than ever. It's hard for me at the moment because all of my training growing up seems to cater to a decision making style that is too haphazard, too reliant on luck and talent as opposed to one based on careful planning and calculated risks. Going too far in either direction is wrong, of course. You need a balance of the two. Good thing I moved to New York after I met my wife - got some balancing to do.