Freedom – Carl's Site

The Office

There was this one time that I left our office out the back door, only to find a homeless couple living in a car parked back there. Their car had broken down and was pulled haphazardly into a spot that hidden from street view. I talked to them; their situation was unfortunately typical—a medical emergency had drained their savings. The solid job the husband had wouldn’t wait for him to get better. They’d run out of options.

I went back inside and got them some drinks and some snacks and made a crazy decision. I would let them stay in our office overnight and would sort out their situation in the morning. I dropped off the snacks and then went back inside, locking up all the offices and lab. I found some boxes of instant ramen and some fruit in the refrigerator and set them out in our break room, invited the car-couple in and prayed I hadn’t done something idiotic as I went home. I didn’t sleep well that night either. What would they steal? Would they damage something? What parts of our insurance or lease had I just violated? My worry about protecting the office made me pretty miserable.

The next morning I woke up early, stopped by Safeway to pick up some breakfast for the couple and headed back to the office. They were fine. Everything was fine. They’d called a relative during the evening who was coming back over to help with the car that day. There’s more to their story, but let’s leave it that we managed to get them sorted out with a minimum of drama.

Not so much for me, though. In my fit of paranoia, I had locked all the offices and the lab. I didn’t have the keys to open them. No one had ever locked their doors before, so while we may have had keys at one point, they were long gone. By some strange coincidence, I did have a ladder handy. I set about climbing up and through the drop ceiling outside each space. I jumped down into each office and, unlocked each from the inside. By the time everyone else arrived that morning, the doors were open, the homeless couple was fed and waiting on a tow truck out back, and I was a mess. The entire time I was climbing and crawling and jumping, I was thinking about what a stupid invention an office is. The function of an office is to keep people out; it is a shut off space, protecting an outside view. Offices make you want to lock doors. An office is a statement about position and location; it keeps the world outside in a beat-up Honda.

I haven’t been able to have a proper office since then, and it has worked out just fine. When I was made interim CEO of a different company sometime later, I moved into a cube near the ex-CEOs colossal fish tank of an office; this caused some concern. The executive team wondered if I was going to make them give up their walls and doors. The new CEO moving into a cube is the kind of symbolic act that is fear-inducing (in an ironic way). In another company, they tried to give me the only office, and I said no. In yet another company they set aside an office for me, and I made them turn it into a conference room for us all to use. Each time I do this some executive worries I am trying to take some space away from them—such is the power of a door and a window. I am, however, always content to let them have their enclosed spaces, as long as they will let me have the freedom not to shut things out, or pen myself up. Work is better this way.

Invisible Fencing

And man? Free of one kind of fetter,
He runs to gaudier shackles and brands;
Deserving, for all his groans, no better
Than he demands.
—Louis Untermeyer “He Goads Himself”

Every time I’m back in my adopted home of South Carolina, visiting relatives, I run the same route in the mornings before the day gets too hot and humid. I run up Santee Road, and then down the gently winding Camelia Circle. I jog past the stately magnolias and the moss-draped pine trees. The well-cared for lawns are mostly free of weeds, sprinklers are misting and hissing here and there, and the passing cars all offer me a friendly wave. By the time I reach the end of Santee Road, I must look quite the sight, not to mention how loudly I must be breathing or what I must smell like to the dogs in the yards of the houses nearby.

There’s a pair of dogs of indeterminate breed, small spotted squirrel chasers who seem to always pick me up on the canine radar as I round a curve on Camelia. I hear their insistent yapping begin to peak as I come near their domain, and as I reach the corner of their yard, they are shooting straight at me, as if fired from a cannon. My cadence and my steps are unaltered by the impending attack though, I have done this run many times. These mixed terriers and I understand the fixed distance between us will not be crossed even though nothing visibly keeps us apart.

There is an invisible fence, a wire, buried along the perimeter of this yard. The dogs each wear a collar that, should they encroach or cross the hidden wiring, will cause the collar to administer an unpleasant electric shock to their necks. My run takes me on the road past their lawn, and they follow me every frenzied inch of the way—never for a moment crossing the spot where the wire waits to administer its stealthy charge. We both trust the power of that divide as if it were concrete reinforced chain link.

This method of training has been understood from the time Pavlov had his own canines drooling at the sound of a bell. I’m confident we could disable the collars and remove the wire in the yard, and my Camelia Circle dogs would still pull up short at the edge of their lawn—such is the power of conditioning. Even empty space can have the capability of a science fiction force field with the right kinds of punishments and rewards.

I am perhaps over-mindful of invisible fences after several weeks of graduation ceremonies and hours upon hours of family gatherings. I look at my sons and my wife and most of all myself and see the shock collars and the self-imposed boundaries. I feel a tingling as we all get near long-buried wires and then vector away, laughing, poking fun; teasing the way families do at reunions. Higher education frees the mind and at the same time, adds other engaging barriers. We have a Lawyer now, and a College Professor matched up with a Special Education Teacher, newly minted Anthropologist, and a Peace Corps volunteer. The little administered shocks at the dinner table when a debate gets going amongst these capable young men causes me to nurse my glass of wine and smile.

They have years yet. Years before they learn that the collars they put on in their youth (ones I most certainly helped them buckle firmly into place) aren’t connected to anything real. At some point, they will realize the wires their professors, partners, administrators, bosses, and brothers buried can be turned off, and they have the switch. They’ll learn soon enough that if they keep running, past and over the invisible walls, all yards are theirs.

Welcome to the Hotel California

Last thing I remember
I was running for the door
I had to find the passage back to the place I was before
“Relax,” said the night man
“We are programmed to receive
You can check-out any time you like
But you can never leave!”
The Eagles “Hotel California”

For years we lived in a beautiful community in Northern California near San Francisco. The city really had all the things we were looking for at the time. A high priority on our list was an excellent public school system for our kids. We chose this place to settle down and raise a family, calling a halt to any more job-related relocations. The decision was a good one and we made a beautiful home for our family in that spot for over two decades. Our city was a community of high expectations: well cared for homes, neatly edged lawns, plenty of parks and trails. With kids to worry about, we delighted in a place that lacked surprises: crime was low, test scores were high, volunteerism and civic engagement were good. You could rationally expect home values and standard of living to increase at a nice pace. You understood the boundaries of the place as if they were the neatly laid out chalk lines of the many soccer fields on which our kids played.

Almost two years ago though, we sold our house there and bought another place in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California, about an hour’s drive south from our previous home. Those mountains are a much wilder, far less structured environment than the “East Bay” from which we hailed. There was this one time after a good rainstorm that a huge lodge-pole pine fell across the road at the bottom of our mountain. The tree took out power and prevented all the neighbors and me from getting home. I had to call back up to my house to get someone to come back down on the opposite side of the fallen pine to drive me the mile or so back. Then again, I couldn’t make the call from where the tree fell because there’s no cell service there—so I drove back into town, made the call and then went back to the tree. Based on what I could see, Pacific Gas & Electric was going to have to spend considerable time to fix this, not only clearing the road but restringing the wires and fixing the pole. So having made it back home, I fired up the wood stove and got ready to wait it out. I can confidently say that nothing approaching this sequence of events would ever happen in the community we left. Big falling trees are a common event in Santa Cruz County, especially during the rainy season. Finding a novel way back to your house is a way of life there. Making sure we were always conscious of a different way home is precisely the reason we made our move.

There is a steady opiate of comfort in well-worn paths. Confidence that the road will always be clear and the power always on is a drug. Success and prosperity are as much a tranquilizer as Ambien. Habits become, well they become habitual. Back in the East Bay, I was getting to a point where small interruptions to the intravenous drip of my sweet life produced outsized anger. How dare that neighbor’s sprinkler fill up my drainage ditch! Who’s car was that parked at the end of the driveway? Consider also that keeping in front of a culture of expectation is a stimulant—an amphetamine if you will. The car you drive, the seat in church, the accolade for a child, the restaurant table near the window is a rush. It is possible for a place to have both the stimulant and the depressant happening simultaneously—I will hazard a guess here that this is a defining characteristic of most prosperous communities. The life-change of children leaving home, becoming “empty nesters” allowed us to think about comfort in a unique way. Children had to a certain extent locked us to the place, and when they left, there was freedom to consider alternative ways of living that exchanged the comfort of the known for the wonder that comes with the unexpected.

For myself, I wanted to be in a spot where a pine can fall, and you and your neighbors laugh at the splintered giant that took it upon itself to sever your connection to the rest of the world. I wanted prosperity to look like a basketful of eggs from a chicken coop. There are no right-angled plots of fescue here; water cuts its own path; your skill with a chainsaw measures you more than a hood emblem. The sheer randomness of this place is so lovely you can be shaken awake in the falling of a leaf; a redwood chains itself to your eye and will not let you look elsewhere. Relocating here was a detox move; a nature diet; an attempt to give the muse her voice back, and it worked.

I am not belittling the genuine tragedies of actual drug addiction—my family has direct experience with it; all the more reason for us to examine dependence in any area of our lives and take immediate action. Realize though there are societal opiates, cultural amphetamines and they creep into most lives uncritically examined. In my own experience, these addictions walked into the marbled foyer of my beautiful home; they didn’t hide; they were prescribed not by doctors, but by neighbors and Pastors. These were socially acceptable cravings, encouraged even. These dependencies kept the peace, made sure we stayed well within lines prescribed by our social circle. When friends and neighbors heard that we were leaving and where we were going, they thought we had gone mad. We heard, “Why would you move?” over and over again. Some people stopped talking to us not out of anger, but out of fear. We were checked in, but we weren’t supposed to leave.

You cannot take half measures with addiction in any form. Trust me on this. Dependency does not negotiate; it kills the hostages, and you’re one of the hostages. Think about your personal hostage status in its present moment. What addiction are you yoked to? Consider for a moment that you might not be as free as you had previously imagined. If you’re ready to consider that, try an experiment: put down your smartphone, and check back in tomorrow. Try to log off and shut down for 24 hours. Go crazy and try this: leave and not tell anyone where you are going. Skip using GPS. Go ahead; we’ll all be here when you get back. Our move was an attempt to get back some choices. To be deliberate in place can be a move towards freedom. A fallen tree can be a lesson in going home your own way.