When I first started this blog, the fundamental question I was asking was whether I was using an exploration of consciousness as a healthy source of empowerment, or whether I was using it as escape. There is a danger with any pursuit that yields peak experiences that we are using it to avoid the mundane realities of a responsible life. So I couldn't go out and stand next to trees in the morning light while my son was still young. But I could do that later. And in doing that, I now have to choose whether I'm going to continue my t.v. addiction, or I'm going to start standing in the evening.
I know that fundamentally I am committed to health, not television. And now that I'm healthy I'm able to look at how this t.v. addiction started and what it's been doing in my life.
There was a time when t.v. actually protected me, or it felt like it was. When I was Ben's age, 11, my parents' already volatile and usually miserable marriage was at its worst. My father had just gotten a job at the CBC, and he was out drinking every night with French television journalists caught up in the drama of Quebec nationalism. My mother was a tenure track university professor, who came home after a day of teaching and university politics, and probably a couple of happy hour drinks at the faculty club, to an empty house, not knowing if or when her husband was coming home. Often he didn't.
It was about 10 oclock when it was clear my dad wouldn't be home, or he'd be home, late, drunk, hopefully not having killed himself or anyone else on the way back.
I'd lie in bed, anxious about homework I probably hadn't done, or had lost somewhere in my chaotic room. My mother, if she wasn't crying already, would probably be soon. I'd sneak into the t.v. room and watch Starsky and Hutch. I had a crush on David Soul because he looked like my dad. Come to think of it Paul Michael Glaser had the same curly brown hair as my mom. They had a partnership that nobody in my home had. Sure they sniped at each other, but deep down there was that working respect. Meanwhile I still can't remember which was Starsky and which was Hutch. But they distracted me from all the emptiness, and fear and heartbreak I wasn't emotionally equipped to bear.
Numbing myself out with t.v. was only something that started around the time I had my son. Before that were the years I was partying as hard as my dad was. Just a different kind of escape.
But now I'm here. A parent, with a child whose brain is going to be going through a quantum growth spurt in a few years. Standing in the middle of those memories night after night is probably going to be one of the most painful experiences of my life. I get PTSD tremors just thinking about it. I wonder if all these morning practices have just been a prelude to this heart of darkness practice that I'm about to set out on. And most of all I wonder what's going to be on the other side.
