2/25/04
L.A. EPIPHANIES
6 PAGES

I recently got back from a week in LA where I was doing Avid support for the NBA All-star game. The last time I was in LA was back in May when Lauren and I went out there for a midwives conference she was going to out in Palm Desert. During that visit, I pretty much instantly confirmed why I'd left LA. It was nothing specific, just an intangible "feel" I got from the place as I was driving around. It reminded me of why I hated LA and why I'd never felt at home there.

This time was different. Immediately outside the airport, driving in my rental car to the hotel, there was a smell that evoked a lot of memories and feelings that were undeniably from my California days. I can't explain the smell because it's nothing specific. "Clean" is the only way I can describe it. It just smelled like clean air, though not clean like "country clean." It smelled, well, California clean. Kind of a fake clean. It doesn't really matter what it smelled like. Honestly it's a smell that I've smelled from time to time out here on the east coast, usually on mild day. And when I smell it, the word that comes to mind is "Burbank." It smells like Burbank. It is a smell that I remember from my semester in LA when I was interning at ER in Burbank. I guess what the smell really is is Burbank in late winter or early spring when the weather is warm but still cool enough to warrant a sweater. And whenever I smell that smell, it makes me think of that time, and ultimately my entire time in California. When I started driving away from the airport, this is the smell I smelled.

The smell would come back to me several times during the course of the week. The smell, coupled with a crispness in the air, and an unusually clear week in LA got my brain spinning and remembering all sorts of good things about my time here. The thoughts aren't completely clear in my head yet, so bear with me while I try and sort through them on paper.

The clear week in LA was a big memory jogger for me. Ironically considering I've never seen LA this clear. It was so clear that as I was driving along the 10 freeway, I could actualy look to my right and see the Hollywood sign in the distance. I don't know how much you know about LA geography, but the Hollywod sign is probably a good 10-20 miles north of the 10 freeway. On a normal day, it is absolutely obscurred by haze and smog, covered by a thick brown cloud. But this week, I could see it clear as day. I didn't even have to squint, it was that clear. It was so clear this week that I could see clear across the San Fernando Valley to the mountains on the other side. I could make out the shadows and contours of the mountains that were always only a vague outline through the smog. It was so clear that I could actually see the mountains beyond THEM. It was so clear that from downtown, I could see the Angeles mountains WAY off in the distance. Snow peaked mountains. I had never seen snow from within the city limits of LA and now, here I was looking at snow covered mountains probably 30-50 miles away. It was THAT clear.

So like I said, it was ironic that something like a clear week in LA would jog my memories considering it was never this clear while I was here. But what it did was evoke the memories of one of the few things I always loved about living here. The landscape. I loved the mountains. I loved hiking and camping. I loved going by myself into the middle of nowhere just 30 miles from the city. It never failed to amaze me how close I could be to LA and yet how far from any sign of human life. It still amazes me how much of Southern California is settled and developed and yet how much of it is still untamed wilderness with wildcats and grizzly bears and landscape that could kill you if you're not careful. And these two realities are always within an hour or two drive of each other: development of obscene proportions and wilderness of pristine beauty.

It was this proximity to nature that fueled every good thing that happened to me and every major decision I made in LA. Or at least, everything stemmed from that. It was hiking that saved my sanity in LA. I realized pretty quickly after settling in LA in July of 1999 that if I was to avoid slipping into a deep depression, I was going to have to reinvent myself. The past 4 years of college had been the best years of my life because I had been so busy working with passion on a career that I loved with good friends who were around me all the time. Now that I was actually being paid for this career, I was less than passionate about it. Somehow photocopying scripts and making lunch reservations just wasn't filling me with a sense of wonder. And forget seeing friends at any time of day or night. It just isn't the same when they're not right down the hall. I was quickly getting dissillusioned with post-college life and depression was seeping in. I had to find something to be passionate about and fast.

That something ended up being the Appalachian Trail. In October of that year, I made a 5-year plan to hike the AT. So I dove into research about the trail, and I began training. I started hiking every weekend. I borrowed a book of great hikes and tried to do as many of them as I could. I bought a backpack and did some overnights in Joshua Tree. I fell in love with isolation and being the only person for miles around.

My sense of adventure stemmed from this. And with all this alone time with nothing else to occupy the passionate side of my brain, I turned inward and spent a lot of time in deep thought, figuring out myself and how I fit into the world. It wasn't anything Zen-like. I didn't sit cross-legged and ponder my life. It was more like as I was driving home, with no girlfriend and no cool job to occupy my thoughts, my brain was free to wander from this thought to the next. As a result of all this soul-searching, I had no less than five earth-shattering paradigm shifts in less than a year. I called them my "epiphanies" when something I had been trying to figure out about myself or my past for so long suddenly just fell into place. They always happened at unexpected moments, like when I was driving home from work and something just suddenly clicked, and they always sent my head reeling. They were very cool feelings and I was having them on average once every two months. I think the most personal self-growth I've ever experienced was during that 10 or so months between October and that following summer when I had an epiphany that convinced me that I COULD move out of LA.

One of the reasons I had all my epiphanies, one of the MAIN reasons, was because I had made a new friend on-line. Laura. We met because of an on-line personal ad I had posted. And we instantly "got" each other. Nothing romantic ever happened between us even though it seemed like it was going to start off that way. But we both quickly realized that there was something more than just a cheap hook-up opportunity here. We both started sending like 10 emails a day to each other, talking about seemingly stupid stuff. Stuff that just happened to run through my head on any given day. Stuff that if I mentioned it to anybody else in the world, I would have been met with an eyebrow raise and a, "Yeah, okay, whatever." But Laura GOT IT. I can't explain it anymore than that. She would say, "Oh my god, I've thought that exact same thing." And because I knew I could say anything and she would empathize, I wrote more and more. Over the next 10 months, Laura was my journal. I told her everything and anything I was thinking. And just the act of getting my thoughts down on paper made them concrete and easier to figure out and that is undoubtedly the reason why I had so many epiphanies.

So as it turns out, the bulk of those ephiphanies were taking place during those crisp months of "winter" and early spring in LA, right around the time when that smell I described earlier was most evident. So that smell being the first thing I noticed once I was back in LA, it brought back all those memories of my epiphanies and accelerated self-growth.

It was a time when anything and everything seemed possible. Mostly because what I thought was impossible one minute was so easy the next as my paradigm shifting epiphany suddenly made everything so clear. I didn't know where I'd be a year from any given day. I didn't know what I'd be doing, or who I'd be doing it with. I didn't know what I'd experience or how close to death I would come. And it was all okay. I loved not knowing. I loved the adventure and excitement of it all. Even though the day-to-day events of my life were uninspiring and dull, the excitement of (to sound completely conceited) myself and my path more than made up for it. And as I smelled that smell, and felt the crisp air and looked at the mountains this past week, I was reminded of it all over again. And I longed for it.

Yes I longed for my days in LA again. I know enough to know that I was confusing a longing for those specific things that happened to me while I was IN LA as a longing for LA itself. But still, I was longing for a time in my life that has been gone for almost 4 years now.

My whole year of epiphanies prepared me for three things. It mentally prepared me to leave LA without fear. It prepared me to be in the right state of mind for when I met the woman I would eventually marry. And after these two things happened within a few weeks of each other, it prepared me to keep an open mind about what life is going to deal me. And after that, the epiphanies stopped. The last one I had came about two months before I left LA forever and I haven't had one since. Oh sure I've figured out new things about myself, but nothing as sudden and mind-reeling and earth-shattering as the epiphanies I had in LA.

For the longest time, during my first several months in New Jersey when I had no job and was questioning my decision to move, I craved that feeling again. This was probably the lowest point of my life. A very humbling point in my life. Not only wasn't I doing well career-wise after leaving LA, but the explosive self-growth seemed to have ended as well. All I wanted, all I needed to re-energize myself was another epiphany. But it never came. And it still hasn't come.

In the last few years, I've learned a lot about the world and myself. I've become more conscious of world-events. I pay attention to the news more. I've committed my life to Jesus. I've married the woman of my dreams and I'm about to become a father. But I have yet to feel again that pure euphoric sense of wonder and revelation that always accopanied the veil being lifted in epiphany. And being back in LA, having all these smells and sights reminding me of those days made me long for them with a deep ache. It wasn't a longing for youth or a nostalgia for times past. It was a craving for the sense that anything is possible. I pretty much know these days where I'll be a month from now, a year from now, even several years from now. I know who I'll be with and about where I'll be geographically. Sure there are unknowns, but the variables are not as intense or as widespread as they were when it was just me and I could go anywhere anytime I wanted.
I love Lauren, and I love my life and wouldn't trade it all for anything, but I couldn't escape that feeling of wanting to be back in that time of my life when truly anything was possible.

It is that feeling that I often long for and truly ached for this past week. And I've wondered why I haven't had epiphanies like I had back then. But the answer has come to me, even I think as I was writing this.

One day back in LA, in an email, I told Laura a dream I had of living everywhere. I wanted to drift from place to place, live there for a few months or a year, work some insignificant job that I'd always been curious about and then move on to the next place. I'd do that until I found someplace that cried out "HOME!" and then that's where I'd live for the rest of my life. I don't think I realized it then… actually I don't think I just figured it out until just now, but that was exactly what I was doing during my year of epiphanies and self-discovery. I was finding a home. I was preparing myself, preparing my mind and my soul to settle down in the place and state of mind that would be my home.

I guess ultimately, the dream I had of moving from place to place was nothing more than humungous cross-country version of the post-adolescent mission of "finding oneself." We all think that we have to go somewhere to find ourselves. We have to backpack across Europe. We have to live in New York City. We have to live here and there and everywhere. But I remember a line from "The Wonder Years" actually the last episode where Kevin's mother tells him that he doesn't need to go anywhere to find himself, "You could just be walking into a restaurant one day and find yourself." That's what happened to me.

(I'm realizing that this is going to be really tough to explain, but I'll do my best.) I had discovered myself during those ten months in LA. The epiphanies I'd had had prepared me for two important events that would ultimately effect the rest of my life. From there, all other things would flow, but it was the realization that I COULD leave LA and the realization that there was life after Mary Ann in the form of Lauren. Those were the two important things I needed in order to move on with my life. I had to realize that there was a life and a career for me outside LA, that I wasn't trapped in this city no matter how much other people tried to convince me I had to be here. And I had to realize that it was possible to love somebody as much as I'd loved Mary Ann. Those two realizations simultaneously set me in motion towards New Jersey, away from LA and into the arms of Lauren. And like I said, the other realization was almost an afterthought but that was the epiphany that even though I don't have it all figured out, it's okay, just take life as it comes.

And just like that, almost anti-climactically in that last epiphany, I had found who I was. All my other epiphanies had empowered me to push forward and go go go. This last one was actually encouraging me to slow down. Take life as it comes. Don't be so intent on figuring everything out right now the way I had been for the past ten months. I'm only realizing this in retrospect, like I said, even as I write this. But every important lesson I had needed to learn for my life I learned in those ten months of epiphanies. Everything since has flowed from those three realizations. And the reason I haven't had anything as mind-blowing as during those ten months is because… I'd already discovered the most important things?

No that can't be right. That doesn't even sound like what I had been coming to in my head. So what is it then? I think more what I was getting at is that, like Kevin Arnold's mom said, I didn't have to live in Texas and South Carolina and Montana and all these other places to find a home. I had found my home with Lauren, the person who matters most in my world. And I found my home in her because my epiphanies had prepared my mind to accept HER as my home, not some far off intangible place that I might travel to someday.

Here's where I start to get hokey, so bear with me. I believe in divine guidance. And even back then, I believe my epiphanies came at least partly from God. At the very least, I believed God was bringing people and events into my life that ultimately directed my thoughts towards where I would have these epiphanies. If that's the case, and if the epiphanies were ultimately leading me to find myself and find a home, then perhaps there's a reason for why my epiphanies came so rapid fire over the course of 10 months rather than spaced out over the course of several years like most people experience.

I've thought on this before and always thought that there was divine intervention here, but I'm looking at it through this new theory. There was a very narrow window of opportunity where I would have been able to meet Lauren and fall in love. I had to get my mind passed Mary Ann before I met Lauren. If I hadn't done that, Lauren would just have been a girl who I'd made out with at Eli's wedding. But just a week before, I'd finally put relationships past in the past, leaving me open to the possibility that I could love somebody else just as much. Enter Lauren. Perfect timing. But Lauren was from New Jersey. Even though I had fallen in love with her that weekend, if I had no intention of moving out of LA, I know that it never would have gone anywhere. She wouldn't have moved to LA for me and in the state of mind I had been several months earlier, I certainly wouldn't have moved out of LA for any "girl." But as it turned out, I had, through epiphanies finally realized that I could get out of LA and in fact had started making plans to move out of LA by the end of the year.

All the timing was perfect for mine and Lauren's first meeting. But it wouldn't have been had I not had all my epiphanies beforehand. With that narrow window of opportunity, in order for it all to work out, I had to discover all this crap about myself pretty damn quick. I really think that is the reason why the self-discovery happened at such an accelerated rate when it did. If it hadn't, I would have missed Lauren without even realizing what I had missed. And once all the right decisions were made, God put me back into normal discovery speed.

I had always thought that it was a terrible thing that my self-discovery process had gone into tortoise mode after leaving LA. I guess now, that's kind of a glass-is-half-empty way of looking at things. I was overly blessed during my time in LA. But I wasn't overly blessed just for the hell of it. There was a specific reason behind all of it. The reason was to get me ready to find my home. And silly me, I didn't realize it even when it happened. I kept waiting for the next big thing, the next big discovery. I didn't realize that the biggest and best discovery had already come.

Ironic considering most everything I have written tonight is stuff that I have already realized in the past. I have said in the past that Lauren is my home. That I don't need to be in Texas or South Carolina or Montana or anywhere like that. As long as I'm with Lauren, I'm home. I've said many times that God was preparing me and Lauren for our exact meeting date, that if we had met even two weeks earlier, it probably wouldn't have happened between us. These thoughts are nothing new to me. But it's like I'm finally seeing them from a different light. I finally understand why the epiphanies that led me to Lauren and to myself suddenly stopped after I found both.

Okay, I get it now. I just wish that it would stop the longing I still feel for that time in my life. I wonder if it will. I wonderif now that I understand the reasons "why", the "why's" will stop and I can move forward without the dull ache for what's behind…

(I had intended on writing more on my LA trip, but I'm absolutely drained now. I hadn't intended on going this deep on this one, but I'm glad I did. I'll delve more into the rest of my LA musings later.)