When the Darkness Comes

I've always had a trait - a stubbornness of a sort - that helped me push through things others might not. It helped years ago in college, working at a UPS facility, when I'd be in the back of a semi trailer I was loading and boxes were piled up behind me until I could barely see light through the gap at the top of the packages.

Most people slow down, because you fell behind and you are still taking that shot of endless Longaberger baskets, so how can you even hope to keep up when the piled-up boxes add to the work you need to do to just grab the next box. You fell behind when there was no pile-up, so in what world could you possibly think you'll dig your way out?

In those moments, I didn't know why, but I could go faster. Maybe it's the same reason that when I was a kid and a bully held me down and told me to "stop fighting," I almost injured myself fighting harder. Some people just have an inborn stubborn streak.

I think I'm lucky for that. I think it's instinctual, and I can't take any credit for the fact that, yes, I may not be able to make it out of the hole, but I never stop trying to climb.

Because of that, I know that, yes, a present circumstance is tough, but I've seen tough before. In each darkness, I remember not just that the dawn is coming but that I will make it through the night no matter how cold or dark because I just will.

Others worry about me, and I try to explain and never seem to be able to communicate what I mean. Because, I'll say I don't want to be alive in this, or as the sun is setting, I will tell you I do not want to live without the light, and I'll mean it, but no one ever seems to understand that I am as sure of the dawn as anyone can be sure of anything, and that I will see that sunrise and struggle through every night of deepest darkness if they are a thousand just to see a moment of that light.

When I can't swim, I find a log. When I can't hold on and my hands are numb and frozen in their grip, I am grateful they froze that way and somehow held on harder. And, every time that I walk away from personal disaster, it is with the humble gratitude that something in me holds on even when it was only instinct and not any kind of chosen fortitude or decision.

I grew up as the youngest of six in the 80s, as my musical preferences show. My oldest siblings were teens for the big years of U2, and my favorite songs were all from the band's early albums. At 9 or 10, I could sing "Where the Streets Have No Name" from memory, and would when I was out running circles around our yard in a bid to be like my older brother who started really getting into shape around 10 when he joined the swim team. Of course, he'd always been athletic and I always took my Legos when my Mom said, "Go play outside," so there was a limit to how far that emulation would take me.

But back then, the song "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" became a personal anthem.

In high school and early college, I'd sing it with a kind of country flavor as I pulled pallets at the end of the night shift at Wal-Mart (I still like the squiggle). People I worked with knew the time by my singing as it echoed around the empty store.

In my 20s, driving in the middle of Winter - 18 hours on a sleepless round-trip on a whim - to my family's place in Ontario just to see the frozen lake, turn around, and go back to be on time for my shift, I played that album on loop as I yelled angry things at God and at myself for a personal loss that felt like the biggest I'd ever known.

When separation and divorce left me with selfish loneliness, it was the song I listened to as I pulled things together and pushed on. When I realized my pain was, to borrow from a TV series, selfish because it was never just my pain, that song was the marching cadence I kept moving to as I processed my guilt for the harm I'd done.

I'll say, for comedic effect, I was a dramatic child, when I tell you that in my pre-teen years I sat on the dock in Canada writing about the ghosts of the past I saw around me. Don't worry about correcting me, because I only make the self-effacing reference for the other dramatic kids out there, to let them know, yah, me too. I add jokes even in the middle of discussing the deadly serious because life does that too, and you had better remember and you had better notice the laughs that interrupt your tears.

Every love that was too short, every hope that was ever dashed, every break-up and break-down and death I heard news of in a lonely place far from everyone who knew what the loss truly meant, I would play that song and - to borrow from a poem I wrote in my 20s - "sling my pack, make tight the straps, and head off on my way."

And then, for the first time, that song stopped meaning something to me. I found a place where I had nothing left to search for. I found what I was looking for in such a profound way that it stripped all the words of any relevant meaning.

If I'd written about this a year ago, I'd be ending with some sappy hope that everyone might find what they are looking for.

But this isn't then, it's now, and today the song rings true again.

Because I have climbed highest mountain, and it was only ever to be with the people I loved. I have run through the fields when they were fields of thorn bushes that tore my skin until my blood gushed, and I never did it for anything other than the promise that someone else waited on the other side. And I have run and crawled when I could not even walk. I have scaled the city walls when the city was my own pride and vice, have invaded and fought those enemies like a man possessed, and it was only ever to be with someone... with those incredible someones from lovers to friends to family.

I have kissed lips that I could feel those kisses in my fingertips and toes, and felt an ache that stretched from my right hand to my left and across my chest where I wanted nothing more than to just hold someone I loved, whether for my own comfort or for theirs.

I have spent nights holding the devil's hand to keep me warm and watched the dawn break with my soul frozen-cold as the payoff for his company.

I have believed in a kingdom to come with everyone of every creed and background joined in harmony, and called that heaven, as much because we'd all be there together like one giant reunion of the human family as any desire to stand in the presence of an almighty source.

I have embraced the message of Jesus, even when I have not counted myself a Christian. I've railed at the sky overhead, swearing if all the promises I grew up with as Biblical were not true, that I'd make them true myself, because God or no, that kind of love is still worth embracing with religious fervor. Love is the only thing.

Every single word of that song means something to me, has meant something to me.

But the chorus is the reminder, like a clock ticking away the short, precious time we have, that, "I still haven't found what I'm looking for..."

When I hear those words, I have a little boy on my shoulders and see his brothers around us and hear us debating the superpowers one might have related to hot springs. I am in my ill-fitting dress greens and bawling my eyes out as I watch a vision in white walk toward me on her father's arm. I am standing in the back of a boat, holding my friend against the cold, as my Dad ushers us to safety and warmth at the end of a hard day. I'm standing in an attached garage, emptying my car, while an impatient cat meows loudly from inside the house because I'm taking too long coming inside.

And I'm forced to admit, I found what I was looking for. I did it more times than I can count. Over those mountains and walls and through the fields and across oceans, I found it.

And each time it has faded from view, I tend to be the kind who hangs on just a little too long. It makes me think of college parties around 3 or 4 a.m., when people have either left or fallen asleep in some corner, and I'd always be the one hanging out as my buzz faded and helping to clean up and make sure people made it home safe. Someone has to be that person, and I never seem to have anywhere I need to be other than there, so I might as well, and I like feeling useful.

I have found what I was looking for in the towtruck driver I road with for an hour who told me about his family at home and had the picture of his kids on the dash. I have found it in the cab driver from Somalia who took me home from a friend's wedding. I have found it in a friend who camped out on my back lawn and did my dishes, and in a dog I named with an Arabic word for "smile" because he was so skiddish and never wagged his tail, and who eventually wagged his tail so much he could take out a leg.

We rise.

We may fall. We may be buried to our necks and tossed by waves that tower like buildings.

We rise.

We may break on the rocks and shatter in the wind.

We rise.

There's a new song, not new in time but new to me, called "Sunrise" by Darren Kiely. It's a new one in terms of being another that every line has a meaning I can asign.

My black hole that "draws me in and drags me down" isn't a town or location. It lives inside of me. And I know everything I've been that was impressive to anyone is still in me even when I am far from impressive. I'm still that "boss." And, boy, do I clown, because people need the clowns, but there is a cost to it that I don't always show.

And I've been waiting on a sunrise, not sure what it would look like, but knowing that, eventually, I have loaded every truck and worked my way through every impossibility, and I will this time too. I will climb those mountains and run like I was 20 through those fields and God have mercy on any part of my pride or vice that thinks it is safe behind those city walls.

But, something has to break, or give, and even with all the things I've made it through or over or past, it can get dark enough I worry whether maybe this is the time the boxes bury me. Something has to give, and I know my heart and my will are not infinitely strong. Everything that can be quantified has a limit.

People remind me there's more out there, and that flowers still bloom, saying it like I never had the thought myself. But I'm not 20 anymore, and as time passes, we reach points where being an astronaut or an Olympian passes out of possibility, and there are more precious things to be than those.

Yes, I can still be a Father, and am lucky to have been a Dad for the time I had that. I'm an uncle and great-uncle many times over, and could do a better job showing my gratitude for the fact. But, I can never be a bright-eyed newlywed in his 20s or the guy in his 30s watching my kid in a play.

Time takes everything eventually, and maybe the physicists with theories about time and space as illusions are just playing at struggles as old as the first human that comprehended mortality.

Which reminds me, as a human race, we really missed an opportunity with the Aleutian Islands. How are none of them named "Time"?

But, something has to break. Something has to give. And those last lines of the song, out walking the deeper forest with my dogs, as a man just past the crest of the hill at the middle of life, I sing it with all the gusto I ever put to U2's lyrics when I was 10:

I hope it ain't my heart,

It cannot be my will.

I'm gonna find a place,

With all that I desire,

If it's the last road that I take,

'Til I'm burning in the fire.

I'm gonna find that sunrise.

Now, I've thought about writing this for some time. I've been walking the trails and singing this song for weeks, and wanted to put down some of this in words. A week ago, it would have had a different ending, just as a year ago it would have never gone this long.

Life is odd like that. It changes, and that's important to note. This song we all sing some little part of in the cacophonic chorus of humanity, it slows and speeds and drops to near silence, and that is often only moments before it rises into some glorious crescendo.

The other day, I saw the sunrise in the form of a person whose very presence reminded me of things I'm ashamed I forgot. I saw it while passing a spot and thinking about someone who spent their last moments watching the sun set, and who every time I think of him, I cannot help but ask his ghost, "Why did you forget to look for the sunrise instead?"

And life is not a movie. The credits do not roll on the happy ending. The sun is going to keep cycling around, rising and setting. But just as the credits do not roll with the sun rising, they also do not roll when it sets.

Tomorrow may not come. It won't come for all of us. But while we should avoid greed, there is one thing where we should push the limits of greediness, and that is in looking for the sunrise.

It may be far from home. It may be seen alone. It may not be the equal of the sunrise we watched with that person on that day, and it may at times remind of other sunrises and take on a melancholy tint.

But the sun will rise, and each one is not guaranteed or granted by any God or gods or force of nature. Each one is such an amazing gift, and even when it's a grudging gratitude, should inspire us to gratitude.

Every child I ever make laugh, my own or someone else's. Every cat that ever sits on my lap and purrs. Every pup that ever shoves its nose into my hand. Every friend who ever frames my name with a smile.

Every precious sunrise.