A Man without a Country

Alan by no means appears the strapping type who would cross continents and traverse oceans in an eight year drive to meet the peoples of the world. He approaches instead the diminutive. We sit across from one another in couch chairs one afternoon last week talking under the bamboo roof of the guest commons at Hostal Rosario del Villa in Cuenca. He laughs easily and looks about 42 years old, wears a worn baseball cap and appears altogether nondescript, perhaps even somewhat undernourished.


Istanbul, Turkey

Alan’s assured cadence and deep voice tell a different story. Those reflect a personal need molded onto a framework of intense curiosity which for almost a decade has stopped at nothing to find universal commonality no matter country or culture.


Cusco, Peru

So is Alan a traveler? “I can’t really characterize myself as anything,” he says. “I can just say that I travel because that’s part of my life.”

A part of his life that’s more consequence than choice he says.
Alan had been working with computer software and hardware in the Silicon Valley high tech era, and started part time, taking personal growth courses and studies. It generated full scale change but not until Alan rammed into a dead end wall years later.


Koh Phangan, Thailand

He has always enjoyed helping people, he explains, helping people discover their hidden aspects, helping people to resolve differences, helping people to better understand their motivations.

Time after time people encouraged him. You’re so good at doing counseling, they said, you ought to practice full time. So he got out of the high tech field and without a psychology degree that is in fact what Alan did for about the next six years.

“I thought about (getting a degree) for many years” he says, “and every time I went to go something stopped me. The main thing is they weren’t actually seeing people, they were seeing statistics in general and I wanted to see people in specifics.”  

He says he did it until he got really good at it. He could figure out their focus of attention, see the things inside themselves that they wanted to change. But Alan says almost everyone wanted to change superficially, for instance, how to change to make more money or how to develop a more likeable personality.

“Is that all people really want?” thought Alan. “They were satisfied with what to me was just a beginning. It was just bread crumbs. And people were delighted with it. And I wasn’t. I needed a path, I needed to go somewhere.”

He felt frustrated doing life coaching because to use Ecuador as a metaphor, people wanted to hear about the country but only one percent ever traveled to it. No one wanted to actually go. People didn’t want a change that turns things inside out or the change that pulls the root of the self out for brave examination.

It was like people “watching the travel channel but then turning off the TV," says Alan.

Buenos Aries, Argentina

This was the dead end experience that birthed the consequence of Alan’s travels across the globe. He visited Asia, South America, the Middle East and Europe. He lived in Buenos Aries, Santiago, Spain, Istanbul and Cusco, Peru. He went to India. He began searching for a commonality among people that unites despite habits of language and culture or country and belief. He “ticked” to find what made other people tick under the clothing of their heritage and cultural upbringing.

This tick is what Alan describes as “intent.” It’s a third aspect that forms a triangle of being along with the nature and nurture aspects, our genetic and environmental aspects. No two intents can be exactly alike Alan is saying, not a one can match exactly that of another. Alan argues these intents are the stuff that make us tick.

While traveling for these many years, Alan has lost contact with his country of origin and to the extent his English has been expunged of American slang. He speaks a neutral English which German or French people can understand.  

Santiago, Spain

“I’m an American in the official sense," he says, "but I don’t see the world through the eyes of an American.”

I don’t know how Alan’s awakening took place. I don’t know if it was like the rise of a morning sun over the horizon, or whether it came as a thunder clap that dismembered the lone tree on an empty tract of land. But according to Alan it was a discovery that contradicted his almost canonical belief that inside everyone exists something which unites them to others of the same species.

…”that came as a big blow to me” he says, “…we were really not…. everybody has something that makes them tick but that’s the only thing they have in common.”

When the interview progresses to this point I’m beginning to wonder if in truth the design of an individual’s being is so unique it cannot ever unite in fundamental fashion with the being of another.

Alan’s finding overturned and undermined the very purpose of his world travels and led him to go on to write a book published last February, available on Amazon in print and digital forms entitled, “The Story between Us, Living and Relating from Being.”

Alan required anonymity to tell his story, and as the author of his book, he’s known simply as Alan S. 

 

 

 

 

 

Books can make readers of us all.

If you don’t read books, you’re missing out, period. I would say this is true so much so that for those of you who have never made a practice of reading books---train yourself to read. If you strive to overcome natural disinclination, you’ll likely discover the reward worth the payment of time and energy. Everybody has interests. Begin by reading a book on a subject of interest. It's not only a way to learn, it feeds an innate hunger to know.

If you have relapsed; if you used to read books but don’t anymore, start reading again. You’ll likely find that without realizing, you wholeheartedly miss the pleasure of reading an outstanding book.

For a time I myself experienced book reading relapse. I attribute part of this to years of working tiresome graveyard shift hours---part to being enamored of digital chat rooms---and part to the internet in general. Binge watching popular Netflix TV series grabs plenty of time and interferes with book reading mode. To learn how to navigate computers and accomplish internet related feats---these can easily slice hours off of time needed, even for sleep.

So yes, this had been my case for a time---until several years ago when someone gifted a novel by Patricia Cornwell to me. I realized what I had been missing by not reading books. That intriguing novel of suspenseful fiction resuscitated my love of reading. Its importance stood higher after. When I finish a book now, I start another. I have erected walls to guard my disposition to read books. These walls guard against what I view as the siege of the internet age threatening to rid me of time alone with books that move my spirit in no other way possible.

Books offer so much of value. By making time to read books, we can transport ourselves a thousand years back and discover a world of medieval belief, practice and stunning turns of history. As we read our minds display images we ourselves imagine. Books invite us to feel sympathies and antipathies for characters whose strength or weakness we may find reflected in ourselves or others. Sometimes as we read a book we’re gratified at how it draws us into a world where we’ve always yearned to really live. Reading books sometimes comforts us with a message of hope. At other times it agitates us to take action for a particular cause. History for instance credits the 1962 book “Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson as the spring board of the environmental movement.

Grisham one of a kind book writer.

If I see a book by John Grisham I’ve never read, I’ll enjoy reading it.

I like how most of Grisham’s books deal with legal and moral issues in small towns of the South. The pithy dialogue he writes for his individualistic, flamboyant characters entertain.

I’m reading his latest novel now, “Sycamore Row.” It’s about what happens when a wealthy white man, close to death from cancer, hand-writes  a new will the day before he hangs himself from a tree.  He bequeaths 90% of his $20,000,000 fortune to his black housekeeper.  With that Grisham creates high impact word pictures of racism in the South, greed among the deceased man’s children, and conflict as attorneys contest the handwritten will. Most of Grisham’s books teach lessons on how the legal system works. He incorporates the drama of stories into structures of the law.

John Grisham

Grisham’s “The Painted House” was a memorable book to read. Unlike the legal drama, the book tells a story amid cotton farming in the South of the early 1950s. One reason I liked it was because a boy narrates the story and the book speaks in the vernacular of the time and place.

The cotton crop needs harvesting. Mexican workers arrive in cattle cars. Ozark Hill people arrive and put a tent on the front lawn of the family house. Grisham’s familiarity with little while growing up enables him to write well the backdrops of poverty in many of his books.

He entertains with telling details expertly thrown into the mix of his novels. He amusingly shows how people pretend. I don’t find wasted or hazy words in his writing. Grisham wrote thirty two published books and nine the film industry made into movies.

Two other memorably enjoyed books by Grisham are “The Runaway Jury” and “The Street Lawyer.”  The first tells an intriguing story as two opposed interests outside the legal system vie to manipulate jurors to win a verdict. The second tells a story about a corporate lawyer who changes his values and starts practicing law for homeless people.

Grisham brings to life the culture of segregation and country characteristics of what life probably is like in the rural South. He was born in Arkansas and raised in the South. He lives in the South now and knows its characteristics. Grisham in his early years traveled from place to place in the South with his family, until settling in Southhaven, DeSoto County, Mississippi. His father did construction and cotton farming. Grisham worked in a nursery watering plants, as a plumber’s helper, as a sales clerk in a department store and in a road crew spreading asphalt.

He first graduated from Mississippi State University with a BS in accounting, and in 1983 with a JD from the Mississippi State University School of Law. He returned to his hometown of Southhaven and practiced law for the next decade. Sometimes he was chosen by courts to represent indigent clients and gained valuable experience in civil and criminal law. He served from 1983 to 1990 as a Democrat in the Mississippi House of Representatives.

Grisham is on the Board of Directors of the Innocence Project, a national organization which advocates for DNA testing to prove the innocence of wrongfully convicted prisoners.