I was asked, today, “Is this your first bachelors degree?” today by a classmate in a class that was canceled for the next couple of weeks so the professor can do one-on-one interviews with the students and so that we have an extra, what, hour and twenty minutes twice a week to work on our capstone projects. This is actually a good thing and I hope to dedicate the time to research, outlining, and writing; but the outcome of going to class and sitting in the conference room where its held was that another classmate showed up and then decided to ask the above question. The outcome was an hour-long conversation about the ideals of life as promoted by the LDS church. To answer to critiques first, I am an active member of the LDS church and my thoughts and internal discussion on what is and is not appropriate does not change my faith or cause me to want to be anything else; and I believe that people should think about and, to some extent, question what is practiced as doctrine in order to determine how best to apply religious beliefs and principles for themselves. As a result of these two thoughts, I also believe that all religions deserve to be tested, thought about, and questioned in order for the membership to determine whether or not what they are being taught is worth living. On top of all of that, I also believe that the current religious practices we follow, generally, are from a Puritan influence and as a result, we often believe that there are a series of good practices and appropriate things and anything that does not fit within the Good Box by extension falls outside of it and is inappropriate. With all of that established, the conversation started with why I, as a mid-30′s-something was working on my bachelors degree at BYU when I should be out in the world working, already with a degree, or doing something else. And, “Yes,” these options were stated, though not expressly.

You see, some years ago my dad sat me down and told me what he (and by extension my mother) thought about what I was doing with my life. What I was not doing, or had not done, was get a degree, have a career, or be married and have a family (or at the very least, be dating seriously). In fact, on the last one, I was not dating seriously, had dated the girl (previous to the dad conversation) entirely for her looks, and broke up with her because she said, and I quote, “You know you love me,” and I had to think about it and when I thought about it for a long time and realized that I “liked her” but certainly could not apply “love” to the relationship I broke it off and she ended up dating another guy and getting married and, even though the conversation preceded her dating the other guy and getting married, caused my sister to talk to my dad who decided it was time to speak to me which in turn turned into a three hour one-sided conversation outlining the three main themes from above.

When I shared these three things with my classmate, and I use these three things because everything else that my dad told me that night are merely extensions of these three main items, he reiterated his question, “Is this your first bachelors degree?”

My answer to that question is, “Yes,” and (unspoken), “BYU does not admit students into a bachelors program who already have a bachelors degree.”

I said, “I started attending BYU in ’97 and realized that I was not taking my education seriously and pulled myself out of school to focus on other areas.”

His response, “If you can recognize you are not taking school seriously, why didn’t you change the way you approached school.”

I said, “I had other priorities, I still have those priorities, and as a result, those priorities were far more important to me then, and now, then everything except for my wife and child and family.” I then said, “Over time my priorities changed [and this is why]…” and then I outlined the three points my dad shared with me when I was 29: no degree; no career; and no lasting relationships.

The outcome was that I decided, in a very small period of days, that it was time to make some radical changes in my life. I drove to where my parents live and had a second “conversation” with my dad, but it too was one-sided and a repeat of the first one and my dad restated the same three major problems I was having and, even more upset than after the first conversation, solidified my desires to change, but in different ways than what I think my parents had anticipated.

As an aside, I drove by my mom’s work and stopped to say, “hello,” and, “goodbye,” to her before I left town and, ostensibly, left immediate contact with either parent. The outcome of this was, first, that I told my mom the same thing I’d told me dad a few minutes before, “My friends have asked me to move with them to [insert location]* and I think I am going to move,” and got a different answer from my mom than from my dad. Dad said, “No you’re not,” and he was right only as far as location, we did not move to [insert location]* but ended up somewhere else. My mother said, “Is this what you really want to do?”

Later on, my mom would have a more formal conversation with me about that conversation where she informed shared a couple of family experiences with me that illustrated events where it is appropriate for parents to intervene in children’s lives and that, as an adult, even though time and situations were very different, both of my parents felt it was appropriate to intervene because what what I was doing in my life was not healthy.

Knowing now what I didn’t know then, I think I was expected to give different answers. And yet, knowing what I know now, I had to make radical and hard changes to my life in order to be where I have ended up. Where am I now? Well, I am finishing my degree in one month. But, this is only indirectly related to the conversation with my dad. The direct connection is that I decided I was tired of being close enough where family members and parents could scrutinize what I was doing closely enough that they missed every single thing I was doing and then decided to make quantum leaps in logic to arrive at what I was really doing and then talk to me about what they thought I was doing compared to what I am actually doing. The indirect outcome is that when I ended up in New Hampshire, expecting to end up in Boston, I agreed to go back to school as a condition of living with my friends and their daughters and as a result started the process of getting the degree I was accused of not having. When I got serious about my education and realized that it was time to place education above occupation and as a result started looking at what schools would best offer me the education-to-cost I wanted. I applied to and was subsequently recruited by Boston University and I also looked into Harvard and other places, but, honestly, decided to make the decision based more on playing a game I sometimes like to play and stated something like (to my mother), “What would it hurt me to apply to BYU one more time?” I’d actually been turned down by BYU about four times and wasn’t certain I wanted to do it one more time.

One other things shifted inside of me when I made that statement, I started to plan a move from New Hampshire to Utah. I was offered a job that helped pay for the move and something I wouldn’t want to do for any real length of time. Finally, I came up with an alternate plan for my education if, and only if, BYU decided to reject me one more time. As a result, I had a plan, I had direction, and I had faith that something would happen, though I didn’t know what that something was other than that I would get a degree and figure out what was next.

The problem, though, wasn’t that I was working toward a degree but that I still didn’t have a career (nor a particular desire for a specific career) and I still wasn’t married and didn’t have a family. My desire, believe it or not, is to be on the east coast. I didn’t get excited to move back to Utah or to Provo. I did have the feeling, and this was rather persistent, that my time in Utah would only end after I’d found someone to marry. As a result of that persistent feeling, when people would corner me on why I moved back to Utah, I told them, rather universally (and flippantly), “I am here to get married.” And I believed that. However, even knowing or believing my statement, I have also lost some of the patience my parents have touted about me and after a summer of acting and writing for the stage I’d decided that after the Fall Semester I would move either to Salt Lake City or to Los Angeles, CA and I was leaning toward California.

Then the Fall Semester hit and I was taking a class through the philosophy department on Moral Storytelling. I noted Erin because she said she was from Massachusetts. That interested me. Though, admittedly, I didn’t expect much to happen even though I did think, repeatedly for some weeks, that I needed to get to know her, specifically, better. Except, I hadn’t been on a date in a couple of years, when I did date it was being setup by a girl who didn’t know me at all and insisted on setting me up with incompatible girls, and when I asked different girls out I would be turned down, all of this so that when I finally got up the nerve to try and insert myself into Erin’s life it was done so backwardly and awkwardly that I am surprised we dated, got engaged, that I flew to Massachusetts for New Years, met Erin’s family, was accepted, and eventually had a child together.

Meeting Erin solidified my staying in Utah and in Provo and at BYU. I was ready to leave regardless of what I’d promised anyone else.

So, by making the hard choices in my life, e.g. moving and then starting school and by extension removing myself from the full-time work environment, I met and married my wife and we started a life together and because I met Erin, we also focused my attention on getting a degree sooner rather than later. As a result of the conversation with my dad my priorities have shifted, though they have not changed, and I placed my education and the opportunities involved higher than I was placing a career or even the search for a career. The outcome of this rather complex relationship between New Hampshire, conversations with my parents, and returning to BYU and Provo and meeting, dating, and marrying Erin is that I have taken care of two of the three problems my dad decided to share with me. I have a degree (or will very soon), and I have a family.

What I don’t have is a career, so let me qualify that. I believe I have a career objective. The objective is to write. I can define further what I mean by writing, but without going into a great deal of detail about the process of getting from my goals and priorities all the way to my career, I want to write fiction. Writing for a corporation is an acceptable short term answer to my overall career goal; but, it is exactly that, a short-term answer. For the long-term, I am actually planning on more education and pursuing, to some extent, advanced education in two other areas, one more than the other**.

I am under no illusion that writing fiction as a career objective is, at best, foolish. There are far more up-and-coming authors than there are slots on a publishers schedule to accommodate. There are a lot of very talented writers. Every tom, dick, and sherry wants to be published and thinks about it and dreams about it. Making a living as an author is not always possible. Because making a living is not always possible, I realize that I have to follow other interests that have carried my attention for numbers of years. Because I know that providing for family is first, I will pursue more education beyond an MFA-Writing where I can teach at a very higher level within the college-university environment. I expect to find myself going to school for quite a few more years and learning things I have ignored or chosen not to follow before now. The outcome is that I am not done with school, my career is to write, and I plan to get more degrees that will allow me to translate what I am studying into what I am writing and supplementing all of that with teaching. In order to follow this, I pursue my goals and my priorities in a fashion that allows me to provide for my family and support my wife in her interests and endeavors.

As a result of making the hard decisions some years ago, I am now in a position where my dad’s critiques are not as applicable to my current situation and where I am better able to move forward both in a fashion that my parents might approve of, but also in a way that shows that life and experience has taught me something about how to live life and how to approach other people whose lives I touch in some way.

The outcome of a lot of things is that I believe in having an ideal. For me, writing is an ideal. For me, being married is an ideal. For me, having a family is an ideal. For me, providing for that family is an ideal. For me, pursuing my interests is an ideal.

I, like everyone else, live in a world of ideals. I also live in a world of reality and at some point one must marry reality with the ideal. The reality of a lot of things falls outside of the Puritan influences Good Box. They are ideas and directions and writing and a whole host of other things that define are not, by extension, wrong or inappropriate or evil or sinning. My having a different view of the world or even a different view of my religion than the classmate with whom I held the conversation that influenced this post, and having different ideas or even questioning why I believe what I do does not make me a bad person nor does it mean that I don’t believe that what is in the Good Box is any less valuable than the other directions I choose to pursue with my life.

For this classmate, the outcome was an argument that it is appropriate to allow my wife to follow her dreams for an education, a career, and for a life and that it is my job to support her in those areas and to help her be as successful as she can be. Because I believe things like this, I can also argue that it might be appropriate for Erin to pursue a career and for me to stay at home with the child(ren) and that our religious beliefs and even the Good Box allows for use to have this happen. And that it is specifically the influence of the cultural beliefs of the community that we would be judged if this is the path we chose to take.

At no time does this change my faith, nor does it change what is good or appropriate, nor does it affect ones ability to be an active and strong member of the LDS church or to serve when asked to. Rather, the way we pursue what we pursue in our lives and how we choose to communicate that with other people and in other places is tantamount to the way we choose to live our lives and by questioning whether or not the Puritan influence and the Good Box are the only way to live a religion.

Because my dad sat me down and told me what I wasn’t doing right I had the opportunity, and took it, to access what was happening and in some cases to be in different situations where circumstances caused me to make a right choice. Because I started making those choices I was able to get married. Because I got married I realize that even though there are culturally defined roles that are not set in stone and can be altered to fit our specific needs. And as a result of the changes in my life, the choices I made ten or more years ago and my priorities, and because I have goals and specific focuses these don’t interfere with my faith or religion or responsibilities and as a result of all of that and a belief that ideals are important, I can live my life and do what I need to do and still be the kind of person I think I am meant to be.

The outcome to the conversation was, in part, that I don’t fit traditional molds for education and for marriage and for a career, and just because it may not make sense to someone or that I would make decisions that might appear to be counter-intuitive to someone doesn’t make them counter-intuitive or wrong and that, ultimately, I have lived a life that is right for me. The outcome is that ideals are nice, but that we need to begin to accept that the things that lie outside the box can be nice and appropriate too.

*[insert location] is intentional and, “Yes,” I do know the location, and, “No,” I don’t care to share.
**not sure I am sharing this one, at least in this post.

Real Heroes Fly