Hurry Up and Die Before You're Dead Rites of Passage

Everybody loves a Pee-Wee with a bow tie.

Sometimes I meet a particular person at a social event in Cincinnati and I can't stop daydreaming about driving them to the edge of the closest wilderness, booting them out of the car, tossing them a knife with clear instructions: "Don't come back uncircumcised...or circumcised...whichever! Just please do something in some bloody way. It's like, "Jeeze, man! Expand your experience (and mine)-- I've asked you like six questions in a row and you haven't the slightest clue how to reciprocate!" 

If you're a transplant to Cincinnati, then you know that we natives just can't seem to get past asking each other about what stupid high school we all went to. I'm sorry, but as a city, and as a tribe, we all need to put this cliquiness to bed. Rather, we need to put this cliquiness to death! There are lots of other habits in my city that I'm ready to put to death in some publicly ceremonial way, in order that something new and better and might live. Below is my first attempt at a "to kill" list.

To Kill

- Otherness fearing (cliquiness, racism, neighborhoodism, high schoolism, which side of city-ism or which side of the river-ism)

- Inertia (extreme conservatism, afraid of change-ism, love of un-spicy spaghetti-ism, Terrace Park speed trap-ism) 

- Soccer mom-ism (fear mongering and over-protection from germs, gays, transportation methods that don't have four wheels and sliding doors)

- OTR-worship

- OTR-hating

- OTR-obliviousness

- Complaining and blaming
- TV
- Use of the words "I'm bored"

I often ask myself, how would a motivated tribe put any of these bad habits to death? I thought of the Kalenjin people of Kenya. The Kalenjin are the ones that have amassed the disproportionate amount of long distance running Olympic medals. I've been giving a lot of thought to their coming of age ceremony and the whole concept of "rites of passage", whereby something old dies, maybe so that something new and more beautiful can take its place. 

"As a Kelenjin teenager-- boy or girl-- you have to go through an experience so painful, it's like a theatrical orgy of pain... and here's what happens... First you have to crawl naked through stinging nettles. And African stinging nettles are much much stingier than western stinging nettles... Your fingers are squeezed together... Then you get beaten on that bony part of your ankle where it really hurts... But all that is just warm up because then one morning comes the circumcision. Now we have some idea how circumcision works, maybe. Some of us are circumcised. But the Kalenjin circumcision happens somewhere right after puberty, so age 13-17. The foreskin is not only cut, but it's tied into a bow... A hole is cut in the top or the bottom of the foreskin and the head of the penis pushed through the hole... When he undergoes the operation, he is obliged to be absolutely stoical... In some versions of the ceremony, mud is caked on the face and allowed to dry. Then, if a crack appears in the mud...all the people around will know immediately to start to beat you with large sticks."

-as told on the Cut and Run episode of NPR's Radio Lab

I've been informally polling friends and strangers about their own rites of passage growing up, and ways in which they've metaphorically tied their foreskins into a bow. My dad told me about "honeymooning" during his MBA and PhD studies with my mom through arctic Minnesota winters. Others told me about road trips where cars have blown up in the desert, or backpacking and missing trains in Europe. The vital ingredient seems to be some disequilibriating effect of adversity. The travail elicits a growth response or adaptation from it, and then a community grows together because of it.  

I've also been asking parents what they hope for in their kids in the way of rites of passage.  One father I met recently told me that he was determined to send his daughter to a new school, and NOT the one where he sat on the board of directors. "She's lived too cushy a life at this school. It's time for her to be stretched and challenged." I'm not a father or anything, but I can only imagine that his hope, in so many words, is that his daughter metaphorically gets her ass kicked just up to, but not quite beyond, the point of death (emphasis on metaphorically). Two of my brothers even told me about how formative it was for them getting their asses kicked on the streets of Brasil, not metaphorically. Poison is made poison merely by the dosage. 

I was just talking with my brother, Mike, about one of the most important deaths I ever died was to an era of self-pitying that typified my 20's. It was a period of sucking on a mother-teat of poison, called "try (but fail) to live up to other people's expectations." What I'm about to say has nothing to do with bragging, but I must give credit where credit is due. What pulled me through that micro-death-and-resurrection experience of my 20's had much to do with the act of completing my first Ironman. It's not that Ironman or my performance was this big impressive thing. But somehow it served as a kind of medicinal technology that enabled me to experience an act of slipping into my own skin-- a kind of incarnation into living within new expectations. It's left an enduring awareness to the gift of both my personal life-force as well as my absolute human frailty. 

Now, my current micro-death project, that I'm struggling to accept and die to, is my incessant what next?-thinking. I obsessively idealize the future and the way things "ought to be" while neglecting and dissing the present. I set lofty goals that look like check boxes left blank for months and even years. I latch on to outcomes that may never be rather than processes that ever are.

"Nice skin, man"

On a small scale, it manifests itself as my dreaming of tasting the orange while I peel it, dreaming of where I'll put the peel while I'm chewing it, dreaming of what I want to do next as I'm walking through my garden to feed the peel to the compost-- never quite savoring each moment for the beauty of itself. So, I'm left trying to figure out how a future-obsessed caterpillar metamorphes into a bow-tie-foreskinned butterfly, fully immersed in the garden around it.

If you have any ideas on rites of passage, I'd love to hear them. My muses remind me that usually, something therapeutic happens in the act of signing up for a race. It's like adding a magnetic field to the needle of an aimless compass. It somehow texturizes the dates on an otherwise formless calendar landscape. It schedules an encounter with my own mortality. There's one race I'm particularly drawn to in September, but also I fear that the in-the-flow moments I've been recently enjoying with friends on our trail runs and conversations with the studio run team suddenly devolve into loathsome "training" duties and future-preparing. But with every new race-adventure I get to do, the more I find that a spirit of adventure seems to inhabit the spaces between tasks not yet checked-off.