What Doin’?

It’s a story-book summers afternoon.  Droplets of rain danced on the cool pavement of the mountainous county roads just hours preceding our returning caravans’ departure from the granite sky scrapers known as the Grand Tetons.  Our family had successfully completed our week vacation camping in Yellowstone National Park.  I say successfully completed because the four of us somehow survived solitary confinement in a 200 square-foot trailer, miles from civilization, still on speaking terms.  Collin does not speak but his warm, open mouthed toothless grins are welcome additions to Deacon’s emphatical rendition of Sesame Street’s: “Sing a Song” at any opportunity he can fashion a microphone out of a stick, toy car, spoon or controller.

It does not take long for the wife and kids to slip into a blissful coma, surely to be entertained by a theatrical reenactment of the week’s events played out in their own minds, as we point the horse and buggy homeword. The quiet solitude affords me the opportunity to focus on the open road and slip into my favorite form of thinking described by author Mark Gungor as “the nothing box”.  My concentration on the low hum of tires skirting across the weather-worn Wyoming asphalt and the rattle of 7.3 liters of American ingenuity paving the roads to my escape to nothingness is unapologetically interrupted by the 2-year old’s trivial interrogation of “Daddy, what doin’?”.

You see, over the past 7 days, Deacon had become very concerned what “mamma” or “papa” or “grahma” or “daddy” were doing regardless of his actual visibility to the doing or not.  The 6-hour ride home was no exception.  Why should it be?  Deacon had persistently, for the past 7 days, 168 hours, or 10,080 minutes, asked, “What doiiiinnnn’” in a sing-song type of voice and trilling an octave higher beginning at the elongated “I” and ending with the sustained “N”.

At this point I should interject and educate those of you not privy to the Utah dialect so you can see how great of a father and teacher I am.  Those words ending in “ing” lose the “g” becoming “in’” like doin’, singin’ or runnin’.  Deacon has been indoctrinated by his hillbilly g-droppin’ parents to habla the right way by dropping the “g” so as to not sound ridiculous amongst his hillbilly g-droppin’ peers.  Children, you’re welcome.  Now back to the story.

Marcel is able to satisfy Deacon’s persistent interest in my doings and soon the truck’s lullabies are too much for the exhausted trio.  As the chorus of reverberations from the inhales and exhales grows and plateaus at a steady rhythm, I attempt my journey back to my secret nothing place.   My path is obstructed as I mentally masticate Deacon’s favorite question: “Daddy, what doin’?”.  At the surface the answer is so simple: driving, eating, reading or cooking.  “What doin’?”, asked hundreds of times the last few days.  “What doin’?” either answered or ignored, the question persists.  The question now serves as a lock and chain tightly secured around my nothing box.  In retrospect, perhaps the question was not a blockade to my hidden oasis but a quizzical question creating an itch that longed to be scratched.

As I internalized the question, I began to seriously ask myself, “what AM I doing?”.  This vacation served its purpose to escape the adult life of working, paying bills, fixing stuff, putting out life’s fires and shrugging responsibilities for another day to focus and spend time together as family.  Why adult?  Why do I work three jobs?  Why do I worry about bills or the constant need to be fixing and repairing?  Why did I decide to go back to school?  Why do I have the hobbies I do and why do I focus on them so much?  The answer to these questions are summed up in the reason for our retreat into the trees this past week: Family.  The answer, just like the answers provided to Deacon’s barrage of relentless what doins’, are seemingly simple on the surface.  As I contemplate the proceeding question from “what am I doing” into a more philosophical question, one that I am pleased Deacon has not taken hold of yet, “Why am I doin’?” I begin to get to the root of the question.  Why do I do these things for our family. At its core, I believe all of us do what we do in order to attain what Dr. Paul Jenkins in his book title Pathological Positivity labeled “the feeling”.

“The feeling” is simple really.  “The feeling” is what we all desire and is programed into our existence.  It is the sense of happiness, it is what we personally define as success and is the motivating factor in everything we do in this life.  As many of you can relate, family brings me “the feeling”.  Shifting my focus from what am I doing to why am I doing creates a paradigm shift inside of me giving me a pleasantly positive perspective on life.  The why bridges the sometimes negative whats like: bills, homework, or late hours at work, to happiness and anticipated happiness.

Marcel and I have had a growing desire to create a website to share our experiences as young parents cluelessly trying to meander through life’s labyrinths for our posterity.  The stories and experiences we share are intended to document, inspire, and on a rare occasion even educate our family, all of you, on our search for “the feeling”.   It is our sincerest hope that our quest for “the feeling” inspires each of you to seek and share with us the same feeling.  So get in, buckle up (it’s the law) and join me in Following the Herd.