A long walk to self-realization
Author seeks lost bonds that tie us together
For Re gina writer, naturalist, philosopher and well-known birdwatcher and broadcaster Trevor Herriot, the old male virtue (some would call it a vice) of getting a bigger hammer to solve each bigger problem worked just fine until something hammered him, and he broke. In simple terms, he fell off his roof and damaged himself severely enough to need big recovery time. The fall — as it does for many men — made him look at who he was, where he was, how old he was, and why he kept doing the same things over and over and, not only thinking the same way, but hurting himself doing it.
A massage therapist asked him: “Do you think you may be too aggressive, forcing things, not listening to subtler messages and energies, just pushing through? Is that the way you’ve been approaching life?” His response: “I have never been any good at reading even the messages my body yells loudly at me, never mind whispering.” Hands up all men, coaches, male parents, etc., who have decided or decided for someone else just to push or play through the pain. No pain no gain, right?
As part of his recovery process, Herriot, like many men before him — Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Roderick Haig-Brown — decided to go for a long walk. Before he went, though, he followed the advice of a First Nations friend and did a three-day fast to find out what he wanted to think about while he walked. He found that he had a “lifetime supply of fear and distrust,” and out of that constant worry sprang constant desire — desire for more, worry that there won’t be enough.
Herriot asks himself, “What do I do with all this desire, what is the meaning of a man and a woman coming together in life, and how do I finally grow up in my relationships?” Out on the road, a three-day trek from his Regina home to his cabin, he has lots of time to blame himself for everything from the way he looks at women to the way male drive has blasted the environment. He sees men, particularly — and he frequently cites himself as an example — as living in a chronic adolescence because, and this is not new, they’ve cut themselves off from those indigenous customs that ritualized the passage from boyhood to manhood.
He thinks that because men often spin their wheels in adolescence, they live, as he does, in a “slough of confused entitlement.” Desire, instead of being gainfully channelled into good works and intelligent meditation, is sexualized by a society all too ready to commercialize any natural instinct or response. So, as he sees it, it’s no surprise that the Inter net is awash in porn, providing instant gratification to all who want it; that there’s a current teenage fetish for zombies, considering the link between virtual sexual gratification and being dead inside; and that this “misappropriating of sexual energy ... a kind of functional despair,” has led to an “abused landscape,” a place where we keep jabbing in our shovels, hoping for satisfaction, and calling it progress.
Young men, Herriot fears, because of the commercially sexualized nature of just about everything, have a distorted notion that the female body is theirs, both in fantasy and in self-gratification. He also fears that in the real world of female bosses, wives, and daughters, “we lose our courage.” “A woman says no and we either get pushy or we quail in fear.” We don’t have what it takes simply to “listen to and love a woman.” So we stay stuck at what Hemingway, way before the Internet, called the boy-man. And we take our frustration out on women, our children, other men, the environment, trying to make a connection, trying to feel something, getting fooled again and again that it’s sex we’re looking for.
Not that young women are without blemish, either, he says: “Many try to have it all — healthy children, solid marriage, successful career, organic food, Caribbean vacations, terrific sex, yoga practice, spiritual fulfilment — running themselves ragged in a competitive/comparative mode.” He points out that successful women he knows have set up communities of sharing in which mothering advice, clothing, recipes, food, child care are passed around to make life easier and more productive.
And this, really, is what Herriot is looking for: our lost communities. Somewhere between the public sphere of work and fame and the private sphere of sex, both of which have become intertwined, we’ve lost many of the bonds of community, those ties which allow us to help one another, make a comment on behaviour, offer guidance, give love.
There’s much more in The Road is How, but this is a brief glimpse of what Herriot thought as he walked off his hammering at the hands of his own “indulgence of desire.” He can be very hard on himself, but it’s obvious that he’s a thinking, feeling man, and in today’s commodified society, that’s not always a comfortable place from which to watch the world.