JOURNEYS IN A COMMON LIFE

By

"Robert Lawrence"

Most Recent Content Edit:  December, 1995

JOURNEYS IN A COMMON LIFE
Table of Contents
		Page	
Foreword		iii	
	Part I - Journeys		
Chapter 1	Jumping Into the Middle of Things	1	
Chapter II  	Before My Beginning                                                                                  	25	
Chapter III	Growing Up Straight	63	
Chapter IV  	Groping and Coping	105	
	PART II -- Arrivals		
Chapter V	Psychology and other Folk Tales	183	
	  *    Some Thoughts on Believing	183	
	  *   The Shamans	187	
	  *   The Surgeons	217	
	  *   Wise Men, Scientists, and Teachers True	234	
	  *   Glimmerings	248	
Chapter VI	Politics for Skeptics                                                                 	263	
	  *  America, Land of the Free                                                                             	270	
	  *    "Social Good" and Other Stops on the Road to Perdition	277	
	  * Wars and Rumors of Wars	286	
	  *  Myth Collides with Reality	294	
Chapter VII  	Liberations of the Heart  	295	
	  *  Options and Reactions                                                                        	295	
	  *  Personal Credos                                                                                  	299	
	  *  Smaller Bites                                                                                         	301	
	  *  A  Chew or Two                                                                                   	303	
Chapter VIII  	A Gentle Uncertainty                                                                       	329	
	  *  A Power in Words	330	
	  *  Finding Each Other	336	
	Afterword -- On Becoming a Village Elder		

  …  		           

	
FOREWORD

You are beginning to read a rather personal book. Autobiographies tend to come out that way. This is about values and about life. As we'll see a little later, this started out as an effort to explain myself to my second wife and to my wife's kids.  Somehow, the project got out of hand. A series of long essays and letters turned around and ganged up on me, demanding to be given greater unity and a chance to be heard by a larger audience. Responding to that instinct, I have been forced to do some hard work: sorting through 40-plus years of experience to cull out what I believe to be real and significant, from what is merely word noise.

Understandably, while I've been mulling over the business of my life -- finished and unfinished -- I've spent some little time pondering. If you are stimulated by what you read here, to reexamine and to ponder the stuff of your own life just a little, I will consider the results of my nights and weekends to have been moderately successful.

However, whatever the outcome of your deliberations, this book will speak at the very least, to four very important people: by my wife, who tolerated the project, by our two adult kids, who seem inclined to shake their heads over the result, and by a nearly-adult daughter with whom I am creating a new and somewhat unconventional sense of "found family”.

I have two objectives as I begin. First, I would like my kids to understand how I have grown to adulthood. I would also like them to try to understand what my life -- and in their own context, theirs -- has been about.

From these objectives comes a natural division of this book into two parts. The first will be about my family roots and growing up in the 1950's and 60's. The second deals with the person I have become and the values I have been led to claim for myself and in my important human connections. Both parts of the book in combination, provide a personal psychic snapshot of the attitudes, attentions and ideas which occupy the middle of a common American life in the 1970's, 1980's and 1990's.

Since Journeys in a Common Life is a work of non-fiction, almost all of the characters you're about to meet are real persons, many of them still living. Not many of these good people are likely to regard the publication of their lives as an unmixed blessing. I have therefore changed names and shifted geographies liberally. A few of the characters in this book are composites. Throughout such alterations, I've tried to preserve the spirit of the times and of the feelings I describe. There is also, of course, a hazard in the kinds of personal interpretations which I will offer here: persons who see themselves in this book a little too clearly for their own comfort may choose to view themselves as "victims", believing that I am returning fire for hurts that should long have been forgotten. By changing names, I protect the guilty from any further disapproval by others who may share my perhaps jaundiced opinions.

The name "Robert Lawrence" is common in our times, but not in my real-life family. Like some of my friends, I value my personal privacy (this, despite having chosen to write an autobiography). Moreover, early drafts of this work were completed while I was on active duty with the United States Air Force. An institution which has been good to me is due the courtesy of at least nominal protection from any bad example that I might represent.

Naturally, the opinions that I offer here do not necessarily reflect those of any agency of the United States Government.  I can think of a number of my opinions which might considerably offend some of my former colleagues and the organizations for which they once worked.  

An Editorial Note (January 2007):  As a special note, the reader should be aware that the document you are reading has been scanned and text-converted from a paper original.  The electronic originals generated in 1982-96 were lost during a series of computer crashes and operating system upgrades (if one can call anything that Microsoft releases to the public, an improvement).  The text conversion process is not perfect, and the reader may occasionally find fragments or improper word uses that my spell checker didn’t notice on the way by.  In the later years of my life, there is only so much time for mechanical administrative work, on a document that most likely will never be published.  But for any resulting awkwardness, I apologize to the reader.

Having disposed of such disclaimers, join me now in the journeys and arrivals of a common life, perhaps not so very different from your own. Mine is a life in which I invite you to recognize parallels as well as differences from your own experience.

It is hopefully a life which provides lighter moments for a reader's laughter, as well as dark moments and hard questions to encourage a reader's thought. Whatever my life may have been to date, I invite you to share the journey and to consider your own destinations.

PART I:  JOURNEYS

When I was younger and more reckless, I enjoyed hiking in the wild places of the California mountains. Most of the time, my friends and I conducted our rambles in river beds or along ridge lines. It was in scrambling from one to the other that we put in the hardest work.  Sometimes life works out that way too. Some of the hardest work you can do may be that of changing your human point of view.