The Crazy Wisdom Community Journal • May through August 2022 • Page 14
The Modern Lost Boy Balancing Inner Divinity
By Brian Napolean Cooper Jr. As I drove down a familiar road on a particularly sunny August day, I stumbled upon a sign just at the edge of the street that read, “discipline equals freedom.” Ironically, this inspirational motto was posted by a storage facility on Ann Arbor’s southeastern tip. Even more interesting, this seemingly insignificant board would almost instantly redirect the course of my life— dramatic, I know. But let’s go backward a bit to better understand the forward. Some of my earliest memories are of boxes. Not literal boxes like those made of cardboard or plastics, but ones built entirely of the world’s socially constructed rules about who I was supposed to be—many of which predated my birth by hundreds of years. These boxes could be better thought of as cages—but referring to them as such would total two dramatic proclamations in the span of two short paragraphs, and I promise I’m not that over-the-top.
As I drove down a familiar road on a particularly sunny August day, I stumbled upon a sign just at the edge of the street that read, “discipline equals freedom.” Ironically, this inspirational motto was posted by a storage facility on Ann Arbor’s southeastern tip. I was (still am) black, and so I wasn’t meant to be smart. Since I was (hopefully still am) smart, I was expected to go into a lucrative professional career. As a boy, books weren’t too cool, especially books like Twilight. Likewise, creative writing was for losers. It seemed that every street that I decided to take, I’d immediately run into a roadblock or a “no outlet” sign. Whenever a tiny flame of confidence was lit in my inner core, it wasn’t long before someone or something told me that I was wrong or misled. Let’s just say that I was no stranger to the phrase, “grow up.” As many of us do, I associated imagination and pure creative energy with childhood, so much so that I was fully convinced that adults didn’t have fun. Not necessarily because the adults around me seemed particularly drab or anything, but because we (the kids) were the ones that dreamt and played and hoped. Young kids were scolded for having imaginary friends past the age of eight, preteens for hanging onto their astronaut aspirations, and fifteen-year-old boys for spending all their time lost in the fictious world of novels. All this scolding persistently came from the same archetypal person: the grownup. To my younger self, it appeared that every one of them had long since passed the invisible threshold into the world of adulthood, into a world void of sunshine and possibility. It wasn’t long before my raging fear of growing older set in. In my early teen years, around the time that my father taught me to drive, I remember asking him if he still enjoyed getting behind the wheel, if he had fun each time he shifted our red Ford Windstar into gear. He chuckled and said that he did have fun driving, but I truly believed that he only said this to save me from the daunting realization that I only had a few more years left before I joined him, and all the other post-high schoolers, on the other side of that proverbial threshold. And so, on every subsequent driving lesson, I would ask him the same question to see if I could ever detect the hidden truth in his words. I lived with a looming storm of dread overhead, taunting me with the promise of one day depleting all my joy and wonder. Soon, the path that was set out before me and the path that I truly wanted to take existed in such a state of dissonance that
my inner drive, my divine masculine energy, was all but snuffed out before I could reach the age of thirteen. With this, I retreated inward to distract myself from feeling as if I’d already seen my expiration date. I set up permanent residence in the world behind my eyes. I guess you could think of my thirteen-year-old self as one of Peter Pan’s lost boys, just blacker and with a cell phone instead of a spear. I existed in this fashion into my high school years, and as the world expanded by way of social media, I found myself moving in the opposite direction, collapsing so far into myself that I’d practically submitted the reigns of my life’s decisions to whoever asked for them. Externally, I went where I was supposed to go, did what I was supposed to do, and skimmed by with as little autonomy as a leaf floating down a stream. But inside, I built entire worlds out of my hopes and desires. I would become so absorbed in this internal world that I would delude myself into confusing it with reality. Maybe if I dream hard enough, this all will be real one day, I’d think to myself. I practically swam in the formlessness of fantasy, all the while convincing myself that I was merely “free-spirited” or “spontaneous.” I flew so high in the clouds that I forgot I had legs, and at that point, the concept of “self-discipline” was as foreign to me as the dark side of the moon. In my late teens and early twenties, I found myself in the whirlwind of a vicious cycle that would go as follows: While going about life in my formless manner, I’d spontaneously receive a magic idea delivered from the heavens, maybe in the form of a story concept or a new college major or a more traditionally lucrative career path (often to please external forces). With this new idea rumbling inside, I’d fuel myself solely on the vision of me accomplishing this goal. I would envision my future in such detail that it almost felt like I’d already achieved what I had yet to set out toward, and it felt good.
As many of us do, I associated imagination and pure creative energy with childhood, so much so that I was fully convinced that adults didn’t have fun… I lived with a looming storm of dread overhead, taunting me with the promise of one day depleting all my joy and wonder. But then I would get a whiff of all the work that it would take to get to those dreams, and since I associated work— you know, the activity that adults always droned on about— with boredom, self-constraint, and rigid structure, my passion for the new project would burnout before I’d even started. After all, it’s a lot more fun to fanaticize about goals than to chase them, right? This pattern was sustained for two reasons: one, I’d become so disconnected from my outer world that I simply didn’t care enough about making genuine, tangible progress towards my dreams, and two, I was doing just enough to trick those around me (and myself) into thinking that I was on a path of upward momentum in the general direction of my goals. As the years went on, I would see the expansion of my inner world in the form of sun-sparkled meadows filled with the flowers of my life’s goals, ice-capped mountains that housed my visions of the future, and starburst galaxies that continually birthed new stars of ideas. My inner world became my oasis, a place that I could go to get a taste of possibilities. In here, I could rest easy on the cotton candy clouds of Neverland, and no one could ever tell me that I couldn’t.
