Meditation to Revelation
Write it down. Highlight it. Memorize it. I guarantee it’ll change your
life.
My father, Haywood Haskell Carr, was a rich man, spiritually speaking. The oldest of 11 children born to sharecroppers in East Tennessee, and armed with a 6th-grade education, my father embarked upon the journey of life with a sense of wonder and amazement I’ve tried my best to emulate in my own dealings with people. Retired from the military and a food service worker at the V.A. Hospital most of his life, he didn’t make it outside the borders of the continental U.S., but that man–God bless his eternal soul–was global in all of his thoughts and deeds.
He remains the smartest man I know, and he transitioned to the realm of The Ancestors in 2001. He never got to get even a GED, but all three of his children finished college and beyond. He made sure of that by marrying a queen of a woman named Catherine Hayes Carr, herself not even a graduate of what we call “middle school” in today’s educational system, who labored countless hours during the week in the back of sweat shops disguised as dry cleaners and did domestic work for white folks on the weekends to make sure we had an opportunity for a better life, which we did, even though we dumb kids didn’t know it at the time.
Our clothes weren’t always up to date, and we often shopped at the Goodwill, which we called endearingly “The Big Wheel,” presumably after my little sister Gussie mistakenly referred to it as such once and it stuck with us as a familial joke. My father insisted that certain styles would come back in vogue, so by continuing to stay a decade behind, in his head, he actually was a forward thinker. That worked for him, but not always for us. Peers can be torturous in their insults, especially about clothing. Between jokes on the tightness of our pants and the counterfeit nature of our Pro-Keds tennis shoes (Converse were the in-style expensive shoes in the inner-city, so anything non-con- verse was group together as “Buddies”), we never got much breathing room from the kids at school. My dad was also the lightest among us: a fair skinned, keen-featured man, with a very full mustache, and very long, straight, wavy hair. Of course, to the kids in the ‘hood, that was fodder for the ongoing joke that “Jeff Carr daddy a Mexican.” Instead of getting overly agitated with the burning, we just learned how to burn back.
When we reached working age, which began with cutting yards in the neighborhood right at adolescence, we were informed by my father that if we wanted to have our own style of clothes, we could work for them and buy them, and that’s pretty much what my brother Greg and I did. I held down my first job at 12 years old, working as a janitor and eventual repair boy at Khone’s Vacuum Service on the corner a block away. I earned $4.00 a week, and managed to save enough money to buy myself my first pair of shoes while in Jr. High. My father thought the shoes, some docksiders, were odd looking, but hey, it was the 80s, so everything was odd-looking. I preferred mine to the “stacks” he was still trying to hold on to, just for the record.
My father was always reading something: the Bible, Shakespeare, various books, magazines, and pamphlets. He even read the flyers the Jehovah’s Witnesses would leave in the door, often inviting them in for dialogue. I couldn’t understand why he’d do that. It wasn’t like he was into church or anything. Although by the time he passed away, he’d rejoined the church and become a beloved Baptist Deacon, all the while growing up, my memories of my pops on Sunday were of him sitting in a chair in the back room bidding us well as the rest of the household loaded up for Sunday School and Church. Yet, he’d engage anyone in a religious and philosophical discussion, even my Church of Christ family members, who swore up and down we were all going to burn in Hell one day because we were Baptist.
Haywood H. Carr had a saying for everything, something that used to get on our nerves growing up:
“Son, cool heads prevail.”
“Son, there’s nothing new under the sun.”
“Son, pick your friends like you pick your fruit.”
Pops was also very adept at talking about shit, figuratively and literally. If we ever tried to lie to him or pull the wool over his eyes, he would always look at us squarely and say, “Son, listen. Whatever you do, don’t try to out shit the shitter.” I had absolutely no idea what that meant until I was almost grown, and to this day, I can’t wait until my kids are old enough to spring that one on. I now have a teen daughter, so I’m sure I’ll be delivering that one any day now.
One particular shit story he always told is one that has kept me away from major conflicts to this very day. It goes something like this:
“Son, if you’re walking down any given road, and you happen to smell some dog shit, don’t go looking for it, because you’ll find it. If it’s laying there in the road, just walk around it and leave it alone. If you have to come back down that road again, just be mindful of where the shit is, just so you don’t step in it. I’ll tell you something else about a pile of shit, if you leave it alone, it’ll dry up and turn to dust. But if you get a stick and start stirring it up, it’ll start smelling like shit all over again and take forever to get rid of.”
Isn’t life just like that? When you’re trying your best to navigate through the road, there’s always some shit somewhere. If we’re smart, we just hold our nose and keep pressing on. Most of us aren’t smart, though. We’re trained by our lack of regard for one another, the reality-show culture we exist in, and the confrontational nature of our government and political system, to go looking for shit. One thing about shit, in this thing called life, it’s all over the place. The thing is, shit can really be avoided. Once we see where it is, the best thing to do is to just navigate around it. Keep an eye on it if you must, but stay out of it. If you ignore the shit you encounter on the daily, it will eventually go away. We end up stirring up shit in our personal, professional, and spiritual lives, and then turn around and wonder why our world stinks.
It’s all just common sense, and fortunately, I’m born of people who demonstrated that “taught sense is better than bought sense.” It may have taken me the better part of my adult life to learn the lessons they taught, layers of which I’m still discovering I might add, but lessons like the ones my father taught me are invaluable; and the experiences I had in his household-even the tough ones-prepared me for life in a way I could never imagine as a child. Having to defend the family from insults by the kids in the neighborhood helped the Carr children develop a razor sharp tongue, devastating debate skills, and a sardonic wit that would carries us to scholarships, forensics trophies, lead roles on stage and screen, and the ability to write and speak to thou- sands without fear or intimidation. The development of a work ethic gave us confidence in our ability to shape and mold our own destiny and to never master the art of making excuses. And those sayings he always delivered? I think he knew we had no idea what he was talking about at the time, but he kept delivering them to us, knowing that with each passing day of adulthood, those verbal lumps of coal he planted in the mines of our minds would be transformed by the pressures of living life into shining diamonds of clarity.
His greatest gift was a secret formula. Actually, it was a saying that I translated recently into a secret formula. Whenever we found ourselves at a crossroads in life, facing a tough decision-no, let’s face the facts: whenever we screwed up something really bad, my father would ask take us through a dialogue that back then started our eyes rolling back into our heads:
“Son”
“Sir.”
“You know how fast the Speed of Light is?”
“No, Sir.”
“The Speed of Light is over 180,000 miles per second.”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Do you know how fast the Speed of Sound is?”
“No, Sir.”
“The Speed of Sound is over 300 meters per second.”
“Yes, Sir.”
“There is only one thing that is faster than both the Speed of Light and the Speed of Sound combined. Do you know what that is?”
“No, Sir.”
“Son, it’s a change of mind. It can happen so fast that it cannot be measured.”
How’s that for wisdom?
I got tired of it as a kid, but my father knew something back then we should all take a listen to. I turned it into a formula so that I would never forget that a Change Of Mind (COM) is Greater than (>) the Speed Of Light plus (+) the Speed Of Sound.
COM>SOL+SOS
We really don’t have to stay in the shape we are in. We can make a decision, right now, to start doing things differently. We have that choice and it’s all ours. Each second that ticks by becomes a part of the past, and we can’t go back and get those moments in time back. All we can do is deal with the right now, adjust our mind to our present set of circumstances and choices, and decide we want to do something special and unique in the here and now that will, hopefully, be a down payment on a brighter future.
I worked in a play by August Wilson called The Piano Lesson with an actor in his 70s who was phenomenal. As a young actor, we’re always taught to “steal” knowledge from people who are our elders in the craft, so I spent a lot of time on stage and off gleaning wisdom from him. I would ask about character development, the storytelling arc, all that old artsy fartsy stuff. One day, we got on the subject of acting as a calling in life. I’ve always known I wanted to act, so I assumed it was the same for the elder, so I wanted to know his personal story. It was nothing like I expected.
He told me that when he was my age-at the time I was in my 30s-he had no idea what the hell he wanted to do in life. All he knew is that he had done the military thing, had quit college to get a job, and was facing 40 years old with two divorces in his back pocket, a dead-end job, and no love for anything, barely himself. He found himself laid out on the floor, weeping and wailing like a baby, until something inside him spoke to him. He said that he heard a voice say “Try acting.” Just the thought of it alone was amusing enough to back off the tears for the moment.
He found himself in an acting workshop. He possessed a triple threat of challenges: the only black man, without a college degree, and the oldest cat in sight. But he stuck it out because he had changed his mindset, refocusing it on something new and different from anything he’d known before. Before long, he’d landed a small role in a New York play, and over the years, he built quite a resume.
His name was Carl Gordon, and before he passed away at age 78, he’d become a legend, appearing on Broadway and stages across the country. He was best known as patriarch Andrew Emerson (Charles Dutton’s father) on the television series Roc, and appeared in film and television series for years and years after he made a mental decision in the middle of his life to do something that would make him happy.
Sometimes you don’t know what you want in life until you reach that sweet spot where you are old enough to know how to do it well, yet young enough to still have the energy to do it. It’s called Middle Age, and it’s been given a bad connotation by society, but it’s really not a bad place to be in at all. I’d prefer to be happy from the middle of my life until the end, than to be happy just from the beginning to the middle and have to live out the other half in regret and disappointment.
Changing your mind is about valuing the voice inside of you.
Sometimes it’s hard to hear that voice because of all the ambient noise we are bombarded with from all around. Everyone is talking. The preacher is shouting, the family is demanding, the job is tripping; and in the midst of it all, we find ourselves reeling back and forth trying to figure it all out. Changing a mindset, refocusing, takes concentration, and concentration takes the elimination of the noisy space. Find some time, some space somewhere where you can sit and tune out every other voice except for the one that comes from within you.
It’s worth it to pay attention to that voice, because it is the one that was implanted in you early on, that knows the true desires of your heart. When you close your eyes and tune out the world, you’ll begin, if you trust yourself, to see the marvelous tapestry of your dreams that God specifically painted on the insides of your eyelids for you and you alone; a vision that gets clouded when we have our eyes wide open to the world and our surroundings, not realizing that the sensory overload of the world we exist in now can convince us-if we are not careful-that the external is the norm instead of what’s within. Churches are challenged by that because they realize that if you seek the answers within, there won’t be much of a need for them anymore. If there isn’t a need, we won’t attend; if we don’t attend, a lot of people who’ve become rich off telling other people what God’s purpose in their life is will go hungry.
The more I reflect upon how fast a change of mind is, the more I realize how profound my father really was. I miss that man like lungs miss air, but I’m comforted in knowing that his continual verbal “harassment” was nothing short of the gifting of a key that will open the doorway of the storehouse of my dreams.
Thanks, Pops.
*Excerpted from the book:
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Leave God Alone (He’s tired of you bothering Him): Liberating Essays from a recovering Church Addict
by jeff obafemi carr, available at major bookstores and online at all major retailers.