W
hen I was a boy, my father was my idol.He was one of the most successful young businessmen of his generation. A war hero in World War II, he came home to embark on a career in business and lived his life at an enor-mously high level of energy.
It wasn’t long before he was president and CEO of a num-ber of industrial companies throughout the Midwest. He be-came the right-hand business partner of Warren Avis, of Avis Rent A Car.
When I was young, I remember flying with him in his small private plane to one or another of his companies in Pennsyl-vania and New York, and thinking that this man is the ulti-mate American hero.
When my father wasn’t flying around the country build-ing his businesses, he would often walk across the street to join me and my friends in a pick-up basketball game, which he would almost always win. He played like he owned the game.
“Desire,” he used to say to me. “Desire is everything. If you have enough of it, you can do anything you want. I guar-antee you. Anything.”
My father used to take me to watch the Detroit Lions play football where he would point out the power of desire on
the football field. His favorite football player was Doak Walker. Walker was a running back, but when the Lions got in a difficult and crucial defensive situation where they abso-lutely had to make a stop, they would put Doak Walker in.
He was small, but his passion for defense made up for it.
Walker was a fearless tackler who always seemed to know where the play was going.
My father loved showing me Doak Walker, and I knew that I was watching a player play the way my father was living his life. He was playing with desire.
Then something happened to my father’s life.
Who knows how these things happen? Could it have to do with the 2,000 advertisements every American sees and hears each day about the desirability of comfort? Could it be so deep in our culture that we are certain we “deserve a break today”?
I am now convinced that the voice that whispers, “Live a life of comfort,” is the voice of evil. I can remember the seduc-tive voice of Madonna in one of her songs whisper-singing, “Let’s get unconscious, baby.” It is painfully true that owners of the human spirit can sometimes be seduced. Owners can lose it completely. Look at Elvis. Look at Marlon Brando. Total owners early in life, and then victims of gluttony and comfort, ballooned up into the size of Thanksgiving Day parade floats, grotesque opposites of what they used to be. Owner to victim in nothing flat.
My father retired early. He was a multimillionaire in his 40s when he decided to kick back and take it easy and enjoy life. And drink himself to death.
His only real pleasure in his final 20 years of “comfort-able” living was to remember the past. His stories would re-visit the glory days of hardship and adventure. When he told me stories about his life, it was always about the things that had challenged him the most.
I loved my father dearly, and I still do when I think of him. Watching him die of comfort was similar to watching my other boyhood idol, Elvis Presley, do the same thing. I don’t blame either of them. I honor them, and I promise myself I will not follow them. (Actually, I already tried following them and it nearly killed me.) In their own way, they have shown us the path to the zone, and we can use their lives as huge les-sons. Or not.
My own attempts to drown in comfort early in my life taught me something I was lucky to live long enough to learn:
Alcohol and drugs first feel as if they offer more life—an ef-fortless route to the spirit. They seem at first to expand a dreary consciousness into something wilder and more free. But it is a chemical falsehood from the start. It’s a major lie.
Addiction is a deadly bait and switch game, because soon the addict must use the substance just to feel like he did be-fore he became addicted. He now needs the substance just to feel normal. Just to feel like he’s having the average bad day of someone not addicted, the addict must score big and use heavily just to feel average! And it had seemed like such a great shortcut to the spirit.
All it proves is that chemicals produce a false spirit. This is not the true spirit. And because it is false, it turns on us.
It behaves like anything we ever tried to get quick without effort.
Get rich quick. Get high. Get lucky.
Some universal vital principle always wants us to see that the effort itself is important...even beautiful. That effort in itself is good fortune. And to chemically try to avoid it will backfire in the grimmest way.
Notice for yourself what people are talking about when their eyes are glowing with happiness. It is almost always ad-versity or some challenge overcome, someone’s first mara-thon, someone’s first talk in front of his or her company,
A Deadly Bait and Switch Game
someone’s big football game, a difficult childbirth. It’s always something that took effort and courage. It’s interesting to keep track of what excites people.
Notice, too, that no one talks much about comfort. If I were to write a book called Great Moments in Human Com-fort, I don’t think anyone would buy it unless he or she thought it was comical, which it surely would be.
On your death bed, you will not wish you had been more comfortable, or that you had found an even easier, softer plea-sure zone to hide out in. You will wish you had ventured out more. That you had spoken up more. Tried some things. Re-invented yourself one more time.