Walking the Wall

I was coming home from doing a variety of Sunday afternoon running around errands and I caught a segment of This American Life on NPR/Michigan Radio.
On it, Paul Tough talks about an experience he had with his father and
how he came to terms with his father’s eccentricity in his
determination to make contact with ETIs (Extra Terrestrial Intelligence)
through the use of a website.
While it is clear that the son is skeptical of his father’s work, and
hurt because it took his father away from his family, Tough was able to
make come to some interesting understandings by the end of the piece
and his experience trying to connect with his dad. He asked his dad at
the end of an interview, “Would you consider this (IETI) to be your
greatest achievement” (I’m paraphrasing here to the best of my memory),
and when his father replies that it is, that it is a life work, the son
cannot help but feel a bit hurt. What he wanted his father to say was,
yes, this is a great achievement in my career, it is nothing compared
to raising a family, and etc. But despite that twinge of hurt, he
understands that his father’s sending out a message to space is really
no different than a prayer. He has a hope, and a dream, and the son
realizes that there is something lonely and a little sad about the need
of this man (and of many people) to find something more, to find proof
that this life isn’t all there is. In the end, the son says he wouldn’t
want his father to give up on his dream, that it is integral to who he
is–but it is clear that what the son really wants is to be enough for
his father, so that his father doesn’t have a need to look into space
and away from his family in search of something “more”.

It was a beautiful piece of writing and it was one of those “listens”
that has you sitting in the car long after you are home in your
driveway just to finish hearing the end of the segment (by the way, if
you visit the American Life website in a few days you should be able to
listen to the production). Two things stuck out to me the most in this,
one is the incredible need we have for validation from our parents no
matter how old we get. I am 37, quite confident in myself and where I
am going and doing in my life, and yet have an incredible mix of relief
and joy and anxiety when my father comments that he is proud of my
plugging along in college and doing well. It is apparently not
something we outgrow, this need to connect with our parents. The other
was the need in human beings to connect to something that is beyond, or
more than every day life, whether this is Lucille Cliften’s “wild witch gran“,
or one person’s religion, or another person’s search for
extra-terrestrial life–we look outside of ourselves and our world for
validation that our lives are enough. I know that I am the same way,
always looking for the fairy peeking out from the leaves, or the face
of a dryad pressed out from the bark of a tree–content with just the
possibilities of something more, but still looking, always walking the
wall. Things seem to cycle back to connections a lot, such a very big
world, but made up of individual people continually seeking to connect.