Dr. Ken Byers is a coaching professional with a thirty year background in business, industry and therapy. He specializes in telephone based Men's Life Coaching and cross-gender personal coaching, helping businesses and individuals identify, define and achieve their Vision through Essential Self-management Technology.
TRANSITIONS
The Dreams of a Man
December 2000
by Ken Byers
"The boy's dreams become the man who dreamt them."
A common conversation about men, and one that comes up in coaching all too often, is the question of commitment. It is said that men have a way of avoiding it particularly when it comes to relationships. I am not convinced that it is a gender specific problem. I think it is a way we all have of dealing with the tremendous pressures that come from expectations imposed on us from within and without. We learn to fear committing ourselves at a very young age for many reasons and from a tangled web of events. Knowing that, can often help us overcome the unconscious tendencies that keep us stuck in those beliefs. The following story helped me recognize and move through it and perhaps you have a similar one.
PILOTS
Summertime, 1949 - somewhere in Indiana
At eight and seven respectively, my cousin Ron and I had been co-pilots for as long as I could remember. Together we had refought the entire Second World War from the cockpit of the most elegant, fastest and maneuverable airplane the world had ever seen.
Our deft craft was approachable only from the hayloft, easily the weakest and least safe part of the old barn, which, had there been anyone with the energy to do it, should have been torn down a generation earlier. Howard Hughes had his plywood Spruce Goose--we had the rotting wood, flying barn. But when you're seven and eight years old you see things in your own special way and fear is a function of selective consciousness.
There was a space where the shed roof had sagged and separated from the eaves at the hayloft's edge, leaving an opening that looked remarkably like the front of a B-17 bomber. (Well, we thought so.) Underneath, right next to the landing gear, the pigs snorted and grunted in the mud and straw. With crayons and paint and old boards, we labored at our artistic and scientific best to create controls and gauges and signs and all kinds of stuff with which to fly the thing. Fly we did for untold hours over those two summers. The war had been over for a few years, but we still had plenty of maps and pictures to plan our attacks with...we were the best. It was during one of these flights of fancy that Ron and I made a bond about flying. A promise to each other that no matter what, we would both grow up to be pilots. We pricked our fingers and traded blood in solemn oath.
Life, however, has a way of directing us away from our most enthusiastically planned dreams. The last time I saw Ron was that summer of 1949. Well, the last time for about thirty-three years anyway. After my father's death, the family moved east and we lost track of the cousins. We moved, they moved, there was no way to find them.
One night in 1982, as I sat at the dinner table with my own family, my oldest boy, then twelve, asked about my father's family. There had never been anyone from my side at any family functions, because there weren't any. I was the last namesake until my boys were born. My son was quite taken by that fact. But he was not satisfied with the missing relatives story and kept bugging me in his best twelve year-old fashion about finding them. So in one of those rare moments of divinely guided desperation, knowing of no other way to shut him up, I picked up the phone and called information in Indianapolis and asked for my aunt Zelma by name. Now there happened to be a listing there for the initial "Z". That was close enough and I placed the call. She answered the phone in her strongest 86 year-old voice. Ten days later Brian and I arrived in Indianapolis for the reunion.
Of course Ron had gotten his pilot's license. Of course I flew United, mostly. I remember feeling strangely uneasy at the time about the fact that I had not kept that commitment to my cousin. Ron also owned his own plane, a small Piper four-seater. On the second day of our visit we went flying. Neither Ron nor I had forgotten our pledge, but it was never mentioned. There was no need to. A bond had been broken between us that was more than just two kids playing in a barn. It seemed at the time like not really a big thing but it was greater than and different from the thirty years of non-communication. It came to represent the essence of what brings trust into any relationship. We had given our word to each other in solemn oath, and I had broken the oath. It was only two kids playing, but it was really more than that. It was something that we all do many times in life. We make it OK to break our word. We find all the rationale we need to not complete. We do it as individuals, in relationships, families, governments but mostly to ourselves. We make it OK not to keep our promises. There was a part of each of us that I disappointed by not learning to fly.
We were only a couple of kids playing in the barn, but it must have been pretty important at the time. I think it still is.
©Copyright 2000, Kenneth F. Byers
Dr. Ken Byers is a coaching professional with a thirty year background in business, industry and therapy. He specializes in telephone based Men's Life Coaching and cross-gender personal coaching, helping businesses and individuals identify, define and achieve their Vision through Essential Self-management Technology.
Ken can be reached at: 415/239-6929
E-mail:
Website:
http://www.etropolis.com/coachken/.
|
This is a series of articles dealing with the lives of men. Mostly they are short stories that are common to almost all men in one way or another. Stories that form the basis of our lives and define who we are and who we will become. They come from many men who's stories touched me in a familiar way and within which are important insights into our growth and happiness. Some come from my previous writing others from timely stimulation, but always with hope that new understanding can be created. |
