A Funeral In The Rain

I encountered a new concept a few years ago during a period of spiritual seeking. Christianity was no longer a part of my life and I was reading anything and everything that my role models in spirituality suggested to me. While reading The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle and later The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield, I kept coming across the topic of coincidence. The messages were similar: when you learn to take note of and explore the strange synchronicities that occur throughout your life, you will often find answers to questions you have about your life, purpose, and the world around you. I've had a pretty tough last couple of years in the spiritual department and this has greatly affected my personal and social life. You could say that I've been in denial of some very important lessons I've learned over the past 3 or 4 years. But yesterday I received a wake up call.

In March of 2006, when I was about to enter my second month in the Pathways Core Training, a teenager named Cameron died. He was a member of the youth group of which I was an assisting youth leader. Cameron and his family were very close to me and they were also involved in the Pathways organization. Originally thought to have committed suicide, it was later found that Cameron was a victim of autoerotic asphyxiation. His death shook everything; his high school, our church, and even the Pathways organization was greatly affected. Like any traumatic experience could have done, I was able to find a great amount of clarity and focus in my own personal evaluation and development during the rest of my Pathways experience. Thanks to Cameron's death I was in a sense reborn. Life was brand new again as I found the power to shed the challenges, the masks, the self-damaging thought patterns that almost buried me in the past.

I know that I only have a few readers to this blog, but I trust all of you with what I am about to say. Now it is August of 2009 and I realize that I have fallen back into some dark times. I confess that I am no longer the radiating, powerful, positive David that I discovered three years ago. Sure, I do a decent job of faking it when I get out and about with my friends. I came to Denton with high hopes in 2007, but I've been greatly humbled. A few failed dating experiences? No biggy, there's lots of fish in the sea. Quitting a well paying yet extremely tedious and boring corporate job? It was a huge relief, but I've been on the verge of broke ever since. Injuring my knee and quitting hockey to heal up? Necessary to my well being, but it really took a chunk out of who I am. Sustaining a broken jaw and a nightmare hospital experience? Though I learned to hate painkillers, I'm not sure that I've ever endured such a disheartening situation in my life. My car breaking down? Its OK, I have a job and I'll be able to fix it in a month or so. Getting canned the next week and spending the next two months unemployed? Fuck. Having a university degree and working at a gas station to make it by? Double fuck.

Something I had to learn the hard way in my Pathways experience was asking for help from other people. My ego likes to make me think that I am self-efficient to the point that I'll bury my troubles deep inside. While it serves the purpose of looking perfect on the outside, its pure hell on the inside. A few weeks ago I decided to finally look for some outside help. After talking to a close friend about my ongoing depression I decided to start seeing a counselor.

About that wake up call...

Yesterday I was up early to go to a meeting with my counselor. While checking my email I found a message from the Pathways organization. One of my spiritual role models, who has been involved in Pathways for the last few years, had lost his youngest son Gaston. He had committed suicide this week after spending the past week with his family at the Pathways Teen and Family Camp. The thoughts and emotions surrounding Cameron's death three years ago quickly flooded in. I was in disbelief that someone with such great parents and surrounded by such a supporting and loving entity as Pathways decided to take his own life. It was just like experiencing Cameron's death all over again.

Later, at my session, I described the Pathways Core Training to my counselor as well as my personal progress as a result of enduring the training. We both agreed that I had forged many great weapons (or what Pathwaynians call tools) that I could use to combat the things that bring me down. Then my counselor asked a really tough question, "How are you using those tools today?" I could only sit there, with a dumb look on my face. "Uhh, I'm ... not," was all I could say. He challenged me to go back and take a look at my notebooks that I kept during the Pathways training and to get back to him after I did that.

Three years ago a teenager's death occurs during my Pathways training and was a catalyst for vast changes in my personal development. Three years later, during a personal slump, another teenager's death occurs and my counselor challenges me to revisit my Pathways experience. Coincidence? I think not.

I believe that life gives you little tests every now and then from which we are meant to learn valuable lessons. If you fail the test its OK. If you didn't learn the lesson the first time, life will just give you a more firm version of the test down the road. In spirit of the theme in The Celestine Prophecy, it is up to the individual to realize the synchronicities that occur and take full advantage of all there is to learn from them. When we shrug off an event as some mere coincidence, we blind ourselves from the great truths that are meant to be ours.

In memory of Cameron and Gaston, I leave the reader with a song.

--DW

Devin Townsend - Funeral