Rules for the Unruly: Living an Unconventional Life - Softcover

Winik, Marion

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743216032 ISBN 13: 9780743216036

Publisher: Touchstone, 2001

Synopsis

Rules for the Unruly is a distillation of surprising life wisdom from National Public Radio commentator and writer Marion Winik -- a woman who has seen it all, done it all, and would never exchange her experiences for the security of a traditional life. Winik's amusing tales of outrageous mistakes, haunting uncertainty, and the never-ending struggle to stay true to her heart strike a powerful chord with creative, impassioned, independent-minded free spirits who know they're different -- and want to stay that way.
Winik's seven Rules for the Unruly are:
THE PATH IS NOT STRAIGHT · MISTAKES NEED NOT BE FATAL
PEOPLE ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN ACHIEVEMENTS OR POSSESSIONS
BE GENTLE WITH YOUR PARENTS · NEVER STOP DOING WHAT YOU CARE ABOUT MOST
LEARN TO USE A SEMICOLON · YOU WILL FIND LOVE

Rules for the Unruly shows us how taking risks, living creatively, and cherishing our inner weirdness can become the secret of our happiness and success, not our downfall.

About this title

About the Author:

Marion Winik is a longtime contributor to National Public Radio's All Things Considered and the author of Telling, First Comes Love, and The Lunch-Box Chronicles. She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and their children.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter 1: The Path Is Not Straight

Let's say there's a well-lit, limited-access, four-lane highway stretching straight and clear ahead of you, but the slow, funky back road with the doughnut shop and the cheap motels is calling your name. You call it curiosity and adventure, your parents call it stupidity and rebellion, but something in you can't resist taking the next exit.

On the other hand, let's say you have your destination firmly in mind and every intention of taking the interstate to get there -- but the sawhorses are out, the orange Detour sign is up, and there's nothing you can do about it. You've taken a different road and maybe even ended up in a different place. Sometimes life rear-ends you, freezes your transmission, sticks a nail in your tire, or roars up behind you with sirens blaring and blue lights whirling -- and you ain't goin' nowhere, honey, at least not for a while. Unwanted deviations from the plan are also a fact of life, and they are not always as disastrous as they first seem.

When you're young, it can seem like the routes are laid out, the itineraries assigned, and the outcome of the whole stupid rat race already decided. Everybody already knows who is pretty, who is rich, who is smart, who is a nerd with no luck at all. Well, wait twenty years and go to your high school reunion, as I did, and see how very wrong this is.

In the end, there's no rat race at all because there are neither rats nor a race: just people, becoming who they are.

I had planned to start my talk that night in New Jersey by telling my audience that the path is not straight, and that this is the thing I know now that I most wish I knew then. But then I realized that while knowing it is a comfort, one I'm damn glad to have when I need it, it doesn't really change anything. No matter how many times life surprises you, it never seems to lose its capacity to do so. Even you don't lose your capacity to surprise you. Just wait till you think you're all done and settled to see what I mean. Then wait till the time after that. And the one after that, too.

Because the path is not straight, nor does it end every time it seems to, life is an adventure. And as dark as the passages and confusing as the cul-de-sacs you find yourself in, it's generally safe to assume that progress is being made. Something is unfolding. You are becoming. But the circuitousness of the journey is one of those things that keep coming as a big shock.

You probably think -- in fact, you can hardly be blamed for thinking -- that after A and B and C comes D. That after high school comes college. That after love comes marriage, after pregnancy comes children, after hard work comes reward.

It does, but only often enough to confuse you.

The rest of the time, after A and B and C come a car accident, a job offer, a chance to run a marathon in Finland, or even just a total loss of interest in D, not to mention E and F. After high school comes the drug bust, or the pregnancy, which was supposed to come after the marriage, which instead was followed by the heartbreak or the tedium or the decision to go back to D and work in his coffee shop. Then, out of turn and when you least expect it, K and L appear on the horizon, and a couple years later you have an MBA. Or an STD.

The many derailments of life fall into two categories: the chosen and the unchosen. In chosen departures, you willfully alter your direction -- often making everyone you know furious at you. They can't for the life of them understand why you chose not to take the job at the newspaper, not to start school this fall, not to marry Eric (or Erica). Instead, you are going to move to San Francisco, work on your screenplay, take a job at a ski resort, tend bar in a nightclub. Your parents are first among this group of doubters. Why? they ask. Why would you do something like this? Why do you want to mess up your whole life?

Most likely you have no good answer for them, unless you consider "Shut up and leave me alone" a good answer.

The problem is that sometimes you have no logical information that what you are doing is right except the feeling in your gut. It may even be true that all the logical information you have tells you to do something different. Everyone thinks you are a pigheaded fool for what you have decided, and even you start to wonder if you are, as they say, a pigheaded fool. But what you're feeling is called intuition, and you can trust it. In fact, if you don't, it spins you around and bites you really hard in the butt.

Making unpopular decisions is very difficult the first few times you try it. It's hard to stick to your guns when people you respect, or at least people you're used to letting control you, don't give you their endorsement. You feel guilty, confused, and full of doubt. Your intuition is a small voice compared to the booming unison of the pigheaded fool contingent, who by now have gotten on the horn to one another and created quite a buzz about your stupidity. And if everything doesn't go 100 percent perfectly from the moment you set out on your new path, oh, the fussing and the clucking! The warning and the wheezing! Just working themselves up to that big glorious I-told-you-so!

At first it is hard to ignore all this, but with practice it gets easier. Because in most cases you will have done the right thing and eventually they will come around to seeing that -- at which point they usually start claiming they knew it all along.

These days, I can make a life-changing decision with clear conviction and hardly a peep from anyone. But I have been called a pigheaded fool many, many times. One of the most egregious was in my mid-twenties, when I decided to move to Austin, Texas, with my gay ice-skater boyfriend, later to become my first husband, rather than accept Harvard Law School's offers of admission. Boy, were my parents thrilled about that. I think they came pretty close to disowning me altogether.

And you know, I wasn't absolutely sure I was right, either. Everyone, including me for a while, had assumed I'd end up a lawyer, and be good at it. Part of me was drawn to the intense competitiveness and the intellectual challenges law school entailed. When I was next offered admission, by Boalt Hall, the law school at U.C.-Berkeley, I almost caved in. But even in Berkeley, California, the point of law school is to become a lawyer, and that was it: I didn't want to be a lawyer. I didn't want to read big books full of rules and regulations. I didn't want to file motions and study precedents. I didn't want to be deferential to judges, I didn't want to swim through red tape, I didn't even want to dress up for work and carry a briefcase. Law school seemed exciting; practicing law did not. Even interesting, important cases with ramifications for social justice, like those I'd read about in books by F. Lee Bailey and Alan Dershowitz, seemed to involve much more caviling over details than I could ever bear.

In all the years that have passed, I have not regretted my decision. I knew I wanted something else -- two things really -- and I was determined to get them.

I wanted to have an unconventional life -- or at the very least, I wanted to get out of the suburbs and off the fast track and see what other possibilities the world and its denizens had to offer -- and I wanted even more than that to be a writer. And while it may have looked to my parents and other outsiders that I was taking every possible detour on the way to maturity, those were the two distant cities on my itinerary the whole time. They were my compasses, though many times along the journey I had to stop, regroup, and reevaluate what really was important.

What seems most unlikely to people familiar with my erratic life story is that I got to a place even my parents would recognize as success. It surprised me a little, too. Except that by that time I had started to accept the ways in which I was like my parents, so the fact that our ideas of success overlapped wasn't quite as unbelievable as it once might have been. For the path is not straight, the destination is not fixed, and the person who is taking the journey is not immutable, either.

But more on that later.

Last year my friend Justine, a bright, funny, and very beautiful girl, dropped out of college after her first semester. After all the agonizing over college admissions and choices, all the trying and waiting and hoping, not to mention paying, it had taken her less than a month to decide that she would rather be just about anywhere on earth than this place she had been dreaming of. It was a good place; it just wasn't her place, at least not then. At first her mother cried when she heard her daughter was heading off to Egypt on her own, with plans to meet friends to float down the Nile. But then she realized it wasn't the end of the world: just the Nile. She dried her tears and made Justine promise to e-mail.

One of the only reasons this didn't happen to me my first semester of college was that I barely attended it. Over Christmas of my senior year of high school, I had become obsessed with Eastern religion. I went to the library in search of books listed in the bibliography of Ram Dass's Be Here Now; I read Alan Watts and Aldous Huxley, Swami Yogananda and Lao-tzu, taking copious notes in a loose-leaf binder. Samadhi = enlightenment! We are all one! The idea of enlightenment, of being free of mind and ego, of entering a pure state of cosmic consciousness, was very appealing to me. My mind and ego had given me nothing but problems as long as I could remember. Maybe this would be the end of the separateness that caused me so much pain.

I quit drugs and started trying to meditate. I became an official exponent of brahmacharya, the Sanskrit word for celibacy. I wrote away to the Lama Foundation in Taos, New Mexico, publishers of Be Here Now, and soon received a brochure describing summer programs at their retreat in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. One was a two-week intensive with Ram Dass, the former Harvard professor- turned-acid guru-turned-spiritual seeker who had authored my personal bible. I begged my parents to let me go.

At seventeen, I was the youngest yogi on the mountain. Everything amazed me. The hand-built adobe buildings with mandalas carved in their wooden doors. The organic vegetarian food prepared by hippie women in long skirts. The chanting teacher Krishna Das's vats of spicy Indian tea with milk, the secret of whose deliciousness, he explained with a straight face, was that he spit in it. We meditated, we did hatha yoga, we hyperventilated in unison, we chanted to Govinda and Kali and Durga.

We weren't supposed to speak except in our private interviews with Ram Dass and the other teachers; rules against talking and unnecessary eye contact were supposed to keep the level of sexual tension under control. This didn't stop me from falling in love with Krishna Das and Sruti Ram and the rest. These guys were in their twenties; they had traveled in India; they had the pure faces and shining eyes and wavy hair of saints. My spiritual seeking was tinged with the same helpless yearning that informed the sex and drugs it had replaced, and I'm sure they sensed it. Nevertheless, they were very kind to me.

I started college that fall at my classy Ivy League school but my heart wasn't in it. To the bemusement of my computer-selected African-American roommate from Detroit, I papered my side of the dorm room with pictures of Indian gods and goddesses and their various human representatives. Every week, I'd skip out of school on Wednesday and hitchhike or take the bus down to New York City, where Ram Dass and his disciples were based. There were classes every day of the week, some open to the public, others by invitation only. I was determined to crack the hierarchy, to get into the elite sessions held on Friday and Saturday. Once I did, I was at college only two days a week.

Some of the most exclusive meetings were held at the Brooklyn home of a woman code-named Joya Santanya, a voluptuous and foulmouthed Italian housewife with snapping black eyes and thick waist-length black hair. She had been visited by the now-dead Swami Yogananda in her bathtub, had left her body for weeks, and had returned to assist Ram Dass in his teaching. She ruled the scene with an iron hand, one minute cursing and joking, the next reciting verses from the Bhagavad Gita.

It was Joya who dealt the blow that resulted in my departure from this rarefied realm. It happened over Christmas break, which I was spending in New York City to attend as many classes as possible, bunking in the Upper West Side apartment of Parvati, Saraswati, and Sita Om. Most of the initiates had received their Hindu names in India from their gurus, but Joya had apparently also been deputized for this purpose. You weren't supposed to ask for a name; it would be given when the time was right. Still, I hinted around when I got the chance. I thought maybe something with "Kali" in it, since I was especially fascinated by this dark, devouring incarnation of the Divine Mother with her many arms and her necklace of human skulls.

Though I had never been personally addressed by her before, something about me got Joya's attention that Christmas. She gave me my name and kicked me out in one fell swoop. "Get outta here, Tits," she said. "Go back to college and study and sleep with boys! That's what you wanna do, and that's what you should be doing."

My eyes immediately filled with tears of embarrassment and anger. "But Joya," I stammered. "I want to be with you. I want to go to God."

"Oh, come on, Tits, you can't bullshit me. I know what you want."

What could I do? Joya had spoken. In retrospect, the insight displayed by her remarks was the most convincing proof of her powers I ever saw. At the time, I was very confused and pained by what had happened. I tearfully packed up my portable puja table, said good-bye to Parvati and the rest, and headed back to college. I vowed to pursue my sadhana, my spiritual quest, on my own, and made friends around campus who shared my interests.

And then I broke my leg, and got bulimia, and became interested in Russian history, and started to hang out at the Women's Center and submit poems to the literary magazine. My life as a college student had finally gotten under way. But though some parts of the story of Marion the yogini are silly, the Eastern principles I absorbed and the spiritual awakening I experienced have resonated in my life to this day. They remain at the core of my understanding. Nothing else I learned that year was more important.

Justine, who floated down the Nile, went back to school too, and so did Jeff Joslin, a college friend whom I thought the coolest person on campus when I met him, our sophomore year. Shortly after we both moved into one of the cooperative group houses on campus, aka hippie central, he zoomed off into the sunset on his motorcycle. I remember waving good-bye, wishing I was going along. Instead, I inherited his copy of Jack Kerouac's On the Road.

Having just read that, as well as Kerouac's The Dharma Bums, Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha, Albert Camus's The Rebel, and Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Jeff had decided to drop out of the Ivy League "forever." He reduced his material presence on the planet to the appropriate ascetic minimum, replacing his Stratocaster and amp with an acoustic guitar and trading his mountain parka and down sleeping bag (covered with evil, petrochemical-based nylon) for layers of wool and cotton. He and everything he carried were 100 p...

About this edition

• Publisher: Touchstone
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0743216032
• ISBN 13: 9780743216036
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192