On the subject of "Into the Blue"

Ladies and gentlemen, I will say this is going to be deep. If you are reading to have a laugh, or to make a funny comment, this entry might not be the one for that. However, if you are going through a time in your life that is anything like mine… please read on, Then, if you want to share your experiences, please do.

When I first started to blog, it was to chronicle a journey in my life, one that was taking me through cyberspace. It was a vast uncharted area that took me to a place mostly familiar yet always new. Joining Facebook and beginning the blogging experience brought me home in many ways with reattachments to many friends of the past. Gave me a “Cheers” type place, where everybody new my name, with my new friends from the improv world. It introduced me to new friends and allowed some connections… real life connections with people who are helping me with new projects.

Of all the friends I have made, it is the Journey that has been the most rewarding. When I wrote the 300 note, it was not to show off how many friends I had, it was to look into my own life, and take inventory of the luckiness that had blessed me every day.

I am not a religious person. I was raised in an Episcopalian family, but we were not regular church goers, at least as a family. My access to the church was always limited to Chapel services on Friday morning in the school cafeteria, where we would all sing our hearts out about “the Saints of God, patient and brave and true.” As a matter of fact, the last time I went to a church service of any kind, I heard that very hymn sung. It was the memorial service for my Father.

Patient and brave and true. Those words mean a lot right now. Emotions have guided me through the last few months since cleaning out my folk’s house. There has been a lot of sadness in mourning, even these three years later. As the world is as it is, sadness has taken shape in other things. Transitions being the most apparent.

I have lost parts or all of projects I have held dear to my heart, thanks to the economy. Things that have defined myself as being, a producer of a high school show, the leader of a college big screen show, the head of a small company, seemed to move into a blurriness not ever experienced by me.

All the while, I have been talking to my wife about a higher purpose for me. What is it out there that is going to help define me as a person of this world? What kind of legacy can I leave that will have a meaning for the rest of the world when I am no longer there?

Everything I thought of keeps coming back to writing. Would it be a book, or a movie or something I don’t even have a concept of yet? The mystery of the journey was haunting me every day.

Patient and brave and true.

I can’t rush into decisions in this time. Life of all kinds is so fragile, so precious, that it can change in an instant. I know that can be said for any time, but right now, it seems even more so.

Take for example the guy who worked with me on my high school show. Here’s a young guy, newly married, with a new house and a job he loved. His world changed in a single moment when someone else in another city had not done his own job in a “brave and true” manner so he gets to pay for it by losing his job. I went to this guy’s going away party and there were nearly a dozen other people who had also lost their livelihoods. They all had smiles on their faces, not of despair, but of relief. It seemed their journey was just beginning.

When I arrived home, I rushed to the Emmy Awards site to see if my yearly Emmy nomination was posted, and alas, for the first time in 15 years, my name did not appear on the sheet. I did not feel disappointment, instead, relief.

Which brings me back around to this journey… the journey of my own life, a life defined not by who I am, but what I do – at least in the perspective of the guy I see in the mirror.

So on this Easter Sunday, I woke up from a dream. To give proper perspective, every dream I have had over the past three weeks has been a nightmare, some of panic attack proportions, and sleepless rest of the nights. This one looked to be going the same way.

(Note to readers… I took notes on this dream when I woke up – and I realize some of this seems a little out there… but please bear with me, I promise it means something.)

I was part of a group on a bus. Many on this bus had chosen to take some sort of drug to make their life easier, to make their reality different. I am not talking acid or LSD, but something that eased their pain. As we were driving along a dark road, I alerted the driver that a young lady needed to get off the bus. She was British, and had long passed her stop, but she new she needed to get home. Against his judgment, and that of the group, he stopped and let her off, and I got off the bus with her, through the back emergency door, like the one you find on a school bus.

We were dropped off not on a dark street, but in a 30’s or 40’s kind of town classic signage. It was an inner city type place, but not a ghetto. There were people all around us, who seemed to be doing all right, but this was not really a happy place. The woman’s name was Sarah, and all she had with her was a guitar case, and I assume a guitar inside. I asked this lady why she needed to be here and she said she needed to find a place that could allow her to be who she was.

As I looked out on this city, there were many signs on top of businesses that looked harmless. They identified stores and other businesses. Sarah and I were standing on the third or fourth floor on a verandah or balcony, and I had a good view of everything around me.

About that time, a matronly lady rushed the two of us and told us that we were different and we did not belong here. She told us that if we were to stay, we had to take these pills that were issued by the local jail. When we refused to take the pills, the lady rushed off as though she needed to call in authorities.

Sarah and I looked at each other. We saw that everyone else was just going about their own lives without a care, and we were the only ones who seemed to be worried. That worry turned to panic.

Then she said, whatever is about to happen, go with it as though my life depended on it, and she disappeared. As she did, sirens went off, and panic hit the streets. The signs on the building fronts flipped. Some of them said, “Run! Keep Running.” They were Big Brother like in their call to action.

I took them at their word and Sarah’s and looked to escape this place. Being on a higher floor, I found myself jumping down stairwells and sliding down poles to get to the ground floor. A fire truck’s ladder, which happened to be near the building helped me escape the structure.

Then I began running. I had no sense of where I was going, but it felt like it was away from something. The first obstacle I could remember was going through a neighborhood with chain-linked fences that I needed to leap over to keep going.

Then a series of white grand pianos were lined up and I dove like Superman sliding across the top of them into the yards next door, but when I landed, it was more like landing in a pool. However, I kept running.

Then details of where I was began disappearing one by one until all I saw ahead of me was a sea of blue. This was not water, but rather the color blue… like I was running into a giant soundstage painted this color.

For those outside of the television business, this is the color blue (sometimes green) that is used by weathermen to do their forecast in front of. It is called chromakey blue. When seen on televisions, anything blue can be replaced by literally anything.

I had quite literally run “into the blue.” It was then I stopped, and looked around and then woke up. I was calm, not panicked. I did want to write down what had happened, so I did, because this had some sort of meaning to me, and I knew what it was.

For years, I have thought there was only one thing I could do well in my life, and that was a sports television producer. My work defined who I was, and who I was going to be.

To me, running into the blue was a wakeup call. Remember, in television terms, this blue can be replaced by anything, and that was when I understood what was going on.

The blue represented possibilities… limitless possibilities. The “jail issued drugs” represented going with how everyone else wanted to define me, through their limited expectations of who I am or what I could be. Being on a higher floor represented that I had reached heights in my life that allowed me to look down and see what it was I had accomplished. Getting off the bus with a stranger was my desire to help others in their journey. Being on the bus with a bunch of people familiar to me, some of whom wanted to take those drugs represented my current life.

I have wanted to find this “higher purpose” in my life and it turns out that all this time, I was being blocked by not looking “into the blue,” and not seeing the possibilities that life had in store for me. It’s ironic for someone whose company is called “Flying Colours.”

I had written in my Facebook status update this week I was declaring this “Breakout Weekend,” as that was the name of the improv show I am starting with a new group on this Sunday. Breakout was the name given to the show for many meanings, one of which was a new beginning.

So in the early morning of an Easter Sunday, it was not someone or something that showed me the way. It was something of a higher source that allowed me to begin a trip “into the blue.” I now can begin to imagine the possibilities of life because they are limitless. It’s not the end of the journey, just the beginning, and I wanted to share that with you in hopes that you can find the “blue” in you.