Written for my 1997 Memoir Class. More detail about my time at Avnet here.

Six years ago, at the age of 47, I was laid off from my job. It was a rather antiseptic and anti-climactic exercise. My supervisor called me into his office, with his boss, who had been conducting this ritual with my peers for weeks. I had survived at least a half-dozen layoffs over a ten year period, so I had plenty of chance to emotionally prepare myself. We all knew what was happening and made it as pleasant and matter-of-fact as possible.

In one way it’s an experience I share with tens (maybe hundreds) of thousands of educated white male ex-middle managers who make up a new, mostly invisible, dispossessed class. Mostly invisible because, knowing we are the designated villains after years of monopolizing power, there is no room to talk about the pain. First, we’ve all been raised never to talk about our pain. Secondly, even if any tried it would only be seen as privileged whining. Thanks to the gift of corporate re-engineering and downsizing I’ve been able to experience a few of the concentric, descending, rings of the hells of the suddenly economically impotent and irrelevant: what it means to identify as your work and then have your identity taken away, the hidden worlds of male depression.

On the way down into who I will be I’ve been through many of the various job search strategies of my contemporaries. I did some retraining, many interviews, ran my own small business for three or four years, spent a couple of years as the Chief Administrator of a non-profit organization. But my particular spin on being a laid off middle manager is that my presence in the business world was very much an afterthought in the first place. After a long sojourn in the counter-culture, even as I worked in the corporate world my primary energies and sense of mission were invested in my spiritual practice at the Zen Center of Los Angeles. After over a dozen years of balancing between family and career on the one hand, and spiritual practice on the other, I had developed ways of mutually enriching them that seemed to point toward an endlessly opening future. That is until I started sensing the ascending arc of my life beginning to turn downward.

The sinking feeling started when an innovative, risky, and highly-visible corporate data processing project I was trying to pull off failed. My boss at the time was president of our division, on his way to becoming the CEO of our six billion dollar corporation. Apparently he hadn’t read the Tom Peters books about the glories of failed experimentation. He came into my office the day after my project hit the wall and gave me his speech about, “I try to surround myself with generals, but you seem to be more comfortable acting like a sergeant.” Of course he was telling me it was the beginning of the end, but I couldn’t really grasp it. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before. I had never dealt with somebody with that much power over my life who could make a veiled threat and then really execute on it.

Already I had been struck by the concept of “descent”, somehow intertwined with my discovery of the so-called Men’s Movement in 1990, and its emphasis on mythology and initiation. In early 1990 I read and fell in love with a book called “Coming to Our Senses” by Morris Berman. Berman talked about the history of the West in terms of attempts to Ascend up and out of the body for Salvation. He was proposing as a more realistic and functional antidote a “descent” into our bodies. Then in May I saw Robert Bly’s “A Gathering of Men” on PBS, and bought the video. In it Bly talked about some patterns in the life of men, and a “descent” that began for him when he was 46 (my age at the time), a sense of his own limitations, of the arc of his life peaking and a sense of sinking into the depths of himself.

Shortly thereafter my wife Mary and I really started dealing with death and dying in the immediate family for the first time. My grandma Sophie, and Mary’s father, Angelo, began very difficult and painful final illnesses. At the same time, my practice at the Zen Center was coming to a level of fruition as Maezumi Roshi asked me (and three other senior students, all of whom are now Senseis running their own Centers) to start giving private interviews to his students while he was traveling. Roshi and I started talking about a date for me to be ordained as a priest. I could feel the energy in my corporate work and the life of my family sinking down, at the same time as my opportunity for spiritual expression increased.

On May 27, 1991 I got a phone call from my father saying my mother was in the hospital with a sudden, very severe, and completely mysterious liver problem. In the same call he told me that his doctor had just told him they found a recurrence of his prostate cancer, which they thought had been completely eliminated by surgery ten years earlier. An even deeper sense of mortality suddenly pervaded our household. The following day I left for Oakland for a Men’s Retreat that I was signed up for, and had some unexpectedly primitive group initiatory experiences, which somehow became intertwined with the strong sense of life and death, and of a descent into the body.

As my mother and father fortunately began to recover, and as I prepared for my ordination, which was scheduled for November 16, Sophie [my grandmother] and Angelo [Mary’s father] died three days from each other, on Sept. 18 and 21. We were completely immersed in grieving and funeral arrangements. And in the midst of that, two weeks later, on Thursday, October 5, I was laid off.

We didn’t have much capacity or time for the shock to register. The night I was laid off I gave my scheduled Dharma Talk in the Zendo. In that one day I was the corporate victim in the morning and the zen teacher in the evening. I spoke on how to apply our teachings of impermanence to situations like death in the family and losing a job.
Since my ordination was scheduled to take place in three weeks, we put off dealing with the practical realities of the job situation until after the ordination, so we could appreciate this milestone after nineteen years of practice. The ordination was a beautiful, pure experience. Because of the convergence of the ordination and the layoff I took it as an opportunity to dive deeply into exploring my mission in life. And thus began this plunge into the question “Who Am I?, now going down into its seventh year. It’s not been a simple job search.

Is there a kind of galaxy that collapses into itself to create nuclear fusion and generate huge energies? All the worlds of my life are being sucked toward the black hole of not knowing at the center of the question. Earning a living, knowing myself, being of service — I’m trying to steer the pieces toward a desired end. But repeatedly I must let go, and allow the forces to congeal, in my body, in my gut.