betaphilings

This picture of Michael Jackson was taken two days before his death on June 25th, practicing for his upcoming This Is It! concert — fifty sold-out shows set to begin on July 13th in London. This wonderful essay written by Michael Jackson first appeared in Beliefnet in December 2000.

Childhood
“Have you seen my childhood?
I’m searching for that wonder in my youth
Like pirates in adventurous dreams,
Of conquest and kings on the throne…”

Written and Composed by Michael Jackson

In one of our conversations together, my friend Rabbi Shmuley told me that he had asked some of his colleagues–-writers, thinkers, and artists-–to pen their reflections on the Sabbath. He then suggested that I write down my own thoughts on the subject, a project I found intriguing and timely due to the recent death of Rose Fine, a Jewish woman who was my beloved childhood tutor and who traveled with me and my brothers when we were all in the Jackson Five.

Last Friday night I joined Rabbi Shmuley, his family, and their guests for the Sabbath dinner at their home. What I found especially moving was when Shmuley and his wife placed their hands on the heads of their young children, and blessed them to grow to be like Abraham and Sarah, which I understand is an ancient Jewish tradition. This led me to reminisce about my own childhood, and what the Sabbath meant to me growing up.

When people see the television appearances I made when I was a little boy–8 or 9 years old and just starting off my lifelong music career–they see a little boy with a big smile. They assume that this little boy is smiling because he is joyous, that he is singing his heart out because he is happy, and that he is dancing with an energy that never quits because he is carefree.

But while singing and dancing were, and undoubtedly remain, some of my greatest joys, at that time what I wanted more than anything else were the two things that make childhood the most wondrous years of life, namely, playtime and a feeling of freedom. The public at large has yet to really understand the pressures of childhood celebrity, which, while exciting, always exacts a very heavy price.

More than anything, I wished to be a normal little boy. I wanted to build tree houses and go to roller-skating parties. But very early on, this became impossible. I had to accept that my childhood would be different than most others. But that’s what always made me wonder what an ordinary childhood would be like.

There was one day a week, however, that I was able to escape the stages of Hollywood and the crowds of the concert hall. That day was the Sabbath. In all religions, the Sabbath is a day that allows and requires the faithful to step away from the everyday and focus on the exceptional. I learned something about the Jewish Sabbath in particular early on from Rose, and my friend Shmuley further clarified for me how, on the Jewish Sabbath, the everyday life tasks of cooking dinner, grocery shopping, and mowing the lawn are forbidden so that humanity may make the ordinary extraordinary and the natural miraculous. Even things like shopping or turning on lights are forbidden. On this day, the Sabbath, everyone in the world gets to stop being ordinary.

But what I wanted more than anything was to be ordinary. So, in my world, the Sabbath was the day I was able to step away from my unique life and glimpse the everyday.

Sundays were my day for “Pioneering,” the term used for the missionary work that Jehovah’s Witnesses do. We would spend the day in the suburbs of Southern California, going door to door or making the rounds of a shopping mall, distributing our Watchtower magazine. I continued my pioneering work for years and years after my career had been launched.

Up to 1991, the time of my Dangerous tour, I would don my disguise of fat suit, wig, beard, and glasses and head off to live in the land of everyday America, visiting shopping plazas and tract homes in the suburbs. I loved to set foot in all those houses and catch sight of the shag rugs and La-Z-Boy armchairs with kids playing Monopoly and grandmas baby-sitting and all those wonderfully ordinary and, to me, magical scenes of life. Many, I know, would argue that these things seem like no big deal. But to me they were positively fascinating.

The funny thing is, no adults ever suspected who this strange bearded man was. But the children, with their extra intuition, knew right away. Like the Pied Piper of Hamlin, I would find myself trailed by eight or nine children by my second round of the shopping mall. They would follow and whisper and giggle, but they wouldn’t reveal my secret to their parents. They were my little aides. Hey, maybe you bought a magazine from me. Now you’re wondering, right?

Sundays were sacred for two other reasons as I was growing up. They were both the day that I attended church and the day that I spent rehearsing my hardest. This may seem against the idea of “rest on the Sabbath,” but it was the most sacred way I could spend my time: developing the talents that God gave me. The best way I can imagine to show my thanks is to make the very most of the gift that God gave me.

“The best way I can imagine to show my thanks is to make the very most of the gift that God gave me.”

Church was a treat in its own right. It was again a chance for me to be “normal.” The church elders treated me the same as they treated everyone else. And they never became annoyed on the days that the back of the church filled with reporters who had discovered my whereabouts. They tried to welcome them in. After all, even reporters are the children of God.

When I was young, my whole family attended church together in Indiana. As we grew older, this became difficult, and my remarkable and truly saintly mother would sometimes end up there on her own. When circumstances made it increasingly complex for me to attend, I was comforted by the belief that God exists in my heart, and in music and in beauty, not only in a building. But I still miss the sense of community that I felt there–I miss the friends and the people who treated me like I was simply one of them. Simply human. Sharing a day with God.

When I became a father, my whole sense of God and the Sabbath was redefined. When I look into the eyes of my son, Prince, and daughter, Paris, I see miracles and I see beauty. Every single day becomes the Sabbath. Having children allows me to enter this magical and holy world every moment of every day. I see God through my children. I speak to God through my children. I am humbled for the blessings He has given me.

There have been times in my life when I, like everyone, has had to wonder about God’s existence. When Prince smiles, when Paris giggles, I have no doubts. Children are God’s gift to us. No–they are more than that–they are the very form of God’s energy and creativity and love. He is to be found in their innocence, experienced in their playfulness.

My most precious days as a child were those Sundays when I was able to be free. That is what the Sabbath has always been for me. A day of freedom. Now I find this freedom and magic every day in my role as a father. The amazing thing is, we all have the ability to make every day the precious day that is the Sabbath. And we do this by rededicating ourselves to the wonders of childhood. We do this by giving over our entire heart and mind to the little people we call son and daughter. The time we spend with them is the Sabbath. The place we spend it is called Paradise.

“And we do this by rededicating ourselves to the wonders of childhood. We do this by giving over our entire heart and mind to the little people we call son and daughter.”

Did you know that the entire range of human emotion falls into four simple categories – sad, mad, glad, and scared? Do you find it curious, as I do, that three of these four words rhyme? Did you know that ad means “toward” whether it’s used as a suffix or a prefix?

The ad component of these words is worth noting because moving toward something is not the same as arriving at something. In our daily dealings with traffic, prices, pollution, crime, etc., we may find ourselves moving toward feelings of sadness or anger. These two feelings do count as half of the full range of human emotions. Whether we actually get there or merely move in that direction depends on our level of sophistication. Babies certainly don’t hold anything back. Dogs don’t contain their feelings very well. Yet adult humans are expected to move toward anger, for example, but stop short of getting there. We are supposed to control ourselves.

Why do we experience negative emotions in the first place? Why can’t we just be happy all the time? Apparently, over the course of evolution we have developed certain responses to our environment that have now become hard-wired into our brains. We see these traits not only in ourselves and others but also in the animals we observe closely. Feelings of fear, sadness, and anger come with being sentient beings.

We want to think that these feelings are unwarranted, that fear, anger, and sadness have no rightful place in our lives, but nothing could be farther from the truth. The sign out front, the sign in front of our emotional warehouse, is programmed for only four words: sad, mad, glad, and scared. Each of these moods gets displayed at one time or another on our emotional signboard. We don’t know why that is. It just is.

It is a very primal urge to let negative emotions show, given that they occupy such a large space in our overall makeup and given that we spend so much of our young lives displaying various bad moods. It may even be healthier to express grief and rage and fear than it is to contain it. I don’t know. I just know that it’s considered more grown up to fight against them — to slay sadness, anger, and fear.

For me it’s more helpful to accept the sad/mad dynamic than it is to try to deny it. There is no overcoming what is inherent. We can hope that brain science will someday bring us closer to understanding why negative emotions comprise three-quarters of our makeup. We can hope that someday our species will evolve “toward” more emotional balance. Until then we are pretty much stuck being alternately sad, mad, glad, or scared.

Of course, the degree to which we experience negative emotions is another matter altogether. Most adults struggle to eliminate negative emotion and stay the course toward gladness. There is nothing I would like better than to be chronically happy, but it is unrealistic to expect that of myself. I think we are too hard on ourselves for feeling less than happy all the time. There are, after all, only four ways to feel, and only one of them is positive.

However, there really are only two ways to feel — good or bad. If we think about the distribution in this way, negative emotions don’t seem so overwhelming in number, and we have at least a fifty percent chance of feeling good. I like those odds a lot better, don’t you?

“Total negation is the essence of the positive. When there is negation of all those things that thought has brought about psychologically, only then is there love, which is compassion and intelligence.”
—Krishnamurti

One of her staff members gave Oprah a camera recently and told her to take some pictures in her California back yard. This is my favorite, a field of lavender nestled beside a gentle oak. The rest of her pictures can be found here.

“Every year our town has a fair and this guy comes with his lizards…he has trained them to pose on mini lounge chairs. It’s a hoot and the kids go crazy to see him. Makes for great photo ops.” —Caroline, The Zen in You

Today I found 134 of the most beautiful photos I’ve ever seen on the internet. I’m putting this link here so I can revisit these beauties again and again. They come from a site called The Zen in You.

(where I’d like to live)

(where I live)

(or how to start a movement)

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” —Anais Nin