Author: C. L. Harmon

Part 1

I have never found the expression, ‘The Lord works in mysterious ways’ all that comforting. Basically, this is the person saying it telling me that they don’t know why the hell things are the way they are.

See…not that comforting. This is not to say that He doesn’t work that way. It’s just really not an answer when people are seeking them.

This, I think, has been my greatest struggle on my journey to writing as a career. Every single time in my adult life when something didn’t work out, I was always reassured by friends and family that it was because God had something better in mind.

Hearing that is a big pill to swallow after graduating from TCC plus having two years of journalism experience and cleaning up puke in the K-Mart bathroom as a stocker while in my mid-thirties.

This was the exact same thing I had heard in the past when things didn’t turn out the way I wanted or felt they should. This would become a pattern in my life. Let me give an example; Before the K-Mart days when I was in my early twenties, I worked with a group of guys in a manufacturing plant.

I liked the job and the people I worked with.

We worked very well together and had a great working rhythm. We were night shift and also had a competition for tonnage with the day shift. We consistently beat them and even set new plant records. This went on for quite some time.

Like most of those types of job situations, there are several different areas to work within the plant. Some of those jobs paid better than mine and well money is the name of the game.

I certainly didn’t go for the atmosphere.

When an opportunity arose for one of those jobs I applied.  I come into work a couple of weeks later and there is a new employee in that job.

I was young and nervous about finding out what happened, but I was also angry and I wanted an explanation. So when the big boss over our shift walked by my work area, I seized the moment and asked why I hadn’t gotten the job.

He blatantly replied, “I am not going to break up a team as good as this one!”

I replied by asking him why a new person was hired over me for a higher paying job when I had been there longer and proven myself to be a good and reliable employee.  He simply reiterated what he had already said and walked away.

Obviously, this did not sit well with me.

Being in the throes of depression and fighting that constant feeling that I should be somewhere else doing something else, only exacerbated the battle already raging inside me.

Little did I know that the small battle inside would become an all-out war in which I am still engaged.

Again, I was told that the Lord works in mysterious ways and that He had something better for me.

Perhaps cleaning puke off the floor at K-Mart for less money ten years later was better. But it sure as hell didn’t feel like it!

The fact that I had gone into debt for school and could not find a job that I could easily have gotten without that piece of paper showing that I had achieved a higher level of education, made me feel as though I had been robbed.

Now, this is where it gets deep, so hang on. As parents, we do our very best to teach our children to have hopes and dreams, but to achieve them, they must sacrifice and earn those dreams. We want them to aspire to whatever it is that makes them happy while also teaching them that faith, integrity, work ethic and determination are the key elements in reaching their goals. It’s at this point in the blog that we must ask, just how does the Lord work?

how does the Lord work?

How does He work when the world is such an unfair place? I felt as though I deserved that job at the plant as did my immediate boss and co-workers.

I had done the right things by working hard and paying my dues, but I didn’t get it.

Did the Lord block that from happening or did man?

And if it was man, then why didn’t God step up and make it happen anyway?

I believed at the time it was because God had something better…or maybe He didn’t.

Ten years later and after a very toxic working relationship with my father, I was working at K-Mart and making less money than I had since I was a teenager.

It would be another ten years before I began to realize that it wasn’t that He works in mysterious ways as much as it is that He and I have different goals.

The second part of this blog will publish in my next post.

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The first few posts of this blog series have contained a lot of negative such as depression, feeling of failure and the chasing of an elusive goal. But this is a journey as I mentioned in my last blog. This means there are good and bad things which occur as in any journey.

In this post, I would like to share something profound which obviously had a great impact on my career.

By my mid-twenties, the bulk of the bad depression had subsided and the depressed moods would come and go but it was no longer a constant darkness as it had been.  As a result, my writing habits had also changed. Instead of the bleak and dark poetry, there was something new that had magically evolved out of misery into something much lighter and optimistic. These would later become the foundation for my columns Mindset which has been published multiple times in several different formats over the last 16 years.

Since I had chosen faith as my drug of choice to help me through the dismal times, it allowed God to work inside of me and alter my perceptions from the inside out. What I mean by this is that I believe by using drugs, alcohol, gambling or some other sort of negative outlet for escape, we, in essence, tie God’s hands by choosing something else over Him to get us through the bad times. In turn, He can’t or won’t guide us to enlightenment until we choose him first.

This is not a Sunday school lesson but simply how I choose to see how faith works. Each person must find their own peace and understanding with God.  At any rate, early in my career, I was writing for a small newspaper in Tulsa. I wasn’t making much money, but it did allow me to gain exposure. This, as any writer knows, is critical in building a career.

The publisher allowed me to publish my Mindsets. It was a great opportunity and I was grateful for it. A few months after I began running them in the paper, I get a call from the lady who did the layout and design for the paper. She was my contact for submissions, though I had not met her. She relayed to me that she had just received a phone call from a lady who had asked to speak to me.

She told the caller that she was not comfortable giving out my number, but would take a message and pass it along to me. It did not take her long to realize that this was not the type of message that one could write on a sticky note. She later told me that she rested the pen on her desk only seconds after the caller began speaking.

The caller conveyed how she had recently lost her son in a tragic accident. Although she was a Christian woman, her faith had not comforted her that much. This poor woman had fallen into an abyss of despair and was desperately searching for any light to help her see a way out.

While out one day she noticed the free paper and something told her to take a copy even though she did not normally read it. She said that the Mindset I had published in it had made her cry because, for the first time since the loss of her son, she felt a sense of peace. The words I wrote, she said, somehow reassured her that God was with her and that He was with her son.

She felt compelled to tell me that.

Two things happened because of that Mindset. One was that a suffering woman was given a sense of peace because I had written something. The second was that I had been given a new sense of inspiration to keep writing. I don’t remember what I wrote or even what I was thinking about when I wrote that particular Mindset.  I do remember that phone call though. And I remember that I made someone’s life a little better that day.

 

There have been many great experiences over the years. Some were great ego boosters and some were invaluable learning opportunities. But when I think back on my career as a writer, that memory is the one incident that sticks out above all.  I earned no money from that Mindset nor did I receive any awards for it.  I simply helped a very sad person feel a little bit better because God wanted me to help me become a little bit wiser.

 

I have always believed that one person can change the world. What I hadn’t realized until that moment was that each person lives in their own world. Each time we speak or write words with hope, love or compassion, we change someone’s world. We give them a new mindset and with that they change someone else’s world.

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In my quest to write this blog, I find myself all over the page, if you will. Like all lives, mine is connected from the prior day and so on.  However, for most, their lives are basically connected in short terms to their past. In other words, they are probably not that connected to their distant pasts as it pertains to their present. For me though, writing has been a constant thread needling through my life since I was a teen.

So my tapestry of blog creation may seem like as if I had a few stiff drinks before planting myself in front of the computer. My point being that it is difficult to write in a chronologically organized manner as it pertains to my pains and triumphs in the field of writing.

It is my objective to create an image of my experiences that you can relate to. In order for me to do this effectively, I will be rummaging through my mental attic, unpacking old memories and intertwining them with my life today.  Since we are already on the subject of a single thread extending the length of my life thus far, it seems like a good place to start unraveling.

Someone once told me that when a person wakes up thinking about something and goes to bed thinking about the same thing, then that is what that person should be doing in their life. Although I assume one can take this literally, I actually believe it to mean that which is most thought of in one’s life. Another person once told me that if something brings you peace and happiness, then why would you want to do anything else.

These are bits of information that sit on the back burner of my brain sometimes stewing, boiling at other times but at the very least simmering at any given time.

This means that today is intrinsically linked to a night when I was 19 and walking outside at night dreaming of becoming a writer someday like Stephen King. It is linked to a day ten years ago when I was a reporter for a weekly paper looking for my next story lead. It’s also linked to the day a few years ago when I started my own newspaper, to the day I finished a short story that didn’t get accepted for publication and to every other day of my existence since I was a teenager.

It’s the same thread. It never breaks and seems to be on a spool that lasts the length of this life on earth. There have been times I was so angry because of the difficulties of succeeding as a writer that I hacked at that thread with an ax. I would soon learn that the ax handle broke before I could hack through that thread. As I wrote in an earlier blog; it’s difficult to be the proverbial jack-ass always chasing the carrot but only rarely getting a nibble if even a bite at all.

Some of you may recognize the title of this blog segment as the title of a Neil Young song. I like the song because it elegantly expresses the desire of a junkie to chase the high at any cost…even unto death. It’s poetic and real. I equate the desire for me to write to the junkie longing for the high. Although I would not kill or steal to achieve the high I desire, I do certainly understand the chase to gain that high. The only difference I believe is that they and I experience different types of needles.

“I’ve seen the needle
and the damage done

A little part of it in everyone
But every junkie’s
like a settin’ sun.”

~Neil Young

In closing, I would like to emphasize that this entire blog series is a journey. It’s a journey where I have used faith and hope to guide me for over 30 years. It is not just a story of the negative and positive aspects of my experiences to becoming and being a writer and the outcomes which have resulted. This is about sharing a life experience with you involving both of these elements.

God has all the secrets and He’s not one to reveal them easily or gossip. However one receives this blog and what they get out of it, is one of those secrets. Sometimes what we need to hear the most is in the words of others. I believe this is why I am so passionate about writing. Have you ever considered how enlightened you have become because of the written word? How many times has the Bible, a poem or a story of triumph affected or even changed you? It is my hope that this blog series speaks to everyone who reads it. And if it does, it is not because of me, but because God gave me this opportunity to write about faith and hope and its importance in all of our journeys within this life.

 

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Maybe it’s part depression but I don’t believe it all stems from that. I am referring to feeling like a failure. I have felt like a failure for most of my life.

Someone told me once that anyone can call anything they are doing a job or career, but if it isn’t making money then it’s really only a hobby. If that is true then some would say I have chosen to be a hobbyist for a career.

As I wrote in an earlier blog, I have had a lot of jobs. Some of those were second jobs such as scrubbing floors at grocery stores in the evenings or painting utility trailers at night. I have always done what I must to make an honest living.  When I was younger those types of jobs didn’t bother me.

I am not too good to scrub floors or toilets or leave a shop grimy and grungy from working on cars all day.

In fact, I expected to do such things. After all, those actions build character and help keep the ego in check. God does require us to be humble and those type of jobs will certainly humble.

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The title of this blog is “Failure to Communicate”. This is because I believed what should happen with paying my dues in performing such jobs as mentioned above, having faith that at some point I would get noticed by someone for my writing abilities and moving up the ladder of success in life both financially and for recognition of my writing desire was always right around the corner.

I WAS WRONG!

The Lord and I were certainly not on the same page. And since He is writing the book of our lives, He can put me on any page He wishes at any time He wishes. There was obviously a failure to communicate between myself and the Creator.

One has to remember from earlier posts that I never asked to be a writer or have such an overwhelming desire to write. This inclination to wrangle words was given to me by God.

So why keep dangling the carrot in front of me and not let me have a bite?

I really was the proverbial jack-ass that kept following the carrot always thinking that I was one step closer to a bite.

On the morning of the Oklahoma City bombing, I became a father. As a result, two things happened. The first was the discovery of a new type of hope for the future of my family.  The other was that for the first time since I heard the voice I began to tune it out… I wanted to do the right thing for my daughter and for my son who came 14 months later.

It was time to put away childish hobbies as it were and to stop chasing the carrot. I soon discovered that I could ignore the voice to a certain degree but desire would just use a new method of forcing me to write.

This new method had become apparent to me while I was failing in junior college as a young adult. I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t concentrate on the objective of getting a higher education.

Not only was the voice ever present at that time, but there was now an unshakeable feeling that I needed to be somewhere else doing something else.

It was an overpowering feeling and I couldn’t shake it. It affected my job and my classes.

This would ultimately lead to quitting a good job and withdrawing from school.

As I mentioned, I ended up going back to work for my dad. It felt safe and allowed me to write in my spare time and pay my bills. For the next ten years, I worked for him, raised my two children and tried desperately to no avail to find work as a writer or get published.

As writing work continued to be elusive and due to my failing hope, I had begun to force the very desire from my being while taking a very serious interest in learning the trade of body work. I knew how to do the work, but nothing about running a business.

It is at this point when I chose the lesser of two evils; to stay at the only job that didn’t give me that horrible feeling that I should be somewhere else doing something else with my life. Looking back on it now, I know it was God giving me a type of sanctuary in which to exist and an environment in which allowed me to be with my children and earn a living while awaiting His timing.

I believe the timing is everything.

It’s not our timing though, it’s God’s. He placed me in the only place where I felt safe because the time to write for a career was not ready. Although I did feel like a failure for not having reached my goal of writing for a living, I began to understand that the acceptance of God’s will is a lesson that all of His children must learn.  Without that lesson, true faith can never be attained

It is not only the days of our lives that are numbered by God, but the seconds we experience happiness, sorrow, success, and failure as well. Within each of those seconds,  we are learning to laugh with love, cry with hope, succeed with humility and fail with grace.

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For my high school graduation, I got a big heaping pile of clinical depression. A life of fun, laughter and partying soon became one of misery, lost direction and loneliness.

There were specific events that catapulted me into that state, but even without them, I wouldn’t have escaped the throes of what I would eventually just call “my depression”. As I had written in my first blog, God had plans for me and to make sure I followed those plans, He wired them into my brain.

Depression for me was liking having a sixth sense. It was as though I could see the world differently than others or had access to layers of our existence that they did not. It was empowering although miserable at the same time.

However, within that darkness that consumed me, there were messages on dungeon walls that I began to decipher…

Late nights writing dark and foreshadowing poetry had begun. It became a tool that allowed me to discover that there was power in writing.

As I write this it occurs to me that some who read this might believe this to mean the power to change the world through words. You would be wrong…at least as to the meaning which I am writing about now.

It gave me the power to believe in something other than the world I had always known. In my world, work was the key to everything. As my father used to say, “if you want more than you got to do more.” When he referred to work it meant the work one does with the hands. Although the mind is certainly part of that work, the sweat comes from the actions of the hands and not the thoughts conjured in the mind.

So I worked

In other words, there were a few people out there who could write, act or sing and make money doing those artistic type of things but those people lived in some alien place like California and certainly not in rural Oklahoma. I still remember the day my dad told me the sentiments I just wrote.  I was 19 years old. My dad’s belief was not a criticism as much as it was the view point of a man who had never known anyone who had made a living that way. The people he knew and spent time with had regular jobs and used their hands to make a living. The other people, those aliens in California, were on his tv and radio but never in a shop or factory. His words were hard to take, but nothing really compared to the constant voice in my head screaming at me to write. Looking back on it now, I believe that he was telling me not to chase the wind because it’s always going nowhere even though it seems to be going everywhere. So I worked and made a living with my hands. I also continued listening to that voice. for the first time in my life, I began to learn what it really means to have hope and that hope and misery are two sides of the same coin.

So I worked and within three years of graduating high school, I worked on cars at my dad’s  shop. I worked at a tubing manufacturing plant. I built trash cans for Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants. I worked at a machine shop and all of this I did while battling an ever growing depression that alienated from every happiness.

Did I mention that I flunked out of junior college too during this period?

The voice that I spoke of in the first blog was screaming in my head so loudly that I couldn’t even concentrate. All I wanted to do was melt away in the dark world in which was my life. I knew there was no escape from it.

I could have used drugs or alcohol, but I knew they were only vacations away from the misery and not a permanent destination for happiness.

I am about to tell why God does not allow us to see our futures. I chose faith and patience. Had I known then how each of those choices would be tested in the years to come, I probably would have chosen the alcohol. I would guess if He did show us, we would all just become drunks and junkies. That may not be a rewarding way to go, but one has to admit that it’s a helluva lot more fun.

What God did give me though was another escape. He gave me writing. And without it, I would have gone insane.

Although it was dark and gloomy poetry, it was something. It was what I needed to believe that there was something beyond the depression and the sadness. There was hope that writing could set me free from all of it.

And the voice never lets me forget it.

Over 30 years later as I come home each day from making my living with my hands, that voice is still there with all the fervor that it first spoke to when I was still just a teenager.

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For over 30 years I have wanted to be a writer. It has been the most frustrating and rewarding journey I have ever known. A friend of mine suggested I start writing a blog about my experiences because it might help other people who feel as I do. He thought that it might encourage others to never give up and to continue following their hearts when all they want to do is kill the beat that can make any dreamer feel lost and alone. I hope that readers will follow along as I continue to add posts about my journey, my frustrations, and my triumphs. This first blog is entitled The Voice.

I’m C.L. Harmon.

THE VOICE

I was one of those kids in school who dreaded math class. It was a real bitch for me. Try as I may, the dots in my brain just would not connect to create an image of understanding. However, English and grammar were the complete opposite. I could sleep in class and still, miraculously it seemed, soak up that information effortlessly.

Years later, I would come to understand that it was by no an accident that my brain functioned that way.  It was by design. My Creator had a specific purpose in mind when he wired those neurons together inside my head. What He didn’t give me was an instructional manual to operate that well-oiled machine that rests on my shoulders. Instead, He gave me a desire that was no less potent than an animal in heat.

We call it writing. Really such a simple word for having such a major impact on my life. And when I say ‘impact’ I don’t always mean a positive one. In fact, I would venture to say that in many ways it has been a negative one. Allow me to elaborate. Imagine, if you will, a nagging little voice in the back of your mind that is ever present and rarely quiet. The voice is constantly reminding you that you need to be doing something else.

Since i was 18 years old I have heard that voice. It has never abated or been silenced for very long. Every job I have ever had (And there have been a lot of them in the past 30 years) that did not pertain to writing in some manner, has been what many might call stepping stones to get me where I wanted to be. To me though, they didn’t feel like stepping stones but throwing stones that were being hurled at me in an effort to follow that voice.

I do not want it to sound as though I had a choice. In fact, I have never had a choice. Trust me when I tell you that after enough rocks hit me, I was going to listen to that voice and get out of the strike zone. I simply couldn’t stand it anymore. Guess what happened next. Yes, I would make a choice that others must have thought crazy or at least unwise. But I couldn’t help it. I would quit a job and take one for less money in order to have time to write or invest in myself to have a career in writing. As the weeks turned into months though and responsibilities of family and bills would tighten, off to another job I would go.

“This time nothing is going to stop me! I am going to make this job work this time. Positive attitude? Check! A new perspective?  Check! The aftertaste of pride in my throat? Check! I am going to be like everyone else here. I am going to work hard, put in my time and be normal. Maybe buy a boat and start going to the lake on the weekends like my co-workers. I am going to focus on being a regular guy who puts in his time at the payroll production plant and then just enjoy my time off until retirement. A steady paycheck, 401K, paid vacations, advancement opportunities. Oh yeah, this is going to be great!”

“Hey! Wake up! You know this isn’t right for you. “What? Oh no! Damn! There it is again. That pesky and annoying voice is back!” With everything I could muster, I would order it to go away, to shut-up, and to leave me alone. I have a good thing going here and you are not going to mess it up, I would tell it. Sure it would quiet down for a little while. But back into my conscious thoughts it slowly crept creating conflict as the weeks would slip by. As though under some alien control, my thoughts would begin looking for a way out.  The positive attitude toward my job, the hopes of being normal without the pipe dream of being some writer who can change the world for the better by being a writer were again becoming overwhelming. However, the voice had spoken…and again I listened.

To Be Continued!

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