Zen & the Art of the Midlife Crisis

Wrestling a sub-prime mortgage in the panic of 2008, a job to fix a toilet provides the opportunity to renovate a life. The loss of parents and two homes, a marriage ending and a business closure create a perfect storm of crisis for the author, forcing a review of his past to find solutions to live a more authentic future. A men?s retreat begins a writing process, leading to a blog exposing the pain caused when, distracted by the business of life, passions go dormant. Within a year, old skis dance through moguls, instructing with his son a group of young children who teach him more about love and happiness than they learn. A dusty guitar is restrung after years of silence and new songs pour out as if guiding the author to sing a message of living passionately and following dreams. To showcase his original music, he forms a band and begins to play out, eventually making small tours and culminating on the stage of New York?s famous Bitter End. On the pages in between, the book examines a childhood where the only real baggage seemed to be about a fanny pack?s worth of being loved too much and suffering a father too abundant in talent to easily imitate his success. Captain of the football team who became a president of the world and a cheerleader for life, his parents modeled that anything is possible, but in retrospect, the author realizes that insidious expectations can lead to a lifetime of self-sabotage. In response, he redefines his relationship with his own son and begins to teach that communicating love is more important than setting a standard of excellence. The book opens on a moment when frustration overwhelms the author, broken down and stranded on the side of the road, forcing a decision that changes much larger in his life need to be made than just fixing his truck. In making renovations to his new apartment, he is able to recognize that his struggles in marriage and business have been the results of a deeper misalignment in his own heart. Fresh out of college in 1977 and onto Kerouac?s road, in a story as dramatic as a novel, the adventure is described to build a sister?s home over-looking the Pacific Ocean that ultimately changed the course of his life. Even with whales, fire and death, at the critical moment, the cliff-side idyll turned out to have actually suspended his commitment to a life as a writer instead of being the experience of inspiration he had wanted. Having adopted one family and tried again with another "from scratch", working to create a business that would make his father proud, the author finally relinquishes his desperate hold on these definitions of success and looks inward to find more satisfaction and a better relationship to the outer world.