After his first marriage fell apart in the 1960s, the songwriter Johnny Cash moved from Southern California to Tennessee. On the first night in his new home, lonely and depressed, he began to pace the length of the ground floor. It was an enormous, beautiful house, all but empty of furniture, wedged between a steep hill on one side and Old Hickory Lake on the other.
As he walked from one end of the floor to the other, from the hill to the lake, he began to feel—almost frantically so—that something was absent. What’s missing? he thought. Where is it? he repeated, over and over again.
Had he forgotten to pack something? Was there something he needed to do? What wasn’t right? Suddenly, it came to him. It wasn’t something, it was someone.
His young daughter, Rosanne. She wasn’t there. She was in California with her mother. She was not with him. A house without family—even a mansion—is no home. Cash stopped, began to shout her name as loud as he could, and fell to the ground and wept.
As we said recently, we all know there are consequences to our decisions, the decision to work too much, to check out of a marriage, to not deal with our issues. The problem is that we fool ourselves believing that we can live with those consequences. We know there is a cost…we just fail to consider what it will feel like when that bill comes due—when our kids don’t want a relationship with us, when they tell us the ways we’ve hurt them, when our partner becomes cold and distant.
Cash was there in a lonely house of his own making. No one had forced him into those affairs, had wanted him to do those drugs, to be addicted to the road. Those were his choices…and the consequence was the loneliness, was missing the person he loved most. And now he had to live with it…as we all do or will if we don’t get our acts together.
This story is adapted from a chapter in Stillness is the Key, which talks about how to find peace and equanimity in a chaotic world. It is also told in greater depth in Rosanne Cash’s incredible memoir, Composed, which we carry at The Painted Porch. Both are worth reading!
