The Upside of Suffering

April 8-9, 2011

For those going through a divorce, there are days when it all makes sense.  In our case, a chimp with a fifty-word sign language vocabulary could come up with a list of reasons why it is the best thing for me, my ex-wife, and our kids.  By this stage in the process, I can usually see the chimp's logic.

At other moments and other days, it feels like someone cut out my heart with an jagged sawblade.  April 8th, 2011 was one of those days.  I had to come face-to-face with the reality that she is never coming back to us.  The first word in "irreconcilable differences" is operative.  It is over.

I played with the kids that night and put them to bed.  After getting the elves down, I called a friend, did some work, and watched an episode of "The Office."  Anything to keep my head from the pillow and the sad thoughts that would keep me from sleep.

My gaze kept returning to a red book on the desk in my livingroom, "Called to Love: Approaching John Paul II's Theology of the Body."  I felt beckoned to open it up and try another chapter, but I couldn't bring myself to do it.  The first 124 pages had been excruciating as it examined the divine root of spousal love.  I thought that it might help me come to terms with my new reality.  Unfortunately, the book had done nothing more than to add in questions about the divine and how it related to my failed marriage.  I was willing to take the hit on my daily Looking 4 Answers quiz by passing up the day's spiritual reading.

I went to bed about midnight.  My daughter Fiona came in around one and sometime after three she gave me a kick that brushed away any semblance of sleep.  I went downstairs hoping to find a distraction.  The laundry was done.  The house was clean.  I didn't want to turn on the TV to risk waking up the girls.

It was just me, grief, and that damned red book.  I didn't understand why it had to hurt this bad.  I'd saw it coming and I thought I was moving on.  What was the point in all the suffering?

I put aside the question and picked up the book.  The first dozen or so pages barely even distracted me from the thoughts of why my prayers hadn't been answered.  Why we'd failed so miserably when I knew that we both really tried.  The pages went along and I didn't find hte answers that I was looking for.  I knew that Creation had been broken and that evil was a reality in the world, but there had to be an upside.  I'd seen too much goodness to just fall into the pit of despair.

Why had I been called to read this book that wasn't helping?

Then on page 138, I saw it, "This analysis of our fallen situation has a sobering corollary: Because love runs counter to the logic of domination, a genuine lover is bound to suffer.  Anyone who wants to love must face the possibility of indifference and rejection; he must be willing to suffer on account of the fractured unity of human existence[.]"

The book went on to describe how suffering has a special capacity to reveal love.  Human suffering moves others to compassion, inviting us to comfort them in their sorrow.  As Pope John Paul II described in Salvici Doloris, "[S]uffering is present in the world in order to release love, in order to give birth to works of love towards neighbor, in order to transform the whole of civilization into a 'civilization of love.'"

At some level, something clicked.  I rewound through my memories of the collapse of my marriage and realized how many acts of kinship and love had been directed my way through that suffering.  Friends calling to see if we were alright.  Near strangers offering to do anything to help us get through the days.  Colleagues at both mine and my ex-wife's work displaying boundless depths of patience and compassion.  A staggering amount of support from my family.

My daughters and I are closer now than we ever would have been without the sorrow created by the distancing of a wife and mother.  Earlier that day, I'd held my little brother's new baby boy in my arms and found out that they were considering using my name as his middle name.  I don't know if they would have given me that honor if they hadn't seen how hard I'd worked to try and keep this sad little family together.

I knew that while I would not wish this sorrow on anyone.  I also couldn't deny that it had led to a powerful force of good in my life.  While I could not guess with any certainty  on what the future brings, I would feel comfortable betting that some of the further good things to come will spring from the reaction to this sorrow.  For better or worse, that is how the Divine works.

The red book's message of peace allowed me to turn off the light and go back to bed.

"Sitting by the Side of a Pond... with a .357 Magnum"

Note: The person described in the following story as Curt is not named Curt.  Everything else is accurate.

September 2002

To say that my path from the military world to the civian world was bumpy puts in mildly.  The medical discharge was followed by a flurry of resume send-outs then an empty mailbox.  I limped around a construction site for a few months before Shane's accident, then I worked at a residential treatment center for seriously emotionally disturbed children.

A well-placed donkey kick from a ninety pound, thirteen year old female patient while I was helping stop a mini-riot on our wing led me to the emergency room and another career path.  Unfortunately this one was with an environmental subcontractor with huge ambitions and no capitol.  The work was steady though the paychecks were not.

By September I was happy to head down to Utah to help a subcontractor get their equipment ready for a water treatment pilot project.  Curt was the president of the company and we hit it off well.  The company only had one other employee and a few contractors.    They were a small rag-tag outfit that more than made up in gumption what they lacked in polish.  In short, my kind of crew.  They'd developed a pretty wild electric water treatment technology and we had to get their trailer finished up to drag  up to Montana to pull of the pilot before the cold hit.

It was random work and we weren't well equipped.  I spent one hot afternoon fourteen feet above the ground unloading a 6oo lb. bag of zeolite into massive canisters with a cooking pot.  Something about that display of both stupidity and fortitude moved Curt to offer me a job.  A man with better options and more foresight would have said no.  I shook his hand.

After the project finished up in Montana, I moved back down to Utah to a little trailer in the desert.  Each day I helped work on a technology that I thought would change the world.  I'd developed a major concern about upcoming water shortages while I was at West Point and this seemed like developing Curt's water treatment technology was tangible way to help minimize the impact of that future scarcity.  It's cheesy, but I thought I'd found my life's mission.

Curt's mind amazed me and I felt honored to be involved with trying to bring his ideas to life.  He was a wild-haired Mormon visionary and I was the Copenhagen chewing second man trying to figure out how to bring the vision into reality.  Every week brought a new challenge and we were short of just about everything but creativity and ambition.

Somewhere over the course of the next year, our progress on the technology slowed.  We were close never quite ready for prime-time.  We'd prep and then test, rework and then test again.  It was exactly what we needed to do, but I was worried that it wasn't happening fast enough for our investors and my love affair with the Utah desert was over.

One June afternoon in 2003, I found myself hotwashing out used septic tanks in 114 degree heat for our next test.  I blasted the scalding water against the grimy plastic for five or six hours before coming to the conclusion that it was time to go back to school.

August 2008

Five years later, I'd completed with law school and spent two years as an associate in a law firm before taking a part-time job as the Executive Director of NAMI Montana.  Once again thinking I was going to change the world, but it couldn't have been much different than trying to develop new technology under the desert sun.

It had taken a while, but Curt and his company had finally flourished.  They used the water treatment technology as a path to transition into plastics recycling.  The company was opening a plant in Burbank and the cash flow projections were jaw-dropping.

Curt and I had stayed in touch over the years and he'd even offered me a position with the company the previous fall.  We talked every couple of months and he'd update me on the company that we'd brought out of infancy together.

I hadn't thought about Curt in a while, but images of him kept coming into my head one August day as I worked in the NAMI office.  I tried to focus on prepping for our upcoming Walk fundraiser, but I just couldn't get him out of my head.  Eventually it was just too much, I wrapped up my half-day and walked home intent to work on some other projects.

But still I couldn't get Curt out of my head.  Finally I broke down and called him.

"Hello?" I heard his startled voice answer on the other end of the line.  "Matt?  That's weird we never get reception up here."

I said hi and tried to strike up a conversation.  I had no intention of telling Curt that I'd been dwelling on him all day and finally called just to get him out of my head.

Something was wrong.  "Curt, what's going on I asked."

He sighed.  "I'm sitting by the side of the pond up at our ranch with a .357 Magnum in my hand.  It's all falling apart.  I'm going to lose everything: my business, my family, everything.  I'm trying to think of a reason not to kill myself."

I spent the next hour talking him down.  I was in way over my head and knew that I was doing everything wrong, but somehow a combination of mindfulness exercises to shortcircuit the anxiety/depression and telling him for the first time about my near brush with suicide a decade before was enough to get him to put down away the gun. 

March 2011

Over the course of the next two and a half years, Curt really did lose everything.  His business, his property, and eventually his family.  They all fell like horrible dominoes.  I know that he could have done some things differently, but the complete collapse was more than one man could ever bring on himself.  It's just a brutal mystery why some struggle so hard through so much. 

Curt's been tested in a way that I hope I never have to be.  The fact that he continues struggling forward is an incredible accomplishment.  Curt had a job interview last week with a water treatment company in Colorado.  It's too early to know whether he got it, but I pray that it's his time to keep moving forward again.

End Note: I had a family member commit suicide about a year and a half before I called Curt on that fateful day.  I've also had a family member try to commit suicide twice in the years following that call.  I can't begin to fathom why I was summoned to contact Curt and not the others.  It's too sad to even try, but that doesn't change the facts around the phonecall to Curt.  

Jesus and the Death Penalty

Note: The passages quoted below are from the New American Bible.  Similar passages can be found in the New International Bible in Matthew 15: 1-20 and John: 8:1-11

I spent this morning in Montana’s Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing on a bill to abolish the death penalty.  I was testifying if favor of the bill on behalf of NAMI Montana’s members who live with serious mental illnesses and their family.

The Catholic Churches, the Assembly of God, and the Montana Association of Churches also spoke up in favor of the bill.  It’s always nice to be on the same side as your congregation and fortunately with this job I usually am.

When the opponents got up to testify, two preachers stated point blank that anyone who was against the death penalty was not a Christian.  One of the preachers pulled out his Bible to demonstrate evidence for his point.

The preacher cited Jesus’s statement in Matthew 15:4, “‘Whoever curses father or mother shall die’” as proof that Jesus was for the death penalty.  In that passage, Jesus is restating the Mosaic Law described in Leviticus 20:9, “And he that curseth his father, or his mother, shall surely be put to death.”

The preacher waved his Bible and made it very clear that professed Christians who did not follow Jesus’s will on the death penalty were hypocrites.  It was a powerful allegation, if true; but if it was true then why would the preacher use that passage of the Bible to illustrate his point? 

In that passage, Jesus described this absurd law from Levitucus and that fact that no one followed it in order to defend from the Pharisees’ ridicule of Jesus’s followers for not washing their hands when they eat a meal. Matthew 15:2.  If the passage was actually a defense of putting people to death, why would Jesus conclude it with the simple statement that “to eat with unwashed hands does not defile”? Matthew 15:20. 

If someone reading the Bible wanted to interpret Jesus’s attitude toward the death penalty, couldn’t they just go directly to John: 8:3-11 where Jesus was asked to sentence a woman for death for adultery?  In this instance, there was no doubt that the woman was guilty or that Mosaic Law required her to be put to death by stoning.

If Jesus was a firm believer in the death penalty, He would have been the first one to throw a stone.  This action would have been recorded in the Bible and made it very clear to His followers throughout history that there was no doubt that Jesus stood on the side of capital punishment.

Jesus reached down to the ground, but he did not grab a stone.  Instead, Jesus took his finger and began drawing in the dirt.

The scribes and the Pharisees who originally dragged the woman before Jesus continued to call for his judgment against her.

Jesus “straightened up and said to them, ‘Let the one among you who is without sin be the first one to throw a stone at her.’” After saying this, He bent down and began writing on the ground again.

Eventually all of the woman’s accusers left leaving just her and Jesus.  “Then Jesus straightened up and said to her, ‘Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”

“She replied, ‘No one, sir.’”

“Then Jesus said, ‘Neither do I condemn you. Go [and] from now on do not sin any more.”

There are some strong arguments in favor of the death penalty.  No one with a heart who listened to victims’ testimonies could deny that.  But the argument that “our government should put criminals to death because Jesus wants us to” is thoroughly debunked by John: 8:3-11.

A French Saint's Prayers for America's Heroes

Note: Catholic’s regularly ask saints to pray for them or others. While this practice isn’t followed by Protestants, it’s fundamentally no different than asking anyone else for their prayers. This is a story about how one of those prayers was answered.

In early March of 2007, our family lost my stepbrother to a PTSD suicide. Chris had been back home from Iraq for about a year and a half. He was a good kid that became a great man, but the traumatic stress injury he sustained in Iraq was too much for even the brave Humvee machine gunner to defeat.

The suicide was precipitated by an Other Than Honorable discharge that he received in the mail. Other Than Honorable discharges are typically given to service members convicted by a civilian criminal court and incarcerated or if the conduct leading to that civilian conviction brings discredit upon the military.

Chris’s only crime was that he didn’t attend his monthly National Guard drills, because of his debilitating PTSD. To this day, it’s still hard to imagine how that discharge ever went through. It was the most damning piece of evidence that our military didn’t have a process to effectively care for its heroes returning home with PTSD injuries.

The most basic question was why hadn’t Chris’s unit sat him and all the other returning soldiers down in front of a mental health professional for a PTSD screening? If they’d identified the injury, they could have directed him towards treatment. Instead, they left it up to his battalion who either missed or ignored the red flags for PTSD and flushed him out of the service.

A few days after Chris’s death, his family stood in his mother’s kitchen and decided to tell Chris’s story to try and prevent other families from having to go through the same tragedy. As a veteran and attorney, I took the lead.

The first week after a tragedy is critical to any effort to force a systemic change from that event. You either harness the wave of media attention that the tragedy inspires or you let it slip by and lose the opportunity.

I spent that week talking to staff of the politicians that could force the National Guard to implement changes in their systems of caring from returning service members. I also talked with the local media. I seemed cut and dry.

I was wrong. The papers came out at the end of the week mourning the tragic death. There was no mention of the discharge, that the military had failed in its duty to care for an injured soldier, or that the system of care could be improved. In short, I failed.

I met with a retired general and another seasoned member of the state government that Sunday. They drew the same conclusion. It was over. The attention would go back to the state’s budget or some other issue and nothing would be done.

I was dejected. I’d failed Chris while he was alive and then again after his death. On my way home, I stopped by the grocery store and picked up a dozen roses for St. Therese of Lisieoux. The little French saint had worked miracle after miracle for our family from curing my grandmother’s infant paralysis to helping me pass the bar exam after I’d spent a summer focusing on the wrong material.

St. Therese loves roses and the only thing I could think to do was to buy her some roses as a way of asking/thanking her for praying to God for a miracle to fix my failed attempt to make something good come out of Chris’s tragic death. I set the roses on the passenger seat of my car and began to drive home. By the time I pulled into the driveway, a barebones plan had popped into my head.

I put the roses on the table. Prayed again and began typing…

I couldn’t have imagined how powerfully that prayer was answered. Eighteen months later, the State of Montana was recognized as the best state for caring for its service members returning home from combat. The foundation for its program was multiple, staged face-to-face mental health screenings for every service member returning from combat. One year later, Congress required a similar screening mechanism be put in place across the military. The Department of Defense is currently working to implement it.

According to the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, the program has the potential to save more lives than armored Humvees.

January of 2009

I walked back into the caboose of the Inaugural Train. Soon-to-be President Obama introduced me to his wife Michelle and told her about some of the things we’d accomplished after Chris’s death.

I reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out two religious medals. I gave a St. Michael medal to Michelle and told her to ask him to defend her family.

I handed President Obama a smaller medal with the image of St. Therese of Lisieoux, the little Carmelite nun that died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-four.

“It wasn’t me,” I said. “It was her.”

End Note: I think it’s important to point out that praying for this does not always fix all of our issues in this damaged world. I know this too well tonight as this is the first night that I do not have my children due to an impending divorce. Prayers are not always answered how or when we want them to be, but that doesn’t change the fact that a miracle occurred after I asked St. Therese to pray for better care for our returning heroes.

Fearing Judgment

December 28, 2010

Disclaimer: I write this post because I struggle with the teaching, not because I’ve conquered it.

This afternoon a friend told me about how the Christian members of his family ostracized one of their cousins from the family and family events because he is gay. This family led my friend to faith. He’d often used them as role models to help guide his path towards becoming the kind of person he wanted to be, but my friend was appalled and confused by their professed application of Christ’s teachings.

I hope that there’s more to the story. If there isn’t, then the issue is between them and God to sort it out. I bring it up as a glaring example of the easy way that evil can slip into the thoughts and actions of people that are working to follow the path that a higher power has laid out before them.

A less cringe-worthy example recently played out in churches across the world as the regular churchgoers looked down their noses at the “Christmas Christians” that filled the pews to overflowing. It’s the same act, just a matter of scale. I’m ashamed to say that I’ve been on both sides of that judgment.

Christ could not have been any clearer about His stance on humans judging humans. In Matthew 7:1, Jesus said, “Stop judging, that you may not be judged, and the measure with which you measure will be measured out to you.”

Again in Luke 6:37: “Stop judging and you will not be judged. Stop condemning and you will not be condemned. Forgive and you will be forgiven.”

This simple, point-blank teaching is hard to follow on this side of Eden. The world can be a horrible place. The men and women in it do horrible things. We have the right and even the duty to stop oppressors from taking advantage of and injuring the weak. There are people who are so scarred by life and wrapped up in evil that they can never safely be released from prison.

Beyond the extremes, what is a sin in the eyes of one person can be an act of love in the eyes of another. How can a person of faith weigh that balance? Or what about in the case of a brain injury or serious mental illness when the person’s injured brain makes decisions that they never would have made when they were healthy.

The short answer is that it’s hard and we are going to get it wrong sometimes. The fuller answer is that we must be truly afraid of our urge to judge in the same manner that we fear our urges to kill, steal, or maim. The fact that it is easier to go through life without killing someone, than it is to going through life without judging others doesn’t change the burden that we bear to avoid judgment.

“[T]he measure with which you measure will be measured out to you.” The warning could not be any clearer.

We have to struggle to come to grip with the basic tenet that it is not our role to determine who is good or evil any more than it is our role to make the sun come up or the tides dance back and forth across a beach. Measuring the good deeds and sins of others is too difficult of a task. Thank God it is not a task that we’ve been given.

A Late Night Lesson from a Screaming Baby

My daughters are only sixteen months and two and a half years old, yet I think they’ve already taught me more than I ever will be able to teach them. It’s not that I’m not trying. I know that teaching them about life, faith, and love is my biggest duty. It’s just that some of their lessons to me have been so powerful that I can’t help but doubt my ability to match them. This is one of those lessons.

The majority of my life has been spent making plans and working to complete them. From elementary school on through West Point and law school; my teachers taught me that you had to define your goals or you would never achieve them. My coaches said that those goals should be taped up on my mirror so I would see them each morning as I brushed my teeth and each night before I went to bed.

I dutifully taped up the goals and eventually achieved some of them. But time and time again my best-laid plans shattered upon the anvil of reality. The complex world swirled by and around my fixed goals. A military career ended by injury at the moment that my country needed me. A business career stymied by technical problems in the product we were bringing to market. A writing career stunted by the brutal realities of the evolving publishing industry. A law career crippled by the fact that I didn’t care enough about the end state of corporate legal battles to ever master the field.

Then tragedy struck, I was in the right position with the right skill set to make a bigger difference than I ever could have imagined. If I had succeeded at any of those other fields, then I would not have been ready when I was truly needed. If I hadn’t had tried and failed at so many random occupations, I would’t have had the diverse skill set necessary to weave my way though the military bureaucracy and legal pitfalls that needed to be overcome along the way.

I had to face the stark reality that I was put in all of those positions by a higher power. My plans were destined to fail before they’d even been concocted. It’s a humbling and terrifying feeling to understand that you’re a pawn in a larger game and that it is a game beyond your comprehension. As one of Dostoevsky’s characters said in The Brothers Karamazov, “since I can’t understand even (Euclidian Geometry)…, I can’t expect to understand about God.”

So much of the world doesn’t seem to make sense. How can we not help but question the greater plan. In a world where a father is killed by an IED on the other side of the world from his children… Where illness or abuse can inflict a child before they’ve even said their first word… Where a man can spend his whole life trying to build up a company only to have it dashed by a world economic collapse… Where people will blow themselves up in a marketplace crowded with their neighbors in an effort to please God…

How do you try to navigate through a world that complex and disastrous?

I received the answer from my two little girls.

I was not prepared for parenthood in general. I was even less prepared for the long nights spent trying to get an overtired baby to quit screaming and go to sleep. I read the books and followed their tricks: everything from setting a sleep schedule, to swaddling, to rocking them in the same room as a running clothes dryer.

Some of these tricks worked to a degree. But they didn’t change the fact that I spent a lot of time with screaming infants in my arms. The longer they stayed up, the madder they became. I felt their frustration at their inability to make themselves feel better. They would struggle to move this way, then that way, then this way again. None of their attempts to improve their plight helped.

I knew that they were just tired. That the only way for them to feel better was for them to go to sleep. I wished that there was someway for me to impart that to them, but their young minds couldn’t comprehend what was really going on.

Each night, they would struggle in my arms until they finally went to sleep. Then I would walk them over to the bassinet and lay them down at total peace. The exact peace that they had wanted all along. They just didn’t know what they had to do to get it.

One of those late nights, I realized that we are all in the same position with God. We don’t understand what role we are supposed to play in this world or what good things can come out of our failures and miseries. We struggle, fight, and rant to try and accomplish the objectives that we think are critical.

We rail against the situation and lose ourselves in doubts, but eventually we have to give ourselves over to the knowledge that there is a higher power and that higher power will eventually drag us kicking and screaming to where we are supposed to be.

Our job is to do our best not to be a complete disaster along the way. I still have a lot to learn before I figure that trick out.

A Fool's Fool: Stop Thinking and Swim

Early Spring 2001

I sat down in the dark surf and put on my freediving fins. My spear rolled with the wave against my waist. A full moon cast its shimmering light through the inky water.

“You ready?” Jimmy Davis asked.

We were on the beach just behind his backyard on Oahu’s north shore. I’d fallen in love with freediving over the course of the past two months. I’d SCUBA dived before, but it didn’t compare to the feeling of strapping on massive fins and going as deep and far as you lungs could take you. This was my first night dive.

I flipped on the dive light, said yes, and followed him into the Pacific. The first hundred yards of water was shallow. At points, we had to scramble over the sharp volcanic rocks that lined the bottom. Then the ocean opened up.

I wasn’t ready for how dark it was. Surrounded by salt water with nothing to guide my way but a four-inch diameter dive light. Black water pushed against the little stream of white. I couldn’t help but think of the tiger sharks that frequented the area.

I couldn’t see Jimmy’s light. I panicked and surfaced. Remembering the mantra of “never separate from your dive buddy.” He was twenty yards away. I swam in his direction.

Eventually, I got more comfortable in the water. Swimming along the bottom. Fish of all sizes darted back and forth through the lava rock and coral. A massive sea turtle lay in a sandy patch. I floated over the serene relic from the age of the dinosaurs. Feeling at one with the living planet as never before.

Jimmy and I separated three more times before finally separating for good. It wasn’t on purpose, but it wasn’t possible to explore the dark waters and keep track of each other at the same time.

I breathed the tropical air through the snorkel and then launched myself down through rocks below. Silver fish shimmered past my light. Octopus tentacles danced away from me. I could feel the water rush by my skin as the long fins propelled me through the depths.

My lungs began to ache, crying for more air. I arched my back and swam upward. The top of my head slammed into a lava rock. A mix of pain and terror sparked through my body. I raised the dive light. It illuminated a rocky ceiling above me. My lungs screamed for relief.

My mind scrambled to assess the situation. It was clear that I’d swum into an enclosed rock formation. I didn’t know if it was a tunnel that would open up or a cave that would dead end. I didn’t know deep I was in the formation and therefore if turning around and trying to swim out would mean certain death.

I quieted my mind and swam forward. Fighting the fear that would devour through the remaining oxygen in my system. My fins moved left, right, left pushing me through the rock formation.

Eventually the rock above me opened up and I launched myself toward the air. I broke the surface and gasped the air into my screaming lungs. After twenty or so breaths, I realized that I was alive and started laughing with joy.

After calming down, I went back down. I was careful to stay above the rock formations. I dove for another half hour, then began to swim back towards the twinkling lights of shore. I swam and I swam, but the lights only seemed to get further away.

I caught my breath and tried to figure out what was going on. It was only after I’d stopped completely that I felt the tug of the current, pulling me away from shore. I dropped down again and began to swim with all had, trying to free myself from the current.

I surfaced. The lights were even further than before. I was trapped. The way forward had nothing to offer. I had to swim parallel to the shore with the flow of the current, hoping to swim out of the current.

I swam for ten more minutes and then tried again for shore. Still stick, being pushed out further. It was time for a decision, Keep pushing ahead towards shore or drop my weight and begin to float with the current. From what I heard anyone stuck in the current had bought themselves a one way seventy or so mile trip to Maui. If you didn’t have the strength to swim into the Maui shore, then you were headed to the open ocean.

I filled my lungs with air and dropped down in the water. I kicked and prayed, kicked and prayed. I surfaced and then went down again. Over and over. Eventually, I felt the fins gaining traction in the water. I pulled the air in through the snorkel and kicked.

I don’t know how long I was in the current, but I broke free and I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a more beautiful sight than the flicking lights from shore growing closer and closer.

I learned two lessons that night. The first is that there is a thousand ways for a fool to die on dry land and ten thousand in the water. The second is that sometimes you have to just keep going, beyond fear and beyond reason. There’s always a way back to shore as long as you don’t lose yourself in the situation and give up.