The Unit – Part 1

When I was less than a year old, I slept in a wooden crib on the living room rug, right in front of a bookcase with glass doors. There were big windows to my left that looked out through the maple trees, and beyond the valley were the mountains to the South. I remember the sunlight and the sound of leaves in the late summer breeze. With my dad running the farm, my grandfather maintaining the equipment, and my mom taking care of the house and my brother, I had plenty of time to stare out the windows and up at the antique books on the shelves. And I had a question.

I remember with great clarity the frustration of not being able to verbalize the conundrum that had me caught in a cognitive circle. I am here, you are there, he is over there – that much we have established. But why can I only see out of my eyes? Why is this life played out through only my experiences? In short – why am I at the center of this universe that I just entered?

The question wasn’t megalomaniacal; I was honestly confused. I just wanted to know why, considering we all have to live together, we were not able to physically experience life through other people, but instead were trapped in just one body with two little light holes. But I was too young to use language, so I couldn’t ask my mom. And even when I arrived at a point in my development where I could form the questions, they never came out right. So I never got an answer.

As I entered my teens, I started to pick up on the fact that not everyone has this question in their mind. Most people did not see things the way that I did – that everything that looks separate and distinct is actually just another side of the same thing. People in my school would do things that were deliberately destructive, not realizing that the ripples of pain they caused were more than just dropping an ice cube in a glass – it was a huge muddy rock thrown into a public pool. It’s not that these kids were bad people. They simply weren’t aware of the connections.

And I was jealous.

I saw for the first time the advantages of being self contained. Freedom from being worried about how others feel. Independence from people who tried to enforce their beliefs on you. Power to make choices that benefitted only you.

Then, on April 9, 1986, when I was 13 years old, I was in a car crash. The vehicle that I was riding in with my grandfather struck a tree at over 60 MPH on a curvy mountain road. We both walked away, but I was never the same. The scar on my forehead took 9 stitches and most of my innocence. It was then that I became determined to live for myself.

For most of high school and then into college, I did the things that all kids do – I worried about how my skin looked, I tried to look cool at parties, I goofed around when I knew a girl was nearby. But I was disconnected and drifting. I never settled on a major. I left school twice. Even the one meaningful relationship I had in college only existed in the microcosm of student life; though deep and wonderful for almost two years, it quickly fell apart when I left. My father died of pancreatic cancer. I returned home to help care for my grandfather; he died within months. I felt like I was grasping at vapors – not understanding what I was after, and not getting it, either.

I shuffled along through a string of dubious employment choices and unhelpful relationships before finally making a running dive at age 25 into Corporate America. I started as a helpdesk drone at GE, and worked my way into a traveling engineer job. And I was good at it. I worked problems that no one else would touch, traveled places no one wanted to go. When I got back from a job, I would buy seafood salad at the store, and go back to my apartment and have a meal and smoke Lucky Strikes until it was time for bed.

It was to be the water receding before the coming tsunami.