Month: December 2015

Faith and Fate

In recent years, I’ve been quite open about my faith. Faith has both graced my life and helped guide it.

I wouldn’t be the man I am today without my faith. Faith has forged the moral code that serves as a background for my actions, views and decisions. Faith has illuminated the road less traveled I’ve taken through my adult life. Faith has shown me wonder and amazement in the course of my travels and travails, and brought purpose to the otherwise robotic and mundane routine called everyday life.

But faith has not driven my life. Fate has.

It’s easy to misappropriate these terms. Culturally, faith is generally associated with good fortune, while fate is considered a dark and dubious term. One is tied with meaning, the other placed in lockstep with the cruelties of randomization.

But it’s not just simplistic and shortsighted to make these generalizations; it’s also plain wrong.

In truth, fate encompasses what happens to us in life. Faith encompasses how we respond to it.

***

On the day after Christmas, devastating tornadoes tore through the eastern suburbs of Dallas. Within moments, 11 people were dead, dozens others were hurt, and hundreds of houses were gone. In the wake of this heartbreaking devastation, someone undoubtedly thought, “How could God do this?”

But God didn’t do this.

The weather conditions were ripe for tornado development, and, lo and behold, a tornado exploded across a busy interstate and nearby residential neighborhood. It was fate that led to the devastation — people, houses and pets being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

That doesn’t make it any easier for us to swallow. So we look for the meaning, and, finding none, blame God and turn away from Him.

***

Devastating episodes like this illustrate the gulf we’ve built between faith and fate, as exposure to one serves to drive away the other. We believe that faith can help us repel wickedness, and by extension, cruel twists of fate. But when the darkest sides of fate turn our lives upside down, we repel faith.

But these two concepts are actually symbiotic.

Our faith anchors us in morality and serves as our compass. But without fate, we have nothing concrete to build off of.

Fate can knock us to the canvas without rhyme or reason, But faith allows us to rally behind our morality.

When we use the two together, we can live stronger, richer lives — even in the wake of events that rock our world.

***

If fate is what happens to us, and faith is how we respond, we must re-examine our cultural definition of meaning. We tend to attach this concept to actions, when we really should tie it to reactions.

This conceptual shift helps us view the world more accurately. It also forces us to face our fears, manifested in one sobering statement.

We can’t control what happens to us.

Scary, but true. We all want control over our lives and the events therein, but the forces of fate are stronger than our desires. What we can control is our response to the highs and lows fate throws our way. And we can use the meaning we draw from these reactions to strengthen and enrich our lives.

***

I believe all of this this, because I’ve lived it.

When I was a teenager, I had no idea my adult life would take the path it has. Fate hit me hard at times — at one point, I found myself lonely and frightened in a remote West Texas city; at another, I found myself living in a hotel room for three months as I looked for a marketing job — but faith was always there to guide me.

Faith helped me focus not on the actions fate had thrown at me, but what my reaction would be. In particular, faith helped keep me even-keeled, motivated and morally sound, even in the wake of hardships and setbacks. I subsequently drew value and meaning from my reactions to these experiences; as a result, I’m a stronger, wiser man today.

Don’t run from faith, or try and give fate the slip. Welcome both with open arms.

A Holiday Wish

The holidays are here.

It’s a time of joy, cheer, giving and indulgence. It’s a time when festive decorations light up the darkest and good tidings bring warmth to the biting winter chill (which seems to be conspicuously absent this year). This juxtaposition is what makes the holidays so special, but there’s another reason the timing of this season is so important.

As someone who’s battled depression at various points in my life, I know that the winter can be the most difficult time of the year. Depression can take root in the mind at any time, but when the days are short, cold and gray, it can have a more pronounced effect. Filling the darkest and shortest of days with the generosity, kindness and light that surround the holidays can help lift spirits that are otherwise weighed down by depression.

So this season, I have a wish for everyone. Somewhere between the Egg Nog and the Champagne, family and friends, gifts and Mistletoe, bring joy to someone who needs it. Someone for whom this season is not a luxury, but a necessity. Show you’re there. Show you care.

Make a difference in someone’s life with this simple act. This will not only bring a smile to your face, but it will warm your heart. Trust me.

Happy Holidays and God Bless.

Our Most Important Attribute

The most important measure of a person is the size of their heart.

Think about it.

The heart is where compassion, empathy, selflessness and love flow. When we express these feelings towards others, we build a positive community and make the world a better place.

Yes, the brain is important. And there are other body parts that all have their importance as well.

But I’ll take someone with a big heart over all of that.

One of my favorite movies of all time is Forrest Gump, for that very reason. Forrest is a man with a subpar IQ, but a heart that’s off the charts.

And we see that heart on display constantly. When Charlie ambushes his platoon in Vietnam, Forrest risks his life time and again to retrieve his wounded comrades. When his shrimp boat business takes off, he insists on giving Bubba’s mother her full share. Forrest never gives up on Lieutenant Dan or Jenny, even when others do.

It’s because of all of these actions that Forrest’s line late in the movie — “I may not be a smart man, but I know what love is.” — has such great resonance. So simple, but so poignant; Forrest has proved this point throughout his life.

We should all strive to be like Forrest Gump. To share our heart with others and positively impact their lives. For it will not only positively affect our lives in return, but it will also change the world.

During this season full of friends, family and faith, ask yourself one question:

How big can my heart be?

Rise Up Together

As I drove by a bank the other day, I noticed the Texas and American flags in front of it were at half-mast. By the time I reached the next red light, I had figured out which tragedy the half-mast gesture was referencing. That’s when I came to a truly depressing revelation.

It seems as if the flags are at half-mast more often than they’re flying high these days.

This is not normal. Furthermore, it shouldn’t be normal. We’re the greatest country in the world, a beacon of freedom and hope. We shouldn’t have to spend 30 seconds trying to figure out who we’re mourning today.

Mass shootings or terrorist attacks are a monthly occurrence in this nation. It’s something we’ve got to change, and I’ll be damned if I watch in silence any longer.

So let’s talk.

Every time a horrific act of mass violence breaks out, the general reaction seems to be the same. Shock, anger, depression, acceptance — all of the stages of grief are in play in some form, except bargaining. There’s usually a call for political action of some sort in there, but don’t confuse that with compromise. It’s more about taking a stand.

But turning to politics is a dead-end road. I’ve always believed the problem with politics is that Conservatives think they have the right answer and Liberals know they have the right answer. In truth, neither side does — making the dialogue between the two sides toxic in times like these, when tensions are high. Yet, when it comes to a response to the recent wave of bloodshed, the answer isn’t so clear-cut anyway, so let’s dig deeper.

Mass shootings exploit a flaw in the documentation our country is built upon. The right to bear arms is protected under the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution, but the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is protected under the Declaration of Independence. Mass shootings use one of our rights to callously deny another.

Sometimes the flaw can run even deeper. Religious expression is protected under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. But when religious extremists open fire on others, they use two our rights to deny the most fundamental one we all have.

That said, taking away the rights to religion and to bear arms won’t rid us of these tragedies. People have been killing each other since the time of Cain and Abel, and people have been using religion as an impetus for violence for nearly as long. The bad guys will find a way, regardless of which tools they have at their disposal. Where we fail, collectively, is letting them become the bad guys in the first place.

I believe that there is good in most of us. But we don’t show it enough. Selfishness, hate and deceit are but a few of the evil tendencies of humanity that are all too prevalent in our society. When the less glamorous side of our existence is on display in large numbers, these dark feelings can consume the weak minded to the point of committing terrible actions.

We must show the good in ourselves more often. Spewing hate and closed-mindedness at others only breeds violence. Selfishly denying assistance to those who need help only leads to tragedy.

The holidays are here. Let’s show the good in ourselves — the compassion, selflessness and universal acceptance that has made our society so great. Let us show love over hate, collectively. This will help quell the crimson tide of bloodshed more than any anti-gun legislation or plan for religious persecution by an imbecile Presidential candidate ever will. We not only can do this. We must do this.

Let’s rise up together.

Darkness In The Light

“I’m going to die.”

The thought raced through my head, over and over like the words on an electronic marquee board, as I sat on the gym floor. I stared blankly out the windows illuminated by bright sunshine, resigned to my fate. All around me, my classmates stared intently, as the faculty leaders told us that we were safe.

“That’s bullshit,” I thought. “Stop lying to us.”

Still, I stayed silent. It wasn’t my place to say a word; even if it were, what would I say?

Soon, it was back to the school day. I wandered to my next class, my body climbing the staircase but my soul halfway to the other side. Moments later, my teacher told us to call our parents and tell them that we were okay.

Still in a daze, I turned on my phone and called my mother. On the second ring, she answered, sounding worried. I told her what I had just heard, but didn’t believe — that I was alright and we were all safe. My mother told me she was glad to hear that, the palpable emotion in her voice knocking me back into reality.

As the shock wore off, I was hit with an avalanche of emotions I’d never experienced before, feelings that I’ll never be able to adequately put into words. At the age of 13, my life had changed; I was broken, and would never be whole again.

The date was September 11th, 2001.

***

It started as a normal Tuesday. It had rained the night before, but as I started my hour-long journey from the New York suburbs to my middle school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan — a trek that included a bus and two trains — the skies were clear and the air was warm. It was the kind of day that made a teenager long for the recently departed summer break; one you wanted to hold on to before the biting chill of fall set in.

As I sat in my history class an hour or so later, I was momentarily distracted by the sound of an airplane overhead — an unusual, but not unheard of occurrence. A few minutes later, it was on to a Physical Education class, and we headed out to Central Park to play soccer in the beautiful weather. As far as school days went, this one didn’t seem so bad.

But as we left the park, I could tell something was wrong. The streets were nearly empty; only a few people were on the move. A woman approached our gym teacher, who was nearly twice her height. The teacher leaned over as she whispered something to him; when he turned away he looked pale. I knew this teacher relatively well; he was also one of my baseball coaches and a pillar of positive energy. I’d never seen him so shaken.

That’s when I learned the horrifying news: The plane I’d heard flying over the school an hour earlier had crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center, just 7 miles south of where I was standing. Moments later, I learned that another plane had hit the south tower. It was apparent that the city was under attack, and doomsday scenarios sprung into the forefront of my mind; even with so much still unknown, I was convinced whoever was responsible wouldn’t stop until they burned down the entire city. There was nothing I could do to avoid the inevitable.

As the entire school gathered in the gym for an impromptu assembly, I was convinced this day would be my last on Earth.

***

After I got off the phone with my mother, and returned to my English class, I gained some clarity. We learned that terrorists had hijacked commercial airliners and intentionally flew the planes into New York’s tallest buildings. Other terrorists had flown a plane into the Pentagon, and there were a few reports of a plane crash in rural Pennsylvania. New York’s public transit system shut down, and the National Guard quickly blocked all the bridges and tunnels around Manhattan. I had nowhere else to go.

Two hours later, my father picked me up. He was teaching at another school a few blocks away at the time of the attacks, but he had to stay there until the parents of his students came to collect their kids.

When my father showed up at my school, I didn’t want to leave. I had finally realized that I was indeed safe at school. Who knew what would happen if I left? But there I was, moments later, walking down empty Manhattan sidewalks, hardly saying a word. Soon, my father and I were heading back to the suburbs in a car driven by his colleague’s mother.

As the car approached a toll bridge at the top of Manhattan, a heavily armed National Guardsman stood by the tollbooth. “Go on,” he said. “Get out of here.” It seemed like something out of a movie, and it gave me chills.

Around 1:30 that afternoon, my father and I met up with my mother and sister in the Bronx, at what would later be my high school. We took the short drive home and turned on CNN. For hours, I watched Aaron Brown give the latest developments on America’s darkest day, his voice weighted by somberness and mounting exhaustion. Eventually, my parents and sister went to bed. I stayed awake, worried that I wouldn’t wake up the next morning — and worried about what would happen if I did. Eventually, exhaustion took over; I shut off the TV and crawled into bed.

***

September 12th, 2001

I awoke confused, angry, disturbed and hurt. School was cancelled for the day, giving me plenty of time to think. So much was unknown, but one thing was abundantly clear: My life would never be the same again.

***

September 21st, 2001

Within a week of the attacks, the authorities reopened some of the sidewalks of Lower Manhattan. My father and I wanted to get a firsthand sense of what had happened, so we took a train to Chinatown (where the police barricades were) and walked a mile down Broadway to Ground Zero.

There was no way to prepare for what we saw next. A plume of debris filled the air, and the wreckage was six stories high. My father touched a scaffold three blocks from the World Trade Center and discovered the dust stuck to it was an inch thick. It looked like a war zone.

Soon, horror gave way to disgust. As we made our way down Broadway, I saw Don King standing on the other side of the police barricade. He was wearing an expensive jacket adorned with the Statue of Liberty and promoting his next fight. It was selfish, callous and rude for King to use a national tragedy as his promotional stage, but there he was just the same; I’ll never forgive Don King for that, as long as I live.

***

Time heals wounds, but some are just too darned big.

As the days and months passed, I returned to my normal routine at school. But everything felt different. I knew the immense pain I was feeling would take time to heal, but it seemed like things were only getting tougher.

I thought about what happened on September 11th, and all that was lost, each day. But in the first few years after the tragedy, my thoughts would quickly turn to questions:

  • What can bring closure after a catastrophic tragedy?
  • Can you get PTSD from watching people jump out of buildings and get buried by debris, even if you only see it on television?
  • When will we truly be able to feel safe again?
  • Will those responsible for turning our world upside down ever fully pay for what they’ve done?

Answers were fleeting, and the pain never subsided.

***

Eventually, I came to a sobering truth.

There is no closure for a tragedy like this, and there never will be one.

I don’t know when exactly I discovered this, but it marked a significant turning point. I had to live with the fact that my life would forever be changed, that I would forever have a hole in my heart. A part of me was stolen on September 11th; instead of letting it go, I had been wasting years trying to get it back.

A strange thing happened when I came to this revelation — I found solace in it. The pain of the memories was raw as ever, but my soul was no longer in a constant state of restlessness. Somewhere along the line I found God, and faith has been a significant part of my life ever since.

***

May 2nd, 2011

I was sitting in my apartment in Midland, Texas, on a Sunday night, winding down before another stressful and exhausting week as a producer at KMID Big 2 News when my cell phone rang. It was KMID’s weekend anchor on the other end of the line.

“Dylan, our troops killed Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan. I’m trying to get more information on this for the newscast, but can you update the station’s website?”

I thought I’d misheard something, but she assured me that yes, Osama Bin Laden had been killed. Soon, I was watching ABC News and writing a detailed recap for the KMID website — from my couch. Journalism at its finest.

Once the story was up and the breaking news rush was over, I took a moment to think about what had just happened. I didn’t even know Bin Laden was still alive at the time, but I felt his death at the hands of our forces provided a bit of relief. Although this might sound vengeful and immoral, I felt that the killing of Bin Laden was justified (and ironically, I was watching an episode of Justified when I got the call about it). A man who brought so much suffering to our world, who ruined so many lives — that man deserved to have that suffering turned on him.

I thought about all this. Then, I thought about the events of September 11th. I prayed about it, went to bed, and slept better than I had in 10 years.

***

November 22nd, 2011

My plane touched down at LaGuardia Airport on a gloomy November day. I was up in New York from Texas for the Thanksgiving holiday. When my parents picked me up at the airport, they sprung a surprise on me: I wasn’t heading to their house.

My mother dropped my father and I off at a subway station; we rode the train to Lower Manhattan and headed toward the newly unveiled 9/11 Memorial at the World Trade Center site. Where the towers once stood now lay two square reflecting pools, surrounded by waterfalls and the names of those who perished in or around each tower. Quite fittingly, it was raining as we walked around the site.

My father and I hardly said a word as we looked at the water rushing into the memorial, both from the sky and the waterfalls. The silence wasn’t unusual; as a teacher, my father had to explain the unexplainable to a group of frightened sixth graders on September 11th, 2001, and the subject had been mostly taboo for him in the 10 years after that.

At one point, I kneeled by the memorial to think about the victims, and pray for their loved ones. As I stood back up, my father surprised me by asking for a hug. Suddenly, we were talking about what had been off-limits for so long — the events of that fateful day, our intertwined memories of the aftermath, the emotions we had to deal with in the years afterward and our separate quests for closure. After a few more moments, I asked if he was ready to go. “Not yet,” he said. We hugged a second time, each choking back tears. It was one of the most emotional moments of my life.

***

December 26th, 2014

As the late afternoon sunshine slowly faded away from the 9/11 Memorial site, and my father and I made our way into the newly-opened museum on the grounds. While I’m not often a museumgoer, it was important to me to get some new perspective on the tragedy that has so deeply affected my life.

I knew visiting the museum would bring back some gut-wrenching memories, but I had no idea how raw those emotions would be. Archive news footage, police dispatcher recordings — they all brought back feelings from half my life ago, the most harrowing and traumatic memories of September 11th, which I’d long since buried. When I came upon recordings of cell phone conversations between passengers on the hijacked planes and their loved ones — calls to say goodbye — I found myself paralyzed by grief.

Visiting the 9/11 Memorial Museum was one of the most difficult things I’ve done in my life. I left nearly as broken as I felt in the days after the attacks; I essentially dragged myself up the escalator and out the door when it was time to leave.

But I wouldn’t have traded any of that for a second. If you don’t have a full understanding of all that’s been lost, you can never be truly found.

***

November 27, 2015

The last remnants of the morning fog lifted over New York Harbor and Jamaica Bay as I watched through glass windows more than 1500 feet above the street. It was as if the veil of the past was being lifted to show the future.

As I explored the One World Observatory — atop the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere, now towering over the World Trade Center site — I felt many different emotions. Fear was not one of them.

Those that took so much from myself — and so many others — 14 years prior had still failed in their ultimate quest. My very presence, high above the ground at the very site they had once targeted was proof of both our collective resilience and the totality of their failure.

But even with my symbolic journey of resilience and recovery now seemingly complete, one thought permeated in my mind:

Although the view is stunning, this building shouldn’t be here. The Twin Towers should.

All we’ve gained doesn’t wipe out all we’ve lost; it simply reinforces it.

***

“Mama said you gotta put the past behind you so you can move forward.”

Forrest Gump is one of my favorite movies of all-time, filled with wisdom I use in my everyday life. But this is not one of them.

I will never put September 11th behind me. Not a day goes by where I don’t think about the events of that fateful day. For more than 5,000 days, these reflections have made me both stronger and weaker. The hole in my heart is ever present, the emotions still raw, and the events of that fateful day never forgotten.

But more than that, I don’t think I’d ever want to put September 11th behind me. The past has helped me move forward, as the events of that day have transformed my life ever since. I don’t take a single day for granted, and I strive to treat others with grace and kindness whenever possible. While I lost all traces of childish innocence forever on September 11th, the actions I’ve taken moving forward have helped shape me into the man I am today.

Coping with the memories of that day hasn’t gotten easier. I will carry the burden for the rest of my life. But while I will never be whole again, I am finally at peace.