Category: Reflections

Generous Indulgence

We pulled up to the bakery in a 1985 Toyota Corolla. A boxy, tan sedan with a stick shift transmission and seat belts that only went over the passengers’ laps.

It was the ultimate nondescript 1980s car. But this was the early 1990s, so it was even more obscure.

We all got out of the car — my grandmother, my younger sister and I. And as we walked to the bakery door, my grandmother gave us a friendly warning.

Now remember, kids, she said. Don’t let grandma get a Danish, cause they make grandma fat.

Instructions in hand, we walked inside. My sister chose a rainbow cookie from the display case, while I selected a black and white cookie.

For the uninitiated, a black and white cookie is basically heaven in a baked good. It’s made of cake filling and topped with hardened chocolate and vanilla icing. And as a child, I was obsessed with them.

I was salivating, imagining the taste of that sugary goodness, when I heard my grandmother’s voice calling out to the bakery associate.

And one Danish, please.

My sister and I turned to my grandmother, horrified.

Grandma, no! we called out in unison. You told us not to let you get a Danish!

My grandmother smiled back at us. I know, but they’re so good! I can’t resist.

Over the years, this pattern would play out over and over on our trips to the bakery. In fact, it soon became a running joke between my sister and I. Grandma’s going to tell us not to let her get the Danish, but still order it anyway.

This scene was my grandmother in a nutshell. Determined, yet indulgent.

 

My grandmother always had a sweet tooth. My sister and I would stay at her house about one weekend a month, sleeping on in our mother’s childhood room.

When we woke up in the morning, our grandmother would serve us Entenmann’s donuts — chocolate iced goodies stuffed with cake filling. She stored them in the refrigerator, which made them delightfully crisp as we took our first bite.

It was a decidedly unhealthy way to start the day. But my grandmother didn’t care. The smiles on our faces made it all worthwhile.

For dessert, we’d all have ice cream — even if the sugar kept us up past an acceptable bedtime. My grandmother loved ice cream. So it only seemed sensible to her that we’d be allowed to have it too.

These were only a few of the ways she spoiled us. She would also get us gifts and let us watch our favorite movies on VHS tapes over and over again. Her reward for all this generosity was the sheer joy in our faces.

And yet, these seemingly small gestures were far from empty for her. They represented fulfilled dreams.

I’ve written a lot before about my grandfather. My mother’s father was a World War II veteran, a renowned storyteller, and one of my heroes. Black and white photos of him in his Navy uniform adorn my home, and I continually feel his presence in my life.

But my grandmother has shaped my life as profoundly as my grandfather did. And in a roundabout way, I’ve helped define her legacy as well.

My grandmother was raised in Brooklyn during the Great Depression. The youngest of three children in an impoverished family, she didn’t have much growing up. But she did have grand aspirations for herself.

My grandmother did well in school and went on to get both undergraduate and graduate degrees. She worked for some time as a phone operator, connecting lines for phone calls in the days before automatic dialing. But she ultimately spent decades as a speech therapist in the New York City Public School system.

Even as I share this fact, I can’t help but chuckle. For my grandmother had a thick New York accent, and a knack for mispronouncing things. On trips to the zoo, my father would make fun of how she pronounced the name for a certain type of buffalo. 

It’s bison, he would say. Not Bye-sawn.

Nevertheless, my grandmother did well in the role over the years.

Still, my grandmother’s greatest passion was not her work. It was her family. My mother, my sister and I represented her direct legacy — particularly when it came to education. She knew of the doors that education provided her, and wanted us to realize similar opportunities.

We never lost sight of that fact. We couldn’t.

When my mother earned her doctorate, she treated the achievement as if it was my grandmother’s as much as her own. And when my sister and I earned our undergraduate degrees, my grandmother traveled all the way to Miami and Chicago, respectively, to cheer us across the finish line.

After all those indulgences we received, it felt great to indulge her. To see the sheer joy on her face.

Several years ago, my parents and my grandmother took a trip Dallas. My grandfather had recently passed away. And while his loss was still raw, it gave my grandmother a chance to visit me in Texas — which she had hoped to do for years.

As we walked down a sun splashed sidewalk next to the Dallas Museum of Art, my grandmother implored me to continue my education.

I had toyed with the idea of going to graduate school for years. But I didn’t want to quit my job to do so. And the prospect of joining a professional program — working by day and taking classes in the evening — seemed too daunting. So, I kept delaying, and delaying, and delaying.

Now, my grandmother was calling my bluff.

A business degree would do a lot for you, she mentioned. I won’t be around forever. I’d like to see you get started.

Her words resonated. This wasn’t the playful Don’t let me get a Danish routine. This was serious.

So, at long last, I started the process. I scoped out several local business schools. I took the GMAT. I applied to schools, and I earned acceptance letters.

And a little over a year after our conversation, I started my grad school journey. My grandmother was excited, and that elation kept me going — even as I struggled to return to my old educational routines.

Then, on the first day of my second semester, I learned that my grandmother had died of a heart attack. Suddenly, my mission changed. Getting an MBA was no longer about elevating my career or making my grandmother proud. It was about honoring her legacy.

The next 18 months were as grueling as they were enlightening. But I powered through, a man possessed. And ultimately, I earned my Masters in Business Administration — with high grades to boot.

At the reception following graduation, my parents shared a word with me.

We’re so proud of you, they said. But your grandmother would be so proud of you as well.

I let the words sink in. And as I did, I thought of all I had been given that got me to this moment.

I reminisced about the sweets — the black and white cookies, the Entenmann’s donuts, the ice cream. I remembered all the gifts I’d received — the toys, books and puzzles.

All that generosity had taught me the value of sharing and of giving. And throughout business school, I had tried to pay it forward to my classmates by helping them prepare for tests and assignments.

But most of all, I considered all the time I had with my grandmother. That was the greatest gift of all. And by fulfilling her dreams, I hoped I had made the most of it.

Not long ago, my sister sent me an audio file. It was of all of us — my sister, my parents, my grandmother and myself — sitting around the dining room table, telling stories about my grandfather.

The stories were entertaining, and many of them made my chuckle. But what stood out most was hearing my grandmother’s voice again.

I miss my grandmother.

I miss her kindness. I miss her smile. I even miss her occasional naivete.

All that is gone now. Or is it?

For everywhere I look, my grandmother’s memory abounds. Whenever I pass a bakery window, come across a word she mispronounced or see my diplomas on the wall, it’s as if she’s still here.

Most of all, the principles that my grandmother espoused continue to endure. The value of opportunity. The love of learning. And the indulgence of generosity.

It’s my responsibility to continue spreading those principles. And I plan on doing so for as long as I am able.

Roots and Branches

Where do our origins lie?

It’s a complicated question.

There’s the biblical explanation, with the tales of the Garden of Eden. There’s the scientific explanation, which ties us back to prehistoric Africa. And there’s the literal explanation, which links us with the community where we entered the world.

Each explanation covers one angle of our origins. So, it’s hard to fully dispel any of them.

And yet, none of them truly provide us the satisfaction we desire.

For when we ask this question, we’re looking for a compelling narrative. A story with a cathartic ending.

So, we turn to genealogy kits. To old photographs. To family heirlooms and documents faded by the hands of time.

And we organize it all into a system of roots and branches. Of family trees, tribal allegiances, and cultural identities.

By weaving this yarn, we hope to learn more about our ancestors. But quite often, we’re also seeking to find something within ourselves.

I’m a longtime Texan.

I’ve lived in the Lone Star State for more than a decade, and I’ve felt more at home between the Rio Grande and the Red River than anywhere else.

And yet, I’m not a native Texan. I wasn’t born here, I didn’t grow up here, and I didn’t go to college here.

In fact, prior to moving to Texas, I’d spent my entire life on the eastern seaboard, in a completely different cultural environment.

So, why has Texas felt so familiar to me? Why have I felt so at home here since just about Day 1?

I’ve pondered this question for quite a while. But eventually, the answer became clear: My father.

Now, to be clear, my father’s only connection to Texas is me. He went much of his life without ever setting foot here.

But my father also has ties to the heartland. For he was born in Missouri.

This was as much as matter of circumstance as anything else. When my father was born, my grandfather was attending medical school in the Show-Me State. And my grandparents had no other relatives living west of the Mississippi River at the time. But regardless the context, Missouri is the place where my father spent the earliest months of his life.

My father has no memories of those days. The family moved to Michigan before his second birthday, and then to Pennsylvania before he turned four. My father lived in the Philadelphia area through college, and he’s spent his entire adult life in New York. So, his own narrative — his experiences, memories and perspective — it all has a distinctly Northeastern tilt.

And yet, when I was growing up, my father would occasionally throw out a passing reference to his Missouri origins. He would pronounce it as Miz-OR-uh, just as he claimed the locals do. And occasionally, he’d host our neighbor — a Missouri native — for a barbecue in our backyard. My father and our neighbor would drink beer and talk late into the night about life far from the big city.

I should have recognized how ridiculous this all was — my father waxing poetic about a life he had barely experienced. But I never did.

Instead, I started to view my father’s time in the heartland as part of him. As a story that had been cut off mid-sentence.

And so, when I moved to Texas to work in broadcast television, I viewed it as more than a career decision. It was a chance for me to pick up the narrative my father had started. The narrative of life in the heartland.

Living that narrative was my mission and my purpose. Falling for Texas the way I ultimately did  — that was just gravy.

Yet, even as my life transformed in the best of ways, something was still nagging at me. The  narrative of my father’s origins still felt as open-ended as ever.

Fortunately, it wouldn’t be for long.

On a temperate August afternoon some years ago, I strode up a jet bridge at Lambert International Airport in St. Louis. I was fresh off the plane from Texas, taking my first steps over Missouri soil.

Inside the terminal, my father was waiting for me. His flight from New York had arrived moments earlier. And that meant he could greet me at the gate, instead of baggage claim.

As I looked at my father, a rush of emotions flowed through me.

This was the first time he’d been back in Missouri in 50 years — since that day the family packed up and moved east.

He was a toddler then. Now, he was a middle-aged man with gray in his beard. And here I was, bearing witness to this historic moment.

If my father also felt sentimental about all this, he didn’t say so. In fact, neither of us mentioned much about it the rest of the trip. There was no time for that.

We were slated to visit both St. Louis and Kansas City over the course of that weekend. We had tickets to baseball games in each city, along with plans to visit the Budweiser Brewery, the Gateway Arch and a few other sights. In fact, our schedule was packed so tight that we didn’t even consider taking a dogleg to the town where my father was born.

But even if the reunion tour wasn’t quite as advertised, that first moment still sticks with me. That sensation of arriving in a new place, while somehow feeling as if you’re returning back home.

There was nothing quite like it.

As I look back on all of this, I find myself perplexed.

What drew me to the narrative of my father’s origins? And why haven’t I been able to let that fascination go?

After all, I have no natural affinity for Missouri on its face. I don’t fantasize about Toasted Ravioli. I haven’t read Mark Twain in ages. And the St. Louis Cardinals haven’t stolen my heart — they’ve only broken it.

This dissonance is natural. For I represent the branches in my father’s life story. And those branches are far removed from the roots.

And yet, a connection remains. A connection that solely exists because of who my father is and what he means to me.

It matters that the man who raised me, believed in me from day one and challenged me to be my best took his first steps on Missouri soil. That he uttered his first words there. That he breathed in that fresh prairie air, just as I do all these years later.

His roots might not be my roots. But they’re part of my legacy.

So, forget the biblical or scientific explanations. Throw away logic and labels.

I am my father’s son. The heartland will always be where my origins lie.

Lone Star

The building was nondescript.

Single story. Concrete walls. A smooth facade near the roof painted a grayish blue.

It was just like so many shopping centers and strip malls across America.

Only this one wasn’t home to a retail store, a restaurant or a barbershop. Instead, the signage on the façade read Midland County Annex.

I walked through the front door, flanked by my father.

The inside looked like a bank, with several partitioned service counters, a number of security cameras, and a line of waiting customers. The only things missing were the plexiglass and the heavy steel vaults. There were no hordes of cash to protect here.

After a few minutes in line, we found ourselves at a counter across from a clerk named Hannah.

She was young and pretty, with brown eyes and dark hair. And unlike so many people who worked in government offices, she dressed in style.

My father and I explained that I was new in town. I would needed to get my car re-registered. I would also need to get it re-titled.

Hannah mentioned that she was new to the area as well. She had been living in one of the bigger cities across the state — Dallas, Austin, Houston, I can’t remember which — but she had moved west to help take care of an ailing family member. Suddenly the paradox of seeing a young woman like her working in the county annex made perfect sense.

A few minutes later, after exchanging some paperwork and a few personal checks, I walked out of the annex with a registration sticker and two new license plates. The plates read TEXAS across the top.

In the parking lot, my father fastened the new plates to my vehicle and added the new registration sticker.

It was all a mundane, bureaucratic exercise. But that moment, in the parking lot under the blistering heat of the midday sun, was an inflection point in my life.

It was July 9, 2010. And now, I was officially a Texan.

I wasn’t born in Texas, but I got here as fast as I could.

Those are the words of a bumper sticker that can be found on vehicles across the Lone Star State.

Many have joked that this sticker was made for me. My parents even bought me one.

But truth be told, that statement didn’t apply to me for much of my early years.

I was a suburban kid. Growing up in the Northeast, I had an affinity for the big cities. The knowledge that others were nearby gave me comfort.

When I would go on trips to the country, I would be terrified by the silence and the darkness. I worried that a predator would attack me under the cover of night. Or that I’d be stranded in the wilderness with no one to help me.

In my mind, Texas represented that wilderness. The stereotypes all painted it as vast, rustic and rural. And I wanted no part of that.

But soon enough, things started to change. When I was in middle school, my family went on a trip to the Grand Canyon. That vacation led me to fall in love with the southwest.

Then, in college, I shared an off-campus house with a friend from Houston. I visited her over spring break and went to the Houston Rodeo.

I was immediately hooked. I was in awe of how big Houston was, how friendly people were and how amazing all the food was. After that trip — my first ever trip to Texas — the Lone Star State was suddenly on my radar.

I returned to the Lone Star State twice more in the next couple of years. One was a short trip with my father and the other was for student media conference. By the end of that second trip, I started thinking of Texas as a place I might move to after college. But since I was completing a TV journalism degree, I would likely end up wherever the job opportunities led me.

That turned out to be Midland, in the heart of West Texas’ oil country. And now, a mere two months after my graduation, here I was. In the parking lot of the Midland County Annex, with two shiny new license plates on my car.

I was giddy. I was excited. But I had no idea what to expect.

That was probably for the best.

“Some folks look at me and see a certain swagger, which in Texas is called ‘Walking’.” – George W. Bush

Texas is a bold place. But if you don’t play your cards right, it can be a lonesome place too.

My early days on the dusty western plains felt desolate. I had an apartment, a TV news job and access to the services I needed. But I didn’t know a soul.

So, I would venture out on my own. I’d try the restaurants in town. I’d lounge by the pool. And I’d go to the ballgame or the rodeo.

Connecting with the culture of my new home was part of my job as a TV journalist. But I was already fond of the cuisine and recreational staples of the region. So, cultural immersion became something of a passion project. It helped me quell the feelings of isolation.

Then, one sweltering summer night, I passed out from dehydration at a Minor League baseball game. I ended up in the Emergency Room across town, getting fluids through an IV.

I had arrived at the hospital in an ambulance. So, once I was discharged, I had to walk 4 miles across town in the middle of the night to retrieve my car and head home.

As I made that walk, I realized the depths of my vulnerability. The ordeal had outlined just how tenuous my connection with my new home was. I felt both obsolete and hopeless.

Fortunately, that feeling didn’t last long. For when my colleagues found out what happened, they quickly exchanged cell phone numbers with me. Don’t ever feel you’re on your own here, they told me. We’re here to help.

Soon enough, I was hitting the town with them, and getting to know the reporters and producers at the other TV stations. Sometimes, we even went on weekend trips to other parts of the state.

After some initial stumbles, I was forming real roots in the area.

I might not have been born or raised in Texas. I might not have experienced the glory of Friday night football games or the pageantry of homecoming as a high school student. I might not have hung out at the local Dairy Queen as a teenager, because there was nothing better to do.

But even absent all of those experiences, I realized then that I had forged a deep connection. It was no longer a formality for me to call myself a Texan. Texas had become an indelible part of me.

Cause no matter how big it storms, I know I can find me a place that’s warm. The sun is shining somewhere in Texas. – Jason Boland

About three years after I first put my Texas plates on my car, I pulled into a parking space in a suburban apartment complex outside Dallas.

I climbed a flight of stairs approached the door of my new apartment. Then I turned the key.

I had made the transition from the plains of oil country to the big city. And, in doing so, I’d started over.

Once again, I was starting over in a place where I only know a scant few people. Once again, I would have to work to set down roots.

But this time, I didn’t have to grapple with what it meant to become a Texan. I already was one.

Even if my zip code had changed, this was still home. Knowing this gave me the confidence to build connections in the newest chapter of my life.

And in recent years, I’ve done just that. I’ve made a new slew of friends in greater Dallas and taken the reins of my university’s local alumni chapter. I’ve also built a marketing career and earned my MBA from a business school in Dallas.

The roots that started out west have solidified during my time in North Texas.

As I write this, I am nearing the 10 year mark as a Texan.

I generally don’t care for milestones, but this one is different.

The world has changed a lot in my first decade in Texas. I moved here in the midst of a recession. Years of prosperity followed. But now, we’re battling another recession — along with an oil bust and a global pandemic.

I’ve changed a lot in the past decade as well. I’m older, wiser and more self-assured now than I was when I first crossed the state line.

But some things haven’t changed. I still love Texas and am committed to making it my home for years to come.

I might not wear my boots quite as often these days. And I might not eat quite as much brisket or Mexican food as I once did. But Texas is still as much a part of me as ever.

I’m looking forward to the next decade here in my slice of heaven. And, God-willing, many more to come.

Texas is home. And I am oh so grateful for that.

Faded Glory

It was so much better back then.

This is the great lament. The pang of regret, of longing, of melancholy nostalgia that eats at many of us from time to time.

When the present seems uncertain or uncomfortable, it’s all too natural to look backward. To rewind to a moment that seems more familiar and less scary. To gaze upon the shiny glow of that moment and believe in its superiority.

But as the saying goes, All that glitters is not gold.

When I look at the world around me, I tend to take the long view.

After all, the structures around us are built to last. Highways, homes and infrastructure have been designed to stand the test of time. And the average life expectancy in the developed world is going up too.

Yes, there are notable exceptions to these standard measures. But on the whole, things seem to be designed for the long-haul. And so, I focus on how we can continue to better ourselves over an extended time period.

But even as I stare toward the horizon, I’m keenly aware of what lies 6 inches from my nose. The short-term might not be my main focus, but it still matters.

In recent times, that fact has been more evident than ever.

A dangerous virus has forced us to upend our patterns of social interaction. A recession has left millions without an income. And longstanding tensions from race relations and political divisiveness have threatened to boil over.

The sun may still be shining in America. But it’s been hard to feel the warm glow.

As I’ve watched the short-term outlook deteriorate, I’ve found myself yearning for better days. Not in the uncertain future. But in the distant past.

I’ve found myself nostalgic for the 1990s.

The 1990s. What a time it was.

I was only a kid back then, but I recall things being harmonious. There didn’t seem to be as imminent threats out there. And there didn’t appear to be as much division and despair as what’s commonplace these days.

We could just live back then. At least that’s the way I remember it.

But take a wider view, and it’s clear that my rosy memories of that era are incomplete.

For one thing, there was still plenty of division. It was just underground. The Internet as we know it was in its nascent stages. And with no social media channels or smartphones, it was all but impossible for the divisive bickering of that era to reach today’s levels of public consciousness.

For another thing, there was plenty of despair to be found. While the United States government was running a budget surplus, unemployment numbers were often still above 5 percent. Plenty of people were poor, hungry and without a path to a better tomorrow. The angst that bands like Nirvana channeled in their music those days was real.

But these facts weren’t hitting me in the face at that time. For I was in a middle-class household under the care of  attentive parents. I was insulated from the darkness of those days.

Well, mostly.

My family did get the print version of the New York Times. And on my way to scanning the sports section, I would see the front page headlines.

The partisan bitterness during President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial. Instances of racial profiling amongst the New Jersey state troopers. The horrific murder of James Byrd, who was chained to a pickup truck by racists in rural Texas and dragged for nearly three miles.

I would look at these stories in horror. But after a day or two, the routine of life would kick in — school, homework, family dinner — and I would forget all about the ugliness that lurked all around me.

There is no blissful ignorance. Not anymore.

Recent events have laid bare the disharmony of life. The gulf of distrust between us. The presence of vile hatred in pockets of society. And the inequality of opportunity.

In the past several years, we’ve been asked to part with our rooted assumptions. To change our behavior in order to promote equity and ensure safety.

We should be up for the challenge. After all, this task has been asked of us for the entirety of the millennium. Or at least since the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

And yet, we’d still rather escape to a rosy memory than tackle the beast in our midst.

Even as that rosy memory remains illustrative fiction.

Hindsight may be 20-20. But the benefit of clarity comes at the cost of context.

It may be easy to look back on a previous era and call it friendlier. But if we could hop in Doc Brown’s DeLorean and travel back there, the situation on the ground would look much different.

I may be look happily on the 1990s now. But truth be told, I wasn’t all that happy back then. I was saddled with anxiety and battling depression. My joyful memories help hide the acute pain I felt in that moment.

And I wasn’t alone. Plenty of people with more life experience than me were also miserable. And they yearned for an era that had passed them by. Even in the afterglow of the Iron Curtain’s collapse, many didn’t feel the present was a step forward.

This pattern has continued to perpetuate. In the social media age, people like to brand each year the Worst Year Ever. This branding stuck in 2009, when Michael Jackson died unexpectedly and a recession decimated the economy. But such a moniker also stuck in 2010, 2011, 2012, and so on.

In the fog of the moment, we are incapable of finding the right does of perspective. And that can become a major problem.

The moment now facing us is unprecedented.

It’s uncomfortable to have to abandon such hallmarks as social interaction or in-person entertainment. It’s disconcerting to think that a trip to a grocery store could ultimately kill us. And it’s excruciating to stumble through the mist with no idea when this moment will be over.

Just about no one is looking at this era with a smile on their face.

But we can do better than seeking an escape.

We can search for the silver linings. We can build for a brighter future. We can focus on our actions and mute our laments.

We can reshape our situation in a manner we can be proud of for years to come.

Nothing’s stopping us from doing this. Nothing but ourselves.

So, let’s break free of the hamster wheel.

The past might be comforting. But the present is still being written. And the future is up for grabs.

Let’s seize the moment.

Home Away

The faded light of dawn appeared out of the airplane window, barely illuminating a dark gray wall of mountains.

There were no houses, no lights. Just the mountains, surrounded in early morning solitude.

I had no idea where I was, only where I was headed. And I had no idea what to expect when I got there.

Some time later, the plane touched down in Santiago, Chile. I groggily made my way through passport control and customs, still weary from the overnight flight. I quickly knocked the rust off my Spanish as I attempted to locate the point person for my study abroad program.

I had never met this man. I just had a name and a phone number. Fortunately, I found him a short time later.

After a few more students made their way through customs, we all got into a van and embarked on a 90-minute journey to the Pacific Coast.

All of this was new to me. I had never been to South America before. And I’d never traveled abroad alone.

Still, as we made our way through arid landscapes and coastal mountain passes, something seemed strikingly familiar about where I was heading.

This odd déjà vu continued after I arrived in Viña Del Mar — the seaside city that would my home for the next six weeks. Even after taking a nap and walking around the city, I still felt strangely comfortable.

I had never before felt like this after leaving the United States. When I traveled to Spain, France, and Italy with my family as a teenager, the unfamiliarity overwhelmed me at first.

You might think this was due to the language barrier. But I felt the same way when I traveled to England, or even Canada.

Something just felt off compared to what I was used to. And I had to adjust — quickly.

But Chile was different. It reminded me of California.

Yes, the architecture was different and everyone spoke Spanish. But the landscape and the cuisine had a distinct California vibe.

It rained every day of my first week in Chile. The skies were foreboding and the sidewalks were flooded. This all seemed so un-Californian, and it should have broken my spell. But I ignored the reminders from the heavens.

I still felt calm and reassured. The locals were quiet and reserved, a perfect match for my introverted nature. The food included steak sandwiches, French fries and hot dogs with avocado and mayonnaise — all close enough to what I could get back home. And the streets were broad and easy to navigate, much like a city in the United States.

My mood only changed when I found out about student protests engulfing the area. Students had taken over the campus of a university in nearby Valparaiso, where one of my classes was to be held. Other students were out protesting in the center of the city.

My class in Valparaiso was moved to a different building, and it went on as scheduled. But we were warned not to check out the protests going on nearby.

The Caribineros de Chile  — Chile’s national police force — routinely use tear gas and water cannons to break up protests, we were told. And the study abroad program leaders didn’t want us to risk getting injured.

My roommate ignored this advice at first. As a journalism major, he felt it was his duty to cover what was going on. So, he headed into the fray of a protest.

He returned with bloodshot eyes and a runny nose. He had stayed a couple of blocks away from the action, but tear gas doesn’t discriminate. After he washed his face, he told me he wouldn’t be heading out to check out the protests again.

The entire scenario was unsettling to me.

This was years before the Ferguson protests in Missouri, where police used tear gas and rubber bullets to assert control. Protests in the United States were mostly peaceful back then. Or at least that’s what I believed to be true.

Seeing police using such force against similar types of protests was jarring. While I had heard much about the atrocities of the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship, those days were long gone in Chile. And everything else I had seen on the ground to that point reminded me of American values.

It was my We’re not in Kansas anymore moment. I might have felt at home, but I was very much away.

So many memories come to mind when I think of my time in Chile.

There were the exotic ones: Riding horses over massive sand dunes. Skiing high in the Andes. Seeing the Southern Cross in the night sky of the Elqui Valley. And exploring Santiago — a mountainous city that seemed like a cross between Denver and New York.

And there were the familiar ones: Watching a movie at a Cinemark movie theater. Shopping at the mall. Watching the sun set over the ocean.

The similarities outstrip the differences, in my mind — even today. Even though I knew I was abroad — in a nation where police used brute force to quell unrest — the familiarity of my experience still makes me nostalgic.

Chile seemed to be proof that American-style economics and structural ideals could thrive abroad. Yes, the United States had taken some damaging steps to bring these ideals to the nation, including supporting a coup and the deadly Pinochet dictatorship that followed. But in the post-Cold War — and post-Pinochet — era, Chile appeared to be thriving and harmonious.

That synergy with my home nation is what kept me calm throughout my time south of the equator. It’s what made six weeks on another continent feel more like a day at the beach than a plunge into an icy lake. It’s what makes me yearn to return someday.

But now, I wonder if it all was a mirage.

Recently, there’s been lots of unrest in Chile.

Throughout Santiago, people have taken to the streets to protest the inequities of life there.

It all started with a 30 peso increase to the Santiago Metro fares.

This would be equivalent to a 4 cent fare increase to a public transit system in the United States. Seemingly innocuous.

However, thousands of Chileans saw it differently.

For the cost of living in Chile has gone up in recent years. But wages and employment opportunities have not kept up.

The financial situation has trapped many Chileans in poverty or on the lower end of the middle-class. The stagnation carries across generations — even older Chileans are finding that their pensions and retirement funds are far less valuable than they once expected.

It’s been a fraught situation. But the Metro fare increase was the spark that brought it to the fore.

It’s not about 30 pesos. It’s about 30 years, the protesters have been chanting. And as their anger has risen, the protests have turned ever more violent.

There are reports of protesters breaking store windows, spraying graffiti on buildings, setting fires and defacing much of the Metro system — previously one of the nicest in the world.

Police have responded with the usual display of force — tear gas and water cannons. But this time things feel different.

This time the unrest is widespread. This time the world is watching.

It makes me sad to see all of this. To see the Chile I got to know and love go up in flames.

For Chileans are not normally flamboyant or bombastic. Unlike their neighbors to the east in Argentina, Chileans are generally reserved and respectful.

To see so many of them turning to violence reminds me that they must really be hurting. They must feel as if they are without hope, and out of options for peaceful discourse.

This breaks my heart.

In my mind, Chile is a magical place. A nation with a unique mix of natural beauty, kind people and western ideals.

I’m not alone.

Many others have looked with wonder at Chile’s rise to a capitalist power over the last several decades. They refer to Chile as an economic miracle.

And instead of focusing on the nation’s checkered past, they point to its bright future.

Have we all been hoodwinked? Have we deluded ourselves into thinking that silence equated to success?

I certainly hope not.

For if capitalism has failed Chile, I shudder to think of the alternatives.

All across South America, from Argentina to Venezuela and Bolivia to Brazil, Chile’s neighbors have been roiled by political and economic crises in recent years. I wonder if a move to a different model would yield the same destructive results.

But mostly, I wonder if my memories of Chile were even reliable.

People seemed happy and content. But could they have been coerced into silence by the memories of the dictatorship? Or by the police’s heavy-handed responses to any sign of unrest?

It’s certainly possible.

Either way, I hope Chile can resolve its current issues peacefully. And I hope Chileans can find a future full of prosperity.

My home away from home deserves nothing less.

Reference Points

Shake it. Shake it. Shake it. Shake it like a Polaroid picture.

These are lyrics from an up-tempo hit song called Hey Ya — which was released by the Hip-Hop duo Outkast. If you’ve been to a party in recent years, this song was likely on the playlist.

The song was recorded in 2002. Which means it’s not all that old, but it’s not exactly hot off the presses either.

And while the tune remains distinctive, signs of its age are evident.

There are some lines that name-drop figures that remain relevant today (Beyonce), and others that don’t (Lucy Liu).

And then there’s that reference to Polaroid pictures. A reference that’s starting to wilt against the weight of time.

Why? Consider this.

There are many several high school students across America who weren’t even born when Hey Ya first hit the airwaves. Teenagers who don’t even know what a Polaroid picture is.

In a few short years, these high schoolers will be the young adults at the parties where Hey Ya is played. And they won’t understand what Outkast is talking about.

A musical masterpiece will fade into mediocrity. All because the perspective will have shifted.

And that, in no small way, is tragic.

 

Hey Ya is not the only entertainment staple to age poorly. Far from it.

Many songs feature over-the-hill cultural references. Many TV shows have dated set decorations and graphics. And many movies feature “cutting-edge” features that have become a punch line in the years after their cinematic releases.

When we encounter these works of art today, we’re ensconced by nostalgia. The memories come flooding back, and our hearts gush as we reminisce.

Yet, there’s a bittersweet side to all the warm fuzzies.

For we know that there are others who won’t ever have a chance to see the world as we once did. To truly participate in the trips down memory lane these pieces of entertainment provide us.

There’s a connection that’s missing — one that has drifted out of sight behind us. These entertainment relics and our own memories are the only bridges connecting us to them.

Sometimes that connection is more style than substance. Polaroid pictures were one a nice gimmick — glossy photos that developed in real-time — but digital photography quickly proved them obsolete.

Other times, the connection is more substantial. Payphones might seem ludicrous to anyone under the age of 25 these days, but they were once an important part of life to everyone else. In an era before everyone had a supercomputer in their pocket, payphones were critical for making plans on the go.

As time moves on and new tools emerge, these erstwhile staples of life get lost. And the cultural remnants capsize with them.

For the perspective has shifted. The new reality is all that’s relevant now.

Reference points mean everything.

Four years ago this week, I launched Words of the West with a confession. One that read I am not perfect.

That statement is as true today as it was then. But I wonder how much else from those early days is still valid.

The world has changed a lot in four years — becoming ever more complicated, divisive and cynical.

And I have grown a lot in four years — pushing my own boundaries and using my voice ever more boldly.

With all this growth and change, today’s reference points are a far cry from those of four years ago.

And while I’ve tried to make each and every one of these articles stand up to the test of time, I know that some simply cannot.

For what they refer to is dated. And their relevance has faded.

This bothers me.

I don’t want to my words to become mothballed relics. To be as irrelevant as Rand McNally atlases in the age of connected cars.

No, I want my words to remain resonant. I want my messages to help and inspire others.

That is why I’ve committed to sharing a fresh article each and every week for four straight years. And that why I plan on sharing articles for years to come.

Misplaced references represent missed opportunities for me to achieve these objectives. And while missed opportunities are inevitable in life, it doesn’t make them any more welcome.

And so, against my better judgment, I rue lost opportunities.

But should I?

There’s not a day goes by I don’t feel regret. Not because I’m in here, because you think I should. I look back on the way I was then: a young, stupid kid who committed that terrible crime. I want to talk to him. I want to try to talk some sense to him, tell him the way things are. But I can’t. That kid’s long gone, and this old man is all that’s left.

This soliloquy comes from the 1994 movie The Shawshank Redemption. And even though that movie is eight years older than the song Hey Ya, this passage stands a better chance of passing the test of time.

Why is that?

It’s not because we inherently relate to the character who uttered it — Red Redding. After all, it’s unlikely that any of us have found ourselves in a parole hearing after spending 40 years in prison for murder.

No, we relate to this passage because of its mention of shifting reference points.

Red is candid about how time alone has changed him. He steadfastly admits that the man he is after four decades behind bars is not the one he was when he committed a heinous crime. But he also acknowledges there is no real link between those two moments he can traverse.

There is no silver lining. Just the cold, hard truth.

This moment resonates with me. For I see my own plight just as clearly as Red saw his.

With each day, new opportunity dawns. But old references fade further into irrelevance.

Past words lack meaning. Faded memories lack context. And old messages become as obsolete as the payphone or the Polaroid.

There is nothing I can do to stem the tide of change. I can only keep charging ahead, knowing that tomorrow will bring the promise of a bright, new reality.

Reference points are merely guideposts reminding me of where I’ve been. Reminding me of how far I’ve come.

Perhaps, in this light, the faded references from Hey Ya won’t seem so sinister. And the obsolescence of yesterday’s lessons won’t seem so stark.

Our future is bright. But our past doesn’t need to be forgotten.

So, let us not lose our reference points. They’re more useful than we might think.

What We Can’t Forget

As the car pulled away, I looked out the passenger side window.

There they were, my grandmother and grandfather waving from inside the screen door of their house in Queens, New York.

The memory feels like yesterday, but it was so much longer ago than that.

It has to be.

I’ve been in Texas for nearly a decade, and my grandfather was crippled by a stroke less than two years after I moved west. He spent most of his time sitting on the sofa when I went to visit him in the years following the stroke.

After he passed, my grandmother sold the house and moved into an apartment in Manhattan with my parents. Less than two years later, she too was gone.

Memories are all that remain. But the details are ever more in doubt.

As I get older, I have no way of knowing for sure if my memories are accurate.

Did everything really happen the way I remember it? Was what I recall seeing, hearing and sensing real, or was it just a mirage?

When I think of that image of my grandparents waving goodbye from their front foyer, I’m not sure if I’m digging up a memory from 10 years ago or if my mind is playing tricks on me.

After all, my grandmother waved goodbye at us from that same spot each time we left the home, up until she sold it. My memories could be conflated.

There’s no way for me to know for sure.

Never Forget.

Those two words are imprinted in my mind forever.

I’m sharing this article 18 years after the darkest day of my life: September 11, 2001.

I’ve shared my memories of that day and its aftermath on Words of the West before. It’s the most important thing I’ve ever done.

Sharing my memories of that day has helped me heal. It’s brought me a sense of peace I had thought I’d never find again.

Yet, even as I move forward, the memories of that day continue to haunt me. As is the case with any traumatic stress event, I’m sure I will remain affected for the rest of my life.

Those haunting memories spike on September 11th each year. Not only do I know what the calendar reads, but all the old images and video clips resurface across the Internet, social media and mainstream media.

It’s like a refresher course, recalibrating my memories of the worst day of my life.

You could say I was one of the lucky ones. I was six miles uptown from the carnage at the World Trade Center. There are no Associated Press photos of me walking across the Brooklyn Bridge with the sky behind me looking like a war zone. There are no videos of me watching in horror as the twin towers crumbled.

Yet, I have my own memories to deal with. Of eerily quiet Manhattan streets. Of heavily armed National Guardsmen at a toll bridge, telling us Go, go, get out of here! Of thinking that at any moment, my life might be taken from me.

Those all come bubbling up, each time the calendar turns to September 11th.

I don’t want to forget.

Good or bad — it doesn’t matter. I want to remember.

I pride myself on what I can recall. On how I use that past experience to make prudent decisions.

Memory is important to me because it impacts all three of the foundational pillars of my life.

Be Present. Be Informed. Be Better.

So, I fight doggedly against the fog of amnesia. I don’t drink alcohol. I get a good night’s sleep. I keep my brain active as often as I can.

And I hang on to my memories. Even the memory that has left me forever broken.

It’s difficult. Gut-wrenchingly difficult. But I fight through the pain.

I pay attention to the remembrances on September 11th. And each year, when I visit New York, I go to the 9/11 Memorial and pray for the victims.

Yet, the more time passes, and the more I subject myself to this kind of masochism, the more doubt creeps into my mind.

The year 2001 was more than half my life ago. I was a young teenager — a kid — on the day my life changed forever. And now, there are now legal adults who have only known a post 9/11 world.

These facts serve as a stark reminder that 18 years is a long time, and even the most traumatic memories can get distorted over that period.

I don’t know if my memories of that day are still accurate, or if they’ve faded a bit.

I want them to be accurate. I don’t want to be accused of embellishing anything from a day we are told — rightfully — to Never Forget.

But there’s no way I can know for sure how much of what I remember is accurate.

When the towers fell, I was in school — a school I left 8 months later. When I got home, my family watched Aaron Brown’s reports on the tragedy on CNN. But my parents and sister were too shell-shocked to keep watching the marathon coverage. So, I spent much of the event in front of the TV alone.

The only part of the day that was easily verifiable was the treacherous trip home. My father was with me that whole time. He recalls what I do.

The rest of the day — what I said, what I did, what I thought — I experienced alone. Those words, actions and emotions have been an important part of my life for nearly two decades. But now, more and more, I can’t tell which of them are real.

Perhaps it’s meant to be this way.

Perhaps our memories are meant to degrade when exposed to the cruel hands of time.

After all, our bodies betray us as we age. It’s only logical that our minds would follow the same path to irrelevance.

Even so, a fuzzy memory is not a welcome sight in our society.

In a world where cameras are always rolling, there is no room for error. The proof is there, in pictures and video. And we’re getting fact-checked all the time.

We don’t forget the events of 9/11 because we can’t forget. There are dozens of documentaries showing footage of the planes flying into the Twin Towers. Of the cloud of debris cascading down the cavernous streets of Lower Manhattan.

The evidence is overwhelming. But is that what really matters?

When I come across these iconic images, I’m almost numb to them. Sure, my pulse quickens and my face turns flushed, but that’s to be expected.

It’s my recollections of that fateful day that get me emotional.

The paralyzing sensation of fear. The realization that I might not survive. And the understanding that if I did, my life would be forever changed.

That is what brings tears to my eyes. That is what brings me to my knees.

And regardless how much my recollections of the details might fade, that is what I will never, ever forget.

Therein lies the truth of the matter.

Memories are not about logic. They’re not about timestamping the images in our mind and cross-checking them for rogue filters.

No, memories are about emotion instead.

That image of my grandparents waving goodbye is poignant because they are now gone. Regardless of the details, that memory is a bridge connecting me with two of the most beloved figures in my life.

And those recollections I have of the darkest day of my life are poignant as well. They might induce nightmares, but they also remind me not to take life for granted.

We all have memories that are intertwined with our emotions. Even if we didn’t live through the horrors of New York City on September 11, 2001.

Let us cherish these memories, rather than interrogate them.

For that connection to our heart and our soul — that is something we can’t afford to lose.

May we never forget.

Leap of Faith

I stood on the platform and took in the view.

To my left and right were palm trees and buildings, illuminated in the steamy morning sunshine.

Below me — some 33 feet below me — was a swimming pool.

I was at the top of the 10 meter dive tower at the University of Miami. And at this moment, I was wondering what I had got myself into.

Wow, I thought. I can see all of campus from here.

Not exactly a reassuring thought, as I prepared to plunge into the water three stories below.

My mind started to race.

What if I overshoot the pool and land on the concrete? What if I injure myself hitting the water? What in the world am I doing?

I thought back to the only time I had seen someone up on the platform who wasn’t on the diving team. It was a girl who won a belly-flop contest the lifeguards set up. She ran off the edge, screaming in terror until she was underwater.

We all laughed insensitively, because that’s what college kids do. But now, the joke was on me.

I looked back at the narrow ladders I had climbed to get here. They looked even more treacherous to descend.

There was only one realistic way down. I knew it. But I wasn’t ready.

I felt a pit in my stomach. The sweat from my anxiety mixed with that from the humidity.

I closed my eyes and opened them. Then I ran off the edge.

The first thing I remember seeing was the water through my peripheral vision.

No, not the peripheral vision that helps us see what’s to our left and right without us turning our heads. The peripheral vision that helps us see what’s above and below us.

We normally don’t think about what we visualize from this vantage point. After all, looking at our shoes gets old pretty quick.

But we’re normally not hurtling 30 feet toward the ground. That changes things.

I was falling, but the water still looked distant. So I started flailing my legs, thinking that would somehow soften the blow.

Suddenly, I remembered the instructions I was given: Run off the edge and make sure you’re straight up when you hit the water.

I stopped moving my legs and let gravity run its course.

As soon I did this, something unexpected happened. I felt a strange sense of calm.

I let gravity do its work. Everything felt Zen.

Well, everything except that rushing sound in my ears. It kept getting louder and louder.

That sound was the air flying by me as I was in freefall. And it was getting louder because I was speeding up.

Suddenly, the water was right below me. I was close — painfully close — to impact.

I made a last ditch effort to straighten my legs. Then, SPLASH.

I hit the water like a ton of bricks. My feet and ankles felt the sting of impact.

After dropping close to 10 feet underwater, I started to ascend back to the surface. Then I slowly swam over to the ladder and climbed onto the deck.

My classmate approached me, holding my digital camera and a few other items I’d temporarily put in her care.

This whole crazy experience was her idea.

She was an NCAA champion diver, and we were in a video production class together. She was at the pool that morning filming a promo for a class project.

She had asked me to tag along to help her carry the video equipment, since some of the clips she was filming were from the 3 meter springboard — about 10 feet above the pool deck. I happily obliged.

“Wear your swim trunks,” she told me the day before the shoot. “That way, you can jump off the 10 Meter when we’re done.”

Now, I had just that. And the adrenaline had yet to wear off.

“Oh, that was something else!” I told my classmate. “Say, which height did you win the NCAA title in, again?”

“The 10 Meter,” she calmly replied.

I stared at her, awestruck.

Diving off the 10 Meter means walking to the edge of that 33 foot high platform and turning around in such a way that your toes are just about the only part of your body still making contact with that platform. It means propelling yourself backwards off the edge, headfirst. It means contorting your body into a set of elaborate twists and rolls as you’re falling. And it means entering the water with pinpoint precision.

It takes a leap of faith just to do this once. As NCAA champion, my classmate had done this hundreds of times — often in the heat of intense competition. And she executed it to precision when it mattered most.

This was no fluke. Three years after my leap of the 10 Meter, my classmate was in London, representing the United States in diving at the Olympic games. There’s no doubt that she’s the best athlete I’ve ever personally met.

Even so, her daily accomplishments from the diving platform put everything in perspective. That acute fear I’d felt moments earlier seemed downright silly now.

I took a deep breath, and resolved not to make such a big deal out of what I’d just done.

In the years since my plunge from the 10 Meter, I’ve had other aquatic adventures.

I’ve jumped off a 10 foot dock into a lake inlet. And off the top of a party barge into the middle of a different lake.

It was fun to take flight. And on scorching Texas summer afternoons, I dare say it was necessary to plunge into cooler waters.

Yet, both times, I failed to feel the exhilaration I did after I jumped off the 10 Meter. The apprehension was gone, but so was the rush of energy.

This was not because of differences in the height I jumped from. It was because of something far more fundamental.

My 10 Meter experience represented the first leap of faith I ever took. Quite literally.

I put myself in a position to do something both novel and uncomfortable. I felt the fear and I did it anyway.

I was better for the experience. I unlocked confidence and courage I didn’t realize I had before.

This confidence and courage came in handy months later, when I moved halfway across the country to a city I had never been to and started working in a field I had little experience in.

It helped me again years later, when I switched careers and moved to another new city without a job lined up.

And it has helped me in countless other, less-dramatic scenarios as well.

Feeling the fear and doing it anyway is a vital part of growing up.

For we will all encounter a new experience in our lives. Whether that starting a job, starting a family or starting to notice changes in our physical abilities. Or maybe even all three.

There’s no reference guide for these experiences. Sure, we can lean on the knowledge of those who’ve encountered these experiences before, but that won’t fully prepare us for what we feel in the moment.

We will feel apprehension —  if not abject terror — as we navigate these experiences firsthand for the first time. This is normal.

Yet, our ability to make it through the changes, and to grow from the experience, only comes if we’re willing to take a leap of faith. To feel the fear and do it anyway.

And that journey has to start somewhere.

Maybe not on the top of a 10 Meter dive tower, as mine did. But somewhere.

So, let us resolve to be bolder. To look out upon that new experience on the horizon that terrifies us and to face it head on.

Let us resolve to take a leap of faith.

Our future depends on it.

No Rest

I’m wide awake.

The dulcet tones of Katy Perry reverberated through the taxi as it pulled away from Chicago O’Hare Airport.

It was a chilly, rainy morning in early fall. One of those dreary days where a cup of Starbucks and Katy Perry on the radio would be a nice proxy for an alarm clock.

Yet, I had been awake for six hours already. I had caught two separate flights while traveling from Texas to Illinois to visit my sister. And I’d done all this on three hours of sleep.

Hearing I’m wide awake over and over again in that vehicle was like a cruel joke. I wasn’t having it.

No! I thought. I am NOT wide awake!

Yet, I soldiered through.

I survived the long ride to Evanston, where I rendezvoused with my sister — at the time a senior at Northwestern University. We then headed down to Chicago for some sightseeing, culminating our trek with dinner at my favorite restaurant.

It was a great day. A glorious day. Yet, my only ammunition to ward off exhaustion was iced coffee and a catnap.

So, by about 8:30 PM, I was toast. I passed out on my sister’s couch.

 

I think about this day often, for two reasons.

First, it ruined a perfectly good Katy Perry song.

Second, it encapsulates the past decade of my life.

I’ve kept my days busy. I’ve achieved a lot in a condensed period of time.

But what I’ve not done is get enough sleep.

This is partially due to logistics. Working an evening shift in my TV news days — and, years later, taking business school classes at night — meant I had to get used to jetting out of town at the crack of dawn when I wanted to travel.

This is partially due to necessity. I could tackle my tri-weekly two-mile outdoor run on a scorching Texas summer afternoon, I suppose. But running at dawn — when the heat is less oppressive — seems like a safer bet. And that requires getting up early.

And this is partially due to my nature. I’m a morning person who would rather be out and about than sleep in.

But regardless of the cause, all of it is an issue.

Don’t count the days. Make the days count.

Those powerful words come from the late Muhammad Ali. They’ve been quoted time and again.

But with great power comes great responsibility. And we’ve been using The Greatest’s words in vain.

Entrepreneurs — particularly those in Silicon Valley — invoke Ali when they treat sleeplessness as a badge of honor. The gig economy encourages millions of people to work 18 hours at a time. And many of us — including me — pack our days with activities, whether it’s a workday or not.

This is asinine.

We are humans, not machines.

We perform best when we’re most energized.

Yet, we only have a finite amount of energy. Energy that depletes over time and must be replenished.

Much as it takes time for our smartphones, laptops and other electronic devices to recharge, our bodies take time to replenish energy.

Traditional wisdom has said we need eight hours of uninterrupted rest. I’m lucky if I get six hours in an average night. Many others are even worse off than I am in this regard.

And no matter what some might say, we can’t make these hours up. Binge-sleeping doesn’t undo the damage of chronic exhaustion.

This is an issue. A major issue.

And motivational quotes about our productivity culture aren’t helping it one bit.

There is a prevailing narrative that as long as we’re awake, we’re capable of great things.

This is a myth.

When we’re exhausted, we’re compromised.

Sure, we’re able to see, to walk, to speak. But we’re also more easily agitated, more prone to error and a danger to ourselves and others.

Drowsy driving can be as devastating as drunk driving. And those heated late-night arguments with loved ones are extra vicious because our emotional control mechanisms are compromised

Even the toxic culture found at companies like Uber in recent years likely has roots in exhaustion. A company built on long days and sleepless nights doesn’t, by itself, spark misogyny. But the lingering corporate culture can spread acceptance system-wide.

Yes, there are profound dangers to our always-on culture.

Rapid advancements in technology might have made 24/7 commerce possible. And drinks supercharged with sugar and caffeine might have extended our daily time horizons.

But our bodies still rely on circadian rhythms. They’re in our nature.

We can try to innovate around this, but the results are inevitable. Inevitable and devastating.

As Dr. Malcolm says in Jurassic Park, Nature will always find a way.

So, what can we do to right ourselves?

It’s pretty simple. Commit to more sleep.

And while some might take this as an excuse to sleep in more, or work later shifts, I believe in the opposite.

I believe the answer lies in going to bed earlier and rising with the morning light.

For the sun is our ultimate guide. In the days before electricity and blackout shades, it had profound influence on our schedule.

Today — in the age of bars, nightclubs and late night TV — that pattern is reversed. We burn the midnight oil. We fight the sun, rather than work with it.

Getting back on the right track means getting attuned with nature.

And while I find this edict challenging as I balance a job and night classes, I am taking steps in the right direction.

I am committed to going to bed earlier on weekends, and on weekday evenings when I’m not in class. I even took a break in writing this article to get some shut-eye. At 10 PM on a Saturday when I had nothing on my schedule for the next day.

The result? I get my eight hours of sleep more often than I used to. And I wake up fully recharged more often as well.

We can all see benefits from following a policy like this one.

Sure, there will be sacrifices. No more midnight movies. No more taking advantage of cheap fare on red-eye flights.

But the benefits outweigh the costs.

Not only for us, but for everyone we come in contact with.

So, let’s do what we can to get the right amount of rest. Consistently.

That way, I’m wide awake can be more than a line in a Katy Perry song. It can be a universal reality.

On To China

When I was 10 years old, my parents did something crazy.

They took our family on a month-long trip to China.

Now, on the face of it, this might not sound so outlandish. People go on exotic vacations all the time. And China is an emergent tourist destination, filled with the capitalist façade of the western world — particularly in the years since it hosted the 2008 Olympics.

But this was in 1998. And it was the first trip outside the United States for both me and my sister, who was 7 at the time.

So, yeah. It was pretty crazy.

The unusual decision my parents made becomes more sensible with context.

When I was six months old, my parents hosted a young woman from the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia, who had emigrated to the U.S. with a Green Card. She became an integral part of our family, quickly gaining the honorary title of “Chinese sister.” She served as my babysitter initially, and later attended college in Vermont.

After graduation, she landed a position with JP Morgan in Hong Kong. Yet, she would make the long trek back to New York at least once a year to visit us.

After a few years, she approached my parents with a novel proposal. What it we all rendezvoused in China?

Hong Kong had been transferred from British to Chinese rule by then, enabling easier travel between the mainland and the territory. So, our Chinese sister could travel with us on much of our journey. She also offered to cover the round-trip plane tickets for my sister and myself — which was no small feat.

The plan was set. It was on to China.

In the weeks before our journey to the Far East, I felt anxious. I had only ventured outside of the Northeast twice, and one of those trips happened when I was too young to remember it. I had only been on an airplane a handful of times, and never for more than 6 hours. And I knew nothing of life outside of the U.S., aside from what I’d seen in a few movies.

My father tried to reassure me, but he was also brutally honest about what to expect. He said that instead of toilets, some Chinese restrooms just had holes in the ground to squat over. (This turned out to be true, but not on a wide scale.) He said that not everyone in China would understand English. (This was a massive understatement.) And he said many restaurants would not have forks. (This also turned out to be true, so we brought a reusable plastic silverware kit with us.)

All of this only exacerbated my anxiety, so I tried not to think about the trip until I was en route. That was probably for the best, because I had no idea what I was in for.

The journey started with a cross-country flight to San Francisco. After a day venturing around the City by the Bay, we got on a 2 AM flight to South Korea.

The Transpacific flight felt like an eternity. I stayed awake the entire time, watching the GPS tracker on the overhead TV screens and looking down at the clouds and the ocean below. By the time we landed in Seoul, I was exhausted. Yet, the morning sun was blinding, so I forced myself to stay awake after our subsequent flight to Beijing took off.

After a couple more hours of staring out an airplane window at the sea and sky, I heard an announcement from the captain asking us to prepare for landing. I was confused, because all I saw around us was a giant cloud. Surely, we couldn’t be about to land. Could we?

We descended through the cloud, and I heard the landing gear deploy. At the last second, the clouds cleared and I saw the runway come into view. We touched down safely and the plane taxied over to a dilapidated airport terminal.

Welcome to China.

I would soon learn that the cloud the airplane had descended through was no cloud at all. It was actually haze from China’s rampant pollution.

That haze never really subsided. During our week in Beijing, there was sunshine in the forecast on all but one day (when it rained). But I never saw blue skies. It just looked dreary and overcast.

I had never seen such thick pollution before. And I’ve yet to see it since.

But the haze was only the tip of the iceberg. After we got to the hotel from the airport, my sister and I took a nap. Suddenly, our mother woke us up, insisting that we go for an afternoon walk to adjust to the time change. It was on this walk that I noticed how different things looked.

There were no glass skyscrapers in our midst. The city buildings looked old and uniform. So did the vehicles roaming the massive boulevards, which were six lanes in each direction.

Crossing the street was an adventure, as drivers seemed to ignore traffic laws at will. We had to join a throng of people to cross some streets, and use underground pedestrian walkways to cross others.

I got the keen sense that we had not only traveled to a new land, but had also traveled back in time. There was a very 1950s feel about 1990s Beijing.

The subsequent days were full of misadventures. We took a Chinese tour bus for a day trip — even though no one on the bus spoke English, and none of us spoke Mandarin. I passed out from dehydration while climbing the Great Wall in the nearly 100 degree heat. And my father argued with a cab driver who didn’t start the meter on his taxi. It turns out the restaurant we were heading to was around the corner, and the taxi driver didn’t want to charge us what amounted to a 5 cent fare.

But ultimately, the strangest thing for me was posing for pictures with strangers. Many people in Beijing had not ever seen an American kid before. One by one, they asked my sister and I to pose for pictures with their children — some in broken English, others through the form of vehement gesturing that transcends language barriers. After a day of this, I felt like Mickey Mouse.

Beijing was an eye-opening experience for me. But there were plenty more surprises to come.

I have no idea what the typical tourist trail was in China in 1998, but I imagine it would include visits to Beijing, Shanghai and the Great Wall.

Our itinerary was different, for two main reasons.

First, we were obliged to travel to Inner Mongolia to meet our Chinese sister’s family.

Second, we had all grown fond of the Sesame Street movie Big Bird In China, in which the iconic bird with the obnoxious voice travels off the beaten path to explore China’s hidden beauty.

So, with these objectives in mind, we broke from the standard tourist script. Instead of boarding a flight to Shanghai, we took an overnight train to Inner Mongolia’s capital, Hohhot.

Hohhot was a prairie outpost compared to Beijing. Yet, in a nation of more than a billion people, even the smaller cities loomed large. Broad boulevards stretched for miles on end, the bike lanes as wide as the main lanes. And apartment buildings stretched as far as the eye could see.

Our Chinese sister’s parents lived in a modest apartment 15 minutes from the center of town. The apartment’s bathroom didn’t have a dedicated shower in the bathroom — just a shower head near the ceiling and a drain in the floor. So, we had to plan out when we were washing up, and when we were taking care of other business.

Sometimes, neither option was available. There were rolling power and water outages; electricity and water pressure were rarely functioning at the same time.

Some of these outages might have come from Hohhot’s daily afternoon thunderstorms, but I believe poor infrastructure played a role as well. After all, the preferred way to remove garbage in Hohhot was to put it in a neighbor’s backyard. That neighbor would then move it to another neighbor’s yard, and so on.

Behind the apartment, contractors worked day and night to build a massive new complex. In the week we were in Hohhot, these workers completed an entire floor. This amount of progress would be seemingly unthinkable back in the U.S., where construction projects seemed to languish for months in the 1990s.

Aside from these tidbits, my most vivid memory from our time in Inner Mongolia was our trip to the grasslands. We took a two-hour car ride into the most remote scenery I’ve ever encountered. Rolling, grassy pastures stretched out to the horizon in every direction, and there was nary a tree in sight. Puffy clouds dropped small shadows on parts of the landscape. Shadows that danced and drifted as the clouds moved across the sky.

We set up in a Yurt — a fortified Mongolian tent with an open roof — and then went on a long horseback ride across the grasslands. Unfortunately, I got heatstroke on the ride, and had to return to the Yurt to recuperate. I slept for 12 hours, missing the spectacle that evening when my father got drunk on a potent barley liquor.

I had never seen my father drunk before, so I was quite confused when I woke up the next morning and noticed he was not acting like himself. My mother alternated between taking care of him and tending to me. I was still feeling the effects of dehydration, so the car ride back to Hohhot was harrowing. But once we got back to the city, we found our form in short order.

Just in time, too. We had a train to catch.

Our next stop on our China tour was Datong. Home to iconic attractions, such as a cave filled with chiseled Buddha statues and a monastery suspended from a cliff, Datong was nonetheless the most backwater city we visited. The streets were barren of the shopping malls I’d seen in Beijing and Hohhot. There weren’t many restaurants. And our hotel was horrid.

Datong was very much a coal town. Dump trucks would barrel by me on the street, covering me in soot. It also seemed quite poor. Homeless people wearing soiled rags begged for change outside the train station, and some of the homeless were women with young children. I had never seen this level of poverty before. It was jarring.

After a few days in Datong, we took an overnight train to Xian. Home to the Terra Cotta warriors — a massive phalanx of porcelain soldiers an ancient emperor commissioned to protect him in the afterlife — Xian was the place where I discovered the phenomenon that is KFC in China. We paid the Colonel a visit so my sister and I could get a taste of home. But we quickly learned that finding a seat in the restaurant would be a difficult proposition. It was strange to see a fast-food joint so packed, but it was also refreshing to see how there was some food the Chinese and I both enjoyed.

Upon leaving Xian, we flew to Guilin in the southern part of the country. Guilin was perched along the winding Li River, surrounded by rice paddies in the shadow of scenic mountains with rounded tops. Big Bird had once visited this area. Now, we were seeing it with our own eyes.

As we cruised in a boat down the Li River to the village of Yangshao, I couldn’t help but think that the scenery was even more beautiful in person than it was on a VHS tape. For the first time in three weeks of travels, I felt comfortable and relaxed in the Far East.

Those happy vibes went away by dinnertime, however. As we sat at a sidewalk restaurant in Yangshao, I noticed that dog and snake were on the menu. I thought it might have been a bad translation to English at first. But then I noticed a caricature of a snake next to the snake dish, and a picture of Snoopy next to the dog item. This was no accident.

I had heard before that people in other countries eat dogs, but seeing it listed on the menu still rattled me. Frankly, it still does today.

Yet, aside from that issue, Guilin and Yangshao were among the more memorable segments of the trip for me. It was the point in the journey where I finally found some inner peace.

The final stop in our journey was Hong Kong. It was refreshing to hear English again, and to see a modern skyline. The weather was hot and steamy, but the city was picturesque, with skyscrapers and a mountain peak rising up from the harbor.

Since the elevation on Hong Kong Island changed so drastically, many people took a series of outdoor escalators from the high-rise apartments up the mountain to the Central Business District. We were staying in our Chinese sister’s apartment on the mountainside, so we rode the escalators right along with the natives when we went sightseeing.

Our time in Hong Kong was jam-packed with activities. We took a speedboat to the then-Portuguese colony of Macau for a day, had dinner on a floating restaurant on a boat anchored offshore, and made an ill-fated trip to an amusement park on a 102 degree day, among other things. All in all, it was the perfect way to end the trip.

As we took the long train ride back to the Hong Kong airport, I was filled with dread. I had come to enjoy my time in China, and was not looking forward to 18 more hours on a plane. Truthfully, I was no longer sure what was real and what was not anymore. Did my life before our trip to China exist? Or was it a figment of my imagination?

After a short flight to Seoul and a much longer flight to New York, I was back in America. The humid summer night air felt hauntingly familiar, everything looked the same as it did before we left. The skyline, the cars, our house, they were all the same as it had been a month before. If not for the pile of New York Times sports sections I’d asked my grandparents to collect for me while I was gone, there would be no sign I’d even left.

I was elated, overwhelmed and confused. I broke down and cried.

I have traveled abroad plenty in the years since our China trip, although I haven’t had my passport stamped for more than a decade now.

I’ve been to Europe and the Middle East. I’ve been to three countries in South America. And I’ve crossed the border to Canada and Mexico.

Yet, I have not returned to the Far East since that seminal journey in 1998.

I know China is far a different place now than it was then. South Korea and Japan, as well. Heading to Asia now would be an entirely different journey than it was before.

Maybe that’s why I have little desire to go.

You see, the trip to China impacted me in ways I can’t fully explain.

I recognized that the moment I came back home and started sobbing. The world hadn’t changed, but my understanding of it certainly had.

Despite all my anxiety about traveling, despite my refusal to eat many of the strange meals , despite my bouts with heatstroke and dehydration, the experience had been invaluable.

Seeing a starkly different place — one filled with poverty, polluted with coal dust and saddled with poor infrastructure — made me recognize just how fortunate I was to enjoy the trappings of American life. Even if those trappings were a blue sky overhead and an electric grid that worked 24-7.

The China of today isn’t saddled with many of the issues it once was. So my experience was as much one of time as it was of place.

I am keenly aware of this fact. And I am appreciative of the time I spent on the other side of the Pacific.

I wouldn’t have done what my parents did. If I were a parent in the 1990s, I wouldn’t have taken my kids to China for their maiden international voyage.

But looking back, I sure am glad they did.