How I Escaped The Work Week Blues

Gunpoint, flashbacks, and lessons

I live in New Jersey’s unfriendliest city.

Most people know it for the airport they rush through and away from. Others know it as car jack capital of the U.S.

My block, though, isn’t so bad.

Drug dealers do their thing a few streets down, and my barrio has enough police patrol to keep most trouble at bay.

Let’s just say I’m used to worse.

One night, before Christmas, I took a stroll around the block.

Wasn’t the “safe” thing to do, but I needed to shake off work-week blues and nothing else did the trick.

So I step into the Newark night, plug headphones in, and enter that mysterious groove which a stroll provides.

I was almost done with my stroll when I hear a car screech lightly after driving by. I keep on walking, gaining distance, thinking generously, glancing back occasionally.

First glance: passenger gets out, fixes his pants, looks at a nearby house.

Second glance: He’s walking toward me.

Third glance: He’s behind me.

Whatever punching he was about to do, I wanted a chance at controlling the outcome, so I entered into the street as a strategy to bring him in my side-view. But he turned right too.

I look straight in his eyes, hear him say something about “time,” then I pull out my headphones to fully decipher.

“The time?” I say.

He clarified his intentions perfectly: “you know what time it is! Give me everything you have in your pocket!”

He was robbing me.

Protruding from his hoodie is a gun pointed at me.

Right then, a forgotten memory smacked me in the face:

Two years earlier I stood in front of the TV watching the local news announce that a man was killed, shot in the back of the head for resisting a car jacking at the mall.

He didn’t want to give up his Christmas presents in the trunk. That’s how Newark gets down sometimes.

I put my hands up and the robbery proceeded as you would expect. Him and his accomplice patted every part of me down, and I mean every part, taking my iPhone, keys, and wallet before running off, one of them while saying to me “…...be safe, man. I needed it.” The irony was thick.

Months went by and lessons from that moment seeped into my bloodstream. The best lessons are always served that way. Unclear at first, but salient with time.

Lesson #1 — An Experience Of Being Alive

The real reason I took that stroll was to escape the nihilistic funk I was in. I’d been thinking of life, how short it is, and how urgently meaningless everything was feeling. The lesson:

I went into that stroll feeling crestfallen.

I finished that stroll robbed at gunpoint, but feeling alive again.

I didn’t understand why I felt this way. But the life work of Joseph Campbell— a true gift to humanity — helped me to make sense of it.

“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.” — Joseph Campbell, Hero With A Thousand Faces

Getting robbed was exactly what I needed — an unmistakable feeling of being alive. A moment for instincts to take over. A cold shower for my soul. Existential clarity in the form of danger.

It’s always easy to turn life’s meaning into one big squiggly line when we are standing miles away from danger, and away from the original rushes of human life, but during gunpoint there’s no room for interpretation.

Instinct understands why you are alive. Intellectualism just tries to.

Lesson #2 — Until You Know

After telling my friends about the incident, many of them spouted off their “shoulda, coulda, woulda” speeches to me. One friend told me how he would have ran. Another friend told me that I should’ve hit the man. And before the robbery, I too envisioned a more heroic response out of myself. The lesson:

Until you are forced to act inside the cloud of stress, memories, and events provided by a given circumstance, you simply do not know how you will react. Professional fighters know this, so they train in every imaginable scenario.

“We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.” — Archilochus

Lesson #3 — Father Was Right

I don’t take my Father’s advice 85% of the time. Often because it’s wrong, and other times it’s not a fit for me. We are very different people now that I’m a man. But he’s long advised me not to stroll these streets.

In life, it feels like a challenge to know who exactly to listen to. But challenge is more nuanced than that: Who is worth listening to, and when?

My father knows the streets. It was once his expertise, his place of operation, his training ground. On matters of street-risk, I should always listen to him. Now, I make more room for his wisdom because life has forced me to respect it and see its truths.

The lesson: know when a person is advising you from a place of training, and not from speculation.

*****