Fool’s Errand

I used to be an advocate for peace.

Throughout my adolescence and into early adulthood, I envisioned myself as the bringer of peace, on scales even naïve for a sixteen year old. The world seemed as though it would be a well-oiled machine were there no conflict, no pain, no suffering. With absolute peace, the Earth wouldn’t be our only oyster. No, the universe would be our oyster. But these endeavors were easy to embrace for an ignorant, relatively unchallenged soul like my younger self. I hadn’t the experience yet to relish in the non-peaceful. Back then, life was so much simpler.

Despite the overt struggles I’ve been through, a large majority of my life has taken place in the confines of what I will label peace. Sure, I’ve been through foster care, lived in relative poverty most my life, trudged through paralyzing depression, even lost my best friend when I was nineteen. But all of these events happened within a relative vacuum. By which I mean, I was doing nothing in the way of engaging the rest of the world. In those times, I just let life happen to me, and I was completely okay with that. This is what I mean by peace. Everything was taken care of as far as I was concerned. Working at Wendy’s for minimum wage barely paid for rent and booze, but then again, that’s all I aspired for. When I was sixteen, I battled with the existential angst every teenager does, but I had nothing to worry about beyond that; my mom took care of everything else while I just waited to be great. This is the vacuum. When my best friend died, I faced the most potent pain I had ever felt, but it wasn’t impeding anything because at that point I was just merely drifting. It wasn’t until my first day of college that I got the pleasure to meet genuine adversity.

Implicit to the word adversity is the idea of a struggle, a fight, two forces meeting, presumably one benevolent and one malicious. My vacuum of a life, this overarching peace I had known for my entire existence met its match when I finally decided to take responsibility for myself. College was the means by which I declared war. My foe is an admirable one. It can seep into every facet of one’s life, it has no shortage of sensitive intelligence on its enemy, and its range knows no bounds. Indeed, my life was peaceful until I came face to face with the very real possibility that I might fail, and actually give a shit about it.

This is the war I wage every single day I wake up and every single night I slip back under my covers. Adversity cannot be considered as such when you have nothing to lose. I found this out when I realized the folly of all my previous years. When I made the deliberate choice to attend college in the hopes that I might actually make something of myself, that is when I really had something to lose. Taking an active role in life is the hardest endeavor I’ve ever undertaken, and after two years, I’m still barely treading water. But every single day that I keep myself afloat is significantly more valuable than a month of just letting it all pass by, not even attempting to reach out and let my fingertips slide along it as it passes. War is merely the consequence of the impediment of one entity by another. Because I was not really striving towards anything until I started college, I wasn’t even able to engage in war. You can’t impede that which isn’t moving.

Nowadays, there’s hardly a moment I don’t think of the necessary steps it’ll take to get into the State Department, or the upper echelons of the UNHCR, or the Governor’s Mansion. Albeit, every other step is a stumble for me still, but the stumbles mean something now; they actually have weight behind them. The idea of adversity being worth its weight in gold has been a running theme in my life as of late. When I reflect back on my life and remember how convinced I was that greatness would just come to me, all I see is wasted time. To be fair, some of this time was spent in deep contemplation on the doctrines of Buddhism. This was my first peek into the notion that suffering was something to be revered not averted. But even then I thought arm chair philosophy was going to lead me to enlightenment. This false sense of entitlement didn’t start to dissolve until March 14th of 2014.

National Geographic aired a special documentary about life aboard the ISS. The whole production was spectacular. But near the end, they pointed the cameras out of one of the ISS windows to show a sunrise from low-Earth orbit. This image did something to me. Knowing that someone can watch the sun rise over the Earth, given enough luck and effort, reminded me of the potential of life. I was reminded that life doesn’t have to just happen to me, and indeed, shouldn’t. At that moment, I decided I need to, at the very least, give myself a shot at seeing that same view in person. Sitting on my dad’s couch in the basement of my aunt and uncle’s house, I knew, probably more than I knew anything, that view would not just come to me, I had to go to it. Two months later I had my GED and I was enrolled at the Community College of Denver on my way to being an astronaut*. It wasn’t long until the 18th of August, the first day of the rest of my life, dawned on me.

Even though I hadn’t articulated it then, this was also the day I realized that peace was a fool’s errand. This was the day I adopted a doctrine of war, a war on complacency and entitlement, on marginal living and menial goals, and most of all, on failure. Because if you’re not at war, you’re not facing adversity, and if you’re not facing adversity, you’re not moving forward.

*After taking Intro to Political Science in my second semester, I found a new mistress. Astronomy, and hard sciences in general, still remain a strong interest of mine, but I realized I was far more suited to delve into the human mind and soul than the truth and mysteries of nature.