Naked at the Bus Stop
A nod of gratitude to my most intimate friends and companions
At my trial, the then-district attorney Kari Brandenburg asked me what she must have known was a trick question. She said, “are you capable of lying to save yourself from life in prison?” And, of course, I understood what she was after.
The very nature of a trick question is that regardless of the answer you give, that very answer, regardless of how truthful, innocent, or logical it might appear before the mirror of reason, it will be utilized to your detriment. Now, a lawyer in defense of his client’s rights might have objected to such a question as condescending, rhetorical, entrapping, or otherwise misleading to the jury. Unfortunately, like so many individuals charged for crimes in the American criminal justice system, I didn't have such an attorney at my side. So I answered Brandenburg's question and watched as she carried out her nefarious agenda of confusing and otherwise misleading the members of the jury.
When I answered in the affirmative, that, yes, I was capable of lying, she immediately turned to the jury as though I had just admitted guilt. But, had I lied and said that I wasn't capable of lying to save myself from life in prison, she would just as eagerly have turned to the jury and pointed out that I was obviously lying because, of course, I was “capable” of lying. And therefore, if I was lying to the jury about my capabilities, then obviously I was lying to them about everything else.
Now, you might be wondering which of the many rabbit holes of conjecture I intend to take us down with this anecdote. The obvious rabbit holes might be “the travesty of wrongful convictions” or “injustice in America” or even “the absolute immunity of prosecutors.” But, no, since these pathways of conversation and conjecture are so heavily trafficked, to delve into them any further is to step into a cacophony of escalating voices all pursuing the same pulpit. Besides, I have already said what needs to be said about the aforementioned points.What I have not, as of yet, exhaustively explored are the reasons why such things like failure, hardship, injustice—hereby referred to as the frictions of life—are so necessary to answering the relentless question that life never ceases to place at our respective doorsteps every morning of every day for the remainder of our lives: do you have what it takes? And, why it's so consequential that our answers emphatically point to the affirmative.
The vast majority of my adult life has transpired behind bars. A reality that affords me a unique perspective, yes, but, bringing a unique perspective into the mainstream of public discourse is a lot like sitting in the nude at a bus stop or simultaneously engaging every person who happens to be waiting for the same connecting bus in a conversation that has nothing to do with my apparent nudity, and miraculously keeping them focused on everything but my nudity.
It is relevant to point out that our predicaments in life are likewise our respective bus stops in life. Therefore, how we answer life's relentless question is directly correlated to how we confront the dilemma of our nudity at the bus stop.
My particular bus stop is called life in prison. Yours might be called marriage, divorce, family, career, sexual orientation, poverty (or its opposite), illness, aging, death, failure, or success. Any and every predicament in life is a different type of friction to that life. To say that there is someone on this earth without any sort of friction is to blatantly deny the truth of our lived experiences. And despite our respective predicaments (bus stops), life still incessantly demands from us an answer to its question.
Of course, some of us have just as incessantly tried to answer life’s question once and for all with what appears to us as answers. Words in either a singular form like, yes and no, or words strung together in short phrases or diatribes of insistence, only to find that life’s question only becomes that much more insistent the more we try to answer its question with the verbal answers it will not accept and is not interested in hearing.
For anyone who has visited the connecting bus stop of failure—of otherwise not having in life what one wants and seemingly finding yourself unable to arrive at such planned destinations like success or victory—it’s crucially important to recognize that failure is not necessarily a destination, it's just a connecting stop like all the others. And, if we find ourselves missing the connecting bus again and again as we watch the doors of opportunity but are too frightened or otherwise deterred from standing up and walking onto the unknown of that bus, that is only because we have unwittingly answered life's question with the only answer it will accept: an answer accentuated with the exclamation point of action ( or, inaction).
How many times have we found ourselves seemingly entrenched in confounding predicaments of our own creations? We step off a particular connecting bus, presumably taking us towards a healthy, loving, stable relationship only to find ourselves once again confronted with a different variation of the same toxic, jealous, and otherwise dishonest relationships we just finagled ourselves out of (feel free to change “relationship” to career, family, or any other sort of life circumstance). With frustration we exclaim in an unintelligible grown to the apparent nobody who is attentively not listening that we’re fed up, and instead of boarding the next bus we're just going to sit, lament our perceived and otherwise imagined losses and instead hope or pray for the changes which we are no longer willing to pursue with the exclamation points of our actions. Sound familiar?
Of course it does. It sounds familiar because we have all lived and endured the monotonous frictions of failure to one extent or another. It’s as disagreeable as swallowing straight vinegar or tobacco spit. And yet, it must be endured, first to the point of indifference and then to the point of enjoyment, if our answers to life are to remain in the affirmative, that, yes, we have what it takes to confront life.
I recognize that it can seem like an unreasonably tall order to proclaim that we must arrive at a point of perception where bitterness is pleasure. A word that comes to mind might be masochism. However, a masochist enjoys receiving pain and what I’m referring to is not the receiving of lashes on the back in pursuit of pleasure for the sake of pleasure. I am referring to pleasure derived from confronting a seemingly impossible, very difficult predicament (many times of our own creation) and wanting to defeat the predicament because in the pursuit of navigating the predicament is where we find glimpses of the truth surrounding the what, who, and why of our very existence.
Allow me to elaborate. My days begin with a variety of fasting cardiovascular exercise followed by yoga, meditation, a shower, breakfast, and then my day begins. My mind and body are both acclimated to the demands of my daily routine, and most days it's just that—a routine. But there are also days of muscle fatigue, interrupted sleep, tiredness, exhaustion, and a general sense of the mouse-in-the-wheel dilemma: Why am I even doing this? And it's in these latter moments when life’s question most vociferously presents itself.
On Sundays I participate in a sweat lodge ceremony that lasts about six hours, but prior to doing so, while the lava rocks are heating up in the fire, I run a 10K (6.2 miles) as a meditative physical and mental warm-up for what is to be endured throughout the actual sweat lodge ceremony. I look forward to these weekly runs as the singular highlight of variation to my weekly routine.
Recently, however, it so happened that as winter was concluding there was a particular Sunday in which the weather was rather horrific. Cold, sleet, rain, all accompanied by high wind gusts. All of which presented me with a dilemma as to whether or not to forgo my weekly run so as to avoid what would most certainly be an excruciating hour of cold and discomfort. Yes, life was presenting me with a slight variation of the very same question it incessantly asks every one of us: what are you willing to endure to have what you want?
As any long-distance runner can tell you, euphoria is the inevitable outcome from sustained exertion. For me personally, after about the first forty minutes of cardio everything about the run becomes easier to the inverse. In that, it's suddenly easier to continue pushing onward with the run than it is to actually stop. Mental clarity, confidence, peace, it's all present and accounted for. It no longer becomes a question of how long can I endure, but rather a question of whether my current dosage of euphoric bliss will sustain me until our next encounter.
That being said, on that particular Sunday, when the only thing absent was lightning there was no euphoria to be found. As a runner I don't like the restrictiveness of clothing, so despite the low temperature and wind-infused sleet, I opted to run shirtless. Which meant that with every turn on the rocky, dirt track I was faced with a wall of elements blowing against my body like a sand blaster. Instead of meditative bliss I was faced with a mind racing between reasons for why I should stop running in circles and instead run for shelter: it's too cold; too hard; too windy; too wet; numb hands; tingling arms; and too much debris blowing in my face. The only thing keeping me going was my sheer determination to see it through. There were no trophies, medals, or even spectators at the finish line to congratulate me on a job well done. It was my will versus the elements of life, and as I ran my laps and dismissed the barrage of reasoning for why I should desist I remembered something of utmost importance: life is a choice.
I remember the hardships of childhood. Whether in sadness or pain the very same question was always present and accounted for. I remembered what it felt like to desist in something—anything!—and therefore have to live with the defeat of knowing that said defeat was chosen instead of realized.
As the sand and sleet pelted my torso and face I ran and recalled every time I had opted for the path of least resistance only to find that, in fact, least resistance is just another way of saying mediocrity; and that mediocrity as an outcome in life is in itself a general acceptance of lacking and to a much larger extent a waste of opportunity and life. Instead of euphoria I discovered an eagerness to persist despite the otherwise perceived futility in said persistence. And as I persisted I came to know a particular truth on very intimate terms; a truth that only reveals itself to a select few.
Life isn't really about having what we want or even about accepting what we have. Rather, it's an opportunity to discover who and what we are through an infinite form of superlatives. It's the type of discovery that religions promise to reveal but almost never deliver on. It's the kind of discovery that propels people to unimaginable heights and depths of the human experience where winning and losing is no longer a question of debate.
On that particular day, I ran the 10K as planned, and then ran an additional kilometer as the enunciated exclamation point of my answer to life’s question. As I ran my final kilometer I noticed another man running on the same track, but by the time I had turned the corner he had already desisted in his efforts. After the run he approached me and said, “I tried to run with you, but it was too hard.”
I didn’t respond in the moment, but as I reflected on his words later in the day it occurred to me that in his statement is the definitive delineator between those who know the truth and those who do not. Truth isn't something we possess, it’s something we experience. An experience that by its very nature can't be taught, it can only be lived through the briefest of moments by those brave souls who are willing to answer life's question in the affirmative—not just once but continually.
My response to Brandenburg’s trick question might have been, “only in as far as you, Ms. Brandenburg, are likewise capable of knowingly confounding the jury to wrongfully convict someone for a crime they did not commit.”
Twenty years behind bars, beneath a wrongful conviction is a difficulty that does not dwindle or disappear. It's present and accounted for in every aspect of life like a cancerous tumor, an amputated limb, a loving family or spousal relationship. But, just like every connecting bus, every route reaches its end, and, as my end approaches I find that I am filled with gratitude for the revealed truths I have discovered behind many of the difficulties I have been lucky enough to face.
Failure, hardship, and injustice are not just the names of the irritating foreign particles of grit in the oyster shell of my life, they are my most intimate friends and companions. They have witnessed my triumphs as well as my sorrows and their presence in my life has produced more pearls than I can count.
I once commented on the fact that confronting a wrongful conviction is the equivalent of facing Everest with nothing more than a speedo and a pair of flip-flops. A predicament in which almost every single person who sees you doing it will spout some variation of “you’re crazy!” But, as they discourage they reveal their own mediocrities and fears, and by doing so they reiterate life’s question.
The opposite of these people are those who will nod their heads to you in acknowledgment as your buses cross paths because they too are climbing the highest mountains or diving to the bottom depths of the deepest oceans. They know what it means to discover truths behind that which is difficult. Their moral compasses are most certainly their own and they never ask for permission before they act. We know them as trailblazers, innovators, revolutionaries, and demigods; and they most certainly should be our role models, just as they are our evidence that the frictions of life are what produce the pearls of wisdom that bring us face-to-face with truth.
If it is possible to know thyself without first entrenching thyself in predicaments of overwhelming odds to your detriment, I know nothing of such a path. I have repeatedly discovered that the dogmas of religion or the herd mentality of the masses only ever produce a general life acceptance of mediocrity in all its forms. Things like genius, greatness, and virtue are byproducts of answering life's question in the affirmative in the face of hardship. We will fall down, we will bleed, and we will even face dark moments of doubt where there is seemingly no light to be seen in any direction. And in these moments, yes, religion can be comforting, but, it's also the active and continual suicide of reason and the mass genocide of all freedom, virtue and individual genius—the very traits we need to discover truth.
Which is why we must encourage others to embark on their journeys, make mistakes, fail, take detours and otherwise miss the mark. Not fail for the sake of failure, but rather the living of life with the curious intellect of reason that isn't afraid of what it might discover. Because truth is not the property of religion it's the byproduct of our persistent efforts to breach the doorways of our limited, human understanding and a willingness to accept those truths for what they are. Truth is sitting at the bus stop naked and without shame, knowing perfectly well that you are exactly where you're supposed to be
.