The Tao of No-One
A Meditation on Recovery
Today’s essay is part of a series on recovery that includes me,
, , , , and . Each of us will wrestle with what recovery means to us and how our life experiences shape that definition.In the forward to The Denial of Death, Sam Keen wrote:
“The root of humanly caused evil is not man's animal nature, not territorial aggression, or innate selfishness, but our need to gain self-esteem, deny our mortality, and achieve a heroic self-image.”
Most of us experience that heroic self-image as a desire to be someone. That’s why, even hough we know the stories by heart, we all love a good rags-to-riches tale. We root for the underdog, not because he’s anything special, but because we want him to become someone special. I feel it regularly, when I tell someone about my past (maybe I embellish a detail or two in old Navy stories, don’t tell anyone) and as I imagine my future — writing great novels and winning awards and leaving an impact on the world. It seems innocent enough.
A few pages into the first chapter, Becker wrote:
Human heroics is a blind drivenness that burns people up.
and I wonder if it’s so innocent after all. Still…
I want to be someone. Not someone rich or famous; someone important. This is my addiction. Slowly, I’m recovering.
***
It’s 2002 and I’m sitting on the floor in the halls of the Naval Academy, a puddle of sweat pooling under my ass in the Maryland summer. The walls reek of pushups and gunpowder. Towering over all of us stands Colonel John Allen, Commandant of Midshipmen and the epitome of the Marine Corps in his starched dress greens, buzz-cut, and wire-rimmed glasses. His voice fills the hallway, smothering out even the exhaustion with what he’s come to say. He’s here to talk to us about our future.
“John Boyd famously challenged us all: ‘To be somebody or to do something. In life, there is often a roll call. That’s when you will have to make a decision. To be or to do? Which way will you go?’
I’ve thought about that call many times in my own career. And now I get to issue it to you. This, this moment in time, this minute in this day in this hallways in this storied institution, is the start of your career. It will be a short one, so you’ve got no time to waste. So today I challenge you. What will you be?”
I told myself I wanted to do something. I was an impressionable nineteen year old kid, and I was inspired by his rigidly straight posture, his gruff admonition, and his storied career. He seemed to espouse a spartan lifestyle, a belief that fame and money and privilege weren’t important, but that the pride of living an important life was what truly mattered. By the time he finished, I swore to myself I would live those same ideals.
I tried, I really did, but those ideals became another way of being someone. They fed my addiction.
*
It’s 2003, still at the Naval Academy, only this time I’m in Alumni Hall. I’m seated in the dark auditorium that would normally be the basketball stadium, but is now a solemn stage. It’s the same stage that President Bush will announce the “National Strategy for Victory in Iraq” a few years later. But today, standing off to the side is a nondescript southern man, dressed in a brown suit that hangs off him like a soaked towel, looking nervously at the crowd.
This man is Hugh Thompson, the hero who ended the Mỹ Lai Massacre, the man who flew his helicopter between 2nd Lieutenant Calley and the villagers of Mỹ Lai and ended the murderous rampage. He’s here to talk about integrity. From the moment he clears his throat, too loudly to be rehearsed, I sit rapt as he tells us about flying reconnaissance missions over the village and being confused that there was no enemy fire but there was so many bodies, as he relives the moment he realized US soldiers were murdering innocent civilians, as his hands shake and his body stiffens recalling confronting Lieutenant Calley, as he remembers ordering his team to aim at the soldiers while evacuating the victims.1
The tears he’s trying to hold back come streaming down, and I feel his fear deep in my chest. I imagine what it would be like to stand on a stage after years shunning the limelight, after years of being made a scapegoat for doing his duty, and tell this story anew. I’m in awe of his courage in Vietnam, his courage today leaves me speechless.
During the question time afterwards, someone asks him, “Why do you think you had the courage to stand up for the Vietnamese against US soldiers?”
Thompson pauses and stares into the lights. The pause lasts a second, two seconds, three, and we’re all wondering what he’s going to say. And then his voice shakes.
“I was already nobody. I didn’t have to be someone in front of my guys or my superiors.
Those guys on the ground; they were in a bad situation, but I don’t blame them for that. I blame them for not stopping when they knew where things were headed. But they all had to be someone, for each other, for their dead buddies, for the officers back in headquarters. And I think that’s why they kept going, why they murdered those women and children. I didn’t have to be someone, so I didn’t feel that struggle between the the identity I needed to keep and doing what was right.”
***
If I could only embrace or disavow my desire to be someone, I think it would be easier. It’s difficult being stuck in this no-man’s land of identity.
I’m scared to embrace my desire. It makes me anxious to share posts like Learning to Hustle. When my friend
commented2:“There have been SO many periods of my life that patterned into the Big Goal followed by the Big Fall, from half marathons to lofty creative projects. After my last Fall, I was like, ok I’m 40 and this ends now.”
I felt like an imposter. I have lived that same cycle, and I know what it does to my self-confidence, but I didn’t write about it. If I embrace the costs of obsession, even love the cycle, would it be easier? Would I be able to look myself in the mirror if I did?
I’m scared to reject my desire too. I recently reread the Tao-Te Ching, and when Lao-Tsu wrote
“The simplest pattern is the clearest. Content with an ordinary life, you can show all people the way back to their own true nature.”
my gut reaction was to dismiss it. It’s a nice fantasy for a 2,500 year old book, but it doesn’t apply to me. I have potential to live up to. I worked too hard, sacrificed too much to just let it all go. What would that say about who I am?
The easy path would be to commit: embrace or disavow. But I can’t accept either option, not with my heart. So I’m stuck.
***
It’s 2015, I’m a test pilot for the Navy, my dream job. We’re a select group: less than one quarter of one percent of pilots have ever landed on an aircraft carrier, and less than one percent of those have gone on to test Navy airplanes. In the oval walkway of the Naval Test Pilot School are a string of silver plaques, 147 of them to be exact, engraved with the names of every graduate of this institution. John Glenn’s name is on that wall; so are Jim Lovell, John Stockdale, and Alan Shephard. And on the same wall is mine, a fact which I’m immensely proud of. On top of that, I’m going to become a dad in a few months. What more could I need?
Today is a crisp spring day, the kind where the warmth finally chisels a crack in the smothering cold and the ice cold beer feels refreshing against our lips for the first time since fall. We’re all in the Officer’s Club, huddling together in the dark cave around the dim lights that illuminate the mementos of our craft. My friends and I play with the A4 tailhook, the same one that flew sorties over Vietnam and now hangs as a reminder of old times for us to celebrate around. On the wall hang mugs with all of our callsigns on them, each stained with untold Fridays worth of beer and dust. I know everyone, these are all my friends and the guys I compete with regularly.
Today, I’m working up the nerve to tell everyone that I’ve got good news; I’ll soon be a dad.
Before I can share, Matt rushes in, three kids in tow. His youngest is maybe seven months old, with blue eyes and tufts of brown hair, and he’s sucking hard on a pacifier. On the end of it is one of those red tags that warns pilots to “remove before flight” only this one is embroidered “Daddy’s Little Wingman.” He’s sucking away, and the red tag bounced at the same speed my heart races.
Just as I finally decide I’m going to tell everyone, finally figure out the perfect witty remark to make everyone smile and then realize what I mean, Daddy’s Little Wingman spits cream colored baby puke all over my flight suit. Matt quickly hands me the little man while he grabs a towel, and all I know how to do is stare at this child. I hold him with outstretched arms, mostly just staring and unsure what else to do, my paternal instincts still unformed. Rushing back to wipe off both me and his son, Matt leans over and says,
“Thanks man. I appreciate you taking one for the team. I’ve got my final astronaut interview in thirty minutes and I don’t think baby puke will help my chances. Wish me luck, dude.”
Like that, I lose my nerve. I feel like nobody, and I don’t even want to share my news. Instead, I finish my beer and sneak out the back door. I drive home early and sit on my couch, alone. That evening I decide I’m going to leave the Navy; I’m going to take a bet that I can be more.
*
It’s 2021, December and bitterly cold in Bozeman. I’m completing my first year as a Venture Capitalist, the dream job I really wanted when I left the Navy. I now have a fancy office downtown, one with frosted glass and a whiteboard and complete privacy. I even have an (almost) unlimited expense account.
Today is the Monday before Christmas. Almost no one is here, just my boss and me. He invites me into his office, with the black leather couch and the shoe rack where he rests his $1000 snow boots when he comes in and sits in his holiday socks, and I sit in the chair across from him. I’m not sure if this is a social invite or a work invite. Maybe both.
He leans back and asks me what I thought of this year and what I’m looking forward to for next year, which must mean this is a work chat. I gather myself and compose my answer, trying to figure out what I should say, when he interrupts my thoughts. “Just say what’s on your mind, this isn’t a trick.”
And suddenly the words are pouring out of me.
I don’t like this job; I thought I would but I don’t enjoy the networking or the power dynamics or the way we invest. I don’t know what else I’ll do, but I know this isn’t what I’m here on this Earth for. I find myself telling him that I think there still has to be more for me, that I feel small here even with the Partner title and the expense account. I’m trembling as I speak and holding back fits of tears.
“You aren’t going to be great at this job if you don’t love it. You don’t love it here, do you?” he asks.
I don’t love it. I tell him I don’t think it’s for me. I don’t tell him that it’s not the job I don’t love. I don’t love anything. I don’t remember how to love, I’ve been so busy trying to achieve and become someone and work towards that goal, that I can’t imagine loving anything. That would be too much: to admit the emptiness I feel inside when I think about work and my own life, to expose the shame I feel when I realize that the things I always wanted are even more empty than I was when I wanted them, to accept the fear that I’ll never figure out this life.
Later I’ll admit those things to myself, and I’ll wonder if my brain is broken because it doesn’t seem to work the same way as other people’s. I’ll spend hours of the day staring numbly into my ocher colored coffee cup watching the dark brown grounds bounce and settle in the dull water and wondering if this is what the next forty years of life will hold. They’ll call it depression, but I’ll call it living a full life. All that will come.
So instead I just tell him no.
***
I don’t believe we’re born with an innate instinct to be someone, nor do we climb the hierarchy of psychological development into that desire.
Ask a child what they want, and they never say being rich or famous. Just this morning I asked my five-year-old what she wanted most of all in the world. She scrunched up her forehead, her brown eyebrows sharpening under the weight of thought until she had her answer. Then she looked intently and said, “Dad, I want to wrestle with you. And if I can have a second thing too, Cassie (her steadfast doll) wants a new dress.” She’s not unusually wise, she’s just a child.
At the other end of enlightenment, the sages rarely talk about status or wealth. In their wisdom, they share lessons of detachment, contentment, surrender. But like most of us, I am neither a child nor a sage. I exist between the two extremes. And like most of us, I listened to society’s message instead of my own heart. I wanted self-actualization, that realization of the best version of myself, but I sought status and comfort and privilege. I craved love, but I sought success. I desired what others were achieving, but I needed to figure out who I really was.
Which is to say I was lost. It’s understandable — after all, Becker believed that the stories we tell ourselves protect us from the insanity that would result if we really understood our human condition — but nonetheless, I was hopelessly lost. Lost with no compass, no map, no model of the world to find a better way.
When I want to be someone, I think it comes from that confusion, that lost feeling. Society’s story was the only model I had, the only thing which I could believe in.
The Bhagavad Gita says
“You are what you believe in. You become that which you believe you can become.”
It took realizing how unhappy I was to believe that I can be, not someone, but more. It turns out, believing has been a good start.
***
I wish I could tell you I am recovered, enlightened even. I’m ashamed to write this ending instead of a happy one, but I’m not sure recovery ever has a happy ending (does life have a happy ending?) I want to experience enlightenment; but more than that I want to be an enlightened someone. Is that holding me back?
These days I’m working on surrendering. I sit in contemplation, before the sun rises and shatters my early morning calm, and I ask myself the same question. “Who am I?” Some days it means “Who am I in Your image?”, other days it means “Who am I when all thought is gone?” I surrender to the pain in my hips and my back as I sit. Surrendering to the mental anguish of not knowing is harder. This is the practice.
For the last few years I’ve contemplated the end of my life; the stoics called it memento mori. I used to imagine a large gathering, important people remembering the someone I was and mourning my passing. These days I like to imagine a small gathering of my friends and family, resting around me in my garden where I’d like to be buried, before I go. I hope that I’ll be at peace, content returning to being no one.
Read the Recovery Series
In researching this piece, I was surprised to learn that this was one of the only speeches Thompson ever gave. It was an inspiration which I’ve never forgotten, 20 years later. How crazy to think that I might never have been moved by his words if any of hundreds of small things went differently and he didn’t come to the Naval Academy.
There were great comments from
, , and that really hit home on that piece.
Such a powerful piece to kick us off Latham. You put me there with you in those moments of sureness and those moments of doubt. Thank you for so clearly illustrating that Recovery is about being human. We’re all in recovery--from something we’ve learned or been taught—that no longer serves us. The self aware “somebody” you are now is authentic and real. That is good and that is plenty. 🙏
This was beautiful Latham. Especially as someone who deeply resonates with the feeling of wanting to be someone, wanting to matter. But knowing how identity can deceive. And quietly yearning for a simple plain life.
I came across an idea in a Dharma talk about worshipping your desire. In the sense that it’s beautiful. That something within you strives towards the good, strives to be better.
Thank you for sharing (: