“Alright LT… lets fast forward 1 month from today. You’ve been retired now for… what…. a week or so? And you’re walking up to the register at Target… you get up to the check out person and you think… Man… this dude has absolutely NO idea what I have been through on a daily basis for the last 27 years…” Before I could finish… the LT lets out a huge belly laugh. We both stand in the OM laughing and shaking our heads at the truth of the statement for a moment and then he says… “Hollywood… that’s for damn sure. I’m telling you man… I have seen so much blood… so much violence… so much death… that I could see a guy get stomped out on the sidewalk and my heart rate wouldn’t elevate one beat.” “Umm… Well… that took a dark and unexpected turn”… I think to myself. We talked for a few more minutes but I could tell that where I was going with the conversation was clearly not in line with where it took him so I figured that it would be best to just let him get back to his hot dogs.
His comment got me thinking though. There has been a number of “prison issues”… I will call them… over the last few weeks in here that have led to lock downs and restrictions and made me remember that I lay my head down in an environment that can get ugly in an instant. Something I try to never forget but find myself lost in daily life at times and slipping into a comfort zone that can be dangerous. These “issues” coupled with the LT’s comment had me reflecting on my own desensitization of aspects of life in here that should be shocking and disturbing but that I have come strangely accustomed to and… like he stated… lost that sense of shock at the sight of some gnarly stuff.
I then started thinking about the world… the real world outside of these gates… and how it seems as though this “desensitization” to horrible events does not just exist in here but has penetrated society as a whole. We see shootings and bombings and starvation and stabbings and people being kidnapped by masked agents on a daily basis out there. If you think about the last month… how many horrible events have happened that you heard about or saw on the news and within minutes… it was out of your consciousness and you were back to the flow of normal life? If you are like me… too many.
So… what does this all mean? In my specific case… being incarcerated… life behind these walls is brutal… it’s volatile… and an aspect of surviving it on a daily basis is forcing yourself to turn off aspects of your human nature to literally make it through the day. But… lets unpack it all a bit. Is there any benefit to experiencing… and more importantly…. surviving these type of violent… negative… brutal events? This question sparked yet another thought…
I read about an experiment that was conducted in the 80’s in the desert of Arizona. It was called “Biosphere 2” and it was (and I believe still is) the largest attempt to build a closed artificial ecosystem with the hope that a similar type of ecosystem could someday be used to sustain life in outer space. It was designed to support 8 people who would attempt to live within it for multiple years. All the oxygen that they breathed… the food they ate… the water they drank… everything was to be generated within the “sphere”. Unfortunately… it never really worked. Multiple problems arose throughout the experiment but like many failures… there were lessons learned along the way. One lesson that specifically sparked my interest was that many of the trees planted to create a rainforest ecosystem grew rapidly at first but then simply fell over before reaching maturity. Initially perplexed by this…the developers eventually realized that trees need wind to grow properly. When wind blows… it bends the tree… which tugs at the roots on one side of the tree and compresses or hardens the wood on the other side. In response… the root system expands to provide a firmer anchor and the compressed wood changes it’s structure over time to become stronger. Wow… mother nature… right? So basically… the trees that are exposed to wind at an “early age” learn and adapt to withstand even stronger wind as they grow up. Wind creates resilient trees.
So… if we are thinking about human beings in the same sense as the above example with the trees… you would have to conclude that we also need some degree of hardship… of pain… of experiencing the dark sides of life in order to expand our root system and harden our bark. But the million dollar question is… how much is too much? I have been thinking about this all week and I certainly believe that the experiences behind these gates is at a level that is ‘too much’. There are certain traumatic events that do not need to be experienced multiple times in order to “toughen up” the soul. But I cannot answer the question for you lucky people out in the real world. At what point is the 24/7 news cycle detrimental to our emotional… spiritual and intellectual development? Is the world that much worse these days than it was in the past or are we just able to consume it in ways that we were never able to access it in previous generations? And if that answer is “yes… the world is f*cked” or “No… we simply feed our eyes balls and ears through too many digital devices on a constant loop”… what is the remedy to course correct either one of those outcomes? What is the answer that will ensure that our children’s roots are tugged and wood is hardened but not so much as to permanently desensitize them to the brutality of what humans are capable of doing to one another?
Unfortunately… I don’t have the answer to enlighten the world at the moment… but I am certainly going to think about possible solutions. Micro remedies that I can do on a daily basis (from in here and certainly once I am out there) in the hopes of finding some semblance of an answer. And if we all commit to doing the same… maybe…. just maybe… our trees won’t fall over before they reach maturity.
Stay Healthy. Stay Active. Be kind to one another.