Okay, so here’s where telling this story gets tricky for me. Sharing my virtual tapes with you is easy; as I’ve said, they play and replay in my head to this day. But for all the extensive image sequences I have access to, there are also gaps, and one of these, I’m now convinced, is more significant than anything in my archives. It’s kind of like Nixon’s missing Watergate tapes, I suppose, except instead of having Rosemary Woods or anyone else to blame, I can only point the finger at fatigue or something bigger than me that I wasn’t meant to understand.
The gap at issue here doesn’t belong to my 1995 tapes, but rather to one recorded fourteen years earlier that will forever be linked to them. I am sitting at my bedroom desk in this well-worn tape, a seventeen-year-old kid with a pencil and paper in hand and no idea what to do with either of them. It’s late at night, a week or two before my high school graduation, and I am struggling to write the valedictory address I’m expected to give—a speech that was supposed to be my shining moment of glory after four years of busting my hump to get into the U.S. Naval Academy. Just weeks before, Congressman Tom Lantos had made that lifelong dream a reality with his official “appointment.” But then came the physical. And the series of failed color identification tests. And the call from my recruiter saying how sorry he was to inform me that the U.S. Navy has no need for colorblind sailors.
So now on this night back in ’81, I am wishing like hell that I didn’t have to get up in front of my classmates. I am still reeling from the biggest blow that life has ever dealt me. Still feeling sorry for myself, incapable of understanding that my failed physical will later save me from years worth of uniformed embarrassment dealing with a handicap much greater than colorblindness.
The theme of our graduation is “This Is It,” a message borrowed from one of the year’s biggest pop hits. I’m supposed to somehow incorporate this theme in my speech, and my first attempts have failed miserably. And still I have no ideas, only a blank piece of paper and a pencil with teeth marks all around it. Soon it’s nine o’clock. And then ten. And then eleven. I am starting to panic.
But then, poof, it’s the middle of the night, and I am staring at a speech I can’t remember writing:
“There have been times in my life I’ve been wondering why. Still somehow I believed we’d always survive…” Songwriter and vocalist Kenny Loggins recently gave us those words of encouragement in his hit song “This Is It.” I hope tonight to make his message my own.
Belief: It’s a true wonder to me that in just six letters so much could be expressed and implied. One word, so vague, and yet so significant in all of our lives. Belief, as I see it, can be broken down into three distinct concepts: Belief in ourselves; belief in others; and belief in life …
My sappy little speech—later preserved for eternity on my parents’ IBM Selectric—went on to offer an elaborate trifurcated explanation of the workings of belief and its ability to help us do anything—“Yes, anything”—including overcome incredible challenges. After a handful of bad clichés and random thoughts on such matters as integrity and strength and faith and possibility, my sermon-like essay wrapped up with an admonishment to my classmates that now is the time to believe, because, well … This Is It.
I remember my confusion and the sense of wonder that came with it as I first read through my penciled scribbles that early morning back in ’81. Not only was I at a loss to explain how the words had gotten there, I was also in awe of how much they instantly meant to me. Belief in myself, in others, and in life—all working toward some greater good. Yeah, that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? At seventeen, profound thinking is finding meaning in a Stones song, or getting more out of a movie than just a few laughs. Yet there I was that morning, with my whole life in front of me and no plans to speak of—save for the ones that had just been pulled out from under me—and what was I doing? Contemplating the meaning of life. Weird.
A few days after my grad speech experience, I decided what I really needed was to go discover America, and perhaps myself along the way. So I purchased a thirty-day Greyhound Ameripass, a backpack, a stack of books, and a cheap silver-plated dog tag onto which I paid a mall engraver to etch the word Believer. If I wasn’t going to be a Naval officer as I’d always planned, I knew I needed a new image of myself to hold. I also knew that whatever else I might someday decide to be, I wanted first and foremost to be a guy who lived by that graduation speech.
The month that followed was unlike any before it. After years of battling to control my own destiny and everything around me, I somehow managed to let it all go. Reaching for my dog tag again and again, I toured cities by day and talked with fellow backpackers by night. Read Plato on the bus and wrote poetry in meadows. Laughed off a close call with would-be muggers in D.C. and drank moonshine with a sweet old man in the South. Never before had I felt so in tune with life and all its offerings. Never again, I now realize all these years later, would I ever feel so free.
I can’t remember just when after the bus trip I stopped wearing the dog tag. What I do know is when and why I put it back on: it was shortly after my brief nuthouse visit with Jackie, and it was because of the identity meltdown I found myself battling in the early weeks of ’95. Doubt, I was learning, consumes from the inside out, and with each passing day, it gnawed away that much more of my core. The guy in the mirror still looked about the same, but no longer could I recognize much beyond his reflection.
Night after night, the nagging questions haunted me: Whatever happened to that carefree kid on the Greyhound? What would he, the great aspiring believer, think of me, the pathological doubter? How devastated would he feel, watching me try to walk away from my parked car, checking and rechecking the doors and parking brake, incapable of believing even my own physical senses? Our only common link, it would strike me in moments of bone-chilling reality, was this weathered dog tag I’d catch myself sliding back and forth on its chain, begging it to remind me of what I once fancied myself to be, and how to get there again.
I can’t help thinking today that, somehow, some way, my pleading must have worked.
On a brisk morning in February I shake off the cold, along with my skepticism, and enter a rustic office building marked “Center for Attitudinal Healing.”
A receptionist looks up from her desk and asks if she can help me find anyone or anything in particular.
“Just looking for some background information,” I tell her, imagining for a second how lost I must seem.
“Are you interested in taking part in one of our support groups, or in volunteering?” she asks.
“Actually, neither at this point,” I say, knowing I’ve come here today for an entirely different reason.
I am here, truth be told, to see for myself that this place and the man who founded it back in 1975 are real. I have spent days reading about Dr. Gerald Jampolsky, his original vision of providing support for children battling cancer and other terminal illnesses, and the subsequent expansion of his practice to people of all ages facing a variety of life crises. I know that his “power to choose” counseling approach, based loosely on the teachings of A Course in Miracles, has proven so successful that nearly a hundred independent centers in more than a dozen countries have taken root from it.
I also know that Dr. Jampolsky’s remarkable accomplishments have drawn the attention of media programs from 60 Minutes to Phil Donahue and the Today show, and that his Center Advisory Board has attracted such luminaries as Dr. Linus Pauling, Fred Rogers, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and singer John Denver. But as always, I am skeptical, and I need to see with my own eyes that this work exists.
Not since The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Washing has any book given me as much hope as Jampolsky’s Change Your Mind, Change Your Life— this despite the fact that it has nothing to do with overcoming OCD, per se. The book simply affirms the human spirit’s power to triumph over incredible physical and emotional challenges. At its root is this basic premise: that our thoughts and attitudes determine how we see the world, and that we ourselves choose those very thoughts and attitudes.
Freedom of choice is not something I’m exercising much of these days. Doubt feeds me one horrific what-if thought after another. And I, without question, give these thoughts all my attention. Time after time after time. But what if I didn’t have to? What if I could willfully choose to do otherwise?
Jampolsky says I can—much as any of the young cancer patients he works with can choose to see beyond the nagging, fearful thoughts of their futures. No, they can’t choose to be rid of their disease, but they can decide not to focus their attention on their sick bodies and their fears about death. Instead, they can choose to see their shared predicament as an opportunity to give of themselves for a greater good—to help others with cancer, for example. Through support groups, pen-pal networks, writing projects, and the like, these brave young souls are willfully shifting their attention, and in so doing, finding peace and comfort in service to others.
It’s all about the “movies” we choose to make and to watch, says Jampolsky, referring now to the big picture that even those of us without catastrophic illnesses must sort out for ourselves. (For obvious reasons, this particular analogy piques my interest.) Imagine that in your mind is everything necessary to make a movie, he suggests in Love Is Letting Go of Fear. What we experience in our daily lives then is simply our own state of mind projected onto a screen of the world. The thing is, Jampolsky warns, we each have two internal directors vying to control our movies: a love-based one that recognizes our inherent good in this very moment; and a fear- or ego-based one that thrives on keeping us from knowing who we really are, largely by miring us in the past and future. We choose which of these dueling directors is in charge—and thereby what we see of the world—simply by choosing which of the two we invest in with our own innate free will.
Just how all this relates to me and my particular challenges, I’m not entirely sure. What I do know though is that I invest my everything in fear and its twin called Doubt, and I sure as hell watch a lot of fear-and-doubt-based movies—literally, in my head, and figuratively, on the screen of the world, as Jampolsky puts it. My “ego director,” it would seem, is this internal voice I’ve dubbed Doubt. As for the other director, I can’t help thinking that perhaps this role belongs to whatever it was that the old dog tag–wearing Believer in me had once taken its cues from.
I’d love to run this whole theory by the receptionist, who is now handing me a schedule of upcoming Center events, but I wouldn’t know where to start. Fortunately, our brief conversation, together with my quick look around this place, has provided me with all the evidence I need to feel comfortable that Jampolsky’s work is not just some façade to sell books, that his principles are really being employed in a real-life setting. I leave here knowing that I’m safe to peek at the vast world behind the curtain at which Jampolsky stands.