“Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path.” The words echoed in my mind as I drove south. I hadn’t been to a meeting in some time, but the drive was a needed reprieve from the countless hours of staring at my computer screen. I was in a pseudo-hypnotic state induced by the heavy rain and the windshield wipers as I hummed along to Linkin Park’s Iridescent—a mainstay on my favorites playlist.
I was heading to Leawood, Kansas, just south of Kansas City. I had been working the day before when I received a LinkedIn notification that Brendan Smith was now open to work. I was shocked. I had met Brendan more than a decade ago while he was a student in the Jeffrey S. Raikes School of Computer Science and Management at the University of Nebraska.
The school was a prestigious and arduous honors program that only accepted thirty or so of the top honor students in the country. I was “on the university side,” meaning not a Raikes student but I had been invited to do my senior capstone with those students due to my academic success. The project required twenty hours or more of work per week on a real project sponsored by a real stakeholder. I struggled to keep up—they were on a different level.
The parallels were uncanny. So uncanny that the university had sent his mother a Dean’s List certificate bearing my name. I’m sure you can imagine my surprise when I received his. As the words played, I wondered if, like me, he was on the edge of desperation, building hope with failure being all he’d known. Was he struggling as I was to conform? To follow the program exactly as it was written? I wasn’t sure.
True friends of Bill would quickly point out that the treatise further states, “we outline the following steps which are suggested as a program of recovery.” Still, the word “suggested” is often lost in translation. I had stopped going to meetings some time ago. I knew a power greater than myself could restore me to sanity. As Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) expressed in the film Angels and Demons, faith was a gift that I had yet to receive. Maybe I didn’t need it. Perhaps my realization that the program is not an algorithm but an abstraction was that power. How could I communicate such a concept? Who would understand? The idea was to give oneself to this simple program. I could almost see the face of an old friend as I recalled him telling me “only dead fish go with the flow.”
I had seen this before in a different setting. The year was 1997. I was sitting in Mrs. Brummet’s fifth-grade classroom situated at the north end of Bedford Community Elementary School. Bedford, a small town in southwest Iowa, was the home of the 1992 Class A State Champions in Football. The tenured coach Bob McCoy had built a dynasty of excellence mirroring that of what would become my future alma mater, Tom Osborne's Nebraska Cornhuskers. Bob McCoy's perfectly manicured field—which he religiously mowed himself and boasted higher-quality agronomy than most golf courses in the area—was the social centerpiece.
It should be easy to imagine, then, the palpable disinterest of the twelve or so fifth-grade boys as a short, stout, non-athletic-looking young man took his place in the front of the classroom to give a demonstration speech on flowers. Was this real? It was: "My name is Kelly Norris." What followed was, on the surface, a ten-year-old demonstrating capillary action and vascular transport to a group of boys who could not have been less interested. Beneath the surface, it was one of the most courageous acts I've ever witnessed. This wasn't normal. Who in this southwest Iowa town would be willing to endure the bullying and ridicule that would follow? Kelly didn't participate in sports. He didn't join the other boys playing sports on the playground. It wasn't who he was.
I listened intently as the drops of food coloring fell, at approximately 9.8 meters per second squared, into a glass vase on the table. The idea was that one could change the color of the petals on the vase's flower this way. He explained the process.
The water cycle would cause water to leave the petals through the process of transpiration. As it did so, the colored water would be drawn upward into the plant's xylem—the part of the plant composing its vascular tissue.
The dead hollow cells of the plant were aligned end-to-end, creating tiny capillary tubes. The water would move through the stem in this tissue via the capillary tubes into the petals. As the water evaporated from the petals during the transpiration process, the colored dye would remain in the vascular traces of the petals, leaving colored vein patterns in the petals.
It seemed simple enough. A similar process was happening in real time in my chair. Some portion of this cultural expectation and societal norm was evaporating in me. His bravery in delivering the information and the information itself was being drawn into my own vascular tissue. Like the pattern imparted on those petals, a new pattern emerged within.
This wasn't normal. This wasn't how boys behaved here—yet, somehow, it was. The capillary pattern left in those petals would remain throughout the flower's life. For me, the same process transpired. The speech left a pattern.
I thought about his speech and what he was willing to endure to pursue his passion. It should come as no surprise that he convinced his parents to purchase and transport an entire iris farm from Texas to Iowa. I followed Kelly quietly through his professional journey. I watched him speak in front of audiences in the horticulture world online and skimmed the published books he had authored.
I struggled with the idea mentally and emotionally most of my life. Should I go with the flow, and do as expected so that I fit in with the masses? How else had this capillary action and vascular transport affected me? The flower had no choice; once the dye entered the water, its nature and environment dictated that a pattern be left behind. It wasn't optional—it was a defined scientific process. Unlike the flower, I could change my environment. I could affect the pattern being left in my own life.
I snapped back to reality. The rain had stopped. I squinted as the sun broke through the storm clouds to the west. I happen to have a sharp sensitivity to bright light. Being a tough guy, I had given myself flash burns years earlier while welding without a helmet. I looked away as my own irises narrowed the radius of my pupils. To the east against the dark-colored storm clouds was a beautiful display of refraction in the ongoing water cycle that was the catalyst for Kelly's demonstration and my own chain of thought. It formed a very prominent rainbow. Tears rolled down my cheeks. The irony wasn't lost on me. The iris farm that Kelly and his family had transplanted—Rainbow Iris Farm. I quickly reached for my phone and sent a picture to Abby, my wife, and told her I would be writing another post but that I couldn't explain. She would have to read it.
I continued to drive. The connectedness of this graph was too real. I knew that I couldn't force the subject on Brendan. If he had indeed, like me, become powerless over alcohol and his life had become unmanageable, he would need to admit that to himself. It was January, and regular meeting attendees would know that we often associate each of the twelve steps with the month corresponding to their index. I thought to say nothing. I am not constitutionally incapable of being honest with myself. But the capillary action induced by the various environments I had chosen to subject myself to had made their mark. I knew that not only was it acceptable, it might be preferable to stray from cultural expectations and what is presumed to be acceptable behavior.
I had no more than completed the thought when the lyrics of R.E.M.'s The Great Beyond started to play. "I'm breaking through, I'm bending spoons. I'm keeping flowers in full bloom. Over my shoulder a piano falls, crashing to the ground." This couldn't be real life. But it was, and it was mine.
I looked down at my car's on-board navigation system. I would be early for the scheduled 5:30 meeting with Brendan. I began to focus on the road as I approached the Kansas City suburb. I looked up from the navigation system and manipulated the steering wheel to take the exit. I was only a few miles away. My anxiety set in. Should I send him my location? Would I recognize him? I thought about the last time that I saw him. He had likely saved my life.
I had been disgusted with myself on a trip to Seattle for a job interview that was the subject of my previous blog post. I had, of course, drowned my sorrows and mixed in some sleeping pills. The cocktail had rendered me unconscious on the floor of his luxurious apartment overlooking Elliott Bay. He, and the same friend that advised me about going with the flow, had gone down to the ground level of the building. When they returned, I was lying in a puddle of my own vomit. I nearly drowned with those sorrows. Unreal. I didn't know what to say to him other than to simply do what works.
I looked to my right to locate the turn. As I did so, my eyes landed directly on a bright green sign that read "5 O'clock Liquor." I laughed to myself. There were likely ten different shops in that plaza, leave it to me to directly spot the liquor store. I looked back down to the navigation system, and when I did, the clock on the digital display changed from 4:59 to 5:00 exactly. I immediately thought of the film Fracture, particularly the scene where the antagonist (Anthony Hopkins), having seemingly outwitted the prosecutor (Ryan Gosling), tells him, "Sometimes life gives us these little gifts."
I laughed to myself. What a trip. I can't tell you what is coming next for me. What I know is that I don't intend to "thoroughly follow" anyone's path but my own.