July Recap

Reflections from zooming in and out during my 59th month of incarceration

Hello All,

I hope that this note finds you and yours well. How you are faring out there in these—shall we say—interesting times is on my mind. I am sending vibes of peace and resilience your way.

My 59th month of incarceration is in the books. Roughly 1,800 days into this experience, my reaction to waking up here some mornings—which used to be, "I can't believe this is really happening"—has morphed into, "I can't believe this is still going on." Being here feels like being one of the last employees of a business that is shutting down. Everyone who lives and works here is under the same impression that whatever it was we were doing before is now over, but we go through the motions of daily life anyway, waiting to receive our pink slips, in whatever form they ultimately come.

We only made it a couple of weeks off restriction before more guys got caught with contraband and the warden locked us down. My outdoor workouts moved inside, and one evening after seeing me throwing a medicine ball against the wall as hard as I could, my buddy Lamar said, "Hey JWay, I'm not sure that's the most practical way to get yourself back outside." There is truth in that humor that extends beyond being punished for other people's misbehavior yet again. I'm wrestling mightily with restlessness.

Phish is synchronistically serenading me through my headphones as I write to you. They have their finger on my pulse with Everything's Right when they sing:

Time to get out
I paid my dues
I need to shout
There's no time to lose

No more to give
The well is dry
The pavement's worn
My brain is fried

It's time to get out
I paid my dues

My shoes have holes
My socks are bare
The mirror's secret is
I'm losing my hair

I'm in prison
Without a crime
My sentence stretches on
Undefined

It's time to get out
I paid my dues
I paid my dues

I'm digging deep for the motivation to continue preparing for release and building increments of momentum toward my vision for the next phase, while pushing out unhelpful thoughts like, "This work would be a thousand times more efficient if I just had my laptop and an internet connection." I keep reminding myself to do what I can without sweating the pace of progress.

The other reminder I need regularly is to not be a jerk. Authenticity requires that I admit to you that I feel a tendency toward impatience, unkindness, and aloofness with the people around me. I am intentionally checking myself and expressing the opposite qualities—even when, and especially if, I don't feel like it. I don't want to leave a trail of funk that negatively impacts others on my way out. That would be like spiking the ball on the 3-yard line as I head for the end zone.

Trey and the boys don't leave me hanging. They sing an exhortation that I take to heart:

Everything's right
So just hold tight...

At times like these, I am grateful that I can retreat into books to shield myself from the collective funk that inevitably results from this big group of characters wrestling with their own restlessness while being locked inside together. I have now read 624 books since arriving at Thomson. Favorites for July were When the Clock Broke, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, Cosmos, and The One Straw Revolution. Running parallel to my regular routine of observing my environment for cues and clues to guide me in my personal reflections, the month's reading was a fascinating adventure—zooming from the inner world of humans all the way out to the edge of the universe.

In In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, Dr. Gabor Maté shared his expert perspective on the causes and manifestations of substance abuse and other forms of behavioral addiction. He concluded with the assessment that, "The prevention of substance abuse needs to begin in the crib—and even before then, in the social recognition that nothing is more important for the future of our culture than the way children develop."

While taking in the stories of Maté's clients and the wealth of research into human development and psychology that he conveys, I was struck by the complexity and fragility of the maturation process each of us goes through. When taken together with the human tendency to seek relief from discomfort, and the psychic pain we harbor from adverse events in childhood, it is a minor miracle that any of us are remotely functional as adults. Maté does carry a message of hope for the possibility of healing—as difficult as it may be—especially if we trade the failed paradigm and policies of prohibition for a harm-reduction approach that creates space and frees resources for addressing root causes.

I moved a step outward from Maté to When the Clock Broke. John Ganz tracked the current moment of American national-populist fervor back to its inception—not in the post-Obama MAGA movement, but rather to the early 1990s. He made a compelling argument that it was the failure of the Reagan Revolution to fulfill its promises to uplift all Americans, particularly those in the working and middle classes impacted by deindustrialization, that brought us to our current predicament.

Ganz included a quote from a Chicago Tribune article by journalist Jon Margolis that could have been written last year or last month, as opposed to its original publication in 1992:

That is why the real problem now is not that “the economy” is in bad shape. It's worse than that... the country is in bad shape. The United States’ economy, to begin with, yes, but also its culture, its confidence, its sense of what it is. And the country is in bad shape because it broke the deal.

The deal he's referring to is the one between leaders and followers that underpins the social compact. He's also talking about the promise of progress and the opportunity for upward mobility that we call the American Dream. To whatever degree that dream used to be real for people—and there are grounds for debate about that—a growing number of people believe it to be dead, and that cynical trend did not begin in the second decade of the 21st century. It began in the last decade of the 20th, if not earlier. In illuminating not only the turn toward cynicism and anger, but also their expression as a self-defeating divisiveness, Ganz indicates how thoroughly we have forgotten Benjamin Franklin's admonition that "we'll have to hang together, or we'll surely hang separately." Our Founders were not perfect, but they had that one right.

From the national, I zoomed a click further out to the international with Waldenström's Richer & More Equal. The book is a response to Piketty's A Brief History of Equality, and it makes the case that—put simply—more things are getting better for more people worldwide over time. It may be true that global factors like literacy rates, infant mortality, life expectancy, and the percentage of people living below the poverty line point to humanity's progression. It may also be true that income and wealth inequality gaps in Europe have closed since the turn of the 20th century (though they haven't in the U.S.). But all the graphs the economists can produce won't change the average person's feeling of being caught in a downward spiral, nor will statistics stop them from making decisions based on a sense of fear and desperation. It remains to be seen how this period fits into the longer arc of history, but the present challenges are real.

In the midst of attempting to understand these weighty political, sociological, and economic forces, The Atlantic dropped a bomb on me with its August issue, featuring a look back on the atomic age 80 years after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Arresting is the word that describes the effect of contemplating the past and present of our fateful decision to invent, use, and proliferate these terrible weapons. I am astonished that we have not destroyed civilization. Jeffrey Goldberg summed up the conundrum well in his piece "Nuclear Roulette":

The sociobiologist E.O. Wilson described the central problem of humanity this way: “We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.” The main challenge of the 80 years since the Trinity atomic test has been that we do not possess the cognitive, spiritual, and emotional capabilities necessary to manage nuclear weapons without the risk of catastrophic failure.

It seems to me that a species that did possess the requisite capabilities to manage nuclear weapons effectively would likely also possess the wisdom to choose not to allow such weapons to exist.

At this point in the narrative, you might be saying to yourself, "JWay has a strange way of dealing with restlessness." Granted. Bear with me, though, because—with a big assist from the wise and learned Carl Sagan—we'll zoom out far enough to find ourselves back in our centers.

Cosmos was a masterwork charting the expansion of our knowledge of the natural world from the level of subatomic particles all the way to the edges of the known universe (or is it a multiverse?). As I took in all that history, allowing it to blow my mind, the words of Cicero, Isaac Newton, Masanobu Fukuoka, T.H. Huxley, and Plato—each of whom chimed in during July along a similar line—were echoing in my ears. Their message was encapsulated neatly by Montaigne when he wrote, "...the largest bit of what we do know is smaller than the tiniest bit of what we don't know."

This studied practice of zooming in and out, while broadening my horizons, has had a more profound effect. My perspective expands from inside these walls, and yet I realize more each day how little I know or can ever know. Far from being dispiriting or disappointing, this realization fills me with a sense of excited wonder at the complexity and interconnectedness of existence, as well as the fragility and impermanence of us, our institutions, and our systems. I feel grounded in the groundlessness of it all.

There is a practical application of this newfound perspective that Sagan put so beautifully I must quote it at length:

We have held the peculiar notion that a person or society that is a little different from us, whoever we are, is somehow strange or bizarre, to be distrusted or loathed. Think of the negative connotations of words like alien or outlandish. And yet the monuments and cultures of each of our civilizations merely represent different ways of being human. An extraterrestrial visitor, looking at the differences among human beings and their societies, would find those differences trivial compared to the similarities. The Cosmos may be densely populated with intelligent beings. But the Darwinian lesson is clear: There will be no humans elsewhere. Only here. Only on this small planet. We are a rare as well as endangered species. Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.

Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group. Initially our loyalties were to ourselves and our immediate family, next, to bands of wandering hunter-gatherers, then to tribes, small settlements, city-states, nations. We have broadened the circle of those we love. We have now organized what are modestly described as superpowers, which include groups of people from divergent ethnic and cultural backgrounds working in some sense together—surely a humanizing and character-building experience. If we are to survive, our loyalties must be broadened further, to include the whole human community, the entire planet Earth.

Staying true to my core values of love and accountability means that when I show up at home, it will not be good enough for me to merely circle the wagons and take care of my own. I need to extract every last drop of value out of these years of incarceration and put it to good use—by reaching out, perceiving what ties us together, and amplifying those common connections to work with others to make a positive impact in whatever ways I can.

The preparation and checking of my ego and shortcomings is arduous at times, as I'm sure tackling some of the challenges ahead will be. But it doesn't all have to be so heavy. Even while I try to break down walls with medicine balls, I can bring lightness and open-heartedness to the process by taking a deep breath, having a laugh with folks like Lamar, and remembering that wise guidance is available to me if I pay attention. The Avett Brothers sing an affirmation to me in my headphones from their song When I Drink that I pass along to you:

But if I think
I just might get something out of this
Our parents taught us to learn
When we miss
They said, why, just do your best

Just do your best
It's the only way to keep
That last bit of sanity
Maybe I don't have to be good
But I can try to be
At least a little better than I've been
So far

Each day, all is as well as I allow it to be. We're okay, and we can get a little better—together. And when we do, we can make whatever we're facing a little better too.

Onward we go. Much love to you all.

J