The call came while I was at work, and I received it in my office. I cannot remember who called me, but I remember the message. My father had died suddenly that morning. I remember a vague awareness that life as I knew it would change forever.
My senses dulled, my cognitive capabilities slowed, and I numbed. I traveled to Canada for the funeral, comforted my mother, and be with my siblings and friends as we tried to sort it all out. There were a lot of financial uncertainties with my father's death, and I witnessed my brothers' anger with my late father. Usually, I would have taken a deep dive into that anger, but curiously enough, I did not. I was frustrated from time to time, yet I recognized that I accepted the situation for what it was and tried to stay focused on solution-based action. It took eight months to resolve, and my mother was left financially stable.
Over the months following my father's death, I noticed that I saw the world differently with a new pair of glasses. I had heard many men go through a 'mid-life crisis' or 'change of life, not so much when they are 50 years of age but much sooner, usually precipitated by the death of their first parent. And for many of us, that often happens when we are between 35 and 42 years of age. I was 37 years of age at the time. People told me to expect a significant upheaval in my attitudes and outlook on life, something I had not experienced since puberty.
And that is precisely what happened. The change was not slow and gradual but quick and upending. I returned to work. The 'everything is a crisis' culture of the workplace, the tyrannical rantings of a questionable leader, and the petty office politics ceased to have the same triggering effect on me. Instead, a curious sense of apathy replaced it. Sure, I got annoyed from time to time but not the long angry jags I used to experience.
Apathy can be a dangerous thing. I remember reading once that the Scientologists rank apathy in the emotional range just before death. I did not care if anyone won or lost if anyone was right or wrong. My social interactions with friends were unsatisfying, and I was apathetic to their concerns, brushing them off. Someone once told me, tongue-in-cheek, never to underestimate the value of a well-developed sense of apathy. Not caring about much is one way not to get hurt, and it is also one way to numb out of life and miss the experience completely. Caring friends told me that this was just part of the grieving process, and I would come out of it in time. How much time? Who knew; I did not care.
However, my friends were right. In about a year, the apathetic gig stopped working for me, and I began to feel a broader range of emotions. It's hard to explain that person who emerged. It was not a purposeful contrivance; it was a more natural metamorphosis. I shed a lot of beliefs that were not working for me anymore without trying. A firmer conviction of who I was and what was important to me came to light, and I began to make it real in the world.
When the big boss told me to do something that ran counter to my professional ethics, I did not argue. I refused. He made it a battle of wills, yet I was not fighting. He threatened to fire me, refused to legally protect me if the agency was sued, screamed and cursed at me. I did not get angry; I did not fight back. I took that energy and did the next right thing, worked with staff, developed a paper and sound recommendation based on facts and policy that garnered support from the local elected officials and the newspaper's editorial board. The boss got all the credit. Behind the scenes, the boss began to make my life, and my team's a living hell because we did not bend to his will. It did not matter to me. I took a stand and faced tyranny calmly, quietly, and I discovered courage, a conviction of the heart. I also came to understand what integrity meant to me: the integration of my physical, mental and spiritual sides working together as one.
Some may say that is nothing less than insubordination, which is unacceptable. Perhaps. The stakes were high. Five hundred acres of the pristine natural environment were ready to be destroyed to create a golf course community. Instead, the result was a natural preserve with a community threaded through it.
My anger of an earlier age transformed into something I did not recognize, something that felt stable and aligned to an internal moral compass. My energies channeled more into constructive solutions than pointless anger. That required input and support from diverse people to verify and validate. I built trust with others, and I became a change catalyst.
I remember attending a City Council meeting one morning. An African-American gentleman chained himself to a seat in the chambers in front of the camera. He vocally shouted his cause to anyone who would listen. Another time, I watched an angry mob of residents march from a nearby public housing project on a meeting I was conducting to disrupt and disband it. A tall fellow dressed in army fatigues with a bowie knife accosted us verbally. In both cases, partial truth and misunderstanding of facts fueled the outbursts. Both incidents involved people who felt disenfranchised and powerless over events that would change their lives. They tried, and no one listened. The angry and violent reaction seemed the only reasonable course of action left for them to get their voices heard.
In the latter case, my team spent a lot of time that evening talking to the angry group. We then committed to meeting them on their turf and understanding their lives and issues. And we did just that, and we were heartfelt about it. It changed our entire approach to the project we were working on, and we received their support for it in return.
Anger is rooted in fear. I firmly believe that. Find out what someone truly fears, and then you have a chance of transforming them. That belief has helped me work with people, change resistance to support, find common ground and build constructive change. It can be challenging and frightening. People have many deep-rooted fears that manifest in complex ways.
I am not an armchair psychologist. I could recognize the fear in another person based on similar fears I had myself. As a result, I experienced and understood empathy in a way that I had never known. And in the course of working with others, I addressed fears buried deep inside of me. This approach can be challenging to manage, but it is not impossible, and it is not an easy fix. I gained wisdom and insight the more I progressed along this path.
And the wonderful part of it all was that it helped me understand my anger and fears. A transformation had begun for me, and I became unstuck from the perpetual, angry person I once was. That was very satisfying for some time, but eventually, it was not enough to sustain me. I felt something was still missing; I could sense it but not grasp it. I intuitively knew I could evolve much more as a human being, but how?
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