What We Resolve to Be

Interior of Barracks through Jackson Arch, ca. 1970. Courtesy of the VMI Archives, Photograph No. 0030532

What I Learned From an 18-Year-Old Kid.

In two weeks I will attend my 45th reunion at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia. It will be the first event of any kind I have attended there since May 1981. Life just somehow never worked out for me to get back, other than a couple of brief stops while passing through Lexington during the summer when the place was near empty.

Although, if I'm being completely honest, maybe it's more accurate to say I never decided to make it work.

That has nothing to do with the importance VMI has had on the trajectory of my life. That is unmistakable. It has more to do with an unfortunate tendency I've had throughout much of my life to keep moving forward without looking back.

I described it like this in my memoir, Seeing Clearly:

“I can hear Raúl Juliá’s line in the 1976 movie The Gumball Rally, as he rips off the rearview mirror from the sports car he is sitting in. ‘The first rule of Italian driving is what’s behind me is not important.’ Somewhere along the way I got good at saying goodbye, and I learned not to look back.”

In my memoir I suggested that my perspective had changed. That I had learned that, while living in the past may not serve us, honoring what came before and learning from those experiences can enrich our lives.

That is undoubtedly true, but another truth, for me, was that I don’t believe I felt worthy enough to be seen, and perhaps that was a factor in why I never returned all these years.

So here I am, 45 years later, headed back to my alma mater. A place I haven't returned to in any meaningful way for nearly half a century, yet one that has always defined a significant part of who I am.

As I think about the upcoming event, I remember seeing alumni from graduating classes in the 1930s returning for their 45^th reunion when I was a cadet.

Man, they were old.

Now I'm just trying to ignore the math.

I will never forget that day in August 1977 when an 18-year-old version of me first walked through the Main Arch and into the Old Barracks at VMI. A tall, skinny kid, afraid of his own shadow, searching for a way to become a man.

My father was a career Navy man who, at the young age of 17, like his brother, answered the call to duty after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Before he even left boot camp, his brother died when his ship sank somewhere in the North Atlantic. I don't know who he was as a young man, but as my father, there was a hardness to him that I can only attribute to the adversity he experienced at such a young age.

My brother was seven years older than me and as a result he took the brunt of our father's hardened heart. At the same time, Mike enjoyed a relationship with him that I would never have. Even as adults, if I called home and Dad answered the phone, he'd say something like "Hi! Let me get your mother." I just assumed he didn't like talking on the phone until I was visiting my brother one day and he suggested we call our parents. Imagine my surprise when Dad answered the phone and the two of them spoke for twenty minutes about golf, football, and God knows what else.

That's not to say my father didn't love me. Of that I have no doubt. But their relationship was a special one. Today I look back fondly at the closeness they shared, but well into my adult life, there was a sense that I lived in their shadow, while Mike seemed to live in the spotlight, and it is easy for me to see how that might have left me feeling unseen, and maybe a little less worthy than my older brother. It is hard for me to deny that influenced many of the decisions I made in my early years.

Sadly, it wouldn't be until years after my father's death that I finally realized he'd always been far more proud of me than I was of myself.

But on that day when I walked into the barracks at VMI, I was searching for a way to become tougher, stronger, better. To be like my brother. Like my father.

To be worthy of being seen, or more accurately, to feel worthy of being seen.

So there I was, an 18-year-old kid, carrying all that baggage when I sat down in an auditorium one day during my senior year in high school. On stage stood a young man, only a few years older than me. He wore a gray military uniform with a stiff high collar. He  stood tall, proud, and confident. He was a second classman from the Virginia Military Institute. He talked about their electrical engineering program, a discipline I was interested in. He talked about things such as honor, strength, brotherhood. Then, near the end of his talk, he said something I can still hear to this day:

“Not everyone can make it there.”

That's when I knew I would go to VMI.

I remember how proud my father was when I told him.

Then I got scared and nearly backed out at the last minute. It was the only time I saw him cry until my mother died 25 years later.

At that point, there was no way I could back out.

I walked into the Old Barracks at VMI looking for a way to be stronger, tougher, and more confident. To finally feel like the man I wanted to be.

I found something entirely different.

It didn't take long to realize there was no number of pushups you could do to satisfy an angry upperclassman. If you did ten, he wanted twenty. If you managed twenty, he wanted thirty.

Eventually you learned that strength wasn't what would get you through.

It was resolve.

Not what you wanted to be. What you resolved to be.

And something else happened along the way. Something that, at first, seems almost contradictory.

One of the things VMI did remarkably well with Rats, as freshmen are called, was strip away many of the things we used to distinguish ourselves from one another. It didn't matter how much money your family had, how good an athlete you had been, or how smart you thought you were. We wore the same uniforms, ate the same food, lived in the same spartan rooms, and endured many of the same indignities.

We were all Rats.

We were all equal.

And, we were all equally unseen.

They didn't particularly care who we thought we were. They cared about what we did. Did we show up? Did we quit? Did we keep going when we were tired, scared, or convinced we couldn't do one more pushup?

Eventually you realize that who you are has little to do with physical strength, and everything to do with how you show up, particularly when life gets hard.

Today, I still walk through life with far more fear than I'd like. I seem to have a special talent for seeing all the things that can go wrong. I’d like to blame that on what I learned from the engineering department at VMI, but if you looked at my GPA, you'd see I probably wasn't paying that much attention, so perhaps I picked up that “skill” somewhere else.

Still, maybe that frightened kid was onto something when he chose VMI.

We learn very little sitting safely inside our comfort zones. Adversity may be one of life's greatest teachers. VMI didn't make me strong. It helped me see that I was stronger than I imagined. It taught me to take one more step when I was certain I couldn’t.

And then another.

Life has been reinforcing that lesson ever since.

Thirteen years ago, I learned that I would eventually lose much of my eyesight. I remember how scared I was, and I think now of that kid walking into the barracks at VMI with equally little understanding of what lay ahead.

With each passing year, my central vision has slowly slipped away. Several times over the last couple of years, I've thought, I've finally hit bottom. It can't get any worse.

Then it does.

More times than I can count I have called on the resolve I learned so many years ago to keep pushing forward, trying to live up to the expectations I still have for myself. Expectations, I am beginning to realize, that were created for a Chris with 20/20 vision.

But each day, that gets a little harder.

An optometrist recently encouraged me to start using a white cane.

“Not for you,” she said. “So others can see your disability.”

But that's exactly what I don't want.

To be seen as disabled.

A friend recently told me that when they see me out walking the dog, they used to wave. Eventually they stopped because I never waved back.

I couldn't see them.

So I walk through the neighborhood, surrounded by people I cannot see, wondering if perhaps they no longer see me either.

It’s an interesting experience for a guy who spent much of his life feeling “unseen.” Life is like that. It tends to give us exactly the lesson we need. The trick, I suppose, is not to miss it.

Today, as I rely on my computer to read back the words I type but can no longer see, I realize I'm okay. I have a great life. One that I would not trade with anyone. And while I would never have chosen this part of my journey, living with a visual impairment has reminded me of a lesson I learned all those years ago as I walked the Rat Line at VMI.

That strength isn't about how many pushups we can do. It's about the strength to stand back up when life knocks us down. To realize that we are far more capable than we sometimes feel.

Adversity is one of life's greatest teachers, if you are willing to take that next step.

And then another.

Soon I will be back at VMI, surrounded by more than 100 of my Brother Rats. People with whom I shared so much. Even those I didn't know well, walked the same difficult path I did.

I know with absolute certainty that I won't recognize most of them. I won't see the wave from across the room or the smile as someone approaches. I certainly won't be able to read their name tags.

It's strange. I'm torn between the fear that I will leave them feeling unseen by me, as if I don't remember them or simply don't care, and knowing that I will almost certainly feel unseen myself.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, that is becoming a familiar feeling.

Maybe what I am still learning is that seeing and being seen have very little to do with eyesight.

I find myself wondering what the 18-year-old who showed up in Lexington that day in August 1977 would think of the man returning nearly fifty years later.

It's hard for me to imagine. No doubt there are things along the road between then and now that he would judge me poorly for. And some of that judgment would be warranted.

But from where I stand today, I see that kid differently. I see an incredibly brave young man who made a choice many kids his age would never have made. He was scared, but he went anyway. And he never gave up.

I am incredibly proud of him. And grateful for the choices he made.

At least some of them.

There are a few I'll leave for another day. He is only a younger me, after all.

All this leaves me wondering, did I turn out to be the man who I resolved to be all those years ago?

I honestly don't know.

What I do know is that when I look back over my life, I see accomplishments I'm proud of, and mistakes I wish I could undo. There were times when I showed up exactly as the person I wanted to be, and others when I barely recognize the man in the mirror.

I can't change anything about the road behind me, any more than that frightened 18-year-old could have known the man I would become. What matters is whether I'm proud of the man I am today.

Sometimes we fail. But it is our resolve to do the right thing that drives us to pick up the pieces, remind ourselves of the path we were walking, and then take the next step in the right direction.

Nearly fifty years later, I think I'm finally beginning to understand that.

And perhaps more importantly, I'm finally learning to see the one person whose approval that frightened kid needed most.

My own.