The Philosofer

I’ve been struggling with an increasingly heavy burden lately. It’s a feeling that’s been like a burning deep in my chest that has been growing over the past year. I’ve always carried this dim smolder of drive, determination, and desire for something great. Everything kind of went to shit when we returned from Tanzania. In a lot of ways I expected us to return to Tanzania or at least have a bit more of a future working overseas with the poor. That might have still been a possibility despite the tension between my wife and I concerning our direction until we lost Sonja’s parents. That completely derailed anything either of us had planned for ourselves. It launched us into a dark season of doubt, grief, and hopelessness. I saw our big dreams slipping away as I watched my wife slip into deep, ugly grief. We circled the wagons and I realized my mission during the next season would be to take care of my wife through the heaviest season of grief. Even through all that my smoldering desire for something big was growing again. I will be honest that I didn’t always handle it well and at times I unintentionally rushed my wife in her grief with ideas and plans of moving on to the next “big thing”. For me finding hope again was hidden in purpose and action while for her hope was buried under pain and grief. The last thing she needed was another big thing to tackle. We’ve since worked through that and have come out the other side stronger and understanding each other much better.

Through that season and meditating on the swelling fire inside me, I slowly began to learn more about myself and how I’m wired. I realized more and more that the thoughts, motivations, and desires I had were aligning more and more with the heroes I had read about for years. I would read books about soldiers, explorers, humanitarians, leaders, and world changers and the thoughts and desires they would share in their stories were at times exactly what I was feeling. I couldn’t help but feeling like I was, perhaps, cut from a similar piece of cloth and that much of my frustration and depression stemmed from energy, passion, and drive that had nowhere to go. I talked about this with my friends and had always assumed that deep inside everyone was a desire for something great. I soon found that nearly everyone around me was content with what they were doing. Their families, children, jobs, and social lives were satisfactory and my dissatisfaction was seen as a negative thing to overcome rather than something to feed and follow. It was a challenging step to understand that most of the people around me preferred safe, predictable, and comfortable lives rather than chasing the dreams of the heart. It was (and is) hard not to judge others for their seeming lack of drive and initiative. I am just now understanding that people run at different speeds. Understanding is the first step and practicing refraining from judgement is the next and one that I am often quite poor at following through with.

Some time ago I was having a conversation with a good friend and we were talking about how your perspective on life changes if you don’t believe in an afterlife. If your 80-100 years is all you have than by god you are gonna make the best of it. If you believe that this is only the waiting room for something bigger you won’t feel the need, nay the urgent desire to go out there and make the best of it. How someone makes the best of their time on earth is largely dependent on their core values, worldview, and personality. I told this friend that I am the kind guy to grab life by the balls and put it into 6th gear to get the most of it. When I die I want to be completely emptied, having spared nothing. He responded that 6th gear wasn’t for him but that he wanted to coast through life smelling the flowers and enjoying the little things. For perhaps the first time I understood, without judgement, that some people don’t want to up-shift. They are content with coasting, 1st, or even 4th gear. Very few even have a 6th gear and those that want to live their lives full throttle are destined to straining, discomfort, and hard work all for a reward that a fraction of a percentage of the population will experience or understand.

I realize it may sound arrogant to include myself in this community and I hesitate to do so. All I acknowledge is that I believe I have the ingredients of what it takes to be a 6th gear person but without the track record or life experience to show for it. To me 6th gear people are the Amundsens, Jobs, Livingstons, Bransons, Slocums, Roosevelts, and Baumgartners. There are many more who have not achieved such notoriety but they are the people that don’t give up, go after the big thing, and then when they get it go after more. As I learn myself more and more I realize that I don’t think will ever be happy unless I go after something big. Something hard, something nearly impossible, and something that will carry me through the rest of my life and mark me as someone who accomplished something rare. I don’t feel that I could ever feel fulfilled by anything but such an accomplishment.
This brings a set of challenges in relating to family and friends. I’ve found that many do not understand the need for epic achievement and most can be offended by it. It offends their sense of self that they are not chasing big things in their own lives. So the response is often disdain and discouragement. I work through this and have been growing thick skin from being misunderstood for so long in other areas as well.
I found the exact language I was looking for to describe this burning in my heart when I was listening to a TED podcast about people who have gone to the very outer edge in their respective fields. One was a lady who was working a desk job and had a dream to paddle across the Atlantic. She made a to-do list and 14 months later she rowed across the Atlantic, just like that. Another was of a guy who skied solo to the North Pole and another who explored the deepest caves on earth, often being underground for months at a time. There was a particular response to the question, “Why do this?” that went straight to my core and has become a mantra for me. To the question “why?” the adventurer responded, “Because I would rather engage and endeavor than to watch and wonder.”  Ah! To boil down everything of what I feel into a single phrase! Even if failure awaits, the attempt far outweighs caution and regret.

So what does this mean for Sonja and I? I am married and in love with a 3rd gear woman. She is wonderful, amazing, beautiful, incredibly talented and creative, and honestly the most tender and genuine person I have ever met. She has big dreams of her own that are formidable and grand but 6th gear is not anywhere in her “DNA”. It has been a point of contention at times but as with anything in marriage you find a balance and do your best to keep it. It’s not easy when you have a husband who wants to sail around the world or live in South Sudan and is constantly depressed and restless when he isn’t working towards something. We have gone over so many scenarios, going to law school, becoming a doctor, getting an MBA in Switzerland, traveling overseas a few times a year to work with the poor, getting into politics, if it’s out there we’ve probably talked about it. I soon realized that all my life’s goals were not possible in one short lifetime and if I kept going back and forth I would waste what’s left of my youth in ambiguity and indecision.

One of the biggest dreams I have carried since my youth was to be a Navy SEAL. My dad was in the Navy and I always wanted to make him proud by going into the Navy as well but I knew I could never do a “normal” job and that the SEAL’s were the only way to go for me. I probably should have just done it out of high-school but I went to Mozambique with Iris Ministries instead which I definitely don’t regret. I came back from that, fell in love, got married, and the rest is history. The dream fell by the wayside. I would always get that burning sensation whenever I would read books or see movies with elite military guys in it. In the last year I began researching the Army’s Special Forces. How I have overlooked these guys my entire life is a mystery to me. They are Tier 1 operators (similar to SEAL’s i.e. the best of the best) but they work with the local people, training them to resist their own oppressive governments. They learn multiple languages and are skilled in all manner of badassery that any self respecting man would want to learn. It was a group of about 150 Special Forces soldiers that trained and worked with native Afghan troops to oust the Taliban out of northern Afghanistan in early 2002. Needless to say these guys are total beasts and their mission scope is one of the few things I could get behind with all that I am. I researched the medic position for SF and knew that that is what I had to do. The SF medics are the highest trained in the entire armed forces with skills ranging from trauma care, dentistry, surgery, infectious diseases, and even veterinary medicine. This on top of learning how to shoot, blow stuff up, jump out of planes and helicopters, speak multiple languages and actually make a difference in the world helping real people fight their own fight for freedom.

To make this happen is an insanely massive undertaking and sacrifice and something Sonja and I have talked about at great length. The possibility for failure is incredible high and the difficulty is extremely formidable. It will a require an uprooting of our entire lives as well as significant time spent apart from each other and away from family and friends. But the reward is what I have been looking for my entire life. A membership to one of the most elite communities in the entire world and a skill set that aligns perfectly with my core values of helping the poor and freeing the oppressed and marginalized. To me a sacrifice of 5-10 years is a small price to pay for the satisfaction, fulfillment, and experience that will come from this venture. I have currently secured a difficult to acquire Army contract (18x if you care to know) that will allow me a chance at Special Forces training directly without prior enlisted experience. I will be shipping out to basic training in the next couple months.

As I stated before I don’t expect people to understand why we are doing this. A lot of people I have told have had a negative reaction. It’s hard to not be understood but that’s ok. I know that I know that I know that this is what we are meant to do. It will set us up for incredible success for the rest of our lives with money for school when this season is over as well as a bridge that exists for SF medics to become a physicians assistants, a high paying and respectable medical profession. Should the stars align there is also a bridge from a physicians assistant to a doctor that only requires a few years of school. In short, I could have all that my little boy heart has ever dreamed, the toughness and bad-assery of being an elite soldier, the cross cultural skills and knowledge to work with foreign people, and a medical skill set that could be used to both support my family and serve the poor overseas. There is a lot still in the air and I am not guaranteed anything until the Green Beret sits firmly atop my head but I couldn’t live with myself unless I gave this a shot. I feel I would be swallowed with regret and self-loathing if I didn’t give this one thing my everything. So this is where we’re at and there are a million little details to work out but this is the direction we have decided and we are moving forward. I felt it appropriate to announce it some way that not only explained my motivation but also the long history of desire, determination, and dissatisfaction that has lead up to this point in my life. Thanks for reading this long post. If you could take anything away from reading this it would be a challenge to yourself…

Do you want to engage and endeavor or watch and wonder? If you do not choose for yourself the choice will be made for you.