The Flat Earth Club

Centuries ago, the world was believed to be flat. It sure looks flat. The idea that it is round requires scientific inquiry and exploration beyond the naked eye.

Recently, I have been wondering about this round-earth hoax.

If my world is flat, not round, that means there is an edge. And when I reach that edge, I will fall off the known world—all the beliefs, experiences, and points of reference that have guided my passage up until now will disappear.

I have danced around this concept of a flat earth for a long time. I sail my ship towards the edge out of curiosity, only to turn back, overtaken by terror.

But now I find myself in a gale force wind. I’ve taken all the sails down. And yet the storm is pushing me ever closer to the edge of the known world. If I had any choice in the matter, I would run back to dry land. But it looks like I am going over that edge this time. The Heavens are in control, not me.

I try to imagine that over the edge of the earth is a new place, where the rules of physics do not apply, where I might find a more profound joy, sorrow, and love than I can even imagine. But that is a far-off knowing as I huddle my cold, soaked body against my mast, bracing for the fall.

***

This morning, well before dawn, I woke to the sound of my dog Kodi snoring. I was disoriented as my brain came back online, a supercomputer booting up.

A thought hit my neurons like that rogue storm.

Burning deep in my chest, someone is squeezing my heart.

A rapid beat.

Falling.

No net.

The fatal smack of bones on rock.

An alarm as old as I am, maybe older, back to the first caveman.

***

I am four years old.

A bright fall day filled with sunshine and leaves near Ithaca, New York. Dad taught English at Cornell then. I wore an itchy wool sweater matching my older brother Will’s. Dad remembers flying kites in the brisk wind. Mom still has a picture of her three boys that day, each with identical blond crew cuts, half a century later.

I clung to the metal, unable to let go, abject terror flooding my body, three-quarters of the way up a fire tower, enduring gust after gust. Will had already zoomed past me to the top and come back down. The wind shook the steel frame several inches in either direction.

My brother had convinced me to climb up the tower, but now I am sure I am going to die, my caveman brain locking my body in place, sure the tiger is just inches away. Dad tried to reason with me from the ground. But I couldn’t hear him.

Mom reports that I had violent night terrors from an early age.

***

The terror that has haunted me throughout my life could have been the height and the wind rattling that flimsy structure that day. Or it could have been the fear embedded in my cells from when my mom carried me in her belly to Mississippi in the summer of 1964, while my dad taught at a black college, tried to register black voters, and three other volunteers were brutally murdered, their bodies eventually pulled from a river.

It could have been that my dad faced a two-year prison sentence for returning his draft card around the time of the fire tower incident. Or that he had passed out from the exhaustion of leading mass Vietnam War protests on campus shortly after. Or that my parents’ best friend, the priest Daniel Berrigan, became one of the 10 most wanted men by the FBI for napalming selective service records while we were in Ithaca and my dad had played a key role in his escape to Canada, and as a result, our house and phone lines were under constant surveillance by the FBI.

It could have been a fear of heights for sure, or it could have been all of that, and the intuition I had as I went to kindergarten that my real-life terror was not over.

It was just getting started.

***

From kindergarten to now, I have had frequent panic attacks, vast waves of emotion out of nowhere, causing me to act irrationally to escape an imagined danger.

I have fought this lack of any solid ground, any sense of safety on this planet and in my skin, with booze, business success, running in the woods, meditation, and writing.

But the terror persists, my old friend returning just this morning.

The worst episodes of my life occurred in 2018 when I became convinced that I was headed for financial ruin, taking my family down with me. The risk of that outcome was not zero, given my brash approach to my business life over so many years. But in the end, I honestly had nothing to worry about.

These days, the terror is more general, but it sometimes focuses on a class I have created from whole cloth, teaching thirty undergraduates. Something I love and objectively can’t really fail at, even if I tried.

But tell that to my heart when it beats out of my chest at four in the morning. I force myself to get up, feed Kodi, get my coffee, and meditate, just asking God to please let me know that I am loved.

In those moments, I try to remember that we are all in the process of learning how to receive love.

***

This flat-earth club is both a blessing and a curse. If I knew the world was round, I would never have experienced 99% of the things that I have in my life. Having an edge—the belief that I am constantly moving from the known to the profoundly unknown world—has caused all kinds of destructive behavior. And caused me to harm people in my life whom I love in ways that I deeply regret.

But it has also caused a well of creative energy that has allowed me to move mountains, change lives, and seek answers where others might have given up. In those moments, I am like the guy who sees his grandmother getting run over and, for reasons no one can explain, has the superhuman strength to lift a two-ton car off her chest before she is crushed. The grandmother is imagined, a bogeyman of my own making, but the superpower is real.

That pin prick of light deep in my chest is, in fact, the deepest and truest part of me. I fucking hate it. I will never get used to the discomfort of it. Each time it makes me feel like screaming and then puking. It tortures me. But it is also my muse—the heart demanding to be heard even when I want it to shut up.

Thank you, fellow members of the Flat Earth Club, for seeing the world the way I see it. And thank you, my heart, for holding me accountable. For always forcing me to love even more fiercely—my family, the Eternal, and ultimately myself.

I am just the sailor huddled at the mast in the raging storm, being forced to the edge of the known world, and forever falling with no net, again and again, to wake up someplace completely different and magical in its own unique way.

—

This post was previously published on Linkedin.com.