Chapter Five

Not going to die today, Mom.

On the winding roads back up the hill, I must have thanked my new saviors at least one hundred times. I introduced myself as best I could, trying to shake the miserable first impression that I undoubtedly made. I learned their names: James and Lucy and their daughter Christine. They also lived on the other side of the bridge.

“So, James,” I asked, “how often do you guys get to come out this way?”

“We try to at least once a month,” replied James. “We’ve been taking Christine here ever since she could walk, and before that we even tried a couple trips in a stroller.”

“That didn’t turn out so well,” Lucy added, “but it made for some great pictures of me trying to lift the four wheels out of mud.”

“I gotta ask,” I started, “does the park ever get old for you? I had a fantastic day, without the whole almost getting lost thing, but does that feeling ever wear off once you’ve come so often?”

“Not at all. In fact that’s when it just starts to get good.” James studied the confused look on my face and continued, “Joel, you said you had a great day and it was your first time being in the park. Tell me: what was so special about the day for you?”

I couldn’t quite see where he was going with this and I took some time to think about the day I had. “I guess what was so great was that I really had never seen anything so magnificent before. It was just one of those moments where you know that the place you are in is sacred beyond words. It’s tough to explain further than being awe-struck.”

“It sounds to me, Joel, that the day was special for you because you saw something you had never seen before. You got to stand there in person and look at something you would usually see on TV or in a movie. It was probably similar to the feeling of your first concert; all the music you listened to in your bedroom was being played right in front of you.

“Now imagine that you got to be in the band. That’s what it feels like to me and my family. Sure the feelings of wonder and awe become slightly suppressed as time goes on, but we stopped looking at the redwoods years ago. Now, we go to experience the woods.

“Going back to the band analogy: who really gets to enjoy that concert? Is it the person who knows the band’s hit songs from the radio? Or is it the person that has seen the band every time they come to the city and know every word to every song, even the songs no one else knew existed? By now, we know this park like the back of our hands and have made new experiences every time we go.”

Lucy added, “It’s been special to us. You know, James actually proposed to me inside the park. Yup, right in the grove dedicated to FDR if you walked past that.” I smiled recalling my own thoughts in that part of the woods.

“Now,” she continued, “we get to look back at those times when we were just getting started with our lives and reflect on all of those great memories. And even better, we can take our daughter there and watch her stand in that same grove that we stood in before she was even a thought. So you can see how the awe goes away, but is replaced with something much deeper than that. It’s about the people, Joel.”

It’s about the people? That may be the exact opposite of what Salazar said to me.

“Oh,” I started, “I, umm, I actually came here today to be alone. I was told it would be a great place to learn a little about myself.”

“Well, I guess enough about us. What’s your story? And what’d you learn, Joel?”

Great. Here’s that question again, I thought.

Maybe Salazar was right after all. I certainly had learned something today, but I hadn’t had the time to actually reflect on what I’d learned. And I certainly knew that I couldn’t respond to the exact same question with yet another poor answer. I had to think quickly. What had I learned?

“My story?” I started, trying to buy some time. “My story is still in its first chapter. Sure, there has been some interesting character development, but it’s a story full of suspense. In fact, it’s one of those stories where the author keeps writing a couple pages a day without really knowing how it’s going to end, himself.

“My story starts just outside of New York. I grew up there with my dad. My mom died in childbirth. Over the years I have come to terms with how that has impacted my life, but I like to still think that she is here with me.

“Even from a young age, I knew that I was going to do something great. I thought I’d find that greatness in engineering at MIT. That hasn’t been the case so far, but I wouldn’t change a thing about any of my decisions so far. This summer I’m interning at Atlas Labs here in San Francisco where the CEO himself this week told me that I needed to learn to be alone. So that’s why I’m here: to learn more about myself.

“You asked me what I had learned today, and while I haven’t had much time to process that, I think the number one thing that I learned about myself is that for some reason, I have an ability to connect with things on a deeper level than I realized. The CEO, Paul Salazar, said that I would find things about myself that I already knew, but I just had to recognize them and accept them.

“Today I learned that I have always been impacted by people or places like today more so than I think most people are. What I mean by this, let’s take the redwoods for an example, I go to such a place, and I get so full of emotion that to some extent it makes me sad. I say sad because I can’t put another word to replace it that makes sense. Maybe it’s a melancholy; yes, that’s probably more accurate. And it’s the same thing with people, looking back on it. Some of my favorite memories are those moments with my friends or family that mean the world to me and everyone is having a great time and laughing, but there I’ll be in the corner, thinking about how beautiful a moment is to the point that I become almost sad. It’s tough to explain, but I guess I’m learning.”

“That, Joel, is a great story,” said Lucy. “So you said as a kid you knew you’d do something great. And here you are in the greatest city in the world. What are your thoughts about that.”

“Well, step one was getting here,” I replied. “I worked for so long just to be given this opportunity that I never really planned for what I’d do once I got here. All I know is that I’m trying to do something big. Whatever that may be. What about you guys? What’s your story?"

We were now passing back over the Golden Gate Bridge. I couldn’t help but stare out of the window as I listened to James tell his story.

“Lucy and I met our senior year of college at the University of Cincinnati,” he started. “That feels like ages ago, but we graduated seven years ago, have been married for five years and now we have a four year old, Christine.

“For the first year out of college, I was working in San Francisco at a tech startup, Lucy was back in the Midwest working for an ad agency. Just as she was getting ready to move out here and find a job, the company I was working for went under and I was out of a job. Instead of her moving towards me, I went back to the Midwest as well and moved back in with my parents where I spent half of my days applying for jobs out on the West coast and the other half working on a personal project.

“It turns out that I should have been working full time on that project because that took off quicker than I expected and soon enough I was back here in San Francisco working as the CEO of my own company with Lucy as the Chief Marketing Officer. It all happened really quickly, I mean it’s still hard to believe the way everything came together, but yeah that’s our story so far.”

“Wow, so your wife was your first employee? I’m not sure if it gets better than that. So what does your company do?” I asked her.

“So the company name is called ‘Preventia,’” Lucy responded. “If I had to sum up 'what we do,' I would say that we are completely eradicating the disease of dementia and Alzheimers.

“When I went home after losing my job,” James continued, “I moved back in with my parents where my mom first started showing signs of mental degeneration. It kept getting worse as the months went on and she went from forgetting my dad’s phone number to forgetting my name. It was really really hard for me to see my own mother turn into a completely different person and I vowed to never have my own kids see me like I had to see her.

“Like I said, in the mornings I would go job hunting and at night I would pour myself over books in the library, reading anything I could about how to prevent dementia. In that time, I learned that one in three cases of the disease were preventable. That was all I needed to hear.

“I continued studying what I had to do for myself and how I needed to change my own life when Lucy had the idea of taking this to a much bigger level. The idea snowballed and what came out of it was a complete lifestyle guide to preventing dementia. It covers everything I studied: from adequate sleep and exercise, to eating specific foods and brain exercises. It started out as just a website and some cookbooks, but now we have had over five million app downloads and are now getting ready to launch our own food line of brain healthy foods. It took a lot of work to make it to where we are today, but I know that this is exactly what I was called to do.

“What is it? You’ve got a weird look on your face,” finished James as he looked at me in the rearview mirror.

“It’s nothing,” I replied. “It’s just that everyone I meet here is so full of purpose. Every story is so inspiring. Meanwhile, I’m here just saying that I want to do something big and don’t even remotely know what that something is.”

Lucy turned around from the passenger seat and smiled at me.

“Don’t you already know that you are currently doing something big? You’re in San Francisco working for your dream company. I know an internship isn’t the end goal, but you have to understand that you can do ‘something big’ at every stage in your life. When James was working for that startup all of those years ago, he was still putting in seventy hours a week. That was big. Your goal in life, Joel, shouldn’t be to do one big thing; but rather, everything you do, you should do it big. That includes your school, your internship, your relationships. That’s all the advice I have for you.”

I sat quietly for a few moments in the backseat of their car. I never really considered what Lucy had said to me. I always assumed that I was just waiting for that one big thing that would change my life forever. It’s not to say that the big thing will never come, but it sure is comforting to know that I don’t have to spend my whole life waiting for it.

I spent the next few minutes quietly looking out of the window. The initial rush of being saved along with the meaningful conversation I was having eventually wore off and was replaced with deep fatigue from having spent the day hiking. I wasn’t sure if this was as enlightening and life changing as my taxi driver’s San Francisco experience, but I was certainly starting to understand. My family was never super religious growing up, yet I spent so long waiting for what I thought would be divine inspiration for the elevator to success. I was beginning to understand that there was no elevator in the first place. Hearing James’s story, it seemed more like a winding staircase where you look up and cannot see the end but simply more stairs overhead.

As we drove downtown, I directed James on where to drop me off in front of my apartment. I once again thanked them a million times, reflecting on how different my night would have been at that moment. When I started walking up to my front steps, Lucy rolled down her window and called me back to the car. James reached over from the driver seat and handed me his business card saying, “if you ever need help doing something big, you give me a call.”

I promised him that I would and I turned once again to face my apartment. When I walked in, for some reason, the apartment felt different than it did that morning or the past week. I had an incredible day and it all started with being alone. Yes I had great conversation with James and Lucy on the drive home, but I had even better conversations with myself along the trails. In fact, I would argue that the previous day I would not have been able to have the same conversation with them in the car had I not taken time to be alone with my thoughts before. I knew that I wasn’t fully where I wanted to be– I still had a lot to learn, but it was a step in the right direction.

I needed to make sure what I learned throughout the day wasn’t forgotten, so I immediately went to my bedroom and stared at the blank wall in front of me. I dug through one of the boxes that I had not entirely finished unpacking until I found my weapons of choice: a pack of sticky notes and a black Sharpie marker. At any point, my walls are usually covered in sticky notes. From to do lists to potential business ideas, I love to have a physical manifestation of all the thoughts going on in my head. I’ve always been a very visual person and it was about time that I started on a new wall in the new apartment.

I started first with a column that I labeled “what I’ve learned” followed by columns labeled “what I want to learn” and more generically, “big things.” I started filling in these columns with other sticky notes with an emphasis on the last column. Lucy had told me that everything I do should be “big” and so I wanted to emphasize those seemingly normal moments to which we don’t give enough credit. It was moments like climbing to the top of the canopy trail that seemed like a normal decision, when in reality that was something massive for a kid that grew up on the complete other side of the country. Hell, even going to the national park alone was something big. I wanted to start celebrating those big moments for what they truly were.

Too exhausted to even eat dinner, I crashed on my bed on top of the covers, still wearing the clothes I had worn all day. Before I dozed off, I thought to myself that I wanted to fall asleep tired every day of my life. Being tired at the end of a day is a sign of a day well spent.