Once upon a time during the early 1970s I lived with my father on the top floor of an apartment building situated a dozen or so miles from downtown Washington, D.C. One morning shortly before departing for his secretive Pentagon job, my father announced he’d be gone for an extended stretch of time due to growing concern the then-USSR was preparing for a surprise nuclear attack.

As he packed a suitcase he suggested that should I see a blinding flash to the East, I should immediately stock the bathroom with canned goods and other non-perishables, fill the tub with drinking water, and place a wet towel along the bottom crack of the door (to keep out radiation). I’d need to remain in the bathroom for several weeks so I’d need to figure out what to do with my waste.

“The building should remain standing,” he said, before adding that, because the Soviet guidance systems were notoriously poor, they might inadvertently strike our Virginia suburb. “If that happens….” he paused for a beat. “Well, let’s just say all your worries will be over.”

The door closed and he was gone. I was 12.

I was 12 and recently ejected from the Iowa home of my suicidal mother. She was suicidal from a lifetime of hell (including the suicide of her own mother) and my father’s recent decision to abandon the family. Lastly, I was 12 living on a rollaway in the dining room because my dad A) told me he didn’t want me there and B) he was likely going to send me to foster care or military school.

The author in military school garb not long before this story unfolded.

Given that this came on the heels of my mother booting me from her Iowa home and not all that long after my dad blew apart the family when his extramarital affair was uncovered, I felt particularly glum about the adult world. Which is to say, the human race.

What seemed certain was that there was no human alive I could count on.

New to my school (the decision had not yet been made to ship me out to military school), I knew no one, ate my lunches alone in the cafeteria, spoke to no one in class, and rode the bus to and from school in similar solitude. For all intents and purposes, I was alone in the world.

Which helps to explain why I started fantasizing about stepping off our 11th story balcony. Nobody would miss me or care, and I’d be done with the insanity of my species.

What saved me was the fear that the hedgerow 120 feet below the balcony would break my fall just enough to leave me paralyzed and in the care of still more adults in some shitty state-run hospital.

Find Your Own Peace

I write this in the wake of Donald Trump’s second election. Numerous friends and family feel deathly afraid of what is to come and demoralized by the realization that more than half their countrymen voted for a convicted felon whose party once again seeks control over women’s bodies.

Whether your candidate won or lost, it’s easy to understand how these individuals, much like my 12-year-old self, might feel trapped in a seemingly insane world.

Yet here is what I would offer them if asked: that terrible feeling represents an opportunity for inner growth. Because central to most mystical traditions is the admonition that one should never place his or her faith in ‘man whose breath is in his nostrils.’

Meaning that if your sense of wellbeing, peace, and happiness is based on the thinking and behavior of others, you’re setting yourself up for a fall.

So if one can’t count on parents, on a mate, on one’s countrymen, where can one turn? The answer, put bluntly (and borrowed from the sages): within.

“You have to grow from the inside out,” wrote Vivekananda, a 19th century Hindu monk. “None can teach you, none can make you spiritual. There is no other teacher but your own soul.”

Or as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin put it, you need to flip the script. Stop looking outside yourself for your answers, for your hope. Recognize that: “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

From that boy of 12 it would be another 30 years of suffering and self-destruction before I’d be introduced to these concepts and years more returning to them again and again each time I found myself caught up in the external world.

I’m still on that journey, but can attest that the only worthwhile peace I’ve found is when I turn within and spend some time in there.