My Whole life was just about to change – I just did not know it yet.

I was adrift in the chaos of my twenties, following along…barely. It was the dreary, doldrums. It was the gray, dead-end of fall, I had registered for more classes at university. I was doing what they told me, fulfilling requirements to "get out." The process was high school, into college, into the world. No one knew why, but it was what throngs of other white, middle class, and undereducated parents were doing with their children. It was a conveyor belt. I was a disgruntled cog or widget, wobbling down the line, escaping every once in awhile to find relief. I’d find it by accident in burned out garages, watching teens from high schools who were angrier than myself, moshing to hardcore bands...beer, sneers, knuckles...other bars and parties, people, women... distractions. None of it was enough.

Unsure if I was on academic probation or double probation at the time, either way, my attitude -even after being threatened with expulsion, didn’t seem to waiver, I was going to show these pointy-headed instructors who was smarter by not showing up or by not doing the work. What did any of it have to do with the state of the world right now? And what good was any of this insipid information going to give me? How was I to benefit the world as a human if I could compare and contrast Robert Blake’s The Tyger and anything by Wordsworth? "What did “intimate,” mean? Think he means imitate." Alas, I was young, spoiled and entitled, eyelids still sealed shut, ears clogged with bread boxes the size of bread boxes and angry about all of it.

Miraculously, I made it to one of my 5 or 6 classes that semester, the one being, Eastern Civilization. It was a random class out of a handful that I could have picked. The teacher was as Wally Cox as he could be...small, bespectacled, wound tight, tweed blazer, button down brain, bow tie...the whole bit. And he could go on and on and on about the dynasties and the empires in a time before time existed. For the first several classes I simply fell asleep. He droned on in a dreaded nonstop, monotone, lecture voice, the kind of tone and endless spoken sentence structure that I could not fight. It was like a section of classical music, once it began, it never repeated to hook you back around, it basically never stopped. The man was a sitar. But one day, for reasons that are unknown to me even now, I began to listen.

For once in my life I was able to focus and listen to this man I normally ripped apart in my mind. I took notes furiously til I had to shake my hand from cramping. I learned to take notes with both hands, sometimes scribbling simultaneously in two notebooks. I ended up filling 2-3 notebooks per class. He often spoke faster than I could keep up, sometimes I would raise my hand and ask him to repeat ends of sentences. My mind raced to understand everything he described. In other classes I would take notes and mark key things one would figure obvious on a test. This was different, this wasn’t about the test, this was for me, and all of it was fascinating. I was able to set my ego aside, which I later found out was trying to destroy me, and I could just listen to all of this information about a time and place and a people and culture that I never in my wildest dreams thought I’d learn anything about.

The access this single class granted me was fifteen thousand fold; it allowed me to open and listen, it took me out of myself, it gave me the opportunity to see that I could learn about mundane topics and anything at all really, it piqued my curiosity to listen for and learn more, it reminded me that I didn’t know anything at all really, it gave me the mind it would take to throw myself into events perceived as difficult, or tasks that I would normally be so very afraid to tackle, it showed me that if I try to detach fear that I can learn, listen, walk and speak with a little more lightness through this life.