6. MY CALLING, Part Two

Sometimes the hardest part isn’t letting go but rather learning to start over.

- Nicole Sobon, Program 13

I used to preach.

In between deployments to Afghanistan, people would ask me how things were going ‘over there,’ or why we had troops in Afghanistan, and I’d give them the gospel truth according to The Military Chain of Command. I got good at it, both because I believed it and also, because the answers seemed obvious, at least to me.

First, I’d say we were helping provide security for the people of Afghanistan, buying time for good governance and civil development to take place. Then, I’d say that progress was difficult because it was ‘a complex operating environment.’ Depending on the audience, I’d drop in a few tidbits about winning hearts and minds in a counterinsurgency, making sure to leave out the part where soldiers would joke about this strategy by saying, “two rounds in the heart, one in the mind.” To close, I’d maybe add that while we didn’t have enough resources – the military never does! – there were a lot of good things happening that didn’t make the news, like schools built or businesses opened.

The years went on and on, and as more of our people came home in body bags and nothing really seemed to change, the answers started to come a little harder. Fast forward a few years to when Western forces left and Afghanistan fell back to the Taliban, leaving many veterans who’d left the best parts of themselves on those dusty plains to wonder what went wrong.

Then again, was Afghanistan’s collapse all that surprising? In a country where the social, cultural, and political contexts were never really understood¹?  Where leaders deluded themselves into thinking that corruption in the Afghan government and the role of Pakistan weren’t necessary obstacles to address? No, in many respects, what happened in Afghanistan was no surprise.

At some point amid all this, the life of a soldier lost its luster. It was no longer my calling, and so I had to start over, learning to serve others in a different way. And yet, starting anything new can be a scary proposition. For years after I knew I’d outgrown my military career, I did nothing because a life in uniform was all I knew. I was scared of starting over, scared of reinventing who I was. I didn’t even understand where to begin and I let that fear of the unknown paralyze me.

The thing is, it’s okay to be scared. In fact, from what I can tell, it’s completely normal and even reasonable to be a bit scared when confronted with new things or at the start of a new journey. Fear can be a good thing — it’s a powerful motivator. It’s kept humans alive for thousands of years through our sympathetic nervous system, which regulates the body’s fight-or-flight response². Fear of getting blown up or shot has caused me to run faster than I thought I could more than once.

Unfortunately, fear can also be paralyzing³, which is the meaning behind the expression, ‘deer in the headlights.’ That paralysis can manifest in different ways, one of which is avoiding learning more about what we fear, which is what happened to me. This behavior is tragically ironic, because oftentimes the better we understand our fears, the more their power over us decreases.

The same thing goes for climate change, which is, on the surface, a simple problem of too much fossil fuels emissions. Beneath the surface, however, lies a web of interconnected political, economic, and social challenges that make the climate crisis so complex that anyone would be forgiven for thinking their individual efforts to help others would be anything but infinitesimal.

Still, while ‘solving’ climate change is difficult, I can tell you that our chances of solving a problem we don’t understand are even harder, which is why one of the first stages of virtually every formal creative problem-solving process involves gathering information to better understand the problem⁴. This is one reason why there are so many youth-led organizations dedicated to informing younger generations about pressing issues such as climate change, like Take Action, Inc. A non-profit founded by Ishikaa Kothari of New York, Take Action, Inc. empowers students to get engaged in a number of meaningful societal causes by providing education and connecting them to mentors. In this way, Take Action, Inc. and other organizations like them embody Marie Curie’s observation that nothing in life is to be feared, only understood.    

With this spirit, then, and to avoid the mistakes I made in my previous calling in uncritically accepting what I was told, the first step to becoming people who serve others is to appreciate the scope and scale of the problems we face.

1. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, What We Need to Learn: Lessons From Twenty Years of Afghanistan Reconstruction, August 2021, https://www.sigar.mil/pdf/lessonslearned/SIGAR-21-46-LL.pdf#page=86, accessed 18 Aug 2021.

2. Harvard Medical School, ”Understanding the stress response: Chronic activation of this survival mechanism impairs health,” Harvard Health Publishing, https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/understanding-the-stress-response, accessed 6 Nov 2020.

3. Kyle Kaloo, “Is Fear the Most Powerful Motivator?”, LinkedIn.com, https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/fear-most-powerful-motivator-kyle-kalloo/, accessed 5 Nov 2020.

4. Thomas Vogel, Breakthrough Thinking: A Guide to Creative Thinking and Idea Generation, Cincinnati, How Books: 2014, 46.