Human Light in the Dark

It’s been a multifaceted few weeks. Life was many things rolled into one — inspiration, pride, tragedy, community, family.

Gratitude.

First, I traveled to watch my youngest son compete in the Indy Autonomous Challenge — a college competition that involves programming a race car to compete autonomously. Getting a car to travel at high speeds by itself is yet unsolved, so there’s a collaboration among teams year-round despite the quest to secure a win at the competitions.

Normally I wouldn’t pay the expense to go see this — flight, hotel, rental car — but I had an ADHD conference in the same area at the same time, so I forked over the dough and went.

It was so worth it, despite my leery emotions leading up to the trip. Since Covid, I’ve become a homebody, and a little fearful of stepping outside my comfort zone. I usually push through the fear, but unlike raindrops on roses for Julie Andrews, it’s not one of my favorite things.

Fortunately, I gently coaxed myself to do a little dance with my fear and reached a compromise. This meant I lugged my shrimpy pal the worrier along for the ride. Oh well. I’m a work in progress like anyone.

How awesome

It turned out, my shrimpy pal was mostly bored on my travels with little to do. The world opened in positive ways. The strangers I met there were beautiful souls — as usual. The competition was inspiring. The illogical highways became more logical as I drove around. The sudden drop in temperature was easily fixed by layering all my clothes on at once. And, hey — gas was cheaper!

Everything was fine, as anyone but my fearful self could have predicted.

Watching the collaborative support shared among the college teams at the race was heartening. I poked around the garage of the raceway complex and watched as students circulated the room, asking each other questions. There were teams from big US, European, and Asian universities there. They’d all been on a dedicated Slack channel with each other for months or even a couple of years by now, so they knew each other.

When the final race happened, the teams were dismayed when any of the other cars had a mishap because they were rooting for the process itself. How awesome is that? Not days later, Artemis 1 launched from Cape Canaveral and shot to the moon in an international space collaboration. How awesome is that, too? Despite our friction, humans can collaborate like nobody’s business.

The unspeakable

The next morning, I picked up my son from his team’s Airbnb, took him to breakfast, and then to the airport where I waved him off. I drove back to my hotel to work on my computer and wait for my conference.

Not a day later, I woke to the news that my son’s campus had been in lockdown all night due to a tragic mass shooting at the University of Virginia. They were still hunkered down, waiting for the police to catch the guy who’d done this unspeakable thing.

It was a complete shock. Not two days before, my son’s team had been working their tails off trying to get a race car to surpass 120 mph on its own. It was hard to make sense of the incongruity. It was a while before I heard from my son that he and his circle of friends were okay.

I felt so many things initially, but I didn’t cry. Mostly, I was hunkered down with my own emotions, waiting to exhale relief. Eventually, word came out that the shooter — a student — was in custody and the campus lockdown was lifted. My son’s girlfriend, who’d been in the engineering building since the night prior, was able to go back to her apartment, warm up, sleep and eat.

Then it started to happen.

Universities from around the country began to post messages in solidarity — we’re Hoos today. My wall of vigilance cracked, and pent-up grief came flooding out.

What if

There was collaborative competition one day and collective empathy the next. The light shining from all this broke my heart into chunks of sorrowful gratitude. It might not have done much to ease the devastation of the families involved, but it made the world seem better rather than worse in that moment.

Eventually, I settled into my conference. This was my first ADHD conference, as I’m now focusing on this in my coaching practice. Talk about collaboration, empathy, hope, and light. There’s no other way to describe it.

There were folks working in the field, folks looking for info on ADHD for themselves or family members, and folks doing both. The unconditional support in that convention center was in every word, face, and body.

Gathered in one place were people who felt at ease because the baseline from which everyone worked was acknowledged imperfection. This collective acceptance allowed people to simply come as they are.

I thought, what if everybody could experience such a thing? We’re all imperfect — not in some conceptual sense, but tangibly so. We’re simply nicely evolved animals. As time goes on, I become more amazed at how often we don’t notice this obvious fact. I fail to notice it all the time! The fallout from this is that we expect more from ourselves at times when we could be supporting instead.

Gratitude

Finally, there was Thanksgiving. My family and I drove up to see my extended family for the holiday. My family, like any, has had its share of struggles — political divide, death, personality tangos. This holiday, however, we had a reprieve from all that and came together in unity and joy. There was laughter, sharing, and listening. I didn’t want to leave.

What I noticed these past few weeks is how life is a patchwork of ups and downs — some high, some quite low — and through it all there is one constant: each other. We let each other down, but also lift each other up. We push each other away but bring each other together. We compete against and root for each other in the same breath sometimes.

No matter how you look at it, we have everything to do with each other. We’re intrinsically intertwined, and even when we stray or take a circuitous route, our lives always come back to the collective. I’ll always be grateful for that.