What does it take to change a life? To have such an impact on another person that it changes their default behaviors and life trajectory, even if subtly? Certainly it can be argued that it takes very little, since our behaviors are always being influenced by our surroundings. But what about a long-term difference? What does it take to really change someone?
The year 2007 was perhaps the most important and most impactful of my life. I say that 2007 was the year that my childhood ended. This may be a slight over exaggeration, but not by much. It was a year of drama and trauma, of new highs and extreme lows. In my personal history, the year 2007 stands out like 1914 in European history. It is a date I measure things from, even more so than my birthday.
That year contained both the best and worst days of my life to date. The worst day, July 20th, 2007, and the bad days that followed it, I have already written about. But what about the best day? What happened on that day?
January 5th, 2007 had all the hallmarks of a good day. I was on school holiday- summer holiday, in fact, since the Australian school calendar follows Australian seasons so that our main break comes around Christmas -and I was traveling. Being ever-curious and ever-precocious, I loved traveling, especially by plane.
All the mechanisms of air travel fascinated me: the terminals, with their lights and signs and displays, acting as literal gateways to every far flung exotic locale on the planet. Customs and security, with its fancy DHS eagles, and its sense of officiality, and finality, advertising that it once you cross this line, you have crossed some important threshold from which you could not simply return, as if somewhere, someone reading your story would be holding their breath while turning the page. And of course, the planes themselves, which not only seemed to defy physics in their flight, not only liked the world together, but did so in such comfort and luxury.
That day, we started early from the family farm in Indiana to the Indianapolis Airport, via a road that had enough dips and bumps that we called it affectionately “the rollercoaster road”. We arrived at Indianapolis Airport for our short flight to transfer at my all time favorite airport, Chicago O’hare, which I adore for its dinosaur skeleton, its Vienna beef hot dogs, and its inter-concourse tunnel, where I would stare up in wonder from the moving walkway at the ceiling light display. I was told that the abstract neon colors were meant to represent the aurora, but for my part, having seen both, I have always thought the lights at O’hare to be more impressive than the aurora.
We arrived in Orlando at about 8:00pm, which, to my then childish mind, was a kind of magical hour. Things only happened after 8:00 on special occasions- watching New Year’s fireworks or space shuttle launches on television, calls from relatives in different time zones. After 8:00pm was the time of big and exceptional things, and the fact that we were only now boarding the bus from the airport to Disney World only seemed to vindicate the feeling I had woken up with that morning that it was going to be a great day.
Much of the resort was already closed by the time we arrived. But even then, there was much excitement to be had. We found our rooms, and as we wound our way around the Port Orleans Resort, I remember drinking in every detail of the scenery and design, and thinking to myself about how much attention and intent must have gone onto adding all the little details and embellishments. At this time I used to enjoy drawing, but whenever I did, I would become obsessed with details and embellishments. I would draw an airplane, and become fixated on the precise curvature of the engines, the alignment of the ailerons, the number of windows depending on whether it was a Boeing 747 like the one we took to San Francisco or an Embraer like the one we took…
You get the idea. Details were important to me. For me to see that someone had paid enough attention to the details to add all these little decorative Easter eggs, like hidden Mickeys, or a plastic frog on a Lilly pad in a small pond beside the concrete path. To see these little acknowledgments of my attentiveness told me that other people had been paying at least as much attention as I had, which put me at ease, and made me feel welcome and safe, at a time when I had spent most of my life as a foreigner, and a great deal of my time at school being bullied.
Thus assured that I was in a place that was safe and well designed by people who thought like I did, I let loose, skipping happily along as I never did in school for fear of being mocked, and sang songs I had memorized from the inflight children’s “radio station” (which was actually just a recording loop) about fishing worms, the state of Michigan, and carps in tubs.
The next day, I was reunited with my Best Friend in the Whole Entire World, whom I knew from Australia, but who had recently moved to Denver. It was the first time we had seen each other since he had moved away. I had missed his going away party because, in what now seems like a foreshadowing of what was to come, I had been in the hospital with Acute Pan Sinusitis, and after having my immune system wiped out by the drugs, was stuck in protective quarantine.
Together, we tore up the parks, going on rides and eating Mickey out of house and home. This last point proved to be dire foreshadowing, as looking back I can say it was the first time that the earliest symptoms of the medical calamity that would consume my life just six months later were indisputably noticeable. In fact, the symptoms of hunger and thirst were so bad that they caused problems trying to eat off the Disney meal plan. It was the only bittersweet thing about the trip- that it was the last great experience of my life unmarried by the specter of disability and looming death. But that’s a story for another time.
So, back to the question at hand: what does it take to change a life? Was my trip life-changing? Did it change who I am as a person, or alter my future behavior or trajectory in a meaningful way? Hard to say. Despite picking a solidly philosophical topic I’m not willing to sit down for the requisite hours of navel gazing to try and formulate the probable alternate histories if that trip hadn’t gone just so.
It’s tempting, then, to brush it off and say that even though I definitely see that event as one of the high points of my existence, that it never changed who I am at my core. It certainly didn’t change the course of events that were about to happen, which were in retrospect so obviously already in motion. It would be easy to extrapolate that the whole event had no effect on me, but for the fact that I know of a counterexample.
The day itself, more than a decade in the past, has gotten old enough in my mind that parts of it have started to fade around the edges. I don’t, for example, remember which side of the two connecting rooms my brother and I slept in, and which side my parents slept in. The parts I do remember are as much vaguely connected vignettes as they are a consistent narrative, and correlate more to the things that struck me as important at the time than what might be important to the story now. Hence why I can’t tell you what rides we went on, but I can describe the exact configuration of the twisty straw that I had with my milkshake.
One of the things that I remember clearest about that day, one of the things that to this day will occasionally interrupt my stream of consciousness, was the in flight radio. In particular, I recall there being several songs about environmental themes. And I recall sitting there, consciously rethinking my point of view. My train of thought went something like this: The reason I’m hearing this song, which, though decent, isn’t artistically great, is because it’s about a cause, which is clearly important to whomever is picking songs to play.
The kind of causes that get songs written about them, and, despite artistic shortcomings, played constantly at children, are ones that are important to society at large: learning one’s ABCs, being prepared for emergencies, and national crises like a world war (Over There) or pandemic (there was a song about washing one’s hands that was circulated during the Mad Cow scare). That I am hearing this song indicates that it is viewed not just as something of idle interest, but as a crisis of immediate concern.
It was at that moment that I remember mentally upgrading the issue of environmentalism from something that I was merely passively sympathetic towards, to something which I actively supported where possible. Hearing that song on that trip changed my life. Or if it is melodramatic to say that hearing a song single handed lyrics changed my life trajectory, then at least it is accurate to say that hearing those songs at that time provoked me into a change in attitude and behavior.
Would I still have had such a moment of revelation on a different day? Probably, but I doubt I would have remembered it. But as to the question of what it takes to change a life, we are forced to consider how much effort it took for me to hear those songs. There is no good answer here. On the one hand, it took a massive amount of societal machinery to record, license, and select the song, and then see that it was played on the flight that I happened to be on. To do this purposely would require a massive conspiracy.
On the other hand, it requires no small number of miracles from a huge number of contributors to get me the iPad I’m writing on, and the web server I’m posting to, and massive amounts of effort to maintain the global system of communications that allow you to view my words, and yet I’d hardly argue that my writing here is the pinnacle of all of society thus far. Perhaps so, in a strictly epistemological, navel-gazing sense that is largely meaningless for the purpose of guiding future individual actions. But realistically, my authorial exercise here is only slightly more effort than recording my unpolished stream of consciousness.
The truth is, even when I can identify what it has taken in the past to change my own life, I can’t extrapolate that knowledge into a meaningful rule. It’s clearly not that hard, given that it’s happened so many times before, and on such flimsy pretenses. But it also clearly can’t be that easy, or else everyone would already be their best self.
People have in the past attempted to compliment me by insinuating that my writing, or my speeches at events, or my support, have changed their lives. Despite their intentions at flattery, I have generally been disinclined to believe them, on the grounds that, though I may take pride that my writing is decent, it is certainly not of a caliber great enough to be called life-changing. But upon reflection, perhaps it doesn’t need to be. Perhaps the bar isn’t nearly that high. Perhaps, I venture to hope, one does not need to be perfect to change another’s life for the better.
