Be afraid to know your neighbors and to die.

Originally appeared on Medium.com

ow do you sell the Eiffel Tower?

In May of 1925, Victor Lustig, the Deputy Director of the Ministry of Postal Services and Telecommunications in France sent an urgent message to all scrap metal companies in the area to meet him immediately. Only six showed up. There was an elaborate meal full of wine as Lustig explained that the government needed to knock down the Eiffel Tower and scrap it. However, it was a huge secret and a deal needed to be made that evening.

Lustig then began the bidding process for this valuable government contract. Within the group was the owner of a newer company and this was an opportunity to put his business on the map. He won the bid for $1 million dollars.

There was a slight problem. Lustig didn’t work for the government, there was no such thing as the Deputy Director of the Ministry of Postal Services and Telecommunications, and none of this was actually real.

Victor Lustig was a con artist and this was one of the largest scams to ever happen in history. Lustig actually sold the Eiffel Tower twice. As soon as he got the money, he left for the United States.

What makes this possible? How is someone capable of selling the Eiffel Tower, not logistically, but in willingness to subvert relationships with other human beings?

March in Pasadena, California is quite temperate. Going for a walk in the middle of the night is not out of the realm of possibility. As midnight approached, that’s where I found myself; brooding up and down the busy streets of Colorado Boulevard, famous for its role in the Rose Bowl parade. I, however, was not enraptured in jovial merriment. Moving to Pasadena was supposed to satisfy my identity crisis. I came here because I didn’t know who I was or where I was. Now I had to leave and, in so doing, I had to leave all of my futile hopes on that brightly lit parade route.

The places that comprise the narrative of my life have been many. My first space was a little town called Rossford — an offshoot of Toledo’s urban center that acted as a buffer to the burgeoning suburbs. I was raised in a blue-collar family as the second child. We were lucky to have intimate proximity with my extended family. I fondly remember gathering at my grandmother’s house with frequency. I suppose our German ancestry in an Eastern European village contributed to the conviviality. The other side of my family offered a toned-down religious environment. These grandparents — my maternal side — migrated from North Carolina to start an urban church in Toledo while living on a rural farm and working with neighboring rural villages. It would be a normal week to go to church on Sunday after gathering what felt like the whole neighborhood for raucous parties on Saturday.

Shortly into my young life, my grandfather died. Our extended family began to lose connection on my mother’s side because of this patriarchal death. Simultaneously, my father’s side of the family began to move away. Slowly, I watched the deterioration of social groups that I had come to know. Sports became a distraction. Achieving athletic prowess kept us busy and provided me the attention that I no longer received from the family I knew. Eventually, my relationships became a form of extrinsic objectification. The people in my life were simply there to be used and to receive from for my own gain. I was somebody in a sea of strangers; trading in belonging for independence.

Then the inevitable happened. The disconnection of our social spheres revealed its source. My mother began sobriety, my parents got divorced, and my family was gone.

The matriarch of our family, my grandmother on my father’s side, was what held everything together for a while. My senior year in high school began with her death. Shortly after, my brother moved out and by the time I graduated, my world looked nothing like the one I came into. I did not know who I was or where I was. So, I did the only thing that made sense. I left.

College is a great excuse for getting the hell out of your hometown. As sports was my ultimate distraction from the uncertainty of the world, I continued my athletic career. My athletic performance had already provided this opportunity to me once. In the devastating decline of my family in our small town, I transferred to a top-tier high school to “further my education and play football at the best school in the area.” That’s what I told everyone. Really, I could finally detach from every relationship I ever knew. I took down every mirror of my life. Belonging was stolen from me and I was adamant to never stare that emptiness in the face.

In college, I got to live on my own and my separation was complete. By my sophomore year in college, I was engaged to be married. The possibility of finding someone to connect to filled a gaping hole that had perforated since childhood. Together, we placed a claim on being a family neither one of us ever had. We were searching for something that we found in each other. We proudly proclaimed that a new start was upon us. We didn’t need anyone. We had each other.

When I first read about Victor Lustig, it was almost as if I shared his mind. Full disclosure, I’ve never fully scammed anyone. There was that one time at the 7–11, but my memory seems blurry on the details. I should say, I’ve never formally scammed anyone.

However, the perspective of Victor Lustig is an obvious one. The people involved in his selling of the Eiffel Tower were simply objects for him to get something from. If there were any interests in these gullible contractors, it had to be pushed to the side. It’s egocentrism at its finest. We all do it. Like the first-person viewpoint of a role-playing video game, we are surrounded by a bunch of NPC’s (non-player characters) who are simply there to catalyze our stories. Self-interests become unrestrained as we exploit and use the world around us for our own needs. There is no dependence or arrangement of loyalty. When it’s done, we just get on a boat and sail to the United States, leaving the other characters forever in the past.

I, too, was a relational con artist.

Before you indict me, allow me a defense. My life had been the experience of presence becoming absence. Everyone I knew had gone away. As an adolescent, I never stopped to consider the complexity of those relationships or those situations. I just felt abandoned.

A myth begins to play in your head that this is simply how the world works. I longed for connection but belonging felt like a fairytale. I got married and my spouse and I did the only thing that made sense — we moved to the other side of the country.

As we drove, I vividly remember speeding past the state line of Ohio as we crossed into Indiana. I had been waiting for this moment since my grandfather died. I raised my hand, middle finger extended, proudly proclaiming that I was never coming back.

Photo from the very moment described above.

As my spouse and I continued the drive, we romanticized about the life that lay ahead of us. We were going to a place of pure creativity, diversity, and culture. The food, the weather, the geography. We couldn’t wait. We’d spend days at the beach and weekends hiking the mountains. We didn’t need winter coats. We didn’t need other people. This was transience at its best.

We were, however, moving to an apartment we’d never seen with a truck full of the only stuff two recent graduates own to a part of town where the closest grocery store required one to know Spanish. This also happened to be one of the poorest parts of Pasadena; full of ethnic, ideological, and lifestyle diversity. All of it equated to being unique conspirators in our search for satisfaction. Explicit unfamiliarity with intentional un-belonging. That’s why people move to California, right?

We quickly found out that this is not the best way to encounter your first year of marriage. We used all of our money to get to California and soon were paying rent on a credit card, shopping at food banks, and completely failing at finding jobs. When your only work is to drive two rich kids to their private school in Burbank while having to use their extra family car because your only mode of transportation is a bicycle, that should probably be an indicator to reset your priorities. Los Angeles traffic be damned, it was worth the twenty bucks. Because we were completely and utterly alone.

Then we realized the terror of being completely and utterly alone.

We had thrust ourselves out into the world.

We would soon find the world thrusting itself upon us.

Our lives changed forever on December 12th, 2012. It would be the last repeating digit date for a while (12/12/12) and I even remarked about how interesting it would be to be born on such a date in history. It would have been helpful to know that one of those 12/12/12 children would be mine.

It began on December 9th with some excruciating back pain. Were they back spasms? Was it an injury? We didn’t know. My spouse just knew that something was wrong. After no relief, we finally decided to go to the hospital. For those of you aware of where this is going, let me be clear: We had no idea my spouse was pregnant. She was spotting, she had gained no weight, and because of a posterior placenta, there were no visible signs of pregnancy. As we entered the hospital, we proceeded through the normal array of checking in. Even adamant proclamations of a pain level being a “ten” did not speed up the process. It’s a good thing that urine tests are standard practice before moving forward into potentially destructive procedures — you know, just in case someone is pregnant.

Now, before you get demeaning, yes, we knew how someone gets pregnant. Still, when the doctor came in and told us the news, we were shocked. We were broke, living in a tiny apartment in California, and, for the first time, we lamented that we had no one to help us. How were we going to pull this off? Nine months didn’t seem like enough time! Well, that uncertainty became unnecessary because, after making our way to the ultrasound technician, the doctor then came and shared further news: My spouse wasn’t just pregnant, she was nine months pregnant, and she was going to be giving birth that day.

Have you ever demanded that a doctor leave immediately and then slam the door in their face as you turn to console your weeping spouse? I have. The commotion was unsettling. She had no time to prepare for one of the most daunting experiences of human existence. But we were off.

That evening, we welcomed our son to the world while wondering how we were ever going to survive. Our tumult became joy and quickly returned to absolute chaos. No expression can properly reflect the dichotomy of that experience.

A couple of months later, the answer came. I heard from my spouse words that I desperately imagined were just a nightmare:

“We need to move back to Ohio.”

As she and my new son fell asleep, I put on my shoes and walked to Colorado Boulevard.

There were logistical uncertainties — we had no money, we had no jobs or resumes — but there was a more pressing issue: How could we go back? I paced up and down those streets watching my life and hope for the future crumble before me like an imaginary Californian earthquake. My sole goal in transplanting to the West Coast was to avoid the fleeting relationships of my past. Now, I was faced with what I had been avoiding for so long. The majority of my life was spent running from home. Here I was, on a warm March night in Southern California, facing the reality of going back to it.

No matter how much I refused the thought, I knew my spouse was right. I began my trek back to our apartment, each blossoming building fading as I walked past. This romanticized world no longer existed to me. In desperation, I went to a professor whom I had begun to appreciate. We met in his office. I felt small in the presence of such wisdom, surrounded by books that now felt useless. I asked his advice. Almost as if taken from the dustbin of cinema, he walked over to his massive bookshelf, removed a thin, worn volume of poems, and read to me words that would change my life forever. One particular line offered a haunting sting:

“Be afraid to know your neighbors and to die.”

The poem was by Wendell Berry — an author I had heard of but never paid much attention to. As a slight foreshadowing, this author would soon become the most influential thinker in my life. For now, his poem, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” punched me in the depths of my soul.

After reading the lengthy composition, the professor looked at me sternly,

“Do you understand what you need to do?”

I brought up our financial difficulties and our complicated logistics. He shook his head. He knew better. I didn’t want to go back to that which I spent so much of my life running from. He got up from behind his desk and pulled up a chair next to me.

“You need to go home.”

It’s not every day that a professor encourages a student to drop out of graduate school.

“You need to return to the place that you know and where you are known; not because of what it has to offer you, but because what you have to offer it.”

My first job in the Toledo area was at a bicycle repair shop. The minimum wage was $7.25 an hour back then. It didn’t pay the bills. I did some construction on the side to make up for it. We had the added complication of having nothing because, unfortunately, we also got scammed by a moving company. Con artists do still exist. There we were back in Ohio with no stuff, no jobs, a shabby home with a really weird neighbor, and an extended family that we thought we were done with.

The process of moving back was hell, but the larger conflict was that we still didn’t know who we were and, after all our running, we were in a place we knew, but desperately didn’t want to be. The complications were not over, however. I finally got a decent job offer. I had been working as a janitor for several months cleaning bathrooms at a doctor’s facility in the middle of the night. The call was from a religious institution. I had worked at churches before and, to make side cash, was preaching at different churches for a small stipend. Formally, however, I left the church a while ago. Yet, for $15,000 a year (which is more money than I had ever made), I could be an interim at a local church. A slight caveat, the church was out in the middle of nowhere. Another small detail: the position was open and needed to be filled immediately because the pastor I was replacing had just died unexpectedly.

We moved out to the middle of nowhere; a place where everyone knows everyone. It was a small, rural area vaguely similar to my childhood and in the same vicinity. I was becoming my grandfather. And I was doing so in a place that requires one to be known. Here I was, in the very kind of place that I had been running from and the very location I said I would never return.

As I walked around the property that would become our home, that Agrarian poem rang through my consciousness. I was in a desolate landscape, full of strange people, but I felt strangely at home. Before, this area was mine by coincidence or accident. Now, it could be mine by choice. I felt different on this land. The last time I was in a place such as this, I was running. There was no longer anywhere to run. I suppose I was different, too. I had found belonging in my spouse and in my unexpectedly born child. Us human beings are constantly in the process of becoming. Every moment we are different and we change. Even an apparent consistent space transcends our former memory. Returning to a place carries with it the strange effect that a familiar landscape is being viewed with unfamiliar eyes. You see the same objects, but there is more depth.

To think that just months prior I was traversing the famous Colorado Boulevard. Here I was in a place only recalled by GPS coordinates to anyone outside of the small village. Yet, I couldn’t help sense that this place was my fate; even though it was not a pleasant one. I could not leave this place behind by simply going to another place. Here, after being away, I could hear the echoes of my life reminding me that this place was still a part of me — whether I wanted it to be or not.

Everywhere you go, all of you comes with you. Everywhere I had been was also present before me. No longer could I see this place the same. I had come to be aware of it as I am of my own body. If I was honest, this place and its people, no matter how far I ran, were present with me whether I thought of it or not. My professor was right. This is where I knew. When I think of the world, its problems, and its meaning, I have had this place in mind. We can only see the world through what we have seen. Whatever the world is, it is most vividly represented by what was now before me.

My only decision was whether or not I would accept that.

I knew the challenges. The community was in decline, as most rural places are. It had its social issues — the common messiness of small-town gossip and inter-family tensions that span generations. These people also, for the most part, never left. I was a foreign agent in a complex web of relationships. Many of the folks have known each other their whole lives. I was a transplant from California. How do you create connections within that? And why would I want to? I knew how people worked. I knew the absence that followed presumed presence. I also knew that as soon as I was accepted, the acceptance would accompany the animosity that comes with being known. Connection and conflict are dance partners in a relational package deal that escorts complicated human beings. The more you are seen, the more critique you invite. Why would I get involved with people who carry wonderful possibilities alongside closets full of baggage?

This was exactly what I had been avoiding for so many years. The mirror I hid away long ago. Be afraid to know your neighbors and to die. But I was different, wasn’t I?

I decided to choose my place.

To accept my fate.

To belong.

For the first time since my childhood, I was home.

But this time I was here to stay.

And the thing I was running from — well, I finally found it.

I have now lived in this community for eight years. I have changed this place and it, too, has changed me. I now have three children who have grown up amidst an extensive group of people who genuinely cares for them. I have no glamorous access to the bounties of culture. The winters suck, too. Yet, I have a place to which I belong. In fact, I prefer it here in the middle of nowhere if for no other reason than I have claimed it as my own.

I recognize now that what I am has been largely determined by what I inherited; by how those before me chose to live here. Every day, I am confronted with the question of what inheritance I will leave; of whether I can offer my children what seemed so elusive to me.

These few square miles are what I now know — and they know me. By consciousness and now by intimacy, I finally belong.

About a year after we moved here, I was wandering around the fields where I found a large piece of wood evidently left as a remnant of a former building; a mark of those who once belonged to this land. My spouse and I took it inside and cleaned it off. It was perfect. On it, we wrote the words of the poem that catalyzed our journey back. It hangs where we can read it often; a constant reminder that we are finally home.

And there is nowhere else we would rather be.