Epilogue — Movement II: The Life That Prepared Me
A fractured life, a broken system, and a long return to spiritual order. Before I could recognize the hidden architecture beneath life, I first had to live through disorder in my own.
Now that I have gone this far into creation, order, and the reality of God, I also have to tell the truth about the life that brought me here.
Let’s start with the fact that I was a foul-mouthed kid (still am) from Long Island who nearly died of a drug overdose in his early twenties. The only reason I survived is that other human beings happened to be awake and close enough to save me.
That was not brilliance. That was mercy.
Soon after, at the age of twenty-three, in an attempt to repair my life—or, as I would now say, reorder it—I made a connection, or perhaps a connection was made for me, to a man who had learned to repair his own disordered life fifteen years earlier. He began teaching me what he himself had been taught. He began showing me how to live according to a set of spiritual principles. He did not present them as doctrine, and there was no formal religious structure around them. They were simply offered as a way of living that, if practiced, might change the trajectory of my life.
Principles like honesty, humility, responsibility, accountability, perseverance, forgiveness, gratitude, and fellowship. We worked through them slowly, over years. From the start, he suggested that I begin forming some concept of God that I could speak to—not a fixed idea, but something I could reach toward. He even told me to pray, something that initially made me very uncomfortable, as I had never really prayed before. Heck, I had never even thought seriously about God before in any meaningful way. My parents, two of the best people I have ever known, never went to church and never spoke of God.
I should also be honest about where those principles came from. The man who taught them to me had learned them in a twelve-step framework, and for nearly twenty years I remained connected to that world. I went to meetings regularly. That was where I found guidance, grounding, and, in some form, faith.
My problem in those early years was not alcohol. It was drugs, and it was serious. I was able to leave that behind, and I never returned to it. Alcohol was not something I was drawn to then, and for much of my life, it played little role.
That changed later, during the period when my children became ill. I began drinking in a way that was new for me, at times in ways I am not proud of. Over time, that, too, became more contained.
What I am saying is narrower than any of that and, to me, more important: those principles took hold. They formed the man I became, even when I did not live them perfectly.
When I first learned how to pray in my early twenties, I did it almost mechanically. I did it because I was told it would help. But there was no real conviction in it. I was not sure anyone was listening. It felt as though it might be meaningful, but it also might not be. At that stage, prayer felt more like a prescription than a connection.
However, what I could not ignore was how quickly things began to change in my life.
