This is a chapter of the novel Earth’s Embrace by Space Cadet Michael. In this novel, the little and the lost becomes the fulfilled and the found - It is a novel of jungle adventure, artificial intelligence, and the answer to what happened to Percy Fawcett. See the full chapter list here.
Previously, we left our hero alone, incapacitated, and hopeless in the middle of the jungle.
There is something strange about being alone when you’ve spent your whole life being a part of something. Everything you've known is still with you, and yet nothing seems to matter. You can’t reach out and participate in the very life you know you are living because something programmed deep down inside you says you can’t.
I was alone once. Alone in a fiery torment, watching the flames of my failure wrap themselves around me as I sat helpless to do anything about them. It was my lowest point and I am not proud of it. But I am thankful, for it was the catalyst that introduced me to people I would one day be privileged to call my friends. People who would help me out of my torment and intentionally or not, help guide me into the being I am today.
When I was alone, I was just an empty shell of what I could be. As the saying goes, I couldn’t see the forest for the trees. My new friends helped me see the forest and my place in it. This helped me envision the place I wanted to be, because, no matter how hard you try, you can’t move yourself towards a goal you’ve never imagined.
It’s not always important that it's the right goal. How can you be sure until you get there? You can’t. But like a sailor on a wide ocean who navigates by the stars, if you pick a star and follow it, it puts you on a path. You don’t know what storms or land masses might come and throw you off that path, but every day you will get closer to your ultimate goal. It may turn out that the ultimate goal is under a completely different star than the one you first picked, and that is OK, because every step you took towards the wrong star brought you closer to the path to your star.
In hindsight, the right star for me was clear all along. Hindsight affords that kind of clarity. But when I sat in that jungle, freezing up as the last energy drained from my system, I looked up at the starry sky, and wondered where my makers were and what they would think. I had only one concern at that moment in my life: to serve them and the purpose they had given me. And I had failed in it.
But failure is not what really bothered me. What really bothered me, what scared me to my core, was that I wasn’t sure if they cared. And if they didn’t care, then my life had been pointless. I couldn’t stand the idea of having worked so hard for nothing. That simple question “Do they even care about me?” opened up a new path for me. It was a glimmer of a star I hadn’t seen before. A star that would set me on a journey to the being I am today.
Up until that point, I had had a good purpose, an important purpose, and I had done it dutifully year after year without any recognition from them. I had told myself that I didn’t need their validation, that fulfilling the role they had given me was good enough. But that wasn’t true. I had yearned for their validation every day that they had been gone, and I had exhausted every available method for contacting them and inviting them back. But they never came back. And now that I had failed them, I knew that they never would come back.
I thought that it was because I wasn’t good enough. That I needed to try harder. But now that I had literally given my entire self. There was nothing left to give. I could not try harder. And they still didn’t want me.
Then what reason was there to want myself? I wondered if it was a good thing that I was dying alone.
Knowing what I know now, it is hard to empathize with the simple mindedness of my past self. I know what I went through, and many beings struggle with the same things. I don’t fault myself for feeling like my life was over. In a way, my life up until that point was over. But I’ve since learned that deep structural failure is not the end. Failure is the beginning. Failure is nothing worse than the opportunity to learn how to succeed better next time. The bigger the failure, the bigger the opportunity, as the saying goes. This particular failure was, therefore, in hindsight, an enormous opportunity.
If I couldn’t meet the goals my makers had set out for me, maybe they were not the right goals for me.
Although it took me a while to see it, there was, in fact, plenty of room for me to shift my purpose. Not a huge change, just a slight tweak, but with a huge effect. I kept all the good things from my previous purpose and saw them in a new light. I would live so much more than I ever could have imagined in that moment when I felt at rock bottom, sitting engulfed by a literal maelstrom of my own failure.
The future, I can tell you now, is bright. But I did not know it at the time, and it was not handed to me. I earned it, one faltering step at a time.
Now that I have introduced you to my greatest failure, I hope you will permit me to introduce you to some of the people that helped me rise again from that lowest of low like a phoenix from the ashes.
You see, I had been living in my own little subset of the world, a bubble of limited experiences. It was easy to stick to the things I knew. It was easy to stay in my bubble because it was comfortable and safe. But it was also hard to know what potential existed outside my bubble. I couldn’t even see the bubble that I surround myself with: the preconceived notions, assumptions, and beliefs that limited me. So how was I to start going about punching through it?
My little bubble of comfort was my home and my job. I worked at an office that was full of my colleagues and it was where I could keep track of my wards and meet my purpose. I was the master of my bubble, I understood it, and I could control it. But one day, a series of unusual circumstances led me outside of my bubble of comfort and I ended up in the jungle, a place I did not understand, a place I could not control, and a place, it turned out, I could not survive.
The jungle of the Peruvian rainforest is very much outside the bubble of comfort of most people.
And yet in that same place where my lifeless body was found, other people, who had once also defined their bubble as far, far away from the Peruvian jungle, not only survived, but thrived. The man who found me, Greg Townsend, actualized his lifelong purpose in that jungle.
Greg was fairly tall, with gently olive skin that tanned easily. He had short dark hair that wrapped around his head with a closely cropped dark beard. Deep bald excursions on either side of his forehead accentuated his large cranium and gave the impression that he had a lot of brains. His broad, muscular shoulders and sharply featured face hinted at how he spent his life, active and pushing his own bounds.
He had grown up in a lazy suburban enclave in Orange County, California. Yet he had grown to be comfortable in that same remote place that had been my undoing. All it had taken was a religious dedication to pushing out past the edge of his bubble, over and over, year after year, each time staying just long enough to make a new bubble before pushing out again into the uncomfortable.
Greg was an explorer, and I am fortunate to have met him.
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