The Road to Amistad

by Ken Dickson

  “You hit the nail on the head. That’s what drives me. I want humanity to move to the next level and experience this. My gut feeling is that if we do, anything will be possible. Why do you think that this is happening now?”

  "How does a chick know to break its egg? Because it’s time. Too soon or too late, and it will perish. It’s the way evolution works: it’s time, and a biological switch has flipped in our brains ushering in a new age. Many people are at a threshold, questioning ideals they've accepted without doubt their whole lives. They are at the precipice: the chick ready to crack the egg. When it cracks, everything will change. Everything is already changing."

  "Do you think that this transformation will succeed?"

  "I hope so and will do whatever I can to ensure that it does. Maybe that's the grand test of evolution—the species recognizing the advantages and taking a stake in making it stick."

  "I certainly don't want to go backward, but I've had a lot of pressure to do that, to just be the old Ken again."

  “It’s incredibly difficult to push the envelope and not fall back. It’s even harder to turn from friends and loved ones and choose this path instead. The pressure to be the old self will claim many if not all. Without visionaries like you and me lighting the way, the transformation will more than likely fail, maybe not forever, but for now.

  “I can see huge potential for humanity in this, but so far, I can’t replicate it. I’ve tried with patient after patient without success. I've yet to find a way to teach anyone to be resilient on the whole, to get that the pain and suffering in their lives is created in their heads and that the world is more than the soap opera of thoughts that plays out in their minds day in and day out. Now, thank goodness, it seems the impossible is happening. People are transforming automatically.”

  “There’s something I have to tell you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We’ve got another name to add to the list: Matt Bently, my financial advisor. And, based on stocks that we’ve discovered, there’s more—hundreds, maybe thousands.” He focused his full attention on me as I told him what Matt and I were doing. Although I’d yet to meet any other resilients, the evidence of their existence was undeniable. Afterward, I told him of my plans for Amistad and then asked him a question. “Can I ask a favor?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Do you think that you could find the other resilients? I can’t build Amistad without them. I can give you a list of the companies and a few contacts for starters.”

  “From what you’ve told me so far, it appears that a good number of these individuals will be struggling with issues.”

  “That may be true. I guess what I’m really asking is if you can find these people and connect me with the ones who aren’t struggling. Perhaps you can take on the others.”

  Contemplating that, he stroked his beard for a few moments and then nodded. “Troubled resilients would be of no use to you, but I’d find them intriguing. On the other hand, there will be resilients like Jessie who made the transformation effortlessly—as easily as going from a walk to a jog. They would be eager champions of change.” As Merry thought of her, he recalled her calling him from the PDC months earlier and telling him about her dream, the very same one that he had on a regular basis. It occurred to him that perhaps others had that same dream. There were plenty of synchronicities going on. Why not one more?

  “You know, I think I might be able to help. I’ve got a question for you. Are you having any recurring dreams?”

  “Why, yes, as a matter of fact. But it’s not a dream; it’s the same end to different dreams. Whenever it happens, I awaken immediately, often with goose bumps. It’s always similar: the sun breaking through clouds after a storm. It’s so bright that I have to shield my eyes, and it always ends in the desert by a dirt road that begs for me to follow it. Why do you ask?”

  “Give me some time. I think that you’re in for a big surprise.”

  Chapter 13

  FLOAT LIKE A BUTTERFLY,

  STING LIKE A BEE

  While Matt busied himself with stocks and Merry searched for resilients, I began a project of my own. If both of them succeeded, it would be up to me to pull everything together by successfully pitching my plans to over a hundred resilients. In order to accomplish that, I would have to be influential, convincing and perhaps even inspiring. There was one problem—since childhood, I’ve been terrified of public speaking. I taught application classes in the not too distant past, but I was expert on the subjects and knew them inside out. Even then, my presentations were clunky, bulleted slide shows for captive audiences, desperate for any help they could get. In this case, I had an idea, nothing more. I didn’t even know where to begin.

  I never realized how poor my speaking skills really were until I spoke to Jack Lowry, a member of Toastmasters International with over twenty-five years of public speaking experience. At his insistence, I attended a Toastmaster’s meeting on July 26, 2012. There were speakers there of all levels, and I was well below the most novice of them all. There was a good reason for that, however. As a kid, I was rowdy, outgoing and fiercely independent. By age five, I was walking alone to kindergarten a month after the school year began, easily a mile away. One rainy afternoon, I was walking home from kindergarten in a yellow raincoat with a small pet turtle I’d taken in for show-and-tell tucked in a box under my arm. As I crossed the street a block from home, I thought that I looked both ways, but if I had, I somehow missed the muddy brown 1956 Ford Falcon barreling straight toward me at ten miles an hour over the speed limit.

  The next thing I remember is looking up from the street a good thirty feet from my last memory with a crowd of people staring blankly down at me. Those people gave me the creeps. They were pale: too pale, like someone drained the blood from their bodies. Maybe they were dead people, or people from in between. Maybe that’s where I was for a time. I tried to move, to escape their gaze, but I was paralyzed. Luckily, I passed out after that. I only remember two things from the next several days: waking up during surgery as they put the traction pin through my left tibia, and asking my mother about the turtle. Somehow, it survived.

  Fortunately, the only physical damage was a broken femur. I spent weeks in traction after that and months more in a body cast from my left ankle to my chest. The doctors were kind enough to build a handle into my cast. I felt like an overstuffed suitcase whenever Mom used that handle to move me from one place to another.

  Although the physical damage was obvious, the mental damage from a severe concussion was much more subtle. I don’t recall being any different, but my brother Dana tells a different story. “You were a mama’s boy after that.” I never mentioned this to anyone, but it was also the start of the vivid dreams that I’ve experienced ever since—dreams so rich in detail they make waking life seem like a black and white movie. Those dreams took me on a rollercoaster ride of fear and ecstasy over the next few years. Eventually, aside from the ones that seemed prophetic, I learned for the most part to ignore them.

  After my recovery, I was afraid of anything that put me in front of a crowd. Crowds reminded me of the pale, creepy people who stared blankly at me while I lay helpless in the street. That disability followed me through life. Now, I had something I wanted to speak about more than ever, and I was completely lacking in the necessary skills. Thanks to the change, however, I was no longer fearful, I was just ineffectual. I joined Toastmasters that day.

  Toastmasters gave me opportunities to improve my skills, but Jack was the real key. He wasn’t the best speaker there in my opinion, but he was my favorite. I liked his down-to-earth, friendly style. He was short, bald, overweight and wore glasses that he constantly pushed up the bridge of his nose, but when he spoke, people not only listened, they were mesmerized. He and I spent a lot of time together after that working through my weaknesses.

  ***

  “Where would you like to begin?”

  “Well, first of all, my memo
ry is terrible.”

  “I’m sure that your memory is just fine. You just don’t know how to use it properly.

  I’ve got a few tips that might help. First, I rely heavily on what I call perfect words—like steak or potatoes—that I use so frequently, they flow from my mind without restraint. I’m sure that you already have a plethora of perfect words at your disposal. Use those whenever you can instead of trying to memorize new ones.

  “Not only do our memories like perfect words, they like to group words or even numbers neatly into chunks, kind of like taking peanuts, chocolate, nougat and caramel and remembering them all with a single phrase: candy bar. I used chunking to memorize Pi to thirty decimal places.” He then recited those digits so fast that I could barely keep up.

  Jack taught me to combine those tools to memorize speeches, using perfect words instead of less familiar ones that require additional memorization, or word combinations and number patterns that clicked with my mind. Then, he told me how he memorized a speech. “I organize and write my speeches ahead of time, but once I’ve made it through a speech once, I throw away the text and force myself to go completely from memory.”

  He stressed the importance of practice and shared his own practice routine. “I call it speech gummies.” He took out a small, drawstring bag, untied it, and poured ten gummy bears into his hand. “Whenever I practice, I reward myself with one of these after each practice run until there are none left, and then I refill the bag for the next time. I do that every day for a week, sometimes two, before I give a prepared speech.”

  After sharing his memorization and practice techniques with me, I admitted my next big concern. “Whenever I speak in front of a crowd, I freeze up. I forget everything and then...” I almost told him about the pale, creepy people, but reconsidered, “it gets really uncomfortable.”

  “Everyone freezes up sooner or later. The trick is to recover quickly. I call the word that tripped me up a ‘Warhead.’ You know what those are, don’t you? They’re really sour. Whenever I practice and encounter a Warhead, I replace it with a ‘Snickers’—I just love those—by substituting a word that’s easier to remember. As I continue practicing, I’m constantly replacing Warheads with Snickers. By the time I give that speech, I’ve got plenty of Snickers at my disposal. The speech might not go exactly as planned, but no one notices because I take advantage of every Snickers that I can. I once gave a speech that was so rough that by the end, it seemed like the whole thing was Snickers. Do you know what happened then? The audience gave me a standing ovation!” he said, laughing boisterously.

  “How will I know that I’m ready? That I won’t choke in front of the audience?”

  “Prepare for the speech in a war zone. As you practice, surround yourself with distractions. Dribble a basketball, run on a treadmill, or turn up the radio in your car so loudly that you can barely hear yourself speak. Speaking in front of the audience will be cake in comparison.”

  His final recommendation was one I never considered. “Have fun! I gave a humorous speech one time in which I used a horn as a prop. To spare my family, I practiced in a large park late in the evening when everyone was asleep. I walked to the middle of that park, honked that horn and spoke as loudly as I pleased. I took my dog with me. No one questions crazy behavior when you’ve got a dog, and she was happy as pie to join me. It was tremendous fun—one of my fondest speaking memories. Part of having fun is to move around, gesture and use body language.” He then quoted the great boxer Muhammad Ali: “You gotta float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.” He danced a few steps, threw some quick jabs and then a right uppercut. Although convincing, his rotund body jiggled the entire time, spoiling the effect and nearly making me laugh.

  Besides teaching me about speaking, he taught me about leadership. “Lead from the front, not the middle of the pack... Be a better listener than talker and make learning people’s names a top priority... Use the Oreo approach when giving feedback: give two positives, the cookies, for every negative, the cream. Personally, I like the cream better, but to each his own,” he said with a wink.

  He explained that leadership wasn’t something that came instantly. It came in pieces. There were many small opportunities to lead in the club: timing speeches, evaluating grammar or listening for filler words such as ‘ah’ and ‘um.’ These small leadership roles provided a foundation for more demanding roles such as General Evaluator or Toastmaster.

  It was a challenging road for me, one of the most demanding of my life. In the beginning, I had my share of Warheads, becoming all too familiar with the expectant expressions of the audience as I struggled to form one word—any word—in my suddenly blank mind. I quickly learned the value of having a few Snickers in reserve. Thankfully, Jack was there through it all, picking me up after a fall and pushing me ever higher. Over time, my skills improved a good deal, and eventually, I was not only comfortable in front of my small Toastmaster audience of barely a dozen people, it became something I never would have believed: natural.

  I wished that I could continue to improve as a speaker and a leader. As it was, I only gave six speeches, told a couple of jokes and shared some words of wisdom. I never did lead a meeting as the Toastmaster, but my time was up. After only a few months, Matt and Merry both delivered. Now, it was up to me to pull it all together.

  Chapter 14

  ROLL THE DICE

  I was the only person who could deliver the pitch for Amistad, and after months of hard work, I finally felt capable of doing so. Thanks to Merry’s creativity, the stage was set. He’d found that audience of resilients. It turns out that he was just as eager to find those people as I was, having lived principally in solitude for much of his life, alone in his resilience.

  He worked overtime on the endeavor, and using only the names of the few companies and contacts that Jessie, Tim, Matt and I provided, he hatched a scheme that, in my opinion, worked much too slickly. When I questioned him about his seemingly effortless success, he at first replied, “Synchronicity.” It took a little prodding to get him to confess the whole story. “Okay, I’ll tell you, but it’s a little complicated. First, I started with a circular ‘Feeling Wheel’ developed by Dr. Gloria Willcox. The Feeling Wheel breaks down the six core emotions: peaceful, powerful, joyful, sad, mad and scared, into their diverse constituent emotions. The wheel has three rings. The most powerful, all-inclusive core emotions are in the center ring, lesser emotions are in the middle ring, and the outside ring contains the most subtle emotions.

  “Next, I broke out all of the emotions on the wheel, weighting them according to which of the three rings they fell on. For instance, frustrated is in the outer ring and is weighted one; angry is in the middle ring and weighted two; mad is in the center ring and, therefore, weighted three. I placed these emotions randomly in an interactive table and created a website challenge where people picked out the ones that best described them in general. A curious thing about the Feeling Wheel is that the lower semi-circle represents positive emotions and the upper one, negative emotions. Tallying the weighted results allowed me to determine how positive or negative a person was. The challenge allowed me to establish with a ninety-six percent certainty whether a person was resilient or not.”

  There was more, but that’s the gist of it. Ultimately, he posted the website link on Facebook, Google+ and Twitter. The challenge was free with one catch—you had to register. That allowed him to capture the contact information of registrants. He then used MailChimp to create an email campaign to narrow the results even more. The challenge was very popular and spread like wildfire, in part because he optimally designed it for the target audience: resilients. As I listened to him explain it, I couldn’t help but think that he gave himself a lot less credit than he deserved.

  In any case, I had the audience I’d asked for, nearly one hundred and fifty altogether. There were others, but they were either in Europe, the Philippines or Thailand, where Nanosys had manufacturing facilities and contracts,
or they had “issues,” which was Merry’s short-hand for, “They have connections with their former lives to sort out.” He referred to the attendees as “dreamers,” claiming that they had a special calling. He didn’t go into detail, but I suspected that it had to do with the question that he’d asked me about the recurring dream.

  Although his success delighted me, I still had to win them over. I estimated that I’d have to convince at least a hundred of them in order to get things rolling and was bent on getting that number. In order to do that, on September 22, 2012, I rented a large ballroom at the Arizona Grand Resort in Phoenix, with seating for two hundred and fifty people and offered free hors d’ouevres and an open bar. The crowd was principally in their twenties and early thirties—an adventurous group of free spirits with minimal attachments. A few were married and even fewer had children.

  I invited Jessie, although I hadn’t yet seen her. I also invited Tim, Beth and my kids. Tim opted out with a legitimate excuse, but I suspected that Mary played a big role in his no-show. Beth wasn’t keen on Amistad with visions of Utopia still playing in her mind from my former psychiatric misadventure and didn’t want to subject the kids to my yarns, so they likewise weren’t in attendance.

  Soon, everything was ready for the biggest performance of my life. I waited a few more minutes for stragglers to fill their plates and glasses and take their seats and then walked onto the small stage erected front and center in the room.

  Despite my training and exhaustive preparation, I found the large crowd intimidating, and old demons taunted me. My heart raced, and my hands shook from nerves. Having not experienced that level of emotions in a long while, the magnitude of my feelings startled me. Nevertheless, I knew that I could harness that energy to my favor, and if I stumbled upon any Warheads, I had plenty of Snickers on hand.