Letters to an Incarcerated Brother: Encouragement, Hope, and Healing for Inmates and Their Loved Ones
Page 5
Life is woven not just from what happens to you by chance, but also what you weave from those happenings, the pattern you create. And sure, our choice of available options plays a part as well. But those options expand and change each time you make a new choice to set your life on a new path.
Life is woven not just from what happens to you by chance, but also what you weave from those happenings, the pattern you create.
At the very same time that one Wes Moore was choosing the steps that led directly to the Big House, the other Wes Moore was choosing steps to turn his life around. Either Wes Moore could have reversed his path at any moment in his life’s trajectory and gone in the opposite direction. One Wes Moore eventually realized that though you may not be able to change your past, you can change the way your past affects your future. The past is where you learn the lesson; the future is where you apply it. And not coincidentally, he’s the one who ended up writing the book. Each time you break away from the direction the “system” is trying to push you in, each new idea you have, each new book you read, each new business you create—all of them give you the power to dictate new choices. Today is the tomorrow you were worried about yesterday.
THE VOICE OF YOUR AUTHENTIC SELF
So now you know: Change a few things. Let me narrow it down some. They say it takes twenty-one days to change a habit. Over the next twenty-one days, change just one thing. That’s my challenge for you. Commit to it. Your future may be completely different than it would have been if you hadn’t made this one change and the others that will follow. It’s all about cultivating the brilliance you already have inside you. I want to help you create a template or system to do just that. To go from the jail you’re in to exactly where you decide you want to be.
Why is having a “system” important? Because when obstacles come up (and they definitely will), we need to have something consistent to rely upon. Something that’s unmoving and steady. Because when the waters get rough, we need an anchor. And the systems/techniques we learn will be our anchor.
I know there are big hurdles. I also know that some of them are psychological. Way back when, after you read Letters to a Young Brother, you wrote to me and described some voices inside you telling you that you’re worthless, that you don’t stand a chance, that you’re a punk. Back when we both were a little younger, you described so clearly those voices of doubt. They were drowning everything else out, you said. You asked me what to do about them.
I told you that it was possible to choose not to hear them. I said that I’ve had to fight those same voices inside me, too—almost every day. They’ll never go away completely, Brotha. Even if the members of our family aren’t who implanted them in us, history has been one long, false argument in favor of them—for generations, minorities have been told they are inferior. So, in a way, the voices were imprinted in us at birth. Society creates them. And now the prison industrial system has taken over that function.
Those voices get damn loud at times! Lots of times, I hear them just before I walk onto the soundstage at CSI: NY to face the camera. I even heard them last week when I was trying to get the nerve up to call a woman I met at a party the night before. But as I dialed her number, I told myself that the fear and doubt in my head are not my real voices. So the question is, when those voices of doubt come up, who are you going to listen to? Are you going to give energy to those negative voices or aggressively seek out the true inner voice that comes from an alternative power inside you?
The voice I’m talking about is the voice of your authentic self. I believe that we all have an inner voice, though the source of it is up for interpretation. Is it coming from God, from the memory of a wise mentor, from a kind of intuition that we’re all born with? Wherever it comes from, it has the ability to argue with us, to plead with us not to do this or to do that. It’s really an amazing mechanism, but many of us ignore it too often. Most of the answers we seek are there waiting for us to listen to us!
The trick is to get into the habit of using the voice of your authentic self as your navigation system. To let it take you from minute to minute. It knows your predetermined destination and will give you directions along the way. It’s your own personal GPS. This is the voice that will give you directions for navigating out of prison.
I know that voice is rising to the surface for you, Brotha, partly because of the way we’ve finally started to communicate. I can tell by the content of your letters that you already know the answers to many of the questions you’re asking yourself through me. Let’s see if, together, we can encourage it to come completely out of hiding and become your authentic navigation system. Because that’s the surest way of finding the path that leads gradually beyond those prison walls.
Take care,
Hill
INTUITION
LETTER 5
Mentors and Options
We must dare to think “unthinkable” thoughts. We must learn to explore all the options and possibilities that confront us in a complex and rapidly changing world.
—J. William Fulbright
It is not so much our friends’ help that is important as the confidence of their help.
—Epicurus
Hey, Brotha,
Now I’m back in Atlanta once again, from Iowa. We’ve still got another week of shooting. This time the layover was smoother.
As usual, seeing my great-uncle in Iowa was like a bath of affirmation, despite the fact that I came there with the intention of cheering him up. That’s when it occurred to me that a good deal of what I’ve accomplished happened because there were people in my life with great expectations of me, and more than that, they taught me how to navigate a journey to go wherever I wanted to go.
MENTORS
I can tell you from experience that nobody can make it completely on his or her own. We don’t have enough to rely on our own supply. No one whose accomplishments you admire or respect achieved those things without help. So, for you to achieve your goals, you’ll also need mentorship. Know what you want, and study people who’ve done similar things. And your mentor doesn’t always have to be someone you meet with in person. You can have a mentorship on paper or online.
It can even be a memory of someone you’ve heard or read about but never met. For example, Paul Robeson, the great singer, actor, and political activist, is my mentor, and he’s not here! True, I can’t talk to Paul today because he has passed away, but I can read an autobiography about him. I can see how he made the choices in his life and why he made them. And he’s helping me continuously, because a mentor helps you navigate the journey and helps you make your choices. He never makes those choices for you or lives with their consequences. You can create an entire blueprint for the next part of your life with the help of your mentors. If they are there to sit and talk with you and answer questions, all the better. If they are not present, you can study their lives and what choices they made and emulate them.
Wanting to do well in somebody’s eyes has helped me accomplish so many things. Think, for example, about fathers. My father wasn’t alive in this world and inhabiting his body of flesh when I invested in my hotel. He wasn’t there with me when I signed the papers. He wasn’t there with me when my TV show made the top ten. He wasn’t there with me when my book hit number two on the New York Times bestseller list, but he was here with me all those times. On Father’s Day I always celebrate my father, my father’s father, and my father’s father’s father.
I know you felt that way about your mother, even after she died when you were fifteen. Remember how you told me that when you were pushing for good grades in high school, it was the thought of the look in your mother’s eyes if she’d been able to see you ace your report cards that drove you on? Now you’re probably experiencing the opposite effect: seeing shame in the eyes of your mother because of where you are.
In my opinion, you should be doing the opposite: still relying on that
warm, loving, caring look in her eyes as encouragement. Or maybe that look isn’t coming from the memory of your mother. Then imagine the encouraging look in my eyes. I want to become your mentor through these letters, if you’ll let me—your mentor on paper.
OPTIONS: MORE VALUABLE THAN MONEY
As your mentor, I want to talk about how you can increase your options. It’s as simple as this: Knowledge is power. Education buys you options. It’s the single best way to use/spend your time. It’s an investment in yourself. The more education you have, the more options you’ll have for the working world when you get out. The more knowledge you have, the more likely you are to make better decisions. Good relationships buy you options. Good relationships with people, but also to things. Having skill and confidence about using a computer is having a good relationship to a thing.
Other than options, all that money can buy you is a fantasy of status and power.
Human relationships, on the other hand, allow people with common goals to work together. They make possible a new coworker helping you learn what’s required at a job. They make it possible for a cat who was also incarcerated to share info with you about programs for finding jobs or a place to live. They make it possible to draw knowledge and information from a mentor. Those kinds of relationships can also get you the best option of all—somebody you can really trust regardless of what happens to you, somebody who’ll be there for you unconditionally. Is there anything else that buys options? Absolutely—money. In fact, that’s all money really can buy—more options. The option to buy a train ticket and go to another town when you can’t find a job in the one you’re in. The option to rent an apartment so you can work in a particular city if you do find a job. The option to spend a month unemployed if you lose your job while you look for new work. As we discussed before, money is a resource that buys options like that, as well. But money is not what most of us have thought it is—an end in itself. Rather, it’s a functional tool that will buy us more and more options, if we use it wisely. Any other use of money—for a car that costs as much as a house, for two chains although you already have a few on, for a pair of fresh kicks that could have bought a week of fresh food—is just symbolic, a desperate bid for social status, an ego meal. Other than options, all that money can buy you is a fantasy of status and power. Ask any strip-club connoisseur. But that power isn’t real. It’s just that, a fantasy. Run out of money at a strip club, and watch what happens with that fantasy. Money and things don’t possess any power. Only people can possess power. Check out what Deepak Chopra said about things:
There is no such thing as a thing. There are only relationships.1
Chopra means that an object can only be defined by describing its relationship to something else. Calling something an object with “status” doesn’t mean the object itself contains status; it means the way we speak about the object has assigned status to it. The object itself has no, or very little, real value. So spending your money to form a status relationship with a thing, associating that thing with power, will only decrease your options.
Limiting options is the number one method the prison industrial complex uses to keep you down. For example, I found out that any correspondence course you might want to do must be done during off-hours, when you’re not performing cheap labor for the prison. Not having the time to get the proper education can ultimately decrease options.
You also wrote me about a related, but more sickening, example: There is a rule in your prison of one book per cell per month; and if a guard finds more, he takes them away as a form of punishment. Such a one-book-a-month rule could only exist to weaken you by limiting your options. However, it’s what that guard does with the confiscated book that really pisses me off. He throws it in the trash! One floor down from those cells is the chaplain’s office. Wouldn’t you imagine the chaplain might find a way to make good use of those books if they were given to him so he could loan them out to other interested prisoners—one at a time, like those misguided rules demand? But a corrections officer who destroys a confiscated book is only interested in punishment, pure and simple. He must have been taught that it’s in his interest—and the prison’s—to decrease your options. Why would he take the trouble to walk down one flight of stairs and hand that confiscated book to the chaplain?
SERENDIPITY
I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.
—Stephen Leacock
Luckily, the number and kind of options we have aren’t static. They change all the time. I know there are hurdles for you in planning ways to get some of your options back, to add to your store of them. On the other hand, you never know what the universe has planned for you. Do you know what serendipity means? I love that word. The dictionary defines serendipity as “the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way.” Serendipity usually happens because of some coincidence. It’s often a fluke that ties two separate things in your life together in a very beneficial way.
So, check this out: I was surfing the Internet, Googling “education in prison” and “degrees in prison,” figuring some of that information might be able to help you increase your options. And I decided to take a break for a few minutes and check the mail. What did I find on top of the stack? A letter from a dude named Eric Bailey. He’d read my book The Wealth Cure while he was still locked up in Elmira, a prison in upstate New York. And now he’s out of prison after eighteen years and trying to get back to normal life in his hometown, Binghamton, New York. He wanted to run some ideas past me about handling funds.
Eric mentioned in his letter that while he was serving time, he managed to get two degrees by correspondence, an associate degree in art therapy and a degree as a paralegal. Since I wanted to find out about that kind of thing for you, I picked up the phone and called the dude. That, my friend, is an example of serendipity. What my girlfriend calls “the Mysteries of the Universe Colliding.” That kind of stuff is usually a sign that you’re on the right track. I’m trying to answer some questions for you, and part of the answer was sitting right there in my mailbox!
One of the things I asked Eric is how he managed to get the money for those courses. He told me he cobbled it together in a really complex way. There was a well-meaning guidance counselor at that prison who thought he had potential and ended up offering matching funds for his education with her own money if he could provide the other half. So he wrote to everybody he’d ever known in his life and asked them to put whatever they could toward the “Eric Education Fund.” No amount was too small. He collected two dollars here, ten there. . . . It took him a year, but, with the guidance counselor’s matching half, he eventually had enough tuition for two degrees.
He also told me that in the state prison where he last was, they wouldn’t even let him use the prison library to study for his correspondence courses, or use any table at all. So he took both courses sitting on the edge of his bunk and balancing his book and pad of paper on his knees. He even devised a lighting system so he could study under his blanket after the lights went out. He traded his cellmate some of the desserts he’d been saving from meals for some batteries, removed a couple LEDs from his own boom box, and rigged up a homemade flashlight. When those batteries ran out, he found a way to tap into the wire inside the wall of the cell and run it to the contacts in his flashlight. I’m not saying I recommend creating options by taking such risks—Eric could have electrocuted himself—but you get my point. He was a determined and creative problem-solver, and he was not going to let any obstacles get in his way. If someone makes up in his mind to do something, he will do it. It may not be today or tomorrow, but it will happen. You can’t hold a determined person back.
If someone makes up in his mind to do something, he will do it. It may not be today or tomorrow, but it will happen. You can’t hold a determined person back.
Bailey tells me you can find out about courses by getting in to
uch with your state’s correctional education administrator. I’ll try to pull together a list of those offices in every state and send it to you.2 Since they’ve begun putting the overflow from state cases in other states’ prisons, we don’t know where you’ll be when you get transferred, so I want you to have the address for every state. As a matter of fact, the federal government has info about the subject, too. You can collect a lot of facts about getting an education in prison by writing to:
Office of Correctional Education
U.S. Department of Education
400 Maryland Avenue SW
MES 4527
Washington, DC 20202-7242
I don’t think you have access to the Internet in there, but if you want to ask somebody on the outside who does, tell them to write to ovae@ed.gov for the same information. Or you can contact Infor-Nation Corp., PO Box 520567, Flushing, NY 11352.