by Hill Harper
It seems to me that a good number of cruel and violent acts performed by gang members in prison and on the street might, at least in part, be the result of their “following orders.” The leader of a gang uses a host of strategies to establish himself as an authority figure. Those people who recognize him as such are more apt to follow even the most destructive of his orders unquestioningly.
Meanwhile, you didn’t mention anything about gangs when we talked last night. I’m hoping it means you found some way to avoid getting jumped into your cellie’s gang without turning him into your enemy. I’ll be home early Sunday evening. Can we talk about this and other stuff on the phone? I won’t rest easy until I know that you aren’t going to find your sense of right and wrong tested the way those in the Milgram experiment were.
Speak soon.
Your friend,
Hill
I MAKE MY OWN DECISIONS
LETTER 17
Lockdown
We can easily forgive a child for being afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.
—Paulo Coelho
Seems like every time you come up something happens to bring you back down.
—Tupac Shakur
Dear Brotha,
Now I know why I hadn’t heard from you in two weeks—no letter, no collect call. I’ve been worried, and it seems I had good reason to be. But you’re not going to fall for that superstition of bad things coming in groups of three, are you? Seems to me you’ve had your share of bad luck for the time being with the two things that have just happened.
I guess you didn’t want to go into too much detail so as not to snitch on yourself, but whatever you saw, man, I guess it must have been fucked up. I hate to say it, but I think you did the right thing by keeping your mouth shut tight, even if it led to the entire prison being put on lockdown for two weeks. Snitching would have been way too dangerous. Meanwhile, finding out the very same day that your kid had been sent to the group home must have been the last straw. I’m so sorry about all of it.
You mean to tell me that during that entire two-week period, they shut down the canteen and made all of you do with nasty-ass cold food delivered to the cells three times a day? That situation, combined with the inability to go into the yard, must have been unbearable. Add to that those notes you were getting from the gang leader—balled-up pieces of paper passed from cell to cell threatening that you’d be rubbed out if you snitched—and it’s no wonder you barely got any sleep. I’m so glad you were able to keep out of the gang your cellie Sammy kept pressuring you about or you might have been the one holding the shiv, and God knows how that person is going to end up.
The only response to falling is to pull yourself out of the mud.
My only advice to you is pretty obvious: For every setback, get back up on your feet again, and keep the larger goals we’ve been talking about in mind. The only response to falling is to pull yourself out of the mud. Everything that’s been happening to you lately is all the more reason to stay focused, to put your hopes in that leap of faith we discussed. As for feeling helpless and anguished, that’s no sign of weakness on your part. It’s a realistic response to what you’re being subjected to. This is an opportunity for you to become more alert, more conscious of how each decision you make can have consequences for years to come. I am so proud that you are not bowing to gang and peer pressure. You are strong. You have a plan. And you are building a new life. Stay the course.
After hearing your voice on the phone last night after two weeks of silence, man, I was relieved. You can’t imagine what I was thinking. If you’re deemed a high-risk offender then they’ll usually place you in the SHU (Secure Housing Unit) in a medium-security until they find you a bed in a max. I tried to get you to focus on the better prison you’ll obviously be moved to as soon as they find a bed. And once you’re in a medium- or even minimum-security joint, there will hopefully be a lot more resources available to you. But oftentimes, max facilities have more resources available. It’s a crapshoot that shouldn’t be. But we’ll deal with whatever and make it work. I’m not at all surprised that your current state of despair is making it impossible to put your mind on the future. You told me that those two weeks of lockdown went by so slowly, they seemed like “an eternity.” To your dismay, you couldn’t really see the light at the end of the tunnel. In fact, the way you feel now, you said, your release seems like it’s “light-years away, an infinite distance from now.”
THE THEORY OF RELATIVITY
Wow. After we hung up, I realized the words you used were actually a reference to the elasticity of time. Einstein proved that time was elastic—relative—by studying relationships between space, time, and the effects of gravity. After thousands of calculations and a lot of theorizing, he came to the conclusion that the flow of time at every location in the universe differs and also depends on how fast something is moving.
For example, if you’re walking at a rate of two miles an hour through a moving train that is going sixty miles an hour, in your own experience you are still walking only two miles an hour. But to someone who is outside the train standing still and is watching it go by with you walking in it, you are walking at a rate of 62 miles an hour (2 + 60 = 62). Anyway, that’s what classic Newtonian physics would say. But the problem is what happens to much, much faster moving objects, especially as they begin to approach the speed of light. Then the perception of movement becomes something a bit slower than a moving train plus a person walking inside it. The two figures add up to a bit less. This gets even more complicated when the moving object is so far above the earth that the pull of gravity is weaker. For example, some satellites are stationed approximately twelve thousand miles above the surface of Earth, where the pull of gravity is weaker, and that difference of gravity also affects the satellite’s flow of time.
All of this may sound very theoretical to you, but today, even something as common as a GPS device has to take Einstein’s theories into account in order to produce accurate readings. The GPS devices we use in our cars and on phones depend on signals from a couple dozen satellites orbiting about twelve thousand miles above Earth and several thousand miles apart from one another. Our GPS uses the signal from each satellite to determine its distance from each. With these figures, it can calculate its location on Earth to within a few yards.
However, since satellites high above are moving through a gravitational field that is a little weaker than the one we are moving through, and since the satellites are moving faster than us, satellite clocks are ticking at a slightly different rate than ours are. That difference is not much more than a billionth of a second. But not taking it into account can lead to a GPS reading that is off by several miles!
Basically, I’ve just given you an amateur’s explanation of Einstein’s theory of relativity. Based on this, scientists have determined that if a person or, say, a rocket ship could travel at the speed of light (186,282 miles per second), no time at all would pass for that person. Taking such an idea into account, what would happen if you could leave and return to Earth on a rocket ship traveling consistently at the speed of light for a duration of ten years’ Earth time? When you returned, no time would have passed for you, but ten years would have passed on Earth. You would have traveled into the future!
That is the main point I’m attempting to make, and I admit that, in the context of your current worries, it may sound a little stupid and irrelevant right now. But if you can somehow move into a “mental dimension” in which you can imagine yourself traveling faster than things are moving in prison, it will seem to you as if only a small amount of time is going by, whereas a large amount of time will go by for the prison, and the time you have left in that prison will have passed before you know it. Your time and “prison time” don’t have to be the same thing. It’s all relative. Right now, you feel as if you’re facing an eternity of incarceration. In another context,
it may seem much shorter than that.
Don’t get me wrong. I know it’s unrealistic to think that a person can bend his sense of time when it suits him, despite the fact that our perception of duration is constantly changing. If you think about it, your awareness of the passage of time varies according to the situation. I’m sure you’ve had the experience of getting absorbed in something so much, or having such a good time, that when you look up at the clock, you’re amazed at how much time has actually passed. It’s something that happens to us all the time, but few of us know how to make it happen. I’m not saying I know how to make it happen, either, but I can promise you that the more absorbed you are in something, the faster time will pass.
I predict that when this difficult period is over and you have moved to a facility where reading, learning, and recreational activities are available, your involvement in them is going to shorten that “eternity” stretching out before you now. Just keep thinking about that. If you can manage to do it, practice creating and using the positive visualizations of your future life that we talked about earlier. Those visualizations can almost serve as a meditation. Close your eyes right now and imagine yourself in a park playing with your son or shaking hands with someone as you close a successful business deal. Both of those things can manifest in your life when you get out.
Peace and love,
Hill
PART 3
QUANTIFY YOUR LIFE
MY NEW JOINT
LETTER 18
Your Highest Aspirations
Your net worth to the world is usually determined by what remains after your bad habits are subtracted from your good ones.
—Benjamin Franklin
Hey, Brotha,
So cool to hear from you finally. I was beginning to think I never would again. I’ll be honest and say it gave me a kind of gnawing sense of loss. You may not realize it, but I like getting letters from you. I look forward to it.
Let’s make a deal. Four years ago, I suddenly stopped hearing from you after a routine of at least a letter or two every couple of weeks. I justified it by telling myself that you were living the ideas we’d batted back and forth, so everything was cool. But no big deal; the important thing is that I’ve heard from you and that you’re okay. Which means you and I can start working on building something new, right? How about we look into fortifying our foundation?
A FOUNDATION FOR ASPIRATIONS
As you were sitting on that hard bus seat on your way west, I was on my way west, too—on a much longer trip. I decided to drive from Chicago, where I was for a conference of MANifest Your Destiny, back to Iowa to visit family. I stayed in Fort Madison again with my great-uncle, the cool cat I told you about who recovered so fast from his triple bypass. We actually had a blast just driving to some of the places in that little town where I used to hang as a kid. Then when I came back home, I got your letter and your list of “aspirations.”
A foundation isn’t something you have. It’s something you build.
The truth is, the items in the list you sent me in many ways are hoped-for fantasies, not aspirations. Fantasies are aspirations without a plan and without the work. And when that cloud turns into rain, the fantasies will come crashing to the ground with it, because there’s nothing real to hold them up. It’s like hoping to win the lotto. There’s no plan for it; it’s just wishing for good luck. All those bright ideas won’t work unless you do. It’s the simple sucka who seldom succeeds that says the road to success sucks. Who said it would be easy? Success doesn’t come before struggle in the dictionary or in life. Pursuing success is like going after a boxing title belt—it’s yours for the taking, but you have to get your ass in the ring and fight for it. You’ll sustain blows and are likely to get knocked down, but you have to get back up and keep fighting. So let’s take luck out of the equation, and there’s only one way to do that.
A while back, I told you that every plan has to be built on a foundation. Remember what your answer was? “Well, I don’t have a foundation.” But see, a foundation isn’t something you have. It’s something you build. I guess it’s my fault, but reading your aspirations made me realize we’ve started things a little ass-backward, now that you’re in a new joint and ready for a new plan.
You need aspirations, but all your aspirations will join the wind unless they’re built on some foundation. And a foundation comes out of the resources needed to make it. To make a foundation for your aspirations, you’re going to need a checklist identifying which resources you already have and which resources you don’t have but you believe there is some way of getting them.
BIG ASS-ETS ERASE LIE-ABILITY
How do you make that list of resources? Let’s call ’em assets, like we wrote about when you were first in the jail. And what about the resources, or assets, you haven’t got, and worse still, what about the stuff that is going to endanger your assets? We’ll call them liabilities. They have the power to prevent your aspirations from happening.
Let’s say, for example, that you want to be a video game designer, and you start by taking inventory of the assets related to it that you already have. One: You’re a very good artist; you can draw realistic-looking human figures. Cool. That’s one asset you have already that you can use to make the foundation for your aspiration. What about a liability? It would be better for you—not me—to think of one of those, but I’ll suggest one: You have no formal training (as of yet) in video game design.
Now, let’s say that an education is also an asset that you will need but don’t have, and it’s going to cost you a lot to get that asset. Maybe when you have your degree and work in video game design, you’ll have spent, or will owe, over $20,000 in order to get it. So what are you going to put in your list of assets? “Twenty grand”? Is that an asset you have or one that you think there’s a good chance you can acquire right away? Yes? Are you planning to rob a bank? The answer is no. “Lacking twenty grand” is one of your liabilities, because you don’t have it, and you’re going to need it for your aspirations. And it won’t be easy to get. Why not put down a related asset that you have now and that might someday result in getting the asset of twenty grand? How about being able to source books and online information listing college loans, grants, and scholarships? That access to info is an asset of yours that directly speaks to eliminating one of your current liabilities. Does that make sense?
SETTING THE TABLE
Well, we’re going to make a table with three columns, in which the columns interact with one another. I want you to be completely honest with me, and most importantly with yourself. Let’s get this done now. And no “Hill, I’ll do it later. . . .” No, do it right now. Remember, “someday” isn’t a day on the calendar. Take a sheet of paper and divide it into three columns:
ASSETS|LIABILITIES|ACTIONS
In the “Assets” column, list all the resources you have already. I’m willing to bet there are a lot more than you realize you have: the memory of your mother, who believed in you and who often seems to be there right at your shoulder, is one of your assets because it gives you strength under stress. Then there are your street smarts, your intelligence, your ability to draw, read, and comprehend. . . . See what I mean? You have a list unfolding already.
In the “Liabilities” column, list everything that could stop you from realizing an aspiration. (The liabilities should not be on the same line as the assets.) This is going to be harder, I know. But let’s start by listing the only one I’ve mentioned: “Need money for furthering my education and increasing my options.” Finally, there’s the “Actions” column. This column is actually determined by the “Liabilities” column. It contains suggested actions for turning a liability into an asset.
Go down line by line. When a line lists an asset, you don’t have to write anything else on that line. It’s a resource you have already, so no action is necessary to get it. But when you come to a line wi
th a liability, you need to think of an action that will start you on the path toward changing that liability into an asset. As an obvious example:
LIABILITY
ACTION
No money for school
Research how to get loans and scholarships
This list only works if you’re totally honest. In a way, this list is about baring your soul. It’s easy to boast about the talents and skills you have. It’s hard to be perfectly honest about them without exaggerating. And it’s even harder to look squarely at the things you need but lack. And remember that you can be vulnerable because it’s for your eyes only. It wouldn’t be cool for me to ask you to do something I won’t, so to be completely fair to you, I’ve started my own table of assets, liabilities, and actions. Here it is:
ASSETS
LIABILITIES
ACTIONS
Ivy League education
