To Every Man There Opens a Way

Have you ever stumbled across a memory that hurls you headlong into the past? 

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I found it in a manila folder while sorting through old papers.

Three-quarters of a page of lined notebook paper, one end torn and ragged, scrawled words once dark now fading.

As I picked it up, memories washed over me.

In the blink of an eye, I was back at the start of my second year of college. A sunny Sunday morning, the first weekend after break, and I had just returned from a run. My energies that summer had been focused on fitness and that focus had developed into an unhealthy preoccupation. The run was a desperate necessity, rather than an enthusiastic urge to exercise.

Dripping sweat in the late summer heat, I quickly made my way back to my dorm room, hoping to avoid run-ins with anyone I knew. As I cut through the first-floor lounge, I saw him to my right; the only person in the expansive white space populated with couches and chairs upholstered a la orange vinyl.

He stood next to the window looking at me, as I tried to hurry past.

“Hey,” he said brightly, with a large smile.

I slowed my pace, intent on passing him undeterred, and kept walking.

“Hey, wait up. Can I talk to you a minute?”

He moved toward me and I visually took him in: A few inches taller than me with brown, close-cropped hair, muscular in a fit, trim way, kind brown eyes.

I stopped, still sweaty in my t-shirt and shorts. “Sure,” I said. “Just for a minute.”

“I watched you run and was impressed,” he said with a nod. “You obviously take care of yourself. Very disciplined.”

He had no idea that I had just spent a summer obsessively counting calories, binge-exercising, and, when necessary, ridding myself of excess food via purge. I had read no books, enjoyed no frivolity; the months of June and July had been a swirl of dark emotion and rigid routine.

“I wouldn’t call myself disciplined,” I offered.

He proceeded to tell me he was a cadet at West Point, that he was visiting a friend. He asked my major. “Journalism,” he nodded after my response. “Guess you’re a writer.” He assumed a lot.

The cadet, who introduced himself as Charles, was eager to talk. I was eager to go. I had no interest in meeting strange, new boys. My life was complicated enough.

As I inched my way out of the lounge, he posed a question seemingly out of nowhere.

“Do you believe you’re responsible for what happens in your life?”

I stopped and looked at him, immediately applying his words to the experiences of my 18 years. I had already asked myself some variation of this question, usually in the form of harsh personal judgement.

“I don’t know,” I responded honestly. “I’m not so sure.”

“I believe our experiences are influenced by what we think and do,” he said in an animated way. “In every moment, we have a choice. Once you know that, it frees you.”

He nodded his head, still smiling. “C’mon, talk with me for a while.”

As a naive teenager with little concept of who I was or what I wanted, the situation was an unnerving one. Here was a person, a stranger, suggesting that my life didn’t just happen to me, rather I happened to it. Admittedly, the idea was intriguing.

We walked back to my room and hovered near the door. He proceeded to talk about life, ideas, literature, seemingly anything that came to his mind, and we stood there for what felt like hours.

“You like poetry, right? I have a poem I want to share. Do you have paper? I’m trying to remember who wrote it.”

Keeping an eye on him and the doorway, I slipped into my room to grab a notebook from the stack on my desk. I handed him one, from which he tore a scrap and wrote down a few words. I’d later learn they belonged to English poet William Arthur Dunkerley written under the pseudonym John Oxenham.

To every man there opens a way
and ways and a way.
And the high soul climbs the high way,
And the low soul gropes the low,
And in between, on the misty flats,
The rest drift to and fro.
But to every man there opens
A high way, and a low.
And every man decides
The way his soul shall go.

“Maybe you can see why everything that happens is a result or can be changed by your action, yours only, no one else,” wrote Charles, leaving a large scribbled C at the bottom of the note.

I accepted the paper to which he had added his West Point address, and said I’d write him when he asked me to. But when he smiled and said goodbye, I knew I wouldn’t see or talk with him again.

Three decades later, long after college books had been returned and notebooks discarded, I went in search of personal items and rediscovered a file labeled Inspirational. Flipping through the contents, I discovered that torn piece of paper, its words still poignant after so much time.

Every man decides the way his soul shall go.

As I slid the paper back into the file and gently closed the cabinet door, I thought of Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. After surviving the Holocaust, the Austrian psychiatrist created a psychological theory promoting freedom of choice and personal responsibility.

Perhaps, if my stranger friend and I were to have a conversation now, at this phase of life, we might agree more with Frankl’s philosophy, a weathered take on an individual’s power of choice.

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

Cheers, Charles, wherever you may be in the world. I’m sure you found your way.