About the Song “Of What I Wasn't Sure” — Track 10 from Begin Again

I could tell that it was one of his dramatic days, when he'd want to talk more than I'd like – convey his wisdom. As I sometimes resent it, he does have valuable insights, unique if nothing else. They make him good at what he does. "Severance is like death," he told me, "but it pays a lot more, and no can tell you what to do anymore," followed by a dry laugh, sounding like he knew something about what was about to happen to me that I didn't (how could he?) and like he was jealous of the freedom I was gaining

I stopped him... "but if no one knows what I know and they come around asking about..."

He stopped me... "we will delay and defer – make them think they're crazy, just like we'd always done before. Besides, if we don't know a thing, we can't be liable for it, and this is perhaps the biggest takeaway from the work we've done since you've been here." When I started to argue with him, he lost his patience with me for a minute... "listen, we've been here a long time before you, you little shit, we know what we're doing." And then he caught himself. I'd seen this happen before: he didn't see anger as useful or productive and he rarely stayed there long. "Everyone here will miss you, but it's time to go."

"So then no one will know anything?"

He looked at me like a child, someone you pity -- "hand me your keys." "Was that supposed to be a rhetorical question?" He said as almost apology... gentler than the earlier laugh that was almost a cough. I saw the door slowly close between us and then heard the sound of the not-my-keys-anymore turn and latch -- the thud and click of this particular door's lock. I wondered with his question hanging in the air: was that lock was to keep him in? Or now, to keep me out? And adding to the pile of rhetorical questions… did we do enough?

I walked slowly through the parking lot as my mind started to blink out -- from grief I guess, or the mix of exhaustion and relief, or from the machine they'd been testing to subtly alter people's thoughts (more specifically, their perception of their own most recent memories -- it was rumored to dull or make them dreamlike, make you unsure as to what really happened). To what end they had not said. Once they started playing with an idea to see whether it was possible, there was always this obsession with proving they'd been right (or that they were smarter, faster, had fancier tools to build with), with what seemed like too little attention to intent or consequences. The engineers I worked with just assumed the product people would figure that out just like they'd always done before.

I had parked at the edge of the tree lined lot that was fed from the US Highway on the east side of the building. I was carrying a filing box of papers and nicnaks, like an office worker in a movie who'd just been fired. I emptied my hands -- tossed these things I couldn't remember acquiring into the back seat. I closed the door, took a deep breath and turned around for one last look at this decay.

When I'd first come here, 20 years ago, it seemed implausible that these people could make a sustainable business out of being clever and doing good. I guess it was. Business was thriving, but it had been awhile since I'd seen much clever or good. Now it just looked like another corporate campus slowly being eaten by coastal erosion. As I let my eyes drift out of focus, the buildings started to look almost like an armada at sea, the sinking foundations and haphazard planning, as if the ships were rudderless like their captains clearly were.

I walked past my car, through the single row of trees, and looked down each long stretch of highway. Without intention, I caught myself tipping my hat ingratiatingly to each horizon, north and south, as if it might curry the favor of both, not knowing where this new journey would lead me. Embarrassed, I glanced across the highway to see if anyone from the east campus buildings had caught the gesture. There was no one outside, and the sun was glaring on the windows, preventing me from seeing in, but I did notice green and bits of white sprouting through the cracks in the concrete superstructure. Before getting in the car, curious about those flecks of white, I walked back toward that locked door to see there was also green growing from not-my-building-anymore. I only got close enough for the recognition to start my mind wandering on what those ox eyed daisies might see.

The details of my situation perhaps don't matter -- except that the work I was doing was at its core fighting a losing battle. Its important work, but the weight of the compromises on my personal values was too much. My mission was essentially fighting the company from within the company, advocating for transparency and control for average people, and I felt like I had both failed the company and failed at that mission, failed the people I was fighting on behalf of and my comrades in arms. During the slow descent into that failure I had felt more and more helpless and had made myself irrelevant, even a liability.

I had been too busy staring at my own failure to see how the company and the world had changed. The tension between my values and the compromises that came with the work had become too great. Instead of seeing what was happening as essentially about change and timing, about my time there being over, I saw everything through this power I thought I had been fighting – the losing battle that could only end in a narrative of failure.

Ox eyes are said to have healing properties -- they represent innocence and rebirth. As I saw those daisies growing out of the side of the building, I began to see that my time here had come and gone, and that the mission I had been adopted as a labor of love -- freedom to choose, agency in those choices -- working that mission had been the barrier to my own freedom and agency. Now that I'd been pushed out and heard the door locked behind me, freedom and agency were no longer abstract concepts that I needed to advocate for on behalf of what we all imagined (perhaps naively) was an unwitting public. Agency became the will I needed to reclaim through making choices, freedom the medium I needed to move through.

The growth in decay revealed a bigger story -- that all this will end someday. When I was being told to hand over my keys, the company, the bureaucracy I had been caught in, the profit motive that created the need for the mission and fight in the first place -- they seemed huge, unstoppable, like I was being crushed by them. But with just some tiny flowers growing where they shouldn't be, the domineering integrity of that concrete structure, its rigidity and the certainty it represented were slowly being retaken by nature's fractal chaos. My intuition and faith made the leap that my brain couldn't, the flowers offering a sudden insight that time has its way with all things. My stepping aside could open an opportunity for someone to do things I couldn't, but it could just as easily be that time gives us a way to look at the fight that seems unwinnable today and see it through a different perspective, as a different type of problem, with other potential solutions.

Growth requires change. Just as it was my time to work on other problems, just as the ox eyes may eventually break down that concrete and retake that coast, those technologies that give me so much concern will be displaced, become obsolete, be forgotten. The idea that a new innocence could grow, was growing, even if only in the tiny cracks to start, let me turn and walk back toward the highway with some peace.

It was a simple idea. No complexity for me to tangle myself in. There was nothing to believe, and nothing to doubt. As I got into the car, I remembered I still needed to pick a horizon to drive toward -- looking out the rear view mirror I saw my rudderless armada differently thanks to its new growth, the green and white glowing under the sunset of a dying star. I got behind the wheel and picked one... of what I wasn't sure, but I'd finally gotten out.