2. Trains, planes, and stupid metaphors.

Years ago, following the birth of my son, I penned a story just for him. The long and short (mostly short) of it, was the journey of a little train who tired of running the tracks that had been placed for him, culminating in an eventual and extreme adaptation in his route to include flight, even space travel. My sweet boy actually loved the tale, with its quaint little meter and Seuss-like aspirations. It may have been a bit on the corny side, if we’re being honest, but still… Looking back on it now, there are things about it that seem strangely applicable. (Cue tasteless “mama always said life was like a train ride” gag. Don’t worry, I won’t take it quite that far. But seriously… Life… Train… You can see it, can’t you? Shutting up now.)

In life, though, it isn’t about the train itself so much as the track it travels. Take a glance in the mirror at who you are today. I’ll lay odds that you can pinpoint each life-altering event – every major crisis, uplifting seminar, or reckless discovery (it was just that one time in college) – connect them like dots in an activity book, and (good or bad) determine exactly how it was that you arrived where you are. But which one of them would you call the Oprah-form “aha” moment? The instant where the switch got flipped and the previous course couldn’t be recovered, no matter how you tried? Which single memory can you turn all the others across?

Now I couldn’t tell you why it is I like the rain as intensely as I do. I’m not entirely sure what led me to decide that cheesecake is the true meaning of happiness. But I can paint a giant red spot on the point of no return in at least one matter...

It was an afternoon conversation with my mother. I find myself getting all silly kinds of whimsical, thinking about it now. We rarely talk these days. Something that we will both attribute to my afore-mentioned affliction of faithlessness. I was seventeen, and we (as we frequently did back then) had gone for a drive in the nearby canyon; where the dry and distant scenery did wonders for amplifying teenage angst into full-blown dissociative ideas. Something had been brewing in the backward corner of my mind. Something I’d spent ages dismissing, because it smacked at my well-nurtured sense of guilt and self-doubt. Haven’t the foggiest idea just what caused it to finally surface after having marinated for so long, but gripping the wheel and taking a long hard look at a particularly dry and distant rock, I glanced warily at my mother and asked, “So… I don’t know how to put this, but… I’ve been having… doubts.” With a bit more dodging, I eventually opened up to the fact that these doubts were of the spiritual sort. It wasn’t that I was looking for her to allay my qualms with the truthfulness of a religion that had been the centerpiece of our home from the beginning of my thereto-short existence. I didn’t need a pep-talk, and to her credit she didn’t offer one. She knew that the question was really of a different nature. I wanted to know if the doubts were okay. I wanted to know that my budding uncertainty didn’t make me a bad person.

Her response is something I would put on page one of Things My Mother Taught Me, were I ever to write a book on the subject. (Edging out other such top-runners as: Never return a dish empty; and Wear your learning as you wear your pocket watch, on the inside of your coat. Never pull it out and strike it merely to show that you have one.) She took a long look out the front window and said, “It can’t be a bad thing to question. If you never question your belief, you’ll never really know whether it’s yours – or whether it’s just one that someone else gave to you.”

It’s okay.

Her words opened a door in my mind; one that I couldn’t have closed even if I’d wanted to. At that moment, every question that I’d never asked, every mental whisper that I’d ever silenced – a lifetime of wonderings – all coalesced and snowballed and took a shuddering lurch to the forefront of my brain. That was it. Many years would pass before religious doubt would become the ultimate evolution of outright disbelief. But that was the moment where the train jumped the track.