The Beat Within continues to share your stories and amplify our voices with every opportunity. This issue includes amazing stories and reflections from youth and adults alike. We hope you enjoy your own writing along with the stories of your neighbors. We believe that when we share our stories with others, we will discover that there is more to unite us, than divide us. Together we continue to build a more inclusive and peaceful world.
With that peace, we enjoy the last days of Summer and get ready for the Fall months just around the bend. We appreciate this time to reflect and refocus. Maybe it’s time to take the opportunity to find new inspiration to carry you through the last few months of the year? We find exciting inspiration from the experiences shared here by one of our favorite contributors, Michael “Einstein” Kroll.
The inspiration for the topic “A journey of 1000 steps” in this issue comes from an old Chinese proverb that goes, “A journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step.” It’s a lesson we all know, that even the longest and most difficult undertakings of our lives have a starting point. Each begins with that first step.
There is, of course, that journey we are all on, the walk that begins with our birth and ends with our death, the journey of life itself. But within that journey, there are hundreds, even thousands, of smaller journeys and adventures, and it’s hard to know where they begin.
A perfect example from my own life is my college years. Yes, it began with a single step, but which was the first step? Did it begin with my high school counselor giving me information about college? Was it the simple act of sitting down with a college application, filling it out, and sending it in? Or did it begin much earlier with a simple desire?
Desire led me to want something new, something different. Desire to leave home and make my own way came before all the other “first steps,” and that desire for change led me to countless other journeys.
In college, I met people from around the world who enriched my mind by allowing me to explore their cultures, to eat food I had never eaten before, to share experiences I had never had before, and to want to travel. I met people who challenged my beliefs, forcing me to think about how others go through the world, and how they respond to it. College gave me a whole new set of friends to explore with.
College even led me to jail! (I was one of nearly eight hundred students arrested in a political protest called The Free Speech Movement in 1964.) And, while I could not have predicted that I would go to jail, I also could not have predicted how the experience of arrest and jail would open yet another path. To see the country from the outside in, I joined the U.S. Peace Corps which took me on a path to Malaysia where I taught high school for the next three years of my life, exposing me to entirely new cultures.
Can you imagine how many other adventures were waiting for me there? Could I have ever predicted, for example, that I would capture a cobra that crawled into my classroom one day, or that I would make life-long friends that now, sixty years later, are like a second family to me?
Another path that opened from my college days came from my focus on the Constitution of the United States, and my love of writing, which led me to a career of writing for newspapers and magazines about the state of politics in America. I wrote about criminal justice, which led me to our nation’s capital as the Director of an organization that hoped to end the proliferation of prisons in this country. As my writing focused more and more on the subject of capital punishment, the death penalty. I was asked to be the first Director of yet another organization in Washington, D.C. called the Death Penalty Information Center, which is still going strong today.
Sometimes the journey leads to places you might rather not be. My writing about the death penalty, for example, led me to befriend a number of men sentenced to death in California. One of those men asked me if I would be there as his friend to witness his execution by lethal gas, the first in more than a quarter century in California. As much as I wanted not to see my friend put to death, I could not refuse his request, and the memory of that homicidal event at San Quentin State Prison in Marin County still haunts me, more than thirty years later.
On the other hand, or perhaps, the same hand, my writing about the justice system also led me here, to The Beat Within. A result that could not have been predicted when I began my writing career, and one that has greatly enriched my life.
Let me tell you about a young man I met when he came to juvenile hall. He described himself as a “gang banger.” He had a long sentence, so he set out on a new path to pass the time. He began to read everything he could. He decided to get his high school diploma, but did not to stop there. He enrolled in classes offered by the local junior college, where he discovered and was inspired by the study of Sociology, something he had never heard of before.
Today, this former “gang banger” is a first-year student at UCLA, one of the greatest universities in the country, and all because he decided to take that first step. He is continuing on a path he could never have predicted, one that will lead to many other paths.
I look back on a long life, filled with adventures which came from that original desire to go to college. I could not have predicted any of them. My journey is mostly behind me, but yours stretches out before you, and, like me, you cannot know where your steps will lead. Your past does not determine your future. If you have the courage to take that first step in a new direction, you will be astonished at the adventures that await you.
-Michael “Einstein” Kroll
What an incredible journey! Michael shares some amazing experiences, and we hope they have helped to inspire you to think beyond your neighborhood, beyond your family and your city. Maybe there are new experiences waiting for you out there that you have not even imagined yet. We hope you can be open to every opportunity that you find and surround your life with love and adventure.