What We Have

A veteran of the Czechoslovak military once told me what he was taught to do if he found himself lost and alone behind enemy lines.

Stop.

Clear the ground around your feet. Draw a one-meter square in the dirt and clean it to perfection. Establish that small piece of ground as your center point.

Then take inventory.

What are you carrying? What can you use? What can you see? What do you know? What can you control?

The square establishes a known center point of agency when everything else is uncertain. The inventory converts fear into confidence through information.

You know where you are—in your square of dirt.

You know what you have. Everyone has a different list.

You can make a decision.

This is where human agency begins.

We live in a world that constantly reminds us of what we lack. Money. Influence. Ownership. Security. Access to the institutions that govern our lives.

The barriers are real. The corruption is real. Monopoly is real. Government is captured by the institutions it is meant to regulate.

We should tell the truth about all of it.

But diagnosis alone does not create agency.

If we organize our lives around the power of the system, the system becomes our psychological center point. We begin every decision with an inventory of what other people control.

The soldier, or anyone who seeks to recover their personal agency, begins somewhere else.

What do I have?

A body capable of action. A mind capable of learning. Experience. Time. Relationships. Skills. The ability to tell the truth, make something useful and join with other people.

The inventory may be small.

But it is likely more than a lost Slovak soldier standing in a square of dirt lost in the forest.

Human agency does not require control over the entire terrain. It begins with clear possession of the place where you stand.

And there is always one more thing inside the square.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Muhammad Ali’s two-word poem:

Me. We.

There is a power greater than any one of us. We are connected to it, and through it we are connected to one another.

That spiritual understanding is part of every inventory.

It may not reveal the road home. It establishes that being lost is not the same as being alone.

The world will always offer evidence of what we lack.

Agency begins with what remains.

Stop.

Clear the ground. Draw the square. Take inventory. Remember there is a power greater than yourself. Begin.