Boise

A cast bronze statue of Abraham Lincoln stood prominently in the park in front of a stately Boise Capitol building. Walking here from Main St. passes several new developments, sleek housing, and crisp businesses. I had particular expectations for Boise, Idaho, formed mostly out of thin air. My only experience with Idaho before this was in very small towns in the north and the mostly uninhabited road around them. This was more urban than expected. 

I wandered through the park, feeling uncharacteristically extroverted, looking for someone that didn’t look to be in a rush. 

I saw out of the corner of my eye that a coiffed gentleman sat on a bench on the far east side of the park. He sat undistracted, without reaching for a phone. He seemed to be finding a quiet repose. In the 5 minute walk to talk to him, the extroversion began to simmer with the more familiar nervousness that comes with approaching a stranger. I reached out and introduced myself. He hesitated at first, not volunteering his name or reciprocating smalltalk. I gave the short spiel about my project and his face lit up with a smile. 

In another quiet blow to my preconceptions about Boise, Sam Branco was not from there. Like most people in a major city, he was a transplant. In his case, just a visitor for a few days. A 44 year old commercial pilot, Sam makes his way through a number of cities, I’m sure.

“I’m from Brazil originally, but I live in Houston. I’m just here for my job as a pilot. Though that’s not exactly true. Boise is one of my favorite places to visit. I always try to stay a here little bit. It’s the perfect mix of big city and small town.”

He spoke longingly as though he was near the end of a catch up with a long lost friend. After a few minutes of pleasantries and introductions, he felt less uneasy and more ready to share. I asked him about respect.

“To me respect is about letting people live the way they are supposed to. The way they want to live. It’s about respecting their existence as individuals. People are not the same, and we can let them be not the same without pushing them to be the way you want them. 

In a lot of ways this instinct is built in to western societies. Maybe it’s from religion. It feels like an ancient impulse to say, “hey I lived this way and I turned out OK so this is the way everyone must be.” But that’s wrong. The process of correcting that impulse in yourself is the way to respecting others.”

The response struck me as informed by a lifetime of seeing different places. Which made sense. An immigrant pilot is an unsurprising candidate to speak a philosophy of accepting difference. As I asked about dignity, his perspective began to take on almost religious tones, which surprised me somewhat after what I interpreted as a dig at religions in his earlier answer.

“Dignity is something you have inside yourself. It is the strength that comes from knowing you’re living the life you’re supposed to. That you’re following your own true path. Some people are more in tune with their path, some don’t even know they’re searching for it, but we all are on one. You hear people may say things like “well that person is poor so how can they be happy” but if they are following their path, the lessons they are supposed to learn in this life, they have a dignity that can’t be taken away. Dignity like this is something that can’t be taken. It’s something you have even in difficult situations unless you allow it to leave you.”

I worried for a moment that our conversation was descending into answers that he thought someone might want to hear. It felt so sleek and well practiced that my natural inclination was suspicion. It was hard to tell whether this was something he felt deeply or if these were the answers that protected him from giving more messy answers. I asked him what made a good life and what he wanted out of his life, in the hopes of getting at more of his particular story.

“A good life is when you feel peaceful inside. Not that you’re projecting peace, but that you truly feel it inside you. The feeling that there’s nothing you want to change. People can confuse status, or fame, or even just being in a nice park with peace. They can assume it just comes with those like a package deal. But it’s about having the feeling inside. That you can feel even in the craziness of a big city. 

That’s the peace I’m after in my life. I don’t have it just yet. I feel I’m getting much better at it but every time I get a bit closer, I self sabotage a little bit.”

That was a turn I was not expecting. It felt deeply real, right at the time when I was out of questions. I probed more to what he meant.

“A lot of times there’s something that feels like it’s the right thing for my path and then other priorities or thoughts get in may head and mess it up. I’ll get to worrying about family or something and bail out of it. Then looking back at the moment, I say to myself, “we would have been just fine.” Fear makes people irrational though. 

For example, I’ve been wanting to move west for a long time, and last year my company opened a domicile in California. I wanted to go. I was all in to move, it felt like finally the perfect opportunity. Some of my friends reached out that day and asked “did you put your house on the market yet? You’re going right?” But then I got to thinking about my daughter in her last year of high school. Would this disrupt her last year? Would it cause troubles? Would it be my fault? She’s going off to college but what if this messes up her plans of coming home during college? And all of that got me so wrapped up that I didn’t take the opportunity.”

He paused for a moment and I could feel the frustration of the moment turn to a practiced patience.

“But I’m getting there. I started in South Florida believe it or not, and move to Central Florida, then Georgia, then Texas. So I’m making my way west slowly. I’ll get there.”

It reminded me for a moment of the thoughts I’d been having on the road for the past weeks of driving. “Consistency.” I said aloud. I drive for 6+ hours a day and I put my car on cruise control and try not to touch the speed for as long as possible after that. A lot of the time, I’ll see people swerve around me and angrily speed ahead only to find them passing by behind me an hour or so later because they weren’t consistent with their speed. I get there ahead of them almost always because I’m just consistent on the road. He nearly yelled in response, 

“Exactly! And I was one of those angry drivers! In my life I was racing so hard, pushing so much, and I was creating so much turmoil for myself and others.

It got to the point that I was seeing physical changes in myself. And I was acting out terribly. With my wife, I was aggressive, and controlling. I’m so lucky she was forgiving. One time. She went out to the movies with people that I didn’t give her permission to do and I got so angry once I punched my front windshield and broke it. I don’t know what was wrong with me to be so controlling. And I was getting ill and with headaches all the time. 

My wife recommended an acupuncturist that she was working at, answering the phones. And I went, figured why not. But at the end he said, I teach a martial art, you should come try to train with me. And I had done jiu jitsu, and Taekwondo, I had learned to fight before. But when I showed up, he was showing how to meditate first. I looked into the meditation he was teaching. Zen meditation, and its link to Daoism. And I saw something in my research that talked about how life should be like water. Water meets. An obstacle and it doesn’t attack it. It finds a way around it, without ever disrupting its flow. For some reason this just hit me. I thought “they’ve got it. I’ve got to learn this.” And it’s been a process for me ever since then, trying to let go of all the turmoil and the anger I brought to things by trying to control it exactly how I wanted. It’s made my life so much better.”

This unlocked the whole experience of our conversation for me. His words felt measured and practiced because they were. Because he had been practicing a version of himself that he felt was healthier for him, though not always his first impulse. I prodded one more time, whether he still feels the pull of that old anger and impatience.

“Sure, I recognize that it’s there. But it’s so small. Here’s a good metaphor still in my life: I have guns, 2 guns. I don’t feel the need to have them anymore. They don’t have any pull over me. There was a time I felt I needed them. For protection, or even to threaten people. But now I don’t care about them. But they stay in my house. Because I haven’t figure a way to fully dispose of them. I don’t want to throw them in the trash, or give them to someone else. Even someone I care about. Because I don’t want to extend the damage that these tools do. I’ll figure out a way to get rid of them responsibly. I feel like my story is applicable for the country too. It’s a cultural thing. Slowly, little buy little as we let go of our turmoil, people will be willing to lay down their weapons too.”