“I was about as down as a person could get,” Nelson confessed to me. “I’d had these big dreams, dragged my wife away from her family in Texas, and here I was with nothing to show for it. I knew what I needed to do—pack up everything that could fit into the car and drive back to Texas to get a job selling cars or insurance or something. But I felt desperate at the thought of actually going through with this.”
Then Nelson had an impulse to call his friend Jimmy, whom he’d met in a screenwriting class. Jimmy was always very upbeat, although he, too, hadn’t ever sold a script. The last time Nelson had spoken to Jimmy, he’d been excited about some independent film he had agreed to help produce, and asked Nelson if he wanted to get involved. “It doesn’t pay anything now,” Jimmy explained, “but it is great experience.” Nelson remembered thinking what an optimist Jimmy was and what a sucker—he was working for free, which surely couldn’t get him anywhere. “At least I should call and say good-bye before I leave town,” Nelson told himself.
That phone call changed Nelson’s life. Jimmy talked him into working on the tiny film, which ended up becoming an underground hit. Nelson realized that he loved producing and had a talent for it, and soon he and Jimmy formed their own production company. Within a year, they’d produced a movie that became a surprise success and went on to create a multimillion-dollar business. “If things hadn’t been so bad,” Nelson reminisced, “I would have missed that doorway.”
This is often how it is with turning points—they seem to occur at crucial moments, moments in which we could easily get stuck unless we look for the opening they offer us. The word crucial is derived from the Latin root crux, or cross. Again, through ancient language, wisdom is revealed:
Hidden within crucial, challenging times are crossroads, transitions and turning points, easy to miss, but promising us wonderful journeys to places of delight and fulfillment we cannot even imagine.
Wake-up Calls
Great occasions do not make heroes or cowards; they simply unveil them to the eyes of men. Silently and imperceptibly, as we wake or sleep, we grow strong or weak; and at last some crisis shows what we have become. —Brooke Foss Westcott
The night after your twentieth wedding anniversary party, your husband suddenly announces that he is leaving you for another woman … Your doctor discovers a clogged artery in your heart during a routine checkup and schedules you for immediate open-heart surgery … Your wife confesses that she’s addicted to prescription painkillers and needs to be admitted to rehab … Your business partner of eight years breaks down and tells you that that he badly mismanaged the company assets, and that you will need to declare bankruptcy.
You have just had a wake-up call.
A wake-up call is pushy. It’s rude. It is a kick in the butt that sends us flying before it knocks us down. It is neither gentle, nor subtle, nor unhurried. Rather, it is demanding and dramatic, forcing us to pay attention to our lives, our relationships, and our own inner selves in a way nothing else does. It is stubborn, compelling us to face what we wish we could avoid, insisting that we deal with those things we are reluctant even to imagine, let alone endure.
If a turning point is a moment when we find ourselves standing at a crossroads, a wake-up call feels more as if we have been hit by a truck and are lying on the ground in a state of shock.
If a turning point is a big storm that creates some dust and disorder, a wake-up call is the tornado that slams into our life and appears to blow everything to smithereens.
Transitions and turning points can be gradual, unfolding over time, but wake-up calls do not afford us this luxury. They often like to wrap themselves in shocks and surprises when they show up at our door. The term unexpected doesn’t begin to describe how it feels when we are suddenly jolted out of our old reality, confronted with circumstances, challenges and issues we hoped we would never have to face. One moment you’re going about your business, and suddenly you look up and to your utter astonishment, everything has changed. You can’t believe how you’re feeling or where you are. You have no memory of any kind of conscious transition. “What happened?” you ask yourself in disbelief. “I don’t remember being aware that I was even heading in this direction.”
Wake-up calls are never on our itinerary. So when we find ourselves in the emotionally wrenching situations to which they inevitably deliver us, we cannot help but cry out: “How did I get here?” Even if we believe that eventually we will learn, grow and improve our lives because of the wake-up call, still, when it first assaults us, the experience is painful, frightening and emotionally overwhelming. My dear friend and fellow author Lorin Roche calls this “being shattered awake.” It is the kind of awakening that we do not readily welcome.
Years ago, when the man I loved at the time suddenly announced that our relationship of ten years was over and he was leaving me, I totally fell apart. For weeks on end, all I could do was weep—actually, howling was more like it. I was in a state of complete shock, incapable at the time of figuring out what had happened or why I, of all people, hadn’t seen this coming. One night, unable to sleep, I turned on the television and began watching a show about men and women who claimed to have been abducted by aliens from outer space. They all shared similar stories: one minute they were driving in their car or asleep in their bed, and the next thing they knew they were on an alien craft undergoing some horrible medical procedure. I remember listening to their descriptions and suddenly realizing that this was exactly how I felt—as if I’d been kidnapped, mysteriously abducted from my old life, only to wake up in some nightmare. And all I wanted to do was to go back home.
This is why wake-up calls can almost have a surreal, dreamlike quality to them. They feel more like a transportation than a transition, as if you’ve been whisked from one reality to another. At first we may even be in a state of denial, unable to grasp what has occurred. “This can’t be happening,” we whisper to ourselves in disbelief, but it is happening. And now, where you are is unmistakable and impossible to ignore.
These kinds of wake-up calls—extreme loss, illness, accidents or tragedy—wake us up to our deepest questions about the meaning of life, our faith, our values, about who we are at the very core of our soul. Others act as warnings, forcing us to focus on situations we have been ignoring that need our attention—the marriage that will end unless we take immediate action, the disease that will progress unless we start taking care of our body. But all wake-up calls have one thing in common: they test who we are and reveal us to ourselves like nothing else can.
I cannot write about wake-up calls without telling you the story of my friend Dr. Glenn Wollman. For thirty years, Glenn has been a highly respected specialist in emergency medicine, and the Regional Chief Medical Director for several emergency departments in California as well as the Director of Integrative Medicine at a large medical center. When I first met Glenn, I was impressed by his knowledge of both Western and Eastern medicine, and by his holistic approach to health and well-being. In our many conversations, it became clear to me that although Glenn loved his profession and was completely dedicated to it, he felt frustrated that he wasn’t able to really work with patients to focus more on preventive health care.
During the next two years, I watched Glenn’s dissatisfaction grow worse and worse. “I need to make a big shift,” he’d confess with a sigh. The question was how. Glenn was very loyal and committed to those with whom he worked, and the idea of letting them down was unthinkable to him. By his own admission, Glenn was also a cautious, precise and analytical person. This was part of why he was such a good doctor, but it didn’t make it easy for him to radically transform his life. The thought of setting out on his own after so many years in institutional settings was daunting. Whenever I got together with Glenn, this was one of the main topics—was Glenn ever going to make the change he needed to make in order to be truly fulfilled?
Late one night, my phone rang. It was my friend Marilyn. “Glenn has been