Pop! Into the world I came. I don’t remember much about that day. I’m not sure that I’d want to. I was presumably naked and confused—maybe a little hungry. My mom tells me there was a tornado that came through town that night, but I can’t remember such details. All that mattered was that my journey had begun.

Five. Ten. Fifteen. The years charged forward quickly, and I rambled through like an adolescent buffalo. Life seemed normal. Not in the "my life is boring" normal way. Just normal. I simply couldn’t imagine life any other way. But then I suppose buffalos rarely imagine life as an elephant or a squirrel.

I remember one time my mom yelled at my friend Ryan for saying the F-word. It was in the middle of our street and she yelled really loudly. She told him to go home, and I’m pretty sure she called his mom. I suddenly felt more like a sheep than a buffalo.

I knew then that I was different. My family was different. We were a family of buffalos in a comfy, suburban neighborhood in North Dakota. Our neighbor actually measured his grass with a ruler. We didn’t swear, or drink, or gamble, or smoke, or spend beyond our means, or have big family feuds. My sister and I actually get along quite well. I took it for granted for a long time. I still do.

I came to college expecting much the same. I was wrong. I lived with an alcoholic my first year. One weekend I put garbage bags on the floor so when he passed out he wouldn’t throw up on the carpet. His name was John. I really loved that guy. Seriously. A lot. He called me last summer. We hadn’t talked in years. He told me how he had dropped out of school to be a lumberjack in Colorado. He seemed sad—like he was trapped in his own life. His dad is a lawyer. I bet he’s not happy.

I realized that year that humanity is broken. That we are desperately depraved beyond our own repair. I knew that people were hungry and that AIDS was running rampant. But I didn’t know normal people were confused and lonely too—at least not to the degree that I was finding.

There is a solution but you don’t want to hear it. It must be something outside of ourselves. Oprah tells us to find the answer within. Do what feels right. What if nothing feels right? What if I feel like taking her billion dollars and feeding the hungry and sick? But even that isn’t the solution. Even having a full stomach doesn’t seem to be the answer. John is well fed, well educated, lives near Denver, played Lacrosse at his private high school, has a lot of money, and doesn’t look like Alan Greenspan.

We aren’t content because we aren’t meant to be content. At least not in the way we think. True joy and contentment comes from your identity. The world says "what you do is who you are." The way of the buffalo says "who you are determines what you do." But who we are is broken. We are mess-ups. We have a moral standard that we feel everyone should keep, but we can’t keep it ourselves. If what I do determines who I am, then the fact that none of us can keep our own moral standards means we are all failures by our own system. This doesn’t look good. We need a new start. A new life. A new person. There is a solution but you don’t want to hear it.

Photo: flickr / somma