On the release of the 2^nd edition of my nonfiction book, While In Darkness There Is Light, I’m thinking about Charlie Dean, the young New Yorker who wandered from the Australian farm his American friends started in 1970 to Southeast Asia. Ravenously political, Charlie wanted to see for himself where the U.S. had been involved. Certainly he knew fighting was still being waged, and he must have known about civil war in Laos. Of course he had second thoughts about the journey he was on. In a letter to his friends in Kuranda, he wrote:

“There once was a young man with two perfectly good heads He was sort of proud—after all, two heads are better than one—and he was sort of bummed out because he had the hardest time making decisions. He had a successful youth and did many things that most people with just one head only dream of. He went on a trip, and one head sort of lost interest, and the other head, previously described as uninspired, or at least under-developed, started to bloom….”

I’ve heard it said we have two brains, the one in our skull and a second in our gut. Charlie’s second head was in his gut, and if he had listened to the gut brain, he might still be alive today.

Charles Maitland Dean, 1972

It’s indisputable that decisions are difficult to make. A single decision—especially a change of mind—can affect the path of one’s life. In one of her letters, Virginia Woolf wrote, “A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.” For some people, especially Charlie with his dogged determination, having doubts about a direction he had chosen was out of the question. He was stubbornly committed to the concept of heroism and wrote about trying to help families rebuild in Cambodia and Vietnam after the effects of war. And that desire kept him on a trail toward self-destruction.

Changing one’s course means giving up one vision and forming another. And giving up is often seen as failure. The medium Andrea Zanon says, “when . . . you don’t see where you are headed, it is time to quit. It is time to change as it will be irresponsible to stay. If you stay, it would ultimately lead to personal misery, and for misery of the people you love. . . .” But quitting takes courage.

Changing course is, in a sense, the sacrifice of the ideal life we envision for ourselves.

Charlie Dean, Australia 1974

And in order to change one’s mind, one must have a perceptibly better vision of an outcome. Charlie had an idea of joining the Peace Corps, of owning land in Australia, of environmental work and social work and, down the road, even political work. It wasn’t enough to espouse a theory, his father had taught, but one had to articulate a plan. But Charlie had too many plans, too many ideas for where he should aim his efforts. For him, giving up meant loss, vulnerability, and ultimately failure, none of which was allowable in his upper-class upbringing with a father who demanded excellence from his boys.

Unfortunately for Charlie Dean, his path to the future was tangled in overgrown vines like the trail Pathet Lao soldiers marched him on before they ended his life at age 24.

While In Darkness There Is Light is available from online booksellers in print, ebook, and audiobook on dozens of platforms.