Closer to Life

I have been writing back and forth with a man in prison who went inside when he was young. He is serving a very long sentence.

There is no way to say that lightly. A long sentence does something to a person’s sense of time. It changes how the future feels. It can make ordinary dreams feel far away. It can leave a person wondering whether life is happening somewhere else without him.

He has told me, in different ways, that he feels he missed out on a lot. And I understand why he would feel that.

There are things most people get to stumble through in the open world: work, travel, friendships, love, mistakes, long drives, random conversations, the simple freedom of deciding where to go on a Saturday. Even the awkwardness of becoming an adult in public.

When someone goes inside young, much of that happens behind walls. Or it does not happen at all.

That kind of loss feels real.

I do not want to rush past it. I do not want to explain it too quickly or cover it with a spiritual answer. Some grief needs to be seen before anything else can.

But what has moved me about him is his willingness to look again. He is not only looking at what was lost. He is beginning to ask whether there is another way to live even now. Another way to meet the life that is here, without pretending the life that did not happen was not real to him.

In one of his recent letters, he wrote something that stayed with me. He said this new outlook was something he had wanted all along, though he did not really know it until he began reading about it and understanding it through our conversations.

Then he wrote that, at times, just knowing there is another way to live and experience things has brought him to a new kind of happiness.

“Just knowing that there is a new way to live,” he wrote, “feels like I am on the way to getting closer to life.”

I read that line more than once.

Getting closer to life.

That is such a beautiful way to say it. Not escaping life. Not pretending life has been easy. Not waiting for every circumstance to change before something opens.

Just getting closer to life.

I think many of us know what it feels like to be far from our own lives. We can be busy and still far from it. We can be surrounded by people and still far from it. We can be out in the open world and still feel like we are watching life from a distance.

Pain can do that. Shame can do that. Regret can do that. So can the long ache of believing we were treated unfairly, or the quiet belief that we are only what happened to us, or only the worst thing we ever did.

It creates distance. Not always on the outside, but inside.

A person can be breathing, working, talking, surviving, and still feel cut off from the life he is in.

So when he wrote that a new way of seeing was bringing him closer to life, I felt grateful. Not because anything was fixed. The sentence did not disappear. The past did not become simple.

But an opening had appeared.

And sometimes an opening is enough to begin.

Later in that same letter, he started telling me what he would do if he were ever released. He talked about traveling, seeing the national parks, picking up hitchhikers, cooking for people living on the street, and getting it all on film.

There was a wildness and generosity in it that made me smile. It was not a polished plan. It was not a careful list of goals. It was more like a heart imagining itself in motion.

Open roads. Food shared. Strangers met along the way. A life that gives something back.

Then he wrote that the main thing he would want to show people is that nobody is all bad. That we all have good in us. That a person is far more than the worst thing they have ever done.

That will always stay with me.

A person is far more than the worst thing they have ever done.

I have heard different versions of that from men inside. Sometimes directly. Sometimes underneath the words. Sometimes in tears. Sometimes in silence.

It is one of the deepest cries of the human heart.

Please do not reduce me to that.

Please do not make one act, one season, one failure, one wound the whole truth of who I am.

That does not mean we erase responsibility. It does not mean harm is ignored. It does not mean consequences do not seem real.

It means the person is still more.

And if we cannot hold that, I do not know how real change happens.

We have to be able to tell the truth about what happened without making a person only what happened. That is hard. It is hard for the one who seemed to cause harm. It is hard for the one who believed they were harmed. It is hard for families and communities. It is hard for all involved.

We want simple boxes: good people and bad people, guilty and innocent, worthy and unworthy. But real life keeps exposing those boxes for what they are.

I have sat across from men who have done serious harm and watched them speak about their children with tenderness. I have read letters from men carrying deep regret who are trying to help someone younger not repeat their path. I have seen people who were once feared become gentle.

In the very place where the world may only know them by their worst day, I have seen men become listeners, artists, mentors, and friends.

You cannot witness that for long and keep seeing the way you used to.

His letter reminded me that a new way of seeing is not only an idea. It can become a way back into life.

Even inside. Even while serving a long sentence. Even while carrying a story that still hurts.

He is discovering that his mind does not have to stay locked in the same place forever. He can question what he has believed. He can listen for something quieter. He can imagine a life of giving. He can come closer to life right where he is.

And maybe that is where a better way begins.

Not in a perfect future. Not after everything is understood. Not after the world finally sees us exactly as we hope to be seen.

But in the small willingness to ask whether there is another way to look, another way to live from here, another way to remember what is still good.

I see that in his letter. I see it in the longing to travel and feed people and tell the story differently. I see it in the hope that others might come to know they are more than their worst moment.

And when I read his words, something in me answers quietly.

Yes.

There is a better way.

And maybe we find it together.