In the early 80s, the air around my preschool smelled of dry grass and wild pine. I was only four years old. At this age, you don’t think about where you’re going. You just notice how the ground feels under your feet and how big the sky looks. It was a rural place that felt more like a jungle clearing than a school, where the line between playground and forest was thin.
I remember walking alone. I don’t know why I was alone or where the teachers were, but I can still feel my little shoes crunching in the path. I was walking along a western-style fence with thick vertical posts and two horizontal logs connecting them. Open field beyond. A group of boys were there, wrestling in the dirt. As they grappled and threw each other down, thick clouds of dust rose into the sunlit air.
They were big boys who seemed to know how to move through the world with sound and energy. I watched the chaos and swirling dust with a mixture of wonder and a primal kind of fear. The group then disbanded. One of the more muscular guys looked up and saw me standing on the safe side of the logs. He pointed. Beside him stood a boy who was smaller than the rest, probably around my size. “Hey!” The older son called. “Come and wrestle him. You’re his size.”
It was not a friendly invitation. It was a challenge. It was a call to step through the wooden rail, leave my quiet place aside and enter the cloud of dust and struggle. I froze. I didn’t know these guys and I didn’t know the rules. Most importantly, I didn’t know they had anything, the courage to throw themselves in the dirt and laugh. I felt their eyes on me.
I remained silent. I didn’t shake my head either. I just looked back at the worn path and kept going. I walked away from the fence, the field and the boys. I don’t remember what they said when I left. They might have snickered, or they might have forgotten me the second I passed the next fence post. But I remember what happened inside me. A heaviness settled in my chest. This was the first time I felt shame.
At four years old, I knew nothing about masculinity or social expectations. I had no words for it. All I knew was that I was called to participate in the world, and I chose to be a spectator. I felt like I failed a test I didn’t even know I was taking.
Now in my fifties, I still think about that boy down the road. I realized that the shame I felt wasn’t really about wrestling. It wasn’t about whether I won or lost. It was about the act of turning away.
That memory followed me for decades, pointing to empty spaces where I thought I should have been grit. Where I grew up, war was an inevitable part of life. Although I now know that physical conflict is never the true measure of a man, my character felt like a ghost, not knowing if I could face it.
When I reached my forties, I realized that I had never fought. I had lived a good life, raised a family and built a career, but I still wondered if I would fall apart when the world pushed back. So, I called my best friend. We’ve been close since we were on the t-ball team together when we were four, the same age I was when I stood on that fence. He is bigger and stronger than me, a man who has seen real battles. I trusted him enough to ask a strange favor: “Will you join me? I just need to know how it feels.”
We meet in his backyard on a Saturday morning with boxing gloves on. The wind was still and the surroundings quiet. We started circling each other. I was nervous, that old familiar urge to pull at my heels and retreat. Then he hit me. I felt the skin on my face twitch, and instinctively, I stepped back. I threw a punch, feeling the vibration travel up my arm and settle into my bones.
We sparred for about five minutes until we were both out of breath. None of us were hurt, but that morning, the forty-year-old man finally stepped through those wooden logs. I learned that I could give and take a punch if I could. The profound insight was that growth does not always require victory. Sometimes it’s just facing an old fear.
By choosing to step into that backyard, I’m not saying that fighting is the only way to grow up. I was accepting that there was no longer a need to protect myself from the possibility of conflict. I found peace in knowing I could stand my ground. It answered questions that a four-year-old boy couldn’t. I have things after all.
It’s amazing how a moment from fifty years ago can still shape the person I am. I used to think that shame was a scar or a sign of weakness. But now I see it differently. That shame is the birth of my conscience. It was the first time I realized that I had a choice in who I wanted to be.
It wasn’t real insight that I was afraid of. It was that I cared about being brave. The pain it took to walk away proved that, deep down, I wanted to stay in the fight. I was never one to be content on the sidelines. I now understand that I wasn’t just afraid of their power or how much they could hurt, I was also afraid of my own power and what I was capable of.
I have tried to walk outside the field for the past few decades. In a way, it made me a better person. It’s made me the person who perseveres when things get tough, the person who takes on challenges even when I’m scared.
I still feel like a four year old inside me sometimes. He stands there by the wooden fence watching the dust rise as the older boys wrestle. But I no longer look at him with judgment. I look at him with pity. I want to go back that way, kneel down and tell him, “It’s okay that you leave today. Because you’ll spend the rest of your life answering that call. The shame you feel is just your courage.”
Preschool is over, and those boys are probably grandfathers now. But the lesson remains. Life invites us to wrestle with our fears, our responsibilities, and our definitions of what it means to be strong. I left once, but every day since then I’ve had the chance to go back to the field and give my clothes a little dust.
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