The Rule of Holes
Air Force veteran Bo Williams on digging into what matters and crawling out of what doesn’t.
Leading prisoners through the jungle in the Philippines with a narcotics detection dog at his side was not the career in service Bo Williams dreamed about during his Eagle-Scout childhood in southeast Texas. He grew up with a World War II veteran father and a guiding belief in being helpful to his community, his country, and the world. He expected that his path to that calling would run through one of the service academies following high school.
But as he prepared to graduate, that dream fell apart inside the turmoil of his parents’ crumbling marriage. Williams enlisted in the Air Force instead, working six years as a dog handler for its security forces before crewing C-130 military transport planes for another eight years. The resentment he felt over his lost opportunity shadowed him long after he left the military, following him into his years as the owner/instructor of a New England scuba diving center. He eventually chased his anger away through the study of philosophy, helping him cultivate the superpower of simply letting go.
I met Bo, 70, in a gift shop called Splurge that he runs with his wife, Autumn, in Hendersonville, North Carolina. (A locale accurately billed by its tourism office as “Your New Favorite Small Town.”) I was headed to a coffee shop to read while the husband conquered nearby mountain biking trails. But I wandered into a bright space full of pieces by local artisans instead—and immediately fell into easy conversation with the man behind the counter.
Over the next couple of hours (and during a later phone conversation), Bo and I discussed falling into holes, getting over our respective pasts, and digging into the profoundly hard work of being human.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tell me how that moment in the Phillippines altered you as a young man in the 1970s.
At that point in my life I was looking for a path to follow, maybe some rite of passage where I could prove myself. On that tour of duty, I had traveled to foreign countries and experienced new cultures. I had participated in the violence of what I believed was something greater than myself — in part trying to reduce the flow of heroin into the United States.
Then, I found myself doing regular police duties. One evening, I participated in a block-and-trap assignment: Other colleagues would chase suspected thieves toward us to be captured. It was a successful evening, and we captured several suspects. But some of my colleagues started to harass the prisoners, and there was a fair amount of peer pressure to join in. The rough treatment just upset me, and I helped de-escalate the situation. That was an a-ha moment that taught me who I didn’t want to be. If you’re in a position like that, you need to think about your purpose. We should be about reducing the suffering in this world, not adding to it.
What’s something you’ve learned from a mentor?
When my wife [Moira, a commissioned officer who died in 2010] was stationed overseas, I couldn’t finagle a joint assignment. So, I entered the reserves and worked for a Japanese education consortium that helped place students in American colleges and universities after they’d gone through intensive English-language studies. We had been struggling to get the technology we wanted to use to work; no brilliant plan we came up with helped. My manager, a highly intelligent Korean woman who had achieved this position of authority in a very misogynistic society, took me to lunch and said, “Bo, sometimes you just gotta stop digging for gold where there isn’t any.”
The rule of holes has guided me ever since. When you realize you are in a hole, just quit digging and step out of it.
That’s excellent advice. And it’s deceptively hard advice to put into action.
It is. Once you get emotionally invested in something, its really hard to walk away from it.
Incredibly so. My experience does not compare to what you encountered in the Air Force, but I put a lot of pressure on myself to prove that I belonged in sports journalism, my chosen field coming out of college. I took a job in New York, discovered the place wasn’t for me, and quit after six months. But my sense of failure after leaving … that stuck around for years. I dug a deep hole for myself in that regard and settled in.
Oh yeah – I mean, the holes we dig are not just about what we’re doing; they’re also about what we’re feeling. We create our own jails, where we lock ourselves up and forget that we’re the gatekeepers. We can walk away from that anytime. But you lose perspective and are just in that emotional black hole where everything isn’t good.
How do you recognize when you’re in a hole like that? And how do you get out of it?
From my own experience, you have to lead an examined life. You can do that through philosophy, or you can do it through religion if that’s a frame of reference that works best for you. But you have to take stock periodically: Is this what I want to do? Am I the person I want to be? And if I’m not, how do I move toward becoming that person?
It also gives you data points to compare. If you were miserable a year ago and you’re still miserable today, and no catastrophe has happened to cause it, you can’t continue to wallow in the same misery. It’s time to try something different or find the significant variable in what’s causing that misery.
What’s your method?
It’s just amor fati. It means accept your fate, love your fate. But for me, it’s not about being fatalistic, that you can’t change where you’re going. It just means you have to accept what’s happened to you and have a realistic sense of who and where you are. It was a term commonly used in Roman stoicism, and Nietzsche popularized it in a couple of his writings. It has a similar meaning in both philosophies. But again, it’s just about leading an examined life.
Emotions, when they’re too intense, tend to overwhelm the situation for me. So you’ve got to have some guardrails there, too. I was angry for a long time, and it’s a very counterproductive emotion. It’s bad for you physically, it’s not good for you mentally, and it’s certainly not good for the people around you.
When were you angry?
Oh, from about age 20 to about 50. Somewhere around there.
We all enter adulthood with work to be done on who we are and who we want to be. And I realized that there was work to be done. But I was pushing boundaries. I wanted to see how far I could go on multiple levels—except for acquiring wealth; I never wanted that. I just reached a point where I was dissatisfied with my choices and outcomes. I had to accept some responsibility for where I was and get my emotions under control. It happens to many people when they’re not examining their life. Whatever stimulus is activating how they feel at the time, it’s the brightest light.
The remarkable thing is that you pulled yourself out of your anger. That isn’t easy.
Part of it is just realizing that no vengeful God has it in for you. When my parents split up when I was a senior, I felt like they left me on my own at a point in my life when I needed their help. They didn’t finish the job of nudging me into a service academy, which I was all set up to do—the grades were there, I did the Eagle Scout thing, I ticked all the boxes off. All I needed was another year of stability in the household or even six more months. And I was very resentful about that. It took me a long time to figure out that that was what I was mad about all those years.
That makes sense. Family hurt is so primal. And anger is maybe the hardest emotion to dig into, anyway.
It is. My mother and I are not friends; we did not talk for about five years. But I look at that episode now, and if there is something I can take away from it that helps me move forward, then that’s good. If not, you let it go.
My wife Autumn got a full ride to the Rhode Island School of Design when she was in high school. She is a talented artist. She would have finished high school at RISD, lived in the dorms, and started the college program. But her mother just said, “Nope, you can’t go. You’re not mature enough.” One of the things I respect about Autumn is that she’s worked at moving past that hurt.
That must have been one way that the two of you connected. It’s so similar to your experience.
I think you’re right about that. When I listened to Autumn talk about that missed opportunity, I was impressed that she had gotten past it, gotten through it, and was able to deal with it in a positive, substantive way. I thought, “Well, maybe it’s time for me to let go of this thing of mine.”
Maybe that’s why I’m so content now—I’m no longer mad at my mother. Freud was right! Think of all the money I’ve just saved on psychoanalysis with this conversation here. Thank you!
Well, same! Seriously, this has been enlightening.
Well, you have to figure everything out as you go on this journey from birth to death. We all do. But I’m at a point where I’ve never felt as content as I am right now. I don’t feel like I’m reaching for anything or striving for anything. I’m all out of objectives.
No more digging for you.
I’m just enjoying everything that’s left.
Thank you for talking with me. I’ve really enjoyed learning about you and from you. You’re one of my new favorite people, Bo Williams.
Well, this was excellent. Thank you, my new friend Beth. ♣
NEXT WEEK: Why friendships are more difficult to make and keep as we get older, and what we can do about it.