The In-Between: Life in the Micro

By Christian Espinosa

I was living in a bubble, and on May 9, 2022, it burst. It was the middle of the afternoon. As my partner Vanessa and I approached a major intersection, a blue car accelerated, ran the red light, and T-boned a black truck directly in front of us. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Shrinking Ego
• Release date: Dec 12, 2023
• ISBN: 9798989407903

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copyright © 2023 christian espinosa

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the in-between

Life in the Micro

First Edition

isbn

979-8-9894079-1-0 Paperback

isbn

979-8-9894079-0-3 Ebook

isbn

979-8-9894079-2-7 Audiobook

Disclaimer

Throughout this book, I have recreated events from my memories. Names, locations, and conversation details have been changed to protect anonymity.

Contents

Prologue

one.

My Rock-Bottom Moment

two.

Actionable Awareness

three.

Resetting My Identity

four.

Informed Intentions

five.

Authenticity

six.

Core Value Alignment

seven.

Presence

eight.

Insight

nine.

Leadership

ten.

The In-Between in Action

Epilogue

About the Author

Prologue

The Accident

On May 9, 2022, life threw me a curveball, and everything came together.

The moment happened in the middle of a typical afternoon.

My partner, Vanessa, and I had flown into St. Louis from Boston, where we saw Nightwish, my favorite band, for the first time. We drove in my 2014 Dodge Grand Caravan from the St. Louis airport to my house in Illinois, on the other side of the Mississippi River. Our minds were focused on the future: we were looking forward to an early dinner and worrying about getting Vanessa to a family function later that day.

But life had other plans for us.

First, a semi-truck beside us on the I-70 freeway blew one of its tires—right next to our passenger window. Vanessa thought a gun had gone off; she screamed and sank into the seat as if trying to avoid bullets. I remained calm and attentive to the road, as bits of the blown-out tire came off and flew through the air, with a few hitting the passenger window and side of our van.

Then, buckets full of chemicals used to clean up gas spills fell from a truck in front of us onto the highway, and suddenly the drive became a bouncing, bucket-filled obstacle course until the road hazards rolled away.

We pulled off the interstate and into the parking lot of a familiar restaurant near home.

But the restaurant was unexpectedly closed.

Finally, as we left the restaurant with our minds on eating and approached a major intersection, a blue car accelerated, ran the red light, and T-boned a black truck right in front of us at the stoplight. BOOM! The blue car was totaled; its front end was completely smashed, and its windows were broken—the car’s hood had crumpled like an accordion to absorb the impact.

After that, everything moved in slow motion.

The crash pushed the truck—a much bigger object than the chemical buckets—forcefully backward, causing it to awkwardly bounce toward us.

Instinctively, I checked the rearview mirror, noticed no one was behind us, and then quickly put the van in reverse, trying to back up before the truck hit us. I wasn’t completely successful—the truck was moving too quickly and hit our front bumper—I reversed enough, though, to limit the impact.

The In-Between Moment

When the slow motion stopped, Vanessa and I got out of our car, and our priorities became very clear, very quickly. What happened next felt pixelated—each moment is etched in my mind. Everything went out of focus, except for what I needed to do: assess the scene for safety, check on the drivers of the blue car and black truck, and call 911 or delegate it to someone else. Nothing else mattered during this in-between moment—what we were eating, Vanessa’s tight schedule, or the freeway bucket fiasco. I felt a heightened sense of purpose.

Immediately, a woman stepped out of the totaled blue car. She was clearly in shock; her arm was bent and looked broken, her leg was bleeding, and there were cuts on her head. Bits of smashed window glass fell from her as she staggered, one shoe missing, toward the center of the intersection. I’m not sure why she got out of the car so quickly or where she thought she was going—I’m not sure she knew, either.

Vanessa, a nurse, ran and caught the woman in the intersection before she fainted. I checked on the man in the truck, who seemed fine, though a little shaken up. At this point, a woman who’d pulled up behind us after the accident walked up and asked if she could help. I instructed her to call 911 and give me an update. I went back to Vanessa and the injured woman, who repeated over and over, Call my husband, call my husband. The woman shouted out her husband’s number, and I called him on my cell phone to convey what had happened as Vanessa helped her to the ground—the pavement in the middle of the intersection. I then handed my phone to the woman: she talked to her husband briefly and let him know the situation was under control. The desperation in her voice to hear her husband’s voice—and the fact that speaking with him was all she’d thought about immediately following the accident—brought tears to my eyes, though my sunglasses concealed them.

It reminded me that I don’t like to feel alone in times of need. Sometimes I’m so focused on the macro-goal that I lose sight of what others need in the micro-moments—which I believe is to feel understood, appreciated, and not alone, particularly when in crisis.

The police showed up after a couple of minutes, getting people to move cars to clear a path for the ambulance that arrived a minute or so later. EMTs got out and helped the injured woman up from the asphalt and onto a stretcher. As they wheeled her toward the ambulance, she mentioned she wanted to thank the nice lady. The nice lady was Vanessa, who’d held the woman while she was on the ground and let her know things would be all right. Vanessa walked over to the stretcher; the woman grabbed her hand and, with tears of gratitude, thanked her.

Then everything unpixelated and came back into focus—the immediate scene expanded, and the worries and thoughts of random things flooded back into my head, from my to-do list and finances to health and fitness.

I looked around and realized the intersection was filled with people still in their vehicles, filming the scene with their cell phones, talking on the phone, or impatiently waiting for the street to clear. Vanessa, the woman who called 911, and I were the only ones who had helped. No one else even bothered to ask if we needed assistance.

What Was and Wasn’t on My Mind

From the time we left my van to help until the time the emergency responders arrived, I was focused entirely on the tasks at hand.

During that span of a few minutes, here’s what wasn’t on my mind:

Will this accident make Vanessa late for her family function?

Will we miss dinner?

Will the police want a statement?

Will I have to fill out an accident report?

What about the new book I’m writing?

What about the relationship with Vanessa I’m building?

Here’s what was:

Is the guy driving the black truck okay?

Is the woman in the smashed blue car okay?

Are the police on their way?

Is the scene safe for Vanessa and me to help?

What more can I do to help?

Here’s what I realized that meant. I was living in a micro-moment centered on the present, not a macro-moment centered on the past or the future. I had entered that micro-moment because I was living in the in-between, the space where I used to be dead to everyday life but had now chosen to be alive to it.

I took my ego out of the equation.

I shifted my identity to a serving state.

I was living to help others, not to achieve a goal I had dreamed up on the distant horizon.

I felt euphoric, connected, and purposeful.

When I realized all that, I realized something else—that I had been moving toward this moment for months, out of a pandemic low.

I’d been living in a bubble, and the accident with Vanessa was part of my awakening. It was a moment that connected the dots, a similar experience that had periodically occurred for most of my life. There were micro-moments like these when I got it right and others when I blew it. The dots clarified the importance of these micro-moments and the moments in between (which I will refer to as in-between moments) when the micro-moments occur—painting the complete picture of who I wanted to be and how I wanted to approach my life.

The accident was a moment that freed me from the burden of a past speckled with regrets and a future full of uncertainties.

It was a moment that helped me shed the burden of a high-achieving existence that often left me feeling empty inside.

It was a moment that pushed me to finally find and embrace the euphoria of living.

Living in the In-Between

I’ve been a cybersecurity expert since 1993. In 2021, I published a book about my experiences—The Smartest Person in the Room—which focused on the human side of cybersecurity. The theme was simple: if you don’t know how to be a human being because you’re always thinking about being the smartest person in the room, you can’t protect other human beings in a way that will work, from a cybersecurity standpoint or otherwise.

Change is a simple concept, but it’s not an easy one for me. I often have the awareness yet, frustratingly, can’t alter my behavior. Reflection brings a spark, the idea to change. But the actual moment of transformation occurs when the spark remains lit and continues burning long enough to carry me through the discomfort of change. The key is to keep the fire burning.

When it came to updating the approach to my entire life, the accident on that Illinois road lit my spark of change, after months spent reflecting on my Danish rock-bottom moment (more on that in Chapter 1) and while in the middle of a new relationship that I was determined to engage in differently than the last one.

I had not just chosen to get out of the van to see if the drivers in the