Richard Louthan, a former graduate student, friend of many students and faculty and user of the library, wrote the following essay Dec. 1 for the campus's initiative, My Personal Compass:

Twenty-four years ago I began the process of recovery from a long descent into depression, substance abuse and post-traumatic shock syndrome.

Over the years I participated in numerous and varied recovery programs and self-help groups. Early on I began an intensive, if random, program of reading concerning spirituality, science and health, both mental and physical.

Very early in the process I came upon two books,The Tao of Physics and The Dancing Wu Li Masters, which came to have a very important influence on my thinking and outlook.

The other reading that has served as the spiritual foundation of my recovery has been The Sermon on the Mount by Emmet Fox. "As you sow, you shall reap." "As you think, you shall be."

Simple enough. In these years of increasing awareness, I have tried to use these as axioms in expanding my personal engagement with the world around me at the quantum level envisioned by Zukov and Kapra.

In the early years of recovery, I was virtually unemployable eking out a living on a small Veteran Administration pension and whatever menial jobs I came by for as long as I could last in them.

At nine years into recovery I awoke one morning with a disaster of a headache. A week later I surrendered myself to the VA hospital where they opened my brain and removed the blood from a hematoma, cause unknown. I have always considered it the last phase of detox.

But more importantly, the insight I received in the hospital was, "If you are not afraid to die, why are you afraid to live?" As I left the hospital, I could barely walk and did not know if I would be a fully functioning human or would ever be able to work again.

It didn't matter. Life was sweet.

Since that time I have endeavored to focus my life around embracing the fear of life and moving beyond that fear into the quantum possibilities of a much larger world and life.

In that time I have served a four-year stint in Africa with the Peace Corps and experienced enough employment to retire with modest comfort. While in the Peace Corps, I formed lasting bonds with an extended family that have provided a whole new meaning to my life.

More recently, people and ideas have come into my life that give it a richness I have never before experienced.

And as I enter the later stages of my seventh decade in this plane of reality, I find myself afraid of neither death nor life, freedom of a sort I had never imagined.

For more My Personal Compass Essays, visit mypersonalcompass.ucdavis.edu. The My Personal Compass project is intended to encourage people of different beliefs to listen to one another. Modeled after National Public Radio's This I Believe program, it seeks to encourage thoughtful and respectful sharing of philosophical, spiritual, political or civic beliefs.