When are you from?
Not a typo. We are used to asking people where they are from. This is about asking when.
The Man Who Woke Up in the Wrong Decade
Josiph Milanick, a Serbian soldier, was hit by a bullet during World War 2. He was fortunate to be saved by his troops, who sent him to a military hospital.
He did not die, but he did not wake up either. He slipped into a coma, and stayed there for over two decades after the war ended in 1945.
After a little over 22 years, he began to regain consciousness. First, he would open his eyes occasionally. His body showed signs of being startled by loud sounds, the way a child stirs in sleep. After a few weeks, most of his bodily functions were returning to normal. He began staying awake for short stretches. He even managed to sit up in his hospital bed.
During one of those waking periods, he heard a siren. Ordinary enough in a hospital, ambulances coming and going. But when he heard it, he almost leapt out of bed, ignoring his fragile condition entirely. He ran out of his ward, telling everyone around him, “run, some bread, some water, run, some bread, some water.”
The ward staff eventually got hold of him and brought him back to bed. He kept repeating it the whole time.
An older nurse, one who had been around during the war, recognised the words immediately. Across Europe, most people would have. When a siren sounded during the war, you ran for cover. And as you ran, you grabbed a loaf of bread if you could, because you never knew how long you would be hiding.
She understood what had happened. Josiph had woken up from a coma after twenty-two years, but inside, time had stopped the moment he was hit. For him, it was still 1944. The war was still on. When the ambulance siren reached him, he felt the only reasonable thing to do was exactly what had kept people alive back then.
He did not know it was 1966. He did not know the war had been over for two decades.
The Frozen In Time You
Many of our emotional reactions work exactly this way.
They are not the appropriate response to what is actually happening in front of us. They are responses coming from a frozen-in-time version of ourselves, parts of us that never got the memo that the war is over.
Your version of the siren might be rejection, being ignored, being threatened, being taken for granted, being disrespected. The moment you hear that particular sound in your current situation, something inside you reacts the way it learned to react, back then.
And it did work back then. Throwing a tantrum made your parents finally give in. A burst of anger made someone realise you were serious. Crying and screaming when the dog came at you drew someone’s attention and they helped. These were not irrational responses. They were perfect strategies given your age, your options, your resources at the time.
But most of them are outdated now. They no longer serve. They belong to a different decade.
The grown-up version of you is resourceful, perceptive, capable of real creativity in difficult moments. But those frozen parts are still living inside you, unchanged, because they have never been healed or grown up. They are still waiting for the war to end.
It is not a problem that they live inside you. The problem is when they take over.
When you respond to a situation without one of those frozen parts hijacking the controls, the only possible response is from the real you, the grown-up, matured you. Emotional intelligence, then, is not something you have to manufacture. It becomes the natural outcome.
A Practice: When Are You From?
As you move through daily life, watch for two things.
The siren, and the reaction.
Notice how certain triggers pull certain reactions out of you, often reactions that feel out of proportion or strangely familiar.
When you catch one, pause. And ask it, directly, when are you from?
The question may bring up a memory of when that reaction first made sense. Or it may not. But what it will almost certainly do is create a moment of distance between you and the reaction, enough to recognise that it belongs to another time.
That recognition is where change begins. Not through force, but through something closer to thawing.
You are Josiph. I am Josiph. We are all Josiph, running through a hospital corridor with a loaf of bread, still fighting a war that ended long ago.