Unearthed

What Göbekli Tepe taught me about digging deeper

“Now… where did I drop my keys?”

Two years ago today, I was in London. I’d just stepped off a long international flight, gotten settled into the hotel with Kara, and was doing my best to shake off the jet lag before an industry dinner.

It was one of those conference events—familiar industry names, lots of handshakes, the usual mix of energy and excitement. I was glad to be there. Tired, but glad.

And then someone said something.

A co-worker. Someone I thought I had a decent rapport with said something disparaging about me, in front of everyone at the table. A public little jab, half-laughing, full of meaning.

I admit it... I felt a bit humiliated.

But instead of reacting, I took the hit with a nod. Later that night, I wrote in my Day One journal that maybe I needed the humbling. Maybe it was good for me. I can have an ego sometimes, so now and then it’s good to drop a peg. I try hard to be someone who is humble—which is challenging for a man as good-looking, brilliant, and talented as I am.

But look, I may love myself quite a bit, but as a child of God, a Christian and someone on a mission to be a good man, I try to love others just as much. That can be challenging. I think you get it. Sometimes, it’s hard to have someone slap you in the face and call it just a joke. Turning the other cheek isn’t easy. That’s the whole reason it was used as an example. Forgiveness is a conscious act.

Back in London...

I have a pretty good Spidey-sense when it comes to people. I pick up on vibes. I can feel when something’s off. If you’ve read my Kotler novels, you know that Kotler has an almost preternatural ability to read body language. That’s an amped up version of what I do—I’ve trained to pick up those little ticks and tells most of my life. I’m not Kotler-good at it, but I’m pretty good.

So I picked up on something with my co-worker. A kind of distance. Coldness, but passive. Where we might normally have sat to have a chat for a while, talking business and industry but also getting into some personal stuff, our whole interaction was stilted and stalled and stuttered. Quick chats, about nothing useful, and he was off. I spent the whole conference alone at our table, talking to authors. I didn’t mind. Talking to authors is kind of my thing. But something... something...

Something was off.

I found out what was causing it once we were back in the states. An accusation was made. I was investigated for something I supposedly said to an attendee. And, because I hadn’t actually said it, I was absolved. But there were repercussion. Discoveries. I learned something about an injustice, and that... well, it set off a chain of events.

Four months later, the tensions from that day led me to walk away from the job. On good terms. No hard feelings, no regrets. I went out of my way to make sure everything was amicable, that everyone was taken care of. Including me.

I forgave the people involved, even though none of them think they did anything wrong.

But echoes of that day still reverberate in my life. It’s a site, a dig that I inevitably keep exploring. Moments when I feel a little anxious, when I wonder if I made a mistake, or when I suddenly remember a detail that flares up some insecurity or even anger... those come up now and then.

They make me wonder.

“I thought I forgave already? So... what gives?

Which brings me to Göbekli Tepe.

If you’ve read my Dan Kotler thrillers, you already know I’m fascinated by that site. A 12,000-year-old temple, buried beneath a hill in southeastern Turkey. No one even knew it was there until the 1990s, when a farmer hit a stone with his plow. An entire temple site, a remnant of an ancient and lost and forgotten culture, discovered by accident.

It isn’t even supposed to exist. Humans weren’t supposed to be building stone structures at that time, much less something as fast and complex as Göbekli Tepe. We were supposed to be using stone tools and wearing animal skins. That’ll teach us.

Since the discovery, archaeologists have uncovered just a fraction of the total site. Every dig reveals new layers. New chambers. New carvings. They keep thinking they’ve reached the bottom… only to realize the whole thing is deeper than they imagined.

That’s how this London memory feels to me. Right now at least. And a hundred times over the past two years. I think I’ve dug it all up, dusted it all off, figured it all out. Then, a pit opens up. Something new emerges. Or, more irritating, I have to start over, and forgive again.

Turns out, forgiveness isn’t a one-time event.

It’s a discipline. An ongoing, active decision to return to the site, acknowledge what happened, and lay it to rest all over again. A conscious choice to keep digging, keep brushing the stone, keep clearing the debris. Sand is funny—you can sweep a spot clear of it, but it only takes a single breeze to bring more in.

There’s more than forgiving co-workers in the mix here. I also have to forgive myself. The toughest of all to forgive. I didn’t do anything wrong, at the time, but that didn’t keep me from feeling as if I did. It didn’t keep me from thinking I had somehow failed, somehow let people down. The fact that I made some decisions, over the course of the next four months, that led to me leaving... there’s a part of me that doesn’t care that it was all good, all amicable. It still feels like failure sometimes. It’s still covered in a thin scrim of regret. Unearned regret, but that doesn’t change a thing.

We all have our own Göbekli Tepe. Our buried sanctuaries. Our sacred sites covered in dirt and time and ego and regret. We think we’ve finished the work, that the past is mapped. But then something shifts. A layer gives way. A new shape emerges in the soil. And we find ourselves digging again.

The tricky part is realizing the truth: That’s not failure. That’s growth.

Forgiveness is a continuous discipline, but so is discovery. It can be a little exhausting, having to keep coming back to that site, keep sweeping the sand away. But doing it, being willing to do it, makes it possible to see the whole thing from a fresh perspective. You see it through the lens of everything you’ve experienced or learned since then. Maybe that’s why you can’t simply “forgive and forget.” Forgiveness has to be an active choice you keep making every day of your life, so you can learn and grow from it.

Maybe the whole point is that we’re never really done with those hurts. We’re supposed to keep using them to be better, rather than letting them rule us.

A NOTE AT THE END

I think there’s an obvious difference between the idea of continual, disciplined forgiveness and the inability to let things go. The first is something that you commit to because you know that now and then, when you’re tired or in a bad mood, or things are at their worst, you’re going to remember that time someone hurt you. Forgiveness, then, is choosing to keep letting go, rather than picking the pain back up again.

The inability to let go is the seed of resentment. That’s when things go really bad for you. If you can’t let it go, every time you pick it up again, it’s going to become part of you. It’s going to be the only thing that matters. And it’s such a pathetic thing to matter.

I’m still dealing with the repercussions of that day in London two years later. But I’m dealing with them. I’m not letting them deal with me.

And that’s the difference.

That’s the whole point.

If you’re intrigued by Göbekli Tepe...

You might enjoy some of my thriller novels. I’ve written about the site a couple of times, in books like The God Resurrection and The Forgotten Rune. Both of which are available in all formats, wherever you buy books online. You can find those and others when you visit https://kevintumlinson.com/books.

“Oh, I’m just sitting here, contemplating all my life choices.”