Author: itoccurstocp

I don’t much care for reading about writing – and my writing likely reflects that.  But recently I stumbled across a blog post (Reditus) by Amanda Mininger that struck a chord and sent me to the keyboard I have been most recently associating only with work.

She notes that when we write we “peer down the silent well.  What’s down there?  What have I been overlooking?  What roots cling with naked tenacity to the stone sides?  What thin layer of much at the bottom hides an ecosystem….  What hides in the cracks unbidden?  I don’t know yet.  I can’t see.  My eyes need time to adjust.”  I like that analogy.  Writing often feels like “peer[ing] down the silent well.”  Continuing, she notes, properly so, that when I feel that tug there is something, often something I can’t even  assign a name to that “has not let go yet.  Has chained itself to my ankle, has let me drag it down the street into my apartment and on vacation and into work meetings and into lazy Sunday breakfasts where I can continue to ignore it, and ignore it, and ignore it if I want to….  But if I say it here – I’m coming back to writing – maybe the chain will break.”

So here I sit at the keyboard, ball and chain unattached – for now.  But the well is always close, the drink so refreshing.

Uncertainty

“When we are not sure, we are alive.”  Graham Greene

I ran across this quote today then, on to Friedrich Nietzsche (you know you are in trouble when you identify with a Nietzsche quote): “What we find here is still the hyperbolic naiveté of man: positing himself as the meaning and measure of the value of things.”

So, to wash that out, this from Leonard Cohen: “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”

It occurs to me that uncertainty may be a better companion than certainty — though it rarely feels that way.

Onward to the day!

An anonymous quote received from a friend today:

“Some quit due to slow progress, never realizing that progress is progress.”

Guilty as charged.  The trick is to stay pointed in the right direction and keep at it.  If I can’t convince the bastards, maybe I’ll just wear ‘em down.

Waking up this morning to news of another mass shooting, it is difficult to focus on anything positive.  People went out for a night of entertainment and many are not returning.  Words like senseless, tragic, and horrific just don’t convey the emotion one wants to convey.  There are times when words fail us.  Still, words help provide respite, provide some warmth, some dim light to allow us to find a comfortable corner until it seems safe to venture out again.

In search of that this morning I came across this from Max Ehrmann’s Desiderata:

“Therefore, be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be, and whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul.  With all its sham and drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.  Be careful.  Strive to be happy.”

Amen!

A friend sent me, and I read with interest, a transcript of a talk that recently appeared in the New York Times – The Dying Art of Disagreement by Brett Stephens.  In it, Stephens notes:

“In other words, to disagree well you must first understand well.  You have to read deeply, listen carefully, watch closely.  You need to grant your adversary moral respect; give him the intellectual benefit of the doubt; have sympathy for his motives and participate emphatically with his line of reasoning.  And you need to allow for the possibility that you might yet be persuaded of what he has to say.”

Wow, that disagreeing well sounds like hard work!  And I thought all I had to do when someone took a position different than mine was: 1) quit listening; 2) start formulating an eloquent statement of MY position.  But for those of us who are “disagreement challenged” Stephens later boils it down to its essence, and though not easy, somehow makes it sound easier when he lists the “crucial prerequisites” of “intelligent disagreement,” namely: 1) shut up; 2) listen up; 3) pause; and 4) reconsider.  Then, and only then, can I, in an “intelligent disagreement; 5) speak up.

There was much that stuck with me in the speech, but this question rose to the surface – In any given disagreement is my goal “intelligent disagreement” or to “win?”   It occurred to me that the response to that threshold question would control the remainder of the process, and whether I engaged under Stephens’ guidelines, or mine.  Or more simply stated, do I see “intelligent disagreement” as a possibility or as an oxymoron?

Yesterday at church we had the reading of the parable of the workers in the field.  The owner of the vineyards hires a group to work “early in the morning,” then hires other groups at 9:00, noon, 3:00, and 5:00.  When the day is done, he pays them all a full day’s wages.  This is a complex parable with many facets that can be endlessly interpreted.  Did those who worked all day got screwed?  Were those who only worked an hour or two unjustly enriched?  (Isn’t that a funny term – “unjustly enriched?”  I suspect it exclusively applies to “the other guy” and never to the one who uses it.)  Why did the owner pay the short-timer’s first and make the day-long laborers wait to get their pay last?  The questions are endless.  Perhaps I just didn’t want to do the heavy lifting yesterday, but it occurred to me that the takeaway was rather simple.  Who got what aside, the certainty in the story is that you don’t get anything unless you show up and make yourself available.  Here, the only folks who lost out were those who didn’t.

“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”  Mark 10:25

Anthony DeMello, in The Way to Love, comes as close as anyone can to making sense of this troubling passage.  “The rich man cannot enter the kingdom of joy not because he wants to be bad but because he chooses to be blind.”  He explains that what the rich man fails to see is that his possessions are not, per se, the issue.  Rather the issue is his clinging to them, or in DeMello’s terms, his “attachment” to them – “attachment” being defined as “an emotional state of clinging caused by the belief that without some particular thing or some person you cannot be happy.”

By way of example, mine, not his, the thought that I can’t be happy unless “my team” wins that big game this week is simply foolishness.  If one thinks on it, the reality is there are likely an equal number of people on the other side thinking the same thing about the opponent, and and many, many more whose emotional well being will not be altered one bit regardless of the game’s outcome.  In this I am reminded of one of my work mentors who, as the pressure rose over the resolution of a given issue, would note: “There are millions of people in China who aren’t even aware of this problem and who care not one iota about its resolution.”  He, of course, was and is correct.