Author: itoccurstocp

Photo taken where we store some of our stuff. Deep thoughts.

Photo of Trinity Episcopal Church in Galveston.

I sat down to write a haiku and put a photo with it, but this song kept coming out, so I am sharing it.  You all know the song from the Charlie Brown 1965 Christmas special — even if you weren’t born before 1965.  Many people don’t know there are real words to the song as it is difficult to understand the children singing in the cartoon.  So here’s one of my favorite versions, by Sarah McLachlan – or pull it up on iTunes.  Diana Krall also sings a good version. 

Merry Christmas!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBAJoF_ndbY

“Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly believe they are finished.”  Dan Gilbert

Can’t argue with this one, though I might add as an editorial note that it is so easy to overestimate my own level of completeness, and underestimate that of others.

Photo taken on a run yesterday, the Littlefield Mansion on the University of Texas campus. Text from John Berryman’s Address to the Lord. See the whole poem at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48948/eleven-addresses-to-the-lord

Today from Howard Thurman’s Deep Is the Hunger, this on the hard work of understanding other people:

“The will to understand other people is a most important part of the personal equipment of those who would share in the unfolding idea of human fellowship.  It is not enough merely to be sincere, to be conscientious.  This is not to underestimate the profound necessity for sincerity in human relations, but it is to point out the fact that sincerity is no substitute for intelligent understanding.”

I hear him saying, politely, that one can’t merely feel your way into understanding others, it takes effort, and fighting the inclination to take the easy route.  Thurman continues:

“A healthy skepticism with reference to rumors, gossip, what we read and observe about others must be ever present, causing all these things to be evaluated by our highly developed sense of fact.”

Absent these meaningful efforts, “we are apt to substitute sentimentality for understanding, softness for tenderness, and weakness for strength in human relations.”  

Photo taken of the clock tower of Union Station in Portland, Oregon a few years back.

Saw the text on a T-shirt at the airport early this morning and it got a laugh out of me, which, given the setting, was quite an accomplishment. I had the picture (taken in Galveston) already in the can. Christmas time is, as they say, a coming.

In reviewing my journaling on my Word of the Year (“Awareness”) this month I came across this quote from Eric Hoffer: “To become different from what we are, we must have some awareness of what we are.”  A few pages over I have this written in quotation marks (though, unfortunately, with no attribution): “…we differ in what we do or don’t do…not in what we are.”

Merging those thoughts, once we “have some awareness of what we are” we recognize that “we differ in what we do or don’t do…not in what we are.” That as we each seek to determine what we are, we come face to face with the reality that we are the same.  In this I am reminded of the line from John McCutcheon’s timeless Christmas classic (though not of the jolly mold), Christmas in the Trenches – “on each end of the rifle, we’re the same.”