Author: itoccurstocp

Howard Thurman writes today about “the nourishment of the Great Exposure.”  A nice phrase, no – the “Great Exposure.”

“We are surrounded every day by the exposure to sudden and devastating calamity. Despite all efforts to the contrary, there is no device by which we might get immunity from the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune.’”  Granted, some may seem to by and large escape the more outrageous misfortunes, some not, yet my experience is that I am not only a poor judge of my own misfortunes, and perhaps more so (if I perceive them at all) the misfortunes of others.  As Thurman puts it: “Life is vulnerable – always there is the exposed flank.”  This is where I hear Thurman offering the “good news/bad news” conundrum: “It is the way of life that it be nourished and sustained by the constant threat, the sudden rending.” 

I am reminded here of Coleman Bank’s translation of Rumi’s The Guest House:

A joy, a depression, a meanness

Some momentary awareness comes

As an unexpected visitor

Welcome and entertain them all

Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,

who violently sweep your house

empty of its furniture,

still treat each guest honorably.

He may be cleaning you out for some new delight.

In his book, Awareness, DeMello writes about the four steps to wisdom. (I know, you’d think it takes more than four!)  Step four relates to changes, and his analogy is quite good. 

So you have an ailment and get your neighbor (who you don’t care much for, but is your only option) to take you to the doctor.  Sitting in the examination room with your doctor and neighbor you explain all the symptoms.  The doctor listens patiently, then hands you a prescription.  As you get up to leave you note than the prescription has been made out for your neighbor, not you.  So you ask your doctor how he expects you to get better by your neighbor taking the prescription, to which your doctor replies – “Exactly.”

All of which points to step four – most of the change that needs to occur in order to attain wisdom (or happiness, or such) is on me, not them.  As DeMello puts it: “We always want someone else to change so that we will feel good….  You are the one who needs to change, who needs to take the medicine.”

Howard Thurman suggests in Meditations of the Heart: “Every judgment is self-judgment.”  Those absolutes always bother me (pun intended).  Still, he has a point.  Later, he puts it in a more acceptable (less absolute) format: “What I condemn in others may be but a reflection of myself in a mirror.”  That I can declare as truth. That, or we have the same mirror.

Photo taken of the wall in my office.

The excuses I make so readily for my own transgressions should be equally available for the transgressions of others.

Photo taken on a recent run.

Howard Thurman writes in Meditations of the Heart about two kinds of ideals.  These days I instinctively recoil at anything that suggests that things are binary, but given that it is Howard Thurman, I allowed him some leeway.  (I am sure he appreciates that.)  Thurman notes that the first type of ideals are “like far-off lighthouses whose glow is far away in the distance.  They belong to the realm of the absolute and are never marred by the sordidness of the surroundings in which men work and struggle.”  Then there are the “ideals that seem to be created out of the stubborn realities I the midst of which men work and live.  They belong essentially to the stuff of life, the vary raw materials of experience.”

The sentences I loved, both for their understated nature and for the hope they create:

“It is well within the range of possibility that these two kinds of ideals will in time prove to be one piece.  The present ever-achieving ideal is seen as the nearer end of the far reaching and ultimate ideal.  When this happens, a man experiences the integration of his life.”

While I do not always perceive those two sets of ideals in the same universe, it occurs to me that Thurman has it right that while it is not often seen as such, living in the “present-ever achieving ideal” places me in “the nearer end of the far reaching and ultimate ideal.”  That is, the two sets of ideals can co-exist; they are in different zip codes, not in different universes.  The separation is more the result of problems in my own vision and my own mind, not with the ideals.  Or as Thurman puts it, it is possible that at some point a person becomes “deeply assured that what he is striving for in his little world is suddenly a part of the larger whole.”

It occurs to me that such might be the definition of peace – when a person becomes “deeply assured that what he is striving for in his little world is suddenly a part of the larger whole.”  This moment, when “I” and “we” are seen as co-existing, may be exactly what Amanda Gorman was getting at in her recent inauguration poem, The Hill We Climb:

“The new dawn blooms as we free it.

For there is always light if only we are brave enough to see it.

If only we’re brave enough to be it.”

Text from Amanda Gorman’s awesome inaugural poem, The Hills We Climb. Galveston Photo.

I got a laugh out of reading C. S. Lewis today:

“Besides being complicated, reality, in my experience, is usually odd.  It is not neat, not obvious, not what you expect….  Reality, in fact, is usually something that you could not have guessed….  It just has that queer twist about it….”

I am not sure why that makes me laugh, unless it is a laugh of relief that my reality and Lewis’, while not the same, seem to have similar characteristics.  Reality — you just can’t make this #%&! up. 

Seems to me that if I take that as a basic premise of life, the stochastic nature of reality, it somehow lightens the load.  Perhaps that is the source of the laugh.

Hank Aaron

That he did as a baseball player is an accomplishment.

That he did what he did under the circumstances he faced was nothing short of heroic.

The he did what he did, under the circumstances he faced, with the grace he exhibited speaks to his greatness not only as a baseball player, but also as a human being and a role model.

Rest in peace, Hank.