Yellow Cars and Cotter Pins

I have this concept that likely has some long scientific name and explanation but I just call it the yellow car principle. It is fairly simple. You may not really pay attention to the number of cars on the road that are yellow (.2%, or 2 out of 1000 per Google), but you know they are fairly rare. That said, if you buy a yellow car, or even just in reading this yellow cars come to the front of your mind, for some time after that, yellow cars will seem more common. That is, you’ll see them more often. Now obviously, buying a yellow car only puts one more yellow car on the road, and thinking about yellow cars puts no more on the road. So seeing more yellow cars is a mental thing. It is not that there are more yellow cars on the road.

This yellow car principle came to my mind recently when I picked up a cotter pin off the street while running (it was me running, not the cotter pin or the street). Oddly, this occurred while I was listening to Merle Haggard sing Holding Things Together , which is of course what cotter pins do. I see lots of things on the road when I run. Washers, bolts, change — even found a dollar bill last week — but I don’t recall ever seeing a cotter pin. but since then I have seen picked up two more (neither while listening to Merle).

By this time, you’re wondering where the hell this is going. So am I. But I guess the point, if there is one, is this. How might I change my life if I preloaded it with good things instead of bad, good news instead of bad news, stories of accomplishment and success instead of failure? And what’s the harm in engaging in that experiment?

Non-Haiku of the Whenever

Photo taken in Phoenix a few years back. Text is the longer and original (1853) portion of a sermon by abolitionist minister Theodore Parker shortened by Martin Luther King, Jr. a century later to — “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Long or short form, the concept is the same, and is true — but damn, I love those days where the “bends toward justice” part is most apparent, because sometimes it isn’t.

Faith and Jell-O

In a podcast I recently listened to, Bishop Michael Curry defined “faith” this way: “I don’t know how all that works.  I just trust that it does.”  Faith is often written about, often discussed, but that thirteen words in two sentences pretty much nails it. It occurs to me that the key word is “trust,” which my Webster’s defines as “firm belief in the character, strength, or truth of someone or something.”  Admittedly, my “firm belief” sometimes seems to be materially consistent with Jell-O.  But still….

A Lesson Within A Lesson

“But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.” Luke 15:20

It occurred to me in reading this passage this morning that (as I am wont to do) I have made many assumptions about the father as I read and thought about this parable over the years.  That is, being told that the father was “filled with compassion” on seeing his son’s return, I have filled in the details to my own liking and assumed that the father had such compassion from the moment the son left.  I have imagined that he continually looked down the road, hoping to see his son returning.  There is, however, no real support for that in the text, and in fact, one could easily assume (though it would be just that, an assumption) that the opposite was true – that the father was royally pissed off at the younger son and had a change of heart only when he saw the son “a long way off.”  Based on what we know, it does not take too much of an imagination to suspect that the father/younger son relationship was a bit rocky before he asked for his share of the estate, nor to consider that the father was miffed the whole time the younger son was away. (I’ve heard there are people who hold on to things that way.)

The text provides no real insight on these issues.  The father is asked to split up the estate, he does, and the younger son leaves.  The text almost invites me to fill in my own details, so I do. All that to say that there is a lesson within a lesson here.  A lesson about how quick I am, having a few facts, to fill in the rest to my liking, when the truth is I don’t really know. Perhaps most problematic here is the tendency to assume my own details are correct, or at least better than those filled in by others.

The Symphony, the Keys

“Think of yourself in a concert hall listening to the strains of the sweetest music when you suddenly remember that you forgot to lock your car.  You are anxious about the  car, you cannot walk out of the hall and you cannot enjoy the music.  There you have a perfect image of life as it is lived by most human beings.”  Anthony DeMello, The Way To Love

Well, he pretty much nails it there.  So easy to fall into the trap of thinking about the keys and forget about the symphony of life that is playing out around me.  So easy.