It occurs to me…

“An anxious heart weighs a man down, but a kind word cheers him up.”  Proverbs 12:25

The movie world seems currently intent on producing movies about superheroes, the main characters having some superpower.  Perhaps that is why, on reading this passage, it occurred to me that while I don’t have ready access to invisibility, super strength, the ability to fly or to “leap tall buildings in a single bound,” I nonetheless have ready access to a superpower – the kind word.  Using the superpower of the kind word, I can make someone’s day, and, as a bonus, make my own.

Well, okay, this is a superpower we all have.  And technically, if we all have it, I guess it can’t be a true superpower.  But still, we have the power, it is pretty neat, and we ought to exercise it frequently.

Revisiting Choices, a George Jones favorite written by Billy Yates and Mike Curtis:

“I’ve had choices, since the day that I was born

I heard voices, that told me right from wrong

If I had listened, no I wouldn’t be here today

Living and dying with the choices I’ve made.”

When George Jones sings that it has a maudlin tone, a sense of regret, yet he and the fiddle accompanying him sprinkle it with just enough hope so as to make it difficult to tell exactly whether the  “if I had listened, no I wouldn’t be here today” line is a lament or something defiantly positive, something like Radney Foster’s line in Half My Mistakes – “half of my mistakes, I’d probably make ‘em again.”

That is, I guess, the funny thing about choices, even choices that can be seen as mistakes.  They are all part of the recipe that creates today, now, the way things are, the way I am – and so we have to be careful about “throwing out the baby with the bathwater.”  Or as Foster puts it – “You can lean too hard on regrets, but I don’t recommend it.”

“I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, and am no longer worthy to be called thy son: make me one of thy servants.”  Luke 15:18-19

It is easy to get caught up in the after story, the father’s welcoming the son back, the sandals, the robe, the ring, the killing of the fatted calf, the party, that we can forget that all of that resulted from a realization, then an admission by the younger son (first to himself, then to his father) that he had screwed up.  That can be, is often, such a difficult step.  It is so easy to blame other people, other circumstances, for difficulties in life, and so difficult to admit that the person in the mirror is the one who screwed up.  Yet, as in this parable, it is that step that is often the one required to get to the road back.

Hebrews 13:5, this from Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase in The Message:

“Don’t be obsessed with getting more material things.  Be relaxed with what you have.”

Or more traditionally, from the NIV:

“Keep your lives free of the love of money, and be content with what you have.”

Two thoughts occurred to me:

Seems like something you’d read in a self-help New York Times best seller.  Oh, wait….

All due respect to Dylan, are the times really a changing?

“Under everything, just another human being.”  Eddie Vedder

In one of those meandering journeys one can make following one bread crumb to another on the internet, I stumbled across this line today.  It occurs to me that the “everything” is the challenge, not the “human being.”  We take on, project on others, a lot of “everything.”

From Max Ehrmannn’s Desiderata:

“Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.”

I missed, and a friend reminded me (that’s what friends are for) of the connection between this from Ehrmannn and Paul’s writing in 1 Corinthians 13:11-12:

“When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child.  When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.  For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face.  Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.”

Reflecting on these It occurs to me that while there is some correlation, the “counsel of the years” that allows us to “put the ways of childhood behind [us]” has less to do with chronological age and more to do with the obstacles we put (or allow to creep in) between us and truth.  Thinking of it another way, no age or generation has “cornered the market” on the inability (or, for that matter, the ability) to see clearly – though I think the 70s disco era may deserve some type of award based on music, clothing, and hair styles alone.

From Max Ehrmann’s Desiderata:

“Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.”

I had previously thought of this as an admonition to accept the wisdom of your elders, or the like, but it occurs to me that in the “counsel of years” Ehrmann is digging deeper, referring to our own internal wisdom, the things, if (big IF) we are open to them, we come to believe over time not because those things have changed, but because we have changed.  As a simple example, my thoughts on salad have changed with time.  Salad hasn’t really changed, still the same lettuce, tomato, dressing, etc.  Instead, the “counsel of years” has caused me to readjust that thinking, and resulted in my “surrendering the things of youth.”  Of course this hopefully happens on a grander stage, and the “counsel of the years” alters how I see people, races, genders, etc.  The “counsel of years” has been busy, and certainly has more work ahead of it.

Song lyrics by Sam Baker.  Give it, him, a listen.

Photo taken on a recent run.

“I have resolved from this day on, I will do all the business I can honestly, have all the fun I can reasonably, do all the good I can willingly, and save my digestion by thinking pleasantly.”  Robert Louis Stevenson

Seems like a good place to start, but I’m glad he found the time to write a few things along the way.