It occurs to me…

From Max Ehrmann’s Desiderata:

“Exercise caution in your business affairs; for the world is full of trickery.  But let not this blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals; and everywhere life is full of heroism.”

Ehrmann’s exhortation hits home, as it reveals how, in a setting where the misdeeds of people, particularly public figures, are public knowledge, it becomes easy to become jaded and cynical.  This is particularly true when there seems to be a lack of remorse, or for that matter, significant consequences, for the misdeeds.  But there I go again being judgmental.  More importantly, Ehrmann is pointing out the indirect cost of such misdeeds.  While the misdeeds of a person may directly impact another person or a group, the larger shadow cast is the one that can make those not directly affected become jaded and cynical, make them oblivious, or at least less open to the reality that “many persons strive for high ideals; and everywhere life if full of heroism.”  That is, or course, Ehrmann’s point.  While “the world is full of trickery” it is also full or persons with “high ideals” and “heroism.”

I particularly like Ehrmann’s equating “high ideals” with “heroism.”  It becomes too easy to limit heroism to people who run into burning buildings and such, but it occurs to me that it is also heroism to do what Ehrmann suggests, to sort through all the crap coming at you in life yet continue to “strive for high ideals.”  There is heroism in a simple action intended to relieve someone’s burden, an act of kindness, or continuing on in your efforts when you would just as soon quit.  There is heroism in a smile, a kind word, or in some circumstances, just doing nothing when what you really want to do is to react or lash out.

“If we magnified blessings as much as we magnify disappointments, we would all be much happier.”  John Wooden

Okay, I complain a lot.  I mean A LOT.  And if I were thankful, grateful, only half that much….

 

“The older brother stalked off in an angry sulk and refused to join in.  His father came out and tried to talk to him, but he wouldn’t listen.  The son said, ‘Look how many years I’ve stayed here serving you, never giving you one moment of grief, but have you ever thrown a party for me and my friends?’  Then this son of yours who has thrown away your money on whores shows up and you go all out with a feast.”  Luke 15:29-30 (Peterson’s Message)

I appreciate Peterson’s fresh language in an old story.  Here is the older, obedient son, who, out in the fields five minutes before he heard the music and asked the servant what was going on, was likely quite content with his life.  Yet knowing the insolent younger brother (I suspect they never got along) has returned, and that there is an ongoing celebration over that, the older brother goes into a full-fledged snit about how much is life now sucks.

But isn’t that kinda how life is?  As John Prine characterizes it – “That’s the way that the world goes round.  You’re up one day, the next your down.  It’s a half an inch of water and you think you’re gonna drown.  That’s the way that the world goes round.”

The parable reminds me that I am like the older brother in that I focus too much on what isn’t than what is, more on what is wrong than what is right, what upsets me more than what brings me joy.  ….  So, if one believes in divine intervention — Literally, as I was typing these previous words, our diabetic cat, Zoe, threw up this morning’s breakfast, depositing it all onto the wood floor.  So here I am, returning to the keyboard after the clean-up, and I realizing that I am faced with the decision.  In an otherwise pretty good life, will I let semi-digested, god-awful smelling cat hurl define my day?  Will I be the older brother?  Where is my snit-o-meter going to point to?

I am a latecomer to poetry, or perhaps better stated, a returnee to poetry, having only recently been able to shed the pall put on it by well-intentioned English teachers who forced me to read, memorize, and, God forbid, recite before the class poetry such as Tennyson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade — the “half a league, half a league, half a league, onward” is still wedged in my memory between other grade-school atrocities.   But I am not bitter, and here I am, more than a few decades later, though still in recovery, enjoying a poem now and then.

So today, I was struck by this from Garrison Keillor:

“Poetry is a necessity as simple as the need to be touched and similarly a need that is hard to enunciate.   The intense vision and high spirits and moral grandeur are simply needed lest we drift through our days consumed by clothing options and hair styling and whether to have the soup or the salad.”

Of course, anything that takes us away from being “consumed by clothing options and hair styling and whether to have the soup or the salad” is worthy of celebration.  But poetry (Tennyson aside) is as good or better a means to accomplish that as any.

“And he said to them, ‘Come away by yourselves to a desolate place and rest a while.’  Mark 6:31

Reading today from Henri Nouwen on solitude, he thankfully prefaces his comments on the benefits by noting the challenges, the difficulties that exist in solitude.

“Entering a private room and shutting the door, therefore, does not mean that we immediately shut out all our inner doubts, anxieties, fears, bad memories, unresolved conflicts, angry feelings, and impulsive desires.  On the contrary, when we have removed our outer distractions, we often find that our inner distractions manifest themselves to us in full force.  We often use the outer distractions to shield ourselves from the interior noises.”

Yep, that pretty much sums it up.  Yet it does not (or should not) create a valid excuse for me to avoid solitude.  Rather, it speaks to the importance of doing so.  Turning off the TV, putting down the phone, and removing myself from the people and the noise is half the journey.  The rest of the journey to the core, my core, lies in setting aside those fears and concerns, those inner distractions, the “you should have…,” the “why didn’t you…,” the “okay, what if you…,” the “what about…” (among a plethora of other inner distractions knocking at the door) and creating a quiet space to listen and learn.

From Rodney Crowell’s Till I Can Gain Control Again:

“Out on the road that lies before me now

There are some turns where I will spin

I only wish that you could hold me now

Till I can gain control again”

I guess I have been listening to that song for more than forty years, since Emmy  Lou Harris released it in 1975 (Crowell was in her band).  It never occurred to me until being reacquainted with it recently that it is a prayer – a pretty good prayer.  Of course, it raises the issue of whether I ever had control such that “I can gain control again.”

“Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves.”  Cheryl Strayed

Based on my internet research, this sentiment has many sources.  I heard it recently, in the format above, from Cheryl Strayed.  That said, it seems to me that this sentiment is found all over the place, and going way back in time.  On hearing this from Strayed I immediately thought of three other variations among some of my favorite writings:

From Max Ehrmann’s Desiderata – “do not distress yourself with imaginings.”

From Baz Luhrmann’s Sunscreen recording written by Mary Schmich – “Don’t worry about the future, but know that worrying is about as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum.”

From Matthew 6:34 – “Therefore, do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.  Each day has enough trouble of its own.”

Whatever the source, there is great truth in this concept.  This is not to say that some things worried about never occur.  As a kid I worried that if I skipped a class in Catholic grade school I’d get caught and end up getting some “nun-ishment” in the principal’s office – I was right, once.  But my odds for one of the things I worry about actually happening are, on reflection, lottery-like.  My path in life is, thankfully, I guess, littered with worries of possibilities that never occurred. All of which points to the realization that I am good at worrying, but not particularly good at deciding what to worry about.  Yet it occurs to me that there are no bragging rights associated with being good at worrying, and perhaps not even knowing what to worry about, because often, things just happen.  (Don’t believe me?  Read the bumper stickers.)  This is a sentiment I think is best addressed in Luhrmann/Schmich’s work:

“The real troubles in life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, that kind that blindside you at 4:00 p.m. on some idle Tuesday.

Great!  What the hell is going to happen this Tuesday at 4:00?

 

“And not many days after the younger son gathered all together, and took his journey into a far country, and there wasted his substance with riotous living.”  Like 15:13

Reading the parable of the prodigal son again today, this passage jumped out at me, particularly the “wasted his substance on riotous living” portion.  My on-line dictionary defines “riotous living” as “given to or marked by unrestrained revelry; loose; wanton.”  Jesus could have, instead, said that the younger son “made some bad decisions” or “ran into a streak of bad luck” or “was taken advantage of by some unscrupulous conduct.”  With the use of those words it would have been much more difficult to be judgmental as to the younger son.  As it is, we can all roundly condemn the younger son for his “riotous living” and, as the older son puts it later, devouring his father’s money with harlots.  We can feel righteous and smug in thinking that the younger son “got what he deserved.”

But then it occurs to me that this all misses the point.  I am reminded of something C. S. Lewis wrote to the effect that before we toss out the life preserver, we shouldn’t ask the drowning man how it is he came to be in the water.  The manner in which the younger son “wasted his substance” is merely a footnote, an ancillary fact in this parable.  The point to the story is that ultimately, he came to his senses, recognized his errors, swallowed his pride, and headed back home, where his father joyously greeted him.  But of course, the father would have taken him back had he only made some bad decisions or run into a streak of bad luck or been taken advantage of by some unscrupulous conduct.  No riotous living required.  The father was and is there waiting on the return, no matter how or why the younger son screwed up.

These quotes from a Brene Brown On Being interview:

“We are all taught to be brave, but warned not to be vulnerable.”

“The difficult thing is that vulnerability is the first thing I look for in you and the last thing I’m willing to show you. In you, it’s courage and daring. In me, it’s weakness.”

Brown repeatedly comes back to the thought that nothing of value is accomplished without risk, without vulnerability.   We often know, or at least feel we know the right thing to do, but have uncertainties about it.  As she puts it, when I decide “I am not going to do it because I cannot guarantee an ending that deserves a bow,” what I am really saying is that the risk of failure, the uncertainty of success, creates more vulnerability than I am willing to accept.

Well, when she puts it that way, and one considers the complexities and surprises in life, the concept does sound a bit silly – that I can accomplish things without risk, without vulnerability.  That implies I can know the result, know the outcome, before I start. As much as I would like to believe that, I know it not to be true in most instances.  And even when the outcome (the spot I get to) is as expected, the path to get there is often full of detours, rife with unexpected lessons learned along the way.

“Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”  Romans 12:2

My friend, the late Jim Mulford, must have thrown this passage my way hundreds, perhaps thousands of times in the years that I knew him.  These are such masterful lines by Paul, Romans 12:1-2, as much for what they do not say as what they say.  Three things always jump out at me here.  Note Paul says nothing about removing myself from the world, nothing about holing up in a cave, a monastery, or some remote deserted island.  No, Paul, at least indirectly, is telling me that my transformation is to occur where I am.  Second, the insertion of “any longer” is such a nice, non-guilt inducing way for Paul to get across that I have already allowed myself to “conform…to the pattern of this world….”  And last, the key, is that the transformation Paul writes of does not come so much from doing as it does from thinking.  I am not being asked to write “renew my mind” 100 times on the blackboard.  I am not being tasked with some physical effort halfway across the world.  I am only (?only?) being asked to think and see things differently (which may, of course, lead to doing, but let’s not go there now).

Boy, that’s a lot packed into one sentence.