Category Archives: people
On Being Alone
The other day, when I went to the zoo, I noticed a lot of clumping, swarming and clustering.
The Harpy Eagle was happily hanging out at the entrance with his trainer and a whole crowd of gawkers, the Flamingos were squawking it up together around the pool, the fish in the snapping turtle pool seemed to be clumping together for safety and the gorillas were all clustered up within 15 feet of each other, despite their huge, grassy, multi-storied, multi-waterfalled home.
What is that about?
A few nights ago when I went to bed, the same kind of swarming together and hanging-out-close seemed to be going on, so I closed and latched my bedroom door so I might get some sleep.
It was a good thing. At 1 am they tried to break in and then again at 3 am I heard them banging on the door. But I held my ground, and as a result got some sleep. I know why they wanted in. They wanted my body, it’s warmth. because they are little and thermophilic and cold at night.
When I got up they were still by the door — my two cats, hungry for company, heat and love and … cat chow.
The creatures seem to not to want to be too much alone.
More and more people are living alone these days, however, partiularly in urban areas. Eric Klinenberg, in his new book, Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone, reports that in recent years, particularly since the 1950′s, solo living has grown, and it has grown most in countries with booming economies: China, India, and Brazil. The US is lagging in this going-it-alone stuff, but more people live alone in the United States than ever before, 28 per cent of all households, about 31 million people.
Studies on living alone have found that women, in contrast to men, are more likely to have strong social networks, and that this enables them to live alone without being alone. Men, living alone, are more at risk of withdrawing into isolation that, in the extreme, can make them very unhappy and that can even be dangerous for them.
According to a Finnish study, “Living alone is associated with an increased risk of alcohol-related mortality — from alcohol-related diseases and accidents.”
It can be fine to live alone, but I think that for most of us, it is not fine to be too much alone. Household practices are changing, but not our core need for clumping.
This is particularly true when we move from our family of orgin to whatever we design next.
I remember in my college years, driving places alone, talking to myself in the car and saying stuff like, “I need more than me, here…” The loneliness in the front of the car was palpable. It felt like cold, dark water running through the bottom of a deep cave.
I find the desire for human warmth to be quite universal.
I spoke to a homeless man a while back, “What is hardest about being homeless?” I asked.
“The loneliness,” he said. “I just need someone to talk to.”
It seems like, no matter how we choose to live, we can’t get away from it — the need for clumping and swarming. It’s weird, almost like we were wired for this, like God himself wired a social port into us. Perhaps it feels like that because … that’s the way it is.
In the beginning of the beginning of the very beginning it was said, “It is not good … to be alone.”
I’ve been thinking a bit about that, and I think that perhaps it is one of the vast accomplishments of life to understand what exists that will never not exist and then to act accordingly.
We are inveterately, undeniably, intrincically social.
So what’s next?
On Being Human
“I think you think that you can’t hurt me when you say stuff. But when you say stuff it does hurt me. I know in the past I acted all tough and hard-headed but I’m not like that now.”
He sat on the couch in front of her and put his fist on his chest and coughed.
“I don’t know,” she said. “You used to say that nothing could hurt you, and I guess I thought that was true.”
“Well, it’s not anymore,” he replied. “You see how I’ve been lately, all emotional with the kids and with you. I see that what I’ve done has hurt a lot of other people and I’m sorry about that and I’ve been apologizing for that.”
I turned to her and asked, “Can you see that he’s been different lately?”
“I can,” she replied. “It’s like he is becoming more human.”
It’s interesting, the degrees of things, the way things change. We are all becoming, everyday, perhaps more or less human.
What does that mean? I’m not entirely sure, except to say that part of it can be explained by the progress or regress we make emotionally. To be human is to feel — pain, love, depression, happiness, guilt, tranquility.
To petrify emotionally is to lose our humanity. To turn to stone regarding other human’s feelings is to lose the human quality of our relationships. To grow numb, to fail to understand or care when our behaviors bring pain to others — this all is part of a process whereby we grow inhuman and inhumane.
This matters.
We must not lose the affective domain or we lose our humanity.
To be human is to be emotionally rich. To break, to soar, to break down, to take courage, to pick ourselves up and explain to someone else how we really feel — this is what it means to be an integrated person, a complete personality, a fully human being.
As long as we can be hurt then we retain the ability to understand someone elses’ hurt.
To the extent that we can accept and honor our own emotions, then we will be able to accept and honor other people’s emotions.
Feelings feel feelings.
Feel.
Be human.
Thrive.
Self-judgment
Many people these days seem to be off put by judgment.
They don’t like politicians who sling mud at opposing parties. They don’t like religious fanatics who pronounce judgment on sinners. They don’t like ex-wives who tell the kids that dad is a jerk.
That’s interesting. I find that all very interesting.
Someone told me recently that they were embarrassed by their own skin, literally, how it looks, how it feels.
Someone told me recently that they lacked confidence, with others — almost always.
Someone told me recently that they had a lot of guilt, when really, as far as I can tell, this person has done nothing much wrong. They aren’t old enough!
Someone confessed to me, “I don’t know if I’ve done enough good to outweigh the bad I’ve done.”
People don’t like judgment and yet it seems that many people are the harshest judge of themselves that they know. People judge themselves in ways that they would never judge others.
I heard that someone told their friend a while back, “People don’t like us!” I know both these people. It isn’t true. Both are liked.
Most all of us, if we hear a baby crying will pick up the baby and comfort it, not scold it. And yet when we cry inside, we too often scold ourselves for the very feelings we should embrace, comfort and sooth.
Yesterday, at a picnic I attended, one of the little boys present whacked his head on the tailgate of a pickup. He bellowed. I held him. He leaned into me. He was comforted. His mom came. He was comforted again.
This is the model for how we should treat ourselves. There will be jugment, but better yet is discernment, and better yet is tolerance and compassion and mercy.
We would all do well, I think, to hold ourselves more when we whack our heads against life, and to bring a little pat and not another whack to the little one within.
sheep
“We bought a sheep for grandma!” my wife Linda told our daughter Laurel.
Of course she told her. We wanted little, preschool Laurel in the charitable-gift-giving loop.
Grandma and grandpa had requested that we not buy them any individual presents for Christmas, but that we buy a sheep for someone in Africa or somewhere and give it in their name. The process wasn’t quite clear to Laurel. It wasn’t really for us either.
So Laurel looked up at her mom and asked, “Could we keep it at our house for a few days before we send it to grandma and grandpa?”
It begs the question, “How hands on is our charity?”
Sometimes not very, particularly when it’s just a check in the mail to an organization that handles the sheep. But, like Laurel, many of us want it and like it hands on. We want our charity soft, wooly, “baaing,” huggable and kissable.
On Sunday Will and Judd were at church. I hugged them both, their scruffy, unwashed beards against my cheek. It was sheep, up close — their stale alcohol breath, dirty clothes and vacant eyes right there, very near and personal. I prayed for each one, leaning in towards them, putting one of my hands on the back of their heads.
After praying for Judd, I looked into his glazed eyes and said, “I am asking you to make the choice, to stop drinking, because it is killing you.”
He looked me steadily in the eyes and said nothing. His brain wasn’t working, or was, just a little, but processing extremely slowly.
He knows I love him.
This is better for me than the check in the mail, even thought the check in the mail is good and sent sheep, good.
I’m wondering, how hands on is my love for my own flesh and blood. How near am I willing to get, because it’s interesting, getting close to the sheep.
The closer I get, the weaker I feel. When you get right next to mental illness, to addiction and to extreme social dysfunction, its makes you feel small and inadequate. Often, you aren’t sure of how to bring lasting, meaningful solutions.
But despite that, it’s so right and good and meaningful to be there, smack up against the stale, broken, dying essence of of charity. I’m learning things there. I can’t make choices for other people. I won’t be successful in helping if I try to do too much for them. They have to choose, they have to want change, they have to fight, hard, for their own lives.
But, I and we can do something. We can open up opportunities, we can present clear choices, we can resource possibilities and we can pray for the sheep and we can love them and stand with them even when they choose to not choose to change anything.
And some of us can even bring some sheep home, if we want, for a bit, and give a wooly hug.
the good coins
Jessica stood in a the front of her church in San Juan, Puerto Rico reading the story of the woman who gave one coin. I listened intently, but could only understand the Spanish here and there. No matter, Jessica was the story anyway, her eyes so beautiful softened by her worship-grief. Every few minutes she wiped them with a folded tissue that gradually took on more and more salt water, but then she went on.
Her grandma had died that morning. Nothing Jessica or anyone else said was more eloquent than Jessica’s presence. She was her coin, all she was, given gladly.
This week I read on Google news that Peter Faulk had died. It happened on June 26, 2011.
Columbo will be missed. Faulk as this character was endearing , especially in a fumbling, disheveled, thumping about kind of way. And he got the bad guys.
“This is, perhaps, the most thoroughgoing satisfaction ‘Columbo’ offers us,” Jeff Greenfield wrote in The New York Times in 1973: “the assurance that those who dwell in marble and satin, those whose clothes, food, cars and mates are the very best, do not deserve it.”
Bingo.
But who deserves anything. Yeah, probably none of us. But perhaps Jessica.
It’s interesting what intrigues — Jessica and Peter. It’s the personalities that matter, that we remember, that are the gift.
On Friday I visited the Camuy Rio caves. Nice — a 17 story underground room, its door ways draped in jungle. But as is par for life’s course, it wasn’t the cave that was the big deal; it was Val and her mom, the friends I made on the tour. Riding there, we chatted it up, and we ciphered it down and it looked to me like Val, a junior in high school is another Columbo and another Jessica.
She is wicked smart and godly beautiful, in love with science and ramped up to help children. Couldn’t get better, the potential, the unfolding narrative, the super righteous possibilities within the existential, ontological, epistemic essence of Val. I told her I thought she should definitely get a graduated degree in the sciences and keep being godly. I bet she will, and that she’ll give the old woman’s mite too.
And then there was Saturday night in San Juan, with the gang, tossing down Mahi Mahi and yakking it up and then getting down to business discussing charity. Lisa, who I had just met through my brother Steve, was spot on. She lectured, and we leaned forward. Lisa talked about the money from her organization, just sitting, waiting, for Haiti, but how the Haitians hadn’t come up with a plan as to how they would use it, how they would do something sustainable.
Wow and wow. She said that one group bought solar panels for a school, I think, and they were stolen that night. They bought them again, and bam, gone again. They quit. The conclusion, you aren’t helping people who won’t own the help.
I loved it! Lisa was a hoot, of information and experience incarnate concerning the NGO and non-profit Christian charity business.
Again, like Val, Lisa was the coin.
What to do? Life is good, and not, and helping is good, and not, and when all is said and done, it seems more and more obvious to me what to do.
Jessica, Peter, Val and Lisa — love those coins.
They kinda deserve it.
sex
Two weeks before he was to be married, the student chaplain at the university where my daughter goes to school told the girl he was about to marry that he was gay.
And so, ended, the dream, they had together; they dropped the wedding plans, the marriage and then shortly afterwards, the young man resigned from his leadership role at the school. He graduates from college this spring — in pain. And he’s not the only one.
My wife and I, talking over coffee this morning, wondered, about the conversations, behind the scenes, between the couple, with the parents,with friends and with the school leaders – painful, excruciating, gut wrenching. The words said to this young man will be remembered by him, for life. And some of the words will have to be recovered from.
Sexual identity is no small issues; our reactions to it are so powerful and so life changing. I really suffer for this young man, and his fiancée and their parents and friends and the school’s students and leaders. This is hard, and I can see that the pain of it has not be adequately acknowledged by the school, by those involed and by the students. But it is there, and it will not just go away. There will be a painful, ongoing conversation, and it will last much longer than some people want it to.
I know pain. So do so many people. A girl told me a while back that she was being pressured by an older guy to have sex with him, even though he is married. This isn’t new for her. Sex has been a huge factor in shaping the last ten years of her life. She’s pained by it and marked by it. What to do? I have told her again and again, “God loves you.” He does.
As my wife and I talked this morning, on the TV news, operating background to our dialogue, their was a blub about college guys voting on girls, “hot or not.” My wife remarked, “So, is that considered fun or is it harassment?” The conversation about that and all things sexual is being had, at the most public level, but much of it will be a report and a few people’s opinions not the much needed exposé of the pain, within the story. The news doesn’t often deal with the pain of men and women who are or who feel or who are made to feel unattactive. Not many people publically talk about the massive, universal insecurity young people have over “how I look,” or with the brutal question some young people pose to themselves, ”Am I hot enough to be loved?” That is not even a healthy question, but it is out there, and we all know it, but we won’t often hear it put that straight.
Too often, when it comes to sexual issues, we don’t have the conversation that is within the conversation, that really matters. Christians, for instance, are known to talk a lot about sexual morality, and of course, morality is very real, and good, and Biblical morality is from God and very important, but the converstation about what is right must be combined with talk about what has already gone wrong. Young people need to be able to talk to older people about what is currently happening. They need to talk about birth control, about STD’s, about sex and marriage and about homosexuality. They are talking about these things with their friends in their dorm rooms but not as much with their parents or grandparents. Why? Sometimes the older people simply will not have this conversation. They may not even know how. But young people still need to talk, to someone who is open and wise and who has lived for a while and failed and learned to be gentle and forgiving.
The conversation about sex must include the forgiveness and grace that need to follow failure. We need to talk about how our society and the church and schools have responsed to sexual issues in the past and whether those ways of responding are ways we want to keep using. There has been a lot of judgment in the past that ignores our universal failure in this area. When it comes to issues of sexual morality, we all fail, actually quite similarly, and that is precisely what is too often ignored. The things to talk about are “our” sexual issues, not “their” sexual issues and we all we need to confess more and pronounce less.
Why confess about this more? Because others are confessing, openly. The confessional conversation is already going on, in public, in private, in everywhere. Proof? Just go to the movies.
Two nights ago my wife and daughters and I went to see the movie “Lincoln Lawyer.” It’s a fairly fun movie. Matthew McConaughey actually gets a chance to act, and he does pretty well, at being cool, and fun. In the story, sex is for sale, and murder after. It’s interesting, what entertains us. Are sex and murder entertaining? Of course they are. Why? Because sex and violence have a powerful grip on all of us.
Sex is in the conversation that people are having, and if we want to be part of the conversation we must openly talk about sex. And if we don’t talk about sex, well, then we don’t, but that won’t stop everyone else from talking and interpreting it in ways that may not be honest or real. Sex is on the docket, and won’t be taken off, and if we don’t say anything, we’ll be left out, without weighing in on one of life’s most significant issues.
Weigh in. I will. Intepret or it will be interpreted for you. Sex is good, normal, fun, exciting, healing, and don’t plan on it stopping anytime soon. And sexual issues can also be terribly and profoundly painful, because sex is not just a physical act, but a deeply ontological, psychological, social and spiritual part of all of us. It is wonderful and makes a wonderful life, and not.
A friend sent me a text yesterday, “It’s a boy!”
“Cool!” I texted back, “Congrats!” This will be this young couples’ first baby. Lots of fun ahead for them.
A bit later, my daughter just texted me from her dorm room. “A girl on my hall just told us she’s engaged. Sorry I didn’t get back to you after you texted me, but I was yelling with everybody.”
“Whoohoo!” I texted back. “I guess.”
Of course its “whoohoo!” and I’m sure it will be fine, I guess, but I don’t know. But it will have a chance, I think, of being more fine if this young couple has people to talk to before they marry about sex and career and babies and fidelity and about times coming when life won’t be “Whohoo!”
A happy marriage and happy babies after the wedding is absolutely fantastic, but it isn’t what some people end up as a result of romance, and love and sex. For many, the relational and sexual stuff, as life goes along, gets just plain excruciating – a woman I know who was sexually abused as a child and then cheated on in her marriage as an adult, the young man at the university who came out as gay, his fiancée, several of my conflicted gay friends, a woman I know who regrets not getting the degrees she always wanted to have before she had babies. I love them, but they hurt, over choices they have made or others have made, and I know this because they tell me.
This morning my wife and I talked about a couple of people we know who are gay. One of them is in so much obvious pain that I worry about him. His sister just had a baby, made the family proud. He didn’t. I suffer for him. He needs to talk to someone, who is safe, and can understand. If he doesn’t find places to be heard, and understood, then he will really, really suffer, like he is right now. I know that God loves him and wants to enter into this struggle with him, but is this young man hearing this, enough, and does he understand this? I don’t know.
Here is the deal. I’m not shutting up about this, and I don’t think the rest of us should either.
We need to talk. And it needs to be talk that is first of all without judgment regarding people who are outside the norm and people who have made mistakes, and people who are in pain. And we need to talk more to young people who have questions and have never had honest answers from parents or leaders who have the wisdom that comes from experience and thought and morality and God and love.
In my house sex is a common topic. We laugh about it, make jokes about it, answer serious questions about it, have moral standards that we discuss, and yet we are open about our weaknesses and failures to be all we want to be. We treat sex as a normal part of life, and we take it very seriously when there is ambiguity, uncertainty, mystery, pain, beauty or love surrounding it. And there is, all this and so much more hovering at the edges of our sexuality.
Sex is a complex issue, and it needs some complex thinking and a complex dialogue. The people with the easy answers are fooling themselves and so they will be fooled, as life unfolds. The main thing is to be open with ourselves and others and to get to know both ourselves and other people, especially people who are different from us, and who have had different experiences, and to hear them, and feel with them and understand them and their pain so that we can better understand ourselves and our pain.
We need to have a conversation about sex, that doesn’t stop, with sex, but extends on into morality and God and pain and grace and unconditional love too.
Let’s keep talking.
For more of my thoughts on this, you are invited to visit www.modernproverbs.net Click on the topic button, “Sex.”
friends
Having different kinds of friends — so very interesting.
I have a bounce-off-of friend. I bounce stuff off him to see what it looks like coming back toward me with his spin on it. It’s helpful, the curve my ideas take on the rebound. Yesterday we spent an hour on the phone debating the growth curve of organizations. Fascinating.
I have a never-let-go friend. She is my stick-tight friend. We have waded through years and yards of stuff, and she is still there. I love the safety of such a friend. This week we reflect on a relational train wreck we both witnessed and survived. I totally adore, her loyalty — to me.
I have a calls-when-he needs-help friend. I don’t mind. I like being the go-to-guy for him. I like how he trust that what I say, or that what I don’t say, is good. It’s good for me to be there for him, in the sacred moment, when the masks come off. This week he told me that when he drove away from the house, after the fight, it was as if he was moving through a dream. “I couldn’t believe that I was doing,” he told me, “what I could see myself doing, leaving, like that.” It was good, to deconstruct the dream, that was really — reality.
I have a conceptual friend. When we meet, ideas meet. We talk insights, theories, axioms, intellectual constructs. We discourse on aesthetics, theology, history, sociality. Recently we explored the kind of creativity that can arise out of devastation. Our friendship exists within the universe of our ideations. I love an abstraction, that we invent and then that we event. It becomes other people’s reality. Fine, so very fine!
The other day I thought about a friend who is not longer a friend. We went through something hard and this friend didn’t understand what was to be understood within the thin and quickly ripping fabric of possible understanding and so we went on down the road with the clothing that had previously covered us, rripped completely off, and I found myself traveling alone. It happens. I recovered myself with the warm embrace of new friends.
It’s very interesting, the variation of sociality.
It is very interesting, the morph, the seed, the stalk, the bloom, and the sometimes surprisingly quick wilt of togetherness, the amazing sustainability of real love.
What to do?
Enjoy, the sweet ones you have been given.
Grieve, the once dear ones, occasionally lost.
Look forward to the precious ones still to come.
the same
I once sat in a small group in San Diego and listened to Henri Nouwen speak about how we are different and the same. He said that too often we define ourselves by how we are different from each other. Nouwen noted that we modern Americans are into being unique, but that this is not actually where the joy of life is found. Then he had one of his friends, who was disabled, speak to us. They were the same, he and Nouwen; both deeply needed to be loved and accepted.
Nouwen writes, “True joy is hidden where we are the same as other people: fragile and mortal. It is the joy of belonging to the human race. It is the joy of being with others as a friend, a companion, a fellow traveler.”
The famous professor, writer, priest — a fellow traveler with us all. I like it, but I struggle to live it. Many of us do. There are so many angles by which we are tempted to declare our differences: republican or democrat, conservative or liberal, orthodox or free thinking, gay or straight, poor or rich, educated or blue collar, white, black, brown or red — the points of view encamp around us and invite us to join them for supper and an after dinner yak about — the enemy. We live, we speak, we react, we differentiate as easily as we breathe.
What is the cure? It is silence, sometimes. Yes we need to dialogue, to say what we think, to put up our boundaries, to air things out, to be honest, to negotiate and compromise and to work the differences out, and then sometimes we just need to do some serious shutting up. To see how we are alike, sometimes we need to quit talking about how we are different, and then we might begin to put effort into the seeing how we are the same.
Silence is a quiet opportunity to observe, similarity.
We woo each other gently, by quietness.
My cat Megan sat on my lap this morning. We said nothing. We luxuriated in a blanket and closeness and touch. We couldn’t be more different. She is wise and fuzzy and minds her own business. We couldn’t be more the same. We both needed a moment for a quiet purr, together.
A friend and I recently strung an internet cable through an attic. He pushed the cable through a hole; I retrieved it. We are different; we are so very much the same, especially when we share a common task, like stringing cable. We are the same in that we need each other to be successful.
The solution to different is to get busy doing the same.
I like it better than the different.
super moist tripple chocolate fudge
Into the paper cupcake holders in two cupcake pans I poured a thin layer of super-moist, triple-chocolate-fudge cake mix.
Then on top of the thin layer of super-moist, triple-chocolate-fudge cake, I poured a thin layer of sweet, whipped cream cheese.
Next — into each cupcake sleeve, I gently spooned, on top of the super-moist triple-chocolate-fudge and the sweet cream cheese, a layer of country-cherry pie filling.
Then I poured another layer of super-moist-triple-chocolate-fudge cake, on top of the surpy, cherry pie filling, which covered the whipped cream cheese, which covered the first layer of super-moist, triple-chocolate-fudge cake.
At this point I grew frightened and decided to put it in the oven — to kill it.
Twelve minutes later, when the little super-moist, chocolate, cheesy, cherry-filled bodies had baked, and then cooled, as part of the embalming process, I spread a thick layer of rich and creamy vanilla, cream cheese frosting on top of each one.
Then — I – ate five!
I hate myself.
Paul, the amazing Christian super saint once wrote, “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. (Romans 7:15)
Sounds like someone else has been into the super-moist triple-chocolate cupcakes. Of course, the truth is that we all have all been there, where we didn’t want to go, doing what we hated to do. We have overeaten cake or indulged a nasty character defect or shot off a mean-spirited repartee or harbored an infected and moldy core of unforgiveness. Or if we have not done these then we have indulged something else non grata, not fun, a fair bit of anguish, the loss of control, the doing what we don’t want to do, the regrets later. This is just what we do — the stuff we hate.
And so, what to do?
I backed our SUV into a telephone pole a few years ago. When I confessed my mistake to my wife, she said, “That’s why we have insurance.” Never once then or after did she say anything condemning about my driving mistake.
Good, very nice. There is a recipe in this. There is a culinary treat to write down, on a card and to keep in a drawer, to Facebook to a friend, to use again.
After any one of us have poured down a super-most layer of triple chocolate fudge blunder, we should pour on top of that a thick layer of sweet, cream cheese honesty. Then it is best if someone else in the kitchen with us adds a thick layer of cheer pie kindness. If as so often happens, another layer of triple chocolate fudge mistake is added, and it gets baked all together, as so often happens in life, we should all yet “cool it,” and top the mess with a thick swirl of cream cheese forgiveness.
Finally, once we have all our layered delights finished and spread out in front of us, then we should each eat five or more of them, just to help us get the layering pattern “down,” and to help us learn to make this unique way of preparing food a real part of us.
A mistake? It needs a loving relationship.
Then, ”We’re really cooking baby!”
who are you?
“`Who are you?’ said the Caterpillar.
This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, `I–I hardly know, sir, just at present– at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.’
What do you mean by that?’ said the Caterpillar sternly. `Explain yourself!’
`I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, sir’ said Alice, `because I’m not myself, you see.’”
Alice, as in Wonderland, is caught up in one of our universal human dilemmas — explaining ourselves. The problem? Who we are is not fixed, and it can’t be easily explained to someone else or even to ourselves.
But we are not always as lost as Alice. Consider your bio or your resume. I wrote a short biography of myself recently for my website. It was supposed to be brief, but I’ve lived long enough that the trouble was in knowing what me to put in, what me to leave out. Then when my office manager transferred my biography to another website which had a different purpose, it didn’t quite feel right there. So I changed it, to fit the context. Like Alice, I had several iterations to choose from.
Resumes? The same thing. We tailor them to the job we are going for. We present ourselves as a good fit for a prospective employer. At resume time, we are all Alice, before the caterpillar, being asked “And who are you?” and we stand and deliver that we are an Alice that will fit in caterpillar’s world. And in that moment, we profess, to know ourselves. Fine, all is well, welcome to selling yourself. It’s appropriate and so professional to offer up a me-for-them on 24 pound linen paper with a water mark, a well-edited self that briefly presents the me of me that fits the them of them. “Make a good impression,” says my mom, your spouse and her best friend Tom as we all head out the door for the interview — ”Knock ‘em dead!”
But dead or not, at the interview or the funeral, there is yet, the Alice-dilemma. Someone may think I am this, or another may eulogize me as that, and I may myself put this or that on the fine paper , but who am I really? Who am I to me? Who am I when I-as-caterpillar asks me-as-Alice, “Who are you?” In other words, who am I employing when I employ myself? This identity is more difficult to get a hand on. It’s harder, penning the slippery, holistic, authentic day-to-day resume, the one we never write but always live, in front of ourselves and others.
My wife, Linda, is a survivor. Now there’s a label that offers an identity many people own. She grew up with a dad who said nothing too many times in a row after muttering nothing and yelling again nothing while devotedly popping another top off another beer after the beer just before the last one. One way Linda survived was to find her place among the stacks — books, and films in a place of something, of resources, a library. She found a career in storing and organizing help, information, resources. The result? She is an interlibrary loan specialist and a phenomenal resourcer of research professors and students. Have a need for a book or an article? “Call her.” She’ll get it for you or find out where you can get it. So while a support group might think of her as a “survivor,” she is really, through and through, a thriver. Contexts change; we change; labels change. Is she a child of an alcoholic parent, always? Is recovery always. How long does the past define us? Only as long as we let it.
I’ve noticed that people tend to like slice-of-the-pie assessments — “survivor, vet, precocious, slow, hot, not.” They don’t so much like the longer, nuanced, whole-pie critique, except when they write their memoirs. Most people go for the quick labels: ”cute, bright, slut, jerk, fun, good girl, bad boy, smart ass.” What are these really? Short hand idenitfications, stereotypes within the stereotypes of the stereotype. Some one told me recently, “You’re smart.” I thought, “Thin slice of me. You just haven’t seen me dumb, but sometimes I am.” Maybe I just haven’t let them see me dumb. I am, as we all are, a walking contradiction — smart here, dumb there, good here, bad there. Of course, obvious, sure — “Get real.”
I want to. I do. I do want to be authentic, and with authentic people, in the moment, congruent, projecting who we are and have been and still can be. This even means being honest about the me of not me and the them of the essential them. Paul, the radical Christian interrogator of the self, in one of his finest letters wrote, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” Touche! Paul has it right. He is not always the person he wants to be, and I, like him, do not always act out the me-of-me and the me-I-want-to-be. And so when I define myself, this must be included. Every resume needs an, ”If-you-want-a-different-twist-on-everything-you-just-read-then-talk-to-Frank category. Or perhaps we should add “Blunders” with dates and references.
The other day a girl told me that she was in recovery from abusing alcohol and drugs. I told her that in high school and college I had done too much drinking too, and had to move away from that to figure out who I was on my own, without a little help from my friends. As I confessed, I was writing my resume for her, an honest one, a human one, one that she could understand. I like that, authenticity. Who am I? I am a person very much like everyone.
And this gets at one more thing I’m learning — not to listen too much to talking caterpillars wherever they appear, but to look after something much more important, helping the them of not me figure out the them of the essential them. This works, nicely, in diverting the soul from excessive introspection. I live best not storying a self, not inventing a self, but instead spending time reflecting back to other selves who they might yet prove to be.
The other day, I happened on an ordinary thing, that later turned weird, a black mustard plant in the uplands down by the Sweetwater Salt Marsh who was freaking out. She was a beauty, a Cruciferae, yellow and spring green with long shapely roots, but she was so upset. She was out of it really, insanely exclamatory, ”Wow upon double wow and wow squared!” she gushed madly, her eyes bent on a black and yellow Swallowtail butterfly who was flapping home to the cathedral arch of a Sweet Fennel.
It didn’t turn out so well. I was told later, that when this mustardy beauty could take it no more, she grew all crazy for the air and ripped herself from the ground. And it was said by those who know that she proceeded across the marsh, beating the breeze apart with her quickly withering leaves, and with dirt still trailing off her roots, that she crashed into the ground only about 1oo feet from where she came.
“Oh!” I grieved for her and for all other selves not happy within the boundary of themselves, and then I went and sat down with Alice again to hear her out.
Later in the evening, I wrote the tragedy up and posted it on my blog.
Then I kicked back, stretched my long, spotted body, nibbled a leafy snack, checked the feedback from my maxillae, and thought, “Now this is the me of the essential me.”
