Category Archives: thriving
perhaps floating is the main thing
When we launched our canoes into the Little Niangua River, we had to paddle to scooch across the first pond below the bridge, but fairly soon the paddling quit.
Looking ahead we could see the water sloping downward. Like a flat table, tipped, like a slide sloped, the water angled down from us and around a bend.
The front of the canoe was now lower than the back, and we sped down the river quickly now, with little effort, silently and smoothly slipping along the surface.
It was a soft, slippery, smooth run down through the green trees along both banks. We quit paddling; we ran fast.
Then the river turned and in the corner we sped up even more. The smooth water ran rough here; the canoe suddenly scraped the bottom, aluminum grinding on pebbles, and then we wacked the paddles into the water hard to scoot on through the turn and avoid smacking into the bank.
Out onto another smooth pond we glided, and we there we returned to dipping our paddles gently into the water again to propel the canoes along.
Slop, slide, slop, slide — with a familiar and constant rhythm we made our way through forested turns, past old, dead logs, along grassy, green banks shaded over with drooping bows.
Paddle, float, paddle, float, paddle float – life has a pattern running through it, a smooth and rough, a smooth and rough, smooth and rough, float and paddle, float and paddle, float and paddle.
I am noticing something. I think that maybe many of us tend toward paddling too much.
We tend to push. We fixate on the rush. We power forward. We compete. We seemed to have an anxious, urgent need to get there.
But … I think that perhaps getting there is over-rated, especially when we don’t really know where “there” is.
Perhaps enjoying the paddle is the main thing, and floating, down the so very nicely prepared slopes, the main thing.
social confidence
Our level of confidence defines the quality of our social relationships. When we are insecure our relationships may seem fearful or dangerous to us. When we are confident, our relationships tend to feel energizing and safe for us.
What to do?
I’ve been thinking about this and something interesting comes to mind.
Think about this if you are want to thrive more socially.
I remember going to a young couple’s party at their house one evening a few years ago. I hated the whole experience. I felt very insecure there. Come to think of it; they were very insecure too. An atmosphere of social ineptness reigned. We sat on couches around a coffee table, but there was no coffee to spike our energy and no comfortable table of conversation to chew over. The young couple and some other people present controlled the conversation. I couldn’t think of things to add.
Wow! It sucked! It felt unbearably awkward. My wife and I left early. I felt like a social failure, no confidence that evening, no social success that night. But now, years later, with much social water having run under and over my bridge, I better see the truth of the thing.
We are powerless in social relationships, when we think we have no control. This sense of powerlessness adds to any insecurity we might already have, and when other people control the conversation, when the turf is theirs, then this is very confidence-deleting for us.
I see now that much of the insecurity was within me, and then so was the solution. I let it happen. I did nothing. I thought of myself a guest with no responsibility. Not good, now I realize, not good.
I’ve changed. Enough weird parties, enough awkward conversations, enough counseling, enough personal responsibility to make social events happen – I’ve begun to have different experiences.
Recently I met a quiet and awkward young couple. I asked them questions. I expressed interest in their personalities. I took time to explore some things we have in common. I invited them to meet me again for coffee. The next time we met, they told me that they had really enjoyed their previous conversation with me and they wanted to talk more, to get to know each other.
What a difference a few years makes.
The real difference? My level of confidence. I’ve gotten more confident, more secure. I know who I am now, and I am not afraid to let that be the social oil or the social glue in awkward situations.
I used to think of myself as socially powerless.
Now I have come to generally think of myself as in charge of any social situation I am in. Wherever I go, I consider myself a co-host with those present. I see myself as in the position of a self-affirming impresario, one of the masters of conversational entertainments. I see myself, in the role, if needed, of group discussion leader.
This isn’t a total panacea. There will be and even lately has been social awkwardnesses. I mistook someone recently for someone else! Awkward! I still sometimes want to leave the party early.
But things have largely changed for me. I like it. I refused to be as silent as wall paper. No more. I now refuse to engage in debilitating social silence. I refuse to be socially helpless. I refuse to act like I have no control. It’s good; it’s better this way. This is working for me, because social confidence is largely a matter of self-perception and self-actualizing behavior.
If you and I see ourselves as leaders in social situations then we usually will be. Act confidently, and we will generally act socially competently.
Social confidence — it’s a way of seeing, and it’s a way of chosing, one thing and not another. It is about chosing to take control. It is about chosing to not be socially helpless.
Parties, better? They can be.
Take charge, my gentle friends and thrive!
doors
“A child of seven is excited by being told
that Tommy opened the door and saw a dragon.
But a child of three is excited by being told
that Tommy opened a door…”
G. K. Chesterton
I remember the door that let me into my first private bedroom in the cinder-block, Missouri home I grew up in. I remember passing through that door, ecstatic to not live in my brother’s room anymore. “Yes!” I now had my own double bed, my own closest, my own window, my own personal space away from my family and from the world.
I loved that bedroom, as I now love all bedrooms of the world.
I love the bedroom I now live in with my wife. I love our double, bedroom doors. I love going through them in the evening, to put on comfortable clothes, to sit in my comfortable chair and look out the window and watch the sun set over the ocean. I love to lay on my king-sized bed, the beautiful, dark wooden bed that my parents gave me, in the evening, and write on my laptop, and savor the moments of leisure and memory and quiet.
And I am not alone in this. Many of us love our bedroom privacy; we profoundly crave our bedroom sanctuaries, spaces to rest in, places of safety, walls around us so we can close our eyes without fear and recover from the world. And those who don’t have a room, the homeless, the transient, the lost, they also needand love a private space, if nothing else a cardboard box, a place behind the dumpster, a moments quiet in a grimy corner of the earth.
I remember so well the door that opened to my first-grade classroom. I passed through that door in R-10 school in rural Missouri into an astonishing space filled with learning, a veritable universe of books and papers and drop-dead gorgeous ideas.
I loved that little classroom, as I love all the classrooms of the world. I love the door that opened to the first college classroom I ever taught in, because it was there that I finally sat on a table and held court and dispensed truth and schooled my students. Many of us love the spaces where we first learned to read. And some of us love the place where we first taught others to read and to write and to think.
Tonight I sit in my bedroom and look out, through the double doors, through the window over the stairs and through the trees in the yard to the mountains and the fading light in the sky. There is something about my bedroom doors, that open upon the world, something to thrill a child and more.
And now I’m thinking, doors.
There is another one. It’s inside me.
I love this inner door; it’s doubled, open now, then pulled nearly shut again, now cracked, now slammed, now pulled but not latched within. Today I encountered someone who hasn’t loved me much. The door closed. Tonight when I saw my wife, the door opened.
Tonight, lying in my room, I am trying to recover from too many days that had too little time behind too few closed doors. I am lying on my bed; I am empty inside, and someone knocks.
Like a three-year-old, I turn and look out through the opening.
Someone is there.
Who?
God.
I open, as much as I can.
I love opening this door, in this way, in just precisely and exactly this swinging out kind of way.
I look out, throught the opening, into the spaces that go beyond my sense of what a room can hold.
I am not alone.
consistency
I keep eating.
I keep working.
I keep resting.
I keep laughing.
I keep thinking.
On Saturday I spent the day at La Jolla Shores beach. Nice! The wind, sun, sparkling water and yum food combo works well for me to relax. My family and I do this every summer. My girls and I, go to the beach, stick our toes in the sand, eat, surf, snorkel, kayak and chill.
It’s called consistency. Haspers do the same things, over and over, the same way, and this is really, really kick-tail good!
Today I got up early and made strong, dark, hazelnut coffee and put milk in it. I do this every single morning without fail and I pet my fuzzy cat Megan and sit in my Lazyboy and luxuriate and extend time and write and read wise writers and dawdle with casualism and alonification and cud chewing.
Life has a pocketful of change in it, that much is certain, but to maintain sanity and peace and to show courage we must keep doing the same things again and again and again, and then yet again squared.
This is a prescription for mental health.
Families in crisis, families with losses, need to find ways to maintain consistency, movie going, meal making, regular bedtimes. Why? It shows courage, especially to the children, to keep going, to keep living, to keep keeping the family-keeping behaviors.
Emerson quipped that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” Emerson, of course, was wrong — even while he was partially right. People have a foolish tendency to stick to old perspectives, but they rightly stick to what is consistently true and what is consistently helpful.
A wise consistency is the trademark of great minds, a consistency of love, a consistency of order, and consistency of stabilizing practices.
This morning, Megan, my cat brought me her toy whale. She always does this, drops it by my chair, and then talks, and waits to be congratulated with a pat. She does this because she is worried, seeing that I don’t have claws like her, that I can’t catch my own food. Megan wants to feed me, again.
Even the animals know, and thrive on Consistency.
The same thing is often the next good thing we need.
wise stuff
Wise stuff is good stuff.
Last night I thought of all the good mayors in Mexico who have been murdered in the drug wars. Wow, tough their families and their towns.
Today I found myself fascinated by the ebook publishing phenomena. We read differently now, on Kindles and Nooks and ipads, and so I must think differently as a reader, a print consumer and a writer.
I love to notice it, life, the changes, and think about how to respond.
It comes to me more and more, that to be wise is to realize that nothing in life is unworthy of my attention. Nothing is mere background. Everything qualifies as meriting focus.
I ache for it. All who want to know do – new experiences, fresh observations, other interpretations, possible theories, startling conclusions, needed disambiguations of the everyday and familiar and miraculous too.
Wise acknowledges it all, the supernatural and the human.
The other day a college aged girl told me that she eventually dumped all boys because they simply, in the end, didn’t measure up to her high standards. She said it, then said she didn’t want to be like that anymore.
Why? She realized that her perfectionism was sabotaging perfectly good opportunities for friendships. Bingo. Get wiser, be more tolerant.
In the 17th Century Fenelon had this figured out, noting that perfection is the only thing perfectly tolerant of imperfection. Whoohoo! Good! Nice! People so misjudge the judgments of the ultimate judge by thinking him mainly judgmental in nature.
And the wise girl get it as she is interested it all, in shadows on her backyard fence and in the shadowy projection of her own desire to be perfect onto others. A trophy boyfriend; the secure woman doesn’t need it.
Here is the deal; to get wise is to get fascinated with oneself and everything within ones imperfect realm.
Eugene Peterson, in his introduction to the wisdom literature of The Message version of the Bible comments that “Wisdom insists that, “nothing in human experience can be omitted or slighted.”
So wisdom literature, the psalms and proverbs, take on all topics and all particulars that wisdom can think of. Wisdom is fascinated by both the large idea of science and by the small observation of the micro-hairs on the bottle fly’s feet.
Peterson observes that this comprehensive perspective on life is the content of the Biblical psalms. “The Psalm are indiscriminate in their subject matter — complaint and thanks, doubt and anger, outcries of pain and outbursts of joy, quiet reflection and boisterous worship. If it is human, it qualifies.”
Beautiful, neutral, ugly, all of it, yes!
If it is human, it qualifies for a psalm, for a proverb, for a second look, for inclusion into the canon of what is spiritual.
Jesus turned water into wine at Cana. The supernatural coexisted with the mundane. It was a miracle of a most everyday and normal kind, for as C. S. Lewis has pointed out, in the fields grapes left begin to turn into wine naturally.
Do we want to be wise, to traffic daily in wise stuff? Then we must reject nothing as unworthy of thought, hope, redemption, promise.
Think broadly and beyond.
Wise.
the myth of privacy
It’s 5:23 am. I’m alone, sitting in my chair with my coffee, thinking, the cats camping out on my lap and nearby.
Last night I went to my friend Tim’s retirement party. About 75 people were there. We qued up for pizza, pasta, and chicken fingers and told stories about various explosions and fires connected to Tim. Tim confessed at one point, in a moment of hilarious candor, after numerous fireworks and burning-engine and flaming-Christmas-tree stories, ”I love fire!”
Then he paced the floor thanking people and honoring others and making jokes and flailing his arm about like a puppet in the hands of a maniac, as he is wont to do when he gets excited, which is always. Tim is no sleepy house cat. He is a wild cat, a man on fire. For a few years he was in the habit of taking 75 or so Christmas trees to the desert, roping them together and lighting them on fire.
This morning, sitting alone with my coffee, thinking about Tim, it comes to me that when life is social, warm, burning, it is best, and that it is always social.
Alone is a fiction. There is no being alone. In a sence I am never alone, because I know Tim.
Tim is one of my very best friends. I’ve known Tim for about 35 years. He was the best man in my wedding. We have a lifetime of talks and some crazy adventures and some rough times too. I rely on Tim; he relies on me. If he were to do something out of character that brought shame to him, I would feel the shame too. If I were to do something wrong, something out of character, something out of alignment with the good reputation that I have in the community, something that disgraced me, Tim would be disgraced too. And in this way, we are accountable to each other, and not really alone in our behaviors and choices.
We have fed each others fire; we burn for some of the same causes; we have each others backs.
Sometimes we speak of privacy. I write this in a private moment. We have created places of privacy, homes and fenced yards and bathrooms, but we don’t see this thing of isolation even close to correctly. Even in those more hidden places, we are never alone. Our friends are there, and there is something else there, and on this I am finally getting my mind straight.
God is there, everywhere, always with me. Privacy is a myth. The Bible, that best book on life and God and reality, says that God watches us, that he sees it all, that his eyes cast around to see who relies on him and he energizes those who do. Last night when I watched Tim lounging about the room, arms up and down, laughing and waving and yelling and creating warmth and love and kindness in the room, I saw a man filled with God, not alone, fueled up on the watching eyes of God.
And I get it more now, although not yet as I will get it when I finally begin to wake up to our utter and complete and irrevocable not-aloneness. God is omniscient. God sees, it all, and when we know that, and live in that, and live as if that is true, which hardly anyone I ever met does, then we are different. If there is no privacy, then my behavior changes, because there is perpetual accountability and endless energy to do the right thing.
Listen, someone else is always in the room! I am growing wisely paranoid. We are being watched! And we are always creating stories than can and will be told. There is no movement of our fingers that isn’t part of the plot that is being written for public consumption, that can’t be told and retold as we live and then retire from work and love and hate and life.
This begs, pleads for, falls down and cries for the question: How would we live if every moment were filmed and shown at every moment to everyone? It is! God sees every moment of our lives. He is consistently present. He even knows our every thought. And so we must each one always ask ourselves, “Do I want to do this right now, think this right now, live this out right now, seeing that God is right now watching me and recording my story?”
It burns in me! Pile on more Christmas trees. It explodes. Set off more fireworks. It smolders in me and in you, the glowing ember of God. It flares up in every moment, and it makes me want to live smart, aware, different, as if the lights are never off, and they aren’t and we are never, ever, thankfully ever — alone.
We are living public stories. We are always living out what will be told at our retirement party. We are always fighting off fire, or letting it burn in us. We are irrevocably public, and we would do well to live as if the whole world and God were always watching.
It is.
He is.
doubt
Doubters asks the questions believers have already answered — unsuccessfully. Is there God? Can we trust our leaders? Is it okay to have doubts? The world is still exploring these questions, and we should certainly keep asking such questions, and answering the best we can without acting arrogantly on either side of the answers, doubt or faith.
Doubt is useful. By it we test our theories, disbelieve liars and discover more truth. I doubt that a fomer friend of my is capable of receiving the truth that his style of relating is harmful, to himself and others. He simply won’t or can’t go there. I doubt he ever will.
For centuries people thought the earth was the center of the universe. But by observation Galileo, with his telescope and his questions, attacked the old geocentrism and led the way to a more accurate view of reality, heliocentrism. But interestingly enough, most people still live like they are the center of the universe. Heliocentrism is taught in school, but geocentrism reigns in our personal choices. Two-year olds and adults have the same problem — decentering. Proof. They do nothing about injustice.
People usually don’t live according to their beliefs. People also do not usually live according to their doubts. Doubters are notorious for not doubting their own doubts. People of faith and people of science are famous for holding on to their theories in the face of contrary evidence.
I’m a doubter. I doubt most conspiracy theories I hear. I doubt what I hear from most political and religious leaders. I doubt that people have pure motives. I doubt that we exercise anything like pure reason. I doubt that there are space ships visiting the earth from other planets, and I doubt that the next President of the United States will do much to improve international relations, bringing peace to our own planet.
I have at one time doubted everything I have believe, and I have even doubted my own doubts. But this has been good for me, because by means of doubt I have come to more certainty about what I do believe. And I have come to believe some things that I formerly doubted by testing them and proving them in my own experience. I doubted that french fries tasted good dipped in ice cream. Then I tried it.
Test everything, but don’t be afraid to believe something. And you do, sometimes.
For more thoughts on doubt, check out www.modernproverbs.net Click on the tab “doubt.”
pride
Pride is complicated stuff.
How’s that? Because it’s about thinking we are better than other people and about thinking we are worse.
It is both, because pride is essentially being overly focused on oneself, making oneself the center, the core, the issue.
Pride puts its nose in the air and says, “Look at my hot car, or body or house or wife or personality or whatever.”
And pride puts its nose down, low, and says, “Look at what a mess I am, and look at how badly I feel.”
This too is a kind of pride because it is all about me or you or whoever is super-focused on themselves.
To really understand pride, we must realize that it is a fiction. Pride is a restoried, manufactured, studied, fictionalized version of reality that we write for ourselves. It takes the story of our life, and rewrites it with our self as the protagonist, the hero, the heroin, the star.
To really understand it might help to see that pride is a lot like a card game.
Life deals us cards. As we grow up, we look over our hand to see what cards we got. And then, we select our high card, and we begin to play it, for a win, for a winning of love and money and approval. Our high card may be our personality, our looks, our smart mouth, our money, our social status, our race, our parents, our attitude, our whatever. There are many high cards, different in value in different contexts, and the cards become high or low, depending on how we and others see them.
This is fine, normal, and this is not so fine, this card game, when pride enters the game. It is not cool, to play ourselves too much, to game ourselves, to story game ourselves, to restory ourselves, to dominate, to win by making others lose. It is not cool when we flaunt our cards, when we use them to use other people, to get what we want, to beat down the competition into submission to our superiority.
But this game, the high card game, the game of who is better than who, is played all the time. People get into it or they spend a lot of energy trying to get away from it.
A person who has worked hard on being humble, may then be proud of not being proud. Wow! Tough sledding, the downhill run away from the self.
What to do?
About the only cure for pride is not to think of it at all – self, self-love, self-hate, dealing with self. The cure comes in turning away from all of this to other selves. We lose pride when we find the other. We quit playing our high card when we think beyond the game, at what we will all do when we slide our chairs back from the table and go to lunch together.
This matters, the game after the game, the game without the game, the time when we gather to support each other, not to win or lose.
This matters.
The interesting thing is the the Bible sees dealing with pride as the central issue of life, because pride keeps us from God. And to persist in pride, can lead to God opposing us
Proverbs 3:34 says that God “mocks proud mockers but gives grace to the humble.”
Cool! And not cool. If we mock the suposedly inferior, we will be mocked.
Interesting. Being proud will bring us down; keeping away from pride will put God on our side and pick us up.
Nothing better than that.
Think about it.
(Todays blog entry is just a discussion starter. What do you think? I invite you to add a comment.)
Randy
wise stuff
Life is a firehose of information but sometimes we just want a sweet drop of truth. I saw a hummingbird dip its food snagger in a red honeysuckle flower recently. Yum! One sip! Good!
I ran into a couple who had just celebrated fifty years of marriage this week. They agreed that to do that, they had done some serious shutting up. Less is more, over the long haul.
Sometimes we want for small when buried in too much big. Yesterday after being social all day, my pajamas and my bed and my laptop were just right to help me restore. Simple beats complex, at the end of most days.
In the end, I went to sleep. We all do, always. Sleep is a good simple for it is simply accepting the day. It is more; the simple act of going to bed each night is preparation for death, the moment when we give in to what was, with no more complicated attempts to change that.
Wise stuff? We need it. More. It explains the world.
Think elegant explanations, like Kepler’s elliptical orbit of the planets,; the beauty is often in the simplicity.
And so, we love a theory and we love a proverb. Short truth delights by telling all with some. We call such collected truth, wisdom literature.
Wisdom literature is ancient, oral, axiomatic, classic, lasting. It is often pithy, punchy, with a pinch of sarcasm, wit and humor tossed in for seasoning. It skewers us, in a way we like, stabbing sence into our psyches. It shapens up the mundane into the sublime.
Want some?
I invite you to visit http://modernproverbs.net
happy
One day, in high school, at lunch, I put a coin in the gum machine in a drugstore. I turned the crank, the gum fell, but not the coin, so I wiggled the crank and the gum just kept coming out. “Humm,” I thought, “I just won the gum lottery.”
I was feeling grateful then, so I just emptied the machine. It seemed meant to be. Then I went back to the school. But pretty soon I got bored with my gum wealth and gave some gum balls away. I think this created a spirit of mass generosity in the student body and soon my friends and I were throwing gum balls, from an upstairs window, onto the heads of students below.
Think of it as a kind of Marxist revolution, a proletarian redistribution of the wealth, and it was going really well until I heard a voice behind me, yell, “Hey!” It was the principal. Oddly enough, he seemed upset. I think, perhaps, he felt left out.
So, anyway, he panicked and he kicked us all out of school. It seemed a bit rash to me on his part, but I learned a lesson from that. If you throw gum at school, invite the principal to join you. And never, ever be afraid to share your gum.
It has been said that the divine smooches the cheerful giver. I like that; it makes me want to change, to get smooched, to smooch others, to be happy, by giving. This is it, the thing, the essence, the really gone girl, the madly free bad boy, to let it rain down, from our hands, the gum, the moolah, time, love, generosity – from each hand, cheerfully. And also, at the core, to never let anyone stop us from giving – not grumpy, stingy principals, not our own shriveled hearts, not anything. I want it; I want to relax into unselfishness and throw good stuff in the air and treat someone else and be happy in giving it away.
For Christmas a few years ago, my wife and I bought my mom and dad, tickets to a local theatre. It was dinner and a Christmas play at the beautiful, classy Hotel Del Coronado. We were excited to surprise them; we could hardly wait to take them there and deposit them in the lobby with the huge, gorgeous Christmas tree and tell them, “You are here, for dinner and a play.” When they came back, they enthused, “Oh the five course dinner, the prime rib, the chocolate covered strawberries, and the play – we had a wonderful evening.” Then we regretted not using the tickets ourselves.
No, not, not even close. Even though we had gotten none of this for ourselves, we were so happy for them, and it was so fun to treat them that we couldn’t have been more pleased in the giving. Anne Lamot says life comes down to a simple law of the jungle, “Stay calm and share your bananas.”
Sharing your bananas, I’ve noticed, is cool because it tends to give back to you, inside, a fullness, a happiness, as sense of having lived well, a calm and even a banana back.
Think children. It takes a lot of bananas to raise one, but if you keep feeding them they yield a return. “Really?” you might say: “I’ve invested in children and all I got back was a lot of bills and some back talk.” I’ll give you this, the return on children is not obvious at first. The U.S. Agriculture Department says the cost to raise a child to age 18 is $291,570? That’s astonishing. It’s more money than you can make in a lifetime. And this figure does not include college, which is another $291,000.
But you do get something back, something good, along the way and eventually — in most cases, with children. My daughter, who is in college, called me this week. We talked on the phone about a date we had gone on recently, to dinner and a play, and just before she hung up the phone she said, “I love you daddy.”
Raising her, $291,000. “I love you daddy,” priceless! And someday, she will pay me back, when I’m old and gum-less and she will give me a much needed hug and pat my head and say again, “I love you daddy.”
It’s good, living this way, staying calm, being happy, living by the truth: Sow small, reap small; sow crazy big, reap wildly huge and happy.
