# 7 on my, 99 Life Tips – A List is: If you’re a guy, hold doors open for women. For that matter, if you arrive at door first, hold doors open for anyone. This way, if you meet the rare woman offended by your offering, you can explain, ”Hey, I hold doors open for anyone when I get to the door first.”
This is, or at least used to be, self-explanatory. I’m not talking about sexist chivalry, here. This is just good manners. This is what gentlemen do. Gentlemen hold doors for women.
I would stop holding a door for a woman who asked me not to, out of respect for her wishes, but it would feel odd to me.
For that matter, hold doors for everyone
In daily practice, I hold doors for anyone and everyone if I get to the door first. Sometimes this turns me into the doorman for a few minutes. Those few seconds lost have never cost me anything of importance. Usually, I get a small sip of feeling good about myself for performing a small act of considerate kindness. I don’t view this as a grand gesture. It is not a statement about the comparative strengths of the sexes. Gimme a break.
Gentlemen hold doors for women and others just to be good people. There are plenty of good people in the world, but not enough of us consistently act like it. This is one hell of an easy way to act like it.
Feels weird to make a blog post about something so self-evident. Almost as strange as writing one about wearing a mask during a pandemic, or getting vaccinated to stop its spread.
But times are different now. Politeness and consideration are at a premium. Human decency is rare as gold bullion. Being nice without a selfie stick or camera crew is apparently passé. Set yourself apart. Go old school. Hold a door.
There were 2 trees in the garden. There still are. (Shuttestock Image licensed to Author)
# 87 on my 99 Life Tips–A List is: There is nothing more magnificent in creation than a tree in a forest. I learned this way too late.
Here I simply refer you to Richard Powers’ excellent (Pulitzer Award winning) book, The Overstory. Read it. Digest it. Believe it. Embrace it. Practice it. Live it as if your life, your kid’s lives and the planet’s life depends on it. It most likely does. This story is a celebration of dependency, because life is better than knowledge — life is dependency.
2 Trees
The story of creation begins in a garden. In that garden are two named trees. This story tells how the lie’s promise went unfulfilled and how life is better than knowledge.
The story juxtaposes these, one to one another, making them antagonists. Black hat and white hat. The distinctions between these 2 trees set the stage for a marvellous story and yet they do no combat against one another. There is no arboreal clash of branches. They do not fight and sway. They simply exist. The two trees are saying something to us through the reach of literature if not from the literal nascent moments of our species and our shared race as humans. The battle is within ourselves.
The one tree has gotten all the ink through the years, but there were 2 trees our first parents could have eaten from, only one of which was forbidden. There was also the tree of Life, about which no prohibition had been made.
The Tree of The Knowledge of Good and Evil story is fundamentally a story about independence. The tempter offered something he could not give to fill something they could not have and did not need. This is the nature of temptation—to overpromise and underdeliver. Always. The temptation to Adam and Eve was to become “like God—knowing good and evil”.
This is a lie of Trumpian proportions, the first Big Lie and mother of all Big Lies. For God is more than knowledge, and God is more than the arbiter of good and evil. God is that Supreme Creator who determines whether a thing, a thought, an act is good or evil in accord with that wisdom and love only God possesses.
Good? Evil?
What man or woman has ever attained to such heights as to know conclusively what good is, independent of God?
Was crucifixion good? Or was it evil? Was the discovery of North and South America by Europeans good? Good for the natives, the aboriginal peoples on those continents? If good, for whom was it good? For God? For all?
Questions of these kinds are indecipherable entanglements. The best and brightest wear themselves out and drive themselves mad, picking at that backlash of knotted contradictions, hoping in vain to answer the very thing promised to our ancestors in that primordial lie. What is good? What is evil? And in our history, have we arrived at any satisfactory, mutually agreed upon, non-controversial decisions about what is good and what is evil? I trust the reader to recognize a rhetorical question when you read one.
Like Begets Like
As fruit contains its seeds within itself, so it is with lies. Like begets like. Apples produce apple trees, not cherries, or pears, or ferns. A lie’s fruit contains no seeds of truth. Accordingly, we see the fruit from that ill-fated tree was a deadly poison in proportion to the worthlessness and uselessness of the knowledge sought. Because that knowledge could not and cannot produce what the lie purported it could, and neither could that lie or the knowledge it claimed accessible to our ancestors, produce—Life.
We may admit that the eating of the fruit gave them knowledge of good—as memory—the sacrifice of their original manner of life killed on the altar of independence. Likewise, it gave the knowledge of evil—as present and future — the now inability to keep and reestablish that level of Life-receiving dependence so foolishly sacrificed. In that, the tempter lied the truth, but so craftily as to make even this outcome veiled and hidden in that initial lie, “your eyes will be opened…”. And what an opening of the eyes that was. The knowledge wasn’t in the fruit!The knowledge was in themselves!
The history of humankind
The history of what happened at that tree is written in blood and pain, and murder, and war, and black charcoal ash scrawled on cave walls, and choking, teeming clouds of black ash smoke caressing skyscrapers, and in striped, torn skin, and in blood-stained bayonets. It is the sky teeming with rockets unleashed by the “good” to exterminate the “evil”. Oh, God! What a damned misery unleashed on the planet and the race from the belief in that Big Lie that by knowing “good and evil” the created would become as the creator.
And here we are, still in the dark. Still not knowing what good is. Still unable to tell what is evil. Still needing to be led by the hand. Still needing to be told. And still too damned proud and stupid to admit our blindness, our need, our destitution and stretch out our hands to Life, for as it says in another place, “knowledge puffeth up” but “love edifies”.
Those 3 words are the most concise history of humankind ever penned — “knowledge puffeth up”.
There is another tree, also fruit-bearing. That 2nd tree remains, because the idea of it remains. Regardless of whether it is a physical, tangible tree, I believe it is the source of all trees, which may be the residual source and the sustenance of all biological life on this spinning ball we ride through Space. It may be a heavenly tree, possibly metaphorical, or hidden in ineffability. But a more magnificent creation, I cannot conceive. This tree of Life exists in the myths of numerous cultures and peoples. Myths this pervasive exist for a reason. There’s usually something real to back them.
Life is better than knowledge — Life is dependency
The fruit of that tree of Life is of 12 different kinds — its leaves have potency to heal the nations. (Is it any wonder we look to trees and forests for medicines?) Fruit is both food and a seed pod. In combination with medicinal leaves, everything the Tree of Life symbolizes implies dependency. Life is a series of dependencies — truth no created thing can capture so fully as a tree, which creates its entire mass, not from itself, but from the very air, exactly in the pattern we are to “in Him, live and move, and have our being.” And nothing gives of itself more fully than a tree, either.
I can find and infer and reasonably patch together knowledge within myself. But I cannot find life within myself. I cannot grow my food from within myself. I cannot, from within myself, create the air I need for my next breath. I cannot manufacture my own medicine from within. For Life, I am dependent. I am in need. And I’d rather acknowledge, even celebrate my dependency—for I would far rather live without knowing, than know without living.
Beware the confidence that you know what is good for you…no one can see very far down the tracks
# 31 on my, 99 Life Tips – A List is: Beware of the confidence that you know what is good for you.
Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher of the middle-1800’s penned this famous quote in his journal. It is instructive as to why this tip to beware of the confidence that you know what is good for you is worth heeding.
“It is really true what philosophy tells us, that life must be understood backwards. But with this, one forgets the second proposition, that it must be lived forwards. A proposition which, the more it is subjected to careful thought, the more it ends up concluding precisely that life at any given moment cannot really ever be fully understood; exactly because there is no single moment where time stops completely in order for me to take position [to do this]: going backwards.”
~ Kierkegaard, Journal, 1843
This usually ends up shortened to:
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards”
Ibid
True Good Must Pass The Test Of Time
As a father to seven children, I’ve oft told another about a lesson I’ve shared with one of my kids. Sometimes, they have remarked to me, ”Oh, that is soooo good!” My reply has usually been, ”We’ll see in six months.” Goodness can pass the test of time. It’s best not to judge to soon.
As the philosopher noted, we do not have the luxury of time-travel while living. We are stuck on the railroad tracks of sequential time. One thing follows another. We are forced to respond on a moment by moment basis. Not being able to see far enough down the tracks of cause and effect, we don’t know at any particular moment how one thing, one decision, one attainment, or one disappointment, may turn out in the long run. If you cannot have the confidence of certainty about the future, isn’t it wise to beware of the confidence that you know what is good for you in the present? Because good is not just about immediate gratification, but also long-term effects.
I’ve said many times, one of the worst things I can get in life is what I want. Just because you want something doesn’t mean you should have it. Just because you think it is good for you, doesn’t mean it is. We are trapped in a short-sighted series of near-term decisions that produce unknowable long term effects.
True Good May Not Be What You Think It Is At All
On two occasions thus far, I have suffered the devastating loss of life. The me that was alive from birth to 21 died at a Grateful Dead show in March of 1986 when I met Jesus. My whole conception of right and wrong, truth and falsehood, good and bad, died with that 21 year old drug-addicted hippie. That me died in possession of a hundred-hit sheet of 3-day-old blotter acid, and tickets to 12 more concerts on the Spring Tour. Things that I was confident were very good for me. And a new me arose in his place. A better me, yes, but with similar limitations at being able to predict the future accurately.
Losing those ”good things”, this death and rebirth, was the first best thing that ever happened to me.
A Second Death; But This Was Good…Wasn’t It?
The second me died on May 15, 2009 when, under duress, I left my wife of 22 and a half years and a houseful of six minor children for whom I had given everything I had to give. They, including my unfaithful wife, were my whole life. Like a vessel ripped loose from its anchorage at a dock, I was completely un-moored from the reality I had known from age 23 to 45 and a half. That role and those relationships formed my entire conception of who I was. That me was as indissoluble from that life as if blue dye was dissolved in water. How would one ever separate them?
There was no “me” apart from the life I’d spent more than two decades living. And yet, through actions not mine to control, that version of me died; along with the at-home father and husband. Those things were so incredibly valuable and good to me, that the whole notion that I would ever see good again, died too.
And yet…
Life Can Only Be Understood Looking Backwards
Looking back these 12 years, this 3rd iteration of me can see and understand. I now know that this devastation was the second best thing that ever happened to me. Not only did it bring about a much needed humbling, it opened the door to a relationship with a life partner with whom I have never been more happy, more authentic, more complete, or more grateful.
I carry in my mind an appreciation for a God who may not keep bad things from happening to me, but who will be with me through them and will work them out for good. Almost like Someone who isn’t stuck in sequential time could see down the tracks and cause enough good to wipe away every tear.
So yes, I repeat, beware of the confidence that you know what is good for you. Rather, do your utmost to be good to others, treating them as you’d wish to be treated. And cultivate your awareness and relationship with One who can see further down the road of life than you, One who knows you better than you know yourself, and Who can love you more fully than you ever could love yourself. One who does know what is good for you. That’s a better place for your confidence.
