One of my favorite quotes is from Walt Kelly, creator of the Pogo comic strip. On the first observance of Earth Day in 1970, he did a comic that ended with this quote:
We have met the Enemy and He is Us
I love this for its simple, elegant, truth.
I am proposing a modification for your consideration:
I have met the Enemy and He is Me
I am certainly my own worst enemy. I don’t need a government or a political party to blame for the shortcomings and failures in my life. I don’t need to look any farther than my own face in the mirror.
My hunch is that you and I are the same in that regard. If there is something in your life that you aren’t happy with, it’s almost a certainty the government didn’t do it to you.
It’s a remote possibility that someone besides yourself is to blame. But my experience has been that even when I’ve been let down and hurt by someone else, I put myself in that position by over-investing in that account. I expected a return they just couldn’t give…even if they had wanted to.
I don’t expect anyone in this world to make me happy. That’s a God-sized job. And the biggest impediment in His way is me. If I am unhappy, there is no doubt that somewhere along the chain of cause and effect, I have done the lion’s share of contributing to that feeling.
Of course, I am beyond grateful for those people and circumstances that enrich my life and contribute to my satisfaction, contentment, and joy, but I don’t expect them to reach the place in my mind that only I can go. I get to decide what kind of person to be.
Good people, the best people, make me want to be my best version. But they have no power to make me become the best version. That’s on me.
One of my favorite NT passages is in Luke chapter 8. Jesus is with his disciples and decides to go to ”the other side” of the Sea of Galilee. They get into a boat and off they sail. Jesus falls asleep in the boat on the way across, leaving the navigation in the hands of accomplished fishermen, many of whom have grown up around this lake and made their livelihoods from it.
But, a storm of high wind comes down on the lake, sunken as it is in the topography of the region, and the boat begins to fill with water, threatening to swamp the boat miles from shore.
These seasoned fishermen, who have undoubtedly been in boats during storms on this body of water before, decide that now is a good time to wake up the carpenter from his nap to tell him, Master, we perish.. And the carpenter from Nazareth rebuked the wind and the waves so that the lake became calm again. Then, in my favorite part of the story, he turns to the disciples and says, ”Where is your faith…”?
Luke’s narrative says, ”then they were afraid…”.
Excuse me?
Then…they were afraid?
They must have been at least troubled, if not outright terrified, to have awakened Jesus to tell him the boat was filling with water and they were going to drown. And now that the wind and water are calm again these seasoned fishermen are afraid?
You’d think that the act of waking him up would have shown their faith. It seems that Jesus would have had no need to ask where their faith was. They called on him, after all. But apparently, they had done so just so he wouldn’t sleep through the tragedy. Clearly, they were astonished by what he had done to save them. They sure hadn’t expected this. Now they are more afraid of the solution than they had been of the problem.
Not exactly fear inducing, eh? Or is it?
I try to see my place in this story. This small vessel is so tossed by wind-whipped waves out on the open lake that it is taking in water, yet Jesus is asleep? That would have been one heckuva rolling, bucking little boat, but he was undisturbed. Would that have inspired me…or angered me? Would I have remembered that at the start of the journey he had said, ”Let us go to the other side” and since we weren’t yet at the other side the journey wasn’t over? Would I have thought he didn’t care? (In another gospel, they did think that). When he finally does wake up to calm the situation just by speaking, would that have changed my life forever? Would I have finally realized who this person is, and in light of that, how foolish my fear is?
Like all of us, these men had placed their faith somewhere. Maybe in themselves and their seamanship. Maybe in their ability to predict the weather. Maybe in general circumstances. Maybe they knew they were good swimmers. I can’t know. I’m sure Jesus’ question was rhetorical. He knew that all of us put faith in something, but in a pinch, it may not be the right thing.
I suspect that Jesus knew these men were rugged, working class, tough, and pretty fearless. I suspect he knew they were self-reliant, independent, and resilient. They would have needed a pretty close brush with mortality, even though this was likely a very familiar occurrence to many of these men. But not at this magnitude. Not with wind at this ferocity.
Jesus knows how to bring each of us to zero. He knows how to bring you to the end of yourself. He knows that as long as you’re trusting in you, you cannot be simultaneously trusting in Him.
Not far from where this little boat eventually made safe landfall, Jesus said, Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs in the Kingdom of God. Only those who recognize their bankrupt spiritual state are fit for the Kingdom. He has a way of breaking all of us who say we want to follow Him. Even if it means we’re in the storm of our lives, and it looks like He’s sleeping through it and completely oblivious.
A year in and some of the old normal won’t be resurrected.
Beth and I turned on the ACC basketball tournament last night and remembered that it was a year ago that the tournament was shut down due to the the first outbreak of positive Covid cases. Within a few days, the NCAA tournament was cancelled. And it wasn’t long before all sports took a hiatus.
I remember seeing the first masks in the neighborhood grocery store. They brought to mind photos I’d seen of heavily populated Chinese cities where the citizens mask up due to smog and air pollution. But seeing people wearing blue masks here in my little town in America felt surreal.
We made a decision early on that we would do our best to act as if we were already carriers. I talked to my two adult kids and the teenager living with me that we needed to curtail all contact with non-family, non-household people unless we were working and wearing masks.
That was hard on my teen-aged son who was very used to having friends over and hanging out with them. But it was more real when he was sent home for his last year of high school to finish his senior year on a Chromebook from his bedroom.
I think younger people in general have had a harder time with a more restrictive lifestyle. As I’ve previously written, younger people are more exploratory than exploitative in life. They haven’t had enough time to craft a life that they are sure they’ll like and that will bring them the riches of contentment.
The sports thing actually became a welcome change of pace. I soon found I didn’t miss it at all. We filled that time with other things that were much more shared and therefore more enjoyable. Virtual, nightly attendance to some game or other had felt normal. But just because something is habitual and autonomic doesn’t mean it should be normal.
Maybe too much of life is lived that way, without putting a lot thought into it. But the new reality of Covid created the context to actually think about the mundane and ordinary. So many things that once were normal no longer feel normal. Even watching movies is odd. The characters have no masks on and we shrug and say, ”Pre-Covid”.
So, for me at least there are some positive take-aways from being forced to re-think how life is done. It’s not a bad idea to have that conversation with yourself and those you do life with every so often. If nothing else, Covid has helped reinforce the belief that my favorite things in the world, and the things and people that make life worth living, are pretty close by after all.
Do you wake up in the morning and decide to feel bad? Ever?
And, to be specific, I’m talking about emotions here, not physical ailments. Though, no one wakes up wanting to feel sick, either. It’s certainly true that our emotional selves live at the mercy of our physical selves. There’s no denying the physical constitution dictates a measure of mental and emotional well-being.
But emotionally speaking, in general terms, and in the absence of pathology, bad feelings show up because you’ve invited them. You don’t have to explicitly ask them in for coffee, they just barge in as the plus-one of your thoughts.
No, most of us don’t choose to feel bad. At least not in a way we’re consciously aware of.
But, without a doubt, there are things you can do to guarantee you’ll feel bad, right? Try to go through your day noticing every single thing that is wrong with the world. Think about everything in your life that isn’t how you want it to be. If that doesn’t do the trick, think of the things that are okay and see what you can do today to spoil them rather than nurture them.
What about feeling good? Can you decide to feel good? I think you can. You probably can’t guarantee good feelings the same way you can guarantee bad ones, but you can certainly choose what to focus on. You can direct your attention.
Here’s a way to give yourself a chance to feel good about things today.
First, think of how you can guarantee feeling bad.
As a kid, I asked questions non-stop. I have early memories of car rides during which I looked out the windows and posed a non-stop litany of one question after another to my bedraggled mom as she tried her best to answer.
Being an early reader eventually helped to quiet some questions. I could read STOP signs and such. But it opened up other questions. I must have been about five when driving along one night, we passed a large, brightly lettered sign that I sounded out, ”T-o-p-l-e-ssss G-g-rrr-ll-ss”. ”Mom,” I asked in alarm, ”why don’t the girls in that place have tops?” My five year old imagination was distraught that the poor girls were cut in half.
My firstborn was quite precocious, and also very inquisitive. She did something unique among her siblings. She created a catch-all word for any object that she didn’t know about. Her word was ”pumen.” When she used it she would scrunch her shoulders up around her little ears. This was her physical question mark to punctuate her inquiry.
Pointing at something she didn’t know about, she would ask, ”What’s that pumen?”<<scrunch>> For a while we lived in a world chock-full of pumens…and shoulder-scrunches.
Funny, right?
And Beth tells the story of her firstborn asking so many questions that after answering her for hours on end, she would finally have to tell her, ”Questions are closed” just to get her to quiet down a moment and take a breath.
I find that level of curiosity delightful!
You may have been the same. Or maybe your children, or grandchildren, are similarly filled with curiosity about the world, and they want to know EVERYTHING, right now!
But what about you? Now? Are you still curious to learn new stuff? Do you have any burning questions?
It is said of lawyers that they try to never ask a question in court they don’t already know the answer to. Surprise and court are not a good mix. Most of us don’t have that luxury.
What I’m wondering is this:
If you could know the answer to only ONE question, what would that question be?
That may be worth taking some time and pondering, because if you can nail down that question, you’ll learn what is REALLY important to you.
If you decide to figure out what your question is, pay attention as well to what it isn’t. I’m guessing if you’re anything like me, a lot of clutter that consumes your mental and emotional energy just isn’t that important in the grand scheme of things.
If you feel like sharing your question, feel free to do so in the comments. Not that any of us will have the answers, but we may all benefit from the questions.
I caught him, slippery, broad-shouldered and born in the veil, on a cool, cool morning in 1998. I had trimmed my nails close in anticipation of playing the role of midwife again, so when he was born shrink-wrapped in the caul, the amniotic sac completely intact around his little body, I couldn’t get a purchase with my fingertips to tear it.
Fortunately, Lisa was there with her fingernails and did the trick, opening the package of the amazing gift he has been from that moment up to the moment I sit writing this.
He is a good kid.
When he was younger, he learned to ice skate at the old rink where Eastland Mall used to stand. We fell in love with hockey from some other dad’s and kids that skated there, and it wasn’t long before he began to play.
He is a fantastic skater, built with a low center of gravity and powerful legs and he developed a wicked wrist shot at a young age.
But…hockey rewards aggression. My oldest son is not aggressive. He is the kindest kid of all my seven. He is quite literally the second kindest person I know, behind only Beth-The-Kindhearted herself. He is so kind that in games playing travel hockey on a team with the best players of his birth year, when he would score on an opposing goalie, he would never show off with a big celebration. Often, he would tap the goalie’s pads with his stick and encourage him!
”You’ll get the next one,” he would say, not wanting the kid to feel bad.
And he’s wise for his 23 years; the living, breathing demonstration of what people mean when they talk about an old soul. I think those two qualities are inseparably linked. His wisdom is born out of his kindness. In Hebrew, his name means, ”He Hears”, and he does, he really does. He hears with compassion and empathy.
That’s a paraphrase from my memory. I did not look it up for attribution.
The quote makes a good point. If you don’t have a goal in mind, a destination to reach, then any result will do. All outcomes are equally good if you haven’t bothered to select a specific outcome.
In practice, satisfaction in life is measured by how well we are doing at meeting implicit expectations. There is a mathematical formula that is descriptive of this phenomenon:
Happiness = Reality – Expectations
If true (and my experience has proven to me at least that it is), a thoughtful look reveals that the only part of that equation in your direct control is the Expectations part. The more accepting you are of however Reality unfolds, without imposing any particular expectations on its unfolding, other than the expectation that it will unfold, the happier you will be.
Can we reconfigure the equation to get any different outcome? Let’s try. By the magic of algebra, solving for Reality, we have:
Reality = – Expectations – Happiness
This equation posits that Reality unfolds regardless of either your expectations or feelings about it.
And then we can also solve for Expectations, and we get:
Expectations = Reality – Happiness
This final look shows that Expectations are True (in the sense of accurate) when you accept what Is ( how Reality unfolds) and disregard how it makes you feel.
So, no matter how we slice it, you can guarantee un-Happiness by expecting to be Happy.
Happiness then, is a poor goal for one who expects it. The rejection of the expectation of Happiness as irrational is the surest way to experience it in Reality. You’re welcome.
Early mornings & freshly ground coffee…it’s all downhill from there.
It has been said that you are what you do…habitually.
If that’s true, what are you?
I’m an early-rising, coffee-drinking, Beth-loving, blog-writing, compulsive-reading, tele-marketing, tv-watching, over-eating, guitar-playing, Gabriel Allon and Carolina Hurricanes fan.
Some of those habits I’m pretty proud of. Others, not so much. A year ago even, my list was different. I was a different person then. Hopefully you were too. I have developed some habits I didn’t have then. I’ve replaced some. I had a couple other serious habits on that list. One needed to go, one needs to come back.
A year ago, I was 3rd on the American server for the online game Forge of Empires. Yeah, that was me…ugh!
I was also a habitual walker. Like…habitual, as in almost 5 miles a day.
The walking is coming back. The gaming is staying in the coffin.
I wrote a post a few weeks back about exploration vs. exploitation. It occurs to me that good habits, while certainly in the exploitation column, also offer some of the aspects of exploration. And let me qualify my use of the adjective ”good” above. By good habits, I don’t mean ”healthy”, I mean ”fun” or ”pleasurable”.
Most of my habits have those qualities. Only one is done out of sheer necessity…unless you also count coffee-drinking, which I probably should.
Make your own list. Check it twice. Which habits are naughty. Which are nice? Which add to your life and make it worth living? Which are detriments, and make you not the person you want to be.
The wonderful thing about habits is they’re like that old Steve Martin joke about keeping a litter bag in your car. They don’t take up a lot of room, and if it gets too full, you can always chuck it out the window.
Learning takes courage. It is humbling to admit that you do not know. And it is impossible to learn what you don’t want to know. Learning affects the ego with the possibility that you have been mistaken about a subject you thought you knew, or, it can introduce facts and concepts you’ve never heard before. Uncomfortable, unfamiliar, challenging truths make us confront our biases. Since it is the accumulation of knowledge and experiences that make you, YOU, a metamorphosis akin to an ego-death might be needed to emerge as the new, more enlightened version of YOURSELF.
Learning also requires intelligence, which can be defined as an aptitude for grasping truths. The greater this aptitude, the greater the chance that learning occurs even without specific intentionality. To be sure, there are very smart people who use their intelligence, not in pursuit of truths to grasp, but in devising systems for denying truth and for creating, protecting and propagating lies. To me, using intelligence this way is the essence of evil.
Rather, a good life is built around using intelligence to pursue and discover truth, and once found, to act on it. If a new discovery forces a change of belief, or a change of direction, so be it. How many ideas in your life are you absolutely certain about? How certain are you that you’ve been exposed to all the truth you’ll ever need? It is written that, “Every man’s ways are right in his own eyes.” But that verse is a warning that absolute certainty is a luxury reserved for a very limited handful of truths.
Seeking out, learning, and acting on truth sounds good until you realize it forces you to act like an intellectual nomad. Your concept of self must be fluid and dynamic, as new facts overturn previously staked out beliefs. So, the learner lives in an intellectual tent that can be quickly taken down, moved, set up elsewhere, maybe enlarged, maybe subtracted from. Brick and mortar rigidity is unhelpful here.
There is a kind of false security that comes from past knowledge. But tradition must never become a replacement for truth. Truth can move with us into the present and will guide us into the future. So let those who claim to be learners be courageous and determined to tear down any house of lies they encounter. Ruthlessly reject untruths, falsehoods, and biases as soon as new facts and new information is discovered. Pitch your tent upon newly learned truth.
Get ready Dorothy, this ain’t gonna look like Kansas anymore…
”You will know the Truth and the Truth will make you free.” ~ John 8:32
I’ve been thinking about this verse a lot. My life was turned around nearly 35 years ago when I bumped into the Truth. I found out that Truth is a Person. I had erroneously thought that truth was an accumulation of facts and knowledge, but it is so much more than that.
The NT was written in Greek. In this language, the word truth is the same as the word reality. I am fascinated by this. I try to think of truth and reality and the person Jesus as equivalents.
The verse above indicates that knowing truth can set one free.
But just what can it set you free from?
Only from a lie, right?
The interesting thing about being enslaved by a lie is this. If it is clever enough, subtle enough, and deeply imbedded enough, you won’t even know you’re enslaved by it. That was me. Think of Keanu Reeves character Neo in the Matrix before Lawrence’s Fishburne’s Morpheus gives him that red pill and he takes it.
The verse implies that a person desires to be freed from enslaving lies. It implies an implicit value of truth over lies. It implies that truth should be loved, and sought, and applied, specifically for its power to make one free.
I am not afraid of truth. Even the most uncomfortable ones. Like Neo, I’d rather eat gruel in reality, than eat steak in an illusory fantasy of my own creation.
