It occurred to me today that I have only recently become acquainted with fear, while others have always known it.
On Friday, I got back from my run memorializing the birthday of Maud Arbery with a 2.23 mile run. I don’t usually run on Fridays, but I didn’t figure a 2.23 mile run was going to be that big of a deal on an off-day.
I wonder if Maud thought his run on February 23rd was going to be a big deal.
I was so proud of myself, posting the hashtag on Twitter and then commenting on my own post with the screenshot of my mileage, thinking of myself as a social activist, as if I’d actually done anything that substantial.
During the run, thinking about Maud pretty much the entire time, I remembered LeBron James and his post on social media from last week, mentioning that black men are hunted whenever they leave their homes.
I can’t even imagine what that would be like. No one noticed me during my run on Friday, no one looked at me suspiciously or decided to follow me while keeping a watchful eye. No one grabbed their guns to come after me to ask me some questions about what I was doing.
I came across a police officer, during my run on Friday. He was turning a corner in his squad car, a corner that I was approaching. I thought to myself of the stories that I’ve heard where people have been unduly harassed by police officers, for whatever reason. I thought to myself that I’ve never had any reason to not trust the police in my neighborhood.
One of Maud’s killers was a retired police officer.
I was also thinking about my daughters and their questions about why I was running on an off-day, trying to explain to them how someone could be murdered in February, but no one gets arrested until May. Trying to explain why racism still exists in the world.
Trying to explain, and mostly failing.
The word ‘asymptomatic’ has been bothering me a lot lately. In fact, it’s got me down-right scared. I don’t know who out there in the world has COVID-19 because of the word ‘asymptomatic’. I don’t know if it’s safe to give my neighbor a ride to the grocery store while his car is in the shop. I don’t know if it’s safe for my son to hang-out with his girlfriend that he hasn’t seen in person in a couple of months. I’m afraid that some ‘asymptomatic’ human is going to infect me and then I’m going to infect one of my kids, or my wife, and then what?!?!
I think about my fear, and then I think about Maud’s fear and LeBron’s fear, and it makes me wish for a world where there is less to be afraid. It also makes me a little bit ashamed to be so little acquainted with fear. My white privilege has me pretty spoiled, it seems.
And, as the story continues to unfold, and people politicize Maud’s death, and people yell at each other about race, no one at all seems interested in listening –> they only seem to be interested in being heard.
It occurred to me today that I’m an imperfect father.
To be honest, it’s occurred to me a thousand times, or maybe a hundred thousand times, before this.
The other day, I finally got fed up with my children being mean to each other. They are siblings, the three of them, and they treat each other with a malice that they seem to reserve for each other. This isn’t to say that they are overtly evil to each other, for I’d have stepped in a long time ago if this had been true. Rather, they are snide and derogatory in a way that has worn on my nerves for a long time, but I’ve done nothing about it.
So, I got fed up the other day and I sat them all down in the same room together and I WENT OFF. Not in a rage-driven sort of way, but rather, I laid down the law in no uncertain terms and set parameters for future behavior and consequences for violations.
And then, within the hour, I realized something else.
They learned it from watching me. I know that this is true because, after I told them to stop doing it, I tried to stop doing it (to be a good example), and it was so hard. I caught myself doing it within forty-five minutes of telling them to stop doing it.
Do you remember that drug ad, from decades ago, where the father comes in to his son’s bedroom, to confront the teen about doing drugs, and the teen says, “I learned it by watching you”? That was me the other day. I was ashamed of myself, as I have been so often before when I’ve realized that my children are bad because they’ve seen me being bad, and I hate that part of the parenting process.
Saying mean stuff is just something that I do, and it’s wrong.
It’s no wonder that they do this automatically. They’ve seen me do it automatically so often that they, like little copy machines, are now running around the house doing it and I’ve had enough of it.
What a hypocrite I am, for being tired of listening to my kids as they do the things I’ve taught them to do.
So, while I could steer this post into a discussion on hypocrisy, or the perils of parenting, I think I would rather talk about the world that we live in where everyone, myself included, seems way too quick with the negative commentary.
I notice this a lot on Twitter, and other social meda outlets, as well. In fact, it’s so prevalent, people speaking poorly of each other, that it surprises me when I see someone with something positive to say. You know that things are bad when the norm becomes the negativity and the exception to the rule becomes something uplifting and positive.
I think it comes from a need that we all feel, made worse by social media in my opinion, to have something to say. The title of the blog post, “If you can’t say something nice…” is a reference to an old piece of advice from many years ago –> If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.
Imagine all of the silence if all of the negativity was just stopped, somehow.
As a teacher, I should know better than this; I have, on numerous occasions, been educated on the importance for teachers to be sure to use more positivity than negativity in my classrooms. I have been present for multiple trainings discussing the ratio of praise to criticism.
I’m left to wonder how I got to be such a negative person. The influence of a society that has become increasingly negative? The pressure that I’ve always felt to have something to add? The lack of value that I put on silence?
And it’s not that I am negative with my own children, at least I don’t think it is. I would hope that my wife would have said something to me if I was being too negative with them. Rather, I think I just say a bit too many negative things, in general.
When I had my three children sat down in the living room, to let them know that I wasn’t going to allow things to continue as they had been, I told them that silence is always a better choice than negativity. Of course, as I was saying that to them, I was yet to realize that they’re getting me as a role model of negativity. What a fool I must have appeared to be to them when I was telling them to be silent rather than mean.
Maybe, my children would have been better off, all these years, with a role model of silence. Maybe I would have been better off, all these years, having kept my mouth shut rather than being so negative.
Maybe our world would be a better place if we would all just keep silent in the absence of something positive to say.
It occurred to me today that the truth is getting harder and harder to find in our world.
On Friday, Jimmy Kimmel tweeted a video of Vice President Mike Pence dropping off supplies to a nursing home. In the video, Pence seemed to suggest that he wanted to carry empty boxes up to the door of the nursing home, for the sake of the cameras that were watching at the time.
Of course, this post by Kimmel set off a storm of people with not-nice things to say about the vice president. Until, Friday afternoon, when it was discovered by fact-checkers that Kimmel doctored the video, originally available from other sources, to make the vice president look bad. This set off a storm of people with not-nice things to say about Jimmy Kimmel. Which then set off a storm of people with not-nice things to say about the people who were saying not-nice things about Jimmy Kimmel. Which set off a storm of people with not-nice things to say about the people who were saying not-nice things about the vice president.
In this midst of it all, it occurred to me that people lie.
Now, this shouldn’t have come to me as a surprise. I lie. You lie. People in the news lie and my neighbor lies and my children lie.
Lying has been going on for as long as people have been talking to each other.
But, as the Jimmy Kimmel episode illustrated to me yesterday, we now have to fact-check things. When did this start? You could make the point that fact-checking has been around for as long as late night television hosts have been making the news by saying not-nice things about others, but I suspect fact-checking has been around for longer than that.
Have you ever fact-checked before? I’m sure you have. Probably not long after you realized how to lie, which psychologists suggest is right around three years of age. You see, it’s at three years of age that children begin to understand that other people are different from them –> they feel differently, think differently, act differently. It’s at that point that children also discover that others don’t know what is going on in the head of the child. This makes lying possible.
Of course, the “bridge too far” when it comes to lying is the lie that is preposterous enough for us to wonder about its authenticity. This is how parents know when their kids are lying. Since children lack practice at lying, they tell some whoppers. And, in the process of doing so, they set off those internal flags in the minds of their parents.
What does fact-checking look like at that early age? When Bobby tells Tina that Suzy called her a poop-face, Tina goes to ask Suzy if she called her a poop-face, and Tina says no, and so the two of them go over to Bobby and kick him in the shins.
Sound familiar? You’ve fact-checked before.
So, considering the fact that fact-checking is something that we’ve been doing pretty much our entire lives, how are people in the media able to “pull the wool over our eyes”?
When Tina goes to Suzy to ask her if what Bobby said was true, there is something in Tina that says, “That doesn’t sound like Suzy.” So, Tina has a reason to do the extra work of fact-checking, and the reason is that she doesn’t believe what she’s heard from Bobby.
Notice that word: ‘believe’.
Jimmy Kimmel convinced enough people that Mike Pence was delivering empty boxes to the front door of a nursing home because those people believed that was a possibility. They wanted to believe it, so it was a lie that was easier to sell.
I used to watch The X-Files back in the late 90s and early 2000s. The main character in the show spent a lot of his time being led around by his beliefs in paranormal phenomenon. Of course, a major theme of the show was Mulder’s desire to believe, and it was this desire to believe that caused Mulder to be manipulated by people who found it easier to sell him certain lies because of his beliefs, and his desire to believe.
Of course, the problem with this is: each of us has a different set of beliefs that determines whether or not we’re willing to believe the lies that people are trying to sell us. Not everyone believed Jimmy Kimmel early in the day on Friday; if everyone had, there would have been no fact-checking leading to the big reveal, later that day.
And, just like anything else, the kinds of lies that people are willing to believe fall on a linear scale. People are unwilling, most of the time, to believe lies that are extreme, and much more willing to believe when the lies are not-too-outrageous. The number of people willing to believe in a government conspiracy to kill JFK is smaller than the number of people that are willing to believe that all politicians are corrupt.
The other thing that occurred to me with this whole Jimmy Kimmel thing was that the fact-checking wasn’t then fact-checked, at least as far as I’ve heard. Why not? Who’s to say that the sources used in the fact-checking shouldn’t themselves be fact-checked?
Where does the insanity stop?
Let’s say someone tells me, and a friend of mine, a lie. I fact-check the lie, because it seemed in my head that it was a lie when I heard it, and I find a source that says that it’s a lie. My friend, who believed the lie in the first place, doesn’t fact-check the lie. Later, with the information that I have on the original lie, I go to my friend and I say, “We were lied to.” Then, my friend fact-checks the source that I used to fact-check the original lie and finds a source that says that my source was a lie. How do we ever reasonably establish whether or not we are hearing lies?
It occurred to me today that, maybe we’ve been doing this whole voting thing the wrong way.
I guess you could call me a Never Trumper; in current terms, it comes closest to describing my political position. I’ve been a conservative all of my life, and until 2016, I would have described myself as a Republican. I have never supported the decisions of the conservatives in this country who voted for him, which has made me a persona non grata with some. That’s okay.
I remember back to 2016, when friends and loved ones in my circles back then, time and time again, said things to me like, “I’m voting for him because I can’t bring myself to vote for her.” or “I’m picking the lesser of two evils.” or “I’d vote for a third-party candidate, but that’s just going to help her win.” or “Why do you throw your vote away on those third-party candidates?”
I voted for Darrell Castle in 2016, and I don’t lose any sleep at night about it.
I thought it was wrong at the time, this “lesser of two evils” approach to voting. I still think it’s wrong. When my friends looked at Hillary Clinton back then and decided that Donald Trump was the better choice, not because of any great character traits of his (does he have any of those?), but because they thought she was worse, were they feeling the way that I’m feeling now as I look at Biden and think of my disgust for Donald Trump?
Yes, it was no doubt this way for them back then. The height of hypocrisy, for me, would be to condemn those people who voted for Trump in 2016 while I consider voting for Biden, to get rid of Trump, in 2020.
The “principaled” version of me in 2016 was pretty sure that it wasn’t going to make much of a difference one way or the other, whether I voted third-party or not. The same me, who wants to stick to the same principals, is MUCH more concerned about our country getting out from under its current president.
It’s not that hard, it would seem, to stick to your convictions when there’s nothing on the line. It is, however, much more difficult when there’s something to lose.
Here we sit, in the midst of a global pandemic. A pandemic that, for one reason or another, seems to be hitting the United States particularly hard. I don’t blame anyone for these circumstances, but I can’t help but wonder about other countries who have faired better than ours. And, maybe I’ve been listening to certain media outlets (not all of them leftist, even) a little bit too much lately, but I’m starting to wonder whether we’d have done better with better leadership.
And, those friends of mine, who voted for Trump in 2016, they’re wondering, too –> I know they are because I’ve noticed from those people (if they’re still a part of my life, four years later) that they’ve morphed into two different groups of people.
One of those groups, I’ll call the Remorseful.
The other of those groups, I’ll call the Rabid.
And, here I sit, a Never Trumper, thinking to myself…
“This is unreal.”
I don’t blame the Remorseful because of what they did back in 2016. But, the Rabid are starting to look more and more scary to me. I can’t have any civil discourse with them and I can’t follow them on social media anymore and I most certainly can’t try to change their minds.
But, I also can’t help but think to myself that voting for the lesser of two evils didn’t work out too well this last time. I thought it was a bad idea back in 2016, and I told some of my closest friends as much, back then, and they called me an idealist, and they called me naive.
Now, granted, a certain percentage of the time, voting for the lesser of two evils is going to work because, a certain pecentage of the time, you don’t end up with one candidate being that much different than another. THE BIG SECRET IS THIS: as much as it might pain people to hear it, having one president in the office, assuming that they have the “right stuff”, is often not that different than having a different president in office. Their choices might be different and their opinions might be different, but they’ll tend to behave similarly.
That didn’t happen this time.
This time people voted for, what they thought of at the time, as the lesser of two evils. Instead, we got an ego-maniacal whackjob.
Can I just take an opportunity right here to wonder whether or not Hillary would have been so bad?!?!
And, in defense of those friends of mine, who have maybe used the “choose the lesser of two evils approach”, who knows how many times in their lives, I can’t say I blame them for rolling the dice one more time. But this time, the “choose the lesser of two evils approach” was a bust. And it came home to roost. And I think that many of my conservative friends are starting to see that.
The thing to do with remorse is to make sure that it eventually leads to change.
As for me, and my silly principles, I’m not sure what I’ll do. Will I place my egg in some third-party basket yet again and hope for the best? Will I do in 2020 what I swore I wouldn’t do in 2016?
This is the second part of a two-part post that won’t make any sense if you haven’t read THE FIRST PART.
Continuing on…
–>What doesn’t make sense now, might later.
I can look at a little, nine-square grid and see many missing blocks and I’ll think to myself, “None of that makes any sense.” But, I’ll go about solving other parts of the puzzle and some of those empty spots in that mostly-empty grid will get filled in via the process, up until the point where there are only a couple of empty spots left. Then, I’ll look at those few remaining spaces and I’ll think, “Well, it’s obvious what goes in that spot and what goes there, and look, it’s done.”
Not every puzzle you face in life is ready to be solved when you first encounter it. Sometimes, the puzzle needs to be worn down by the passage of time and the changing circumstances; only then might you be able to solve it.
Additionally, I sometimes cheat. I cheat because, the way I do things, I face each daily puzzle from my calendar and I won’t move on until I finish the puzzle that I have in front of me (that’s how I do it). If I get stuck on a puzzle for too long (two days or three days or four), then I feel a pressure to just cheat to get the answer. So, I’ll turn the puzzle over and look at the answers on the back, just to get one of the blocks that I need –> I don’t usually need more than that. I hate doing it, and I won’t do it unless I really am in need. But, even this has its own little lesson.
You might not be prepared to solve every puzzle when you come against it. Sometimes, you need to be a better you to be able to solve the hardest puzzles.
–>The biggest win comes from the longest odds and it tastes the sweetest.
There really isn’t much joy for me, anymore, in completing easy-level puzzles. I do it to stay up on my practice, but it’s not a challenge to my skill set. I can’t imagine Michael Jordan would be that impressed with himself, were he to win a game of horse against some sixth-grader. Antonio Esfandiari, one of the greatest poker players in recent years, would not be that enthused in a win against me and my poker buddies.
But, when I have been struggling with a puzzle that is particularly rough, one that started with only a quarter of the blocks as given (there are 81 blocks to be solved in a Sudoku puzzle), and I have battled and persevered and succeeded, those puzzles are worth a little cheer of success.
–>Sometimes, luck is all there is.
There are certain puzzles, of the most difficult level, when you get to the place where you have deployed all of your tactical approaches and wisdom and learned maneuvers and the puzzle won’t budge. It might be down to a single block that only can only be one of a couple of possibilities and the only choice for you to make is the choice to guess. Those are the puzzles that you complete in pencil. When it comes time to make that guess, and you play out the rest of the puzzle and you make it to the end having had your guess justified, then you can fill in those blocks with a pen. Otherwise, when you make your choice and it turns out, ten or twelve or twenty blocks ahead, that your guess was the wrong one, you’ll be glad to you did the puzzle in pencil.
For me, having my back up against the wall with no other option but to take a chance and see how it turns out, I hate having to guess. And, when faced with a guess, I will try to look as far ahead into the puzzle, based on that one guess, as I can look to see whether or not the whole things pans out. Maybe there are times when all you can do is your best and the rest is up to luck.
And so, Sudoku has taught me much about life. I’d encourage you to find a hobby that will challenge you to be its master. Perhaps you can rise to the challenge and learn your own lessons along the way.
It occurred to me today that I have learned more from Sudoku than some of the college classes I’ve taken!
So much, in fact, that this will be a two-part post, with the second part coming tomorrow.
Anyway…
I have been a Sudoku player for many years, but I’ve become pretty fanatic about it over the last few years especially. And, as silly as it might sound to hear me talk about the game that I love to play, there are quite a few things that I’ve learned from Sudoku.
–>What might seem hard isn’t always that hard, and what might seem easy might not be that easy.
Most Sudoku puzzles have a difficulty level assigned to them. If you download them from the internet or find them in a book or –my favorite– pull them off of the daily calendar, it will say somewhere on the puzzle what difficulty level it is. I have, on numerous occasions been more challenged by what I was told was easy and not challenged enough by what I was told was hard. Just over the weekend, I spent forty-five minutes on an easy puzzle that should have taken seven minutes, just to turn around and complete a hard puzzle that should have taken me a couple of hours in seventeen minutes.
Just so you know, when other people say that something is hard, what they mean is, it was hard for them. That doesn’t mean it will be hard for you. Similarly, when someone tells you that something is easy, be warned; it might be hard for you.
–>Practice really does make you better.
I don’t know if it should have taken me this long (I’m forty-four) to learn that this is true. In my own defense, I probably learned this was true earlier, but I don’t think I’ve understood it as deeply then as I do now. I have been practicing my skills at Sudoku for a long time, and I am better at it than I’ve ever been. I have learned from the process of doing these puzzles what tricks to use. I know how to change my approach when I am stumped so that I continue to progress. And –this is huge– I’ve learned that you don’t have to be away from something for very long before you start to lose your edge.
If I ever get pulled away from my daily Sudoku practice, even if it’s only for a few days, I notice that I don’t have the skills that I did have because I let myself slip. If you think getting to the top of something is a challenge, try staying on top.
–>Sometimes, it’s just best to walk away.
I will literally sit in front of a Sudoku puzzle, just staring at it, going over the possibilities in my head until I am so frustrated that I am not aware of anything else; just my task and my approach and my frustration and my failure. And I can sit there in front of that puzzle and stare at it for as long as I want to, but I’m not going to get any further for my effort. When it gets like this, I need to walk away. I will get up and leave and go do something else. Then, I can come back and sit down and, in seconds, I will have the next step to take, because all I needed was a change to clear my head so I could come back and see things differently.
And, this was one of the greatest lessons on my life. How many times have I just walked away because I needed a chance to think, a chance to breathe, a chance to reset my mind? And then, to re-engage when you’ve had a break, everything becomes so much clearer.
–>Recognizing patterns is a must.
There is an inner geometry to a Sudoku puzzle, beyond that which is understood by basic players of the game. That geometry helps you, if you know it well enough, to recognize the patterns in the puzzle as they develop. When a block in a certain spot get solved, and you know the geometry of the puzzle and recognize the patterns, it gives you other block solutions that you might not have had otherwise. It took me many hundreds of puzzles to start to see the patterns, but now, I see them in so many of the puzzles that I do.
I think pattern recognition is a part of what makes for the most observant citizens in our society. The things that are going on in the world around us, the problems that need to be solved, the issues of contention that we’ve had with each other, the difficulties that weigh down the human condition; these issues are not old issues. They are part of a bigger pattern that we should be recognizing when we see it, so we can do something intelligent about solving these issues. It’s the twenty-first century, folks, and we should be beyond some of this garbage.
It occurred to me today that our world has been shaken.
The pandemic has shaken our world, as a whole, and each of the individual worlds that we all live in. I have come to understand this through a number of changes that have been wrought in my life. While some of them have been difficult to grapple with (I’m a teacher who has transitioned to e-learning, for better or for worse), others of those changes have been welcome and –I dare say– enjoyable.
I kind of like not having to do some of the things that I am no longer able to do.
In time when things are shaking, we look for what’s solid. In an earthquake, you are told to get to an area of your house that is less likely to fall (more solid). We build our houses on foundations (more solid), rather than just on the dirt that is prone to movement.
You get the idea.
So, the question is, what have you been looking to –what solid thing– as the world has been shaking.
Weeks ago, I guess it has been now, I first saw a video that took my breath away:
Now, the reason that the video took my breath away was probably different than the reason that this video might take someone else’s breath away. It is, on its surface, an inspiriational attempt at rallying the troops and sounding the battle cry and garnering hope. But, to me, the most stunning part of the video came in its very first sentence.
“At a time when things are most uncertain, we turn to the most certain thing there is: science.”
Now, I don’t usually use this blog as an evangelical tool because I believe that the best way to evangelize people is to live alongside them and to show them the difference that God makes in my life, and, since most of the people out in the world who read this blog are never going to live alongside me, there isn’t any point in trying to evangelize them through this tool.
However, please excuse me while I wax religious for a few paragraphs (or maybe more).
When I first saw that video from Pfizer (don’t get me started on big pharma), when I first heard those first seventeen words, I thought to myself, “This commercial is exactly right. We should all be turning to God right now.” And then, the eighteenth word dropped –science– and I laughed out loud. What I thought was going to be an ad, reminding the world that the only sure foundation is a faith in God, turned out to be something else entirely. Since that first time, I’ve seen the video many more times, and I am still taken aback by what the video is very subtly saying.
I know that, in my own personal world, while science is wonderful (a God-given gift, I would say), it is not the most certain thing there is.
God is.
I wrote my Master’s Degree thesis in 2012 on the effects of post-modern society on the educational environment; in doing so, I learned some about the subject of the philosophical changes that are associated with the post-modern world in which we live. Whether or not you’ve even heard the term “post-modern” before, you have been living in a post-modern world your whole lives. And, one of the most important tenets of post-modernism is the rejection of “grand narratives”; we should strive to establish our understanding of the world around us without relying on the stories that we’ve been told (this is a thinly-veiled attack at organized religions).
So, resulting from post-modernism, one of the philosophical developments that has been sweeping the globe, especially in industrialized nations, since the middle of the twentieth century, has been a move toward atheism. Remember, since we have to reject the grand narratives that we’ve been told, we must, instead, just look around to establish an understanding of reality and, rejecting the truths of organized religion and faith, try to make sense of it all. Our attempts at doing this, without an understanding of what we are seeing around us, might send us to the false conclusion that there isn’t a God.
But, one of the problems with atheism is that people require, on a subconscious level, an understanding of someone or something above them, to help them to be comfortable with what can otherwise be a very harsh and terrifying world. It used to be, for most people, we took our solace in God. These days, in what are we to take solace?
Now, atheists, in a defensive reaction, will tell you that this isn’t true; they don’t require –or even desire– that there be someone or something above them, in charge and in control and protecting them, but talk is cheap, and if you watch them, you will find them putting “faith” in other things.
“What other things?” you might ask.
These days, for many in the post-modern world, that “power above” has become government. In case you haven’t noticed, our society is uber-political, in ways that it has never been before; I would posit that this is a result of post-modern atheism and the importance of the government as our “power above”. To the degree that people used to get very passionate and excited and emotional about their faith in God, their decendants are left to get very passionate and excited and emotional about their government. When people come to believe that the government is the “power above”, they become extremely interested in how it works, in who has power, and in whether or not that government is efficent and effective.
Or, let’s say that you’re not comforted by the idea of government as your “power above”. Where else can people turn when seeking something to help them make sense of the cruel, cruel world?
Well, Pfizer would have you believe, the “power above” is science. Science makes a great replacement for God, if you’re into that kind of thing, because science is the tool that people will try to use to prove that there is no God. So, why not replace God with his assassin?
In fact, I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed before, but the war between science and religion gets a lot of play these days. This “war” leads to things like 1) religious people being thought of as ignorant by atheists, 2) religious people rejecting science because they’ve been told that they are at war with science, 3) scientists with faith having to walk around on eggshells in their professional communities, etc..
Let’s not forget, however, that science and religion have, over the long haul of history, been best friends for most of that time. In fact, a) education and b) scientific study and c) human intellectual endeavors, until only relatively recently, have taken place in accordance with each other. In fact, the only schools of the distant past were monastic schools where people of religion were the teachers and the students and the scientific researchers.
Nevertheless, should science be our “power above”? Don’t get me wrong; I have always loved science and I believe in the ability of science to interpret the inner workings of the world, as built by God, but it still feels like a second-place god to me.
In fact, government and science, and any other idol you might erect for that matter, they are equally ill-suited to the task of being our “power above”, and all for the very same reason.
We made them. And we suck.
Well, let’s be generous. Humans may not suck (consistently), but we are inconsistent (see what I did there), and that inconsistency leads to the things that we make having flaws. Science is flawed inasmuch as scientists hypothesize things that other scientists then prove to be false and insasmuch as scientists still don’t have explanations for everything. Government, another human creation, is flawed because we can’t even come together long enough to agree what government should do.
So, let’s bring this around full circle.
That Pfizer commercial, the one that I linked above, the next time you see it, think of that opening sentences this way:
“At a time when things are most uncertain, we turn to the most certain thing there is…”
It occurred to me today that we’d be happier if we could just enjoy the journey.
I actually started writing this post months ago, after a conversation with a close friend of mine about people being too goal-oriented, rather than having an interest in the journey. I was telling this friend, at the time, about my attempts to get back on the treadmill and how difficult it was, after a period of being away, to get back into the habit. We talked about how I was wanting to build stamina and lose weight, but I was frustrated, not seeing any results.
Then, just the other day, I was talking to a different friend of mine about writing and wanting to be a famous writer but not wanting to have to do the work of writing everyday in order to become the successful writer that I dream of being.
Both of these conversations point to something in me that is so laser-focused on the goal that I am unable to appreciate the journey in getting to the goal. I think that there are many reasons for why I have such a hard problem with this (and I know that I’m not the only one), but these are probably the big three reasons.
1) We have been conditioned, as a society, to avoid difficult things. Things that are easy, quick, and pain-free have been served to us on the silver platter of the advertising machine for decades. I wrote about the easiness problem just recently, so I’m not going to beat that dead horse right here and now.
For example, they say diet and exercise are the steps to be taken to lose weight, but very few people are interested in committing long-term to this kind of lifestyle. So, instead we have diet shakes and New Year’s Resolutions and none of it really amounts to much. Why not, instead, commit to the idea of a journey –an hourly, daily, weekly devotion– that will forevermore include these hard things.
Life is supposed to be hard. If it were supposed to be otherwise, novels wouldn’t be three-hundred pages long, detailing the arduous journey of the protagonist.
2) Another part of the problem is that we don’t get recognition, or give recognition, for the individual steps of progress that are always part of any journey toward a goal. I know this is a problem of mine when I sit down to read some pages in the novel that I’m reading at any particular time, and I berate myself afterward if I didn’t get enough pages read. I hardly ever congratulate myself for having read a decent number of pages, and I am never proud of progress of even lesser consequence.
I saw a meme on Pinterest that said the we should be proud of every step in the right direction, rather than just being proud upon some final accomplishment. But, it really is a mind-shift for us to be self-congratulatory as we take each of our steps. I am always excited when I finish a novel, but I am rarely thus during the process of progress.
3) I think an additional part of the problem, maybe even a bigger part, is that we are too busy to be able to make changes. That’s a lesson I’m taking away from the COVID-19 quarantine; so many of the things that have made my life so damn busy in the past have been cancelled for the last several weeks. With those things out of the way, I have been able to do more writing and to be more faithful in my exercise routine. These changes in what I’m doing with my time, because of the freedom of having your “life” ripped away, they are resulting in changes in the way that I look at myself. I have to admit, I like what I’m spending my time doing these days more than I liked what I was spending my time doing before.
When we pack our lives with busy-ness, it makes it harder to be able to make changes when we discover that we don’t like the way that things are going. If you are looking at your life and you’re unhappy with the direction that it’s taking, you’re the captain of the ship, are you not?
What could you stop doing to make room for what it is that you want to be doing? Will it take a global pandemic to free you from the cage of that to which you’ve become accustomed?
Of course, once everything goes back to normal and I am going to be expected to go back to normal with it, I will have to fight some battles, I think, to be able to hold on to the changes that I’ve made. The world is going to expect me to pick up the load that they’d placed on me before all of this, and I’m not sure that I’m willing to pick that load back up.
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It should have become obvious to you, during this post, that I think about story-telling when I think about journeys. For me, one of the most enjoyable parts of reading any story is to be a witness to a journey undertaken. When the main character is transformed at the end of the story, for better often, but sometimes for worse, it is enjoyable to have been a part of watching that happen.
When it comes to me, and my transformation, I have unfortunately been far too pre-occupied with the last few pages of the story. As unholy and wrong as it would seem to open a new novel, to flip to the last five pages, and to read it as if it were the only part of the story worth any consideration, it would be even more inappropriate because of what little I would understand, having skipped what came before.
Our stories only makes sense –we only make sense– when we consider the whole of each of our stories. How I end up wherever I end up is only going to make sense, only going to be enjoyable, in the larger context of the whole story.
And yet, this is what I so often do. In my mind, I think that the story leading up to the finale is worthless. The part of my mind that is interested in being a world-class runner and a New York Times best-seller, isn’t at all interested in the journey of getting there.
Thankfully, the avid reader in me understands what my mind does not: it’s all about the journey.
It occurred to me today that there are Spocks and there are Kirks, and I’m a Spock.
Of course, if you haven’t watched the original episodes of the Star Trek television show, circa 1966-1969, or the original movies (Star Trek 1 through Star Trek 6), then you might not have any idea what I’m talking about. So, let me catch you up as quickly as possible.
The captain of the Starship Enterprise was one James Tiberius Kirk, played by William Shatner in the original series (TOS). His right hand man was Commander Spock, played by Leonard Nimoy. These two, and their interactions with each other, were illustrative to the extent that Captain Kirk was regularly a passionate leader, emotional, sometimes prone to hysterics. Commander Spock, on the other hand, was logical, intellectual, and reasoned in his responses. To watch the two of them, working together to solve problems and to “save the day” in the short one-hour time frame that they had, you often got to see the importance of looking at problems from different points of view.
The relationship between Kirk and Spock was a little more complicated than that, especially when you consider that Spock was half-Vulcan. The Vulcans were an alien race, dedicated to logic and reason and self-discipline, and that Spock’s mother was a human…
But, I don’t really need to go into that.
As often as it was the case that Kirk’s human emotions were chastised by Spock as “illogical”, they were what made Kirk’s character endearing. Kirk was a great leader because of the compassion that he had for those in need of assistance and rescue. Spock was often cold and methodical, incapable of understanding why emotional empathy would ever be of value.
Needless to say, the two of these characters, together, encapsulated the totality of the human mental experience –> emotion and passion fighting with reason and logic to try to equate to an integrated thought process that would have appealed to Goldilocks; not too cold and aloof, but not too emotionally charged and impassioned, but rather, just right.
And so, all of that is to say that all people tend to fall somewhere on this spectrum. At one end of the spectrum, you have people who are ruled by logic and reason and intellect, while on the other end you have people who are ruled by passion and emotion and feelings. Of course, as I am a fan of the middle ground as much as possible, we should (I suppose) be striving for a measured combination of the two approaches. I struggle against my inner Spock to try to be a little bit more Kirk.
However, I just can’t abide by people who seem to be emotional all the time. The highs and lows of life are just so numerous and the roller coaster that would ride each of those highs and each of those lows is a ride on which I would prefer not to be a passenger.
I saw a meme the other day that had a picture of a heartbeat (you know, the little jagged heartbeat reading on the otherwise flat-line readout) and the meme said, “If your life doesn’t have ups and downs, then you’re dead”. While the meme is intended as a play on the imagery of the heartbeat reading, the deeper meaning is somewhat alarming. To a certain extent, I suppose I agree with the meme. However, I have known people who voluntarily –subconsciously, but voluntarily– decide that they are going to ride every high and every low that there is to ride, to get excited about things of no consequence and to get upset about things of equally little consequence.
It has always seemed to me, maybe because of my upbringing, maybe because of my preference for logic, maybe because I have always thought that Spock was cooler than Kirk, that such emotional roller coaster rides are pointless and –dare I say– extremist. But, I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention the other extreme to be avoided here. You can’t go through your whole life being cold and aloof and disconnected from the relationships with the people around you, the people around you that matter the most. As easy as it would be to not get our hands dirty with the emotions and feelings of the people in our lives, we have to embrace that as part of the human experience. People have feelings, and those feelings have a legitimacy because the people who are feeling them have legitimacy.
Spock without Kirk is just as bad as Kirk without Spock.
P.S. I am just now realizing that this post is set to drop on May the 4th. It makes me laugh out loud to think that I have inadvertently stepped on Star Wars day with this Star Trek post. A true sci-fi fan appreciates both of these wonderful worlds of sci-fi fun. May the 4th be with you.
It occurred to me today that our current political system it’s kind of like a s’more.
If you’ve ever made more than a few s’mores –and trust me, I’ve made hundreds– then you know what the issue is. If you end up making the perfect s’more with the perfectly roasted marshmallow and the chocolate and the graham cracker and everything seems like it’s going according to plan, and then you smoosh it, to encourage the chocolate and the melted marshmallow to become this magical melted confection in your mouth. And, when you smoosh it, here’s what happens –> the extra squirts out of the sides and it gets on your fingers.
And the problem with melted s’more on your fingers is that it’s a sloppy mess. If you’re not careful, it could even end up ruining the whole experience.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about party politics in America, and how it has (either recently or maybe not so recently) become very contentious and hate-filled and disgusting. I’ve been thinking about my party affiliations throughout my life and how I feel like those are changing because of the way that things are developing in our country and because of movements within these political parties.
I’ve been thinking a lot about extremism, as well.
I think of how wonderful a perfectly constructed s’more can be. I think about how the vast majority of Americans are probably more moderate than extremist. The pressure that you put on the s’more to get the chocolate and the marshmallow to mix is what causes things, if you’re not careful, to squirt out the sides.
From what I understand, liberals and conservatives all have had their problems recently with the most extreme members of their parties, in much the same way that I hate getting s’more shmutz on my fingers.
The party that I’ve voted for most of my life has recently run away from me, and so I find myself wondering what to do about that. I’ve thought, at certain points, that the two-party system is the problem, but at other times, I wonder if we just need more cooperation and less bitter division.
It’s the squeeze that causes the s’more to smoosh out of the sides. So, if we can ride this metaphor for another mile, I wonder about the pressure that is causing the extremism in American politics. What is causing extremist liberals to head toward socialism? What is causing extremist conservatives to head toward fascism? Why do people feel like these positions are worth occupying, and in light of what current social pressures are these changes occurring?
Why can’t I just squeeze down on my s’more and not have the goop shooting out the sides?
I guess, when I think about it, this is how things usually go down: I squeeze, I get the shmutz, and then I have to wipe it off of my hands. I use a napkin to clean my hands and then I toss that napkin, covered in the shmutz, into the fire.
I would hope that a reasonable citizenry would do the same thing –> recognize that extremism is to be avoided and abhorred, discard it as so much pointless inconvenience, and move forward with enjoying your s’more. Don’t let it ruin the experience for you. Don’t focus it on it or become consumed by it or even be surprised when it happens. Just deal with it, get past it, and move on.
It Occurred To Me Today 