Musings

I don’t believe that faith in our own abilities is wrong.  I don’t believe it is prideful.  It can be, but it doesn’t have to be.  Faith in our own abilities simply means that we acknowledge our potential to do things, to accomplish.  Whether you believe that potential flows from a Higher Source or from the neurons firing in our brains is irrelevant.  Being certain that we can get up each morning and perform the many tasks that fill our days is essential to a positive outlook on life.  It is the cornerstone of faith in self.

I observe far too many people second-guessing themselves, attaching self-deprecating disclaimers when they speak up, or even choosing not to speak up altogether.  As I’ve mentioned before, I believe fear lies at the heart of all such activity.  We undermine the things we do by focusing on our own fear of inadequacy, and this often leads to the self-fulfilling prophecy of our inevitable failure.  Nothing lasts forever, right?  All good things must come to an end?  Absolutely.  Especially when that is our expectation of life.

I believe that the desire to have faith in ourselves is inherent in all human beings.  We are born with it.  It can be observed in action in children, particularly younger children who have not yet felt the sting of disapproval or been corrected so many times that they begin to doubt their own abilities.  What was once possible yesterday now becomes impossible; such is the path out of childhood and into adolescence.  The pattern continues into adulthood…and beyond.

I do not believe that my abilities are greater than the forces at work in the Universe, the ones that mold and shape the destinies of the smallest microbes to the brightest stars.  Again, the point is not whether you believe the source of everything is a singularity that exploded into all matter in existence today, or a singular Divine Entity who created all that is in 6 days, or a Supreme Consciousness that simply wished long ago to know itself.  The point is that we wholly own and are completely accountable for the actions we take each moment we draw breath and interact with the world around us.  As fully-accountable beings, we have certain abilities.  When we are young, we have complete and utter faith in these abilities.  As we grow older, doubt shakes this faith.  We under-perform.  We slip.  We falter.  We trip.  We inevitably fail.  Each failure reinforces our doubt until we forget that we ever had faith in our ability to climb up a wall or swing from the high branches of a tree or even simply make it through the day with nothing but a smile on our faces.  This is the state of play we could use much more of in our lives.  Go forth and play!  You will recover faith in yourself in the process.

I don’t have a book of answers that I can share with everyone.  There are people who know me well enough to know that I am a human being who struggles with a great many personal demons.  Perhaps that robs me of credibility in their eyes.  But, maybe, just maybe, what I do have is the ability to put into words what is in my mind and in my heart.  I can write these things down, share my experiences, and write a book…a manual, if you will…about how to live life the only way that I know how: my way.  It’s not your way; it can’t be.  My trainwrecks and triumphs belong to ME.  Go make your own.

I was reminded of a great Oscar Wilde quote today: “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”  Be you.  I will be me.  I will write about being me.  You can read my owner’s manual.  Maybe there will be something for you to write into the owner’s manual for you, maybe not.  Regardless, I have faith in my ability to write the best damn book about me that was ever written.  I roll that way.

And I have complete and utter faith in my ability to do so.

UPDATE: I love the fact that there are well-known, high-profile authors and thinkers out there who have the humility and the self-confidence to be able to acknowledge that they don’t have all the answers!  It’s about charting your own course and having the courage to share that with others.  As evidence, I offer this post from Seth Godin: http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d83451b31569e201156f21e302970c.

I was cooking dinner on Easter Sunday, and it was coming down to the wire.  I do a pretty good job these days of timing things such that my dishes are all ready at the same time.  Easter turned out to be one of those times I cut it a little too.  I was multi-tasking, and I got a little distracted.  In the midst of moving my rice from pot to bowl, my beans were ready to be served.  I took the now-cool lid off the pot and ladled them into a serving bowl.  I grabbed that and the bowl of rice, and I carried them out to the table.  Dinner was almost ready to do.

I had gotten distracted, of course, with everything going on and all the people buzzing about, moving things from the kitchen to the table.  In my distraction, I failed to realize that I had left on the burner where my rice had been cooking…and placed the lid from my beans right on it.  As everyone was beginning to make their way to the table, I rushed into the kitchen to grab something.  I noticed the lid on the stove, the beans uncovered, so, naturally, I sought to keep my wonderful beans warm.  I reached for the lid.

I am, of course, grateful that I was the one who grabbed the lid and not my wife or my sister-in-law, or one of my boys.  Unfortunately, the sound of sizzling flesh on heated metal keeps such gratitude at bay in the moment.  The pain was instantaneous.  I was moving to quickly grab the lid and put it on the pot to begin with, so I was fully committed to my grip.  The natural course of action would have been to drop the lid, but someone, I can’t recall whom, was standing next to the stove precisely where the trajectory of a flung lid would have been.  So, I held on to it and put it on the pot.  Loudly.

The only time I can remember any of my grandmother’s yelling at me was when I was about ten years old or so.  She was making coffee on the stove using one of those iron stove-top percolators.  I wanted to help, so I grabbed the percolator when she asked my mother to remove it from the flame.  At the age of ten, you tend to care less about not dropping things than you do the searing pain in your hands.  So, I flung the percolator and coffee spilled all over the place.  I think my grandmother yelled at me more out of fear than anything else.  When I recall her face today, I have to laugh.  I don’t know who was more scared.  Or who was more relieved at the relatively tame reddening of my fingers.  After all, the percolators was more insulated, and the heat hadn’t crept quite as greedily up the side of the device as it would have on…say…a stainless steel pot lid.

The pain in my hand was like television “snow” in my brain.  The white noise filled my head.  I know I was talking to my wife…something about burning and pain…but I can’t really recall what was said.  I just know that I felt the pain coming in waves of ever-intensifying pain.  It would come, ebb, then come back more viciously.  Each time, it grew worse and worse.  And worse.  “Do this!”  And, “Do that!”  Maybe there was a, “I read you shouldn’t do that.”  I can’t remember.  I just remember the sizzling sound, the burning pain, and the waves.  

I ran my hand under cold water to ease the pain.  It helped.  The moment I removed my hand, though, the pain came roaring back.  And the noise started to fill my ears.  Mercifully, my thumb took the brunt of it.  Don’t ask me why, but it did.  My ring finger also felt like it was on fire.  I stole a look at my thumb, and I could see four distinct blisters already forming just minutes after the incident.  I remember thinking to myself, “This is going to be bad,” as cold sweat ran down the back of my neck.

That’s when I saw my wife’s hands around mine, gently cradling my pain.  I felt the warmth of her hands hovering a fraction of an inch above my skin.  From her skin, I felt a warm, steady…flow.  I don’t know what else to call it.  I felt her flowing into me.  I closed my eyes, and I attempted to feel her from inside my hand.  Crazy.  All I felt was the waves of pain.  Then, she called my boys over.  Together, the three of them laid their hands on mine, closed their eyes, and…made it all better.

The pain didn’t leave immediately, but I felt the waves begin to lessen in intensity.  I took a deep breath.  They smiled at me, sent loving energy my way, asked if it felt better.  I told them it did.  It didn’t at first, to be honest, but it got better with each minute.  We sat down to eat.  Later, as the meal drew to a close, I looked down at my finger.  The blisters that had been spreading in front of my eyes about an hour before had shrunk.  They were there, but they not longer threatened to merge into one.  The pain was a shadow of what it had been.

 I wouldn’t have believe it myself had I not experienced it first hand.  It is called Quantum Healing, and it operates on a level I do not understand.  I know it when I feel it, but I can’t tell you much more about it.  There’s a book somewhere here in my house that I feel compelled to read now.  Maybe I won’t.  Maybe this was just one of those moments of faith, where I believed in my family, and they believed in themselves.  Maybe I just over-estimated my injury.  Who knows.  All I know is that there isn’t so much as a scar on my hand.  The skin on my thumb is a little rough, but that’s it.  It has begun to peel away a little, like dry skin.  It’s no more than dry skin.  Not so much as a blister or an area of reddened flesh.  All evidence is gone.  Nothing ever happened.

It’s as if I’d never suffered burns to the hand.

 So much of life is made or broken in the details.

Think of your favorite website.  Or your favorite restaurant.  Or your favorite birthday.  It’s often about a detail, one moment or one thing that makes the memory come alive.  Sometimes, it’s the service you receive that makes you go back.  Or maybe it’s the quality of work that makes you buy one again.  Or maybe it’s the way she smiled at you that makes you remember that date above all others.  Or maybe it’s the way both of your little boys giggle that puts a smile on your face no matter the mood or the weather.  This is what I mean by “made or broken” in the details.

That’s not to say that we should allow one detail to ruin a day or soil a good deed.  On the contrary, I would offer that it is impossible to look upon something as wholly undesirable when considering the details.  I would offer that there is always some redeeming thing that can turn any dark day into something worth salvaging.  Both extremes represent a choice.  It’s the choice on how to judge our own lives.

In fact, I would offer that the tendency to allow a detail to sully something that is on the whole good, is a function of the Ego.  It is an attempt to undermine happiness, to sabotage enjoyment of life.  Why would we do such a thing to ourselves?  I don’t know.  I personally struggle with it myself, so I don’t have the complete answer.  What I will say is that I believe fear is at the heart of such self-sabotaging actions.  Fear?  Yes, fear.  I believe it is fear of being worthy to experience something good in life.  With one good thing, there exists the potential for others.  And what on Earth would we do if we failed to experience the next good thing?  Or if the next good thing took too long to come around?  Isn’t that something worth fearing?  Or, maybe even worse, what if we aren’t worthy of ever experiencing another good thing in our entire lives?  Isn’t that something worth fearing?  Why not sabotage life so that we never have to live with that uncertainty?  At least that way, we’ll understand, consciously or subconsciously, why life is so miserable.

But life isn’t miserable.  Life is pretty wonderful.  I can sit here and say that not because I’ve had an easy life but because I’ve had a life that is filled with details worth remembering.  There are far more good ones than bad ones.  At least, that’s how I choose to see things.

My life is wonderful, and it’s the details that make it.

I used to frequent this place called “La Tiendita.”  Literally, it means “The Little Store.”  And that’s what it was: a little store.  It was a block down the hill from my school.  There was a street at the bottom of the hill, and once you hit that street, you made a right and walked about 3 more blocks.  The store was little more than a doorway into a low cinder-block building.  Inside, it was little more than a room with food and drink, sort of like a compact Quik-E Mart.  More like the supply closet in a Quik-E Mart.

It felt like La Tiendita was always open.  When I was young, I would sneak down there after school to buy a snack.  Maybe I’d buy a Coke.  There were street vendors sitting right outside the school gates, but there was something daring about walking down to La Tiendita to buy something.  La Tiendita lay on the outskirts of what was a pretty rough neighborhood.  It wasn’t the wisest place for a kid to wander around.  And I was a foreigner.

As I got older, I started buying cigarettes at La Tiendita.  There was an irony in buying smokes after basketball practice, but such ironies escape those engulfed by the hubris of adolescence.  If you sweet-talked the person behind the counter, they’d sell you individual cigarettes.  This was an essential tactic when, at the end of the week, you were down to the change left over from all the hotdogs wrapped with bacon that you’d buy from the guy with the cart parked out in front of the school.  Besides, La Tiendita was filled with all kinds of other things to buy.  

When I look back on the time I spent with my friends at La Tiendita, I realize how stupid we were.  Like I said, the neighborhood wasn’t the best, yet we ventured down there just about every day after school.  We never had a run in, we never got into a fight.  Other people did.  At least, there were stories about that kind of thing.  Maybe we were just lucky.  Maybe I’m just a man, a father, who looks back on those days with different eyes.

Different eyes, indeed.  Benjamin Franklin said something like, “Show me a man who was not liberal in his youth, and I will show you a man who has not lived.”  It is by necessity that our eyes change over the years.  When we are younger, we brashly push envelopes and test society’s boundaries.  When we are older…not so much.  We conform.  We adjust.  We hide.  We fit in.  We become much more cautious, and we don’t do stupid things like venture down to the Tienditas of our lives. 

Maybe it’s our youth itself that keeps us safe.  Maybe others look at us, recognize the brashness of youth, and simply step aside, respecting and understanding the cycle at work.  But, maybe, just maybe, we make it down to La Tiendita, drink a Coke and have a cigarette with our friends, and return to school in one piece because we believe we can.  That belief is what is referred to as Faith.

Some Faith we keep in our lives, other Faith we lose.  Faith in ourselves, in our own abilities, is most often lost.  We see it in so many people around us.  We see it in ourselves.  Our Faith gets shaken by the indignities and the failures that befall us between the time we leave our high schools to the time we sit in our basements, the children asleep upstairs, writing about things that flutter through our minds.  I am not alone in this shaken Faith.

Then, the Universe shines a light on our path, highlighting good and bad alike.  Through the eyes of others, through their experiences and trails, I learn just how important it is to have Faith in oneself.  In the work that I do, I am granted a gift that gives me humility whenever I stop to contemplate it.  I am given the gift of trust.  Somehow, someway, I am able to build relationships with others such that they entrust me with their personal lives.  I hear their fears, their aspirations, their doubts, their joys.  By listening, perhaps I provide some level of comfort.  I like to think that the trust I earn and keep grants me permission to speak my mind, to offer an opinion or a suggestion, that, in the end, may make the slightest difference in a life.  If I can do that, then the gift of trust is warranted, and, just maybe, a little Faith can be restored.  For them and for me.

La Tiendita is just around the corner.  Adjust my eyesight.  Start down the hill.  Have a little more Faith.

There is something to be said for surviving the process of filing your taxes, particularly when you fall into the “married filing jointly” category.  I am sure that more than one marriage has dissolved under the pressure.

I didn’t hold a tea party today, nor did I attend one.  I sort of look at taxes as the price of admission.  I’ll pay one way or another, so it might as well be taxes.  I take exception with how the money I send in is spent.  That’s a whole other issue.  I’ll pay my taxes gladly, just get someone to spend all that cash I send in wisely.

I’m beat.  Thank goodness you get a “do over” every morning.  I’m looking forward to a shot at a whole new day.

Cheese.  Oh, how I love you.  Your stinky aroma, your quasi-rotted taste.  I love you, love you, love you.  Particularly when you come in the form of a ball encrusted with almond slivers.  Preferably on a whole wheat cracker.

Cheese.  Fermented mammary excretions from a cow.  Or a goat.  Except I don’t like goat cheese.  It tastes like goat.  I don’t like the way goat tastes.  I imagine that walking up to a goat and licking it tastes the same.  I haven’t had cheese from any other mammals, come to think of it.  I hear that the milk from a whale is as thick as cottage cheese.  I guess you skip the whole fermenting process with that one.  

Cheese bothers me.  I know I shouldn’t love it, but I do.  I know I shouldn’t eat it, but I do.  I don’t consume it in the mass quantities that I once did, but I still haven’t cut it out completely.  Why should I?  I should because I fundamentally don’t  believe that adult mammals should be consuming milk.  Milk is for babies, not adults.  Do you know why whale milk is so thick and fatty?  Well, when you’re meant to get as big as a whale AND you have to grow really fast to avoid all those unpleasant ocean predators AND you have to tolerate those frigid ocean temperature, you sort of need a high-calorie, high-fat food to kick start the whole process.  It’s not that far a leap from whale’s milk to cow’s milk.  Cow’s milk is meant to do pretty much the same thing: take a baby animal to a pretty big animal in a short period of time.  That’s why there’s all that fat.

Apart from that, there’s the whole issue of how cows are treated in the production of milk.  If we all agree that milk is for babies, then how is it that all these cows are producing milk?  Where are all the babies at?  And why aren’t they with their mommas, drinking their milk?  I don’t know why…I just think about these things.

So, yeah, I sometimes feel weird when I eat cheese.  I don’t drink milk.  I pretty much don’t eat ice cream.  I don’t eat dairy yogurt.  But I eat cheese.  I eat cheese and I love it.

Do I get like this because this is an inconsistency between my actions and my beliefs?  Or do I get like this because I am falling prey to the trappings of a title?  Mainly, the title: VEGAN.  I can’t use that moniker unless I quit the cheese.  But…should I care?  The answer, of course, is “no.”  But, for some reason, I find myself falling victim to the external pressure I feel to fall neatly into a category or to represent my fellow non-carnivores in the best way possible.  It’s odd how you can be sure sure of yourself in some regards but not so confident in others.  This small, seemingly insignificant detail means something to me.  I guess I just need to explore why.

Cheese.

 I find it interesting that this whole Somalian pirate thing has flown below most people’s radars until the past week or so.  I guess I must either enjoy listening to NPR too much, a sign of aging, or my commute in the morning is sufficiently long such that I hear enough news stories more than once that most, if not al,l of them stick.  Either way, I find the media attention…disturbing.

Don’t get me wrong, I feel for the captain and the crew of the ship.  However, what happened to them has happened to countless ships traversing this particular seaway.  This is a part of Somalia that has had no functional government since the early 1990’s.  There is no law enforcement.  There is no protective national military presence.  There are no utilities.  There is no commerce.  There is no industry.  The only economy is one of violence and theft.  This is a truly lawless land.  Some people say that these pirate clans took to the sea because there simply was nothing to steal on land.  None of this happened over night.  It is all just another sad example of life (and death) in Somalia.

The only reason we care now is because the media made us care.  

Don’t you feel a little used?  Don’t you feel a little like…sheep?  I said that I was aware of the pirate issue off the coast of Somalia.  I didn’t say it really moved me.  So, when I talk about feeling like sheep, I include myself.  For all of the morning NPR stories I heard, I still wasn’t emotionally engaged.  It was too distant a problem.  It was just another in a heap of indignities; it was just another assault on my human sensibilities.  I let it go.  Fast forward to yesterday, and, like a good little sheep, I’m mesmerized by the details of the Navy SEAL rescue.  Sharpshooters taking out three pirates at the same time from the back of a boat on turbulent seas.  It’s the stuff of movies.  They got me.  I’m a sucker.

Today, it occurred to me precisely what was done to me.  I was yanked by the chain and lead to the exact place they wanted me to go.  My question now is “why?”  Why did they decide it was time for you and for me to care?  What profit motivated them to blow this whole thing out of proportion?  And, more importantly, who is “they?”  I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist or anything, but I am truly and deeply perplexed as to why…why now?  Why this story, at this juncture in time?  Why?

What is it about Somalia that is worth this much attention?  I understand the human rights issues and the genocide and every other attrocity that gets reported from that place.  What I don’t understand is why everyone suddenly cares?

 “More and more it’s about the outcome and not the quality of the arguments that get us there.”

The quote pertained to a discussion on the current state of the appellate process in the United States.  We didn’t start there, but that’s where it went.  I call it a meandering conversation, but the stream-of-consciousness is often my preferred method for discovering the Universe through the eyes of others.  This particular stream was interesting.

After a bit more ranting, I received an apology for his having taken the conversation into the world of his problems, as he put it.  I told him that what he said resonated with me, particularly since it lent itself to application across an almost universal set of topics.  I thought about work.  I thought about politics.  I thought about human societies.  Again and again, I can think of instances where it’s the outcome, not the quality of the foundation of the process, that has become the most important.

The logic behind a decision, the intent behind an action, and the underlying reasons for a behavior are all examples of instances in which the quality of the process is as important as the outcome itself.  Yet, there is a tendency to positively reinforce the outcome, not the process.  In school, they used to tell us to “show our work” because demonstrating that you understood the mathematical processes behind the number at the end was more important than just the answer.  But as we got older, something shifted.  I don’t know if it’s something that comes with age or if there is something shifting in our society, but it bothers me how often I see things like the person who speaks the loudest getting the recognition versus the person who comes to a sound decision based on a solid logical thought process.  It hints at a society where flashes, shiny things are valued most.  That’s not a good path to follow.

Yet, I also have a great deal of faith in humanity.  I meet enough interesting, thoughtful people that I don’t shake my head in disbelief.  They are out there.  I think the most important thing I can do is engage them, encourage them, and support them.  They come from different walks of life and operate in different arenas.  They are demographically diverse.  They are out there, they are working, and they can help keep us on a collectively positive path.  Just find them.  

And if you can’t find one, then become one.

I wrote this the other day, but it’s been haunting me ever since.  I am not quite sure why.  

Today, I watched a recent episode of “Oprah” that was dedicated to the lessons being learned by studying people in the so-called “Blue Zones.”  These Blue Zones are areas where people live into their 100’s with a far greater frequency than most other places on Earth.  These people live a long time, and they are enjoying an incredible quality of life.  That’s what made me think about what I wrote a few days ago…

Children are, by their inquisitive nature, fascinated with nature. I haven’t met a child yet who can’t be cajoled into exploring a tree’s bark or listening to a quick explanation of how the capillaries in a leaf work. It does not take much to engender passion for the environment. Unfortunately, what they observe around them, particularly at home, can undo and quell that passion. Adults kill childhood passions, particularly through careless, irresponsible actions. Fortunately, it works both ways. My kids are little environmentalists because they see us being meticulous recyclers, taking home recyclable material from their grandparent’s home, McDonald’s (WHY ON EARTH don’t they have recycle bins?), and anywhere else where we generate trash and recycling is not available. So, another key component to keeping children in love with the Earth is building the bridge between school and home in an effort to spread the virus. This becomes a larger and larger obstacle depending on which end of the urban socio-economic scale you go.

Why should it be that love of nature is something that we have to fight to keep alive in our children?  I cannot imagine anything more invigorating than living at peace and in harmony with nature.  Isn’t that child still inside all of us?  I am still fascinated with nature.

 There is no better way to learn than to teach.