Paralyze

Life's challenges are not supposed to paralyze you, they're supposed to help you discover who you are.

-- Bernice Johnson Reagon

Increasingly Illusive

​I've noticed...that overall meaning gets increasingly illusive, for me, when the requirements of performance persist.

LT: Vision

​The very essence of leadership is that you have to have a vision. It’s got to be a vision you articulate clearly and forcefully.... You can’t blow an uncertain trumpet.

-- Reverend Theodore Hesburgh

At Best An Imposter

Before we can become who we really are, we must become conscious of the fact that the person who we think we are, here and now, is at best an impostor and a stranger.

-- Thomas Merton

Someone Else's Life

Instagram: bobgoff

God's first priority
isn't for me to understand
what He's doing in someone else's life.

-- Bob Goff

Place In The World

​I admire, or at least am drawn to, someone who seems to just know their place in the world - the spot they occupy, what they offer to the context they are in. Why? Among other things, perhaps it provides a kind of comfort, when someone is comfortable with where they're at, how they fit, where they fit.

This doesn't mean that they are perfect, nor does it mean that they aren't aware of anything uncomfortable or less than what is needed about themselves. In fact, they are very aware of these things. But, they don't try to hide them or pretend -- they acknowledge them, even bring them to light. This actually reinforces their sense of ease about themselves -- they know themselves, what they are good at, what they aren't good at. And this gives you space to be with them...maybe, even, to be yourself.

I have often wondered about my 'place'. Do I know what it is? What do I fill? What do I offer?  I think I am growing more and more into who I am -- becoming like the description above (though I'll leave the attractiveness of that up to someone else to determine).

Perhaps some people see me, like I see someone like this. Which makes me wonder if they see themselves the way I can easily see myself...not fully embodying being comfortable with who I am (and am not) -- occupying my own space, with contentment and peace.

Pomology

Poem for the week -- "Pomology":

I will eat the apple
read Stephen’s note this morning.
He is volunteering to play Eve.

He wrote, I will eat the apple
—but there are no apples in the house.
We have no lascivious Honeycrisp,

no bonny Braeburn, no upright Baldwin.
We’re out of spry Granny Smiths,
the skulking Northern Spy,

or the mysterious Pink Lady.
Stephen does have an Adam’s apple
and I have an Apple computer,

but you can’t compare apples and oranges.
The note said, I will eat the apple.
Perhaps Stephen’s chasing out the doctors.

Perhaps he’s not falling far from the tree.
Or he’s already eaten from the tree of knowledge:
in Latin, malum means both apple

and evil. I think Stephen is sending a warning.
He means, I will protect you.
He writes, I will eat the apple.

-- Kim Roberts

Will You Still Like Me?

​If I don't do things that help you look good, will you still like me?

Whether they (we) realize it or not, how far off is this from the core question which under-girds much of what people are operating from?

Assimilate

We must all assimilate other lives in order to live.

-- W.H. Auden

LT: Belittle and Freeze

Our country is in desperate need of servant leaders, of men and women willing to kneel and embrace those who are not like them. Everyone seeking the presidency professes great love for our nation. But I ask myself, how can you be a genuine public servant if you belittle your fellow citizens and freeze out people who hold differing views?

-- Howard Schultz

Attractive People

​Attractive people—people who attract others—keep moving and growing; they don't just 'hang on'...especially to the past. The are alive right now.

Right Now

​Both Jesus’ and Paul’s notion of faith is much better translated as foundational confidence or trust that God cares about what is happening right now.

-- Richard Rohr

Immortality

​We seem to long for something along the lines of immortality, wishing that we could abate the physical declines that come with aging. Yet, it also seems true that we experience more of life, with different faculties, as we do so.

I wonder if we go through this experience this way; when we are young we experience much of life with our bodies; in the middle of life, with our minds; and, towards the end through our spirit.

All three are in play during each phase, as our spirit is growing throughout.

It is ironic then that in some ways we become alive to more things as we approach our death -- inferring perhaps that there is something more, for which we are being prepared.

Ancient Sunlight

Poem for the week -- "Ancient Sunlight":

Shame on you for dating a museum:
Everything is dead there and nothing is alive.
Not everyone who lives to be old embraces
the publicity of it all. I mean, you get up and folks
want to know, How did you get here? What makes you
go? What is the secret? And there is no secret except
there are many things that build the years out.
They are not vegetables every day and working out
but a faith that all of these things add up
and lead us to some sum total happiness
we can cash in for forever love in the face
of never lasting. That people along the way
keep disappearing in a variety show of deathbed ways
is also the sheer terror that it may not hold for us too.
That we may outlast everything and be left
alone to keep going, never Icarus with wax melting,
never the one whose smoke & drink undid
the lungs that pull our wings in then out and the liver
that keeps chugging the heft of Elizabeth Cotten’s
“Freight Train” with her upside down left hand guitar still
playing in videos past her presence. I have become a person since
I reorganized my face in the mirror and the world is my inflation.
But this testament offers no sound or silence since
nothing is proven yet and you are still here,
the dead stars’ light landing on your rods and cones
in a vitrine of cameos building—blink.

-- Amy King

From the author:

“‘Ancient Sunlight’ is a consideration of the ways in which we attempt to preserve aspects of ourselves via identity, via material existence (hence the physics aspect) and in seemingly ironic conflict with the idea that we must die in order to achieve immortality. That is, the conservative definition is ‘to live forever,’ but since death is a transition necessary to appreciate the shifts and cycles of being, the larger scope of immortality is often conflated with a desire to be remembered, so would it be a disaster to go on living forever, inevitably forgotten?”

Order

​We all have a need for order - the question may be about the degree to which we will become obsessed with keeping it.

One way to observe your commitment to order by how you feel about people who seem to disrupt it.

The More You

​The more you give, the more you get.

    The more you get, the less you'll have.
    The more you take, the less you'll have.

The less you have, the more you give.

LT: Experience

​What we have to offer is largely born from our experience.

How To Live

​As long as you live, keep learning how to live.

-- Seneca

Be awake.

Answers

Instagram: bobgoff

More from a series on faith...here.

Wanting to have all the answers
now isn't bad,
it just isn't faith.
Stay the course.

-- Bob Goff

The Moon & Identity Crisis

From one morning earlier this week:

The full moon, brilliantly speaking from its place just moments before, waved goodbye as it sunk silently into the cool of the lake's rising mist.

It was as if it was signaling me about something....


​I inadvertently discovered this week that I've fallen - fallen into an identity crisis. Perhaps, crisis is a bit over-stated (but, perhaps not!). I realized that I have fallen into the common trap of relying too heavily on external perceptions to define my identity. There seems to be a very incremental nature to such falls, even when they're rooted in specific events or interactions. One little indicator after another, borrowed and stowed away without overt knowledge, creep up on you - often adding up without realizing it. Even my wife had to come right out and ask me.  Like one of the prior generations one-liners, "I've fallen and I can't get up!", I had landed in a funk and didn't know why. Some of it, I'm sure, was related to a combination of encounters with other people. But, this question crawled out from under the pile, "why am I letting some of these things, that don't normally affect me, bother me so much right now?

And that lead me to acknowledging that I have once again (its happened before multiple times) slipped into the mode of using other people's perception of me dictate how I see myself. This was most obvious by the anger I felt towards them, again over how I thought they were perceiving me. My perceptions of their perceptions my not even have been true, but even if they were...I am still left with the fresh awareness of what I am using to define who I am, who I think I am.

Re-Discovery: I am not actually defined by what others think of me, nor even completely by who I think I am. I am defined by who God says I am. From there, all true identity freedoms spring forth. But, managing the dams of others' perceptions is a dicey enterprise - one that often ends up either in defeat or hatred.

I need to return again and again to who God says I am and let that define my self-view.

Obviously, all of the external things, like the perceptions of others, are 'in the mix' when it comes to self-awareness (or we likely end up living in some strange, contorted form of denial). Nonetheless, we need to return to the true definer of things - to the One who created us, in the first place, for our sense of real identity.

I needed this to recognize anew one of the basic realities of my so human existence.  The voice of the moon invited me to do it...to stand up and be my true self again.

The Voice of Things

Poem for the week -- "The Voice of Things":

Forty years—aye, and several more—ago,
      When I paced the headlands loosed from dull employ,
The waves huzza’d like a multitude below, 
      In the sway of an all-including joy
              Without cloy.

Blankly I walked there a double decade after,
      When thwarts had flung their toils in front of me,
And I heard the waters wagging in a long ironic laughter
      At the lot of men, and all the vapoury
              Things that be.

Wheeling change has set me again standing where
      Once I heard the waves huzza at Lammas-tide;
But they supplicate now—like a congregation there
      Who murmur the Confession—I outside,
              Prayer denied.

-- Thomas Hardy

True Belonging

​True belonging doesn't require that we change who we are. It requires that we be who we are.

-- Brene Brown

Change Me

​I've noticed...most things of interest to me are things I believe or hope could change me.

LT: Do Your Work Well

​Just do your work well; and don't stop...doing it well.

It doesn't matter whether your peer is doing their work well or not, at least in terms of what you should do.  Do yours well; without complaint or finger-pointing...be humble.  Work is a gift to receive and to give.

Healing From Silence

​There can be something so healing to the spirit about silence. We seem to grow into this knowledge of serenity, particularly as we age.

I Am

Instagram: bobgoff

Skepticism & Nature

​I am reading a book about skepticism and belief. I was reading the book on my way to some extended time away from my normal context for life and into the natural world (outdoors). I awoke one day there thinking it is difficult to be too skeptical when you're out in nature.

I then wondered how true this would be for the earliest settlers in the natural world. Nature, in spite of all its beauty and splendor, can also seem quite harsh at times - indifferent even - to our more human concerns (ask many of the earliest settlers to North America).

I wonder if my experience of nature is often conditioned by a participation in it from the position of comfort. I go and visit it, but I don't live in it. I go out in it, but come back to a warm shower, prepared food, and a comfortable bed. Even the wood we enjoyed in our fireplace that night before was already cut (and neatly stacked). What if all the effort of food and comfort, even survival, were up to me? What would my disposition to nature be then? What, in that arrangement, would my level of skepticism be?

I guess I just don't know. But, I have thought since about what seems to be a way in which our world (as opposed to the natural one) operates on the premise that we can control for many things -- comfort, convenience, predictability, etc. It seems to me that life in the natural world would require something else of me -- cooperation with the natural order of things...me joining it, rather than it joining me, etc.  Is that orientation part of my reaction to it now...the compelling forces of its beauty, strength, order (even in its own chaos), longevity, quietness, pace, etc.

And, how would all of that affect something like skepticism? I tend to wonder if a lot of skepticism is related to the problems that come from human-beings, rather than nature. I could be wrong about this, but I wonder....

Both And

Poem for the week -- "Both And":

It is almost always
more
both / and,
than
it is
either / or.

Preclude Thought

​We use what we call reason to preclude thought.

-- Marilynn Robinson

Than We Think

​What if we are actually more free to do what we are afraid to do than we think?

LT: Most Productive People

The most productive people learn first to interpret the messages from their own emotions, and secondly, pay more attention to the motivational style of key people around them to be less annoyed and more synergistic with their efforts.

-- Mary C. Lamia