I’m wondering…what is it about the value of something that we seem to need to know?
One of the things I do is curate ideas. But, at some point, something isn’t working in my activity related to that (or, at least, there is a question in mind about it). At times, I can feel a lurking question; what is the value of it—either the curation itself or whatever it is that I am curating?
I’ve noticed…that I am often inspired by those who can articulate the value of what they are doing. Because, for me, the ability to articulate that value is often what is so compelling to others about the ideas that are driving the good activity that often results.
A while ago, I watched the movie, The Antidote, where what people are doing in communities to help others was, in my estimation, powerfully described in terms of the purpose and reason for doing what they’re doing. The recent movie Soul pulled on a similar thread for me (at the very least, it appears I'm not alone regarding my value question!).
I find myself wishing I had more of an ability to describe, or even create, the value of what I do. I'm typically not very self-promoting, but that isn't really the core of what's involved here.
So, I'm wondering what this can look like for me now going forward...I feel the need to know.
You can't out-pace the sadness of the world.
Our greatest confidence is enabled by experience.
Few things clarify quite like adversity.
If it’s true that we are all just a couple of choices away from some serious life problems, how much more is it true that we are just a couple of choices away from brilliance?
Prior Randoms...
At the threshold moment, when the true self within is demanding emergence, things can go either way; we can let the crisis thrust us into the heart of transformation or we can regress into our same old patterns.
-- Sue Monk Kidd
You may not be wrong...but, are you right?
In other words, not being wrong can become a thing all unto itself...and completely miss the ‘what is right’ that needs to be done.
In other words, a non-negative is not the same thing as a positive.
It seems like claiming that I didn't actually do this or that isn't really enough.
Example—I may not consciously disparage the poor or the needy, but do I actually help them?
Or, I can claim "I don't hate...". But, the real question is closer to, "Do I love?"
One may not require much, but the other does.
If you put the jelly on before the peanut butter, the sandwich will fail.
And if you try to spread the peanut butter on the plate and then add the bread, it will fail even worse.
Like so many things, the order is not optional.
And yet, we often do the least-scary or easiest parts first, regardless of what the order of operations tells us.
-- Seth Godin, The order of operations
I've noticed...that I need to be more presumptuous.
It's likely not so much that this is the case as it is that I try too hard not to be, which is too self-serving.
Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.
-- Luke 6:38
Humans can be so beautiful (yes, what that isn't saying is also true).
The point of self-wareness isn't about working hard at who we're trying not to be, as it is on accepting who we are.
Rest is not as much about inactivity as it is about replenishment and restoration, which is a very active thing—a transforming kind of energy.
Prone to so many answers, why don't we ask more questions?
Prior Randoms...
'Poem for the week' -- "Songs for the People":
Let me make the songs for the people,
Songs for the old and young;
Songs to stir like a battle-cry
Wherever they are sung.
Not for the clashing of sabres,
For carnage nor for strife;
But songs to thrill the hearts of men
With more abundant life.
Let me make the songs for the weary,
Amid life’s fever and fret,
Till hearts shall relax their tension,
And careworn brows forget.
Let me sing for little children,
Before their footsteps stray,
Sweet anthems of love and duty,
To float o’er life’s highway.
I would sing for the poor and aged,
When shadows dim their sight;
Of the bright and restful mansions,
Where there shall be no night.
Our world, so worn and weary,
Needs music, pure and strong,
To hush the jangle and discords
Of sorrow, pain, and wrong.
Music to soothe all its sorrow,
Till war and crime shall cease;
And the hearts of men grown tender
Girdle the world with peace.
-- Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
You wouldn’t worry so much about what others think of you, if you realized how seldom they do.
-- Eleanor Roosevelt
Another lingering reflection, from a recent Randoms...:
There is something so seemingly satisfying about short-term prospects, especially when compared with the likelihood of long-term fulfillment.
Because what if the long-term never happens?
Isn't that the age-old question?
And yet, at times, it seems so conspicuous that short-term satisfaction seems to directly compete with long-term fulfillment. Not to mention, that short-satisfaction is, by definition, short-term and, therefore, relatively un-satisfying over the long haul.
But, we want to fill or feel something right now, which often leads to a later feeling of something like, "I wish I hadn't done that...".
And, so, the dilemma continues...sometimes round and round and round.
The reality seems to be that two things are actually in play at the same time—something I want right now AND something I also want later. Sometimes these aren't mutually exclusive; but, sometimes they are.
So, where does this leave us?
In my experience, I can feel the push (from outside...and inside) to deny one over the other. I think this is the bigger problem (than trying to determine which to appease). Denial is rarely a good thing; awareness, on the other hand, often is. Listen to yourself, interact with yourself, engage your self. Make a choice. Make a different choice next time. But, don't just deny one reality over the other.
We don’t learn much when everything goes right. We learn most when things go wrong.
-- Simon Sinek
Ever noticed...our tendency to think if we can get there faster, the more we'll get to see?
When, actually, the faster we are moving, the less we seem to notice.
Disappointment needs space to breathe or it gets by-passed for more intense emotions.
Sometimes you have to stop long enough, in one spot, to see what is really there—to sit in things for a while and discover what is going on.
Faith should never become a closed system, for then it is no longer faith.
You may not be wrong; but, are you right?
Prior Randoms...
It was among the most jarring scenes of the Capitol invasion, on January 6th. As rioters milled about on the Senate floor, a long-haired man in a red ski cap bellowed, from the dais, “Jesus Christ, we invoke your name!” A man to his right––the so-called QAnon Shaman, wearing a fur hat and bull horns atop his head, and holding an American flag—raised a megaphone and began to pray. Others in the chamber bowed their heads. “Thank you, heavenly Father, for being the inspiration needed to these police officers to allow us into the building, to allow us to exercise our rights, to allow us to send a message to all the tyrants, the Communists, and the globalists, that this is our nation, not theirs, that we will not allow the America, the American way of the United States of America, to go down,” he said. “Thank you, divine, omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent creator God for filling this chamber with your white light and love, your white light of harmony. Thank you for filling this chamber with patriots that love you and love Christ.”
Falsehoods about a stolen election, retailed by Donald Trump and his allies, drove the Capitol invasion, but distorted visions of Christianity suffused it. One group carried a large wooden cross; there were banners that read “In God We Trust,” “Jesus Is My Savior / Trump Is My President,” and “Make America Godly Again”; some marchers blew shofars, ritual instruments made from ram’s horns that have become popular in certain conservative Christian circles, owing to its resonance with an account in the Book of Joshua in which Israelites sounded their trumpets and the walls of Jericho came tumbling down. The intermingling of religious faith, conspiratorial thinking, and misguided nationalism on display at the Capitol offered perhaps the most unequivocal evidence yet of the American church’s role in bringing the country to this dangerous moment.
A recent survey, conducted by the American Enterprise Institute, found that more than a quarter of white evangelicals believe that Donald Trump has been secretly battling “a group of child sex traffickers that include prominent Democrats and Hollywood elites,” a core tenet of...continue here.
-- Michael Luo
Wealth among traditional people is measured by having enough to give away. The generosity of the earth is not an invitation to take it all.
-- Robin Wall Kimmerer
If it doesn’t include all of us, then it doesn’t include some of us. And, if it doesn’t include some of us, isn't it only a matter time before the question becomes whether it includes me?
It really has to be good for everyone, in order for it to truly be good for me.
Because, the other way around, doesn't really work for long.
Freedom is not a state; it is an act. It is not some enchanted garden perched high on a distant plateau where we can finally sit down and rest. Freedom is the continuous action we all must take, and each generation must do its part to create an even more fair, more just society.
-- Alex Hickey
Mindful of the recent 56th anniversary of Sunday Bloody Sunday.
I'm wondering...if my next major hurdle is a better understanding of my response when people despise me or say that I am not something that I should be.
I wrote this a while ago—how am I doing?
Self-diagnosis is hard—we tend to be either too hard or too easy on ourselves. It is helpful, but also conspicuously tempting, to need the perspective of others.
Sorting it all out; the magic in this dilemma seems to be in trying to be as open and aware as we can be AND still being willing to take risks. An imperfect process to be sure, but perhaps therein lies the secret.
John of the Cross says that the dark night is God’s best gift to you, intended for your liberation.
-- Barbara Brown Taylor
The highest good is not to know thyself, but you can’t get to the highest good if you don’t.
The more and longer we hold onto things, the tighter we have to become.
Accumulation occurs, even naturally. But, it should never end up being about consumption; it should be about helping those in need.
What are things we do to ourselves that make us smaller than we are?
Prior Randoms...
At one point in her new book, the NPR journalist Michaeleen Doucleff suggests that parents consider throwing out most of the toys they’ve bought for their kids. It’s an extreme piece of advice, but the way Doucleff frames it, it seems entirely sensible: “Kids spent two hundred thousand years without these items,” she writes.
Her deeply researched book, Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us About the Lost Art of Raising Happy, Helpful Little Humans, contains many moments like this, in which an American child-rearing strategy comes away looking at best bizarre and at worst counterproductive. “Our culture often has things backward when it comes to kids,” she writes.
Doucleff arrives at this conclusion while traveling, with her then-3-year-old daughter, to meet and learn from parents in a Maya village on the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico; in an Inuit town in a northern Canadian territory; and in a community of hunter-gatherers in Tanzania. During her outings, she witnesses well-adjusted, drama-free kids share generously with their siblings and do chores without being asked.
She takes care to portray her subjects not as curiosities “frozen in time,” but instead as modern-day families who have held on to invaluable child-rearing techniques that likely date back tens of thousands of years.
One of the craziest things we do is praise children constantly. Continue here....
-- Joe Pinsker
Anything considered above criticism will soon become demonic.
-- Richard Rohr
The very thing I feel I need is not what I really need—especially when I believe I need it from outside of myself.
What I really need is sourced within myself.
I catch myself wanting to make it about what others are not doing for me, how they make hard for me, etc. (blame is so handy, isn't it?). But, if they can’t provide what I want, they just can’t (they’re self-preoccupied, physically or emotionally incapable, exhausted, or even just disinterested)—whatever the reason, if they can’t, they can’t.
And, in the end, they can't anyway. Because what I really need is already within me.
So, I can only live from a source within.
Why is this so hard to accept? In part perhaps because, in some way, demanding it from others transfers something away from myself and, thereby, keeps the locus of the issue in the wrong place. This culturally convenient construction is a deceptive, insidious, and onerous thing. No one can give me what I essentially need because they were not, after all, designed to do so. And, I am not designed to receive it from them.
Do I want things from others? Yes. Things that make me feel good? Yes. Things that make me feel better about myself? Yes.
Can others satisfy these levels of need with me? No.
Our sense of need is so often misdirected, as is our sense of solution for it so often misplaced.
The truth is, I already have everything I need—the challenge is learning to fully acknowledge this and turning to the work of discovering what this means. I am something at my core. What am I? Who am I? What do I need? That's my work (not somebody else's).
In other words, the answer is not so much out there...as it is in here.
You don't need to be perfect to inspire others. Let people get inspired by how you deal with your imperfections.
-- Wilson Kanadi
I've noticed...that I want to be noticed, more than I realized—evidenced by catching myself holding it against people who don’t.
"That's not true!" ...ah, but it is, isn't it? Why so defensive?
The truth is, most everyone wants to be noticed. It's probably more when you feel taken-for-granted that things get...a little dicey (for the ego). As I argue with myself about it, perhaps that's some of what I'm feeling today.
