Enlarge The Box

Every problem, every dilemma, every dead end we find ourselves facing in life, only appears unsolvable inside a particular frame or point of view. Enlarge the box, or create another frame around the data, and problems vanish, while new opportunities appear. 

-- Rosamund and Benjamin Zander

What I’m Wondering About

I’m wondering…what I’m wondering about and why. 

Every 3rd Monday (unless something comes up on a Monday), I post something about what I’m wondering about.  Usually, it’s about a ‘why’ or an ‘about’.

Why does this (or that) happen?

What is this (or that) about?

Today, I’m wondering about why the things that make my list…make my list in the first place.  Isn’t something influencing that most of the time?

Or, what about this — why does it seem like I don’t wonder about certain things (at all)?

Surely, there have to be some implications here (if not ramifications)….

Distort Numbers to Push Ideological Agendas

Beauty, Gratitude, and the Divine

Some years back I hit a skid in my personal life. Though I knew objectively that I had much to be grateful for, it was hard to acknowledge a sense of gratitude. It was difficult to notice the positive that was out there beyond the slog of getting through every day. But now and then, I’d feel the impulse to take out my phone and capture a slice of beauty. These fleeting glimpses of splendor broke through my horizon of pain and lifted me up…. 

These photos, taken on my way to the gym in the morning as the light was coming up over the F train overpass, or as the setting sun glinted through the trees above the electric wires at the end of the day … were about stumbling upon unexpected splendor, savoring random moments of grace in the midst of an overfilled, overcomplicated life. These were moments to stop and actually see the wonder around me despite the swirl of so much else going on, time to stop and breathe and slow down…. 

In teaching that we are to say one hundred blessings a day, the Talmud encourages us to take notice and not simply lurch unseeingly through our days…. Bringing photography back into my life was a visual version of this urging to truly perceive and experience the beauty of the world and not take any of it for granted…. Making these small photos on my phone … helped me find my way back to gratitude and a connection to God…. 

These photos have become part of a spiritual practice that grounds me and reminds me that not all is difficult, not all is complicated — that joy and amazement exist — if I take a moment to look. 

-- Rabbi Hara Person

3 Observations & A Question

It is good to take an inventory now and then — it’s surprising to discover what all has accumulated. 

You should carry your own weight — so that you know what it takes and can help carry someone else’s, when they need it. 

Much of social media is more about insinuation than substance — we should see psychological trickery for what it is.

Does it seem like comfort is among our highest priorities (always trying to get something to make us a little more comfortable)?

Prior 3 Observations & A Question….

Sanctuary

‘Poem for the week' -- "Sanctuary":   

Sanctuary is 

as vital as breathing.

I find it in places 

secret to my soul: 

in the natural world, 

in the company of 

a trustworthy friend, 

in solitary or shared silence, 

in the ambience of 

a good poem or music. 

-- Parker Palmer

Stillness and Sanctuary

 

Within you, there is a stillness in a sanctuary to which you can retreat at any time.

-- Herman Hesse

Looking

When is the last time you looked up for even a few minutes at a cloudless night sky?

When is the last time you looked endlessly at that portal in your hands?

Which do you feel better serves your needs?

I’m doing an experiment.  Like everyone else (I’m assuming), I don’t think I am addicted to one form of social media or another.  But, I am noticing the ease with which I rotate back to Instagram, for example, just to see the latest…skuttlebutt or anything else that might be entertaining.

I’ve decided to test myself a little bit on this by deleting the Instagram app on my phone.  What will I feel when I have that extra minute? Or, what will I feel in the evening when I’m too tired to do anything else, but am not ready for bed?  If I don’t have that to turn to (because it is so easy), what will I turn to? What if I have simply deluded myself into thinking that I’m not into something more than I think I am?

I know there is something psychologically appealing about keeping track of controversy. It feeds something in us.  Perhaps, we think we’re more in control of something, if we’re aware of it.  But, it’s hard not to notice how easy it is to go looking for it as well. 

Besides how it feels, what does it really feed? Is that something constructive or good or is that something else?

I know myself well enough that sometimes I have to build in things to check myself.

At the very least, I know that what I feel, based on what I’m looking at, can be quite different things (night sky versus social media, etc.). I think I need to find out if what I’m looking at is creating something in me that I’m not aware of.

Maybe you’ve already performed an experiment like this — what did you discover?

Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better.

-- Flannery O’Connor

What You Scroll

You become what you scroll. Choose accordingly. 

-- Shane Parrish

The Pain Around Me

I've noticed...that I absorb the pain around me.

Tool of Oppression or … ?

I have a feeling it should look more like this:

3 Observations & A Question

Full experience almost always seems to include (require?) the physical. 

When we don’t have some awe in our life, we are in more trouble than we know. 

In the end, you don’t ever really get away with anything…because the mark you left is the mark you left.

We do know that we have to care for more than ideas (you know, like our neighbors), right?

Prior 3 Observations & A Question….

You Think You're the First Person...?

Demonization

When I feed the hungry, they call me a saint. When I ask why people are hungry, they call me a Communist. 

-- Dom Hélder Câmara

Given the diet of our current public discourse, these labels hardly even register any more.  They seem tepid by comparison.  The ones in play now are far more…you fill in that blank.

And, yet, we are more aware than ever that nearly anything we say can (and will) be used against us in the court of…public opinion.  Ironically, demonization is alive and well. 

Fashionable or not, though, at some point we have to ask ourselves why demonization exists where it exists and what are the purposes it serves because, like a cancer, it is eating away at both the objects and subjects of it.

For one thing, it’s just so easy. It doesn’t involve real thinking. It doesn’t involve real work. It’s just far easier to point out what appears to be wrong than it is to do the work of promoting what is right (especially in the context of what may be wrong). Even if “what is right” is the pretense for it, what is right and being (or doing) good is clearly not the same thing right now.

Moral superiority inevitably seems to require the demonization of whatever it tries to subordinate. In other words, the bar is not the bar — the bar is simply the separation between us and others. Demonization is just a super handy way to do that and it lets us off a fairly serious hook. Part of what is insidious about it is its deception that makes us believe that it, in and of itself, is virtuous. If someone else is bad (now we use the term evil), it is simply easier to run with that conclusion than it is to work out what to do about it (not to mention remedy it).

Demonization is a beast that can never be fully satisfied — you just have to keep feeding it...because it feeds something in us.

Do we even need to say, then, that it is unhealthy...and unproductive?  Apparently, we do.  Because now it is so normalized that we’ve moved beyond the rhetorical nature of it to the manifestation of it.  Just a little historical review will indicate what a dangerous path this is, for all involved (the perpetrated upon AND the perpetrators).  It clouds both the mind and the spirit, so much so that it can become easy to no longer even detect it.

Demonization leads one to believe that the devouring will only continue in the intended direction.  It misses the nature of its beastliness — that it doesn't really discriminate that well and that it will simply turn on the feeders themselves, in the end.

Be aware of what you are really hungry for, lest you end up eating something that will in turn eat you.

Just one example to consider...here.

Your Instincts

I learned you have to push away the demand people’s expectations by believing in your instincts.

-- Stefano Pilati

Work Doesn't Work

Work doesn't work without play.

-- Shonda Rhimes

Musculature for Grief

Ever noticed…how little musculature we have as a society for grief?

And, we can’t figure out why we’re so anxious….

Among other things, we don’t want to take the time to grieve — opting, in effect, for retribution and revenge instead.

We even elect leaders who will do that for us now.

Let’s stop blaming them and look in the mirror.

Through Friendships

It was only later, through friendships with Christian men and women who truly embody the spirit of understanding and compassion of Jesus, that I have been able to touch the depths of Christianity.  

-- Thich Nhat Hanh

Be honest — what of Christ has really impacted you outside the context of deep Christian friendship?  We aren’t changed by information (theology) as much as we think.

It is in relationships that reality is embodied, where truth is experienced…where Christ is truly revealed.

3 Observations & A Question

Prayer, for me, is increasingly like on-going dialogue.

Good power seems to be far less something that you have than it is something you access.

Ultimately, we have to accept that healing is something we can't rush.

In a number of ways, isn’t a warrior mentality primarily juvenile in nature (if not in substance)?

Prior 3 Observations & A Question….

Options for the future

From Michiana Chronicles: 

We stood on the beach skipping stones into Lake Michigan, the Beach House Blowout at our backs. A steady wind in our faces, rolling waves singing across the pebbled apron at Indiana Dunes State Park. 

A timeless and irreplaceable jewel, this day stretched out in lazy solitude under a white-blue sky. Across the lake, at 10 o’clock, silhouette stalks of the Loop on the horizon. 

But then a disorienting sound – faint but closing fast and now exploding everywhere all at once. The heavy thwap of helicopter rotors, dozens of them, the swelling, deafening sounds of violins, trumpets, French horns! 

From behind the dunes they burst over the trees – ancient, olive drab Hueys – so close we could see the faces of the door gunners, the glint off pilots’ aviators. 

This howling swarm moved in a menacing...continue here.

-- Brett McNeil

Our Conscience

My longer posts each week seem to rotate between something happening in the world around us (more often political stuff lately) and something more sublime (why do we have to force ourselves away from our media-diet of controversy (which we say we hate, but do we really? — after all, we all know by now that we actively perpetuate it…).  Given that cadence, I guess it's time for...the former (ugh).

Honestly, I've not been immune from what the sucking-us-down has been doing to all of us.  It does, ironically, seem conspiratorial (conspiring against us).  How do we engage, and not stick our head in the sand (pretending what is happening isn't), without becoming incapacitated by it all?

The range and depth of issues is confounding; impossible to both enumerate or itemize.  Why should we even have to?  But, what happens if we don't (maybe the exact opposite of what we tend to think; but, who knows?)?

It’s like watching a ship take on water.  But, you feel it a little differently if you’re on that ship.  You feel stupid, angry, and most of all…helpless. “Do something!” we scream (at ourselves in the mirror).  We know panic doesn’t help, but we’re increasingly desperate for an effective alternative.  And, if we’re honest, we all have this sinking feeling that we’re aiding-and-abetting things somehow. 

How does one, then, resist what truly needs to be resisted?  We don’t know how, in part, because we still haven’t collectively re-agreed on the what.  So, what should be resisted?  We need a better answer than the easy one of simply saying, “the other side”.

We have to find out though.  We must find a way to identify it.  The ship is going down and we’re going with it.  Our very survival is being pressed now into differentiating between a basic understanding of what is good and bad and what is being co-opted as being so (yet another horrifying example here…yes, go ahead, add 1 more thing to the controversy column).  In other words, we are having to rediscover what really is at the core of our individual and collective conscience.  Perhaps the silver-lining is that this is long overdue...and is now happening (or starting to).  What do we really want collectively?  What do we really need collectively?

Our resistance is not predicated on how likely it will be to alter the conscience of the oppressor. We resist to retain our own conscience. And to awaken all others who are still in possession of their own souls.  

-- Cole Arthur Riley

Loyalty To

Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world — and never will.

-- Mark Twain

Smartest Person In The Room

The smartest person in the room, I’ve learned, is usually the person who knows how to tap into the intelligence of every person in the room.

-- Scott Kelly

AI

I’m wondering…about AI — mostly about where meaning and morality fits in (or doesn’t).  

Just because LLM’s can make new connections to an unfathomable degree and at an unprecedented rate doesn’t mean that they're real (or substantive).  None of this happens without a rate of an investment that we’ve never seen before.  Investment is predicated on the possibility of return.  Perhaps we need to evaluate more carefully what that return actually is — we are, after all, funding this through our societal choices.

Too often, we throw up our hands on such things and say, in effect, “but what can we do about it?”  Well, other societies aren’t caving in as easily.  They are doing something about it, by getting at the values they have as a group.  So, why aren’t we?

Just because you can make money at something, doesn't mean you should.  Sometimes I wonder how much our love of money has stunted our growth and development as a society (no to mention as individuals).  

Many of our leaders have just caved in to our appetite for consumption, regardless of the implications.  Given the amount of money involved now, is AI just one more example?

Small, Dark, and Negligible

While I am looking for something large, bright, and unmistakably holy, God slips something small, dark, and apparently negligible in my pocket.  

-- Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark

4 Observations (from Others)

A crowded mind leaves no space for a peaceful heart. 

-- Christine Evangelou

It is more important to find the truth than it is to know the truth. 

-- John Cleese

If something is true, no matter who said it, it is always from the Holy Spirit. 

 -- Thomas Aquinas, De Veritate

If the truth will set us free, why are we so committed to trying to control for it?

Prior 4 Observations (from Others).

Wealth Transfer

The Wall Street Journal explained that there were 927 American billionaires in 2020 and 1,135 in 2024. Together, they are worth about $5.7 trillion. The 100 richest of the set control more than half of the total at about $3.86 trillion. As the number of billionaires grew, “supply side” economic policies in the U.S., designed to concentrate wealth at the top of the economy among investors rather than on the “demand side” made up of consumers, hollowed out the middle class. From 1975 to 2018, at least $50 trillion moved from the bottom 90% to the top 1%. 

-- Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American

On The Lighter Side: Dead Yet?

 On the Lighter Side:

Stars / Love \ God

I looked up early this morning at the still nighting sky.  

The stars were stunning.

I was reminded that they always are and that the only thing that really changes is my perception of them.  They're sitting there all the time; shining or doing their thing (whatever that is).

Invariably now, when I put myself in a position to see them and then contemplate their significance, my thoughts drift towards…love.  Is that cultural conditioning?  Or, is that something innately existential?  Many have debated the question over time.  So, if nothing else, I'm not the first to wonder about it (not to mention what really changes whatever I end up concluding?).

Something (Someone?) put such things in place, even as the nature of their 'place' is always evolving.  The span of time involved so far exceeds both my experience and understanding of it, my conclusions are somewhat irrelevant (at least on that scale).  It makes a lot of sense (even beyond rationality) to me that such a thing means something.  The traditions of understanding that nature is the primal representation of spirituality is not hard for me to accept (even if I tend to forget it at times).

Further, the connection between nature and that Being described as love does not feel inappropriate or even a stretch.  It would seem that Being would have a motive when creating something beautiful — true at both human and divine levels, isn't it?  A motive to do that would be what we might characterize as...loving.  The meaning involved would seem to necessitate communication;  portrayal, offering, invitation, acceptance.  

Doesn't nature seem to do this?  Obviously, there are deviations from a constant state of this (how else can you fit things like earthquakes or other 'natural' disasters into this equation of understanding?).  But, the overall pattern seems to be beauty, harmony, inter-relatedness, dependence, care, respect, work, enjoyment...and on and on.  This all could be described in a variety of ways (and has been), but it holds water for me to also describe it as love.

I'm going to a funeral today.  Why (am I going)?  

I suspect it is related to all this because the life lived, in the context above, was caught up in the meaning of this beauty.  He tried to capture it.  He wanted to embody it.  Many benefitted because of it; we were drawn into each of the three dimensions I'm describing here.  Nature, love, God.  I want to honor that and the person who was involved and who lives on, despite his physical passing.

Perhaps my body lifted my head this morning (usually I'm looking down, trying to avoid falling in the dark).  Perhaps it said something like, see what persists (and surrounds) in all the living and dying we do on this earth.  Notice it.  Appreciate it.  Perpetuate it.

Nature does it, in my opinion, because it represents Something (God) who does it, so that we can do it, too.  

Better To Hope

In all things, it is better to hope than to despair.

-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The Good Life

The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction, not a destination.

-- Carl Rogers

Physical Activity

I've noticed...physical activity helps orient me to my emotions.