The Invisible Man

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. I Corinthians 13:12

Tag: langston hughes

What a Landslide

I had dinner with a friend from college. He’s just retired. How is that possible? 

Each year where I work we meet with a representative from our financial services company that manages everyone’s retirement accounts. This year I had a literal nightmare before the morning of my zoom meeting. It’s getting closer. I think I’m looking forward to that day. But thinking about it also fills me with dread.

What’s really happening is change. This evening as a cold front was moving into the region and rain was arriving, I could smell the change. During these days, I feel as if I am smelling change.

“They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.” ― Andy Warhol

My problem is that too often I freeze up and can’t make myself leap into action as I know I should. There are too many little acts that must be done to get to the next step. I am a big picture personality. These incremental tasks can paralyze me. After a time I do get the courage and steam up and get it all done (all those plants put into the ground I bought last week).

My wife was the heavy lifter. I never had to do much because she was always getting all the hard stuff done while I was dancing around singing, writing, painting and making speeches. She held down the fort and made me possible. These days I’m trying to figure out how to be a dreamer and a doer all at the same time. Not always successfully!

“A garden to walk in and immensity to dream in–what more could he ask? A few flowers at his feet and above him the stars.” ― Victor Hugo

Dear Garden, I Have Changed: How a Connection With Nature Helped Me Through My Cancer Diagnosis - Everything Zoomer

My friend sat across from me tonight and shared wonderful dreams about the next chapter. There are great adventures ahead. I think I must have dreamed too much early in my adult life. I didn’t work hard enough. There’s not much room left now to dream, I don’t have any left. Mostly what I think about are projects to get completed. They might sound like work to someone else. To me, I guess they are my unfinished dreams??

“Hold fast to dreams,
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird,
That cannot fly.”
― Langston Hughes

I need my wife’s spirit, to help me get all the seeds planted so that my dreams (projects) can take root. Once this hostage crises we’ve all suffered through is finished, maybe then I can start nailing down my next chapter of a life.

There’s a phenomenon that happens to all of us when we experience attitudes, thoughts or behaviors that come into conflict with each other. For example, understanding research that smoking causes cancer, yet continuing to smoke. We call this phenomenon cognitive dissonance. What people then try to do is to find ways to relieve the feeling of stress and anxiety this dissonance produces. There are a number of ways people go about finding relief.

We all know that these days most of us are living in situations more disconnected from normal life. Social interactions have been minimized for health concerns. Even when we are around others, it’s usually at a distance and hidden behind a mask. As Americans we like to think of ourselves as independent individuals, full to the brim with self-reliance. Those can be healthy values, when applied to accomplishing a given task, but they aren’t very helpful when it comes to keeping us healthy humans. People must be in consistent interaction with other people to be and remain healthy.

There are people I know who can’t figure out why they are a little anxious right now. Me too. They don’t report feelings of loneliness or separation. Most talk about a “just fine” adjustment to a quarantined existence this past year. My theory is that they might be experiencing a little cognitive dissonance about some conflicting attitudes/ideas; (1) being more isolated from others is just fine, and (2) it’s not healthy to live life disconnected like this. I believe deep in our inner being, humans know that they were made to be social. No one was born a hermit.

Then the Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone…”  – Genesis 2:18

To relieve some of this stress you can (1) admit this isolation isn’t normal and isn’t a choice you’d make again, (2) keep reminding yourself that this situation is going to end soon, and/or (3) slowly start to change your isolated habits (don’t let convenience win, online meetings really aren’t going to be better).

How solitude and isolation can affect your social skills - BBC Future

The end of the semester is drawing near

But this year, it’s more than that. For me and countless others, it represents the end of this strange year of separation. This year of trying to make things work despite all of our precautions. A year of distance with safe hand clamped over our mouths. As the days pass (when you age, the days race faster) I am longing to finding my next chapter. What are you looking for, right over the horizon?

This one’s for Emily

Divide and Conquer

“Divide and rule, the politician cries; Unite and lead, is watchword of the wise.”― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

In Lebanon, Pan-Sectarian Protests Are Raging as Forest Fires Burn

I spent Saturday watching my team lose an annual rivalry game. I’d love to have beat that team – those people really need to lose!

This morning, I watched three young brothers sitting in front of me poking at one another behind their father’s back. As brothers do, have probably always done.

Today’s lesson in Sunday School was about a horrible family tragedy between King David and one of his sons. Absalom staged a military coup and almost took the throne – he had been plotting for several years. The whole thing started when Absalom’s older brother raped their sister. The armed conflict blew up after Absalom murdered his brother at dinner two years later. You thought your family had problems!

Have you yanked your TV out of the wall yet? It’s not just been a season of locked up and sealed off from others – with new rules and methods of interacting and places we aren’t visiting much anymore. All this is bad enough. But what about the constant skirmishes that are going on within our public discourse, on our streets, online, and even within extended families? It has been going for too long and has eaten away at our social connections. We’re afraid to even talk to each other anymore.

It’s impossible to solve collective problems when no one’s willing to talk.

I was texting with friends who live out of the country. Everyone was catching up and sharing about current events. It seemed to go on and off for most of the evening. I started to notice how often labels for people and groups were being used in these quick communications. For ourselves and for others. It’s an easy way to organize into “out” and “in” groups, us vs. them.

“In the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined.” ― Thomas Stephen Szasz

Do you really think the norm is that we are too different from each other to be able to converse, work and get things that need doing done? Has that been the history of mankind? The threat of external violence or physical survival having kept us clinging to one another just until the hurricane passes. Once we get most of the basic problems of living worked out, we’ve got time and energy to start hating others who aren’t in our camp du jour?

Is that really who we are?

Are there powerful forces at work in our society pulling and pushing us up against one another in order to create conflicts? Does social conflict keep certain people in power – people who promise salvation, cures and never ending provisions?

Just wondering?

I don’t believe we are the same as our primitive ancestors. I think we have self-control. Our society is an exceptional evolution of moral progress. We are being transformed by God. You and I don’t have to sit back and be divided into warring tribes. Instead we can all do the right thing right now.

  1. Watch what you say, text, email – be extra careful during these days
  2. Go out of your way to listen and work extra hard to keep your mouth shut – and your really valuable opinions to yourself
  3. “But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you…” – Jesus

Each one of us will have to go another mile and give up some of our will if we really want to keep the social order – our country desperately needs some examples in every neighborhood, place of work, restaurant and church.

“Society is always taken by surprise at any new example of common sense.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson

Keeping our society held together one more day is as simple as loving your neighbor as yourself.

Being an example of common sense isn’t really that hard. It means putting others ahead of yourself. It means treating people with respect, despite their opinions and actions that might disavow all attempts at respect. It means not being too self-absorbed that we try the impossible, to become the perfect example first before being just a good example right now.

“…for very strangely his officers looked upon Jack Aubrey as a moral figure, in spite of all proofs of the contrary…” ― Patrick O’Brian

If you outlive your mule, don't get another one – so funny! – Alabama Pioneers

“Once, when I were a child, I were kicked by a small mule. Neither the mule nor I had any sense. I were trying to make the mule go one way, but the mule was trying to make me go another. I were for hitching the mule onto a plow. The mule were for nibbling grass. So, after that kicking, I learned right then and there to respect animals and peoples when they are not of the same mind as you are.” ― Langston Hughes

Hold Fast to Your Dreams

How did I get here so quick?

Have you ever gotten to a point in life when you asked yourself this question?

It began to dawn on me that I had reached some turning point in my life when little old men at church started calling me “sir.”

As I look back on the past decade or so…

  • Instead locating all of the emergency exits in the building, I”m beginning to have a working knowledge of where all the bathrooms are
  • I realize that I know too much information about my pharmacist
  • For a while there, I was using handicap parking spots. It became a whole new way of managing parking strategy

I joke that every night as I lay my head on the pillow, it seems like I was just there a few minutes ago – time is rushing by so fast. I always thought getting old would take longer!

“They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.” ― Andy Warhol

There are so many life experiences happening now that I sort of expected, like being a grandparent, taking care of aging parents, and new stages at work. There are also many life twists and turns that came out of nowhere like fighting cancer with my wife.

“It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.” ― Gabriel García Márquez

There are days on autopilot with too much disengagement. Other days when there is just one big crisis to manage. Dreaming too often gets pushed to a very far corner. I have too many old bags of dreams from long ago that smell like mildewed laundry. I know this not the right way to live.

“A being who, as I grew older, lost imagination, emotion, a type of intelligence, a way of feeling things – all that which, while it made me sorry, did not horrify me. But what am I experiencing when I read myself as if I were someone else? On which bank am I standing if I see myself in the depths?” ― Fernando Pessoa

The dreams of yesterday, of my youth, don’t work now.

That’s not how dreams are supposed to work. They are real, they are work, they breathe life into each new day. But dreams need to be alive, growing and evolving with life as it is lived and changing. Today will never work if you won’t turn loose of those dreams of your yesterday and don’t let them become newly built dreams of today.

“At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.” ― Salvador Dali

Whatever comes at you from around the next corner, as your life changes, as you hit the next stage/age of your life – keep your dreams alive by letting them breathe. Your choice isn’t to let your dreams of youth die because they don’t fit today. Your choice is to let your dreams out of the prison of your past. Let them emerge and take up residence in your life today. Let your dreams come to life again right now. It’s not so much the substance of the dream, but the act of dreaming that keeps us going on into the night. 

“Hold fast to dreams,
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird,
That cannot fly.”
― Langston Hughes