I’m convinced that you and I have superpowers and the capacity to radically transform our immediate circle of influence.
Our capacity for hospitality is a superpower and, as powerful as it is, it goes beyond opening our homes to guests and strangers. It’s opening our hearts to everyone we encounter. It’s simple friendliness. It’s a no-strings-attached welcome to all.
Our capacity for generosity is a superpower. We have it in us to share, to give, to alleviate burdens for others. It’s extending this natural gift to those who least expect it from us that elevates natural generosity into a superpower. It’s a planned no-strings-attached sharing of time and resources.
Our capacity to both hear and listen to people is a superpower. When we offer people undistracted attention and hang onto every word they say, we are validating their story, their very existence. It’s a no-strings-attached gift proclaiming “I see and hear and value you” in an often indifferent world.
Our capacity to treat all other people as equals (which they are) and with respect (which all people deserve) is a superpower. We can learn powerful and important lessons from anyone and everyone. This no-strings-attached acknowledgment of the treasures within all people, like all our human superpowers, cannot be faked.
Scout walks “Boo” Radley home…. after he saved her brother’s life.
I am fascinated by process, time, growth; how life itself gets us ready for life itself.
When my sons were very young neither they nor I could imagine them leaving, going off on their own. None of the three of us was ready for that.
It is different now.
It’s not that I want them gone. I do not. But I do want them to forge ahead with their own lives. I want them to find adventures in far off countries and to make friends with people I will never meet.
Life prepared me for that transition. I find no resistance within me for it to continue. I thought I would hold onto the boys in some way but I cannot find it in me to do so. I am ready, we are ready for things none of the three of us could have foreseen us being ready for.
Life did it. The process did it. This is what I am celebrating.
In the meantime I shall Value obscurity. Enjoy doubt. Celebrate ambiguity. Embrace mystery. Love complexity. I’ll stop searching for certainty, sureness, and seek simplicity.
Not only can I not have all the answers, I cannot even have most of the questions!
Life itself, does it’s part in preparating us for life.
Swimming, showering and bathing are the same thing. A shower with soap and shampoo cleans you for four or five days. Licking your fingers washes your hands. Biting an apple brushes your teeth. Potato chips IS vegetables. Flossing and flushing? Why? You just have to do it again.
Sleeping wastes time (weekends). People need sleep (school days). Making a bed is stupid. You get into the same one every night. Wearing a shirt inside out is putting on a clean shirt. Pulling a shirt over your head combs your hair. Putting clothes away means you just have to get them again. A bedroom is tidy if you can see (any part, even a smidgen) of the carpet.
Lighted candles must be disturbed and never left alone. Drip the wax, always, anywhere. You can climb, throw, jump on anything if you really want. All bodies of water must be disturbed, no matter how peaceful or beautiful, you must throw something into it or skip stones. If you have a brother EVERYTHING is a competition. SHOTGUN for the front seat works even if you only think it.
Australia—2010— no, they did not write on the rock (and neither did I)
“There are two little English words,” my mothers would often sing, “that will open any door with ease. The one little word is THANKS; the other little word is PLEASE.”
It’s clear to me that such common manners seem in short supply.
Is that your observation, too?
Stand back for someone, hold the door open, clear the way – and the recipients of common kindness quite often move on, ignore kindness, as if being served is their expectation and you are simply doing your job.
Besides “please” and “thank you” there is another good manners suggestions I’d add:
Before you – anyone that is, myself included, of course – bank it, spend it, eat it, use it – if it was a gift – thank the person by calling or in writing who gave it to you.
“I haven’t had the time to write a thank you letter or make a thank you phone call,” I have heard.
What nonsense.
If you found the time to use the gift you’ve certainly had the time to express thanks for it.
“My grandma (grandma, uncle, aunt) doesn’t expect a thank you card or a call,” he said.
That a generous person may expect no formal thanks does not mean it ought not be communicated.
Thulani was 4 and, coming down stairs he screamed siren-like, a prolonged yell and fell, his whole body convulsively sobbing. When I reached him and picked him up and held him close, my hold necessitated a shift from hug to restraint until the boy convulsed less and relaxed enough to reveal the carpet nail lodged flush in his underfoot.
I had spent the afternoon, while Thulani and his infant brother were napping, ripping, tearing, hauling an old carpet off a stairwell.
Dr. Yancey made me do it.
He said something was bothering infant-Nate’s breathing, perhaps an old carpet and ordered it out.
I examined the exposed hardwood time and again, running my open hands carefully over each newly exposed stair for a missed carpet nail and found none.
Now the nail I did miss plugged Thulani’s foot.
With a boy hanging around my neck I headed for the living room sofa and, using my full body weight, held him down to lock kicking legs.
He froze seeing I was about to remove the nail.
Silent, transfixed – he watched me pull it out and puked as I held him tight against my chest.
The warm flow spewed from his anxious tummy, gluing us together as it snaked down my shirt.
The sludge, a sloppy mucus curtain, dangled between us and, to trap the flow, I held him even closer and waddled to the basement and stripped him. Maneuvering his frame from arm to arm I removed my soiled and dumped our soggy clothes into the washer.
Upstairs, I eased him into a warm soapy bathtub and sat on the rim.
Finding the opportunity to seek forgiveness, participate in repair or restitution with people whom I have hurt may result in their expressing forgiveness. While hearing such comforting words warms me, self-forgiveness remains difficult.
Do you have similar battles?
I know this is a particular struggle because having known what is right, good, wholesome, I have not always done what is right and good and wholesome. I find this painful to admit and address. Knowing better was hardly helpful.
While it is no excuse, I am aware that I am not too different from many.
When I am feeling down it feels as if my failures speak louder than any successes. Despite the knowledge that “people are more than their actions” shame seeps and runs deep and makes me feel vulnerable and fragile. It can be a physical sensation.
Again, I must ask, do you ever feel this way?
When I am at my best, I can humble myself, accept my imperfections and that I am a forgiven person.
Admitting I am flawed is key to my freedom which leads me to self forgiveness at which point freedom fills my soul.
I’ve been asked a few times why I’m a rideshare driver for Lyft and Uber.
The answers are easy.
It keeps me from spending money at local hardware stores.
I tend to drift into a few, earnestly thinking and believing I am good at fixing things, you know, minor home projects like remodeling the kitchen, adding a bedroom, after decades of knowing otherwise. Truth is, I’m not. I have hardly ever finished a single repair, paint, assemble, project I ever began and I have unused equipment to prove it. I’d rather drive a few hours and make a little cash than buy stuff I end up never using and see it sitting wherever I abandon it until it burns my eyes.
When I drive for Lyft and Uber — yes, New Castle, you have at least one rideshare driver I know of — I get the joy and privilege of meeting people who I would probably never otherwise meet.
Read the car correctly and there are riders who really want to talk and will tell you their life stories, most of which, if well-penned, could be best sellers, even movie franchises. Many riders simply want to rest or catch up on phone time after a very hard day’s work. Some sleep. That’s fine by me. It gives me time to be thankful for all the home-projects I am avoiding and calculate all the money I’m saving by not buying the John Deer foundation digger thing I found most attractive and fully believed I needed a few days ago.
I have long prayed that God would permit me to travel and teach young adult students who are rich in almost everything but money and who live in places I couldn’t find on a map. If I drive hard for a week I can earn enough money to fly anywhere in the world where I’m invited.
Paying my own way means I don’t stretch budgets of campuses in some of the most economically vulnerable and challenged countries on Earth.
My three trips, scheduled before 2024 closes are to Santiago – then home, Accra, Lome, Nairobi, Worcester, – then home. After Thanksgiving, it’s Bujumbura. If I drive it means I can go to such destinations. I think my prayers have been answered.
When I drive for Lyft and Uber I get the joy and privilege of seeing parts of the city of Indianapolis (and Anderson, Muncie, St. Louis, Fort Wayne, Elwood, Madison and Columbus, Indiana) I would never otherwise see, and there is beauty, stunning beauty everywhere, just as there is everywhere on this gorgeous planet.
I like to drive because I meet biblical characters. The woman caught in adultery cried her eyes out in my car one morning before 7am. The 19-year old told me God would never accept or forgive her for what she’d just done and cried all the more when I told her that would be most uncharacteristic of the God I’ve encountered.
I’ve driven men and women to and from all the major hospitals who express overwhelming joy in simply being alive.
When women ride with me and I hear them on their phones negotiating extra hours with three part-time jobs, scheduling care of several children – for their own and for the children of neighbors and friends – while also learning a language in a new country, I want to declare my 2013 Lexus holy ground.
Deep breath now: when 4 young men in their late teens got a ride from an abandoned fast-food parking lot and, after a short while started to tell me their stories and revealed that all had lost a dad, uncle or friend in a violent death, and all had been with someone who was dying, and that there were five weapons in MY car (among the four of them) and when I asked why and almost as one they said WE HAVE TO and I drive off leaving them behind, regretting I could not sit with them and hear more and more and more.
Yes. Long sentence. Full of run-ons, just like the conversation we had in the car.
Lyft? Uber?
It’s beautiful I tell you.
Maybe one day this week I will stay home and paint a room.
Apart from thinking outside of the box (kindly forgive the cliche) my challenge to myself, my sons, and those whom I have the joy of teaching, is to think alone. Have thoughts, plans, aspirations, that are not determined or shaped by commercials, fads, friends, or even by immediate and extended family.
This is a tough but liberating challenge. I encounter people who appear terrified to allow an independent thought to cross their beautiful minds. They give a sideways or backward glance seeking affirmation before the thought is permitted to step out.
The joy of owning their own thoughts, exploring unique possibilities even within their own heads, it appears, will not be theirs.
The fear cripples into conformity.
Seth Godin, speaker and top-selling writer, used the term “sheepwalking” in Tribes to describe mindless following.
I’ve extended his metaphor:
“Sheep-thinking” – borrowing thinking from others for fear of having an original or contrary thought.
“Sheep-talking” – sounding just like everyone else sounds, something particularly noticeable in churches and faith movements.
“Sheep-feeling” – to feel what everyone else feels, not in empathy or solidarity but in being caught up or swept up by the emotion of the moment.
“Sheeping” has become my catchall when it’s happening within me and I hear or see it around me.
Photographed in #Curitiba, %Brazil, with permission,
The soul – enigmatic, yet so incredibly powerful – is what brings to life, and is the essence of life, feuling and energizing an inner-being. We may refer to a young person, even a toddler, as an old soul and we know the toddler is, as many toddlers are, or appears to be a deep thinker. We may say a spritely person of advanced age is a young soul and we ready ourselves for an elderly person with a spring in her step or a youthful inside. Soul is often packaged with a prefix: broken-, angry-, critical-, abandoned-, creative- and all reflect on an inner-condition.
The Soul is the Person housed in flesh and bones; pulsating immortal vitality ferried, decade upon decade, within the mortal corpus, while not limited to it or by it.
May I illustrate? As I write my soul is reaching out to your soul. Hopefully our souls are connecting right now as you read. I have no idea where you are but I assure you, my soul is firmly here with me while simultaneously seeking to reach you and be received and embraced by you.
I hope it does, and is.
It has happened before.
I know it occurred through the thousands of newspaper columns I have had the joy of writing and hearing in return from many readers.
The soul is the spark of light within that lights up the eyes – eyes which will cease to ignite (yours and mine) once the soul is freed from the body, a body that, for whatever reasons, can no longer house or contain it. On this side of life we have named this moment of release, rather unfortunately, death. Perhaps, rather, it’s a new beginning, a refreshing adventure of deeper love and deeper companionship than any of us has ever before known, and it’s not death at all.
That’s my belief.
Installed, divinely imputed and imparted, at the milli-moment of conception, itself also learning, the soul begins immediately, within the womb, to impart strength and resilience into the made-from-dust flesh-and-bone outer form. Soul-power sweeps into the body, bringing with it a life-time’s worth of the capacity for love, a life-time’s worth of the desire for survival, a life-time’s worth of joy in human connection. It imparts to the physical being, an enduring and innate urge for worship, and a compelling desire to impact the larger environment and leave behind a beautiful and substantial legacy.
You and I are not limited to our physical bodies and I do not mean some outer-body experience, well, not exactly. It is much much more than about my soul reaching out to yours.
When we write, paint, sculpt, love and rear (raise) our children, adore our grandchildren, and enjoy great-grandchildren; when we arrange flowers, build skyscrapers, plant vegetables, light birthday candles for 3-year-olds, leave fortunes to find cancer’s cure, we are gathering the best of our pasts and throwing our souls into the future.
Generations yet unborn will know our departed souls:
They will know who we are from the stories told by those whom we have loved.
They will know who we are from what we have written.
They will see what we have painted, sculpted.
Our handiwork and heartfelt work, our generous love and nurturing gentleness will live on, revealing the power of our souls long after the fuel of our inner-being has escaped our aging, dust-to-dust, ashes-to-ashes bodies, the whereabouts of our remains marked with a stone or a plaque, and our souls have returned to the Place from whence they came.
So? Write it (whatever it is). Record it (whatever it is). Say it in poetry, with colorful paints on paper or on canvas. Write a book, gather photographs, place them in an album. Dance it (whatever it is). Sing it. Declare it, while you can.
You’re seeking a soul-mate in a great-great-grandson yet unborn.
When he is old enough to understand what you have created for him – your name signed at the end of a love letter or your family name on a high-rise research hospital – he will appreciate it and you will be generational soul-mates.
You may have noticed a certain keenness and sharpness within your soul, a sharpness and keenness that may far outpace the keenness and strength of your body, even your intellect, mind, memory. Perhaps your soul is more aware than you may think and knows it is teetering on inevitable escape, in a year, or three, or more. This is why this is as good a time as any to dance, to sing, to declare, and to do so while you can, however you can, ……. when you can.
Your soul is intricately invested in beauty and in your life’s legacy.
Reach for the diary, the photograph album, the compendium of letters your grandparents or great uncle or favorite aunt left to you and allow those precious souls – now adventuring or resting paradise – to speak to you anew across generations, and then, via you, let them, too, continue to live in the generations yet to come.
We are holding hands, not across a mere oceans, not across mere time zones, but with the generations, past and future, and so, let’s Do Like David did – DLDD – and let everything that has breath (life, soul, energy) Praise the Lord (Psalm 150:6).
One of my favorite paintings — I keep it illuminated 24/7/365 to remind me ever of the women who made me a dad — and sent my soul soaring.
I had occasion to be with two women who work closely with the public. One, a hairstylist, the other is in guest services for a major hotel.
I asked how soon each was able to identify if a customer is going to be a difficult customer, high maintenance, or easy going.
“They tell on themselves,” said the hairstylist without taking a moment to think, “as soon as you open your mouth to welcome them they start with the demands, and you are wrong before you even start.”
“I can tell by how they walk in through the doors,” said the hotel employee, “and the first thing they do is tell you they booked online and they booked luxury. And now they want to upgrade this and upgrade that. I can see the booking. I know they are not truthful.”
“Easy going people are easy to see. They ask my opinion and really listen when I tell them what I can do. And they laugh a lot,” said the hairdresser.
“When someone comes to check into the hotel and they are not pushing, and I don’t mean by what they say. Difficult people push, push with attitude. Easy people are nice to help. They are not trying to get something all the time.”
Some people are just plain difficult— no matter what!
difficultrelationships.com 