Majoring in the Minors

What is life?

Is it the daily routine or the adventure?  The whole "Working for the weekend" idea is the reality we endure in our culture.  When we talk about life, our memories gravitate to our adventures, misadventures and places we have been, chances we took.  Yes, those are our "glory days".  It has me wondering if travel IS life and our daily routine is how most of us define comfort and stability.

Never in the history of man have we been so mobile, yet most of us cling to a small bubble of a world.  When we leave that bubble, it is an adventure.  We learn, grow, and experience things in the Bigger World.  Travel changes us, and it need not be to the other side of the world but then again, why not?  I think our country would be a better place if everyone were able to visit a 3rd world country for a week.  To see that not everyone lives like us and has what we take for granted, and yet they are happy.  To see that there is suffering that we never considered, social norms that we never conceived, craftsmanship untold, food we have never tasted and beauty we have never seen in the midst of it all- that is profound learning.

So is life learning or existing?  Adventure or station-keeping?

Have I spent my life majoring in the minors?

Brilliant Will Durant Quotes

“Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.”

“The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionaries are philosophers and saints.”

“It is a mistake to think that the past is dead. Nothing that has ever happened is quite without influence at this moment.”

“To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves.”

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”

“A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within.”

“I feel for all faiths the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the trust in reason is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments of darkness groping for the sun.”

“No man who is in a hurry is quite civilized.”

Glennon Doyle Melton Quotes

  From Carry On, Warrior: Thoughts on Life Unarmed and  Carry On, Warrior: The Power of Embracing Your Messy, Beautiful Life

“Life is hard—not because we’re doing it wrong, just because it’s hard.”

“When her pain is fresh and new, let her have it. Don't try to take it away. Forgive yourself for not having that power. Grief and pain are like joy and peace; they are not things we should try to snatch from each other. They're sacred. they are part of each person's journey. All we can do is offer relief from this fear: I am all alone. That's the one fear you can alleviate.” 

“The only meaningful thing we can offer one another is love. Not advice, not questions about our choices, not suggestions for the future, just love.” 

“You have been offered "the gift of crisis". As Kathleen Norris reminds us, the Greek root of the word crisis is "to sift", as in, to shake out the excesses and leave only what's important. That's what crises do. They shake things up until we are forced to hold on to only what matters most. The rest falls away.” 

“The sun shows up every morning, no matter how bad you've been the night before. It shines without judgment. It never withholds. It warms the sinners, the saints, the druggies, the cheerleaders- the saved and the heathens alike. You can hide from the sun, but it wont take you personally. It´ll never, ever punish you for hiding. You can stay in the dark for years or decades, and when you finally step outside, it´ll be there.” 

“That’s how you can tell that you’re filling yourself with the wrong things. You use a lot of energy, and in the end, you feel emptier and less comfortable than ever.” 

“If you feel something calling you to dance or write or paint or sing, please refuse to worry about whether you’re good enough. Just do it. Be generous. Offer a gift to the world that no one else can offer: yourself.” 

“God approaches us in the disguise of other people.” 

“What is to give light must endure burning.” —Viktor E. Frankl

“Kind people are brave people. Brave is not something you should wait to feel. Brave is a decision. It is a decision that compassion is more important than fear, than fitting in, than following the crowd.” 

“When they speak to you from their fear--speak past their fear and directly to their love. Their Love will step forward eventually.” 

“Wherever you go, there you are. Your emptiness goes with you. Maddening. Things that help: writing, reading, water, walks, forgiving myself every other minute, practicing easy yoga, taking deep breaths, and petting my dogs. These things don't fill me completely, but they remind me that it is not my job to fill myself. It's just my job to notice my emptiness and find graceful ways to live as a broken, unfilled human... 

If there's a silver lining to the emptiness, here it is: the unfillable is what brings people together. I've never made a friend by bragging about my strengths, but I've made countless by sharing my weakness and my emptiness.” 

“I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.”

“Persevere. Bear with great patience each other’s infirmities of body or behavior. And when the thorns of contention arise, daily forgive, and be ready to accept forgiveness.” 

“I think one of the keys to happiness is accepting that I am never going to be perfectly happy. Life is uncomfortable. So I might as well get busy loving the people around me. I’m going to stop trying so hard to decide whether they are the “right people” for me and just take deep breaths and love my neighbors. I’m going to take care of my friends. I’m going to find peace in the ’burbs. I’m going to quit chasing happiness long enough to notice it smiling right at me.” 

“Reading is my inhale and writing is my exhale.” 

“I am a child of God, and so is everyone else. We are all on the same side. And so in each new person, I see an invitation to know a new side of God. There are as many sides of him as there are people walking the earth. I think that’s why he keeps making people. He’s not done telling us about himself yet. So I remember that each person I meet or hear from, even if she’s not yet treating me the way I’d like to be treated, is the most important thing on earth. There is no hierarchy of importance, of brilliance. We are each infinity important. More brilliant than the sun. Because each of us is a child of God. So we better recognize. Those are the two sides of the golden coin I’d like each of my children to keep in her pocket forever: Be confident because you are a child of God. Be humble because everyone else is too.” 

“Loving people and animals makes us stronger in the right ways and weaker in the right ways. Even if animals and people leave, even if they die, they leave us better. So we keep loving, even though we might lose, because loving teaches us and changes us.” 

“Why does it have to hurt? Why does it have to be hard?” Tish asked me. “You know how math is your hardest class right now, but it’s also where you’re learning the most?” I explained. “It’s like that. Life is about learning, and we learn best when things get hard.” 

“I don’t want to take anything to the grave. I want to die used up and emptied out. I don’t want to carry around anything that I don’t have to. I want to travel light.” 

"Different always turns out to be an illusion."

“I love God, whoever he is, and I’d really like to get closer to him. I’ve been thinking about how one of the simplest ways to get close to a woman is to be good to her children. To be kind and gentle and to pay close attention to the things that make them special. To try to see her children the way she sees her children. And how God made us in his image. How he is the mother and father of all of us. So I wonder if that would be the best way to get closer to him too. By being kind and gentle to his children and noticing all of the things that make them special. So many of us spend our time trying to find God in books, but maybe the simplest way to God is directly through the hearts of his children.” 

“Let’s be Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. Atticus’s children, Scout and Jem, carefully watch their father’s behavior as the house next door to theirs burns to the ground. As the fire creeps closer and closer to the Finches’ home, Atticus appears so calm that Scout and Jem finally decide that “it ain’t time to worry yet.” We need to be Atticus. Hands in our pockets. Calm. Believing. So that our children will look at us and even with a fire raging in front of them, they’ll say, “Huh. Guess it’s not time to worry yet.” 

“I thought a lot about how beautiful and powerful courage and faith are when they are found together.” 

“You can never get enough of what you don’t need.” 

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive." —Howard Thurman

“I don't believe in advice. Everybody has the answers right inside her, since we're all made up of the same amount of God. So when a friend says, I need some advice, I switch it to, I need some love, and I try to offer that.” 

“I think God puts people in our lives as gifts to us. The children in your class this year, they are some of God's gifts to you. So please treat each one like a gift from God. Every single one.” 

“Peace is not the absence of conflict, but the ability to cope with it." —Robert Fulghum 

“Holes are good for making friends, and friends are the best fillers I’ve found yet. Maybe because other people are the closest we get to God on this side. So when we use them to find God in each other, we become holy.” 

“There are two different types of time. Chronos time is what we live in. It’s regular time. It’s one minute at a time, staring down the clock until bedtime time. It’s ten excruciating minutes in the Target line time, four screaming minutes in time-out time, two hours until Daddy gets home time. Chronos is the hard, slow-passing time we parents often live in. Then there’s Kairos time. Kairos is God’s time. It’s time outside of time. It’s metaphysical time. Kairos is those magical moments in which time stands still. I have a few of those moments each day, and I cherish them.” 

The Way of Being Lost

Cutting Loose

Sometimes from sorrow, for no reason,
you sing. For no reason, you accept
the way of being lost, cutting loose
from all else and electing a world
where you go where you want to.

Arbitrary, a sound comes, a reminder
that a steady center is holding
all else. If you listen, that sound
will tell you where it is and you
can slide your way past trouble.

Certain twisted monsters
always bar the path — but that’s when
you get going best, glad to be lost,
learning how real it is
here on earth, again and again.

—William Stafford, The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems

5 x 5 Method

Unseen Things

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.  ~Hebrews 11:1

So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.  ~2 Corinthians 4:18

Reboot

In the past week, two people have told me that they are leaving behind the world of self-employment and being their own boss.  In both cases, the combination of stress and lack of financial payoff were causing them to abandon their dreams or at least back-burner them for an indefinite length of time.

The cost of those dreams can outweigh the benefits.  The stress alone can kill you.  Tasks you thought you could manage alone get too time consuming to manage alone.  People can let you down.  Clients can be unreasonable.  Communication becomes a chore.  Everything takes longer than you thought and "setting your own schedule" becomes working 24/7.  Personal finances and business finances can get blurred.  It is rare that a body can juggle all that without incident.  Life IS surprises.  Life is all about plan B.  

The skill you love to do must be balanced with self-promotion and professional development.

And on and on...

So it is time for a reboot.

Unnecessary definition: That is computer vernacular for shutting down and starting over.  Information and programs get a fresh start up, a new running of the commands that make them perform- updates and deletions get reshuffled.  Inexplicable ghosts in the machine can be ironed out.  Sometimes that is just the trick.

Except this time it's your life.

You have more invested in that.  It feels catastrophic.  It feels like a failure.  Humbling...no, humiliating.

Yet on the other side of the reboot there is hope.  Realignment.  Restoration.  It could take time before you find 'normal" again.  You might never regain the same boldness that led you off on the road less traveled, or you might, depending on how you process the journey.  You have unlimited reboots, you don't have unlimited time.