Category: Posts

Boundaries

Someone unsubscribed from one of my newsletters the other day. When you unsubscribe, you are given the option to say why. Here is what he wrote in the box:

I had thought that we were friends until your Twitter unfollow showed that you do not reciprocate. I wish you well.

So many layers in just 21 words.

What had happened was that he was someone I had met at a conference once. At the time, I was really active on Twitter, and he followed me there. But these days Twitter is a dumpster fire, and it’s been years since I truly enjoyed it – in fact, I barely have a presence there at all anymore. But recently I have been trimming it down, weeding out the noise, to see if there is still value there for me. And that has meant unfollowing some people I used to follow there.

Including this guy. Who I have not spoken directly to, or been spoken directly to, for at least five years. Like, nothing. He hasn’t interacted with me, on social media or in real life either, at all. But because I unfollowed him, he took it personally.

I could spend hours talking about the ways in which Social Media deludes us into the appearance of connection without the reality of it. But the bigger point I want to make is this:

Nobody has a right to all of you.

As a friend once said about me, my life is well documented. I have an Instagram account, open to the public. I have a Twitter feed, open to the public, that he still could follow – I was just choosing to not follow him. I have a couple of Facebook pages, open to the public. I have two newsletters that go out every week where I share very personal things.

All of that is open to him, but because he did not have access to this one part of my life, he got mad.

Nope, nope, nope.

You have a right to boundaries, a right to decide how much of you is available, to decide how much of your life, your time, your story, your pictures, your memories you wish to put out into the world. You get to decide how much of your life you want to share with people, and you get to decide that on a person-by-person and event-by-event basis.

Every relationship has boundaries. Every single one. It is the boundaries I have around my relationship with my wife that make her my wife and not my roommate. And in every single interaction we have with anybody, we are teaching them how we want to be treated.

If you answer a text from a client on Saturday, you just taught them to text you on Saturday. If you let your coworker talk to you like you are trash, you just taught them that is OK. We have to teach people how to be in a relationship with us.

As Prentiss Hemphill says, boundaries are the distance at which I can love both you and me at the same time.

But if I have to choose, I will choose me.

Connection

I spent this past weekend in one of my happy places – the mountains of North Carolina. I love it there, even if it is not home in the way the hills of my native North Mississippi are home to me. But it feels in some ways closer to home than the subtropical prairie of Central Mississippi where I live now. Geography is a funny thing.

But the thing that drew me back there this time was not geography, but people. This pandemic has been hard on this sociable introvert, and my experience of the pandemic has been a conservative one: Because of Renee’s heart transplant, which renders her severely immunocompromised, we have been more careful than most careful people, which means lots and lots of distancing ourselves from others.

I drove the 9 hours – I’m not ready to risk getting on a plane yet – and got in late at night, and was warmly greeted by an old friend. He’s the sort of friend with whom you sit until long in the night, catching up and sharing stories from your lives that are too granular to include in the periodic phone calls, the sorts of things that don’t make the curated feeds of social media. The conversation ebbs and flows, the silence is comfortable when it happens, the topics are wide-ranging, and suddenly you realize it is two AM.

Over the next few days, I spent time with several old friends – people I knew from the Before Times. Not just before-the-pandemic times, although that is true, but also from the before-my-life-was-what-it-is-now times. They knew the angry Hugh, the impulsive Hugh, the Hugh that burned out. They knew him and his faults and loved him anyway. And it was delightful to be back among people who truly knew me, in a way I have not been known by anyone since moving back to Mississippi.

That is no reflection on the people here – it’s mostly about time: The people in the mountains have known me for more than a decade. We worked together on various projects together, we made things together, and together we traversed tragedy and joy -divorces, deaths, weddings, and babies, all together. When I fell, they picked me up and loved me – hard. In short, we had opportunities for connection I have not had here, where ⅔ of my time has been spent trying to survive a pandemic in front of a Zoom screen while wearing sweatpants. It’s not the same thing at all.

An old friend who has drifted out of my life would say, when I would do or say something that indicated I truly knew her likes and dislikes, her fears, her quirky guilty pleasures, that it felt good to be known.

And that’s truly it, isn’t it? The desire to be known fully, to be understood, to be seen and heard, to be acknowledged and remembered. This is, at its core, why I write.

* * *

I find myself these days craving connection. My old friends are laughing at this, as I am horrible at staying in touch with people I love. Some of this is my ADHD, as a common thing people with my type of brain do is find that the thinking about a thing feels to our brain as if we did it, so my remembering my friend Kim and thinking fondly of her elicits the same feeling in my brain it would if I had sent her a text or note, so having had the memory, I no longer feel the drive to act on it. Of course, this does nothing to let Kim know that I was thinking of her, but here we are.

I also wonder though, how much my paralysis around reaching out to people isn’t so much my paralysis, but unreasonable expectations set up by technologies that are less than a generation old. As late as the 1990s, most of us had a relatively small group of people about whom we knew what their day-to-day life was really like. In 1998, one might know from an email – or a decade earlier, from a phone call or letter – that a cousin in a distant town took their family to the amusement park, but now we know that their eight-year-old threw up on the roller-coaster, that the six-year-old hates corndogs, that they lost their car in the parking lot, and everyone got sunburned.

And we know that level of detail about hundreds of people, regularly.

There is a phenomenon on social media where, although I am writing a public post, which theoretically can be seen and read by anyone on earth with an internet connection and a browser, in my mind, it is actually only intended to be read by a select few. I don’t parse my words as if it is a broadcast to the planet, but rather as if it is more like a Christmas Newsletter, going out to people I love.

But the inverse is also true – when we read other people’s posts, it is perceived by our brain as if it is written to us specifically, which is one reason we take it all so personally. I saw a post from someone I don’t really know where he was complaining that people were shoving their love for the 2022 Superbowl Halftime Show down his throat, when in reality nobody had addressed him specifically at all – they just had opinions that they posted on their own wall, which he could see. But to his mind, they were all addressed to him.

Because of this, my brain tells me that all my friends are sharing many details of their lives with me, and I am not reciprocating at their level, so the relationship feels imbalanced in my head. But they are many, and I am one, and so their collective flood of sharing is naturally dwarfed by my own output. In other words, it is an ever-escalating race that is unwinnable.

The people I saw this weekend in the mountains – some of them I have not seen in the three years since I have been gone, but we did not lack connection. The sporadic emails, texts, and glimpses into their life on Instagram were enough to sustain the relationship until we could sip tea together in the same room, rehash the old stories, and tell new ones.

The truth is, I could be better about calling and writing, but the bigger problem is my definition of connection is probably skewed by unrealistic expectations because of stories I tell myself about myself.

* * *

None of that diminishes the very real longing I have for the deeper connections here, where I currently live. The additional friction created by the pandemic – the uncertainty of who is safe and who is not, the difficulty finding a place to meet where one feels safe, the second-guessing and cultural gaslighting – are all real factors that make this really hard.

But I find myself these days eager to do the work it will take. I have lunch and coffee meetings (on patios, in places that require masks, with vaccinated and boosted people) scheduled. I’m trying to regulate my social media usage in a way that makes it a servant instead of a master.

And I’m trying to be honest about what I need and to state my needs. And what I find myself needing these days, more than anything else, is connection.

What We Leave Behind

I bought some life insurance last week. I’ve been putting it off for ages, ostensibly because I wanted to research my options, but the long list of other things I have procrastinated on speaks to the lie in that scenario. In reality, it just wasn’t much of a priority, but finally, I got there.

In my 20s, I used to sell life insurance, and Past Me would tell Current Me that I am under-insured, but perfection is the enemy of done, and some is always better than none. I bought breathing room until I can get it all figured out.

One reason – the worst reason, actually – for delaying the purchase was my reluctance to think much about death. I mean, that isn’t completely true: I feel like I have been thinking about nothing but death and people dying for the last two years.

Of course, there is the massive casualty toll from COVID 19: Right now we stand at just under a million dead in the US alone. And none of those people exist in isolation: They are all someone’s brother, someone’s father, someone’s aunt, sister, mother. They were our co-workers, our server at our favorite restaurant, the mechanic who worked on our car, the doctor who looked after our children. The ripples from those million deaths are strong and wide-ranging.

But even putting aside deaths from Covid-19, there is just so much death right now, literal and metaphorical. I know people right now reeling from unexpected deaths of loved ones, friends, partners, and parents. I know people dealing with the death of beloved pets, and those who are planning the end of life for their pets. And then there is the death of dreams, relationships, and livelihoods brought on by this pandemic.

So much dying, all around me. Thinking about it has been overwhelming.

I’m not afraid of dying – that’s not it. I mean, I like living, and intend to stick around as long as I can, but I don’t fear death itself, because I don’t think there is anything to fear. I have preached at dozens of funerals in my career, and I can tell you what the various traditions, including mine, believe about what happens after we die, but the reality is, nobody knows. I mean, really knows. In my experience, people who are insistent that they do know either want to sell you something or sell themselves on something they already bought.

The rational part of my brain says that our species existed 300,000 years before I was born, and I have no firsthand knowledge of any of it, so it would be irrational to suppose that I will have first-hand knowledge of it going forward after my death. To be more concise: The rational choice is that my consciousness will be the same place after I die that it was before I was born: Non-existent. That when I die, I just turn off, like a light switch.

But I believe in humanity and community, and for most of those 300,000 years, there has been some belief in most cultures that we persist in some way. Perhaps it is delusional to think that I may be reunited with my loved ones in some way after I am gone, and it is not the most rational belief system by far, but it is a beautiful one, nonetheless.

I tend to be ruthlessly pragmatic when it comes to things like spirituality. Since I do not know what will happen after my death, I don’t spend much time thinking about it, preferring instead to focus on what I can know. I know what happens when I feed hungry people, when I ease someone’s burden, or when I look for who is missing and work to get them found. I know what happens when I do the work in front of me and so I leave speculation about rewards in the afterlife to other people.

But I also know that I will live in the memories of those who love me, and as long as there are stories I am in, as long as my influence is still felt, as long as any change I worked to make happen can exist and be built upon, in some sense, I am never really gone. We all leave legacies behind us, and it is up to us to decide if they are to be worthy ones.

No, any hesitancy I have around death doesn’t involve me at all, but the people I will leave here, who will miss me when I am gone, who will have to find a way to move on, who will have to clean up whatever mess I leave behind, and who will be left to pick up the pieces – because no matter how well I plan, there will be pieces. Every death breaks things, and there is always a mess to be dealt with. And now my death – which is inevitable, if hopefully a long way away – will be slightly less messy than it would have been before.

 

 

Love and Attention

I recently came across a description of a scene from a movie I have not seen – Ladybird.

The scene description goes like this:

Sister Sarah Joan (Lois Smith), the principal, has read Lady Bird’s college application essay. “It’s clear how much you love Sacramento,” Sister Sarah remarks. This comes as a surprise, both to Lady Bird and the viewer, who is by now aware of Lady Bird’s frustration with her hometown.

“I guess I pay attention,” she says, not wanting to be contrary.

“Don’t you think they’re the same thing?” the wise sister asks.

The idea that attention is a form of love (and vice versa) is a beautiful insight.

I really want to like this. I do. I even want to believe it – that the things we pay attention to are the things we love. And it may even be true – if you happen to be neurotypical. But I’m not.

And because I’m not, my attention is not rationed out in proportion to my love for things, but in a haphazard spray of chaos, driven by random neurons in my brain that follow their own path. As a result, there are people I passionately care for and would die for that I routinely neglect to call or text, and instead find myself reading articles or watching YouTube videos from someone whose ideas I abhor.

No, ideas like this – that love is attention – just make room for more shame in my already shame-filled mind, one that makes me convinced that my brain sabotages all that is good in my life, that is secretly convinced the teacher in 8th grade that said my diagnosis wasn’t real and was just an excuse to not pay attention in math class was right, that my absolute inability to focus on things that do not interest me is just my own inherent laziness and that, if I wanted to, I could keep my checkbook balanced, my tires rotated on schedule, and never miss a deadline, no matter how arbitrary.

Of course, my rational mind knows that none of these things are true.

My ADHD means I work harder and more than most folks to do seemingly ordinary tasks, not less. What’s more, my ADHD brings gifts that make some things in my life possible that neurotypical people struggle with. If you are neurotypical, I guarantee you I can out imagine you, I can come up with more out-of-the-box ideas than you, I can learn in ways you cannot, and I see things that are invisible to you.

I have super-powers of which you can only dream.

What I probably can’t do, at least in ways you recognize, is pay attention to you. At least, not without some help.

So I set notifications on my calendar so I remember to text people that matter to me.

Other attention=love hacks:

  • I have a list of people on Facebook, so theoretically I see the things those people post more often, and these are people I just default “like” everything they post. If my friend J, with whom I was in love with in elementary school, posted her favorite recipe for a bowl of Cheerios, I am going to *like* that thing. Because in our social media driven world, things like that show we are paying attention, and she is one of the people in this world I love, even if I have not seen her in years. (Actually, there are two women whose name starts with J who fit in this category, and I love them both dearly, so if you are reading this, J, yes, I mean you).
  • Set up a Google alert for their name or company.
  • Find out their birthday and put a reminder in your calendar app.
  • Set an appointment time in your calendar, and during that hour, text or message everyone you can think of you love.
  • Set standing dates: For 8 years I had a weekly lunch date with a friend. I miss that a lot.
  • Have a “drop everything” rule: When someone you love pops in your mind, give yourself permission to drop whatever you are working on and text or call them.

There are more, but you get the point – if you have a brain like mine, you have to remind yourself to pay attention to the people you love.

Not because you need it, but because they do.

Making Room

It was September of 2016, and I was fried.

It was my 10th year of doing frontline work with virtually no break for very little money. My wife had a heart transplant the year before, changing our lives forever and dramatically complicating it.

Some people who cared about me had put some money together and arranged for me to take a month off – not as a vacation as much as a sabbatical of sorts. I would get some downtime, learn things, and do some writing. So we spent a week at the beach in North Carolina and another week on Jekyll Island in Georgia, and I went to Hollywood, California for a week to see something different and to listen to Rob Bell for a while.

Rob was legendary in the circles I moved in at the time, having been the voice of deconstruction for many of us who had grown up in evangelicalism. Books like Velvet Elvis had given us language for what so many of us had felt, and his Nooma videos and his attention to aesthetics made many of us feel known.

But he was also a gifted communicator, and after he left the ministry, he made his living writing books and giving classes on, among other things, communication and speaking. And since I made a hunk of my living giving speeches and sermons, I was glad I got the opportunity to go and sit in on his three-day class on speaking.

Rob is so ADHD; he makes me look like Yoda. However, it’s always a high-energy experience, and he is not boring at all, and he really is incredibly gifted at this, so I was excited to go. But what I don’t think I was prepared for was how confessional it was.

Public figures like Rob practice what I call selective vulnerability. I do it, too, here on the blog. I’ve decided what parts of my story are open to the public and what parts are private. And because I draw those lines in different places than some people would, it can seem dramatically open to people who have other boundaries than I do.

Sometime on the second day, Rob told of his first full year in LA after leaving the church in Michigan. The way I remember that he told it, there was a TV show in the works – think Oprah or Ellen – a talk show, but around spiritual topics. They filmed the pilot, and his people talked to their people – they had a deal and would start filming after the beginning of the year.

Rob cleared his calendar and waited for the phone to ring.

The phone didn’t ring. The new year started, and nobody called. Weeks went by. His agent assured him the deal was still on.

One day his agent called and said the deal was off.

“Sometimes that happens out here,” he said.

Rob said he had just bought a new house and had nothing on his calendar for the whole year. No book deal in progress. No speaking tour lined up—no idea how any money at all was going to come in that year.

So he sat down at his kitchen table with his teenage son’s microphone and started recording what would become his first podcast.

And then he did it again the following week. And the next.

And he said that the podcast gave him structure and made room for things to happen. It gave him something to focus on, and by focusing on that, other things became clear. Nowadays, Rob’s podcast is hugely popular, and since then, he’s written many more books and done tours, and people have flown from North Carolina to listen to his class on speaking.

“So, the moral is,” he said, laughing, “If you ever get stuck and don’t know what to do, start a podcast. Or at least start something.”

It was September of last year. I was feeling stuck. It was 18 months into a pandemic that had crushed every plan I had when I moved here. I was 10 months into a deep depression I was just beginning to move out of. I needed something on which to focus.

So I started a blog. It launched in the middle of September, and by October, I was publishing twice a week. But I started posting every day in November, and I’ve kept that up (except Sundays) ever since. I’m now 121 posts in, more than 100,000 words. More than 500 folks have signed up to get the links each week by email, plus many who read it on Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr.

And it’s made room I didn’t have before. I now field offers for projects weekly. People want to collaborate in ways I hadn’t imagined before. Offers open up. People want to meet. To be clear – almost none of this is directly related to the blog. They aren’t wanting to meet about something I wrote – but it is as if I made room for it to happen. For example, I got asked to do my first wedding in Mississippi today – by someone who has never met me, after being referred to me by someone who has never met me.

Yes, that sounds woo-woo. And no, I don’t care.

The rest of the story: I came back to work after my trip to LA. The same hot mess I left was still there, made worse by my absence for a month. The following spring it almost collapsed, and the following year, I was done. You can’t fix systemic problems with a spa day. Or even a trip to Hollywood.

 

Next

On March 16th of 2020, I had a lunch meeting scheduled with a colleague.  We had planned to go to Subway and eat, and then go to her office for a more formal meeting with a third person, but she was running late, so I grabbed the sandwiches to go and just brought them to her office.

I often said in the year that followed that what should have been my last meal in a restaurant for more than a year still ended up being take out. I haven’t relaxed in any public indoors space for almost two years now, and 900,000 Americans are dead.

There isn’t much more I can say about that. I mean, there is a lot more I want to say, but my saying it won’t make things easier, or better, or even make me feel better. In fact, it just makes me angry, and I’m trying not to do that these days.

But here we are.

The Buddhists tell us that our suffering comes from our attachment to a preconceived idea of how things ought to be. That tracks for me: I’m not mad I’m having many Zoom meetings every week – I’m mad because I think things ought to be the way they were this time in 2020 – when lunch with a colleague didn’t require D-Day levels of planning, when you could meet someone new and ask them out to lunch without wondering if they were science deniers or anti-vaccine folks. I believe it ought to be that way, and I’m frustrated that it is not.

* * *

One thing I like about swimming is that I can’t do anything else while I’m swimming. I can’t listen to podcasts. I can’t check my email. I can’t listen to an audiobook. All I can do is swim. And think.

I had a Zoom meeting earlier today. One of dozens I have already had six weeks into this year, as we approach the 2-year anniversary of when the world shut down.

The first six weeks or so, back in March of 2020, was a blur. The hunt for toilet paper. Essential workers. Musicians performing from home. Worksheets sent home from school for The Boy, who was living with us at the time. Zoom lunches. Working out grocery delivery, teaching people how to Zoom. Figuring out how to do church.

If I’m honest, I enjoy a good crisis. I obviously don’t like that people are suffering, but in a crisis, priorities become clear, the haze and grey areas burn away, and it’s always clear what needs to be done next. In a not-crisis time, my ADHD muddled brain often has trouble with what should be done next, but a good crisis makes things clear.

Another thing I love about a crisis is that it moves things faster. Priorities become clear for others too, and so instead of having 27 meetings, we can get things done.

But the mundane, the everyday, the slog – that stresses me out. And now we have entered the stage of this thing where we are still in crisis, but it has become routine. Sure, thousands of people die every day from this virus, but here’s a late fee for your phone bill.

I was thinking about all of this today, while swimming up and back, up and back, up and back.

* * *

I think this is just what we do now. This is just how life is. Each day feels like a Sisyphean challenge – dodge the virus, avoid people, try to stay connected, try to keep people you love safe, try to be as normal as possible while being reminded dozens of times a day that there is nothing normal about this at all.

Because normal is just another word for whatever you are used to, and I’ve exerted a lot of energy trying to not get used to this.

Like many of you, a whole lot of my time and energy these days is being spent trying to figure out how to live in this new reality. How to earn a living as a community builder when people are vectors of the virus and your family is immune-compromised.  How to live with a brain that seeks variety when every damn day seems endless and repetitive. And trying to figure out, if this is what life is just like now, how to do it as well as you can, and in such a way as to bring hope to others as well.

I don’t have any answers. I am leaning in, though. I’m upgrading my office equipment – turning makeshift arrangements that have been cobbled together for the last 23 months into permanent features. I’m building new, virtual and distanced communities that didn’t exist before. I’m learning new skills that will be useful in whatever comes next. But mostly, I’m constantly trying to stay connected, to be creative, and to build a life in the midst of it all.

Blog updates

Most readers know this, but I wanted to state it clearly for anyone who is still here: I am now blogging exclusively over on my new website called Humidity and Hope. I am currently posting there six times a week, so if you have been missing your Hugh fix, you can get it there.

This site will still be here as a sort of virtual business card and a hub for my various online presences, and will use this as a place to store copies of sermons I have given, but I will no longer be blogging here.

I hope to see you over there! If you have questions, just shoot me an email at hughlhgmail.com and I will be happy to answer them.

Thanks for reading my stuff!

 

Names Matter

She looked tentative and uncertain, like she wasn’t sure she was in the right place.

Hell, I wasn’t certain I was either, to tell the truth, and I was allegedly the guy in charge.

I had just preached at the chapel service of the small homeless ministry I ran at the time, and the service was now over, and I was doing that sort of thing I do after I preach where I am already thinking about how I can retreat and hide and recharge, yet recognize that some folks need to metaphorically touch you after they heard you speak, often as a way of processing it.

“I’ve never been here before…” she starts. But I knew this. Anyone who watched her body language would have known. Besides, I knew why she was there. She had been part of a group of students who had volunteered with our meal program the day before, and had heard me talk about our little chapel service, and she was one of several people who had come to watch.

This often happened, and we never really knew what to do about it – we welcomed everyone, but it was always a bit weird knowing people were there to watch you work. There were times it felt like being in a zoo, only we were the attractions.

“But something just happened, and I want to talk about it.”

I encourage her to go on.

“All my life, I’ve prayed for those who were homeless. But today, y’all named people who were homeless. All my life, I have prayed for people who needed jobs. You named people who needed jobs. I’ve always prayed for people to be safe in the cold weather. You named people who sleep outside in the cold weather. It was the first time I have ever prayed for people who are poor by name.”

Names are sacred things. Names matter. Names contain magic. In the story in Exodus, when God sends Moses on a mission to free the slaves, Moses wants to know God’s name before he will do it. You can’t set off on a mission of that size just because some no-named bush that was failing at burning in the desert told you to.

The Jewish writer Martin Buber wrote about “I – it” relationships and “I – thou” relationships. In short, I-It relationships are relationships where the proper name of the persons involved do not matter. I do not need to know the name of my server in a restaurant to have a pleasant dining experience. Any competent server would work, and if one was out sick, another could fill in.

But there is a Chinese restaurant we like to go to not far from our house. It has a thriving takeout business, but few people eat in – so we do. In these pandemic times, it is a way for us to eat in a restaurant, and yet because the space is practically always empty, we feel very safe while we are there. Because of this, we get special attention and always tip well.

And the owner of the restaurant has a ten-year-old son named Lucas.

Lucas is big for his age. I would have put him at 12 or 13, and he looks like he would rather be playing video games, but his mom says he is her apprentice, and she stands by him as he takes the orders, and nudges him we he doesn’t say “Thank you”, and he brings the food out on shaky arms, but the whole time, you are just rooting for him.

If I went in there tomorrow and Lucas wasn’t there, I would ask about him. Lucas matters to me in the way the anonymous server in a place I am not known does not. I mean, I care about the no-named server in the abstract, but I care about Lukas specifically. Lukas and I have an “I-thou” relationship.

When we know names, it changes the dynamic completely. I once planned on cutting down a tree in the backyard of a house I owned until I learned the tree was an elm tree, and having learned about Dutch Elm disease, it felt sinful to cut down a tree that had thus far beaten the odds.

Somehow, knowing it was an elm made it different than knowing it was a tree. The specificity mattered. It having a name mattered. Because the tree was an elm, I knew things about it I didn’t know when it was just a tree. I knew it was a native, and part of the food system for the local habitat, and endangered, and however annoying, was worth protecting.

Because I knew its name.

Giving it 80%

In 2012, I spent a week at Mepkin Abbey, in South Carolina. Mepkin Abby is a Trappist monastery, and they invite folks to come and stay with them as a form of retreat. A friend I really respected did it on the regular, and encouraged me to do it as well.

I really enjoyed my week there. It was lovely, and the campus is beautiful, and it’s right on the Cooper River, where you can sit on the bluff and watch the boats roll by. The campus is filled with Live Oaks that literally drip Spanish Moss, and the silence there is magical, punctuated by the chanting of the monks seven times a day.

You are also invited to eat with the monks, and they have a simple, vegetarian diet. Again, one of the struggles those of us with ADHD have is the inability to create structure, so a simple diet with simple rules appealed to me, and I think there is definitely an ethical argument that can be made for not eating animal flesh. So, when I came back to the “real world”, I decided I would be vegetarian.

I lasted strictly about six weeks, and gave up trying completely within three months. Because it was easy to fail at being vegetarian, and when you have the sort of life I do, where lots of people want to feed you, and a huge part of how you expressed your spirituality involved eating with others, it became super complicated, super-fast. In the end, it just wasn’t sustainable for me at all.

My last few days have been chaotic. I went from having a week in front of me with virtually no outside meetings planned to having my entire week scheduled almost instantly. Which is fine – in the work I do these days organizing Faith Leaders, it is like that sometimes – you are forced to react to something someone else does and then your whole schedule changes.

But what that does mean is that my whole routine is thrown off, and instead of cooking dinner for my family like I do most nights, this week I am eating a lot of sandwiches and take out, and because I am living on the phone when I’m not in front of a Zoom camera or at City Hall, I had to miss going for a swim today.

Most of my career has been filled with reactive crises like this, and in the past, I have often used that as a reason to not prioritize my health, and to not eat well. But these days, as I prioritize my health and try to avoid returning to the burnout that almost took me out, I am seeing things differently.

I want you to pay attention to what I did there – it literally is about seeing things differently – I am looking at things through a different lens, and it has made all the difference in how I view the world in general and my health in particular.

If you get ill and, as a result, don’t take a shower on a given day, you didn’t fail – you just didn’t do something you normally do. You don’t decide that because you failed at cleanliness you will henceforth renounce soap. You don’t decide you will now sleep in a mudhole. The next day, you take a shower again and you are back on track.

And tomorrow, I will be back at the gym. I didn’t fail at being healthy. I didn’t fail at anything. I just didn’t do what I normally do. But tomorrow, I will. Because this way of life is sustainable, and I don’t fail if I don’t do something just one day.

It’s easy to fail at “Being Vegetarian”. Hell, it’s easy to fail at “dieting”. But it’s almost impossible to fail at “focusing on my health”. Saying I am focusing on my health recognizes that it’s about what I do most of the time, not what I do one time, that will make a long term difference to my health and my life.

I tend towards extremism – again, my brain loves simplicity – but I am trying to remind myself these days that even though I can’t give it all I have, if I can give it my 80%, then that’s enough.

The Apocaloptomist

It was Thanksgiving morning in 1986, I think, that my Daddy’s friend got gunned down in a trailer park by his cousin. There was liquor involved, and a shotgun, and much screaming, and my Dad’s friend, who had tried to get his cousin to put down the gun and go sober up, was instead shot down and left to bleed out on the gravel in front of his house.

I remember it was Thanksgiving because we were getting ready to go to my grandmother’s when Dad heard the news. He told Mom he would be back soon, and then hopped in his truck and went over to see the family. It was a dirty, shabby story, with no way to clean it up or make it make sense. It was the sort of tragedy that happens when families squabble and there is both alcohol and guns involved.

Eventually, Dad came home, and we went to my grandmothers and ate, while Dad pushed the food around on his plate, and then got up and went for a walk, leaving us all at the table.

In the weeks that followed, I heard Dad and others talk about the man who had died. He had been a leader in his small community, had served on the Volunteer Fire Department, and was generally seen as someone to look up to. That he died trying to de-escalate a bad situation only added to his personal legend.

It was the first time I really thought about what people would say about you after you were dead.

* * *

A while back, a friend sent me the Urban Dictionary entry for an Apocaloptomist and said, “It’s you!”

I looked at it and realized, sadly, that it was. I do believe the world is going to shit, but still at least hope it turns out OK. I am inordinately hopeful, in the midst of overwhelming evidence that the world is crumbling around me.

I’m not some Pollyanna – In fact, I’m somewhat resigned to the facts: The world is getting warmer, the systems that hold us together are failing us, and our politicians have sold us out for campaign contributions. But if the world is ending, well, what sort of person do I want to be when the world ends?

Do I want to be the guy on the jet, eeeking out every bit of hedonistic pleasure, or the person committed to the very end to hold on as long as possible, to scratch and scrimp to save as many people as possible for as long as possible?

“What sort of person will I be when the world ends?”

I think about this question all the time. Not the specific form, but the general: What sort of person will I be when X happens?

What sort of person will I be when the supply chain runs out of food? Will I be the sort of person who had enough food to share with their neighbors, or the sort of person who sits on their roof with a gun, to defend their homestead?

When I am old and my grandchildren learn in school about the Obergefell v. Hodges, the same way I learned about Brown v. The Board of Education, what sort of story will I have for them when I get asked about where I was? What sort of person was I in the years up to Obergfell v. Hodges? In the years after?

When I am “…layin’ on [my] back, lookin’ at the roof of the church / Preacher tellin’ the truth and it hurts”, to quote DMX, well, what sort of person do I want them to say I was? What sort of person do you want to be when you are dead?

I don’t believe in the great man theory of history – that some are born great, waiting on history to recognize them. Instead, I believe history is made by those who show up, who decide to take a stand, who, when given a choice to do something or to do nothing, choose to do something.

And I will, as long as I can, be the person who does something. And I know I’m not alone in that. It doesn’t all depend on me – there are lots of us that choose, in the moment of truth, to do something.

And maybe, together, we can change things. We can definitely try.

And that gives me hope, in spite of the facts.