Category: Posts

State Your Needs

While in Raleigh last week, a friend asked me to join Marco Polo, so we could send each other video messages. And because this friend is important to me, I did.

And since then, she has sent me three messages, and I had sent her one that basically said, “I am trying this thing out”. So this morning she sent me a message that said, and I’m paraphrasing, “I read all your blog posts, and I do that because you are important to me and that is how you prefer to share what’s going on. This is how I prefer to share what’s going on with me, and I hope that matters to you.”

Typing it out, that sounds harsh. But it’s true. This matters to her – to me, not so much. But it’s how she feels loved, and she matters to me, so I will do it, and find ways to make it a habit.

This is the same friend that revolutionized my life one day years ago, when I was complaining about a work relationship that wasn’t working out, and she told me that it was my fault my needs were not being met, because I wasn’t communicating them to the other person – I just sort of expected them to understand what I needed from them.

“State your needs, Hugh!”.

It sounds so simple, doesn’t it? But I often find it really hard. And that is what my friend was doing this morning – stating her needs. The honesty was refreshing. I have come to love it when people tell me how to love them, even if I sometimes struggle to do it myself.

Ever since Gary Chapman’s book The Five Love Languages came into prominence years ago, the idea of love languages has been in the popular vernacular. The idea behind the book is that different people have different ways that they feel love and express love, and if you don’t understand that, then your partner may not feel loved, despite your trying really hard.

Chapman’s model is primarily based in romantic love, and has five “languages”: words of affirmation, quality time, receiving gifts, acts of service, and physical touch. So, if you show love by physical touch, and your partner feels loved by acts of service, she is pissed you don’t do anything around the house but want to cuddle all the time. Meanwhile, you are feeling like she is nagging you and distant.

I want to say up front that Chapman comes from an Evangelical Christian background, and while he is a pretty easy read, you should probably know that if you engage his work. But this isn’t really about his book, but rather the concept behind it: That different people feel and show love in different ways.

I believe this to be true, and would extend the concept beyond romantic love. Today, in response to one of my Facebook posts, a friend said that cooking for people was her love language. It’s one of mine, too. I feel loved when people read and engage things I write, or when someone really listens to me and I feel like they are paying attention to me. I show love by giving you books, cooking you a meal, and fixing your dishwasher.

I have another friend who loves to send text messages. I really don’t. But because he is important to me, we text regularly. And he is far away, and so I can’t fix his dishwasher. But even if I can’t show him love in a way that moves me right now, I can do things in a way that move him.

So I don’t know what your love language is, but I know you have one. Maybe it’s, “Share TikTok videos” or “Make me spaghetti”. Or maybe it’s “Help me do chores” or “Listen to me nonjudgmentally when I’m down”.

I know this all may seem somewhat self-evident, but as a pastor, I cannot tell you how many relationships I have seen fall apart because the people involved don’t know how to love each other. Let the people you are in relationship with know how to love you.

And state your needs.

Solstice

It was cold.

The sort of damp cold you only get in the American South – the sort that penetrates your defenses and goes down deep into your joints, and hurts.

The small crowd was a ragtag bunch – men who had no homes to go to, social workers, shelter employees, pastors and church volunteers, and some people who had lost people they loved that year. And most of us were in more than one category.

And we held candles, and we stood in silence as someone called off a list of names – names of people we all knew, and missed, and loved.

It was the annual memorial I went to every winter solstice when I lived in NC, a night where we honored the memories of those who had died while experiencing homelessness; done each year on the longest night, a night when one who was sleeping outside had to endure the most darkness, and had to wait the longest before the hope and safety that comes with the dawn.

For most of my career, winter meant death. Every year, I would bury people I knew and cared about who had died outside, alone, in the cold. But now I do different work, and while it doesn’t stop, it does slow up in the dead of winter, and there isn’t the frantic rush, the life and death struggle to get the blankets in time, the urgency to have hot coffee when you open the doors, the critical work of begging for dollars to buy hand warmers and sleeping bags to keep people alive.

So now, the days are short and the nights are cold and I sometimes feel stressed because my body knows I should be busy, my adrenaline surges because of the weather reports, my nervous system is geared up. Cold weather and short days are a legit anxiety trigger for me.

And then last year I spent the whole winter in a deep depression. And as I have come, slowly, out of it, I am trying to reboot myself, to feel things but also to look at what lies beneath he feelings, and to learn how to embrace the seasonality of it all.

This year I have sort of looked forward to winter, and have, more than any other year, tried to build a plan for it. I have a workshop now, a place I can go and do creative things in comfort, even when it is dark and damp outside. And my garden and yard got away from me this past year because of the depression, and so I look forward to the weeds dying and giving me a fresh start in a few months. And having a strong routine in place and a gym membership, where I can move my body independent of the weather has been crucial, too.

But mostly, I’m trying to live into this time of darkness being not a symbol of death but a symbol of dormancy, a time to rest and build up our inner resources, to embrace and own the hard work of survival we did this year, and to dream of the longer, brighter days to come.

Happy solstice, friends. It only gets brighter from here.

Habits Are Things You Get for Free

Yesterday, my friend Don told me that he admired my output since I began daily blogging. What he didn’t know is that if I don’t do it daily, it pretty much won’t happen at all. I write every day, because if I only write when I get in the mood, I will write never. In the first 9 months of 2021, I wrote 9 blog posts. Since October 1st, I’ve written 72, and since November 1st, I’ve written one every day.

Today I have written more than 2500 words, between two very rough draft blog posts, a newsletter, and this blog post. I have written about 25,000 words in the last 30 days, which is about half the number of words in The Great Gatsby, by writing every day. That is 25,000 more words that I would have written had I written when I felt like writing.

I publish newsletters on Monday and Friday, every week. As a result, I have sent hundreds of newsletters to my lists in the last 5 years. When I had a newsletter that I sent when I had something to say, I sent perhaps 3 in two years.

I was talking to a friend this morning as I was on the way to the gym to swim.

“I really admire your regularity. It’s impressive,” she said.

I told her that regularity was sort of my super power. Regularity can make you unstoppable. My ADHD brain thrives on structure, but has a really difficult time creating structure. Like many ADHD folks though, I thrive in structured environments, because it drastically reduces my choices, and choices are paralyzing for me.

That is why, for example, I wear the same clothes day after day. I don’t wear shirts with letters or graphics. I tend to wear earth tones, and literally I grab whatever shirt is on top of the pile.  When I wore suits for a living I did the same thing, only with blue and white shirts, red ties, and blue suits. I don’t have to worry about what I will wear, or if it matches or is appropriate. I have casual clothes and work clothes and dress clothes and there are rules for all of them, and I only own clothes that follow those rules. As a result, I bet I spend less than two hours a year thinking about clothes.

Some people exercise on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I would exercise Monday, Wednesday, and the forget and it would be Saturday and I would get mad and then forget Monday and say to hell with it.

Doing it every day means you don’t have to remember. How much time do you spend thinking about brushing your teeth? None, because it’s a habit. And as the writer and activist Corey Doctorow said, “Habits are things you get for free”.

I have a habit of exercising, whether that is a walk or a swim, every day. A habit of working in the shop after supper. A habit of reading before bed. A habit of writing. All things I get for free.

In fact, it’s the parts of my life I haven’t figured out how to create structure around that give me fits.

But I’m trying.

The Lemonade Stand

There is a neighborhood not far from me that is the “old, nice” neighborhood. For example, Eudora Welty once lived there. They film movies there sometimes. Think large houses, large lots, lots of trees.

I look for their curb alerts on the local listserve because these people throw away better stuff than I can afford to buy. For instance, not long ago, I got a Webber gas grill for free off someone’s curb in this neighborhood because it needed a $6 part.

A while back, I knew I would be going through this neighborhood, so I checked to see if anyone had recently put anything out, and fortune had shined upon me: Someone had posted a picture of some concrete yard art – cherubs, mostly – that would have worked perfectly in the crazy cottage garden I am building. So I set my course on Google maps and headed that way.

When I pulled up, I saw the cherubs sitting on the curb as promised, and across the street were two small children with an honest to God lemonade stand, complete with a homemade sign listing their hours of operation (1PM to 5:30PM) and everything.

I have a rule: I support motivated kids. Kids who cut grass. Kids who want to rake your leaves. Kids who sell things that benefit them (I do hate school fundraisers though). A kid who starts a business or has an interest in a hobby? I am a soft touch for all of that.

So, walking by the yard art on the curb, I walk over to the lemonade stand. The girl (age 6, I would learn) was already pouring me a cup.

We start talking. The little boy (age 4, but he turns 5 next June and so we talked about both having June birthdays) asked me how old I was. I told him 49, and he looked me up and down and then said, “Wooooow”. I resisted asking if he was concerned or impressed, as I feared I did not want to know the answer.

He had lots of questions. Where did I work? Did I have any little boys? Did I like my lemonade? I finished my cup while he was asking the questions, so his sister poured me another, and as she handed it to me reminded me that would be another 50 cents. Apparently, there are no free refills on this block.

I told them I had to leave, and the girl told me I should buy another to take home to my wife. I had a long day ahead of me before I would get home, though, so I bought another lemonade but asked them if I could come back and get it later. They readily agreed to this plan.

As we are talking and these kids are plotting how to ensure I am leaving them both broke and diabetic, a large, nice car pulls up and stops in the middle of the road. The little boy says, “Yay! Another customer!”, but it was not to be. This lady with improbably large hair got out of her car, walked over to the yard art, and put it all in her trunk while I am just standing there, holding my second lemonade and reconsidering my life choices.

“I guess she doesn’t like lemonade”, the girl said, as the land yacht pulled away with my yard art in its trunk.

I guess not.

I’m rooting for you.

It’s probably the nicest pool I have ever seen in my life.

It’s the half-sized pool, 25 meters long, but so wide it’s almost square. Three walls of the room are floor to ceiling windows, and there are skylights overhead, piercing the knotty pine ceiling, flooding the room with natural light. When you speak, the sounds bounce around a bit, sounding unnatural and flat.

There is another pool in the room – a square heated pool they call the therapeutic pool, but they assure me that if no one is using it for a group, I’m welcome to use it, too. When I walked through this morning, it was in use by two women who appear to be around 80, talking in low tones while using foam dumbbells to exercise.

My focus this year, the year after my Dad’s death, has been on my health. My dad was only 21 years older than I am, and while his death from a virus says nothing about my own life expectancy, it does make one begin to count. I’ve been eating better, and logging my food. I exercise nearly every day. I prioritize getting enough sleep.

And this week, I joined a gym with a pool, because my joints are trash after years of abusing them.

This morning, I put on my trunks (which fit me perfectly 50 pounds ago, but are now relying more than they should on the drawstring to defend my modesty) and slid into a warm pool, and commenced to do laps – quiet, slow, trudging laps – the equivalent of walking as opposed to the running the speedo-clad twenty-something guy in the next lane is doing.

I can only really backstroke with any degree of proficiency, so I am watching the ceiling, following along under a wooden beam that spans the length of the room, keeping all the moving parts going the way I was taught all those years ago on Parris Island: Hands up along the sides to the armpits, then out, then down, hands cupped. My shoulder grates a bit, unused to this particular motion.

And in the aisle next to me is a Black woman somewhere in her late 70’s, with the foam dumbbells, raising them and lowering them in the water, all the while moving down the length of the shallow end of the lane sideways, back and forth. A woman I assume to be her granddaughter cheered her on, saying, “Good job, Granny!  I’m so proud of you!”

I knew I was not moving quickly, but I have to admit I did notice when Granny passed me. Several times.

And I did think, briefly, that it is a crying shame that my swimming ability is so slow that an 80-year-old woman can walk sideways faster than I can swim. But as I swam, back and forth, slowly, like an impressionistic portrait of the athlete I used to be, I couldn’t help but think how awesome it is that she is doing the work, and how great it is that her granddaughter is spending time with her, and how much I wish I could spend that sort of time with the people who loved me into being.

And then I spent some time in what my Buddhist friends call an act of Loving-kindness, where I just took Granny and her family and focused on them and wished them every good thing.

I’ve never been good at competition. I almost died as a kid, and often in the years after it was an accomplishment that I showed up. I learned long ago that whatever motivation I have to have to get through my day is going to have to come from my own motives, and not what you think of me.

And can we be honest with each other a minute and admit to ourselves and to each other just how hard the last two years have been? There has been so much put on us that we had to just survive, so any thought of winning or not seems so secondary right now. If we just show up, that feels like winning to me right now.

Wherever you are in this whole thing, I’m rooting for you. I want us all to win.

So good job, Granny. I’m proud of you, too. And while you might get there before me, I’m glad you’re ahead of me, to show me the way.

The day I did not die

Content Warning: Descriptive narrative of a suicide attempt. Discussion about suicide and mental illness and depression.

I was 16 years old, and my parents were not home. I don’t know how to describe it – it was just a wave that came over me, and when it did, I was ready.

I was a smarter than average kid who looked differently than his classmates – I was scrawny, pimply, socially awkward and most of all, afraid. I was always afraid. These days you would say I was bullied. In those days, I would have said I was in hell. But that wasn’t the reason it came over me. But had I been successful, it would have been the reason ascribed to my actions.

I had read countless accounts of suicide – no mean feat in that pre-internet age. I had read all the dictionary entries, all the encyclopedia accounts. Then I researched famous suicides – Socrates, Hemingway, anyone at all who had made their way into the Britannica. I had a morbid fascination with death, and with suicide.

So when the dark wave came, I was ready.

I had received a shotgun for Christmas when I was 14. There were strict rules around its use, but it was unlocked. I sat on my bed and loaded it with buckshot. I took off my shoes, because I had figured out I could pull the trigger with my toe – a “trick” I had learned in a book I read about famous deaths. I put the barrel in my mouth – right now I can taste the bitter, acrid taste of the oil and the metal on my tongue – and placed my toe on the trigger.

And I sat there for what seemed like an eternity, but was probably 30 seconds or so.

And then I took the barrel out of my mouth, unloaded the gun and put it away. I don’t know why. The darkness receded, just like it came. I was horrified to find myself there. And it would be more than 10 years before I would tell anyone that it had happened.

I was on no list of people who would have been watched. I had a neurologist, but no therapist. No guidance counselor ever approached me. No teacher was concerned about me. I should NOT have had a shotgun, but in my world, people my age often did, and so nobody could have known. I was active in youth group, had been baptized, and would have strongly identified as Christian.

It wasn’t the last time I thought about self-harm, however. Once since then since then, I was as close as that day, and have been contemplative multiple times, although not for several years now. The darkness just comes on sometimes, and it seems an incredibly rational solution to end the pain. It is always late at night (more accurately early morning). I hate waking up at 3 or 4am – not because I am afraid I won’t go back to sleep, but because I am afraid of where my brain will take me if I stay awake.

Don’t mishear me – I have a good support structure in place. I have tools and strategies should things get scary, and I learned to recognize triggers, and avoid them. I have people who know my history, who love me, who I feel safe calling should I need them. There are people Renee knows to call if I scare her with my moods. Mentally, I am in pretty good shape these days. Or as good as one can expect given everything that has happened the last two years.

When all is said and done, most suicide is a symptom of mental illness.  And mental illness is just illness, like pneumonia is illness, or cancer is illness.

I’m not saying nobody ever rationally decides to end their own life. The enslaved Africans who threw themselves into the waters of the Atlantic rather than be enslaved made a rational choice. Those who fell from the burning building rather than burn – I get that. People facing months and months of excruciating pain before their inevitable deaths – totally understandable. But we are not talking about those people right now.

People who appear happy can be mentally ill, and people who are bullied can be mentally ill, and people who have families that love them can be mentally ill. And all of those people can commit suicide, because suicide is a symptom of mental illness.

Likewise, people who love Jesus can be mentally ill. People who go to church can be mentally ill. People who are clergy can be mentally ill. And all of those people can commit suicide, because suicide is a symptom of mental illness.

And when people die of illness, it’s horrible, but we don’t blame them for it. We wish it could have been prevented, and we seek to prevent other people from dying from it.

So, this is why we don’t have shotguns in my house – ever. And why every chance I get, I tell people that they need to take care of themselves, and be honest with the people who love them, and don’t be ashamed to ask for help. Because the world is a much better place with you in it.

If you feel like hurting yourself, please don’t. The National Suicide Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. And if you don’t want to call them, please call someone. 

The world is listening.

When I read old novels from the turn of the last century, it’s a kick to see that they didn’t really have protocols in place on how to answer the phone yet.

Some of them answered with the name of the family that lived there: “Smith Residence”.

Some answered with their phone number: “4286”.

Some said, “What?”

Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, favored “Ahoy” as his preferred answer.

When I was little, almost 50 years ago, our small town phone book had instructions in the front of the book for how to use the telephone, and it recommended you answer the phone with “Hello”. Which, I recently learned, was the protocol recommended by Thomas Alva Edison.

Anyway. My point is, it takes time to learn how to best use a new technology. And so when I get frustrated with the ways some people use Social Media, I try to remind myself that the medium didn’t really go mainstream until after the smartphone went mainstream – about 12 years ago. It’s a very young medium, and many people still don’t have intuitive ways on how to act there. I mean, my mom signs her text messages, for crying out loud.

Historically, most of us only had one on one relationships. I would talk to Bill, and then I would talk to Mary. I may, at a party or something, talk to both Bill and Mary. But mostly we talked one on one. We didn’t have many other options.

Some people had public relationships. Pastors come to mind, as well as teachers and of course celebrities – people who were watched, who had a platform and the capability of being heard by many people at once, and who were known by many more people than they knew.

But now many of us have these public relationships. And we are like the nouveau riche child stars who don’t know how to handle the sudden attention and so we act out and end up with the equivalent of a heroin addiction and a neck tattoo.

Because of the algorithms, despite the fact that I have more than 2400 Facebook friends and more than 1400 additional people follow me there, I really only interact with about 150 of them regularly. And so it’s easy to think that when I post something there, I only imagine I am only talking to those 150 people. But I’m not.

Instead, I have found it useful to imagine I am having a conversation on a live radio show, and I am broadcasting for all the world to hear. If you were having a conversation on a live radio talk show, you would comport yourself differently.

In any event, we are all still figuring this out, this mixture of public and private, and we all have different boundaries and lines. But it’s important to think about these things because right now, there is no “standard”, and the medium thus requires a level of intentionality that most of us are unused to.

Here is a concrete example that may be helpful:

It is not uncommon when someone dies for their friends or family to post it on Facebook. It makes a lot of sense to let people who you are not in regular contact with know what has happened.

Sometimes it is simple, like, “My aunt Mary died last night, the funeral is Friday.” And other times someone writes a formal obituary, such as you might have put in the paper in the past.

But the key is, and a good general rule on social media is, people get to decide how much they share. So when somebody posts that someone has died, please don’t ask how they died. If it’s important to the conversation, they will tell you. And if it isn’t, then that isn’t information they want to share.

When Dad died last year at the height of the pandemic and I saw lots of people acting like this virus was not serious, it was important to me that you know he died from COVID. That he was a First Responder and caught this virus while caring for people who were dying from this virus was important to me. So I made sure you knew, in everything I wrote, that he died from COVID.

But I, the author, get to decide.

If we were on a live radio show, and I told you my 17-year-old daughter died*, would you say, “How did it happen?”. I hope not. But some people have no problem asking that question on Facebook, while not seeing it’s just rude and inappropriate. Do you really want me to say, on a live radio program, “She killed herself, Karen”?

No, Karen imagines it is just us, one on one, chatting away in the living room, eating tea cakes and coffee. But it isn’t. We are on the air. And the whole world is listening.

*For the record, I do not have a 17 year old daughter.

Kindness

When I was 5 years old, my best friend in the world was a boy named Paul who went to kindergarten with me, and who lived a mile and a quarter up the road from our house.

Paul was adopted, and his parents had been around 50 when they adopted him as an infant, so Paul always had the “old” parents. By contrast, my parents were 21 when I was born, so his parents were nearly 30 years older than mine.

His father was a tall man, who worked in a warehouse and had thick ropey muscles in his arms, and a silhouette of a naked lady putting on her panties on one forearm, and an anchor on the other – vestiges of his time in the Navy.  At the time, it was the coolest thing in the world. I remember asking him if the naked lady was Paul’s mom, and he just giggled.

He also had an old Ford Falcon that he had turned into a pickup truck with the help of a cutting torch and some plywood. If there was anything cooler than having a naked lady tattooed on your arm, it was making your own pickup truck. I thought Paul had the coolest parents in the world.

Anyway, it was Paul’s birthday, and I was invited. It was a beautiful spring day, and there were lots of kids there. Paul’s parents didn’t have a lot of money and they lived in a small single-wide trailer with one bathroom. And so, predictably, when there were suddenly 10 little boys in the house, a line formed outside the bathroom. And I suddenly had stomach cramps.

I was hurting bad. My stomach was churning and there was this long line to the bathroom and suddenly my intestines exploded and then there was warm diarrhea running down my legs inside my Sears ToughSkin jeans. I was mortified. But, as often happens when you get everything out of you, I felt so much better, other than having a pants load of poop, that is.

I went and found Paul’s mom, but I couldn’t tell her I had crapped my pants. So I told her I wasn’t feeling good, and asked if somebody could please take me home. Paul’s dad was pressed into service. I climbed into the cab of his homemade pickup truck, with a cloud of putrid funk following me. He gets in, looks at me, and rolls down the window. We head to my house.

At the stop sign, he said, “So, you are not feeling good?”

I replied that I was not.

He said, “You know, it smells like you messed your britches.”

I sat silent, mortified.

“If you did, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Sometimes, I mess my britches. It happens.”

We rode the rest of the way in silence.

When we pulled up in the driveway, Dad was outside, working on the car. Mom came out when she saw us, and I ran to her and hugged her legs. Paul’s dad explained that I said I wasn’t feeling well, and he and Dad talked about whatever was wrong with our car while Mom took me inside, her nose telling her exactly what the problem was.

She asked what had happened, and I told her, and she told me it was OK, and asked how I felt. I told her I felt wonderful, now. She asked if I wanted to go back to the party. I assured her I did. She cleaned me up, we put on new clothes, and I ran outside and told Paul’s dad I felt much better now and asked if I could go back to Paul’s with him when he went.

On the way back, he looked at me, and said, “So you feel better?”

I assured him I did.

“I’m glad.”

And the rest of the way in silence, and everyone welcomed me back when we pulled up at Paul’s house, and it was as if nothing had ever happened.

There were so many ways that could have went differently. He could have made a big deal out of how much I stunk. He could have laid out plastic for me to sit on, or demanded I answer him when he asked if I had soiled myself. I was already embarrassed beyond belief – he could have made it so much worse.

But he didn’t. Instead, he tried to empathize with me, and normalize what I was feeling.

“If you did, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Sometimes, I mess my britches. It happens.”

I think about that story sometimes, about just how… kind he was in that moment to a mortified kid with poop in his socks.

Kindness counts.

Hope is a choice.

I met a new friend today. At least, I think we will be friends.

It was one of those conversations where you just agree to meet up for coffee and before you know it, three hours have passed and you have talked about 5 or 6 different things, and the conversation flows easily from one thing to the next. Those are rare for me, but I love it when they happen.

And one of the things we talked about was how change happens. I have these conversations a lot these days. We look around us and feel like things are bleak and divided, and we wonder if there is any way out. If those who work to oppress others, those who would take rights from others, those who work for their own self-interest even when it hurts others, and we wonder how we get them to change.

My new friend was somewhat cynical. “I think I have given up on their changing,” she said. “I mean, I want to believe they can, but it doesn’t feel like a real possibility”.

I told her I didn’t have enough self-esteem to believe that people can’t change.

She was puzzled. So I explained that I once believed very different things than I do now about… almost everything. I used to be an Evangelical who wanted to save your soul from Hell, and now I’m not. I used to believe God did not love Gay people, and now I don’t believe that. I used to chase money, and now I chase relationships. I used to want to distance myself from the South, and now it’s a core part of my identity.

“But here’s the thing: In every one of those instances, I didn’t change because I accidentally had a change of heart, but because of a relationship I had that caused me to reconsider my position.  I changed because who I knew changed, and I changed because my ideology had to follow my relationships. My heart changed, and then waited for my head to catch up.

The Jewish mystic Abraham Heschel said that when it came to God, there were no proofs, but only witnesses. In other words, some things can’t be proven but only experienced. I believe people can change because I have changed. A lot.  I can’t prove that people can change, but I am a witness to the fact that they do.

And I don’t believe I’m special. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’m not. I’m pretty mundane, actually. And if I can change, as un-special as I am, then pretty much anyone can, given time and the right relationships. Or else I have to assume I’m so special that I think I can change, but they can’t. And I don’t have enough ego for that.

“That is… hopeful. Maybe more hope than I have right now,” she said.

“Oh yeah. It’s hopeful as hell. Because I want things to change. And I believe that the only way things will change is because people change. And if I thought people couldn’t change, then what choice would I have but despair? So I find myself having to choose between hope and despair.

“And I choose hope.”

My neighborhood

On the 15th day, I’m thankful for my neighborhood.

I love my neighborhood.

In fact, we really bought our neighborhood, and they threw the house in.

Each day I go for a walk through our neighborhood. The walk started as a distraction for the foster son we had living with us at the time, and has since become a sort of spiritual practice for me. I love walking the same path each day, knowing it will take between 40 and 43 minutes, depending on a traffic light or two.

But other times I am distracted by neighbors in their yards, and the pace suffers as the relationships increase. I will always take the time to have a conversation, to listen to a story, to hear their concerns or hopes. I spent most of my life thinking I had to avoid interruptions in order to do my work, until it occurred to me that my real work – the work of being human – was actually found in the interruptions themselves.

I pass by heavily wooded lots, hear the children playing at the elementary school, after rains hear the rushing water in the creek and the occasional speeder on the interstate. I see lots of neighbors walking, and a few running. I do notice that all the walkers are smiling and the runners are scowling, and this confirms for me that I am no longer a runner.

Jackson is a storied place – I live but perhaps ten minutes from the homes of both Medgar Evers and Eudora Welty (albeit in different directions). The only openly affirming United Methodist Church is a 3-minute walk from our home, and I pass by the houses where both a former Governor and the author Willie Morris used to live every day on my journey along what Morris called Purple Crane Creek.

We live within walking distance of 2 grocery stores, 3 gas stations, an independent bookstore, and a bakery. We are a 5-minute drive away from a larger grocery store, 10 minutes away from a Home Depot and a Target. The Elementary school is a block away from our house, and the Magnet Elementary school is also a 5-minute drive.

My neighborhood is diverse – of the 5 lots that touch mine, they are all people of color. My street has retired preachers, college professors, social workers, retired military people, salespeople, a psychiatrist, and whatever I am. I am one block away from mansions, and one block away from 900 square foot cottages.

Our neighborhood has block parties, a Fourth of July parade, a holiday party and loves Halloween and kids.

I remember when we were looking at houses, Renee strongly advocated for houses in this neighborhood, even though the houses here were slightly more expensive.

“That place (where we now live) feels like a neighborhood. The other places we looked at feel like just some people who live next to each other.”

And that sums it up nicely. We love this neighborhood because it feels like a neighborhood, not just a place where some people happen to live next to each other.