Category: Reflecting

Stimulus Pause Response

As motels go, it wasn’t horrible. It was the $50 a night option on Priceline, with a 7.9 guest satisfaction rating. It was a national chain. The water was hot, the room clean, and the water pressure was lovely. As someone who used to travel a great deal, I can assure you I’ve paid much more for much less.

But almost from the beginning, things began to go wrong. Someone was meeting us there, and he arrived a few minutes before we did. He tried to use the lobby bathroom, but it was locked, for guest use only, and was told he could go use the bathroom at the gas station across the busy highway.

All the lights were off in the lobby, with just one light on over the registration desk. The vending machine, the ice machine, the “business center” computer desk – all had large “Out of Order” signs.

The website had promised a “deluxe continental breakfast”, which in practice consisted of sugary yogurt, a selection of 4 small blueberry muffins, and some of the smallest Red Delicious apples I have ever seen, an apple whose name is half accurate in description and which has the distinction of being exactly no one’s favorite apple variety. Whatever continent it is where they eat breakfast this way, I want to die having not visited there.

The desk clerk was rude and curt. The housekeeping staff did not clean our room, and when we asked, we were told that because of COVID shortages, they no longer provided daily service – which makes sense, and wouldn’t have been a big deal, had someone told us. Instead, we came back to the room after a long day, ready to take a shower and had no clean towels, and were out of toilet paper. There were multiple clerks who worked various shifts, and none of them had English as their primary language, and they each blamed whatever the current misunderstanding was on the lack of English skills of the other clerk.

The morning we were to check out, I had gone to the front desk to ask for clean towels, and was told I had to bring my dirty ones to the front desk to turn in before they would give me clean ones, so they would know I wasn’t stealing the towels. It was frustrating, going up and down the stairs, over and over, each time being told you hadn’t done it right, or to get called a thief.

None of it was horrible – but each offense built on the previous one. While Renee was in the shower, I decided to leave an honest, if frank, review. The last time we had been in town, we had stayed at the motel next door and had an amazing experience. I thought people should know.

I opened up my computer and opened a text file to compose the review. I was scathing. Frank. Brutal. I poured my three days of micro-frustrations into this review. The longer I typed, recounting the various frustrations, the more heated I got. I decided I was going to wait until I got home to post it – I didn’t want to leave a bad review before we checked out, in case there was some sort of retaliation they could take.

We were checked out and on to have lunch with a friend before heading home when my phone rang. It was the hotel owner. His accent made understanding him difficult.

“Are you checked out? Are you done,” he asked?

I assured him I was and braced myself for whatever he was about to tell me had gone wrong. Instead, he just told me that we had left Renee’s camera bag, which conservatively contained $1000 worth of photography gear, in the room, but not to worry, because he would put it behind the desk and we could come by and pick it up any time.

Well, crap. How do you leave a bad review for a guy who saved you a thousand dollars? For a guy who was looking out for you? For a guy who went above and beyond?

We swung back by the motel on the way out of town, retrieved the bag, and hit the road. That night, when we got home, I deleted the poisonous review I had not yet posted, and for not the first time, remembered words I had read long ago in an article by the psychologist Rollo May:

Freedom is the individual’s capacity to know that he is the determined one, to pause between stimulus and response and thus to throw his weight, however slight it may be, on the side of one particular response among several possible ones.

To pause between stimulus and response, and to choose one response among several possible ones.

Imagine if I had posted the review while she was in the shower. Imagine how horrible I would feel knowing I had trashed this man’s hotel and livelihood – this man who looked out for my family and would save our stuff.

Virtually every time I have done something I later regretted, taken action I would wish I could undo, said words I could never pull back, it was because I did not take sufficient notice of the power of the pause between stimulus and response, and thus chose my response poorly.

When you step on a dog’s tail, the dog may lash out, instinctively, and bite you. There is stimulus, and then response. But as humans, we have the privilege of being able to insert a pause between the stimulus and the response.

And in that pause, we can find both power and freedom.

Two Years.

In about two weeks, it will be the anniversary of the last time I did anything that involved other people that didn’t include worrying about COVID. It was a funeral for a friend’s dad, and while we had heard stories of COVID, it felt sort of like SARS did – like a thing that had happened to some people, but that didn’t really affect anyone I actually know. After the funeral, we stood around in the parking lot, no worries about distance or masking, and talked about toilet paper shortages that were already happening, and how ridiculous it all seemed.

It was a simpler, more innocent time.

The Boy was a week away from his last normal week of school, before the spring break that would actually end his school year months ahead of schedule. We had house guests, who stayed with us a week – the last normal week for any of us.

And then a year of pure hell would happen.

The 12 months after March of 2020 were ridiculously hard. I don’t think I realized at the time just how hard. I’m good in a crisis, am able to strip away inessentials and focus on the problem at hand, so I let a lot of things go during that time – things like self-care and routine – and couldn’t do a lot of things that were important to me, like eat with friends and be in the larger world, while scrambling in order to take care of people. I’m pretty sure the combination of having people who depend on me and people who read my writing kept me alive that year.

But it was still a horrible year. This morning, I saw that I had posted this on Facebook a year ago today:

A global pandemic.

Political uncertainty.

Foster children.

Dad’s death.

Depression.

Trying to scramble to pivot and keep our income afloat in the midst of extreme economic uncertainty.

The death of at least 8 people I personally know from COVID.

The extreme stress of being worried about bringing an almost certainly fatal disease home to my wife who has no immune system.

Insomnia.

Spending thousands on car repairs, only to have to scrap it and buy another car after all.

Watching paid speaking and consulting gigs reschedule, then reschedule again, and then cancel.

Losing grants and donations as donors’ and grantors’ priorities shift because of the changing realities.

Isolation.

A winter storm that brought my city to its knees, and left it there.

It’s been a horrible 12 months for my mental health. I know I am not alone with this, but for 12 months I have had legitimate reasons why I am not operating at my best, and I am just tired of it. I want to be back at full strength. I want to feel productive again. I am at about 40% of pre-pandemic capacity, and some days that 40% is a stretch goal.

I told someone the other day that this whole last year has felt like a really bad normal year, but while wearing a weight vest. Everything is harder, more expensive, lasts longer, and is more exhausting than normal.

I don’t have anything inspirational to say here. It’s hard. It just is.

I learned a long time ago that it sometimes helps to say out loud how hard it is, and to say it where others can hear it.

That way, if it’s hard right now for the folks who hear it, then they will at least know they are not alone.

Yeah. That guy was in really bad shape.

I remember how low I felt at this point last year. Spring is always my favorite time of the year, but spring last year felt like an endless winter. Everything was dead, and felt dead, and looked dead.

Over the year that followed, I would personally know another six people who would die from this damn virus, as the nation lost hundreds of thousands more. Delta and Omicron would destroy all the plans we had of a year where we could return to “normal”, despite the literal miracle of the vaccines. Our political situation, while more superficially calm, has gone from “aftermath of insurrection” to “brink of nuclear war”.

And yet.

Over the last year, I would write well more than 100,000 words. I would start a new blog, and a new newsletter that would quickly grow to half the size of a newsletter I have written for seven years. I would develop new sources of income. I would begin a daily practice of both writing and moving, and would learn to pay attention to my diet in a healthy way for the first time in my life. As a result, both my blood pressure and glucose levels would decrease to healthier levels, and I would lose a hair over 50 pounds.

Growing up in the evangelical end of the church, we were taught to expect change to happen instantaneously. The Apostle Paul, on the road to Damascus, had this watershed moment, where he was struck by an overwhelming force, and as a result, had no choice but to change his life’s direction.

It’s never been like that for me. Change for me has always been quiet, slow, and nearly invisible, but striking in retrospect. So I’m grateful for the times that Past Me has admitted it was hard, the times he told the truth about what he was going through, the times he bore witness to the pain and grief, if for no other reason than to leave a signpost so Current Me could look back and mark the truly miraculous ways things have changed for the better.

My depression is more under control these days. I spend about 10% of my time on deliberate practices to keep it managed: I control my diet, prioritize movement, pursue connection, and write like my life depends on it.

It’s two years later. People are still dying. We are on the brink of nuclear war. And the daffodils are blooming in my yard.

Big Un

When he was sixteen, the world lost its mind, and he lied about his age to go in the Army. I don’t know, at this great distance, what led to that decision – he died before I knew to ask such questions, and he was never much for talking about his inner-life, anyway, so no one I ever could ask did know.

It was the second decade of the last century, and the whole world was at war, and this sixteen-year-old boy, always large for his age, would end up as a pilot, flying planes that had open cockpits and required scarfs and goggles and he would do things nobody should ever have to do and would see things nobody in his hometown had ever dreamed about.

Later, after the war was over, he would return to the States, travel with an air show for a while as a barnstormer, and eventually settle down in North Texas, marry my great grandmother, and have some kids. My mother’s father was his son, and he thought the sun rose and set on me.

He was a large man, about 6’5”, barrel-chested and thick. He wore bib overalls and work shirts and had hands the size of canned hams. He was larger than life in so many ways, not just his size, and he captured all my attention, with his cows and border collies and his 1946 pickup that had lost both third gear and reverse, so driving it took some planning.

He was my Great-Grandfather, but that was a mouthful for a young feller like me, so I called him Big un.

We didn’t really have money for vacations as a child, so we visited family instead, and every Summer, around the Fourth of July, we would make the eight-hour trip to North Texas and stay with my Mom’s Dad and see that side of the family.

On this particular summer day in 1976, my great-grandmother and I had been blackberry picking. We sprayed ourselves down with stuff to scare away the chiggers, and we took empty coffee cans and walked through the pasture to the fence row where the wild blackberries were rampant, and we filled our cans and our mouths and black juice ran down my face and all the while she told me things I cannot remember, but the thing I do remember is how safe and loved I felt, and how lucky I must be to belong to people that owned both cows and blackberry bushes.

I no longer recall (if I ever knew) where she went, but she told Big Un that when she returned, she was going to make a blackberry cobbler with those berries for dessert.

She was not gone more than a handful of minutes when he called me into the kitchen. They lived in a tiny North Texas farmhouse, with a utilitarian kitchen with cracked linoleum on the floor, a 1950’s era Formica and stainless steel table, and an electric icebox in the corner that now contained, among other things, a 1 pound coffee can full of blackberries so full of goodness they were about to burst.

Big Un put me at the table and put down two mismatched bowls, the porcelain glazing cracked and crazed from years of use, and mine had a faded rose on the bottom of the bowl. The coffee can of blackberries was retrieved from the icebox, and with his huge, rough scarred hands he poured the blackberries from the can into my bowl and then his. The berries were of various sizes, the way wild berries always are, filling both our bowls to the edge and then he poured the fresh cream we had gotten from his own cows that very morning over the top, the cream running over the berries, filling in the cracks and crevices until the berries looked very much like small blue-black islands in a sea of creamy white.

We sat there, he and I, in a 4-room house in North Texas, 70 or so years and a Formica table between us, quietly eating the purloined blackberries. When she came back, there would be hell to pay, and no cobbler to eat, but for now, we were content to merely be together, eating our berries and absolutely certain in the knowledge that no king had never had it so good.

The partnership

I carry a notebook around with me, and I jot down things I want to remember to write about. But it’s a small notebook, and I have 50-year-old eyes, and so sometimes in the name of expediency, I lose either legibility or intelligibility and sometimes both.

Like the entry that I wrote a few weeks ago in bed, late at night. Here it is, in its entirety: Paul McCartney, song (talk to Renee) / partnership between reader and writer.

Now, this time, I happen to completely understand what I was getting at. For Christmas, I got Renee, who is a huge Beatles fan, this two-volume book of Paul McCartney lyrics and commentary, called, fittingly enough, The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present. It’s huge.

And one night we were lying in bed, reading our respective books, when she told me that she had just learned an interesting thing about a particular song – that while the lyrics were powerful and moving to us both, it turns out that when he wrote them, it was meant as a fun song, almost whimsical.

I bet you are wondering what song it was. I am too because while I wrote down the event, I made no mention of the song because I would surely remember it.

I do not remember it. My brief note was a bit too brief.

But I wrote it down because it so perfectly encapsulates the partnership that exists between the writer and the reader.

In 1994, I was dating a woman who was my superior in practically every way. She made more money than I did, she was older than I was, and she was smarter than I was. And when we broke up, which was, in hindsight, inevitable, I took it rough. Really rough, in the way only a 22-year-old could.

I went on a three-day drunk. I drunk-called her house at all hours. I showed up outside her house and the police got called – not by her, but by the neighbor who took umbrage to my declarations of my love in her front yard at 3 in the morning.

Eventually, I came to terms with the breakup, but like 22-year-olds everywhere that go through tragic breakups, I found solace in music.

At the time, there was a popular country music song called Little Rock, by Tom Douglas, sung by Collin Ray. In it, the protagonist is starting his life over in Little Rock after destroying his relationship and is now trying to rebuild his new life while mourning the loss of the life he had.

A sample of the lyrics:

Well, I know I disappeared a time or two,

And along the way, I lost me and you.

I needed a new town for my new start

Selling VCR’s in Arkansas at a Wal-Mart.

I haven’t had a drink in nineteen days.

My eyes are clear and bright without that haze.

I like the preacher from the Church of Christ.

Sorry that I cried when I talked to you last night.

I think I’m on a roll here in Little Rock.

I’m solid as a stone, baby, wait and see.

I’ve got just one small problem here in Little Rock,

Without you, baby I’m not me.

Now, you might look at those lyrics here in the cold light of day in the year of our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty-Two and say to yourself that they are trite and sentimental. And I would agree with you. But 22-year-old me in 1994 drank at least a few cases of beer while sobbing and listening to that song on repeat, for weeks and weeks. I wore out that cassette tape; playing that song, then hitting rewind and playing it again. One thing you can say for MP3 players – listening to sad breakup music is easier than it was back in the day.

I already knew the song, of course. It had been out a while. But when I went through that breakup, it perfectly captured the struggle, the mourning, the lament, and the hope of it all.

When Tom Douglas wrote that song, he had no idea who I was. He had probably never set foot in Southaven, Mississippi, the scene of the yard incident. But he didn’t have to. He wrote the words, but I supplied the meaning. We were in partnership, Mr. Douglass and I.

It doesn’t matter if he had ever been through a breakup. It doesn’t matter if he had ever dated anyone, ever. I supplied every bit of meaning that I put on that song. And while I hear that song today and it reminds me of that time, I recognize that, objectively, it’s not a great song.

But it didn’t matter.

I try hard to write in an accessible way – people who know me say they can hear my voice when they read my writing, which is 100% what I’m shooting for. And I’m fortunate that I have a really interactive group of readers. Not a day goes by when I don’t get an email or Facebook message from someone who read something I wrote, and often they will tell me the story of how something I wrote – sometimes something I wrote years ago – really spoke to them.

And sometimes, they see things in my writing that perplex me, because I didn’t put them there. Luckily for me, they tend to be good things, by and large, but still. But I guarantee you I saw things in the song Little Rock that neither the singer nor the songwriter put there. In the partnership between the writer and I, he supplied the worlds, and I supplied the meaning.

Now, I have to confess that as a writer, there are times this frustrates me. I will spend a great deal of time crafting an essay about, say, birds, and then I see where someone shared it on Facebook, and they talk about how it’s a testimonial to the enduring power of the human spirit.

I really thought it was about birds. But if they needed to hear about the enduring power of the human spirit right then, I’m willing to let them have it. After all, I just bring the words – they supply the meaning.

Re: Facebook

I want to preface this by noting that the irony that Facebook is the largest driver of traffic for my blog is not lost on me. Neither is it lost on me that I have many relationships with people I love dearly that I no longer have contact information for other than Facebook Messenger. And I also want to point out that there is a strong likelihood that you won’t see this post, as posts that are critical of that platform tend to not get seen there.

Social media is fine if you want a place to see pictures of your brother’s kids. It’s fine as a place to find like-minded people (which explains most of the FB groups I belong to) or to learn new skills (which explains the rest of them). But it is always important to remember that the reason social media exists is not to entertain you – it is to make the social media company money. That’s it. The whole reason Facebook exists is to make money, and you don’t factor into their calculations at all. They don’t care that you don’t like the new design. Or the way your timeline shows the same four people, over and over.

It’s become commonplace to blame the algorithms for the lack of diversity and echo chambers, but these algorithms are not Holy Writ, handed down from Mt. Olympus (or Mt. Sinai, if that’s your thing). Rather, they are the result of intentional business decisions, designed to – you guessed it, make the social media company money. If they make you angry – Facebook makes money. If they show you something you disagree with and you go on a ranty – Facebook makes money. If you link to something that makes you happy, they now know more about you, and they can then make more money.

We are not Facebook’s customer: We are their product.

If you are relatively conscious, I have not said anything at all unknown to you. We all trade access for privacy, and while we fuss, most of us stick around. We are in an abusive relationship with this site, and their sins are well known. I’ve talked about this before, but I wanted to elaborate a bit: Facebook is a horrible place to depend on, because it is space you do not own, but only rent, and you rent it from an abusive landlord and you have no protections as a tenant, and you have no lease.

If tomorrow Facebook decided to change the rules, you would have no choice but to take it. Many small businesses got wiped out in the mid-teens when Facebook began charging Business Pages to get views – businesses that had invested years in cultivating a following on Facebook and getting traffic and followers. Overnight, the rules changed.

Or if you have views Facebook decides to restrict. Any post I share that talks heavily about the pandemic will get far fewer views than normal. It just doesn’t get on as many timelines. Who decided that? Facebook.

So, like anyone who rents space, I am ever conscious that I don’t control this space, and I don’t want to make business decisions that depend on this space.

I am a writer. I mean, it’s part of how I make my living. And while I recognize that a lot of people read my writing via Facebook, I am refusing to depend on it. Because I see people all the time who tell me they don’t see my posts on here.

But you know who never says that? Email subscribers.

Email virtually always gets delivered. Email is 100% open. If I left Facebook, I lose all my Facebook friends. I couldn’t port them over to, say, Twitter. But If I quit using Mailchimp and began using ConvertKit to send my emails, it would be seamless. Subscribers would most likely not even know it happened. Because I own my email list – but I’m just renting the Facebook list.

Virtually every creator I know worries about how Facebook gatekeepers our content. I’m making more and more business decisions that take me towards openness, and away from closed platforms. 

I find myself growing more and more frustrated with Social Media platforms. I get angry when I’m on there for any length of time, and the lack of civility and reflection frustrates me. Most days I am on there for only a few minutes to check in or to post something, and then I’m out – which would be great, except for the other days, when I find myself doomscrolling and getting angrier and angrier. I have taken all Social apps off my phone, and have blockers on my browsers so I don’t get on during certain hours while I’m trying to write.

Another thing I don’t like is how it discourages civility. For example, I had two interactions today with people who read my stuff and who disagreed with me: One by email and one on Facebook. The email response was thoughtful and measured, and I responded with a thoughtful and measured reply. The Facebook interaction was a frustrating dumpster fire, and then after I put over an hour in interacting with it, he deleted his post, erasing all the work I did.

As long as it makes sense to keep sharing my blog posts in clear text on my Facebook feed, I will do so as a courtesy to my readers there, as part of my POSSE (Post Own Site, Share Everywhere) strategy. But one day, I fear the juice will no longer be worth the squeeze, and that will change.

So, in preparation for that day, please know that you can also read this blog on the website at HumidityandHope.com, or you can get a weekly email from me with a link to that week’s posts, or you can go to this page and find links to follow me on Twitter or Tumbler or even my blog’s Facebook page where the links are auto-posted or find out how to sign up to get the whole text of the post in your email inbox within minutes of my posting it.

But however and wherever you do it, I’m grateful for your readership, your sharing, and your engagement.

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.

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.

 

 

Knowing When To Sing

My favorite story my Dad ever told me:

Once upon a time, there was a baby bird, sitting in the nest. And like most baby birds, he wanted to fly. His mom had left him alone in the nest while she went for worms, and he ventured out, to try to fly on his own.

He leaped off the edge of his nest but plummeted down to the ground, where he was knocked unconscious. To make matters worse, it was very cold, and he was on the edge of death from exposure. 

Along came a cow, who crapped on the baby bird. The heat of the cow crap enveloped the baby bird and warmed him. Revived, the baby bird began to sing.

A cat was walking by and heard the baby bird singing. The cat grabbed the baby bird out of the cow poop and promptly ate him.

There are three morals to this story.

  1. Everyone who shits on you is not necessarily your enemy.
  2. Everyone who gets you out of shit is not necessarily your friend.
  3. If you are warm and happy in a pile of shit, keep your mouth shut.

 

I’m going out of town for a few days to see an old friend, and will be largely offline until Wednesday of next week. I’ll see you then. 

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.

 

Rage

My personality is such that I get furious when others are mistreated, but tend to give little thought to how I am treated. I am always going to fight for someone else, even if I am largely unwilling to fight for myself. There have been times I walked away without getting paid rather than fight about it, or I have had to pay more than I should have had to rather than fight about it, yet let me see someone else get taken advantage of and I will go into full-bore Hulk-smash mode. I am a much better negotiator for you than I am for me.

This has not always led to positive outcomes for me.

For more than 12 years, I survived on rage. I was deep in the fight on behalf of people whose voices had long been suppressed, and the sheer rage I felt on their behalf kept me going, long after it was no longer a good idea for me to do so. This rage led me to fight a city, several neighborhoods, more than a handful of slumlords, at least three churches, and dozens of individuals. Rage was my fuel.

Rage as fuel, however, is not sustainable, and I burned out – literally. In the years since then, as I have been in recovery from that period in my life, I have been working hard on anger management, on acceptance, and on advocating better for myself. I’ve been trying hard to learn to survive on hope instead of rage.

Most days it seems to be working.

Today, however, it did not.

I have been involved in a local campaign around working to make sure Black-owned businesses get their fair share of the city contracts here. In a city that is 85% people of color, less than 5% of city contract dollars go to businesses owned by people of color. This has led to all sorts of interesting interactions with the business community, local politicians, and the media.

And today I got interviewed by someone in the press who managed to piss me off. As far as this story goes, it doesn’t matter how they did it or why they did it, but in any event, I got pissed. Experience has taught me that when you are angry and in front of a television camera, that is not the time to take it out on the person who has angered you, so there I was, on camera, getting angrier and angrier.

And then I got angry at myself because none of my hard-won coping mechanisms were working. I was getting angry that I was getting angry. But I survived the interview and lived to fight another day.

But I got angry. Like not the general, have-you-seen-the-news-generalized-hellscape angry, but I felt real, genuine rage, at someone else and then at me.

I let them get to me. That was… disappointing.

I’m OK. And it’s fine, really. Nobody got hurt, my passion probably moved some things forward, and I came home and went for a long walk, and watched the tiny sparrows play in the leaves that had gathered in the corners of the creek, and came to terms with the fact that I still have more work to do.

I’m just glad I have a chance to get to do it.