Living Life Fully’s Daily Pick-Me-Up

I’m not looking forward to the next year in our country.  For twelve more months, a whole bunch of candidates and a whole bunch of people who want their candidate in office will be trying to gain the office of their choice.  And they’ll do so often by attacking their opponents, by pointing out what they see as negative traits and actions, without spending much time talking about why they would be the better person for the job.  The focus for the next year of our media and public will be on sound bytes, presentation, popularity, and perception rather than on the deeper issues that should be at stake, such as character and honesty and compassion.  The one bonus is that G. Bush won’t be a candidate for the presidency–his last two campaigns were among the most vitriolic and hateful campaigns I’ve ever witnessed, and the shame of it is that he still ended up winning.

During this next year I often need to take myself out of the daily news, ignoring it for weeks at a time.  I believe in the principle that what we let into us becomes a part of us, and I don’t want to be manipulated into feeling negative things about certain candidates.  I want to try to focus on their qualifications and positive aspects, trying to decide for myself who is best suited for the job.  Sometimes this is difficult, though, when all we read and hear is attack after attack on character.

I like that most European countries have only one month for campaigning, and that one candidate isn’t running–the party runs, and the winning party appoints a leader.  This is a sound principle that doesn’t allow for the victory of the “cult of personality,” such as the one that swept our current president into office seven years ago, even with fewer votes than his opponent.  And the individual made many promises during his two campaigns that have been completely forgotten; and he has made other sweeping changes that he never mentioned at all during his campaigns.  Is this what we really want in a president?

But we have a system that encourages this type of actions.  For me as an individual, it’s important to separate myself from the process and not buy into the status quo, not buy into the promises and mud-slinging.  After all, if I’m to be useful and helpful to the people in my own life, then I need to be at peace in my mind, not in a state of confusion or distress.  I need to develop equanimity, not imbalance.  I need to take care of my state of mind and my conscience and my heart, and watching other people battle it out rather than commit themselves to fair and reasonable campaigning leads me to negative thoughts and ideas, and I simply don’t want those put into my mind by people I don’t even know.  I will vote in a year, but I certainly won’t be a witness to the process through which the candidates try to convince people NOT to vote for their opponents rather than TO vote for them.

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One of my favorite songs comes from Shawn Colvin, and it starts out “I don’t why the sky is so blue.”  I love the simplicity of the line, and I love the idea behind it–that we don’t necessarily need to know why the sky is so blue.  It simply is, and it’s beautiful that way, isn’t it?  There are many things in life that I just want to accept as they are and enjoy.  I don’t need to explain them, to analyze them, to change them, or even to think about them too much.  They are as they are, and that’s fine.

Knowing about things is fine, too.  I know why and how leaves change their colors in autumn, and that knowledge is interesting to me when I see autumn foliage.  On the other hand, that knowledge does absolutely nothing to deepen the feeling I get when I come across a stand of trees that has changed colors and that sits brilliantly in the sunlight under blue skies on a crisp, clear autumn day.  I don’t need to know anything about the scene when I see it; I simply feel the amazement that such a view creates inside of me.

Sometimes I get the feeling that many of us are drowning in information.  We have access to information at levels unprecedented in human history, and few of us have slowed down enough from the gathering and organizing of such information to consider the possibility that we have too much information.  Is all that we know helping us, or is it hurting us?  Could we be spending the time that we spend on information focused on something more valuable to us, such as developing our spiritual lives, our prayer lives, or our relationships with others?  For some people, the more information the better–but they don’t ever step back to consider that they may be using their information-gathering as an escape from more pressing matters such as knowing themselves, their spouses, their children, or their siblings better.

Sometimes it doesn’t matter a bit if we don’t know why or how something happens, or how something is made.  When all is said and done, after all, there’s simply far too much to know in this world as it is for one lifetime.  There’s no way that we can know everything, so why do so many of us try to do so?  There are many things in this world that I never will know, and that’s fine with me–I don’t have to know about them.  There are many people who do know about them, and I’ll leave them to know their field, and I’ll try to focus on getting really good in my fields.

As a teacher, it’s been somewhat difficult for me to accept that there are many things that I’ll never know.  I like explaining things to my students.  I sometimes feel bad when I can’t explain them.  But now I also like saying “I don’t know,” and referring them to a source where they can find answers to their questions.  I don’t need to know everything, even if I am a teacher.

Knowledge is great when I’m taking tests, when I need to explain something to my students, or when I want to make myself look good in a social setting.  But it’s not always necessary.  Do I need to know why sunsets get so colorful in order to enjoy them?  No, I don’t.  Do I need to know why a baby’s laugh makes me smile whenever I hear it?  Nope.  Do I need to know the aerodynamic principles involved in a butterfly’s ability to fly in order to marvel at the beauty of its flight?  No way.  These things simply are, and they are marvelous, and they make my life richer even if I know absolutely nothing about them.

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I came upon a beautiful quotation recently:  “Learn to see what is in front of you, rather than what you learned is there.”  It’s from a man named Stephen C. Paul, and it really gets me thinking about what I see and experience in life.  Sometimes I start to take things for granted because I’ve seen them so often and because others have taught me just what they are.  But if there’s one thing I’ve learned from the last fifteen years of studying materials written and produced about life and living, it’s that what we think things are and what they really are usually aren’t exactly the same things.

What we’ve learned in life is often what other people think we should know, not necessarily what truly is.  When I was young, some people tried to teach me to accept racist attitudes.  I know that that was completely wrong.  Others tried to teach me that I should know and accept my place in life, and not try to make myself more than I was.  That, too, was wrong.  I was very fortunate because I was always questioning everything I learned–much to the chagrin of my grade-school teachers, I must say.  But that questioning helped me to see the world in a more authentic way–I wasn’t stuck with the perspectives that other people tried to force upon me.

“What is in front of you, rather than what you learned is there.”  Is this really just a tree, or is it a fantastic creation that’s giving forth oxygen so that we humans may continue to survive?  Or is it even more than that, or less?  Can it be that the tree is simply an illusion that we all agree is there, so it’s therefore created by our collective consciousness?  I don’t have a definitive answer for any of these questions, and I honestly don’t believe that there is any one definitive answer.  I do know, though, that until we’re willing and able to step outside of our comfort zones, we won’t ever see the world in any new or different–or perhaps even genuine–ways.

The people who taught us had the best of intentions, but they also had limitations that they learned in the course of their lives.  So it’s important to us to be able to shake ourselves free from the shackles of what we’ve learned to see, and see things as they genuinely are–from our own perspective.  I believe that when we do so, we’ll discover a new and beautiful and fulfilling world all around us, and we’ll see our place in it quite clearly.

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Every time I accidentally turn on television news, I swear off it once more.  It’s difficult for me to believe what the people who make the programs see as news, what they present simply in the hopes of having better ratings.  This weekend I saw a three-minute newscast during halftime of a football game, and the top stories had to do with a little girl dying, a car accident in which someone died, and a shooting.  In a city of several million people, were these really the only “news” stories that they could find?  Why do they think that their viewers want to see only death and destruction?  And what does it do to us and our outlook on the world when we constantly fill our minds with such horrible things?

Somewhere along the way, we’ve come to think that anything that involves death is front-page news.  And we even see it become fornt-page news again sometimes, on the anniversary of an unsolved horrible murder, for example.  But there’s so much more to the world than this–so much more to our lives than deaths of people we never knew, or crimes done by people we don’t know, perpetrated against people we’ll never meet.

What do you fill you mind with?  Do you fill it with positive and uplifting ideas and material, or do you fill it with murder and mayhem, horror movies and crime novels?  Our entertainment also has taken a strong turn towards the awful, as horror movies–and even television shows–become much more graphic with their violence and crime.  And while it is “only” entertainment, we have to wonder what the cumulative effect of filling our brains with this sort of thing can have.  After all, cookies and candy are “only” cookies and candy, but if we fill our bodies with them regularly, we will see extremely negative effects on our physical health.  So what are we doing to our mental health when we constantly watch victims being brutalized by criminals, whether it be fiction or not?

Personally, I’ve sworn off horror movies.  I feel too strongly for the victims, and I feel awful after having watched a couple of hours of brutality.  I never want to reach a point at which I’ve desensitized myself, at which I can watch a rape or a murder without feeling intense feelings for the victim.  My sensitivity is what allows me to feel the compassion that I feel for my fellow human beings, and I don’t want to lose that.

We all have decisions to make in life.  Sometimes we fall into ruts in which we don’t realize that we really should make a decision, such as allowing tons of negative stuff into our brains.  It took me a while to realize that unless I was willing to close the door to that sort of thing, I would continue to hurt myself and desensitize myself by constantly watching the same types of violence over and over again.

(And on an artistic note, this type of violence in film and on our TV news shows nothing but a lack of creativity and originality on the part of the people who make the movies and programs.  It takes true creativity to present violence in ways that aren’t so brutal, and true originality to look for the true news in any community–and most of the people in the business are just doing what’s easy, following the status quo and not taking the time or making the effort to be creative and original.  It’s kind of a shame, really!)

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I read two separate short articles on listening this morning, in two different books, so it seems that life’s sending me a not-so-subtle message.  One of the articles was “Creative Listening,” by Wilferd A. Peterson, in which he points out many of the benefits of listening, and strategies for doing so.  To him, the value in listening is what we can learn, and how we can change our lives in positive ways when we do actually listen.  He encourages us to listen to the beautiful and to the good, and to listen critically and creatively and with patience.  If we do listen, he says, we can get something out of what we hear.  He implies that if we don’t listen, we really won’t get anything at all out of what we experience.

The other passage was by Richard Carlson in Never Mind the Small Stuff.  His focus was on listening to the other person closely in order to make both of you feel better about yourselves.  If we spend our time formulating our answers and just waiting for the other person to finish so that we can speak, we won’t get much out of the interaction and we’ll probably make the other person feel a bit diminished.  When we do this, we’re not showing respect to either of us.

Whenever I come across material from two different sources that’s so strongly related, I take it as a sign that there’s something there for me to learn.  As far as listening is concerned, I’ve studied quite a bit about it, yet I still don’t practice what I’ve learned very well.  I do some things that I don’t like while listening, like formulate my response and avoiding eye contact; while I’m trying to change these behaviors, it’s coming very slowly.

One of my biggest problems with our current president, for example, is that he doesn’t seem to listen to anyone.  He always seems to have made up his mind already, and any input he asks for is irrelevant.  This behavior runs contrary to everything I believe about life and learning–a president has advisors because he’s supposed to listen to their advice.  How many of our people wouldn’t be dead now if he had listened to reason before he invaded Iraq.  No, there weren’t any weapons of mass destruction, and the very people we had sent there to find this out said so, but he refused to listen.  He wouldn’t learn from their input, and many people have died, and have lost fathers and mothers and wives and husbands and children because of his refusal to listen.

While the repercussions of my own failure to listen aren’t nearly as drastic–and definitely aren’t life and death–I do still affect people in my life.  When I listen closely to them, I can make their day brighter simply by treating them with the respect necessary to listen to what they say.  And what they say is valuable, if not to me, then to them–I just have to recognize that value and respect it and truly hear what they say.  Listening is one of the most valuable contributions that we can make to our friends and co-workers and family members–true listening, not just hearing the words, but focusing on the meanings behind the words.  So my goal for today is to listen better, and to try to keep up that habit in coming days.

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I think that many people are having a hard time staying positive in this world of ours today.  After all, we’ve spent almost all of this new millenium suffering a constant bombardment of negative news on a global level, from the wars in Iraq and Africa to the tsunami disaster of a few years ago to the destruction of the World Trade Center and the hijackings of the jets that were used to destroy them, not to mention the murders of the thousands of people in the jets and buildings.  Economically, we’re seeing disasters in the housing markets, the international currency exchange, and the inability of low- and middle-class families to keep up with rising costs because wages aren’t keeping pace with the higher costs of gas, food, travel, and utilities.  More and more people are allowing foreclosures on their homes and seeking bankruptcy protection from the courts, and fewer and fewer people seem to be able to create situations in their lives in which they thrive.

And in the midst of all this doom and gloom, we’re being inundated with books and movies and magazine articles that say our lives are in our own hands, that we can create our own realities and cause our own affluence and wealth.  And somewhere in our subconscious, we have to be asking ourselves, “If this is true, then what about those thousands of civilians who have died in terrorist attacks over the last few years in Iraq and Afghanistan?  How can we say that the hundreds of thousands of people in Somalia and the Sudan who have died in genocidal attacks created their own destiny?  How could the people on the airliners who were involved in the 9/11 attacks have chosen to end their lives this way?  There are thousands of such questions that just don’t seem to fit.

Add to the many problems of the world that we’re witnessing the fact that most people are working harder than ever and bringing home less than ever, and we have situations in which people aren’t able to slow down and take a look at their own lives.  All of the other overwhelming things in life become overwhelming because so many people are unable or unwilling to slow down long enough to let things settle in their minds and hearts, so issue after issue in their personal and public lives starts to build up into a mountain of stress.  Since these issues are never dealt with actively and consciously, they simply pile up and become a monstrous mountain that keeps us from finding the peaceful and loving parts of our lives.

One of the things that I hope to accomplish with this blog is to publish reminders that can be helpful in allowing ourselves to take the time and make the efforts necessary in order to deal with the issues of our lives in positive, constructive ways, as opposed to passively allowing the issues to create stress and tension in our lives.  Nothing changes if we don’t deal with it actively, and it’s important that we deal effectively with all of the inputs of our lives, be they positive and uplifting or negative and potentially debilitating.  The important words there are “we deal.”  And that’s what learning is all about–finding ways to deal with the issues of our lives that will make us healthy, happy, and whole.

And that’s what this Weblog will be all about.

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October 19, 2007–the day I’ve finally decided to post a weblog of thoughts and ideas that I hope may be useful, relevant, and interesting to you!  It’s a bright and sunny day where I live, and many of the leaves on the trees have turned to brilliant golds; when I look at them up against the clear blue sky, I feel my breath leave me in awe and wonder.  They’re a nice reminder of the beauty that we have to enjoy in this world, even if we are faced day after day with a barrage of media influence that so often focuses on the bad and the harmful.

I don’t believe that life is the negative experience that our media people tend to paint it as.  In fact, I see life in a very positive way–as a wonderful gift that we make of as we will while we’re here.  If I wish to focus on the negative and depressing elements of the world, guess how I start to feel?  And if I wish to immerse myself in situations full of negative and depressing people, well–guess what again?  We’ve been given the gift of life to make of as we will, and one of the most difficult things for me to watch constantly is how people make decisions and take actions that will keep them down, that will keep them from ever reaching their highest potential in life.

My goal with this weblog is to offer beauty, peace, hope, love, to all who choose to visit.  I still don’t know of what the site will consist, for I want to keep this a dynamic page that doesn’t have a strict plan behind it.  I may be feeling very different about life and living six months from now, and I hope that if I am, I’ll be able to continue to post positive and uplifting material here.  I thank you for your visit here, and I hope that you’ll be back!

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