Crunch Time

Feminine napkins and me

My wife and I have three children.  My son is fourteen and my two daughters are twelve and ten.  Though change is constant and swift for them (and us) in the fertile ground of adolescence, there is one change that is hitting me hard in the stomach - and it involves the feminine napkin.

I know what they are and what they're used for.  Heck, I sometimes find them in my gym bag enmeshed with my workout clothes from the wash.  Generally, I don't give them much thought.  Until now. 

When my wife sprung the box of feminine napkins on me one evening, she was preparing me for the inevitable and imminent use of those "things" by my little girl.  My little girl having a period! It was more like an exclamation point. I somehow never imagined her ever needing and using them.  What was I thinking?

I'll tell you. She's my little girl; my snuggler at night, and reading companion by day.  She's the little girl that sits on my lap and kisses me on the cheek.  She's the little girl whose little bottom I wiped clean and dressed with a diaper.  She's the little girl that scibbled love notes with crayons to me on a regular basis. She's the little girl that stole my heart.

Those feminine napkins seemed like thieves.  I saw them as conniving to steal my little girl from me. They were repulsive to my sensibilities.

I was in avoidance mood.  But as is the case, I had to be a big boy and embrace those napkins for what they symbolize - vibrant life and progression into a future that cannot be halted. Her life is vibrant. Always has been, always will be.  Our life together is vibrant. Always has been, always will be.  Feminine napkins will be around.  Always have been, always will be.

Damn that Dumbledore

Today I saw the sixth installment of the Harry Potter movies.  I'll admit I got choked up when Dumbledore, the wizened old wizard of Hogwarts, was betrayed and killed at the end of the movie.  I shouldn't have, because after reading the book I knew what to expect.  But there came the tears. 

I lost it when I read the same tragic event in the book two years earlier with my children.  I had to stop and gather my composure and try to explain to my kids why I was such a blubbering mess. I had a difficult time trying to sort it out.

What is it about the death of Dumbledore that made me so damn full of grief.  Here is what I think.  I am grieving the loss of heroes in our culture.  I mean real heroes.  You know, men and women who are wise and have a rich, deep history with an ability to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the greater good. Heroes who are in this thing called life not for the massive amounts exposure they can garner but for the deep service they can render the human race.

There are no heroes today, really.  They are all celebrities now.  We live in a celebrity culture - a fact borne out in magazine sales alone.  There are exceptions, of course: towering figures such as Nelson Mandela and the late Mother Teresa. But these are not celebrities as such, but the globalized world's saints, its few remaining heroes.  They are to be admired and wondered at, not aped, while everyone else craves their 15 minutes of fame.

Our adulation of celebrities highlight how crucial the surface level of life has become.  If nothing means anything beyond its surface impression, it is little wonder we look for the gloss of celebrity rather than any depth of character, like that found in heroes (even fictional) like Dumbledore.  We live off the buzz that celebrity culture supplies without being involved with any form of moral commitment.  Celebrity is about appearance and spin: it cannot form character.

The problem with much celebrity is that it rarely lasts.  More tragic still, the most enduring celebrity is the dead celebrity. Think of Marilyn Monroe, John Kennedy, Jimi Hendrix, Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Kurt Cobain and Princess Diana, and now Michael Jackson.

Thankfully, many people recognize the superficiality of celebrity culture and seek some sort of alternative. Graham Cray, the current Bishop of Maidstone in England, states that an heroic response to the cult of celebrity must hold together several things:

• First, we have to acknowledge that there is a certain inevitability about it. It is a direct consequence of deep changes in our culture, and we will achieve nothing if we simply rage against it.
• Second, there is a fairly widespread awareness of its superficiality, which means that celebrity is usually consumed with a measure of irony.
• Third, it will be much more important to grow some heroes than to rail against the B-list stars put up for our consumption.

This may sound over the top and bit "wacky", but damn that Dumbledore, he exposed my deficiency in a depth of meaning and my yearning for heroes who can help me make life truly worth living.

It's On

Southwest Airlines launched a new Ad Campaign on June 1st aimed at tough times. At the end of the ad a narrator intones that the airline doesn't fly around tough times. It's on, and they're ready.

It's on for all us... 

It's on every time our minds persist in discouraging thoughts.

It's on every time we think we can go it alone without the comaraderie of those who care.

It's on every time we stubbornly refuse to admit our fear and hide behind a facade of platitudes.

It's on every time we avoid nourishing our souls with silent listening, contemplation, and transcedent faith.

It's on every time our decisions preclude others who are in greater need.

It's on every time we become too enamored with our technology to solve our problems.

It's on every time we rely on massive military might to secure our happiness.

It's on every time we stop taking initiative for the health of our relationships.

It's on every time we live without grace.

This is the time of our lives. It's tough. It's on. Are you ready?

Embrace Uncertainty

This morning I was reminded of my propensity to be  "duped" by the illusion of control - the tendency for human beings to believe they can control, or at least influence, outcomes that they demonstrably have no influence over.

I was stuck in traffic on a way to a meeting.  Traffic drives me nuts!  I feel trapped!  It makes me angry! So I began to play the jam like a game of chess.  I strategically made moves across lanes while measuring my progress in comparison to another randomly chosen vehicle on the road.  For a while, it seemed that my ability to maneuver through the morass of cars was working, when suddenly the car I'd chosen to measure my progress zoomed right past and well ahead of me on the road. By the time it was all over this morning, I was late for my meeting and realized once again that I had no more actual control over the predicament of that jam than I do over almost any other area of my life.

Recently the op-ed page in the New York Times highlighted new survey results from the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index showing that Americans are smiling less and worrying more than they were a year ago, that happiness is down and sadness is up, that we are getting less sleep and smoking more cigarettes, that depression is on the rise.

The reasons for this gloom seem economically obvious, yet the author of the piece, Dan Gilbert, concluded that it isn’t a matter of insufficient funds. It’s a matter of insufficient certainty.   The fact that we don't know what is going to happen with the stock market, or predict with any certainty when this recession is going to turn around, or why traffic can be so constricting this particular morning is a root cause of our current malaise. 

Rather than try to regain sway over the events in life, a shrewd skill to develop for navigating tumultuous change is to EMBRACE UNCERTAINTY.  Resilience demands it.  To do so involves lamenting the passing of known illusions of control.  To deeply grieve the loss of control and a previously known world where it was once operative allows for healthy forms of personality development that are largely precluded in its absence.

Undoubtedly, lost opportunities and mistaken expectations are often unpleasant to think and talk about. But a seven year study by Laura King, a researcher at the University if Missouri, indicates that individuals who take time to stop, think, and mourn their losses are more likely to mature and a achieve a potentially more durable sense of happiness.

Grieving losses is important because it allows us to unleash energy that is bound to the lost experience—so that we might re-invest that energy elsewhere. Until we grieve effectively we are likely to find reinvesting difficult; a part of us remains tied to the past.

Grieving is not forgetting. Nor is it drowning in tears. Healthy grieving results in an ability to remember the importance of our loss—but with a new found sense of peace, rather than searing pain.

Healthy grieving is an active process, you can't "just give it time". One way of understanding the work to be done is to think of grieving as a series of tasks you need to complete (not necessarily in sequence):

1. To accept the finality of the loss;

2. To acknowledge and express the full range of feelings we experience as a result of the loss;

3. To adjust to a life in which the lost experience is absent;

4. To say good-bye, to ritualize our movement to a new peace with the loss.