Crunch Time

They mostly come out at night, mostly

In the movie "Aliens", a little girl named Newt, found by a visiting crew, gives insight into the cruel, fear-inducing aliens that have decimated her community and home. "They mostly come out at night" she says, "mostly".  The aliens that haunt me during this recession mostly come out at night too. They wake me up from an uneasy sleep and make it hard for me to go to bed at night. They mostly come out at night, mostly.

When you bed down for the evening there is a vulnerability that sweeps over you. Your physical body is going to shut down for a time and your brain is going to dissipate into dreams. You are at the whims of the night. It is then that I begin to feel the full weight of the situation and the reality of very tough times - the aliens of angst in our midst.

What are the aliens of angst that come out at us at night, mostly?

The alien of uncertainty: We are conditioned by our Western scientific mindset to value certainty over all else. When it gets threatened, we begin to run scared in the face of its unpredictability. It is the loss of control that we fear. Yet even in the best of times, the loss of control is a certainty. It is the illusion of control that we cling to and that gives this alien its fearful presence. To look uncertainty in the eye and accept it for the fact that it is, diminishes its negating, illusory partner; control.

The alien of failure: I have lived most of my life living under the description of bipolar II disorder. It has stalled my life. The main reason is that every opportunity became an invitation to despair. A friend asked me yesterday if I ever had a dream job. I answered I might have, but I wouldn't have known it. So here I am with very few prospects, no momentum, and not much to show vocationally for all my work.

To define failure, one must define success. You can't understand one without the other. Yet our definitions vary across the spectrum. For some success is defined by material possessions. For others it is the amount of time available to pursue what's important. This alien comes at me most profoundly because I allow the materialistic, consumeristic definition of success to rule the night. I am not a failure.  I am a good father to my children and a loving husband to my wife (thought not very capable at the moment of providing for them). So, in the words of the great American philosophy Kenny Loggins, "even though we ain't got money, I'm so in love with you hunny, that everything will bring a change of love."

The alien of despair: Despair is like a compression wave that radiates through everything. It is mostly a mindset that we allow ourselves to engage in and allow to have its way with us. I've mentioned in previous posts that depression has a tight logic. It's easy to stay there. What's harder is to break out of its grip. To do so requires joy. Joy is not happiness. Happiness is fleeting, like trying to chase a butterfly. Joy is enduring and finds us. It can seep into our lives in the most unlikely of situations - situations for which joy should be in short supply. It comes from something outside the realm of our reality. Joy, as C.S. Lewis says is "the serious business of heaven"

Six pack abs and Family Dinners

A new study revealed that average bodies are as appealing to others as men who have six pack abs. That is good news for the majority of us who either by genetics or by lifestyle have bodies that are, quite simply, average.

Due to time constraints and shifting demographics, less and less families are sitting down at home to share a common table together. They seem quaint, unrealistic and outdated these days.  Average. They are mundane it's true, but how critical they are to communal health. 

It seems to me that most of the ills we are experiencing today is because we didn't want to be average. The mundane was something to be avoided and seen as a roadblock in our pursuit of excellence. The creation of exotic mortgage packages, our overspending, and intense sports activities for the kids are all symptoms of our flight from normalcy.

The point? All of our striving today and our frenetic attempts to be "excellent" may not be the best thing for us. We are conditioned by the myth of progress and the tug to be outstanding to believe that everyday life just doesn't cut it. Yet it is everyday life with its dirty dishes, pesky weeds and average tasks that ground us in reality and provides the greatest joy.  Being average doesn't mean mediocrity. It does mean that every moment of every day is spent unleashing the power of average.

The Joy-Driven Life

In the midst of all the upheavals in the world today, it is easy to ponder the sobering reality of life and fall into a major funk. But there is a greater truth and a richer response to life and what it means to be human: Joy. G.K. Chesterton, an English Journalist, Novelist, and Essayist who died in 1936 knew well the undercurrent of joy in life. A person is fully human, he says,

"when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind;...Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday; joy is the uproarious labor by which all things live."

May all you labors this day be uproarious with joy

The loss of reverie

I'm pooped. I mean it. Our contemporary culture and its accompanying stresses has left me exhausted. Not in the physical sense, mind you, but in the mental.  The speed at which everything runs today is zapping my cognitive resistance.  What is eroding in me is attention.  I can't focus.

Despite our wondrous technologies and scientific advances, we are nurturing a culture of diffusion, fragmentation, and detachment.  The thesis of a very important book by Maggie Jackson entitled Distracted posits that the way we live is eroding our capacity for deep, sustained, perceptive attention - the building block of intimacy, wisdom and cultural progress. She writes that

"Increasingly we are shaped by distraction...the seduction of alternative virtual universes, the addictive allure of multitasking people and things, our near religious allegiance to a constant state of motion: these are markers of a land of distraction...This is why we are less and less able to see, hear and comprehend what's relevant and permanent, why so many of us feel that we can barely keep our heads above water, and our days are marked by perpetual loose ends."

It suddenly dawned on me that I no longer waste time. My days have been subdivided into smaller and smaller units of efficient time. I have lost reverie. Reverie is a state of being lost in one's thoughts; to daydream.  When is the last time you daydreamed?  When was the last time you deeply pondered a sunset, or sprawled on the grass with your arms behind your head letting your thoughts wander with the movement of the clouds? 

If, like me, it's been a while, then you are overly distracted.  We are in essence not nurturing our inner selves when we lose reverie. I encourage you to go ahead and waste some time every day.  Don't let the efficiency bug infect you. Give yourself permission to go against the speed, expectations, and distractions of your life. Don't respond to the annoying "ping" of arriving email - stay focused on the task at hand. Shut off the television and read a book for two hours straight (think you can?). Don't check Facebook or Twitter for a whole week.  Have a three hour dinner with good friends. Let go of the guilt for wasting time.

You'll be a more interesting and deeply peaceful person as a result.

The persistence of joy

My lived experience has been an attempt to effectively migrate the quandaries of change by tapping into the persistence of joy. In a previous post, I defined joy as that smoldering internal ember that refuses to be extinguished despite repeated external attempts to douse it.  Happiness is embedded in our constitution and is a protected right.  Yet happiness is fleeting in our attempts to capture it.  Joy, on the other hand, captures us.

Joy is the deep undercurrent of life. Independent from any temporal realities, joy compels us to tap into the transcedent dimensions of our lives.  The two eternal dimensions that buoy joy are humor and hope. Both are in desperately needed today.

Humor: This is the closest we can come to facing our failures and moving on with renewed vigor.  When we can laugh at ourselves and the situations we find ourselves in, we are engaging in a very courageous act; for both our egos and our culture don't like to be laughed at.  Yet it is the discovery of humor and the act of laughter that disarms them both. As the great American philosopher Jimmy Buffett once said, "if we all couldn't laugh, we would all go insane."

Here are some suggestions for finding humor and engaging in laughter:

• Listen to comedians.  Most comedians will tell you that their humor is inevitably birthed from pain and insecurity.  Some of my favorites are Jim Gaffigan and Demitry Martin, and Ken Davis

• Share a bottle of wine (or two) with great, close friends and loosen up the nerves enough to laugh with one another. A nice affordable merlot that does the trick for me is Red Diamond

• Read and watch satirical content such as the Colbert Report or "The Onion".

Hope: I define hope as an act of the will that stubbornly leans into and moves forward against the headwinds of life. It is a refusal to be knocked down completely. Hope exists at the interface between the temporal and eternal. All that separates this world from the next is a sigh. That deep, audible exhalation of sadness or duress is the signal to begin leaning forward. 

Here are some suggestions for accessing the will and leaning forward in hope:

• Nurture the soul. This is best done in contemplation and silence. It is very hard in our noisy world, but try sitting silently for 20 minutes. Let any thought that comes your way to flow along out of your consciousness so that can be fully presence with the eternal.

• Don't go it alone. Share your worries and fears with those who can be trusted. The act of verbalizing them with others can normalize your situation and provide much needed camaraderie and support.

• Absorb stories of lives lived hopefully in the midst of extraordinary bleak circumstances. You will learn how powerfully resilient the human spirit is when enriched with hope.  Two wonderful ones are: The book "A Paradise Built in Hell" and the movie, "Life is Beautiful"

I wish you all joy as you move forward into the new year!