Category: Uncategorized

Some of us are always looking ahead – for the next step, the next job, the recognition we deserve, the day when our value will be appreciated, our potential realized. This is more than simple longing for greener pastures. This is desire for fulfillment, longing for arrival. Today is never satisfactory. I myself am never fully satisfactory.

Which is why I was so intrigued by a recent conversation I had with someone named G.E.. What did G.E. stand for?

Good enough.

Although I figured that the initials represented something to the contrary, I decided not to push the matter. It’s not every day that you meet someone with such a moniker. Besides, I liked knowing that there was someone like G.E. who was fully filling their own shoes.

“How do you know when you’re good enough?” I asked.

Apparently accustomed to the question, G.E. offered me a long, patient look. It was the sort of visual survey that made you think you might answer your own question and, when you did, the person to whom you had originally posed the question would nod and smile. But I don’t like being treated like someone who knows better than I show and so was having none of the tactic. Name yourself worthy of self-satisfaction and you need to go first. Eventually, G.E. did.

It doesn’t mean I’m satisfied.

Silence still, on my part.

It just means I’m not dissatisfied.

The “dis” had been emphasized, gently, no doubt to help assure that I caught the differentiation. Double negatives, however, can leave me singly uncomfortable. It’s like announcing that an afternoon’s weather is not unpleasant. Why not just say it’s pleasant? Is there any other option?

I don’t see the point of being good enough, I wanted to say. It feels like a compromise, a decision not to try to excel, to improve. Instead I inhaled and posed: “Can you describe what it feels like – to not be dissatisfied?”

Seeking to avoid a direct challenge to my new discussant, I draped my words in a non-confrontational tone. A passer-by who overhead me could have assumed we were considering the ambient temperature.

A tuft of G.E.’s hair lifted gracefully in the breeze. The response seemed to float with that wisp of that browny gray.

It feels like release.

By now it had occurred to me that G.E. was an embodiment of non-attachment, a walking incarnation of non-desire, someone who repudiated suffering through a choice to accept circumstances as they presented themselves. I’ve read about such people. I’ve even aspired to be like them. Unfortunately, I have this mental script that inserts itself in my inner dialogue whenever I attempt to adopt the demeanor of a seemingly carefree spiritual traveler. Our actions are meaningful, this script screams out. The universe depends on our decision-making and efforts. I don’t have to resolve myself to pain, mediocrity, and the status quo. Would not doing so represent capitulation, a lackadaisical resignation to laissez-faire living and existence?

I shifted my gaze above G.E., narrowing my eyes as if something that had been set loose needed to be reconnected. “I choose to fight the good fight,” I said slowly. “I choose to refuse complacency.”

It suddenly occurred to me that G.E. might enjoy playing the role of provocateur, offering different answers for varying situations when asked what the letters G and E stood for. Good enough, for me. It could also be Great Expectations, for you. Or Grand Enthusiasm, for another. Even Galloping Ego.

Do you think we should teach our children to be good enough in this world?

This was not the rejoinder I was expecting. My instinct was to distract, mostly because the question was a bit destabilizing to the mindset I was trying to hold. I exhaled, deciding to let the fullness of the inquiry penetrate. Why was I so resistant to the phrase “good enough”?

A memory arrived. When my oldest daughter was still riding in a car booster seat, she told me, quite emphatically, how it was wrong to aim for perfection in life, whether it be at school, home, or in any pursuit.

“You can’t be perfect,” my daughter declared. “It’s not good to try to be something you can’t be.”

I remember looking at her face in the rear view mirror, seeing the defiance that was set in the angle of her jaw. “We can try to always get better though, can’t we?” I asked.

“You need to be careful,” my little girl replied. “Because you can just get disappointed.”

We teach our children, and we expect each other, to be good. We want to offer sufficient good such that we contribute in a positive way to the world and to its movements. How then did the term ‘good enough’ come to signify an average performance? And what was wrong with that anyway? Besides, there might be another way to use the expression. It could be interpreted as bringing ‘enough good’ to others that I, you, or anyone are part of the overall improvement project we call the earth.

I could feel G.E. watching me. I could also sense the other memory banks of my years spinning in search of examples where doing good, of being good, had definitely been “enough”. And I could almost hear the ache of countless humans on the planet wondering, daily if not more frequently, whether they themselves mattered, whether they personally made a difference, whether their unique lives and existence was meaningful, was, in fact, enough. One thing was wonderfully, unexpectedly clear: most of us, especially me, and most of our experiences, despite our naive desires to the contrary, are extraordinarily, and somewhat magnificently, average.

“We should teach everyone that they are good enough,” I told G.E. “Because that way, together, we can be better.”

The perfect is within the whole, not the individual. The individual just helps make the whole possible. The contribution to the whole is what manifests the possibility of the perfect out of the joy of the sufficiently good.

Ah, the things life has left to teach. Thanks, G.E.! Today, I’m trying to be pretty darn good enough. What a gratifying experience.

When someone leaves the planet, returning is not easy. There is the desire to be back, yes, the will and yearning to have feet on terra ferma, to have hands intertwined with those who are loved. But the process of returning is risky. There is the atmosphere, the angle of descent, and the performance of the heat shield on the spacecraft. There is the landing itself. And there is the departure from a new perspective afforded by leaving the earth’s surface, the requisite return to a life that will forever be different because of the experience of suspending that life, even temporarily, while traveling outside the bounds of our planet’s gravity.

A new sense of normal must be found.

So it is with our species as we exit the first (and hopefully last) year of a pandemic. While we may not have broken the bounds of the earth’s pull in the past twelve months, we have certainly been required to witness the tearing of ties with much of what we previously considered “normal”. Too many have died; it is estimated that at least a third of Americans know someone whose life was lost to the virus. Most of rest of us have experienced fear, been tested for the virus, or have ourselves fallen ill and recovered. All of our lives have been disrupted.

How then should we re-enter the world if and when it is declared to be “post-pandemic”?

While it is easy to adopt the language of return, the perspective that we must and will get back to normal, I hope we will collectively try to do better. Because the old normal was over-rated. Yes, there are some basic daily rhythms and freedoms of movement we would all like to again experience. And we should. But there were some other restrictive, unfair, and inequitable aspects of our previous life – things that remain part of our current world – which have been starkly exposed under the glare of viral illness and death. Despite many advances in science and technology, we remain, unfortunately, a flawed society, within and across our political boundaries. There are fundamental structural challenges and regrettable hatreds that continuously plague us, their impacts greater than a novel virus, their existence dramatically evident under the siege by that virus. There are widespread imbalances in human rights, in access to basic services, in social supports for fundamental human decencies, and in leadership. We are fallible; our blunders lie naked before us. We are selfish; our vulnerabilities to self-protection and personal wealth aggrandizement are visible in our response to spreading hardship. We are fearful; the collapse of our confidence in institutions and those who run them is stunning reminder of the delicate nature of the unspoken contract that helps bind us together, that protects our individual freedoms, that facilitates our ability to listen, learn, and aspire to be better.

And yet – the pandemic may still improve us. In fact, we may already have experienced such change. The outpouring of interpersonal support, often at the local levels, sometimes quietly, among people who live and work in close proximity, between those who volunteer for others and those who request help, should be acknowledged and celebrated. Many people have contributed in ways large and small to the common good. Some have done this with actions. Others through donations. And many, I would venture, through intentions, through thoughts, and through silent expressions of compassion.

How many of you have found yourselves watching and listening differently to others, even if just occasionally? How many of your neighbors, co-workers, and people you may not know have themselves listened, watched, or observed you, not in your moments of human weakness, but instead during the times when you manifested hope, generosity, and caring? Have you thought and prayed, even in the smallest of moments, for people you don’t know? Have you ever wondered how many other people on this planet have done the same? Imagine a world in which we recognize that everyone, at some level, has aspirations greater than themselves. Breathe the inspiration that comes with the possibility that all humans, even those you think are fundamentally different from you, want a better world for everyone. Hold – just for one moment – the idea in your heart that everyone knows we are all more than our individual selves.

Maybe we have all, in some way, been astronauts this past year. The pandemic has blasted us out of our routines, severing our connections with daily expectations. We may often have felt loosed, untethered, even weightless. We may have questioned the point, the very purpose, of being. While the experience may not have been something we sought, it has, perhaps, given us opportunity for new perspective. I think of my own struggles and then I try to see them from outside the earth’s atmosphere. My woes recede when I let my view hover beyond the oxygen-enriched embrace we so cherish, are invisible amidst the grandeur of the greater image and vista, blend with the totality of the events teeming across the entire planet and cosmos. I know that I cannot continue to drift weightless above and outside the consciousness that I call my life. I know that I must return to the spot within that whole that I cannot see when I watch and witness from the outside. It helps me, however, to feel the release, the freedom, of being less, of being invisible, of being a part of something I know little of and am little within. I become nothing, and everything. I feel the all within the awe.

Re-entry is necessary. And it is challenging. Yet the experience of relinquishment is steadying, strangely calming. When I surrender to the realization that so much more is possible, that so much less is necessary, I feel ready to slice back through the layers surrounding my daily breath, feel comforted by the awareness that there has never been normal, that the search for so-called normalcy is a transient grasp at the view from the ground level, not a deliberate deliverance to the majestic weightlessness of the whole. Whether or not I continue to need a mask, or to practice some other response to a virus, I can still be inspired. Whether or not you continue to need a mask, or to respond in some separate way to this same situation, I can still feel your inspiration too.

May we co-create. May we continue to take flight.

The human enterprise is messy. History is full of evidence for this. So is daily experience. Our species can demonstrate amazing compassion and selflessness. We can also be guilty of deplorable acts of cowardice and brutality. Somewhere, in the deep expanse of being that is beyond our simple three dimensional experience, there is a semblance of a scorecard about the human race and its progress on the planet we call earth. And on that scorecard, in the place of letter grades or numbers summarizing the status of human existence, there are written, perhaps, single words. Such as unfinished. Uncertain. Meandering. Messy.

Last Thursday, I was walking through a line of cars at a mass vaccination site in Phoenix. All the vehicles, thousands during the course of a day, contained people who had just received the COVID 19 vaccine and were awaiting receipt of follow-up appointments for 2nd doses, or the documentation on their vaccine medical cards that they had completed the two shot vaccines series. Most importantly, they are idling in lines to be sure that none had the rare yet still real reaction known as anaphylaxis. Having just checked in with colleagues who were overseeing this station, I was on my way back to the station that preceded this one, the location where cars entered tents, people rolled up sleeves, and vaccines were administered.

“I need to change lanes!”

Two car lines to the east, a solitary man in an older sedan, his car window down and his mask misplaced, was wildly swinging a left arm into the air while hollering to someone, anyone who might listen, that he was in the wrong lane. He needed to change.

No one seemed to hear the poor fellow. Not that I can blame them. Most of the people working the lines were volunteers, many younger in age. Their role was to make appointments, guide cars forward, and signal for help for the occasional circumstance when someone who had been vaccinated was possibly having a reaction.

In the normal world, if you are walking along a busy city street during rush hour and some guy is yelling out his car window about traffic, common sense and basic survival skills guide you away from the situation, not toward it. This not being a normal world, and the situation anything but a busy city street, I decided that someone should figure out why this fellow felt the need to change lanes. That someone was, apparently, me.

“Good morning, sir. What seems to be the problem?”

In my defense, it was a good morning. The previous afternoon had been windy; many of us were still finding dirt and desert sand inside our hair and ears. Today though was sunny, calm, and spring-like. It was a morning that seemed ready to wrap the world’s inhabitants in reassurance – except, it seemed, this bearded, unmasked, and tending-towards-unhinged-status man in a white t-shirt.

“Look at this!” he gestured. “They’re all moving and I’m stuck! I need to change lanes! I have to get out of here!”

There was nothing subtle about the man’s frustration. His hands gripped the wheel like he was ready to spin it counter-clockwise, turn the car left, and leave tire tracks over my toes.

“How are you feeling?” I asked. “Are you doing ok after your shot?”

Please don’t laugh: it was a reasonable question. He had, after all, just received a vaccine. I needed to check to see that he was aware of his general circumstances and was not experiencing a reaction, either from the vaccine or an underlying conditions. That was, after all, the main reason why he was sitting in a line of cars.

He was clearly oriented to place and time. But the question did help – if only a bit. “Well, yeah, fine. I feel fine. But look! It’s past my fifteen minutes!” He pointed dual index fingers at his windshield, on which the time of his vaccination had been written in impermanent Expo. “And I need to get to work! I haven’t had a shower and I need to get home so I can change and get to work!”.

Ah. A person who was worried that his wise decision to get a vaccine might cost him his practical job. Now I understood the reason for the traffic-type rage. I confirmed from the time on his windshield that he was indeed past his allotted waiting time. Then I surveyed the four cars in front of him, the orange cones to the right and left of his car, the cars inside the lanes on the other sides of those cones. Yep, he was stuck. And I knew the reason: there was an information technology problem that was holding up the car at the head of his line. I started to explain this to him but that’s a bit like telling someone who needs oxygen that a tank has been ordered from the warehouse and should be delivered soon. So we embarked on a different course.

“Tell you what,” I offered. “If I can safely get you out of here in a few minutes, will that work for your schedule?”

It was a bold bet. The guy’s hands relaxed their grip on the steering wheel and he took the bargain. “I doubt you can get it done,” he said, resting his forehead on the knuckles still holding the wheel. “But go ahead and try. I’ll be watching you though.”

Behind my KN-95 mask and baseball cap, I laughed. “Ok, fair enough! Let’s see what can happen.”

People who work together for a common goal can get a lot done. When the volunteers and staff working in the area observed that I had survived the close encounter with the melt-down in the middle of line seven, they were more than happy to help make my plan successful. The universe did its part as well, allowing a rebooted iPad to connect to the information system that resolved the delay for the car sitting at the front of the line. Appointments were swiftly finalized. All in the four vehicles were well following their recommended fifteen minute waiting period. And so, in less than five minutes, these cars and their occupants safely exited the wellness area, each off towards the next part of their day and hopefully immune protection from the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

That brought my new friend to the first position in line. I cleaned the numbers off his windshield. Like a plane authorized for take-off from the tower, he was released. The man had replaced his mask. His shoulders and entire demeanor had relaxed. He made a congratulatory fist and offered a single phrase as you slowly departed: “God bless you all.”

I’ve never seen myself much as a people person. Shy by nature, I don’t seek opportunities to meet people, especially those who seem intense. But a career in medicine, and a year in social isolation, have helped me realize just how interesting, thoughtful, and surprisingly cooperative and caring many people can be. It is not easy to work ten hour shifts in mass vaccination sites. There is plenty of cause for fatigue. The engagement with hundreds of people, however, buoys and boosts the spirit. Even when they are anxious or impatient or angry, most people are not looking for separation. They are seeking a sense of connectedness. A reason for tomorrow. Even the joy that comes with having breath.

The man in the car who needed to get to work, and the scores of others who opened small windows last week into the experience of their lives, reminded me how much I still like people. Despite the acrimony and bitterness awash in our current world, notwithstanding the ugliness of bigotry and the sometimes diabolical division deliberately sown across the human field by those who would see a tolerant society fail, we are still a species with possibility. The human enterprise is indeed messy. Yet people themselves can, even if just occasionally, open the glimpse of the marvelous.

How light is your soul?

During a recent early morning drive across the Arizona desert, I noticed a few unusual dots on the horizon. The air was cold, even for February. The sky was pasty. The dots seemed balanced atop the scene, immobile, as if they were small blobs of paint placed on the canvas of winter by an unseen hand. No, my mind corrected itself, those dots resemble points on graph paper more than artistic whimsy, data on the grid of daybreak plotted by avian artists. As I drove further, through the mesas of higher altitude and into the distance expanding across the car windshield, more dots appeared. How many were there? Six became eight, wait, there were at least two or even three more, was that another just to the east? yes, how many now? – soon I lost both the count and the desire to make it. They were hot air balloons, of course. A bevy of them. Lifting, ever so gradually, from the surface of time, manifesting, with calm majesty, into the morning, ideas, released by unseen thinkers, tear drops, of joy rather than sadness, embodying the release of life and the floating sensation of being present for such moments of expression.

In 1978, as part of my sophomore year in college, I spent a semester studying in France. The goal was language acquisition through immersion. But the daily classes were held inside a school, all the Americans learning together, a process of study separate from the community in the French town where we were staying. I was somewhat shy, and was staying with a family whose house was farthest from the school. I was also trying to actually learn French and, using the excuse of living at such a distance, avoided routine gatherings of the mobile American student ghetto as it frequented local cafes when there were no classes. This left me somewhat adrift, from the standpoint of communications. There was English woven through the daily French classes. There was French outside those classes. And there was my limited ability to communicate in my new setting coupled with my desire to still make friends and connect with fellow students from the States who seemed much more comfortable in their skins than I was.

What emerged was “Kwin Mo”, a daily rendering of form and color on the classroom chalk board, a geometric design, always punctuated by a small circle, sketched against the blue-gray slate. Picture a pie with only the upper right quadrant remaining. Draw the straight edge borders of that quadrant with white chalk, two lines representing the truncated x and y axes. Now, using other chalk colors, place a series of arcs, smudges, and lines within the open field above the x axis and to the right of y axis. Find by instinct the right place for the small circle. Maybe you feel the circle is an eye. Maybe you feel it is a portal through the drawing into a world of being on its other side. It doesn’t matter. What matters is spontaneity, completion of the design, signaled by placement of the small circle. Name the design. For example, “Kwin Mo: The Journey Continues”. Replace the chalk where you found it. Wipe your fingers across your clothes (sometimes damp from racing on your bike to arrive in time for afternoon class). Sit. Say nothing. Ignore the raised eyebrows and tilted heads of classmates. Wonder from where your own expression arose and why you were compelled to free it. Smile when the professor erases the entire blackboard before beginning the lesson.

Our souls are such delicate things. We like to speak of them using somber tones, feeling the need to differentiate them from other parts of ourselves that we call spirits, or hearts, or personas. Since there is proof for what I feel – because I feel it – and there is similar proof for what you feel – because you tell me you feel it, there is safety in referring to feelings and emotions, relative comfort in leveraging the language of body parts that can be visualized, damaged, and occasionally held. Heart. Intestinal fortitude. Gut instinct. However, the soul, ah, well that is different. The soul supposedly cannot be weighed. It has never been repaired by a surgeon. It refers to something that might exist beyond our physical form. Let us be cautious then of soul speak. For a soul has not been photographed. It has never been definitively demonstrated. It is the realm of belief rather than commonly accepted reality.

Driving this week into the lift of spherical balloons from flat desert fields, I could not help but reflect on the nature of who we are and where we find our reason for being. Unpacked against the hard ground, the nylon and polyester shell of a hot air balloon is filled with more than helium and hot air. There is intention. Purpose. Dream. As my car passed one balloon gently finding its shape, I felt myself filling with the miracle of possibility. Of buoyancy. Of simple, subtle, sensational flight.

Might life be that easy? If we fill ourselves daily with the freeing goodness of honest breath, might we all become so light that we have no choice but to fly? That inspiration, that motivation, that acceptance which gives us weightlessness, that, my friends, is soul. There is no need to go searching for soul. For soul has already found you. Fill with it and you will find your lift.

Volunteering at a mass COVID vaccination site is quite the experience. Six thousand people per day, all in vehicles, every person and car filled with a unique blend of enthusiasm, fear, hesitancy, impatience, and ebullience.

“Hello!” “Is this your first or second dose?” “Any history of serious reactions to vaccines, foods, medications, pets, or anything at all?” “Have you had any other vaccines in the past 14 days?”

As a vaccinator in one of ten car lanes, a clinician charged with performing last minute screenings prior to gently slipping a needle into deltoid muscles large and small, I have learned to ask screening questions while scanning faces, listening for responses that might disqualify someone from receiving the vaccine, staying attentive for tense voices and body language that could foreshadow an anxiety reaction, being alert for signs of defensiveness and watchful for unexpected reactions that my questions, posed through the muffling shield of a KN95 mask, may bring.

It is rewarding work. It is fatiguing. It can be exhilarating. All in the short span of seconds, really. Take a breath. Smile with the eyes. Bring new energy for each vehicle. Observe. Assure that the vaccine is delivered where it is supposed to be. Try not to fumble with a bandaid that often sticks to other things than the skin it is intended for. Remember to acknowledge the sincere expressions of gratitude offered by the majority of car occupants as one vehicle rolls out of the station and the next one rolls in.

So much of our lives are choices. We can, at any moment, decide whether or not to give a vaccine, to receive one, to tell someone about ourselves, to take real interest in another person, to contribute, to trust, to offer our love, to believe that love, and its expression, is meaningful.

Valentine was a fairly common name in past millennia. It meant strength, capacity. In the centuries of the Roman empire, someone called Valentine was a person named in honor of valor. It took courage to live up to the appellation. People died because of that bravery. One of those people, Valentine of Terni, was martyred for it on February 14, in the year 269. A feast day in his honor – St. Valentine’s Day – was formally acknowledged in the year 496. Today, over 1500 years later, we retain our own version of this remembrance, a day filled with an assortment of symbols and expressions of romance, amorous intentions, and fondness. The path from 269 to 2021 has had some interesting turns; along the way, dying for love transformed from a religious to a more secular interpretation. The change, however, is not a loss. What has been retained, despite contemporary manifestations of materialism in the name of intimacy, is the vital expression of interpersonal caring. Of love. It is not easy to decide to love someone, whether that someone be a romantic partner, a family member or friend, or a stranger in need of assistance. Doing so is a choice. Acting on that choice is a display of vulnerability, commitment, and common identity.

Such actions take strength.

I am thinking today about strength, and its sources, because I am reminded this morning, the day prior to another shift of vaccination volunteering, of how weak I so often feel. There are big problems in the world. There are huge challenges in daily life. Sometimes I’d rather plunge my head into the proverbial sand of distraction, of avoidance, rather than turn towards the seemingly tyrannical pleas for assistance, for betterment, that surround us so openly, so persistently, so painfully obviously. Pandemic or not, we do not, as a species, reliably advance common causes of decency, inter-reliance, and global protection. It is, sadly, all too easy for narratives of individualism and personal achievement to occupy our focus and seduce our energies. And it is, unfortunately, part of my own plight that a day giving to others necessitates at least two or three sun cycles of emotional preparation. I worry about my ability to serve, to truly support the needs of each person in each vehicle, to be a part of the whole that understands, fulfills, and enjoys its role.

But that is a choice, is it not? That is my choice. My decision. When I am able to do that, when I can find strength through my convictions, then I can share that capacity with others. And that stoutness can be shared with me. Atoms, bonded together, form molecules, and molecules that combine become compounds. That is “valence”, the essence of everything we physically experience, at a basic biological level. It is the ability of things to bond. And bonding is what we all seek on emotional and spiritual levels as ell. So why do we make both our fundamental desire to connect and our experience of connecting so difficult? Why do we question, fret, and despair when our individual capacity to bond feels insufficient? That is how this design of life is structured. That is the basic drive behind our desire to love, to be loved. We are not separate; we only like to think we are. We are not isolated; we only experience isolation through disruptions of our commitment to connect. We are not energizers; we are simply expressions of universal and cosmic energy.

I can chose to believe that together, you and I, are powerful. We can chose to recognize that separately, you and I, are weak. If we do so, are we not then stronger? When we embrace that strength, are we not then all Valentines?

I hit the wall this week.

As a year, 2020 was a sprint that became a marathon. It brought a distinct and unusual experience of time. Of breathless daily life. Of stubborn stamina. In some ways, I found that I could work harder, longer, than many other years in my life. Intermittently, sometimes late at night, I felt that I could withstand, even overcome, previous challenges of personal impatience, fear, and uncertainty. Most days I aspired to dispassionate detachment, a state of caring release, from the horror and strife of a world wracked by pandemic, and, occasionally, during a limited yet noticeable portion of year’s earth cycles, I actually experienced a tiny fraction of the potential that acceptance of impermanence brings. Some weeks felt like the middle miles of my first (and only) actual marathon. I was working but not trying. I was progressing but not moving. I was in a state of flow. I was outside of pace. I was manifesting formless being.

A marathoner’s “wall” is real, however. Anyone who has embarked on extended journeys of the self, either physical or metaphysical, can attest to this. And the wall hurts when it is hit. For just like Chicago, in 1984, when at mile twenty I turned a street corner and suffered the humiliation of abruptly shifting from a human riding the wind to one abjectly empty of all breath and energy, my sense of equanimity and existential poise abandoned me this past week like a rented utility discontinued for my failure to pay the fees. Which perhaps it was, in an odd way. The electricity fueling interpersonal connectivity is not a force that simply flows on its own. It must be sourced. Voltage is required. And resistance can shut it off.

This is not to suggest that I had achieved, even intermittently, some state of personal enlightenment. Heavens no – I am about as enlightened as a rock in the afternoon sun, warm to the touch during cloudless moments but cool and edgy when the external climate is less sustaining. What I had experienced, occasionally, was nothing more than brief moments of acceptance. My emotions, however understandable, were not going to move the pandemic offshore any faster than anger might move a violent storm more quickly along its path. Weeks or months were not of my choosing. A period of patient persistence was. I learned to not question the universe and its Creator about time but to accede – on some days – to a will larger than my own. It felt good to do that. It seemed like a personal achievement to do so.

It was cool and rainy on that November day when I ran the Chicago marathon. I had been training but not for a twenty-six mile race. The decision to register had been spontaneous. It would be interesting, I told myself, to see how far I could go based on my current state of fitness. I had not foreseen that my time, at the half-way mark, would be reasonable. I had not expected that my legs, at the eighteen mile point, would feel fresh. I had not prepared myself for the possibility that, at the turn of twenty miles, a budding star of long distance running, a medical student without a previous history of exceptional athletic performance, was on track to post a qualifying time that would make him automatically eligible for the Boston marathon. It was wildly invigorating and exciting. The runner sped up. He envisioned the final six miles being completed in a speed less than the pace of the first twenty. He embraced the exhilaration of personal discovery and achievement. He – hit – the – proverbial – wall.

Turned a corner. Felt the weight of rain on the arms. Lost the buoyancy of feet atop pavement. Was drained of all motivation and mechanical go-power as if by a colossal cosmic vacuum. He slowed. Walked. Came to a halt.

“Don’t stop now!”

An elderly woman, not quite five feet tall, materialized by my side. She looked up as I were a giant, pointed a crooked finger at my past.

“You’ve come so far.”

The woman’s tone was not sympathetic. Her words were saturated with challenge, a rebuke wrapped within a seemingly encouraging observation. It was almost as if she, on behalf of the universe, had been waiting for me at this rain-drenched corner. The day had turned dreary. My dreams of outstanding performance had evaporated. Somewhere, irretrievably behind me, invisible through the mist that had become my present, lay the ego-saturated glory of unwarranted success. Ahead, unflinchingly, lay the pain-riddled reality of the final six miles. I could not stop. Not after that directive. I could leave my ego on the curb but the rest of me needed to drag itself over another 31,680 feet.

It was an ugly traverse. There was hobbling, shivering, cramping, and faux-running. Still, it happened. Still, I recall the comeuppance I had received from a universe that does not carry remorse for those who lose touch with role and accountability. And still, almost as if she were beside me now, I remember that elderly woman’s face, the bend of her forefinger, and the simplicity of her exhortation.

We do not shed our egos like snake skins, or goose feathers, or old coats of paint wrinkled by the weather. They are part of us, inherently interwoven plot points in our unique identity stories. I could not, regrettably, deposit my over-inflated ego on the curb of that Chicago street in 1984, hoping for it to picked up by the waste disposal trucks later that week, anymore than I can set its contemporary version on the shelf of a year wracked by disruption, by tragedy, by perseverance. Ego must have its place. Where I have control, where my freedom ultimately may best lie, is how I recognize my agent of personal esteem apart from my higher self, how I hear it without heeding its fabrications, how I learn to guide it, as if it were some petulant child, away from danger and harm, distinguishing in the process the difference between becoming and being recognized, between breathing and the fanning of self-reflective airs, between embracing the whole and the warm glow of self that comes from such an embrace.

The path beyond ours wall need not be traveled alone. Our liberty resides strongest in our collective choice to continue. Together, we have indeed come far. As one, we can decide to go farther.

As a people, a species, a global society – we must not stop.

“What have you been promised?”

That was the question posed in my morning meditation. After a few minutes of reflection, I didn’t have an answer. Which was not necessarily a negative result – just an honest appraisal of my general awareness.

What have I ever been promised?

Over thirty years ago, my wife and I shared vows before both a judge and a priest. Those count, for sure. Others?I’d like to think that my children will never disconnect from my best attempts at love but there is no guarantee of that, especially given the experience that I have seen other parents encounter.

Shortly after my birth, an aunt and uncle stood before my parents, a priest, and the Almighty and promised to complete my religious training should anything happen to my parents. I don’t recall the event of course but, having served a similar role for a nephew and niece of my own, the oath, while important, is a blend of ceremony and cautious commitment.

Other examples? Upon completion of medical school, I swore an oath related to my new profession – but that was a promise I made to a set of principles, not an assurance extended me on behalf of or by those principles.

Has the universe ever offered me any clear and credible pledges?

I cannot recall any, at least none that I have understood as absolute guarantees. There have been plenty of explanations and relativistic arguments, most based on a Judeo-Christian ethos and western moral tradition. I don’t begrudge or belittle those perspectives: they sustain me, to be honest. They offer me respite from the anarchy of a restless mind. They provide ballast in the sometimes stormy seas of uncertainty, disappointment, and despair. However, none would qualify as something that I could proclaim as an unequivocal promise. Never has a voice audibly spoken to me from outside the bounds of expected sensory experience. At no time has a representative of this world, the next, or any existence enfolded between the two tapped me physically on the shoulder, looked me directly in the eye, or taken me actually by the hand and offered me a promise that my actions today are directly correlated with something later, that everything and everyone I care about will be “ok”, that my time here, now, with you, is meaningful.

I am embarrassed by that statement, not because isn’t true but rather because it somehow doesn’t seem like the full truth. I feel exposed. I am sure that I am wrong. It’s just that I cannot be certain about my error. What am I missing?

If your answer is faith, I must object: faith is from me, not the Godforce. While enormously comforting, and often inspiring, my belief in a spiritual power greater than myself seems best construed as an oath made be me – not the other way around. The Creator is under no obligation to heed my prayers. And heaven knows that I have, in the course of my decades, offered my fair share of them. Many for others, plenty for me, a smattering for general precepts such as peace and common decency – I have dropped ample wishes into the well of unspoken offerings. Although a goodly number have seemed to reach a kindly cosmic ear, I should not interpret that apparent success with any assurance of future results. My vision into how the world works is miniscule. My gathering trust in the grace of God and the hands of their mercy cannot be confused with any sort of assurance extended to me. A cell on a finger typing these words can sense that something grand and marvelous exists outside its walls. That cell cannot possibly understand its role except by being that role.

Enter a memory. The writer and theologian C.S. Lewis once offered perspective on prayer in a beautiful four stanza poem. The essence of Lewis’s perspective on prayer is that God does not engage us in dialogue when we pray. There is no you, hey there, God and me, over here, human. Because, as Lewis explains, “while we seem/ two talking, thou art one forever, and I/ no dreamer but thy dream”.

Lewis’s poem on prayer speaks to me now. Am I, when I open myself to the divine, the expression of that divine? I honestly do not know the source of my ideas. Long ago, I stopped trying to explain where a thought might arise, especially if that thought was of someone or some thing that just appeared within me and, when noticed and acted upon, such as a phone call or text to a friend, encountered the response of “I was just thinking about you!”. That example seems trivial, I realize. Yet it is part of my everyday experience to ask for help on some issue and, usually, at some point in the not-too-distant future, to receive that help. The assistance often comes in unexpected forms, some of which are not without discomfort and pain. But the ask-and-receive pattern is noticeable. I may not like the medicine I receive when I ask for help. I do, however, receive it – especially when I ask without a specific outcome in mind.

So what have I been promised?

My fingers hesitate over the keys. There is a sense within me, somewhere, without place, of what I want to – what I need to – type. It is just this: promises offered are promises made. If I can make a promise to open to the Godliness within and behind and suffused through our world, I am, somehow, the recipient of that promise. My witness to the beatific is an audience with the holiest of vows. My oath to the divine is, somehow, inextricably, the divine’s promise to me.

You and I – we may be bound by, released to, and cradled within our pledges to the sacred gifts of kindness, forgiveness, and love.

It seems, after all, that I have been promised much.

Our Creator moves through us.

Or so it is said. I read and pray and listen and believe that the immutable force we call God, Allah, or Yahweh, the pulse of being behind and within both the everyday and the extraordinary, the energy flow for good, for betterment, for being, the guiding influence that binds and unites, that this presence and power for tomorrow moves through me today, like it moved through you yesterday, and I am humbled, amazed, and sometimes, regretfully, resistant. Because I am a poor conduit for the Almighty, an unreliable channel for universal love. Pettiness and internal conflict, disapproval and external judgement, doubt and easily fatigued faith – these things course through my veins and neural junctions with more frequency than I would like to acknowledge. My penchant for selfishness, for viewing the world through the lens of my own needs and experience, seems unbounded. Glimmers of something greater than my own ego occasionally shine through, yes. But these rays of release are too easily enshrouded by the clouds of self-consciousness. If the Creator needs me to do her work, if God depends on me for reliable daily performance of his holiness, than our collective purpose seems in peril. For despite the occasional best of intentions, I am a flawed and inconsistent contributor to the common good.

Last spring, I sent a message to an elderly Catholic priest who befriended and supported my father during his last years of life. A monsignor by rank, this gentle soul has an Irish wit and a calming wisdom. He also has the same last name as I do. We are common descendants from the same brick makers who helped build sections of west Philadelphia. And we possess similar flawed pride in the knowledge that, one hundred years ago, bricks were occasionally made with the outline of the family name on the front of some bricks. In fact, just prior to my father’s death, the Monsignor had told me that he had one.

“Please tell the Monsignor that I am waiting to see that brick,” I texted another of my dad’s friends, someone who spends regular time with the semi-retired priest. It was one Irishman’s way of teasing another, an only slightly serious probe enwrapped within a deliberate twinkle of uncertainty. Did he really have one of this rare bricks? I had never seen one. And I frankly did not much care whether any bricks existed or he had one. I simply wanted to say hello and perhaps receive some sort of riposte to my thinly veiled disbelief in his claim.

Weeks passed, as did the memory of that text. And then, in the first week of May, the universe sent me its reply. A letter arrived from the Monsignor one day following a well-wrapped box. No – the Monsignor had not sent me a brick. Instead, his hand-written note mentioned the presumed loss of the brick, as it had been lent to someone who was, it seemed, unlikely to return it. More importantly, the letter extended me warm wishes and a kind outreach that my baiting message sent through an intermediary may not have deserved. Deeply enmeshed in the regional response to COVID19, and awaiting word on whether anyone would make an offer on the house my wife and I had just put on the market for sale, I was a bit distracted; I read the Monsignor’s letter but forgot, for a few days, to open the box.

My uncle, another Irishman with a penchant for humor, has the same name as the Monsignor. I say “has” because, despite his death three years ago, I like to imagine my uncle staying busy in the events of our world. It appears he does. “I sent you something you should have,” his widow, my aunt, texted me that week. It was nice of her to think of me but, really, I didn’t need anything – except perhaps to sell the house and avoid getting the coronavirus. And so Tuesday turned to Wednesday, and Wednesday slid through Thursday to Friday. I was warmed by the Monsignor’s letter, appreciative of my aunt’s outreach, and wondering if we had made a mistake trying to sell our house during a pandemic. I completely forgot about the box on the front porch.

Then I opened it. Yes – indeed – enfolded in a sea of bubble wrap I found a named brick from my ancestor’s Philadelphia brick yard.

“Where did you find it?” I asked my aunt on the phone. “You know your uncle,” she replied. “Who knows where he got it.” But – no – she did not know the Monsignor, nor was she aware of the running communication I had with him, nor knew of my gentle probing with the Monsignor about our common ancestors and the evidence of their constructive contribution to west Philadelphia. She had just found the brick in her yard the week before and decided that my uncle would have wanted me to have it.

Huh. Wow. I smiled and set the brick on the mantle. And, within twenty-four hours, we received an offer for our house.

This is a season when we celebrate deliveries: the renewal of daylight, the release from a rather terrible year, the rededication of the Temple of Jerusalem, the birth of Christ. If you are like me, you may long for rescue, for a guarantee that somewhere, somehow life is more than “this”, that I am more than “me”, that you and I can be more than who, where, and what we’ve been. As I write this, I look at the brick sitting on the hearth of our new home. My heart glows under the evidence that the universe and all its mysteries are not to be bounded by the uncertainty of one single traveler in human time. And I sense that renewal, restoration, and renascence are always within our collective reach.

The Grinch had a problem: his heart was too small. And so, the story goes, he couldn’t experience joy. Worse than that, the Grinch could not tolerate it. It grated on the Grinch like nails against a chalkboard when the Whos in Whosville displayed public signs of wonder, peace, and forgiveness. Because like all the scrooges and humbugs of oral and written traditions, the Grinch was mean-spirited. Selfish. Close-hearted.

It is easy to feel a certain Grinch-ness in 2020. We all have ample reasons to gripe. The whole world is semi-justified to wallow in some self-pity, annoyance, and smallness of being.

And yet yesterday I heard the birds singing. While their song may have been more instructional or perhaps motivational (See it there, that twig? That’s the one! Please bring it here. Yes!), it was definitely comforting, reassuring. Nature and its cycles still encircle us. Trees in the northern hemisphere gird for winter. Sap that will rise in the spring feels assured. On the solstice, the sun and its daylight will once again begin their slow return.

Last month, on Thanksgiving, a few family members and friends tested a new tradition: a poetry yam. Not being prepared for a proper poetry slam, we punned on the seasonal food and gathered via zoom to read or recite from memory a small slice of truth oft nestled within the arms of verse. Today, on the eve of potential calamity from pandemic and social discord, my wife’s selection, The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry, resonates. When I read the words of its remembrances, I can feel myself settle.

“when despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”

Still water often surrounds us. We have only to seek it out, to listen for its inaudible pulse, to feel its presence with our spiritual beings.

Have you heard about Hands across the hills, a dialogue about understanding and peace created by two communities in Kentucky and Massachusetts (https://www.handsacrossthehills.org)? Organizers from both communities were interviewed this past Wednesday by Don Berwick from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) during his annual keynote address (virtually-delivered) of the IHI Forum. The interview, and their story, is magical. People from vastly different communities, traditions, and political views crafted a conversation that has helped bridge divides. Even more impressive, people who might otherwise stereotype, avoid, and perhaps vilify each other have learned that they like, respect, and can learn to love one another – as human beings, as fellow travelers of this thing we call a lifetime, as people who sometimes “wake in the night at the least sound” and tax our lives with “forethought of grief”.

I feel great solace in the discovery of this inspiring project. I find sincere comfort in knowing that Wendell Berry – and perhaps you too – awake in the night at the least sound. I cherish the release available to us all, the rest and grace that is still ours to share, if we can only relearn and believe in the power of joy.

There is no shame for compassion shrunken from sadness, despair, and anxiety. From the soundless ripple of still water, however, it is time we collectively refind and refresh our common humanity, purpose, and spiritual poise. This December, yes especially this December and this year, let us feel the song of life singing all around us. Let us forget our reasons to be angry, hurtful, and small.

Let our hearts swell.

We all have things about ourselves that we don’t like. Some of these foibles of physicality or fumbles of character date back far into our memories. Take my ears. I have never fully embraced them. They are quite functional, to be sure, but unfortunately that functionality comes with a price: they stick out too much. What boy of the ’60s could like crew cuts when the only thing visible (to him) in the mirror each morning were ears the size of Dumbo the elephant’s? A boy such as that would try to brush what hair strands remained as far as water and effort could stretch them. When the rules of hair cuts were eventually his to make, he would let his hair grow, shaggy-dog style, so it would cover not only the sides of his head but much of the front as well. He would learn to hide his social blush, to tilt his face in such a way that his eyes – and the outside world’s view of his inside spirit – were just slightly averted, sheltered. He would feel exposed, revealed, if ever a barber’s scissors trimmed too much of the complete mop of scalp camouflage that the decades kindly gifted him.

At the age of sixty-one, I can now laugh at that boy – and at the man he became. What conceits I am so easily able to form and carry! Like bricks unnecessarily stuffed into my life’s backpack, I have burdened myself with my fair share of needless cares and distractions. While I have learned to forget my ears, my focus has shifted to other, more obvious limitations in my form, function, and social fit. My eyebrows, for example, resemble caterpillars just before they roll into chrysalides. And the way my eyes and brow judge others, well, that is anything but attractive. Why do they have to be so expressive? After this many years on the planet, shouldn’t I be better able to hide my thoughts and emotions from those around me?

Hmmm – no doubt you see my dilemma. I aspire to growth, as a person and a soul graced with human form. But the habits of selfness, the vanities and insecurities of experience in the form of conscious being, they are not to be under-estimated. Just when I begin to applaud myself for making some progress in life’s journey, the inner mirror, the awareness that knows me so well, is ready to reflect a bit too much honesty into any silent, self-congratulatory ceremony.

Am I able to ever know if and how I have changed?

A former college classmate called me yesterday to say hello. Despite the years that have passed since we last saw each other, I remember him as if he is unchanged: personable, insightful, relaxed, accepting. Our conversation reinforced that memory. He is as kind and inquisitive as ever; we continued a friendship as if it had never paused – which, despite the absence of formal communication, it perhaps did not. There was, however, a slight perturbation in the field of time, a nuance of acknowledgement that we both were undoubtedly different, at least in some small ways, from what we remembered of each other.

“Have you ever gone to reunions?” he asked.

I have not. In truth, I have sometimes found the concept of traveling long distances to regather with people from points A, B, and C in my life journey a daunting prospect. My excuses have always been real: family, work, and schedule priorities. Inside, however, I’ve worried that somehow I wouldn’t measure up, that reconvening with my past might remind me of how little I have really traveled as a person. Would I be exposed as still similar to that hesitant young man of forty years ago? Would I be snagged by the quicksand of comparison, the tendency to judge my own decades against the so-called career successes and personal triumphs of others? I feel different to my twenty-two year-old historical persona. But is that difference meaningful, is it substantive, or is it instead another example of the persistent selfishness of my spirit, the desire to be better, the egocentric fear that somehow my efforts to improve have been misplaced or, worse yet, unsuccessful?

“I went to an event last year,” my friend laughed. “It was fun! And you know what I learned: there are a lot of good people in our class. I talked to some classmates I hadn’t seen in years, or didn’t really know back then, and it was really nice to learn what good, decent people they were, they still are.”

Good. Decent. What a nice way to frame our life voyage! I cannot change things like my ears, my youthful (and perhaps persistent) insecurity, and the silly concerns of career, curriculum vitae, and measured contribution to the common cause. When time’s looking glass is held into view, I may be different, I may be same, I may be recognizable in some ways, I may need refocusing in others. Have I simply been a good person, a decent fellow traveler?

That question is never mine to answer. It may be yours. It may be the Creator’s. It may even be beside the point. For the point may be nothing more refined that this: my ears are to hear, not to see. The better I can listen, the more I can learn. And the more I can learn, well, the easier I can accept all parts of who I am, who you are, and who we might be together.