Thanks to Richard Swenson’s book, A Minute of Margin, the recent death of my i-phone and the fact that it’s December, a month that has the capacity to upend my calendar, complexity is on my mind. Continue reading “Ten More Minutes: The Guilt and Grace of a Snooze Button”
I’m a Junkie
My i-phone started dying last week. Maybe I should have recognized its feeble cries for help, the apps that looked as though they were trying to open only to fade back to a confused menu screen. First it was Google. Then it was Instagram. Then Reader. One by one its apps were closing their eyes to me. Then two nights ago, with a newly charged battery coursing through its electronic veins, it powered itself down for good. Continue reading “I’m a Junkie”
Letters in the Night
On the fumes of the night, I found a blog. And on the first hit, I was hooked. Sentences swung back and forth like a hypnotist’s watch. Time faded. And a blog I did devour. It was heaven, and I remembered something about good writing. A good writer makes me want to write. Her art is in letters, in making them into story. A good writer is not afraid to look bad to her audience. She doesn’t take herself too seriously. And she writes her life, however sad or comic or seemingly insignificant, through a lens of redemption and grace.
As I reflect on my favorite writers, the ones I most admire, the ones who most inspire me, I realize something else. The writer writes to fail just as much as to succeed. It is the risk she absorbs every time she sits to write. In writing she merges her pain with her bliss and welcomes her reader to a momentary world where he can make sense of his own. Oh, and we love her, love her so much we steal from her. We’ll take her thoughts and re-word them into the sentence of our own life until they become ours as much as they were ever hers. Continue reading “Letters in the Night”
The Evil Within
“I think now, looking back, we did not fight the enemy; we fought ourselves. The enemy was in us.” That’s how the film Platoon, a commentary on U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, ends in the words of protagonist Chris Taylor (played by Charlie Sheen). The words seem appropriate today as I read that little Wang Yue, the two-year-old injured in two horrible hit-and-runs in China has died. Continue reading “The Evil Within”
Isms, Ists & Anti-ism-ists
In late September, 1988 I was a sophomore at Wheaton College. The air was alive with fall, colors were exploding on trees, students chatty and excited about new classes. The sweatshirts had been dug out of the bottom of dresser drawers. We were starting to order coffee, hot tea and hot chocolate at the Stupe, the campus snack bar. We were adjusting to new professors and their expectations. We’d barely gotten notice of our assigned chapel seats when Dr. Arthur Holmes took the stage in what would become inseparable from the culture of our shared four undergraduate years, the “Isms, Ists & Anti-ism-ists” message he delivered to roughly 2,000 of us in Edman Hall. I don’t think a single student in my graduating class forgets it. Honestly, I couldn’t have told you what that address was about, but I always remembered its title. We students would forever associate that phrase with any mention of the philosophy department or Dr. Holmes. Continue reading “Isms, Ists & Anti-ism-ists”
Procrastination
Procrastination. Enter it in the little window adorned with a “g” at the top of your browser, and find, among other things, the following reasons why we procrastinate: Continue reading “Procrastination”
Home, Blankets and Old Jeans
I’m thinking of home again, of the life we left when we vacated a house and neighborhood we’d lived in for almost 15 years. Every once in while, this past brushes up against my skin and, unguarded, the tears come. Like fringe on an old blanket, the faint and gentle threads of this past linger. I knew the blanket so well, knew its threads, the way they fit together and moved. But the fringes are different. Thin and lacking substance, fringes are like ghosts. I feel them unexpectedly, brushing up against a new day in a new place, and suddenly I remember that old blanket that was home and neighborhood and haven. In a cool draft, I miss its warmth and mass. Continue reading “Home, Blankets and Old Jeans”
Newsworthy
Though a devastating flood in Pakistan has, as of the time of my writing, taken nearly 300 lives, it got barely a few lines of coverage in today’s news outlets. A thwarted attack on the U.S. embassy in Kabul got a few more lines so far, but I had to search to find news of a bus and train collision in Argentina. Instead, most of what has been deemed newsworthy for American media outlets so far today is financial in nature. Bank of America has announced it will eliminate 30,000 jobs over the next few years. Stocks continue to decline, and the loss of U.S. jobs prompts discussion over regulation review. On the heels of reports come interviews with banking experts and financial pundits. If you are one to agonize over uncertainty or fret over your finances, current news reporting would be great exposure therapy, that psychological technique of helping the fearful overcome their fears by exposure. Continue reading “Newsworthy”
Memory and Loss
On this tenth anniversary of 9-11, we relive the day that the towers of the World Trade Center buckled and collapsed, the day the Pentagon smoked and airplanes crashed. Televisions across the country re-broadcast pictures of flames pouring out of the jagged chasm in the North Tower. September 11 would be the day our national self image was forever altered, and its images are a flood of memories. We remember. We struggle to explain the event to children who didn’t yet exist when it all happened. Emotions are once again fresh and sore. And as we revisit the terrorist attack, I am amazed at how grief is an attack of its own, often unsuspected until it is upon us. Continue reading “Memory and Loss”
A Lazy Vigil
They’ve wrapped a water wing round the black spool used to hold nylon rope. It’s the little girl’s bait to catch her seven-year-old brother, a very large fish. Under a big blue sky in the round pool of a house we’re borrowing, they make the sing-song sounds of summer, their high voices bouncing off pool water to canal to house next door. Continue reading “A Lazy Vigil”