Twitching Grey Matter

Have you ever gone through one of those times in your life in which you can’t calm down your thoughts for love nor money? I’m going through one of those periods right now. Or at least the past few days.

I’ve been awake nearly all night with thoughts swirling around and around and around. Nothing I did last night could get the neurons in my brain to calm down and shut the hell up.

More than just a night’s sleep

We attend a Friends Meeting (Quaker church). Yesterday, I couldn’t get my brain to calm down either. The whole point of the silent meeting is to be very present with those around you, collectively seeking God. It’s really a very cool experience.

But if you can’t get your mind settled down enough to enter into that time, you’re really just sitting on a hard wooden bench for an hour, waiting for the time to be done. And for the most part, that’s what I did yesterday.

I didn’t like it.

What to do?

Because I’m in the middle of this mind churn, I don’t particularly have an answer as to how to stop it. I know that it will calm down eventually and my mind will come to its senses and I’ll be able to sleep, to concentrate, to be part of Meeting. But not right now.

Even trying to write this entry this morning is proving quite challenging. I just wasted about 15 minutes of the 30 I have to write this blog post, fiddling with iTunes. (There’s a podcast I listen to while driving to the 5th Circle and I wanted to get the newest episode … which isn’t even there … which then “forced” me to look for something else to download, but what do I want to listen to? AARRRRUUUUGGGGHHHH!)

What I’m going to do.

I’m going to do my level best to be patient. Patience doesn’t come easily to me. It’s not so much about instant gratification for me as it is about doing something. Anything. I have tremendous trouble following the incredibly sage advice of Madeleine L’Engle.

Don’t just do something, stand there!

But that’s exactly what I’m going to do. I’m going to continue my morning routine of writing for the first 30 minutes after I get up at oh-dark-thirty, rather than stay in bed for that 1/2 hour because I didn’t sleep. I’m still going to make myself sit quietly for the first 10 minutes after returning home from the 5th Circle, because I need to do that to be a human being for the evening following a day in that place.

And I know it’s going to suck until my mind unsticks itself from this feedback loop of endless activity.

The Point

What does this have to do with anyone other than me an my neuroses?

Well, I suspect that I’m not the only one who suffers from mind churn.

Further, I suspect that I’m not the only one tempted to try to sit down and parse out the strands of the churn in search of some elusive Truth hidden within the churn. Assuming I’m not the only temporary nut case on the planet, let me just say that doing that won’t work. Been there, done that (more than once).

The best thing you can do (imo) is to keep following your routine, telling your mind that it’s okay to be upset for a time, but that it would be really helpful to your ongoing sanity (and ability to sleep!) if it would please calm down and be clear about what it wants and needs.

Eventually, that will happen. If nothing else, your mind will get tired of the churn going unacknowledged and will slow down and finally stop. And you will be able to think again, to sleep again, to concentrate again, to be truly Present with those around you again.

Seems a much better outcome than going bonkers permanently.

I’m just sayin’.

You may or may not know the name Rube Goldberg . . . but I’m sure you’ve seen his work.

Rube Goldberg's Self-Wiping Napkin Invention

He’s the comic artist who devised all of those crazy complex machines to perform simple operations. If you’ve ever played the game Mousetrap, that’s a Goldbergian sort of thing. If you remember Doc Brown’s method of feeding Einstein, that’s another example. The most recent example sweeping the interwebs has been OK Go’s music video in which the fantastic machine is timed to the song.

In other words, he is the guy who came up with the idea of making the simplest of tasks as complex as possible. Or at least he’s the one who drew the pictures of them. We humans had the process of over-complexity down pat many, many generations ago.

Why do we do this to ourselves?

The short answer is, “I have no idea.”

I’m among those who regularly make things far more complex than they need to be. For whatever reason, my penchant for doing this is strongest in dealing with my personal “stuff”. My goals. My desire to change some things about the reality in which I currently reside.

I know what I want to change. I may even know the best end result. Where I bugger things is the process of getting there from here. I seem to create invisible (or metaphorical … take your pick) Rube Goldberg machines for changing my life.

The problem is that they’re not nearly as funny as his machines were.

What to do about it.

I keep reminding myself of Occam’s razor. It’s my geeky love of physics coming out.

The basic idea of Occam’s razor is that the simplest explanation or method is likely the correct one. Although this is not accepted as de facto logic in the world of science, it is taken quite seriously.

If, in the development of theories surrounding some unknown phenomenon, two scientists have two wildly different explanations and one is simple, while the other is wildly complex, if all other things are equal, many (if not most) scientists will gravitate toward the simple explanation.

Why?

Because with additional complexity in a system or idea, the more room you have for screwing things up. You enter in the possibility of false outcomes that are a result of some subsection of the complex explanation, rather than the phenomenon itself.

How  to apply to life.

When faced with an overwhelming situation, just stop. One thing I’ve found in myself and have observed in countless others is that we tend to make things far more complex than necessary when we rush.

As Mark Twain (or Plutarch … pick your source) is rumored to written at the end of a letter to a friend, “I’m sorry to have written such a long letter. I didn’t have time to write a short one.”

Take the time to sit with the problem, sort through what’s going on, and discern potential solutions. As solutions float up into your consciousness, don’t necessarily take the first one that comes to mind. Find some others, then sort through them to find the cleanest solution and implement that one.

Yes, I know first hand how very hard this can be, but I’ve also made the mistake of trying to solve my problems with a Rube Goldberg machine often enough that I’m starting to learn a new way.

The Point.

Life is complex enough without us creating a 30-step process just to wipe our chin as we eat soup.

Give yourself a break. Make things easier by taking a few minutes to assess your options before diving into a solution that may actually make things worse than they were before you implemented your fix.

No, I’ve not (completely) lost my mind; that’s Latin and not gibberish.

Dum spiro, spero … So long as I breathe, I hope.

It’s a saying most often attributed to Cicero, a great thinker and orator of ancient Rome. And it is, in my opinion, one of the best approaches to life that I can think of.

If one actively engages hope with each and every breath, one is also engaging life with that same breath. And actively engaging life in all its messy glory is really what it’s all about, isn’t it?

Quirks of Language

I love that the Latin words for “breath” and “hope” are so very close to one another. Although I’m relatively sure that it’s just a quirk of language rather than a causal relationship, I still really like it.

Every once in awhile, when I explain this phrase to people (it’s written on the white board in my office at the 5th Circle, and people ask … they think I’m weird, but they do still ask) they see the  interesting synergy between the works spiro and spero too. When that happens, they usually go up in my estimation.

In my mind, linking those two words opens up a lot of new possibilities.

If breath – which has long been linked to the idea of spirit and life itself – is linked to hope, then hope becomes coincidentally linked to spirit and life as well. And if hope is some part of that which is at the heart of life itself, then hope is set up as something more than our culture would have us believe it to be.

Hope.

I don’t really know why, but hope has received a bad rap. Somehow, it has come to be confused with fanciful wishing (which I personally think is also critical to a full life, but what do I know?).

Like anything, it can be maltreated. For example, I might hope that the sky turns purple. Now I wouldn’t actually hope for that, because who really wants a purple sky, but still you understand my point. Hope seems, to me, to be something much bigger than we’ve come to think it is.

Hope is about possibility. It’s about that which can be. Hope can be that which incites us to actions which may cause our hope to come into reality as a tangible outcome.

And if hope is the first step toward creating change … toward becoming the change we want to see, then isn’t hope a critical element to life itself?

Considered in that light, hope isn’t such a fanciful thing, now is it? And my tying it to the idea of breath and life isn’t so silly either.

The Point.

We have so many things in this world pulling us down a dark hole of despair and regret.  The news. Our own versions of the 5th Circle (“day job” for those who are confused by that). Bad relationships. Envy of those whom we perceive to have it “better” than we have it (whatever the heck that means!).

Why not set that aside intentionally and purposefully and choose to hope instead? Why not use our breathing as a means of remembering that hope? Breath as a physical mnemonic to help us remember.

So long as I breathe, I hope.

Ridiculously simple. Infinitely complex.

Just like all of the best ideas.

“The best way out is always through.”

- Robert Frost

Why is it that Western culture seems to teach us that we can bring about a change we desire in ourselves or our situation through avoiding the things that make us want to experience the change to start with?

No really, if anyone knows why, please share. I really do want to know, because it’s making me crazy.

Something somewhere at some point in time convinced us (and by “us” I mean Western culture in general) that avoidance is a great way to bring about change.

What?!

The Wisdom of Robert Frost

I love the little quote at the start of this post. It’s the most concise way of expressing this very big idea.

Why is it a big idea to go through a situation to get out of it? Because we are implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) told that we can get around our problems through avoidance or some other tactic.

The trouble is, when we do that – when we avoid, run away, or otherwise do our level best to pretend our difficulty isn’t there, we don’t actually ever come out on the other side of it. More often than not, we end up sticking our fingers in our ears yelling LALALALALALALALALA, thinking that this will make the difficulty not be there any longer.

But doing this makes it hard to get on with life. And getting on with life is the point behind dealing with any problem facing us.

Yes, I know it’s hard.

But that’s not a reason to not do it. Plus there’s that whole thing of it coming around behind you to bite you on the bum when you’re looking the other way. That’s the best way I know to really screw up your life. Trust me, I speak from experience.

It’s really hard to look our problems straight in the eye … often because we are ourselves the creator of the problem … and stare it down. It’s harder still to walk into the maelstrom of the problem with intention and purpose, much less the hope of coming out alive on the other side.

The honest to goodness truth, however, is that you WILL come out on the other side, and you’ll realize that the maelstrom was more of a tempest in a teapot when you’re on the other side of it.

I’m not minimizing the size of some of the challenges faced by each and every one of us. I’ve just learned over the years that nearly all of the time (unless you’re Jack Bauer or something) you will come out on the other side, and you will see that your imagination made a much bigger deal of it all than it ever actually was.

Taking a Different Tack.

Don’t believe me? Well, I dare you to give it a try and see for yourself. Really.

Heck, I TRIPLE DOG DARE YOU! (Just ask Emma about how serious my dares are.)

Pick one of your problems (and if you’re one of those who is facing only one challenge in life, please don’t tell me … it might cause my head to explode).

Imagine that problem to be caught up in a bubble. Allow the bubble to be as big as you feel it needs to be to fully encompass the whole of the challenge.

Now this isn’t just any old bubble. It is a strong but very flexible bubble.

Take the bubble (or what little part of it you can grasp if it’s THAT big) in your arms. Trust me, you don’t look as dorky as you think … besides we’re doing this within the private confines of our own imagination, right? (NOTE: if an actual bubble has appeared on your tangible plane of existence … um … well … not sure what to tell you. I’ve heard they make pills for such conditions.)

Start to squeeze the bubble. It will take some effort depending upon how big and tough and strong the problem is, but keep at it. Squeeze and squeeze and don’t give up.

The bubble will give without bursting. I promise.

Just keep squeezing until you get it down to a size that is manageable. A size you can turn around and view from all angles. Something you can hold in your hands.

Now look at it. Really look at it.

Squeezed a bit down to size it’s not nearly so overwhelming, is it? I’m not saying it’s magically become simple and easy, but at least it’s not so huge you don’t even know where to start.

Once you’ve gotten your mind wrapped around it just a bit (and if you need a friend to help you in this, that’s fine. If they are your friend, they won’t think you’ve gone round the bend, promise), put your hands on either side of the bubble and pull it out again.

Just a bit.

Just enough so that it’s big enough for you to step into it.

Put the bubble on the ground and walk through the bubble’s membrane, directly into the problem. Remember what you saw and learned about it when it was no bigger than a volleyball. Don’t forget that.

Now just plow through it. It might be hard going, but just keep moving forward until you see the membrane of the bubble on the far side. Do what you need to do to get to that membrane, and push through it, out into the open on the other side of the bubble.

You’re through.

You made it.

And you’re alive.

Remember, all of this was in your imagination. Now take what you learned and find a way to apply it in the real world. You can do it. Now that you’ve done it once, you can do it again.

And once you have, and you’re really and truly on the other side, you can move on with life knowing it won’t bite you on the bum unexpectedly at some future date.

The Point

We’ve all got our “stuff” and sometimes that stuff makes it really hard to get anything done that we actually care about. I don’t know about you, but I’m sick and tired of my stuff preventing me from fulfilling my dreams/purpose/desire/pick-your-term. Sick and tired.

Since the world isn’t going to change to make all of my problems magically disappear, I will need to do it the old fashioned way.

Besides, by going through the problems, I learn stuff. Valuable stuff. And I can use that good stuff to make me more than the sum of my inadequacies.

A friend passed along to me a lecture by Australian writer Don Watson, given at the Australian National University. You can Google him  to find out more, but he’s done a lot of things – including working as a speech writer for an Aussie politician – and he has not yet lost his sense of humor.

Anyway, the gist of this lecture, given in support of his latest book, Bendable Learnings, is that Corporate America are destroying our ability to communicate via language. (Truthfully, he skewers all corporate speak; he just has so many excellent examples coming out of the American flavor that it’s a bit weighted that way.) BTW, it’s not available yet in the United States.

You can watch the lecture for yourself here.

Give yourself some time to listen. It’s worth the effort.

He lambastes PowerPoint – one of my least favorite software packages. Yes, Keynote and the Open Office equivalent also go in this pile. Although there’s a kind of underground movement afoot to change the way presentations using these softwares is done, mainstream corporate folks still depend on meaningless clauses (if they even deserve any sort of speech-part definition) bullet pointed into inanity.

Because one of my many jobs within the 5th Circle is being the public voice of the whole organization, I understand all too well the insanity Mr Watson highlights. It doesn’t seem to matter how very hard I try; the meaningless insertion of “outcomes” or “metrics” or “value proposition” creeps in.

It’s true, I sneak through actual thought content on a semi-regular basis, but  not nearly often enough for it to have genuine value. I know this. It’s one of the reasons I hang out here.

Who else out there is subjected to this non-speak on a daily basis? What do you do to keep it from making you stupid? Let’s learn from one another.

What is compassion really? We talk about it a lot.

Compassion for those caught up in the Haiti earthquake.

Compassion for the homeless.

Compassion for the abused and disenfranchised.

Compassion for the suffering of others.

But what do we really mean by it? Is it a synonym for sympathy? For empathy? For something else entirely?

I can’t help myself. I need my OED.

Interestingly, the most extensive English-language dictionary has relatively little to say on this word. (For the OED, this means less than a full column’s worth of meanings.)

The first two definitions are particularly interesting to me.

1. Suffering together with another, participation in suffering; fellow-feeling.

2. The feeling or emotion, when a person is moved by the suffering or distress of another, and by the desire to relieve it; pity that inclines one to spare or to succor.

Interestingly, there’s a note accompanying definition #2.

(The compassion of sense 1 was between equals or fellow-sufferers; this is shown toward a person in distress by one who is free from it, who is, in this respect, his superior.)

Why I’m confused.

This word compassion comes from Latin (which of course has some Greek roots, but I’m trying hard not to get carried away by my geeky love of words). Depending upon your source, it means com (together with) + pati (to suffer) or passus (which is directly related to the English word “patient”  (one who suffers).

The inherent meaning of the structure of the word implies a condition in which the one who has compassion is participating in the suffering in some way, shape or form. Deeper than empathy, compassion isn’t just a feeling; it’s related to a shared suffering that results in action of one sort or another.

Why has the meaning morphed to include the outsider’s view of the OED’s definition #2? This isn’t a recent thing; the oldest source the OED cites for definition #2 comes from the 14th century, so this isn’t some modern growth of the word.

I Need Different Sources.

So I look to the sources from which many of our concepts of compassion come: faith traditions.

Whether you know it or not, compassion is one of the few things that all of the world’s major religions seems to agree on.

Jews, Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Jains, and many others cite compassion as a root of faith.

Muslims, for example, are supposed to start their day – as well as all significant actions that take place each day – by invoking God the Merciful and Compassionate (Bism-i-llah a-Rahman-i-Rahim). And part of the point of Ramadan (a month-long observance in which the devout fast from sunup to sundown each day) is to suffer with those who go without on a regular basis, building tangible compassion for them.

For those of the Hindu tradition, compassion is one of the three central virtues.

For Christians, the most common example is likely the parable of the Good Samaritan. I find it interesting that the dominant example of compassion in the Christian tradition essentially involves definition #2.

Of course – and not surprisingly – Martin Luther King Jr. took the Good Samaritan and make it more.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

The Jews and the Buddhists.

Both the Jewish tradition and the Buddhist tradition embrace the idea of compassion from the perspective of the word’s etymological meaning.

A suffering with that leads one to action.

I am told that at the beginning of instruction in Buddhism, many new followers are overflowing with the desire to show compassion to the world. That burning desire to love the world into a different state of being. And yet, they are taught, the most difficult first lesson of compassion is learning to have it for yourself. For, if you do not have compassion for yourself, you cannot have it for another.

In the mystical Kabbalah tradition of Judiasm, a similar theme is stated:

Kindness gives to another. Compassion knows no other.

And that’s the root of it. At least for me it is.

Compassion and love and all of the other virtues we chase in our over-stimulated world of chaos, begin with the person in the mirror.

You.

The Point.

The trigger for this little exploration of compassion (and I know, I’ve not even scratched the surface) was hearing the word bandied about so much by those moved by the earthquake in Haiti. It typically felt to me as if those calling for a compassionate response were more often actually asking for sympathy accompanied by a donation.

Don’t misunderstand, the people of Haiti need our help. They need every penny than can be poured into their country. But they need that on all of the other days of the year in which there was no earthquake.

So I’m trying to sort through just what it means to be compassionate. And in all my reading it kept coming back to the way in which I approach myself. If I cannot and do not show compassion to myself, I can’t be terribly effective in showing it to others. It seems like it would be like trying to show someone how to tie their shoes when you don’t know how to tie your own.

I know that I’ve ended up in this post with more questions than answers. But I think that’s okay. As Christian theologian Thomas Aquinas is reputed to have said, “I would rather have compassion than know the meaning of it.”

That’s where I’m coming out right now.

But I’d really like to hear from all of you. What is compassion from where you sit in the universe? What isn’t it? How does one embrace compassion in real and tangible ways?

The comment box is below. Please make use of it.

When was the last time you were faced with a situation in which being honest – and following your own conscience about something – was at odds with your external security?

And when I say “security” I mean anything from the really dramatic (your actual life or the life of someone you care about) all the way down to something like your job.

What did you do?

A Story

Someone – let’s call her Mimi – worked for a company run by someone whose primary focus in life was earning at any cost. The sanity of employees was of no concern. Ethical behavior toward other companies was out of the question. Anything resembling the word “integrity” was laughable.

Mimi was the manager of a product line offered by this company. It was a small product line with a lot of potential. One day, the owner of an external company came to Mimi seeking to do a deal that would allow him to white label one of Mimi’s products into his own.

Unbeknownst to this guy, Mimi had already begun development on a product that would directly compete with this guy’s product. She wasn’t concerned, however, because the market was big enough to sustain the presence of both products, with plenty left over for growth. And the white labeling of the existing product to this guy’s company wasn’t a problem, because he needed the information delivered by the product, and it’s better that Mimi get paid for providing it, rather than someone else.

So Mimi is pleased by the deal she cuts and goes to tell her Boss about the new competitor, as well as the white labeling. Mimi also tells him that she’s formulating a way of telling the guy about the product she’s developing, since it doesn’t feel right to her to not say anything and let him find out when the product releases.

Boss doesn’t get it. He tells Mimi that she is absolutely NOT to tell the guy about the competing product. Further, he instructs her to gather as much information as possible on the guy’s product to ensure that Mimi’s new product will be as good as or better than the one the guy is launching. Even further, he expresses a dubiousness about “helping” the guy access the information created by the product Mimi has just white labeled to the guy.

Mimi is frustrated and unsure.

She really doesn’t know what to do. Her heart and her conscience tell her to absolutely tell the guy about the new product, but Boss has more or less indicated that her job is on the line if she does.

For awhile, Mimi stays silent. She has multiple conversations with the guy, setting up the implementation of the white label agreement, but never mentions the new product.

And this does not feel good to her.

She struggles with the ethics of it all.

Yes, she knows her boss is a dunderhead. And dishonest. And probably some other d-words.

Mimi’s Choice

After some few days of mulling things over, Mimi decided to tell the guy about the competing product she is developing. She knew that if Boss found out, at the very least she’ll get berated. At worst, she’ll be fired.

It seemed worth the risk to keep some semblance of her integrity intact.

The Guy’s Response

The guy heard Mimi out, heard Mimi reassure him that so long as she’s in charge, he would be able to white label the data she’s providing him.

She could hear the smile.

“The market’s big enough for both of us,” he said. “And maybe where our products are different, we can help one another out, while also helping our respective customers get what they actually need to do business better.”

She was relieved. He had a similar ethical structure to her own. They talked about Karma and the value of treating people the way you want others to treat you.

While she still fears Boss finding out what she did – telling the competition about an emerging product – she feels she did the right thing … by her own conscience, by the business relationship she’s built with the guy, and even for the fledgling product she’s building.

The Point

It’s easy to talk about things like integrity and ethics in the abstract. It’s a much different matter when it’s the real world and your job (and in extreme cases, your life) depend upon your decisions.

Don’t think I’m being all Pollyanna about Mimi’s story. She could still lose her job, and she’s the only money-earner in her household. The prospect of losing her job is a big, huge deal. But I’m aware that Mimi stands by her decision all the same.

In the same situation, would I? Would you?

Haiti.

Just that one word probably pulls up images that we’ve all seen in the past week or so. The one of the woman with dried vomit and blood on her face, covered by a whitish coating of what I presume is pulverized cement powder.

A dear friend of mine was there, working on access to clean water for the many in Haiti who didn’t have access to clean water before the earthquake. He survived. Ironically, the UNDP base managed to keep its internet link up (I’m guessing it was satellite-based), and my friend posted to his Facebook profile that he was okay.

Not so much for the millions in Port-au-Prince.

Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. There are (were) a majority of people in that little patch of island, eking out an existence (most definitely not “a living”) on less than the local equivalent of $2 a day. Could you exist on less than $2 a day wherever you live? More than a billion people around the world do it. All day. Every day.

And Yet …

And yet, as we’re seeing the very literal dust begin to settle in Haiti … supplies are starting to get through, the injured (who survived long enough) are beginning to be treated properly… we’re seeing the survivors, well, surviving.

They’ve moved their little charcoal stoves (think campfire; not Frigidaire) out into areas free of debris, and not in the shadow of partially fallen buildings, and they’re cooking. They’re pulling the one or two things they had out of the pile that was once their house, and are preparing to rebuild … again.

These folks get slammed by hurricanes regularly. An earthquake is effectively the same, without all the water. And because they don’t have much to begin with, they are great at picking up and moving forward.

Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not at all romanticizing what has happened there. I was in Turkey for a similarly-sized earthquake. I know what happens to improperly-mixed cement when the ground undulates. The one Turkish word I am least likely to ever forget is deprem (earthquake).

What I’m Trying To Say…

What would you (or I) do in a similar situation? Could we, as wealthy (in that global relative sense of wealth) individuals who suddenly lost everything to some natural disaster, survive? Think an earthquake measuring 10. Think a tsunami that reaches Colorado or Ohio. Think a plague or pandemic. Think the unthinkable.

Once we got past the point of trying over and over to get a mobile phone signal, what would we do? I know some might curl up in a Twitter-withdraw ball, but you’ll eventually get hungry.

How many of us know how to build a fire without matches or a lighter to start it? Do you know how to filter contaminated water so it’s safe to drink? What’s the right thing to do with your personal waste? Do you know which plants you can eat and which ones will kill you? Did you memorize enough episodes of MacGyver that, given enough of a supply of duct tape, you could overcome the bad guys who will inevitably take advantage of the situation?

Most of us who survived one of those natural disasters would die of our own ignorance not long after. Without wikipedia to help us get through it, we are  in trouble.

Unless …

If we watch the ways in which the Haitians pull together, and learn from it, we might have a chance. If we think and plan ahead, we might survive. We do not have to descend into the morass of violence and murder in order to make a way forward. I’m not talking about utopia here folks, I’m talking about being smart now; before you actually need to be.

Maybe the Haitians are still living life in closer connection to the earth than we are. Maybe that’s mostly necessity, but still, that connection – that understanding is what’s helping those who survived the initial disaster to survive now. Because they’re accustomed to needing to work together to survive, they’re continuing to work together, in spite of radical shortages of food, water, shelter, and medical care.

That’s not to say there aren’t bad guys there, taking instead of sharing, but they seem to be in the minority.

Projections by doomsayers in the US indicate that survivors of a natural disaster here won’t be able to make it without resorting to violence and hording.

I want to believe that’s not true.

I want to believe that we’re capable of rising above our spoiled, privileged existence to care for our neighbors as well as ourselves in the midst of a disaster. We saw hints of this in New York nearly 9 years ago. We saw fewer hints of it in New Orleans in 2005.

I’m not harping on preparations for an unknown disaster here. In the 1950s, people installed “bomb shelters” in their back yards out of that kind of fear orientation. Instead, I’d like to suggest that we make a conscious decision here and now that, in the face of the unimaginable, we will continue to be human beings and that we will see those around us as human beings as well.

Remember that earthquake I mentioned before? The one in Turkey? The one I was caught in?

Well many, many people died there too. In fact, the only time in my life as a photojournalist that I intentionally destroyed negatives was in the midst of that disaster. Some things I just won’t be responsible for exposing people to.

Still, in the middle of that, I was walking down the street with my companions and a young boy came out and pulled us (politely) into what had once been his family’s front yard. His mother had seen us coming, and had put on tea. On a fire made of what I think had previously been furniture. She managed to find a sufficient number of mostly-unbroken cups and saucers for us to share in this simple ritual of hospitality. And we did.

As we sat talking over our tea, we learned that, somewhere in the pile of rubble behind us … rubble that a day previous had been her house … our hostess’s husband and baby girl lay buried.

Never in my life have I appreciated a cup of tea more than I did that day. And I pray I am never faced with another situation capable of topping it.

The Simple Power of Being Human

Human beings who choose to retain their humanity in the face of unspeakable adversity are the most incredible, resilient, powerful creatures anywhere.

How much more can we do if we choose to face the world as human beings filled with compassion when there’s not a disaster?

What can you do, right now, today, to embrace those around you as human beings of worth and innate goodness? If you do it now – if you learn this behavior in this moment, you will carry it forward into whatever the future may hold for us all.

No, this is not a New Year’s Resolutions post. Well, not a typical one anyway.

I receive a postcard from a friend living in Japan once each month. She was born and raised in the United States, but has lived in Japan longer than she lived in the US before going there. She lives and works in the northern part of Japan, and is just one of the most amazing women I know.

Her name is Mary (her last name is not important for the purposes of this post).

I first met Mary in 1994. I was working for the NGO that funds her work in Japan, and she was considered by some in the organization as “challenging.” I was on the communication team for the organization (actually, I was the main writer and photographer for this organization), so I was given the task of interviewing Mary when she was back stateside, as well as shooting a new photo of her for fund raising stuff.

And let me say, I was prepared for a difficult, demanding individual … who never showed up.

Never Believe the Hype

I knew from reading her bio that Mary had trained as a mathematician prior to taking up her work for the NGO. I was aware that she had devoted herself to the intensive study of the Japanese Tea Ceremony for many of the years she’d lived in Japan, and considered it to be part of her personal spiritual discipline. I figured out quickly that she is very much the introvert, in a role (when stateside) that requires a tremendous put on act as an extrovert for a long stretch of time.

In other words, Mary has a keen analytical mind that is orderly, disciplined, and gets tired of too much external stimulation.

So I approached  her with that in mind. In so doing, I discovered someone with an incredible passion for her work. Someone who works harder than most of us do, for less pay, and for far less appreciation. Someone I almost instantly admired.

Thankfully, Mary liked me too. She even paid me the kindness of saying that, in her long history with the organization, I was the only one ever to quote her accurately. I wanted to tell her story. I wanted supporters of the NGO to understand – really, deeply understand the work she was doing.

She also liked the photograph I made of her. She’s one of those people (not unlike me) who is a challenge to shoot. This has nothing to do with one’s attractiveness; it’s about something much deeper. Some people are just so conscious of everything about themselves that they can’t settle themselves for the fraction of a second required to expose the film to the light bouncing off them.

Aside: Yes, I used the word “film”. It is an antiquated substance used to capture the image revealed when light bounces off an object (or person) at certain frequencies. Try wikipedia. I’m sure they have an entry on it somewhere.

Anyway …

Even after I’d moved on from the NGO, Mary stayed in touch. There were occasional emails, actual snail mail letters, and the like going both directions across the Pacific. I walked with Mary through her encounter with ovarian cancer (a cancer that the Japanese are doing really well with … and are far ahead of the West in treating … so much so that Mary is now a 10-year survivor. Yes, I said TEN YEARS).

Eventually, Mary shifted to writing me a postcard at the beginning of each month. The postcards are sometimes series of cats. Sometimes they’re from museums. Sometimes they come from her occasional pilgrimage to Mt. Fuji. Often, they involve monkeys, because I was (according to the 12-year animal calendar) born in the year of the monkey. At the start of each New Year, Mary sends me one of the special Japanese New Year postcards, on which the incoming animal for that year is celebrated by the other animals of the calendar.

This postcard I just received from Mary celebrates the incoming of Tiger’s year … Mary’s year. She was born in the year of the Tiger, but even more importantly, she is reaching her 5th cycle in this round of it being her year. This is a big deal in Japan.

On the card she wrote:

Author Ayako Sono got rid of photos and tens of thousands of pages of manuscripts when she turned 60 (5 full cycles, so a special age in the cultures that do the 12-animal cycles), and I have decided to do the same . . . It’s actually quite satisfying to lighten my footprint on earth.

The Point

Part of the point is that I wanted to tell you about my friend Mary … someone about whom no one will ever make a movie, or (unless I do it) write a book. And yet she is one of those remarkable individuals who has changed the lives of many people, simply by following her heart and doing work she feels called to do. I am not nearly so brave as she is. Would that I were.

The other part of the point is that we’re in a world based upon continual accumulation. There’s never enough. And that’s true even if you’re trying to help those who are genuinely suffering. Mary’s postcard got me to thinking about what I can do to “lighten my footprint on earth.” I’m still thinking, and it’s a worthy endeavor.

How about you?

No matter who among us desires to be seen as humble, and no matter who among us actually achieve it, we all have egos. Each and every one of us.

The ego serves as a kind of insulator, a protector between the ways in which we choose to see the world, and the way it actually is. For some, this goes to the extreme of egomania or a kind of self-centeredness that causes a very real and genuine belief (albeit sometimes unspoken or unconscious) that the would quite literally revolves around them and only them.

Of course, this isn’t true of anyone reading (or writing) this blog.

Never.

Of course not.

How silly of me to even mention it.

Huh?

The truth we never want to admit is that we all egomaniacs of one sort or another, because we all see the world through our own eyes and experiences, and those filters inherently change perception.

The key differences we will find amongst ourselves has more to do with whether we use the ego as a tool for good, or allow it to be a self-determined monster.

Ego as Monster

This doesn’t require a ton of explanation, because we’ll all both seen this person, and have been this person.

A style of walk that indicates fear of nothing and command of everything. A way of sitting that takes up more space than is physically required for your body as a means of indicating that you’re big and strong and deserving of the deference indicated by large space. A talking down to those deemed inferior – whether they are perceived as being less (like service personnel) or as being stupid (meaning less intelligent or learned). The sort of person who is courted by those who strive to become that, and avoided by those who are actually holding on to some semblance of sanity.

I’m not going to venture into the idea that often these people who give the appearance of having the largest egos you’ve ever encountered are often covering up for fears and a sense of inadequacy. That is well-known. What matters in this scenario is that the filters we all have for taking in data from the world in which we exist have been given a place of importance in this person’s mind and heart that makes about as much sense as putting a screen door on a submarine.

Filters through which we take in communications and other stimuli around us are just that; filters. Sometimes they’re wrong. But we can sometimes give to them too much importance and then they skew our perception of the world and tend to subsequently screw up our lives. Not a good scenario.

Ego as a Tool for Good

Let’s be honest. If you’re without an ego, you’re without any sense of self. Yes, I am fully aware of a number of spiritual traditions that advocate the shedding of the Self. More carefully examined and more fully understood, however, they’re not actually about the killing of the ego; they’re about seeing it for what it is – a set of filters, which are really just tools – and not giving those tools any more importance than is needed.

I like to think of it this way …

When our ego is being used by us as a force for good, we are empowered to see ourselves as we are seen by others. What I mean by this is that we use these filters to sift through the sensory inputs that are heaped upon us day-in and day-out, and drawing from them a sense of the ways in which we are being experienced by those around us. The ways in which our words hurt or heal. The ways in which our actions or inaction are contributing to either healing and hope or death and despair.

The Point

Part of what has really messed with the past six months of my life has been the fact that I work for someone who is not using the ego as a force for good. Instead, his ego is being used to destroy both individuals and a company. In really ugly ways. And the saddest part to me is that I do believe he no longer realizes that’s what he’s doing. The monster is in total control and is fast becoming a sort of cancerous mass that is growing exponentially. And cancers of that sort usually have the same messy, sad ending.

For a long time, I was allowing that ego to crush me. To adversely effect my own ego – my own sense of self. And I realized it had to stop.

That’s really hard.

Somewhere along the line, I came to understand that I have the ability to control my own ego and that in so doing I began to see the ways in which others see me. It was kind of scary. And uncomfortable. And made me want to go live in a cave far, far from normal society. But then I realized that the kitty box still needed someone to scoop it, so I decided I’d better stick around.

So I started trying to use my ego for good and not evil.

I’m the first to admit that I’m not perfect at it yet. This is mostly because I think this is a long process that is fraught with fits and starts. Still, I keep trying. Trying to see myself as others see me, and adjusting my behavior to project to the world the person I really – deep in my soul – want to be.

I’ll get there one of these days. In the interim, it’s proving to be an interesting journey.