Category: Love, Friendship, Family

Dad of Divas Highlights Neil in its “Dads in the Limelight” series

Chris with the “Dad Of Divas” website posted an interview with me on October 6th. It was a fun interview to do, and I post the questions and answers below. Thanks much to Chris for posting the interview – I really appreciate it!

Tell me about yourself, (as well as how you are in the limelight for my readers knowledge)
First and foremost, the concept of “limelight”. Most of us are in some form of limelight in one way or another. In my case, as I was raising my family, I spent time in executive positions that were high-visibility, as well as organizational limelight such as congregational president and lay pastor, or facilitator of large group events.
At this point in my life, my children are all grown, and the shape of the “limelight” has changed. I’ve moved myself away from executive positions with high visibility, and have concentrated my life on my passions, primarily writing. I write books, articles for periodicals, and blog regularly. I hunt and fish more than I ever have in my life, and spend a lot of time doing the long-distance endurance bicycling and bicycle touring that I’ve come to love.
These passions and others generally form the context of what I write, and the undercurrent is generally a strong sense of spiritual “place”.
Winter Hut Trip in the Rockies with Ian
Tell me about your family
My wife and I raised 3 children, who are all grown at this point. The oldest is 30, the middle one nearly 28, and the youngest is 22. The youngest is a woman, the two older are men. They all live very close to me in the Denver area.
The oldest and I operate a construction company together, primarily landscape design and implementation. The middle one works with his brother and I, and goes to school when he can. The youngest just graduated from college, and is at a fork in the road considering graduate school.
I love having my kids so close to me. I love all the time I’m able to spend with them. I love that they continue to be such an integral and important part of my life.
What has been the largest challenge you have had in being a father?
I think it may be the concept of learning to be a good incubator rather than trying to be a designer. It was so easy for me, (especially early in the fatherhood process), to think my job was to try and define the shape of my children as they developed. In fact, much of what we learn in our culture about parenting focuses on trying to shape our children.
As my children grew, I learned that there was a shape inside them that was emerging, and for me to try and alter that shape was only going to be destructive. A lot like the sculptor who “releases” the shape inside a block of wood, I’ve come to see my job as a father as one of providing a good environment for the “shape” of my children to emerge.
Most of us probably have many “shapes” that might emerge, depending on the environment around us. In my opinion, being a good father means providing a healthy environment, and looking for the shapes that might be trying to emerge – encouraging those that are most healthy.
At the end of the day, our modern nature wants to play G-d, and wants to be the “creator” of children. We want to mold them and shape them into what we want – usually some facsimile of ourselves. I’m convinced this results in heartache more often than not, and is counter to the ability of the child to become all they can become. It’s a tough thing to realize we’re not G-d, but just an incubator with the hard job of maintaining a good and healthy environment.
What advice would you give to other fathers?
First, see and feel your ego, and put it aside when it comes to raising your children.
Second, observe and listen to “elders” as they interact with your kids – they’ll have lots to teach about what they learned on the journey you’re on.
Third, realize how strong, resilient, and adaptive humans are. Don’t try to be the perfect dad – just be a good and loving one. You’ll make some mistakes, and your kids won’t feel any impact at all of most of those mistakes.
Seeing that you (or your position) are in the limelight, how have you come to balance parenthood and outside life?
I think integrating our professional persona with our parental persona makes good sense. For our kids to see us behaving in our outside life is a good think. It makes it tough for us to do the hypocritical “do as I say not as I do” thing, doesn’t it? When we take this approach, it forces some of that balance.
In addition, becoming very actively involved in the things your kids want to do forces another level of balance. When my kids were coming up, I was always coaching their soccer teams, building school projects with them, or whatever else was part of their life.
I remember our annual Christmas party at a place I worked as an executive for many years. I’d always played Santa at the party. One year, as I sat with the kids around me at the party, I noticed my little daughter giving me a little extra scrutiny. As Santa left the party, my wife asked my daughter about Santa, and my daughter informed her that the man had been her father.
I should reveal that she was a pretty smart little cookie, and when she was 15 or 16 we finally called her on the whole Santa thing, as she’d been playing along for years. She said she’d figured it out when she was 6 or 7, but liked playing along. The boys were in on it with her.
I tell this story to highlight that integration I was talking about. My kids saw me behaving in my professional life in a manner consistent with what I “preached”. They saw me in leadership and high-visibility positions within the community, practicing the behavior I talked about at home. They saw me step into the shoes of Santa to try and bring joy and hope to the hearts of children, and they decided to reflect that joy back to me by continuing to play the game with me long after they saw through the ruse.
College Graduation
What have you learned from the fathers that you have interacted with?
Oh man, what a good question. Of course there’s the good, the bad, and the ugly, but I’ll focus on the good.
I recall a few really stand-out guys that made huge impressions on me as I was doing my “growing up” as a father. It’s easy to think that as a father, you are “due” respect from your kids. It’s easy to have a picture in your mind of how children should behave and interact with their dad, and to try and “teach” this to your children.
However, the lesson I learned many times from a few really good role-models was that “respect” wasn’t something you “taught” children, it was something you earned as a father. When your kids see you model the behavior you tell them is good, and they see you live a life that is honest and honorable, they come to respect you.
That respect has no value in and of itself, but it is the foundation that allows the real relationship to develop with your kids. They learn what honor and honesty looks like, and learn to discern behavior based on integrity as opposed to talk about integrity. From this, they learn how to find and develop relationships of value in their life as they grow up.
What else would you share regarding your experiences as a father thus far?
Don’t view fatherhood as something you do for 18 years or 21 years while your kids are “growing up”. View it as a lifelong journey you’re making with your kids. I’ve found that with each year that passes, my relationship with my kids just keeps getting better.
I see lots of folks who fear the coming teenage years. Hey, we all go through the teenage years. For a few years, our brain cells get marinated in a toxic blend of hormones that makes us stupid. That time comes, and it passes. My boys tell me often that when they hit about 14 or 15, they couldn’t believe how stupid I became. They wondered how on earth I could manage to dress myself in the morning. But then, as they moved into their 20’s, they say they were amazed at how smart I seemed to suddenly get.
Don’t take it too seriously – just be the best person and the best father you can be. It’ll all sort out in the end, and you’ll start to get your brain cells back…
What have been the most memorable experiences that you have had thus far as a parent?
I think most of my favorite memories from when my kids were young revolve around vacations we took, and activities on those vacations. Building sandcastles with my daughter on the beach in North Carolina. A bicycle vacation along the rail-trails in Wisconsin, where the boys would ride ahead a couple miles, then drop their bikes and gorge on wild raspberries until we caught up, then jump on the bikes and do it all again – their little sister singing and cooing in the trailer behind my bike as we rode. Hiking in old forest in the Smoky Mountains, my middle son sleeping soundly on the top of my head as he rode my shoulders. My little daughter sleeping soundly in my arms all day long on a cruise ship, as I moved around the decks and enjoyed the bliss a father feels when his child sleeps safely and contentedly in his arms.
If I could do it all again, I’d make sure to take more vacations. For me, it was during those times that I could leave everything behind and really connect with my kids.

  

Hunting with Jesse

Cycling Across The Southwest – Sedona

Day 11 – Resting in Sedona

“Once, it was so damned dry, the bushes followed the dogs around.”
  ~Nancy Dedera

My friend Dale is a former boss from many years ago. He’s a guy who was always renowned for his hard-hitting style, and his relentlessly demanding style. I helped him build his companies up into a tiny little empire, then I got bored and went on another of those eclectic little careens I talked about in this post. Dale and I parted as good friends, and a few years after I left he sold his companies and became very financially secure. Well, wealthy really.

I was busy careening… Continue reading “Cycling Across The Southwest – Sedona”

Live Well

I was chatting with a health nut the other day – someone extremely fastidious about what he eats. I greatly respect the super healthy habits that he’s developed, and learn from him every time we talk about how to eat more wisely.

This particular conversation was unusually enlightening. Charlie, (that might be the fella’s name), for some reason veered off into a discussion of why he’s developed such healthy eating habits. Turns out he’s developed these great habits because he wants to live a long time, and wants to do all he can to ensure a peaceful death.

Hmmm. I’m not sure about the “peaceful death process” part of the equation. Seems like no matter how healthy our living is, our death is almost a crapshoot. Maybe it’ll be a peaceful and gentle process, but maybe not.

But the other part of the equation really intrigued me. I like to stay healthy as well, but the conversation really brought my motivation into focus for me. While Charlie focuses on a long life, I tend to focus on a full life. Sure, it’ll be fun if it lasts a good long time as well, but what I really care about is that I maximize whatever minutes, hours, days, and years life still has in front of me.

While Charlie will pass when the cake or pie comes around, I rarely do. And every now and then, I truly cherish a good chicken-fried steak and mashed potatoes slathered with gravy. Of course, I can’t eat like that all the time, and need to work hard to make sure I’m burning the calories I’m taking in. Eating chicken-fried steak all the time would diminish the relish of it when I do get it, and I’ve learned I can’t possibly burn enough calories to eat like that very often.

But now and then…

Image from Natalie's Killer Cuisine - natalieskillercuisine.com

It’s a balance for me. There are things I enjoy that aren’t healthy – like chicken-fried steak. There are also things I enjoy that require really good health – like cycling. I need to strike a balance that lets me pack the most joy and adventure and bliss and contentment into my life as possible. Sometimes the wonders I want to pack into my life conflict with one another, and I need to find a way to make them all stay in balance.

It’s all about how much I can pack into life, not about how long I can make life last. In the end, death is the only way out, and maybe it’ll be gentle or maybe not. I’m reminded of a story Garrison Keillor tells, about how he wants to die peacefully in his sleep like his grandfather did, not screaming in terror like the other people in the car he was driving as it flew off the cliff…

Live well.

“When it comes time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with the fear of death, so when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song, and die like a hero going home.” 

  ~ Tecumseh


Relationship Business at the Final Threshold of Life

I was asked to do a guest post a couple months ago about “End Of Life Preparedness”. Specifically, to address the need for a thing like a Living Will. While I want to do the post, I’ve been putting it off while I work through a balancing act in my head.

I’m not an attorney, I’m just a guy who’s lost a mom, a dad, and a stepmom. I’ve seen other friends and relatives at the doorstep of death as well, and watched as they eased across that threshold into whatever might (or might not) lay on the other side.

What I’ve seen has colored my view of our responsibilities to one another at that important point at the end of this life. It’s colored the way I talk to my kids about how I want to live and how I want to die.

It’s not an easy thing in our culture. We’ve created a culture that absolutely petrified of death and dying. The subject is taboo, and we’re generally at a great loss for words when those around us feel the loss of a loved one. I blogged about loss in this post not long ago, and about our reactions to loss in this post.

It’s a great shame really, that we’re so afraid of death. Death is just one more of many transitions in life. If fact, from the time we’re born, we begin a long series of transitions that are all leading inexorably to death. Looked at that way, death is just the final of these transitions.

Depending on the spiritual paths you happen to be walking at this point in your life, you may view death as a beginning as much as an end. In my book, Peace at the Edge of Uncertainty, I share in very personal detail the spiritual context that I’ve developed as a result of mystical gifts that I’ve been privileged to be part of. If you believe in notions of reincarnation, you probably see death in this life as just another in a series of windows we pass through in the lives we’re part of.

But what about this path we walk today in this life? This path that leads without question to death. Continue reading “Relationship Business at the Final Threshold of Life”

Wood and the Language of Love

In some mysterious way woods have never seemed to me to be static things. In physical terms, I move through them; yet in metaphysical ones, they seem to move through me.
~ John Fowles 

A friend, (let’s call her Darla), told me once of a piece of furniture her husband had made for her. It meant a lot to her, she explained to me, because her husband is a pretty quiet guy, and she’s come to realize over the years that making things for her is his language of love to her.

Decades ago, I cut firewood to make extra money. Wherever I found trees being pushed over to make room for new houses, I’d ask permission to cut as much firewood as I could out of the area. Occasionally, I’d find an ancient tree pushed over that was big enough to harvest lumber from, and I’d work mighty hard to load it into my truck, and haul it to the sawmill, and have it milled down to rough-sawn lumber. Then I’d carefully stack and dry it.

I accumulated quite a treasure trove of excellent lumber – oak, walnut, and cherry mostly – much of which was 12” wide or more. I used it over the years, for things like bookshelves and fireplace mantles in homes we built. But much of it has stayed with me all these years, pieces of ancient woodland history harvested and cared-for by me as I’ve traveled through life.

I think I always held out hope that my kids would come to appreciate the deep wealth and history of those bones from within ancient trees. But, as is generally the case with kids, they follow their own paths, and those paths didn’t take them close to or through the libraries of ancient tree lore.

But fate crossed my path with Darla, whose husband used wood as a language of love. Who better to appreciate the thirty-something years of care my lumber received after the trees it came from had gathered life from the earth for hundreds of years? Who better to understand the significance of the language this wood can speak?

So I helped him load the wood into his truck the other day, and handed custody over to a younger man who can care for and craft the wood into it’s next iteration of language. While there was perhaps a tiny bit of sadness as the wood left, there was far greater joy that it might now be crafted into a rare and wonderful language.

My role in the transformation of those ancient trees was only to rescue their lumber, and to cure and care for the lumber through many years. Through those years, it aged and ripened in my care, preparing for the next step in its transformation. It’s now been given to its next custodian, who will help it emerge into a wonderful language – much like the language it must have spoken all those years ago standing tall and strong in the forest.

The groves were God’s first temples.
~ William Cullen Bryant, A Forest Hymn

 

Lots of things in life are like that, aren’t they? We’re often called to play a role for a time in the transformations of this world around us. To protect a thing, not to possess it. To be a steward, not a tyrant. To be a gardener and a nurturer, not a leech and hoarder.

To every thing, there’s a season.
A time for seed to take root,
A time for growing,
A time for uprooting…
A time for holding on,
and a time for letting go.

I am the heat of your hearth, the shade screening you from the sun; I am the beam that holds your house, the board of your table; I am the handle of your hoe, the door of your homestead; the wood of your cradle, and the shell of your coffin. I am the gift of God and the friend of man.
~ Author Unknown 

Not Fearing Death

I sat with a chapel full of people on Saturday, and said goodbye to an old friend. While he was 71, his death was still a bit sudden and unexpected. Much like the death of my father, (which I write about in Peace at the Edge of Uncertainty), my friend’s death was preceded by a coma of some short duration.

It’s a common theme today – one that most families will face in one way or another. A loved one sustained mechanically and electronically, while their mind and body seems to be reaching for the thing that’s next after this life. The journey takes it’s toll on those who must make the difficult decisions on behalf of the stricken loved one, though I feel the toll extracted is much larger than it needs to be.

We count on those around us to have the courage to make the hard decisions that must be made on our behalf when we can’t make them ourselves. We count on the love of those closest to us to help us successfully negotiate the end of this life when we need that help. Providing that help should be an honor, not a burden. Being chosen, or asked, or even forced by circumstance into that role of both honor and pain is a privilege we should bear with pride.

The words just roll right on to this page, as-if it’s easy. But it’s not. I hope and pray that we can evolve our culture to fear death less, and to embrace all aspects of this wonderful journey we call life – including that final aspect we call dying. But until that happens, I’m certain I’ll continue to see the deep pain and heavy burden of hard decisions on the loved-ones who do the right thing for those who trust them to make good and right decisions.

While I don’t look forward to death, I also have no fear of it. I’ve had several quite mystical and spiritual experiences in life that have left me completely confident in the uncertainty that lies beyond that vague window at the end of this journey. These, also, I write about in Peace at the Edge of Uncertainty.

It may be that my end comes as a rapid and certain event, or it may be that I’ll need the help of those whom I love to find that window at the end of the journey when it’s time. In the event that I do need that help, I do all I can while I live to make sure those folks I count on for that help understand in advance how much I’m counting on them, and how much I appreciate the love and the courage they’ll show in helping me.

It’s a discussion we should all have, but a discussion that’s hampered by the fear of death that we seem to have in our culture. Getting over that fear should be a primary focus of growing up, shouldn’t it?

Book Review – Sex at Dawn

Sex at Dawn – The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality
by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha
Author’s website

This was really a fun book. While it certainly does hold true to it’s billing – talking about how our sexual behavior may have developed as we’ve evolved as a modern creature – it’s really about more than sex.

I suspect that if a reader has really rigid ideas about what human nature is, and how people can, do, and should relate to one another, they will be troubled by the book. The ideas in the book really did cause me to re-think quite a bit about what I thought was “general and accepted wisdom”.

Here’s the author’s (or publicist’s) description of the book:

“In the tradition of the best historical and scientific writing, SEX AT DAWN unapologetically upends unwarranted assumptions and unfounded conclusions while offering a revolutionary understanding of why we live and love as we do. A controversial, idea-driven book that challenges everything you know about sex, marriage, family, and society.”

The book uses our adaptations and development of sexual behavior to explore the notions of ownership and control in our modern cultures, and how this may differ dramatically from the deeper “human nature” that developed as we evolved. The book develops a heck of an interesting argument about the “nature of human nature” with regard to how we “own” and “hoard” assets, taking and controlling as much as we can.

We’ve taught ourselves for many generations that this is the nature of the human – to conquer, take, and control assets. Our stated sexual expectations reflect our insistence on making sex reflect these values of selfishness, even when the actual behavior of the vast majority of humans makes it clear that meeting these expectations is not part of the true nature we developed over our evolution prior to recent times.

But is this conquering, taking, and controlling really part of our most basic nature? The authors make a heck of an interesting argument that it’s only since the agricultural age began that we’ve developed these traits of ownership and control – that prior to this the bulk of the evidence suggests that we lived in very cooperative and egalitarian groups. They argue that the group survived and thrived because of this tendency to share openly and to help one-another. Hoarding and selfishness were likely among the worst of “sins” an individual could commit. The very antithesis of our values today.

Of course, the authors spend a great deal of time discussing how sex likely played a role in this sort of culture, and present some pretty convincing evidence to back up their ideas. But to me, the more important ideas were the more broad ideas about how cultures likely operated.

I’m no anthropologist, so maybe these ideas have been out there for a long time, and nobody has brought them into mainstream thinking. If so, what a shame that we continue to reinforce and convince ourselves that the selfish and warlike tendencies that get us into so much trouble are simply part of our “nature”, when there’s pretty convincing evidence that this simply isn’t the truth. By nature, we’re more likely to be very cooperative, selfless, and egalitarian. We’ve just done a great job of teaching ourselves to operate against our nature.

I’d really recommend this book. It’s not at all an “academic” book, and it reads quickly and easily. I can only imagine the changes we might be able to make within our culture if we were able to get folks to stop and think a bit about how we got to this selfish and warlike state that defines our “nature” today.

Oh Brother, Who Art Thou?

A friend and I were corresponding about a road trip she took recently. She reconnected with a brother, and found herself surprised at who he was. She and the brother had apparently not really talked or corresponded for quite some time – maybe 20 years.

I don’t know the details of why the estrangement occurred in the first place. There are almost always all sorts of reasons for these sorts of things. I think part of it was that she made some assumptions about what he must believe, and he made some similar assumptions about her. Probably things got said that reinforced those assumptions.

She has a lifestyle that most folks would call alternative. He converted from something to Mormonism. She was getting wild tattoos way before wild tattoos were all the rage. He was apparently deeply involved in his Faith. She assumed his Faith would have little room for her lifestyle, he probably assumed her lifestyle would mock his Faith.

The years went by. No voices crossed phone lines. No letters came into mailboxes. Email became a “thing”, but email inboxes remained uncluttered by messages from one another.

Then a conference came up that she wanted to attend, and it was close to where the brother lived. A hand was extended, and grasped, and a dinner happened.

And they liked each other. They found one another to be far more open to the other than either had expected. She was, after all his sister. We all have faults after all, and who’s to say which faults trump others, and what are really faults anyway? He is, after all, her brother, and his heart is open and good and accepting.

They enjoy dinner, and are amazed at the similarities they share as brother and sister. They feel the glow of reminiscence as they tell stories they haven’t thought of in years.

In the depths of our DNA, we’re all brothers and sisters at some ancient place. Like my friend and her brother, we’ve all had assumptions and misconceptions woven into the lens through which we see those distant brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, cousins and neighbors. Those assumptions and misconceptions maintain walls and borders that are most strong and excellent. They help the morally corrupt among us sow hatred of anyone a little different that we are. They stoke the machinery of war, and maintain a constant flow of our tax dollars into that machinery.

In the relative scheme of things, I wonder if it was easy for my friend to reconnect with her brother. He’s her brother after all. Or is it even harder with those that we’re closest to? It’s not a matter of forgivingness for past wrongs that I’m talking about – it’s a willingness to be open to truly understanding the other person, without the burden of assumptions and misconceptions.

I think it comes down, once again, to that amazing power our brain has to categorize. We build a category for something, and then our brain does a really great job of sorting the world we walk through very efficiently, placing new things into the categories it’s built. So, I have a brother that becomes a Mormon, and my wonderfully efficient brain drops him into the category it’s built for Mormons. I don’t need to ask him what he believes, and waste all that time listening to how he really feels, when my wonderfully efficient category already has a set of answers.

I don’t need to spend time getting to know my Muslim neighbors, because I have a wonderfully efficient category for Muslims that tells me what I need to know about how they behave and what they believe. I don’t need to waste my time with my coworker who’s quite vocal in his support of Atheism, since my category for Atheism tells me all I need to know about him.

Life is so efficient when we let those efficient categories in our brain work to keep the world around us nice and tidy. We don’t need to think too much. We don’t need to go through the messy and uncomfortable soul searching and self-evaluation.

Or we could get a bit messy, and have dinner with our brother.

 

 

The Shape Of Help – 101

I suspect most folks have the same kind of angst that I’ve had lately about the disaster in Japan. We see folks in great need, and there’s something deep inside us that wants to reach out and help in some way.

There are lots of relief agencies who will supply resources as they can, and we can surely contribute resources to these sorts of agencies. Generally when this sort of disaster happens, resources pour into relief agencies, but there’s always the logistical bottleneck at the point of disaster – trying to find a way to get the resources to the point where they can really help.

For those of us who give the resources, we have some feeling that we’ve done something to help, albeit a distant hand offered through many brokers in-between. Detached.

I knew someone once who would get wild hairs to “help someone”. Once, at the end of a dinner among several people, she insisted we box up the many leftovers and give them to homeless folks someplace. We were in a town none of us knew, but we boxed up leftovers and ended up somewhere we probably shouldn’t have been, finding a way to share the leftovers with folks who seemed to want them.

At the time, I thought the exercise silly and of little value. It seemed to me that all we were doing was soothing someone’s guilty conscience about being more well-off than others, but we weren’t really doing anything effective to solve the problem of homelessness or feeding people. We all humored her, and she got to feel warm and fuzzy inside, like she’d really done something.

That’s how I felt at the time.

Looking back, I still see some amount of silliness in what we did that evening. But far less than I did at the time. She did, after all, reach out with real help to someone who needed it. She looked them in the eye and food went from her hand to theirs. Well actually, it was me looking them in the eye, and my hand doing the handoff, since it was clear we were not in the safest place in town. But still…

It was a true gesture of of personal help to someone. Did we spend more in gas delivering the help than the help was worth? Maybe, but I doubt the guy who ate well that night as a result of the gesture thought much about it. Or cared.

Our world is so fractured these days, and people are so insulated from each other. True interactions of deep engagement between one human and another are becoming more rare all across the globe. We see someone who needs help, but the only “reasonable” way we can offer help is to send a check to some relief agency, and hope a reasonable portion of the money is used in a wise way.

Mind you, I’m not arguing against relief agencies in any way – these folks do excellent work all across the globe, and the world needs them to continue their excellent missions.

What I think I’m arguing for is something extremely personal. True compassion and true giving come from the most personal and deep place in our heart. Most of us can’t really give that sort of help across the Pacific. Those opportunities for real and personal giving are much closer to us every single day.

I write a lot about the “circle of giving” thing. It’s different than a “ledger”, which is very binary and linear. In a ledger, I give a thing, and I get a checkmark for something I receive in return. It’s scorekeeping. When you keep score, it’s a transaction that ends as soon as the box in the ledger sheet is filled in.

The Giving Circle isn’t a ledger, but only works at a very personal level. Inside each of us is a deep and abiding compassion for others. At its most powerful, this compassion emerges as I reach my hand out to help someone else. As they reach their hand back to me, and accept the help, the circle becomes complete and grows. Their acceptance of my help “gives back” to me as a deep fulfillment of that desire within my heart to help others.

No ledger. No scorekeeping. Pure and simple sharing of compassion and gratitude, each feeding the other. A complete circle of giving.

Compassion that keeps a ledger feeds the ego. It’s a sense of pity for others who might have less good fortune.

Compassion that builds a Giving Circle is born of humility. Understanding the suffering of another allows the voice of our desire to give, and opens the heart to receive the gift of acceptance and gratitude in return. Giving becomes a privilege, and honor, and a gift received.

I’m a reasonable and practical person. There’s both good and bad in that. When it comes to “giving”, maybe it’s time we looked for “unreasonable” ways to help. Maybe we should look for opportunities to get in the car and deliver some food to somebody who needs it.

There’s nothing reasonable about true compassion.

Arguing With The Rock

As a teenager, I remember a friend commenting to me that he’d never met anyone who liked to argue as much as my dad did. He was sure, in fact, that if you put a rock down in front of my dad, he’d find something to argue with it about.

I’d never thought about it. I never really thought of the discussions my dad liked to have as “arguments”. We were taught from an early age that understanding was important, and that one of the most important tools in understanding was discussion. Real discussion – none of this “polite company” stuff. A discussion meant getting deep into the meat of an issue, and tearing it apart, and coming up with real understanding.

It wasn’t arguing really. It was exploration. Those who weren’t around my dad a lot didn’t realize that when a discussion opened up, he’d argue either side of the issue. If someone seemed to be taking “side a” in a discussion, my dad would strongly represent “side b”. If you were only around him occasionally, it was easy to think he was opinionated, and that you understood his positions. But when you knew him well, you knew that he could defend many different sides of an issue equally well.

In fact, that was an early lesson to me. Dad was insistent that hard discussion was critical to good and deep understanding, and that you should only enter into hard discussion if you could argue both sides of an issue equally well. If you could only argue one side, it only meant that you didn’t understand the other side, and only a fool argues against something he doesn’t understand.

There was great love and camaraderie in those heated discussions that we’d have as I was growing up. What felt at the time like stubborn resistance to ideas that seemed perfectly logical to me was actually relentless nudging toward the center of an issue – the only place that real truth and understanding could happen.

There were folks who would get frustrated with Dad, as he rarely let snide political comments pass unchallenged. Regardless of whether he agreed with the sentiment or not, (and you rarely knew if he did), he couldn’t abide the dishonesty that pervaded when you only presented one side of something.

The art of discussion is something I fear we’ve lost today. Few people are willing to invest the energy necessary to really understand an issue – they’d rather be told what to think by some idiot on the television screen. In an argument, folks have a set position, and victory means making a fool out of the other position, or talking over them, or bullying them. In Dad’s eyes, victory only happened when both people came away better able to argue the other side of the issue.

A good and dear friend got mad at me not long ago. His ideas seem strongly aligned with the extreme right or the extreme left politically – for this article it doesn’t really matter which it is. He’d gotten into the habit of including me in the never-ending emails produced by propaganda masters in the places where the extremes live, and forwarded to the party faithful for endless subsequent forwarding. This isn’t one side or the other – both extremes do the same thing.

The emails are generally mostly blather, with maybe the tiniest dose of the shadow of a true fact in there someplace. They’re targeted directly at the “party faithful”, to try and whip up the anti-whatever-they’re-against sentiment. They cater to those who don’t want to think for themselves.

Most of the time when I get these, I just push ‘em off to the trash can without even reading them. Now and again, I might read enough to rest assured that it’s just more blather. On one occasion, I read the blather, and was shocked at the complete lack of any fact or truth in what was being said. I shouldn’t be shocked, I know, because this is business as usual for the extremists – make stuff up and say it enough, and it no longer matters that it’s a lie.

On this occasion, though, I felt compelled to write back to my good friend, and correct some portion of the complete fiction that was in the email. My hope was to engage him in an actual discussion – really digging down into a particular issue. The result, however, was that I raised his anger at me – why couldn’t I just enjoy a little “humor”? He’s just sending this along to me in fun for crying out loud!

After a couple emails, I think we agreed that if he sent the political tripe to me, he should expect that I’d respond as-if he were looking for dialogue. (Sending an email is, after all, a form of opening a dialogue in my estimation…) I haven’t gotten any more emails…

I guess I’m glad to have less tripe in my inbox, but I’m sad that there’s now more distance between me and a friend of many years. If people have true affection and respect for one another, one of the most powerful demonstrations of that affection and respect is their ability to disagree with one another, and to explore the disagreement, and to learn from the position the other person is defending.

Or at least that’s what Dad taught us. Maybe that’s an ethic for a bygone era. Maybe today our culture teaches us we only want to engage with people who see things exactly as we see them. Maybe today, our hearts aren’t big enough for those who aren’t clones of us.Have our minds really shriveled and closed up to the point where they can only accept opinions and points of view that are already in there?

In the olden days of my father, “character” meant having the strength of ego to be wrong, the intelligence and understanding to defend many sides of an issue, and the heart to care more for friends than their opinions.
I fear our egos have become fragile and weak, our minds have become slaves to idiots on TV screens, and our hearts have shriveled to the point where we sometimes can’t see the difference between our opinions and our friends.

And I miss my friend…