Autumn Morning

Cool Autumn morning:
The heat of summer is passing
as wispy clouds above.

Loving What You Do

Reminded again last night of the power of loving what you do.

I had the opportunity as part of a local industry group to which I belong to tour a local microbrewery. It's small - a small warehouse with a tasting room. Split into two groups after the dinner, we walked through.

The surroundings were minimalist, the sort of start-up industrial appearance one expects concrete floors, concrete walls, with the stainless steel implements of brewing towering like sentinels above you.

But the best part of the tour was the guide himself, who was one of the owners. His enthusiasm for his job simply oozed from every pore. It was not enough that he obviously knew a great deal about what he was talking about, it was his demeanor and animation as he presented it. Here was a man who truly loved what he did (he started out homebrewing and moved up from there), had a dream, and is working very hard to make it happen. His open manner and the pride you could see in his eyes as he spoke was wonderful.

As I drove home three beer samples the wiser, it reminded me yet again how critical loving what you do is the key to any success you will find in the field of what you do. With the passion for brewing beer, I'm sure he would have never found the drive to learn, to volunteer, to work in other places gathering the knowledge required to one day have his own company, and sell others on the idea of his vision.

Without passion, anything can become drudgery. With passion, our dreams are only bounded by effort we will put in.

Empty Me

Holy fire, burn away

My desire of anything

That is not of you, that is of me

I want more of You, and less of me, yeah

Empty me, empty me

Fill, won't you fill me

With You

- Empty Me, Jeremy Camp

Hope

Hope is the indispensable ingredient in life.

With hope, all things seem bearable. Without hope, no matter if one had the whole world, life seems nothing but a long tunnel of despair that never ends.

What is hope? Merriam Webster defines it as: "to desire with expectation of fulfillment; to desire with expectation of obtainment; to expect with confidence." It that belief that something we want or desire will come to pass.

Note that hope does not incorporate any direct consideration of the odds against it. Hope does not preclude the probability of hard effort to reach the desired end; what it does do is believe that such effort will be eventually rewarded.

Without hope, effort ceases - or at least significant effort. We can go through the motion of our lives, but there is a sense of futility with which we do everything. It's the practical sense that everything we are doing is going to be packed up in a box, eventually to be sent offsite and then destroyed.

The object of hope matters as well. What do we hope in? What do we place our confidence, our desires into? Are we placing them into the appropriate vessel, or are we placing them in things which will fail us?

As a Christian, it is this point where I fail all too often. I place my hope in things of time - other people meeting my needs, a fulfilling career, a comfortable life, a meaningful existence. Not that there's anything wrong per se with these things; it's when I put my hope in these things, rather than the One who provides these things, that I ultimately fail.

And so it comes to focus. Where am I focusing my own hope? Is it on the things that will fail - those "broken reeds of Egypt" that eventually will not be able to bear the weight, nor meet the confidence I am placing in them? Or is it God, the One who Himself is hope?

But I must be careful. In placing my confidence in God, I need to be wary of the fact that my hopes are not the same as hope. My hopes are often desires; His hope is purification, salvation, and glorifying His name. In putting my hope in Him, I must needs hold all other things with a loose hand, lest in my need to have hope, I hold to the gifts rather than the Giver.

Rain

I sit this morning looking out my window into the cool, overcast backyard - something I haven't seen for probably 8 months.

We finally received rain over the weekend - about 2.5" worth - and the resulting cloud cover kept everything cool throughout the day. That has held to this morning, as the gray clouds continue to cling tightly to the earth.

As I went out this morning to practice Iaido, the ground was damp and noiseless and gave a bit - not at all like the crisp crunch of grass and turning in the dirt I've been doing for months no. The yellow leaves of the falling oaks carpet the wet-brown earth as I look out this morning, nice blending in and on the yellow sun-seared grass.

The morning is muffled as I sit here and type, the sounds of life seemingly far more distant than they really are. A lone bird sings its morning greeting near our yard, as other songs sound more faintly farther away.

It's a comfort to me, as I try to mentally prepare myself for another day, that such things as the simple rain of God - long prayed for, much appreciated - can create a thing of beauty and peace almost instantly in the midst of drouth and dust.

Conscious Choosing: Vision

What is your vision?

Vision is fun. Vision is the future. Vision is that which we want to do, hope to do, some day.

But the problem with vision is that it often gets submerged beneath layers of life itself. Vision can become dimmed with time, dimmed with tragedy, dimmed with the daily act of living itself. Before long, the bright crystal windows we looked out from in childhood have become the fogged and dim with the coal smoke of reality.

But vision is necessary - indeed critical - for conscious choosing. We can make conscious choices with knowledge of ourselves, we can make conscious choices based on the values we have identified - but without the vision of where we want to go, we end up living in a small circle circumscribed by the realities we live in, rather than potentialities we conceive.

Fortunately, vision is probably the easiest of the three elements of conscious choice to discover. It's fun, it's exciting - because it deals with what we want to do with our lives.

Some starter questions:

- What impact do you want to have when you're gone?
- What would you really like to do?
- Based on your knowledge of self and your values, what is the best way you can express that?

Vision is the star ahead of us on the ship of Conscious Choice. Find that second star to the right, and sail on to morning.

Conscious Choosing: Values

How do we incorporate our values into our daily life?

Values are probably the most underrated and often ignored part of the combination of knowledge, values, and vision. Knowledge is always easy to convince people of (who doesn't want to consider themselves from time to time), vision is easy to get enthused about (the future is always exciting), but values are those hidden things which are too often easy to ignore or override in ourselves.

Ignore? Value, like knowledge of self, often requires us to sit down and think deeply in sustained ways about what our values are. Some are very easy to nail down but others are far more subtle, influencing us in ways that are surprising once we identify them. But without knowing them, they simply become ignored - or overpowered by other things we think are values.

Override? Too often in my own life, I have sacrificed expediency for my values. Values are often things which are not immediately or physically rewarded; the rewards are often internal, the result of a life which is in harmony with itself and what it believes. It's often difficult to explain to others the benefit of such an inner harmony - especially when the press is often to accomplish things now.

But in order to avoid ignoring or overriding our values, we need first to define them. And obviously in some detail and depth: the clearer we are, the clearer we can be about the conscious choices we will make and why we make them.

Conscious Choosing: Knowledge

How do we come to the knowledge of what is truly important to us, of what our priorities are in life? And how do we separate the things that are important from the the things that we say are important?

These answers are important - critically so - if we are to engage in the conscious choosing which defines a life which truly makes a difference and is a success.

The difficulty for me, as I consider the question, is the fact that what I often claim as a priority, a value, a thing of importance, is whether or not such things are so. How did I determine them? Was it my own determination, my upbringing, my acculturation, even (as C.S. Lewis would say) the fact that my coffee was good and I feel fine with the world? Too often I think they are a conglomeration of all of these things.

In considering the question, I think one has to start with the concept of time and limitations. We do not have all the time in the world - an average of 77 years for most of us - and we cannot ever do everything that we want. Too often we believe this not to be case: we think that youth goes on forever, or we will have endless amounts of energy and resources, or that we can do anything we put our mind too (we can do most things, to be sure - but at what cost?). If we believe time and energy and talent are endless, of course we will never focus - we will always believe we have enough time for something.

But reality is far different. There is a time for all of us, and our energy and talents are limited by time and entropy. Based on that, we need to consider what we really want to accomplish, what is truly worth doing based on those parameters.

Some of them are seemingly unrewarded in this life. For example, it is important to me that Na Clann have a close relationship with God and good spiritual founding. This is of such important that we have decided to sacrifice our time and finances to ensure (to the greatest extent possible) that this occurs. Is there necessarily any recognition or direct rewards accruing in this life? Probably not - but that's not really the point. It is a thing that is a priority to us. And it means there are things that we cannot do because of that commitment.

What I wish I had sometimes is the equivalent of a river in my life. As it moves through the plain or high mountains, it would grind or wash away the softer rocks and soils, leaving only those things that are harder. These remaining stones and rocks, I submit, are the equivalent of those things that are the true values, the true priorities in our life.

But whatever that process is, it must be followed. We must determine - we must be realistic - that ultimately, we all have limitations. The sooner we discover what is important to us, the sooner we can be about doing something to make those priorities a reality in our lives.

Conscious Choosing: Definition

"Define success, pursue it, and put a lot less importance on the other stuff. That's how to succeed on the only terms that matter: yours." - Jeff Haden

In this process of conscious choosing - of making a decision thoughtfully and knowingly, rather than drifting along with the flow of life - what criteria do we use to evaluate how we make decisions?

This is critically important. This someone, I suspect, most people don't do in any reasoned and thought out fashion. It's far easier to disguise a "going along" decision with a "choice we made" - but when pressed, we often cannot come up with the reason why we made that "choice" in the first place.

The key is definition - definition of ourselves (knowledge), definition of what we hold as things of the highest importance (values), and definition based on these two items of where we want to go (vision).

But definition is a hard thing: it's not like a television program which is piped through a cable and gives us "High Def TV". Instead, it's a reasoned and intensive process of looking internally at ourselves and what we value.

In the quote above, Jeff Haden makes the case that success is not something that can be generically defined. But many of us do, defining it as "living comfortably" or "money" or "a good family life". The problem with generic definitions are simply that they are generic and not really applicable an individual's life. We are all individuals; success for each of us, success that would make us truly happy and gratified, is as individual as we are. But without knowing, we will never take the step of actually defining.

"The unexamined life" says Socrates through his pupil Plato, "is not worth living". If unexamined is defined, Socrates is correct: we will not, in the end, have a life worth living if we have not defined how it is that we truly want and need to live.

Conscious Decisions

I consciously made a decision this weekend for the first time in a long time. The specifics are not important; the general concept is.

How often have I made decisions unconsciously, merely going along with the flow of things because "that's what everyone else does" or "that's the path"? Too often. That's a bit of a surprise to me as I think about it, because I think I too often don't decide anything at all - which is, of course, a form of decision making itself.

But this morning it was different; this morning I consciously decided for something instead of unconsciously deciding against something. I did it based on a sincere sense that the timing of the decision was simply wrong - and that I was simply unconsciously making a decision that would not really address the true problems I was facing in my life.

That's one of the great things about making unconscious decisions, I suppose, of drifting with the stream: we are never forced to confront the ground issues that we struggle with, the thing that are really creating the issues in our lives and placing us in the situation that we find ourselves. Instead we drift in a cocoon of non-realization, carefully protecting ourselves from the hard confrontations of ourselves that will truly implement change in our life.

The odd thing? Even though with the decision nothing changes, I feel a greater sense of control and progress in my life than I have for a long time. I made a choice for something, to confront those things in my life that need confronting, instead of merely moving them down the road once again.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood; I took the one less traveled, and it has made all the difference - Robert Frost

Back to Mornings

I'm moving my writing time back to early mornings.

I had moved my time to later in the morning, both to accommodate my new schedule as well as to use the benefit of having a functioning laptop upstairs I could access, being out of the hurly-burly of morning preparation.

What I've found instead is that the most valuable thing in my meditation or writing is not what I do, or on what I do it, or even where I do it: it's the silence to do it in.

The key to my own writing is silence - true silence, the silence of myself up early in the morning with nothing but my thoughts and the keyboard.

Why is this? I'm not fully sure. What I have noticed is that when I am writing later in the morning, my thoughts becoming clouded and hard to follow. My mind has apparently already moved on to the upcoming day, to the background chatter of Na Clann getting ready for school, to having to finish everything I need to do before I go to work.

In contrast, writing (as I write now) is a much more fulfilling experience. There is nothing except myself, the tick of the clock, the hum of the refrigerator, and the clickety-clack of the keyboard as I write. It almost seems that the hum and ticking are foils for the internal silence (and frankly clarity) that I feel: when I stop for spelling or to think, the gentle noises serve as the background I need to recollect my thoughts.

Working to go to bed earlier will be a bit of challenge, of course - but the ability to write and feel I've written as opposed to writing to get something out on the paper is worth far more than any 30 minutes of slumber.

The Epiphany of Love

I discovered last night what love really is.

Love is something which sometimes feels very hard to quantify, especially as one advances in years. Part of it, I suppose, is simply the fact that being with someone for so many years tends to dull the edge of what we grow up thinking love is: that bright, tingly feeling that makes every day bright, that makes every moment exciting, that makes the heart race every time one touches or sees or thinks of the beloved.

Another part is simply the confusion that our society has generated around love and sex. Simply put, for society love = sex. Our entertainment and literature glorifies it: love is physical involvement with someone else. If you're not - or not frequently anyway - you're not really in love.

The problem is neither of thing is love (as many others far wiser than I have written). If love is a thrill, then we will always be a people seeking new thrills and when that wears off, we will wander off in search of the next fix. If love is only sex, we will find ourselves constantly worried about if our physical life is enough, or if our partner will sudden turn on us, seeking the next experience.

What is love? The epiphany of love is that of a parent painstakingly care for their child, addressing every aspect of a condition that needs to be dealt with - not just the personal care, but the care of the ancillary items - and then doing it again, and again, as many times as necessary.

This example of service, of caring, of putting aside of one's own agenda for the sake of someone else, is one of the greatest examples of love I can think of.

Note that it is not even directed at the relationship between the parents. There are certainly no bright sparkly feelings, and no physical expression is exchanged. But this act conveys more about the underlying bedrock of what matters and what is important than the greatest Academy Award winning sex scene could ever do.

Physical manifestations change. More than likely, a sex life will as well. But caring and sacrifice as an act of love - perhaps the highest example of an act of love - is something which, I realized in a flash, is something so desirable and so understated it is often missed. And yet, the feelings and thoughts that underlay it are the very things so many people say they truly want.

Patience and Endurance

How patient and enduring am I?

Am I patient enough to diligently work towards a goal or objective that long term, even when I am mired in the day to day operations of life and everything is seemingly ineffective?

Am I patient enough to stay the course when the course itself is dark and cloudy and I seem to have lost the path - or worse, the path is washed away?

Do I have the picture in my mind of what I want to accomplish - that shining goal, that finish line- that I can hold before me as an icon in the darkness of daily life?

Do I even know what those pictures are? Without knowing, it is very hard to grasp them, to have any sense of going towards anything other than more darkness.

If I am becoming patient and enduring, what am I patiently waiting and enduring for?

Expecting and Working

"Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first." - Mark Twain

I've been struggling this week - really, this month - with the dichotomy of success and the world.

On the one hand, I have Mr. Twain's quote. "The world owes you nothing." It's a profound comment - one that I think I have too often ignored or taken for granted.

For some reason, I think I've always believed that I deserved something from the world - you know, the "I've been good, I try hard, etc. Something should be coming my way." I have to accept, I think, the reality that it is simply not true - at least in the sense that it is meant.

The corollary to the point is that you have to work to get something. But here also I find a dichotomy. On the one hand, hard work is (in theory) supposed to advance and do all sorts of wonderful things. On the other hand, hard work and rewards are quite often not connected at all, due to the fact that while one controls one's work, one does not control the granting of the rewards. There are always personalities and political factors and rules that prevent such things from being easy transactions. So in a sense, one might say that hard work is hard work - and possibly something good might come out of it.

A second thought that comes to mind is simply that even with hard work and possibly "earning", there is often a bias against the rewards of the hard work. We have become a society driven by envy of one's neighbor on the one hand and a genuine sense of entitlement on the other: as a living, breathing individual, I am entitled to X - and you are not entitled to more, even if you have worked to earn it, because my entitlement overcomes your hard work. If we want to have a discussion about the roles and responsibilities, that's one thing; but I don't think we can equate the universe with societal norms.

Where does that leave me? Too often I find myself in any of these three positions: feeling I am owed something when I am not, or feeling I am working hard with no hope of reward, or occasionally working hard with the gratification of the reward. I need more of the last, less of the first, and a way to find a place or spot or activity or whatever in life where the middle one is true more often than not.

Perhaps I simply need to start with the basis: The world owes me nothing. Even in hard work, it owes me nothing. If there is hard work being performed and nothing is happening, then perhaps it's my job to make something happen - if not in that activity, then finding something else.

In this sense, I will not change the world. I can only change my view of it.

All I Needed to Know I Learned in the Highland Games

1) If you're trying, you're going to get scraped and bleed. It's just how it is. Keep going.

2) Prepare. Always wear something under you're kilt - you never know when momentum will take you down.

3) Sometimes the reward for doing something is doing the same thing, only with a heavier weight.

4) Kilts really are appropriate for any occasion.

5) When doing something, you will be most successful if using all of yourself. You cannot just muscle a weight to throw it; it takes your whole body.

6) It's about the competition, but it's just as much about encouraging those competing with you.

7) When heavy things start to fall, best to be out of the way.

8) Most often, the reason we can't do things is because we believe we can't do them. Try, and amaze yourself.

9) Balance - in caber and with life - is key.

10) There are only two groups: competitors and spectators. Be a competitor.

Autumnal Equinox

The First Day of Fall:

yellow oak leaves carpeting

the drought yellow grass.

Confirmation

Nighean gheal is going through Confirmation.

Confirmation, for those of you not in the know, is a process (also known as reaffirmation of baptism) in at least the Lutheran and Catholic denominations in which the catechumen (fancy Latin word for "person being catechized") in instructed in the fundamentals of the faith.

Us being Lutheran and all, we have the benefit of having two documents already laid out for us: The Small Catechism with Questions (by Dr. Martin Luther) and Luther's Large Catechism (again, by Dr. Martin Luther). The process where we are is a two year, alternating Sunday program in which they study the sacraments (for Lutherans, Baptism and Communion), the Ten Commandments, the Apostle's Creed and other articles of the Faith.

It's interesting to me, both because of the fact that it reminds me of my own confirmation (now 30 years past) and as a re-grounding (as it were of my own faith) - I don't know that I can expect my own daughter to memorize things that I myself will also not memorize.

It also brings a bit into thought the whole process of how we treat converts and deal with our faith.

I've the advantage of coming out of both the mainline Protestant movement and the non-denominational movement. Both have strengths - the power of structure of one, often the power of enthusiasm and energy and adherence to the gospels. Both have weaknesses - the confinement of structure and dead orthodoxy of one, the potential of no authority and misguided teaching with other.

In either case, the reality is that Christianity is not just a visceral emotional reaction or feeling, it's also an intellectual framework of what we believe, how it functions in relation to the world in which we live, and how we accept, acknowledge and incorporate these truths into our daily lives.

What is baptism? What does it do? What is Communion? What are the differences in how Protestants and Catholics and Orthodox believers approach it, and what does that say about how we interpret the Bible? It's questions such as these, perhaps not the primary fundamental of Salvation but the not unimportant Tier 2 fundamentals of what we believe and why we believe it, that tend to nag me in odd moments.

Many children - my own included - can tell me everything about the world of Harry Potter. Can they tell me equally about their Christian Faith and the fundamentals of it? And what does that say of us as church - not that we should not participate in the world around us, but that we can treat the important matters of faith as not as important?

Hierarchy

There is a hierarchy of goals and achievements that I had not previously perceived in life.

I have always understood that not all goals and achievements are the same, that some are more important than others. At the same time, I believe that I have discounted my larger aspirations to settle for the smaller ones.

Settle for the smaller ones. Is it really settling, or is it my inability to get beyond my greatest needs and fears (because these are always what limit us) that essentially "write" what I will and will not accomplish.

An example: I crave being liked more than almost anything, and so I step aside from hard decisions and hard conversations because I want to be liked. Of course, those decisions and conversations would actually propel me farther than the approval of peers, but because they are hard and because I shun conflict, I settle for the lesser.

For those that have achieved their dreams - however defined - there must come a time when the dream becomes more important than lesser things, that the going forward is more desirable than what is being left in place.

One thinks of those who have accomplished and achieved prominence: looking back in their life, there are undoubtedly situations and people and places that were left. It's the whole introspective interview with people stars grew up with: good friends and great times were passed through, moving to the greater thing.

Not all goals, not all achievements, are equal. The key is to figure out what you really want, and then move towards that.

Plateaus

I feel like I have plateaued in my life.

Plateaus, for those of you that may have forgotten your basic physical geography, is "a usually extensive land area having a relatively level surface raised sharply above adjacent land on at least one side". It can also mean "a relatively stable level, period, or position." The verbal form (which also works) is "to reach a level, period, or condition of stability or maximum attainment". Either way (and both work for the purposes of my discussion) it's a flat place which, while raised, is not continuing on any upward path.

Why do I feel I've plateaued? Because in so many areas of my life, I simply seem to be. I'm not really moving forward (at least in any measurable way I can notice); instead, I am at the same level I have been for some time.

Why is this? Is it because I've accepted the plain as the end of the journey when there are mountains in the distance? Is it because I have failed to realize that the journey continues on a dog leg, while I am sitting looking at the cliff, having missed the turn? Is it because it requires a new level of effort and I am simply lazy? Or perhaps that I have become too comfortable here on the plateau: it's flat, it's easy, and I already know all the routines.

Perhaps all. But life cannot be lived on a plateau forever - because plateaus, given time, wear away. It's either up the mountain or back to valley.

(HT to artofmanliness.com for their excellent article "Plateau Busting: How to Take Your Life to the Next Level", which got this thought train started.)

Monday Morning

Monday morning blues.

It is amazing to me how much my job affects other parts of my life. During the weekends, I have no problem at all sleeping 8 hours straight through the night. Sunday night, I inevitably wake up twice, always earlier than I need to, and inevitably feel tired as I prepare for the first day of the week.

Instead of the soaring feeling of waking up with a day of tasks to do (as on the weekends), I feel nothing but a low level of dull interest as I walk through the motions of preparing for another day. More and more, there is not sense of doing things for an accomplishment; instead, there is the dull roar of duty as I get ready.

How do I bridge this gap between these two land masses? It's clear to me that life can never be lived at its highest level as I continue to slump through week after week. At the same time, it's equally clear that the free fall of doing anything on my own without a well thought out (dare we say, God inspired) plan is not a recipe for success - it's the difference between taking the elevator down and cutting the cable: both will get you to the ground, one just faster than the other.

But I can sense it out there: the thing, that thing, something that gives me purpose when I leap out of bed in the morning, that gives me a sense of doing good here and in eternity, that makes every day rising like a Saturday. If I can only catch what it is.