Which Way Does Your Gate Swing?

Does the name Judith Sheindlin ring a bell? She's from Brooklyn, New York (if that helps).

A line you hear often is "Life's not fair." What an unsatisfying answer!

• Your kid doesn't get to start at quarterback, so: "Life's not fair."
• The jerk in the next cubicle got a raise, you didn't, so: "Life's not fair."

The antithesis of that seems to be: "I'm so blessed."

• Your daughter makes the elementary school cheer squad, so: "I'm so blessed."
• You son makes the Honor Roll, so: "I'm so blessed."
• You live in a "gated community"...

WAIT, that one depends on which way the gate swings. Our youngest son works for the Oklahoma County Sheriff. For the folks he's around, the gate swings the wrong way, because they're all innocent and "Life's not fair."

You know in some cases, maybe they're right. I heard a statistic the other day that purported that for kids who have parents who are incarcerated, more than 70% of them will at some time be in jail themselves.

Monet's Garden Gate

One of my favorite people to hear speak is Michael Sandel. He's a professor at Harvard. He teaches a class called, "Justice: What's the Right Thing To Do." You can watch it on YouTube or you can read the book by the same name. I highly recommend both. Here's one of my favorite quotes:

“The way things are does not determine the way they ought to be” 
― Michael J. Sandel, Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?

It seems to me that sometimes we can have several "I'm so blessed" and "Life's not fair" moments all in the same day. In other words, both of these states are temporary, and depend on the circumstances we find ourselves in.

Here's a statement I believe is more true and accurate than either of those two: Life's complicated.

Back to Sandel's quote: If we're not careful we'll come to believe that the way things are DOES determine how they ought to be, and how they in fact ARE. Is it crazy to say that the way things are, is not necessarily the way things really ARE? In other words, do we sometimes make the wrong assumptions about reality?

I promise you--if you watch too much Fox News, or if you watch too much MSNBC, you will soon have a distorted reality of the way things are. I know this is coming across as opinionated preaching, but what I'm really doing here is putting in words and ink a new lesson I'm learning.

For me this lesson is this: if I constantly look at life as though I'm looking through a microscope, telescope, or a tunnel, I have no choice but to view and judge every event as a moment of: Life's not fair, or I'm so blessed.

Oh, and you do know Judith Sheindlin. You know her as Judge Judy. Turns out that she is the highest paid judge in the land. A justice of the U.S. Supreme Court makes just over $200,000 a year. Judge Judy makes nearly $50,000,000. Yes, that's 50 MILLION a year! Is life fair, or is Judge Judy just really, really blessed. And if she is, what has she done to merit such blessfullness? Or is it even based on merit?

Here's what I do know, by experience, for myself: If I look broadly at life, taking as big a picture as I can, I see that we are all blessed way beyond what we deserve, that there is more beauty than I can behold in a lifetime, and that when you try to see life as it was Designed and Created, it is in fact, fair.

"The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is." --C. S. Lewis

See what I mean?

The Magic Of A Perfect Pair

Sometimes "writer's block" is real; and it sounds like this (cue video):

Sometimes, I have several ideas for a post and can't decide which one to develop. So, I try to weave the ideas together into one theme. This is an example. (If it seems like I'm straining to make the connection, you wouldn't be wrong.)

FIRTH: My favorite drumsticks are made by the Vic Firth Company. Vic's sticks have a great feel and are "tuned together". They market the sticks as "the perfect pair".

Over the weekend we saw Woody Allen's new film "Magic In The Moonlight" starring: Emma Stone and Colin Firth. They were a perfect pair in this film. If you like Woody's films, you should see this one.

THECOND: Speaking of drumsticks, drummers use one of two grips: traditional or matched. If you care about the details of these two, which I realize is highly unlikely, Wikipedia has great explanations.

I began playing drums in the 60s. I use a traditional grip. My two sons started playing many years later and both use matched grip. I might assume that as their father, I have not had as much influence on them as the rock drummers they watched play with matched grip. Then I could tremble, wondering what else they picked up from the "world" over the influence of the more traditional Significant Others.

Without a doubt, our cultures and the traditions of our tribes, run deep. And, as it goes with advancing years, I tend to think the old ways of doing and viewing things are the best. Whether it's how to hold your drumsticks, or how whether you prefer drumsticks over breasts (speaking of poultry of course), we tend to stand by our preferences.

THIRD: Colin Firth's character in Magic In The Moonlight is stubbornly set in his ways. Emma Stone's character works a bit of magic though, and his walls come tumbling down. Funny how that works. Perfect pairs morph through being tuned together--listening, paying attention, learning.

Emma Stone & Colin Firth

Recently I was at a meeting and a guy was doing a talk on "crucial communication". He gave an example of the importance of communication by reading an advertisement from CraigsList. It went something like this:

Motorcycle for sale. Like new. Only 500 miles. It is a great bike and I hate to have to sell it, but apparently I misunderstood when my wife said, "Do whatever the hell you want."

May I Be Serious

A RELATION OF MINE TOOK THIS PHOTO OF GRAIN ELEVATORS IN WESTERN OKLAHOMA. As soon as I saw it, I thought, "if that were my photo, I would use at as the background for a poem or quote: something from a guy like Wendell Berry. Then this one came to mind from his book called: The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays.

To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want.
― Wendell Berry

Photo by Corey Lee Fuller. Used without his permission.

This quote came to mind for me again this morning as we had communion at church. Of course, Wendell Berry is speaking in an agricultural sense, but his use of the metaphor is clear.

But I began to ponder this idea of breaking of body and shedding of blood in the context of humanity as a collective "body". No doubt there have been times when we as the human race have justified breaking the bodies and shedding the blood of our own kind. And some of it may have been necessary; maybe.

I also know however, that our human story, which we call history, is full of unjustifiable, senseless breaking and shedding. But dang it... It is everywhere these days: from Ukraine, to Afghanistan to Ferguson, Missouri, to our hometowns where drug-addled "baby daddies" are beating their own infants to death.

In the sermon this morning following communion the speaker suggested that when Jesus lead his disciples through that first, Last Supper, and said, "Do this; and when you do, remember me," He was giving us a center point, a true north, a way to find our way.

We need that, right? Maybe it just old-age coming on me, but we seemed to have lost our way. To borrow a line from the old catcher of the New York Yankees: 

If you don't know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else. -- Yogi Berra

50 Shades of Pops

I KNOW I SHOULD probably create a playlist of high energy tunes for my morning walk--you know to encourage a brisk pace. This morning though, with the player on Shuffle, the first tune in the random draw was "Crying" by Roy Orbison. As I listened I thought, "Get over it Roy! Behind those dark shades she doesn't know you're crying, and probably doesn't care."

Next up was Patsy Cline's, "Crazy."

What is this playlist trying to tell me? 

There's a new book out that sounds intriguing: Roy G. Biv: An Exceedingly Surprising Book About Color. Roy G. Biv is a mnemonic device to help us remember the colors of the rainbow. Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo and Violet.

But, (here's an excerpt from the book):

That mnemonic, it turns out, isn’t strictly accurate: “Technically speaking, there aren’t seven distinct colors in the rainbow. But Isaac Newton felt pressured to name seven colors to match the seven tones in Descartes’s musical scale, so he shoe-horned indigo in.”

So how about Black, White and Gray? Well, there's the whole total presence of color / total absence of color thing. But let's not get too technical here. And what about the Shades of Gray? I took a look at Sherwin Williams color selections and found way more than 50. Of course, any of us who grew up with B&W TV know that. And we are very comfortable making sense of it. To this day, I find good B&W photography to be way more compelling than Color.

Well, back to that mournful playlist I started my walk with--I will confess right now that as I tread deeper into this second-coming-of-age, there are times I realize I am crazy (in a lovable way) and I will admit that these days I can get dewy-eyed more often than Meg Ryan in Sleepless in Seattle and You've Got Mail put together. But then so can a lot of the old guys I know.

So I've decided to own my new shades of emotion and personality, although I will say, I don't necessarily enjoy them all. It was easier being just a guy with emotions about a half-inch deep. Now my shades run deeper and sometimes darker. The problem with having more feelings is they get hurt more often. But I'm finding it's a small price to pay because on the other end, in the brighter shades of gray, I'm more aware of the subtle joys and blessings along the way.

Maybe I should have titled this post: From 5 to 50 and Growing--The Shades of Aging. But who would have clicked to read that?! Better to use the 50 Shades title because they thought it might have something to do with the book.

To me one of the saddest things that happens to us humans as we age is that we try to eliminate all shades of gray. Everything, we think, must be Black or White--our political views, our religion, our world view. So we become more narrow-minded, more dogmatic, and just meaner.

Call me Crazy, but I don't want to be that way.

The color of truth is gray. --― André Gide

Speaking of that book: Yes, I did read it (don't judge me), just the first one (of the three). It was repulsive and a poorly told story. Any book that ends with a girl caught in emotional angst because she is looking forlornly at a half-deflated balloon of a helicopter some self-obsessed wacko gave her, is a poorly told story. They only thing that would have made it more ridiculous is if she had been wearying an air-brushed t-shirt he bought for her at the State Fair. I finished it because I don't tolerate people who criticize books or movies that they have not read or watched in their entirety. And that is not a recommendation to watch the forthcoming movie of the same name or to read the book.

Gray hair is God's graffiti. --Bill Cosby

PS: If I could choose one musician to sit in a coffeeshop and listen to for hours it would be Brandi Carlile. She understands how to paint a picture with music. Watch this video of her singing Patsy's song and notice all of the colors of tone and expression that she shows us.