It started with a yada yada conversation about week-end plans with JE. In the world of baseball and post-season play, everything is scheduled around The Game(s). He began with, "When do the Angels and Yankees play?"
I took another swig of my Corona.(in the tradition of Seniors Citizens--which is my new club--we were at a Happy Hour when drinks are cheaper and occasionally there are free snacks.)
Sometimes I worry about him. "What game?" The Angels had lost a fourth game, American League playoffs were over and it was time to move on. Hoping for the Yankees to get their pinstriped butts kicked, but nonetheless time to get to "acceptance" already.
"The fifth game."
"There is no fifth game--the Angels lost." I could see their stiff upper lipped I'm too big a boy to cry faces headed toward the clubhouse.
Another thing I've learned in this new Senior Club is that anxious looks from people around you are not uncommon. Lose your keys. Misplace a coffee cup or the date, forget a kid's name when the kid is yours--forget your own name--and people look...worried.
We were giving each other The Look. JE is older than I am and a little hard of hearing, while my hearing is adequate and it's the vision going. (Now Bush the Elder just showed up in my head which is not an unusual event--not Bush but the whole pinball thought process --nd he's going on about the vision thing. Never mind, though. Really.) Being as JE sometimes misses things, occasionally I have to set him straight--gently and with great respect for his feelings.
"Bet you five bucks, " I said.
He raised. We'll skip the details but it was the kind of stake where no matter who loses both people win.
A handshake and we went back to our beers. Nibbling veggie spring rolls and barbecued ribs--which were NOT free but were (in theory) at a reduced price. I kept looking sideways at him--frankly a little worried. How could he be so confused?
Of course he was giving me the same looks and asked me several times: "You really are sure about this, aren't you.?"
"Wouldn't bet the rent money, but, yeah, I am." Wondering how he would take the inevitable news that he was wrong.
Naturally, you know what happened--or otherwise I wouldn't be writing this, now would I? He was right I had commingled the defeat of my team--the Dodgers--at the bats and gloves of the Phillies with the hard fought Angels' win over the Yankees in game four. I had ended up with two sad stories when the second one hadn't happened yet. (It did.) Right about the saddened faces, wrong about the team.
We watched the game and the Angels lost. But the whole incident "gave me furiously to think," as Hercule Poirot would say. (I have to drop these things here because most of the time nobody I'm talking to would get the reference and I don't have to worry if you get it or not. Or even if I've misquoted it.)
I had had absolutely no doubt that I was right. Not a speck, not a scintilla, not a crumb. None.
With the kind of certainty I had had , I might have risked the gallows. Or at least mockery on the Drudge Report.
And I was wrong. Completely, no excuse, and no shading wrong. The only thing I had right were the names of the teams and there's no prize for that.
My point? The strength of your conviction has nothing to do with being right. And this brilliant insight is applicable in all kinds of ways. Really.
First of all, I find my certainty unnerving. I SAW the Angels win. True, just on television, but I saw it and then managed to flush it completely out of my mind. I was almost literally blind--there was something I couldn't "see,," no matter how clear and plain it was.
That kind of scary wrong certainty makes me wonder about other things I'm damn sure about.
One of the arguments I've heard from both pulpits to religious books of varying academic weight actually rests on the whole strength of conviction argument. Why would the disciples been fired with evangelical zeal, if they didn't know that Jesus was the resurrected, living Messiah? Early Christians faced the lions (who just about always won), torture, stoning, crucifixion--only a crazy person would endure that if they weren't absolutely, heart and soul deep convinced.
I have no argument with this assumption until it's taken to the next step which is to claim that this passionate belief proves that the tenets of Christianity are fact, well, fact.
The one has nothing to do with the other, any more than a suicide bomber's willingness to die proves anything about the "facts" of his/her belief.in whatever religion or ideology the dying is for.
I was so very sure about what I KNEW I knew that not one bit of doubt crept in--not one. I was only "concerned" over JE's feelings when the poor darling found out he was wrong.
These days in self-help lit and in political arguments, religious arguments, and on and on and on, doubt is of the devil. You shouldn't ever doubt yourself, your abilities, and the in reachness of your dreams. Don't waver or wobble in your faith, your ideas, your solutions. Don't even waver on what you say you said--even if those damn lying words are on video--because strength of conviction is all.
One of my favorite sayings--going back to the days when I wrote advice for parents of teens--is "choose the hill you're going to die on." Not every issue is the apocalypse and if you treat it as such--well, by the time the real thing shows up all your ammo and your credibility will be gone.
The trouble is that I think the real issue is becoming not what hill will you die on--but the various hills you will kill for. Lord knows we've all seen more than enough of that--the World Trade Center is an obvious one, along with the Pentagon, suicide bombers, Oklahoma City, and acceptable "collateral damage" nearly everywhere. Woops, my bad's are everywhere. Didn't know that was a school, hospital, wedding party. Sorry for the babies blown to pieces in daycare in Oklahoma, but they probably shouldn't have been in a government building anyway. I could--and usually do--go on and on. Health care, stalled budgets, hating your neighbor and sending your dog to poop in the middle of his/her lawn....
However, my daughter, KM, pointed out to me that most people want to read something short in a blog. If they wanted a book, they'd buy one.
She has a point.
But I want to bring this around to my barefoot on the ground and mindful moments--even if that epiphany at Happy Hour and home is old, cliche, and hardly even new to me. I mean, like wow: I can be wrong. Facts can be not only discounted and ignored, but erased. My mind--your mind, anyone's mind--can try to reinvent reality to suit our desires and never register a conscious thought.
Believing really, really hard doesn't make anything so. Wishing doesn't make it so. Saying "make it so" isn't a guarantee either, unless, perhaps, you are a deity. And, if you are, why are you reading this?
Mindfulness is being present, present in the world as it is, not as I want it to be. (That's another blog entirely.) If I am present in the moment, PAYING ATTENTION, I might be less likely to delude myself.
If I am trying to be aware, I might be able to perceive the desires that I am focusing on that are simply that: desires. Acknowledge them and let them pass. I wanted the Dodgers to win. I'm not actually that fond of the Angels even though I want to be.
I can check my facts.
And, in matters of faith and belief where facts as we know them do not exist, humility would seem to be in order
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Showing posts with label love. Show all posts
Showing posts with label love. Show all posts
Monday, November 9, 2009
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Love Is All You Need?
Love is all you need, love is all you need…. Stuck in my head from a commercial for something I can’t recall and will not bother to look up. Cool kids though and, well, fun to watch. I think they all find themselves by the last frame too and that’s always a good thing.
Love is all you need. When I was 18, back in the early 60’s, I think I might well have said yes and then, maybe, added books. Peace and freedom and full stomachs would have grown naturally, organically, from that one strong root, the original blessing of love. Even at 18 I didn’t think love was as simple as a song, but it was music and as natural as a sigh. And if I could have, I would have put my arms around the world and everyone in it and held them close,
Life changes. We change our circumstances and our circumstances change us. Shit happens. Children and bills come and the years when love is action and quite often as much fun as dragging an eight year old or yourself to the dentist. I love you still rolls off the tongue but sometimes as one more item on the endless To Do list. A question, a wish, a promissory note, sometimes spit like a curse, or pounded like a club up side the head: thud, thud, thud.: I-Love-You.
Oh, the drama of it. Of course those years weren’t endless drudgery and the bills to pay. They were a jungle, thick and rich and surprising, one swing of the machete and you turn to heartbreaking beauty, you pratfall into the mud, a wasp stings you, the piranhas needle your feet to the bone and your friend pulls you out of the slough and you laugh and drink coffee in a clearing.
But if you had hummed Love is all you need I might have laughed, spewing my coffee; I might have turned my head away so you wouldn’t see and let the tears flow. But I wouldn’t have been able to say yes. I would have told you that love is complicated, easy to say, hard to live, a choice—something willed and worked at. Oh, I still wanted to put my arms around the world and hold everyone close, but I knew how little good it would do in a world of stick thin kids with swollen bellies, people armed with guns and money, a world where four kids (well fed and, thankfully, unarmed) couldn’t ride in a car for two hours without nearly killing each other and giving my peace loving tie-dyed mind serious thoughts of child/teenicide.
It’s a broken world and love comes in many flavors, as the Greeks told us with their four words for whatever it is, that crazy little thing called loved...
Of course at a certain point, it gets simpler again.
Love is what you lose.
My father died in ’83, my mother in ’96. Children leave even though (if you’re lucky and the stars are right) they don’t die. They discard soccer uniforms, prom dresses, baby shoes and boots—the Barbies stay behind with the Legos and leave them behind to gather dust along with all the things you were going to do and never did and all the things you did or said or thought and wish you hadn’t—they slip away from their childhood like a snake sheds its skin.
Friends become acquaintances, acquaintances become memories, husbands and wives leave, brothers turn gray….
That’s when you learn that loving is the bravest thing you ever do. That anyone ever does. Because the last word that love ever says is always good-bye.
Now I’m in my early sixties rather than living in the Western world’s 60’s. More drugs but less fun. (Unless of course you consider staying alive and nominally sane fun. Which I do.) And love is all you need is a Blackberry commercial. (OK, I bothered to look it up.)
So?
I know I don’t need a Blackberry and at the moment don’t even want one. The commercial’s catchy though and if I weren’t a klutz and regular destroyer of cell phones I’d have an iPhone. (Instead I carry one that’s popular with construction workers and park rangers.)
So, don’t need a Blackberry, but what about love?
I have fallen in love so many times, the physical and emotional symptoms poets and scientists describe—and certainly not always with a potential sexual partner. A new baby floods body, heart and soul with oxytocin and the ability to go without sleep and not abandon the creature whose needs keep you from sleeping. I’ve been drawn by a glance from across the room, giggled and cried with friends, held a child with so much emotion that I laughed and cried.
So back to the 60’s in my sixties and peace and love and crunchy granola? Well, I can’t paint you a rainbow or tie dye a meadow, but here, in my sixties I think I can say, love is all I need. I’m not trying to say that a starving child in the Sudan just needs a big hug or that loving Ted Bundy would have saved his victims’ lives. This is a complicated, messy, and cruel world. Smart bombs kill stupidly. Unspeakable horrors never even make a small paragraph on the back pages of a newspaper.
A great, wide, wonderful world in which everything works for good and the all endings are happy? Well, as Papa Hemingway would say, “wouldn’t it be pretty to think so?”
But the world is. It exists and in itself that’s amazing. I am here, you are here. We try to understand what the hell or heaven is going on and what in the world or out of the world we are doing here? Or are supposed to be doing here?
And we love—write songs, change diapers, hug, kiss, make birthday cakes….
My mother was a shy woman, didn’t want to say boo to a goose. When my dad was dying, there wasn’t a doctor safe from her questions. She would hunt them down, notebook in hand, relentlessly asking questions and writing down every answer. Did he need something he didn’t get or get something he didn’t need? Someone would hear and hear and hear until the situation was resolved to her satisfaction.
This wasn’t being “in love.” (I love you but I’m not in love with you.) This was love as a fierce and active verb. No happy ending of course, just a miserable, painful death from cancer—regrets, sorrow, grief—grief and relief that the pain was gone and you didn’t have to watch him suffer and didn’t have to feel guilty or even a little bored when he was drugged and slept and you read magazines by his bed.
Love is an act of faith—at every wedding, every birth—maybe even at every divorce—there’s an act of faith that love is possible, that it can last—hang on through thick and thin, good and bad—make the long run or leave to try another track because love is possible.
Love is all you need. I think I finally learned about love when I learned to make tea the way my mother liked it. A tea bag steeped for exactly five minutes, two spoons of sugar to make it sweet, a squeeze of lemon or spoonful of bottle juice to make it sour. Five minutes made it too strong I thought and even slightly bitter.
So I would cheat and make the tea the way I thought she should like it. Until one morning something—might have been love—clubbed me over the head and said make the damn tea the way she likes it. Because that’s her tea and you let the words I love you roll so easy but you make her tea the way she doesn’t want it.
Love is all you need? From the vast distance of 63 years, I say yeah. Love is all you need.
Not love that hands you flowers or even sticky kisses.
The love you need is the ability, the grace, the gift of being able to love. Because when you do, when you love you make the tea the way she likes it.
Maybe you even figure out how to get some food to the child starving in the Sudan.
Love is all you need. When I was 18, back in the early 60’s, I think I might well have said yes and then, maybe, added books. Peace and freedom and full stomachs would have grown naturally, organically, from that one strong root, the original blessing of love. Even at 18 I didn’t think love was as simple as a song, but it was music and as natural as a sigh. And if I could have, I would have put my arms around the world and everyone in it and held them close,
Life changes. We change our circumstances and our circumstances change us. Shit happens. Children and bills come and the years when love is action and quite often as much fun as dragging an eight year old or yourself to the dentist. I love you still rolls off the tongue but sometimes as one more item on the endless To Do list. A question, a wish, a promissory note, sometimes spit like a curse, or pounded like a club up side the head: thud, thud, thud.: I-Love-You.
Oh, the drama of it. Of course those years weren’t endless drudgery and the bills to pay. They were a jungle, thick and rich and surprising, one swing of the machete and you turn to heartbreaking beauty, you pratfall into the mud, a wasp stings you, the piranhas needle your feet to the bone and your friend pulls you out of the slough and you laugh and drink coffee in a clearing.
But if you had hummed Love is all you need I might have laughed, spewing my coffee; I might have turned my head away so you wouldn’t see and let the tears flow. But I wouldn’t have been able to say yes. I would have told you that love is complicated, easy to say, hard to live, a choice—something willed and worked at. Oh, I still wanted to put my arms around the world and hold everyone close, but I knew how little good it would do in a world of stick thin kids with swollen bellies, people armed with guns and money, a world where four kids (well fed and, thankfully, unarmed) couldn’t ride in a car for two hours without nearly killing each other and giving my peace loving tie-dyed mind serious thoughts of child/teenicide.
It’s a broken world and love comes in many flavors, as the Greeks told us with their four words for whatever it is, that crazy little thing called loved...
Of course at a certain point, it gets simpler again.
Love is what you lose.
My father died in ’83, my mother in ’96. Children leave even though (if you’re lucky and the stars are right) they don’t die. They discard soccer uniforms, prom dresses, baby shoes and boots—the Barbies stay behind with the Legos and leave them behind to gather dust along with all the things you were going to do and never did and all the things you did or said or thought and wish you hadn’t—they slip away from their childhood like a snake sheds its skin.
Friends become acquaintances, acquaintances become memories, husbands and wives leave, brothers turn gray….
That’s when you learn that loving is the bravest thing you ever do. That anyone ever does. Because the last word that love ever says is always good-bye.
Now I’m in my early sixties rather than living in the Western world’s 60’s. More drugs but less fun. (Unless of course you consider staying alive and nominally sane fun. Which I do.) And love is all you need is a Blackberry commercial. (OK, I bothered to look it up.)
So?
I know I don’t need a Blackberry and at the moment don’t even want one. The commercial’s catchy though and if I weren’t a klutz and regular destroyer of cell phones I’d have an iPhone. (Instead I carry one that’s popular with construction workers and park rangers.)
So, don’t need a Blackberry, but what about love?
I have fallen in love so many times, the physical and emotional symptoms poets and scientists describe—and certainly not always with a potential sexual partner. A new baby floods body, heart and soul with oxytocin and the ability to go without sleep and not abandon the creature whose needs keep you from sleeping. I’ve been drawn by a glance from across the room, giggled and cried with friends, held a child with so much emotion that I laughed and cried.
So back to the 60’s in my sixties and peace and love and crunchy granola? Well, I can’t paint you a rainbow or tie dye a meadow, but here, in my sixties I think I can say, love is all I need. I’m not trying to say that a starving child in the Sudan just needs a big hug or that loving Ted Bundy would have saved his victims’ lives. This is a complicated, messy, and cruel world. Smart bombs kill stupidly. Unspeakable horrors never even make a small paragraph on the back pages of a newspaper.
A great, wide, wonderful world in which everything works for good and the all endings are happy? Well, as Papa Hemingway would say, “wouldn’t it be pretty to think so?”
But the world is. It exists and in itself that’s amazing. I am here, you are here. We try to understand what the hell or heaven is going on and what in the world or out of the world we are doing here? Or are supposed to be doing here?
And we love—write songs, change diapers, hug, kiss, make birthday cakes….
My mother was a shy woman, didn’t want to say boo to a goose. When my dad was dying, there wasn’t a doctor safe from her questions. She would hunt them down, notebook in hand, relentlessly asking questions and writing down every answer. Did he need something he didn’t get or get something he didn’t need? Someone would hear and hear and hear until the situation was resolved to her satisfaction.
This wasn’t being “in love.” (I love you but I’m not in love with you.) This was love as a fierce and active verb. No happy ending of course, just a miserable, painful death from cancer—regrets, sorrow, grief—grief and relief that the pain was gone and you didn’t have to watch him suffer and didn’t have to feel guilty or even a little bored when he was drugged and slept and you read magazines by his bed.
Love is an act of faith—at every wedding, every birth—maybe even at every divorce—there’s an act of faith that love is possible, that it can last—hang on through thick and thin, good and bad—make the long run or leave to try another track because love is possible.
Love is all you need. I think I finally learned about love when I learned to make tea the way my mother liked it. A tea bag steeped for exactly five minutes, two spoons of sugar to make it sweet, a squeeze of lemon or spoonful of bottle juice to make it sour. Five minutes made it too strong I thought and even slightly bitter.
So I would cheat and make the tea the way I thought she should like it. Until one morning something—might have been love—clubbed me over the head and said make the damn tea the way she likes it. Because that’s her tea and you let the words I love you roll so easy but you make her tea the way she doesn’t want it.
Love is all you need? From the vast distance of 63 years, I say yeah. Love is all you need.
Not love that hands you flowers or even sticky kisses.
The love you need is the ability, the grace, the gift of being able to love. Because when you do, when you love you make the tea the way she likes it.
Maybe you even figure out how to get some food to the child starving in the Sudan.
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