Races finished. And not.

New continents. And familiar ones.

Entries brimming with exclamation points and joys. And others with ellipses and tears.

Shouting matches. And songs.

Resolve. And retreat.

Stories. And stanzas when a story simply would not suffice.

Minor notes. And major ones.

Published thoughts. And private ones.

And most of all, the trading in of an imaginary horizon for the one in front of me.

Max Comes Home

What this clip touches on is true, even if you’ve done a darn good job of navigating the difficulties that come with having this lot in life, it still can be really hard. Arduous even. My hope is that this clip will be a small catalyst towards the community at large acknowledging this.

So, when a word or string of words have struck a chord with me and caused my heart to go, “yes, that’s it, that’s how I want to live, that’s how I want to love, that’s how I want to go about my day…,”  I’ve tried to sit with it for a few days, to think through the implications of those words being planted and manifested as something tangible to the world around me. Some of the words have been thrown out for I realized they weren’t actually something I believed, much less wanted to be part of my fabric. Others have taken root and begun to sprout up in all sorts of unusual and exciting ways. And others I’ve wanted to throw out all together because they’re difficult to implement, yet, I know I must carry them with me for I know them to be true, right and important.

More than anything this approach has caused me to keep my mouth shut when I otherwise wouldn’t for, “if our lips are moving, but our actions don’t match – we become a badly dubbed foreign film, without the benefit of subtitles” (Kristin Armstrong, http://bit.ly/6lATv1) and I don’t want to live life that way.

Truncated thought often replaces the profound

Volume becomes a poser for meaningfulness

Ideas are birthed without gestation, and it shows

Five minutes later the yelling started up again, at which point I started to get angry. First of all, we were in a public place and I think it’s rude to behave in such a way that disrupts the peace for those around you. Secondly, this guy was yelling so loudly I couldn’t even hear what was being said in Obama’s speech. Most of all, I was frustrated that this guy wasn’t providing Obama a chance to speak before passing judgement. Moreover, the thing that was being judged wasn’t  the speech at all, it was Obama himself.  As the swearing and yelling continued, I hurriedly finished my workout and left the gym with a whole new pile of frustrations.

As I was leaving, I checked my Twitter and Facebook feeds to see  how others were reacting to the speech. Reading people’s comments I quickly realized that the experience I’d had the gym, where preemptive judgement was embraced as opposed to critical thinking, was the norm and not the exception.  Posting after posting cast the speech and Obama in either a black or a white light, save for maybe two comments, there was no middle ground. What is it about our culture that we prefer to immediately place things into pre-determined categories as opposed to wrestling through the tension, ambiguity and nuance that are so prevalent in issues of politics, faith, immigration and the like?

I so appreciate Seth Godin’s take on matters such as this (from Tribes):

“A fundamentalist is a person who considers whether a fact is acceptable to his religion before he explores it.  As opposed to a curious person who explores first and then considers whether or not he wants to accept the ramifications.  A curious person embraces the tension between his religion and something new, wrestles with it and through it, and then decides whether to embrace the new idea or reject it. Curious is the key word.  [It has] nothing to do with organized religion.  It has to do with a desire to understand, a desire to try, a desire to push whatever envelope is interesting. [...] What we’re seeing is that fundamentalism really has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with an outlook regardless what your religion is.”

Perhaps the reason we’re prone to reduce, simplify and prematurely compartmentalize complex situations is that engagement in critical thinking and dialogue may lead to us having to admit we don’t have all of the answers (and let’s face it, if there’s anything Americans are supposed to have at all times its answers….) All of this makes me wonder, will there ever be a day that critical thinking is embraced and and not feared in this country?

As we approach November I’ve noticed that something’s missing… it’s eerily quiet. Sure there’s lots of political noise occurring on newscasts, the radio and TV but the activity seems to be contained to those spaces & the community at large isn’t talking about these elections. In fact, most people don’t even know there’s an election coming up. In 2008 everyone was talking about the election, you couldn’t escape it. Tina Fey even came out of semi-SNL retirement for the conversation. I get it, the mid-term elections don’t have the level of pomp that you’d see in a presidential election. We’ve all been told that the decisions of the president have less bearing on our day to day lives than those made by the Senate, the House or local councils but a lot more work is required to learn the names, faces and deciding issues for those elections. I don’t really know where I’m going with all of this. I guess coming out of the last election I’d hoped that the energy and spirit of 2008 would spill over to the community at large, that we’d continue to engage in the issues and decisions that affect our lives. Maybe it has but I’m not seeing it.