Helping You Be the Change
[This article has also been published on the Huffington Post.]
Many of us are heaving a sigh of relief that this presidential election 2016 is drawing to a close, yet we also know that the hostilities that have been playing out in our nation these last many months are not simply going to evaporate after the last poll has closed and the last vote tallied.
We are going to be left with some important work to do — and we are going to need to be clear about what we are dealing with.
I have a friend who is an exceptional drummer, and she told me a story once of being in a drumming competition and advancing until it was just her and one other drummer remaining. During the break before the final round, she went to a cafe to get a cup of coffee and to try to figure out what she could do to wow the judges that she hadn’t already done.
As she reached for a packet of sugar she thought, “That’s it!!”
She was called up for her final performance and when she walked out on stage she had nothing in her hands. No djembe, no conga, no trap set. Nothing. She stepped up to the microphone, reached into her pocket, took out two packets of sugar and with them began creating subtle, complex rhythms that blew the judges away.
As you might have guessed, she won the competition.
I often think of that story because it has so many lessons to teach me, one of which has to do with risk-taking. I admire my friend’s courage, even when so much was at stake, to do something so original that it could have been seen as completely outlandish.
Her story also reminds me how much we crave the novel — something, anything, that will shake up our expectations. How refreshing it must have been for those judges to see someone dare to take such a creative risk!
What I think about most, though, when that story floats through my mind is what it teaches about the gift of quietness. We live in such a loud culture; we’re constantly bombarded with messages shouting for our attention, messages that keep getting louder and flashier in an effort to stand out from all the others.
The end result of this is what many of us experience as a kind of fatigue, where all we really want is a refreshing dose of quiet honesty and simple authenticity.
But it’s senseless to point the finger at the culture, as if it were to blame for our distractedness, because if we’ve done our inner work we know where all the culture’s bombastic insecurities come from. A culture, after all, is simply a mirror of what’s going on inside all of us, and those of us who have taken the time to really examine our own minds have no doubt felt like we landed smack in the middle of Times Square.
Living a spiritually-centered life, though, we compassionately notice that inner clamor and we tenderly dismiss it, recognizing it as nothing but the imaginary, often fearful, chattering of the ego-mind.
And then, finally, we begin to hear the quiet, beautiful, sweet rhythm of our own soul.
This past Tuesday, sitting with my spouse, Kip, in a packed sports bar watching the World Cup soccer match between the U.S.A. and Belgium, I was delighting in the comedy of the situation.
The gathering, mostly young people, many of them decked out in red, white and blue, beers in hand, crowded around the large flatscreen televisions, cheering and groaning together as though they were many bodies ruled by one mind.
The excitement was palpable. Maybe, just maybe the U.S. could pull off an upset and defeat the Belgian team to move on to the next round. Anything seemed possible in this World Cup that has already seen the dethroning of some of the world’s soccer powerhouses.
Thanks in large part to the extraordinary performance of their goal keeper, Tim Howard, the U.S. team managed to hold their own through the 90 minutes of play, and when the whistle sounded to end regular play the game was tied 0-0. During the break before overtime, we all took a breather. The T.V. volume was turned down, the bass-heavy music turned up, people mingled and, in the case of several of us women, stood in line for the restroom.
Not long after the 30 minutes of extra time began, Belgium scored its first goal, and the mood of the crowd instantly plummeted from excitement to disappointment, and then to resignation when Belgium scored yet again. A man behind me, angry, began using expletives more liberally and another young man within ear shot, clinging to the possibility of victory, said, “You gotta believe!”Continue Reading
Each morning I begin my day reading a poem by Mary Oliver. Yesterday morning I read “Humpback,” from her book American Primitive. The poem brought me to tears.
Oliver has a unique gift of opening herself to Reality—the Reality so many of us spend our days asleep to—and of finding words to convey it such that its radiance can pierce our own minds.
It got me thinking about how the poet’s foremost job is to be awake to life, to notice things that most of us don’t. Only by being awake does the poet have anything to say. Only after her raw encounter with Reality does she turn her attention to the difficult work of finding the words to describe what she has witnessed, words that have the power to stir her readers into our own wakefulness.
All of this made me think of Ellen Langer, a professor of psychology at Harvard, who for over 35 years has been researching the effects of mindfulness on health and happiness.
Langer takes a different approach to mindfulness than most of us are accustomed to. For her, mindfulness doesn’t require a rigorous practice of meditation or yoga. And in her opinion admonitions such as “Be present” are useless, because when we aren’t present, we aren’t present to know we aren’t present.
For Langer mindfulness is quite simple. It’s simply noticing, setting the intention to go about our day noticing things we’ve never noticed before. This practice pulls us out of the sleepwalker’s life in which our body is on automatic pilot while our mind wanders through the maze of its own fictions.
Later on yesterday I was walking home, following Langer’s advice to notice things. As I walked by a flowerbed near our house I noticed the shadow that the cap stone cast on the stuccoed wall. Its dance of light and shadow looked like an inverted mountain range.
I had walked by that flowerbed countless times. But this time, having set my intention to notice, I saw something beautiful I’d never seen before.
Langer is right. Noticing is a path to mindfulness, one that doesn’t demand we squeeze yet one more thing into our crowded schedule. After all, it takes just as long to walk home mindlessly as it does mindfully.
This simple practice can help us live more like poets—awake to the radiant Reality that is always present when we let ourselves see.
My spouse, Kip, is an avid soccer fan, and for the last several days life in our household has revolved around World Cup soccer games. On Monday night I returned home from a lecture at the library to find Kip elated over the U.S. team’s win over Ghana, the “nemesis” that had eliminated the U.S. from the last two World Cups.
John Brooks, an unexpected substitute who came into the game after one of the lead players for the U.S. left with an injury, scored the winning goal with a perfectly executed header.
For those who pay attention to soccer this was a fairly remarkable moment, because John Brooks had never played in any competitive game for the U.S. national team and he was the first substitute player to score for the U.S. in any World Cup game. But what made his winning goal even more interesting, at least to me, is that it was a dream come true, literally.
A few nights before the match Brooks had a dream in which he won the game for the U.S. with a header, very much like the one he carried out in waking life, in the 88th minute of the game. In waking life his goal occurred in the 86th minute. Close enough.Continue Reading
Every summer growing up I attended Vacation Bible School at our Presbyterian church in downtown Denver. We would do crafts, sing songs, memorize scripture verses about God’s love, and try to cream each other in games of dodge ball in the church basement.
One summer one of our craft projects was to make a cross out of matches. We took partially burned matches and pasted them onto a cross-shaped piece of cardboard. Then our teacher had us glue the cardboard cross to a piece of contact-paper-covered plywood and told us to find an appropriate scripture passage to write on it.
I loved doing crafts, and this project was right up my alley. Painstakingly, I pasted my matches onto the cardboard, lining them up neatly, then glued the cross onto the backing. Then I thumbed through my Bible to find just the right scripture verse.
I was excited when I landed on the perfect verse. I carefully wrote it out, and proudly took my project to my teacher to show her.
As soon as she looked at it I could tell by her expression that I had done something wrong. She didn’t say what it was, but there seemed to be a problem with the verse I had chosen: “If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross.”Continue Reading
Several years ago I was attending a Quaker meeting when a young woman stood up and began singing, slowly, the old gospel song “Down By the Riverside.”
I’m gonna lay down my sword and shield down by the riverside…
After singing a few lines, she spoke the first few words of the lyric, adding an emphasis that opened up the song in a new way for me. “I’m gonna lay down my sword — and shield.”
In all the years I’d sung that song I’d scarcely paid any attention to the shield part. After all, it was a song about studying war no more, and war, as we all know, is about swords.
But when she emphasized those words — “and shield” — I realized that laying down the shield is even more radical than laying down the sword, because to lay down one’s shield is to lay down one’s fear.
In truth, we rarely lay down our shield. We spend a lot of energy trying to defend ourselves against the threat of attack, whether it be of terrorists, lawsuits, or even personal embarrassment. If you start paying attention, you’ll probably notice how often you use the shield in everyday interactions. Every time you feel the impulse to defend your opinion, or your experience, or your worth you are holding forth the shield.Continue Reading
