Living Done Well

Let Them Go Shopping

2008-08-21T17:30:00Z

This article is something of a confession of sorts. For most of my life I have not been politically active. In fact, in spite of the fact that I love politics and even worked for the United States Congress, I never actually voted in a national election until john Kerry ran for President because I desperately wanted to get rid of Bush. But now, as I begin to consider the status of my citizenship in conjunction with my deepest hopes for the world that I will one day leave behind, it has become increasingly clear to me that silence is a betrayal. And at a time when so much of our lives are filled with the inauthentic artifacts of a meandering culture, the center must hold.

That is to say, maybe there was a time when we could lose ourselves in the sluggish extravagances of the American

life, but that time has unequivocally passed. The world is a very different place; and now as we stand in the shadows of our collective preoccupation with wealth and superficiality, we are finding that the experience of being an insignificant king of a forgotten hill will never give us the sense of accomplishment we so desperately desire. We are a nation asleep at the wheel of history. The hour is late and soon the light of the setting sun will move beyond our grasps leaving us with memories of what might have been.

And I don’t care what our leaders say, we simply cannot allow ourselves to become so profoundly trivial that we substitute celebrity for greatness. Being famous on the Internet or having your face on the cover of every magazine in America doesn’t make you important because greatness is an inside job. It happens in the dark. It happens in the heart; and long before we go public we must interrogate the substance of our lives in private; behind closed doors, as it were, because some miracles can only happen when we are alone. This is what 911 was really all about. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 were one of those moments in the history of a nation that rarely come without the shedding of blood. I don’t know what it is about us, but we never listen to life until we are surrounded by death. What is it about death that makes us embrace life so unconditionally? And since we’re on the subject, what is it about life that makes us so oblivious to its fragility that we live as if living is forever when clearly it is not?

Life and death. That’s where we were in 2001. For a few days in the fall of an otherwise uneventful year, an entire nation wrestled with the task of finding meaning in our questions; and for the first time in the short history of a generation we were confronted with the possibility of a defining moment, but instead of reaching for something noble we elected to go shopping. We went shopping. And if that were not enough we did so upon the general advice of our leaders. Or to say the same, in response to the sheer banality of evil we were encouraged to medicate our sorrow with a consumerism.

Nations come and go, but the great ones have at least one thing in common, they repent!

And Then There Was You

2008-06-17T01:33:00Z

Forty years ago Dr. Martin Luther King admonished us that we had better learn to live together as brothers or we would perish together as fools; and now the moment of truth has finally come upon us. And I wish I could say that for all of our advances we have finally mastered the basic science of survival but it appears that our propensity for foolishness continues to be greater than our capacity for brotherhood. And if (forty years ago) Dr. King was right on philosophical grounds, today his admonishment has become a matter of practical necessity as now, for the first time in human history, most of the world's population live in cites. And although the fact that more of us are living in cities may not strike you as something significant, at the very least, it should remind all of us that we are,

as it were, more connected than we have ever been; and where once the geography of our lives isolated us from the truth of our inter-independence it has now become clear, however, that the literal landscape of our lives has changed.

But the real challenge of our “emerging” interdependence has more recently manifested itself in the international food shortages effecting countries across the globe. What began in Australia with farmers planting fewer crops for consumption because of the effects of global warming (and the commercial benefits of cash crops such as grapes and bio fuels) coupled with farming subsidies in other industrial countries has resulted in food shortages and an 83% increase in food prices in developing countries around the world. Follow the logic. More of us must buy our food because for the first time in human history more of us live in cities; a fact which implicitly has come to mean that fewer of us have the capacity to feed ourselves. That is to say, for the first time in human history most of the world’s population does not have the aptitude or the capacity to produce the food we need to survive. Consequently, more of us will have to depend on fewer of us to keep the rest of us alive.

We are such fragile creatures. If we don’t wash we stink. If we get sick we die. In the summer the heat drives us out and in the winter the cold drives us in, proving that we are still slaves to forces the Mastodon mastered ages ago. And yet the pretense of human arrogance is astounding. We live as if our existence is in no way predicated upon the presence of other people and yet we silently hope that the coming of age will in no way find us alone. But this is beyond needing each other. There are millions of people who can’t afford to eat because the potential profit associated with bio fuels has exacerbated our propensity for greed. People are starving because the production of grain and rice for human consumption is not as profitable as the production of bio fuels. And while it is true that we need to produce alternative energies for the sake of the planet (and perhaps even for national security?) it is no less the case, however, that saving the planet at expense of its people is not a solution to the problem!

But in spite of the apparent cruelty of the moment, I still believe that there is still another word. This is not the final statement about us. We are, in a phrase, so much better than this. And although history is repeat with the bleached bones of civilizations who failed to subdue the darker impulses of our humanity, there have always been a few committed individuals who resisted the power of this common temptation and appealed the angels of our better nature. I still believe that somewhere in the bruising darkness there is still light—you are that light. And wherever you see greed, selfishness, and cruelty reducing men into statistics, women into tragic cycles of poverty, and children into dust, we need you to shine. A new day is coming; and each of us in the particularities of who we are by virtue of our distinctive genius must act as midwives to this moment. Something is happening. And what though the fields be lost, all is not lost where there is still life, where there is still love, where there is still you. So keep shining like the sun—the world needs you.

We Are All Dancers

2008-05-29T13:15:00Z

The other day I was in the office of a friend of mine and I overheard a conversation between two women about the vacation one of them had just taken. Apparently, one of the women had gone away to one of the islands in the Caribbean and while she was there, her husband tried to get her to go dancing but she refused because as she put it, “I am not a dancer.” And as I stood in the office of a doctor who specializes in treating people who are battling cancer, I wanted to weep for all the women and all the men who have overcome cancer and depression, heart break and set backs and have become beautiful dancers and don’t even know it.

I wanted grab that woman by the hand and tell her that none of us can survive the night seasons of life without learning how to dance. We have all had to be big in tight places and balance the wait of what we wanted against the pain of what we had; we have all had to stand alone while facing the challenge of helping other people while we were ourselves silently falling apart. We have all loved and then lost what we loved only to love again. And if that were not enough, we have all been wrong at least once.

Life is always changing. And those of us who faithfully endeavor to live at our best must learn how to dance to the music life happens to be playing at the time. We are all dancers. We are all moving to the music of our lives.

And the secret to living is learning how to move gracefully through the circumstances of life with dignity and style because there are no wallflowers at this dance. From the moment we are born until the day that we die we are all dancing. We are all rising and falling, laughing and crying, slowing down and picking up speed; and this is the dance that we do and it is glorious in our eyes.

And so we dance, sometimes in the company of strangers and at other times with tears in our eyes, but the dance goes on. Each day and at every turn we move to the beat of our lives with a sense of reverence and sometimes even gratitude because we must, for to stand still in a sea of endless motion would ensure our destruction and the life that lives in us will have none of that. Everything dances. Even the sun dances across the sky to the music of many colors and at night the darkness does it own dance to sacred sounds of moonlight.

So let there be music. Let there be joy. But most of all, let there be dancing!

Never Give Up

2008-05-15T21:52:00Z

David Baltimore (the Nobel prize winning biologist) reported in a recent address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science that the AIDS virus has evolved in such a way that priming the immune system (the usual goal of a vaccine) appears to be an ineffective plan of attack. Dr. Baltimore went on to say that efforts to create a vaccine have failed leaving “no hopeful route to success” and that “the best hope may lie in the biological equivalent of a Hail Mary pass” or what might best be described as a combination of gene therapy, stem cells, and immunologic therapy to thwart the disease.

This rather bleak assessment of the situation comes in stark contrast to the excitement researchers expressed in 1984 when they predicted that a vaccine would be ready to go to

market in three years. But now, 25 years later, the prognosis is grim and every attempt at developing a vaccine has ended in failure leaving some (even one AIDS organization) to conclude that the best way to deal with the pandemic is to give up on a cure altogether and focus our resources on testing, treatment, and prevention. Now that the effort to find a cure seems to have ended in failure, and after a quarter a century of toil and struggle, many in the scientific community are beginning to “lose faith” in the possibility of an all encompassing cure; but to them we say—giving up is not an option.

As it stands over 22 million people have already died from AIDS and the numbers are only growing. Right now there are 42 million people living with HIV/AIDS and 74% of them live in sub-Saharan Africa. By the year 2010 five countries (Ethiopia, Nigeria, China, India, and Russia which make up 40% of the world’s population) will add 50 to 70 million people to the numbers of those already severely infected. And if that were not enough, 14,000 people are infected every day. That’s 14,000 new cases of infection happening every single day in both the industrial and developing world.

Anyone could understand how the recent failure of health officials to develop a vaccine is a disconcerting reality to say the least, but this is not a time for us to lose perspective. In spite of how we feel about the lack of significant progress in this regard, we must resist the temptation to take the situation out of context; because while it is true that AIDS is a rather new phenomenon, the fight against infectious diseases, however, is not.

Take for instance the battle against Polio. We now know that Polio was first detected in the United States in 1921 but a vaccine to cure the dreaded disease was not developed until 1955. It took 34 years for researchers to develop a successful treatment and at no point in the journey was the process easy or immediately successful. And while it is true that AIDS is more of a pandemic than Polio seems to have been, it is no less the case that the fight against Polio exacted the same amount of courage and commitment that the battle against AIDS seems to be demanding from researchers today.

What about the Bubonic Plague? Here is a disease that began in the 14 century but a vaccine wasn’t developed until the middle of the 20^th century. For nearly six hundred years courageous men and women dedicated their lives to the singular vision of eradicating “the black death” from the face of the earth. And were it not for their generational commitment to the possibility of human flourishing, millions of people might still be needlessly suffering.

Just like AIDS there are ways to prevent the Bubonic Plague, but the ability to prevent something should never be substituted for the capacity to cure it altogether. Each comes with its own reward, but having one without the other has not (at least not in the case of AIDS) prevented the death of millions of people around the world.

Yes we can prevent AIDS, but the development of a vaccine will not only protect us from the virus, it will, in a manner of speaking, protect us from ourselves. AIDS is a uniquely human reality because the virus is linked to some of the central elements of our humanity, namely, sexuality, addiction, lust, and perhaps most of all indiscretion. And it is in this sense that AIDS is a true pandemic (from the Greek, Pan meaning: all and Demos meaning: people) because every human being has within them the capacity for infection regardless of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation. We are all so tragically human and the possibility of making a mistake is ever before us. It is in many respects an inescapable reality and trying to use prevention as the only way to fight against AIDS is like trying to stop people from arguing by preventing them to talk. It might work but it just isn’t likely.

This is what makes the conundrum of AIDS such as complex situation. We aren’t just fighting against the mutating configurations of the virus itself, we are also battling human nature, human fallibility, the seductive influence of addiction and desire. And while it is true that everybody makes a mistake, it is no less the case that nobody should have to die for it.

Maybe health officials and researchers should begin to see their work as less a matter a science and more a matter of faith. Not faith in a God or some other transcendent reality, but faith in the possibilities of persistence. And maybe with a little faith in spite of the facts some unknown scientist in some distant part of the world might be inspired to advance the cause for a cure and bring hope to millions of people across the globe.

Perhaps members of the scientific community could learn a little something from those of us who believe in something other science; because it is becoming increasingly clear that the race to find a cure will depend on another distinctly human capacity, namely, the capacity to hope. The situation is so dyer that we must leverage all of our ingenuity and genius in the effort to find a cure. And while it is true that we are indeed fallible creatures full indiscretions and vices, it is no less the case that the great gift of our humanity is the capacity to be greater than the sum of our parts.

This is not a call to religion because hope has no particular religious affiliation. And besides, at this point in the struggle we don’t need any more ideologies getting in the way. What we need now are inspired people who (either in service to their religion or by way of some other motivating factor) believe that healing is possible, that you never know what tomorrow will bring, and that our best days are still ahead of us.

To all the researchers currently working to find a cure for AIDS we simply say, “just when the caterpillar thought it was over--she became a butterfly.” Never give up!

Rejection Is Never Easy

2008-05-15T16:10:23Z

Rejection is never easy; but when you understand that you can get what you need somewhere else, the experience of being rejected looses it’s power. People who reject you do so because they believe that you are not good enough to be apart of their world. And when you think about all the people who have ever rejected you, the one thing they all have in common is the belief that they had something you wanted; and while this might in fact be the case, you must always remember that they are not the only ones who have it. There are 300 million people in the United States of America and billions of people in the world and when one person rejects you it is important to remember that somewhere on this planet there is someone who would love to have the chance to give you what they won’t.

The real problem of rejection is not the fact that people say no, but rather the inconvenient truth that too often we build our lives on the hope of them saying yes. We needed them to say yes. And whenever you have too much invested in yes—a simple no has the power destroy you. I have seen people beg their into other people’s lives. I have watched others try to buy their way into relationships—but in the end you can’t make people love you. And why would you want to?

If you have to beg your way into a relation-ship, it's prob-ably a good indication that you were never supposed to be there in the first place. You don’t have to beg anybody for anything because you can get what you need somewhere else. So let them say no. Let them walk away.

Let them reject you because as long as life is saying yes...it doesn’t matter who says no. When you don’t need to be in—the fact that someone locked you out really doesn’t bother you as much. It is when we learn how to walk alone that we become author of our own horoscopes. Stop worrying about them and write your own future.

Homesick

2008-05-14T15:58:00Z

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmAon-1ZOCY

We all know people who moved to far away cities in search of a better life—only to discover that the life they found was a lot like the one they left because greatness is an inside job. And no matter where you go, you can’t get away from yourself. If you were a mess in Chicago the odds are you will be mess in New York. Changing your address won’t make your life any better until you change your mind. Real change happens in the heart. And long before you will ever be able to change your life, you must be about the business of transforming your thinking one thought at a time.

Lil Wayne is right. Staying within yourself is how you learn how to be at home wherever you are. And yes, you can be at home wherever you are even if it’s not where you want to be. There are too many people who suffer from “homesickness” because they are never at home within themselves. We think the grass is always greener in other places but people are people and nobody’s life is perfect. Loving yourself is one thing, but being at home with who you are is an entirely different journey altogether.

And the genius of Lil Wayne in this video is that he understands that we reproduce how we feel about ourselves in almost everything we do. Our homes, our relationships, our jobs, our finances, and even our spiritual lives tell the hidden story of what we think about ourselves when nobody is looking. In spite of the public displays that we make, there lives within us a secret conversation that we have about ourselves, and the results of this conversation can be devastating if the words we use are full of fear and insecurity. The great struggle in life is to protect your heart against all the things that come to make you small. Understand that people who don’t know how to protect their hearts don’t know how to protect their homes, their jobs, their money, or their families; because whenever you lose yourself, everything connected to you is lost in the process.

Just like music, life is personal and the only way to be good at it is to be intentional. Today we celebrate imagination and all the people who dare to be themselves. We see you. You inspire us. You make us want to go home.

Shine!

2008-05-06T20:50:00Z

Recently I was in New Orleans for a conference and spent the better part of my time in the lower ninth ward. You do remember the lower ninth don’t you? How could any of us forget what happened in New Orleans when the levies broke and for four days thousands of people were stranded in the streets of a major American city without food or water? How could any of us forget what we saw on television that week or how we felt as the coming days brought no relief to the victims of Katrina and the people of New Orleans in particular. And as I stood on the saddest soil in the United States of America I could hear the melancholy music of the levies, the sweet sound of conscience, and the requiem of some inner voice reminding me of why God loved King and Gandhi, Mother Teresa and Eleanor Roosevelt. They were

all great souls; and in the ordinary expression of their common genius they found the courage to live for something greater than themselves.

People who are only motivated by their personal interest will soon be forgotten after their time here on earth is done; but those of us who find the courage to speak for the least of these, who advocate for children and perhaps even for the child in us, who believe in the dignity of every expression of our collective humanity even if we disagree with the person or their lifestyle, for those of us who work for possibility and not for a check, who give without needing something in return, and for those of us who know the joy of celebrating someone else’s success, history, even if it is a story told only once, will not forget that we were here.

Martin Luther King didn’t have a laptop, a cell phone, or a fax machine but he changed the course of human history with what he had, because whenever you are doing what you were born to do– you don’t need a lot to be effective at making difference. And the moment you become more concerned about your legacy than your rent, you will, in that hour, find yourself in the company of greatness.

True greatness is a perspective, a way being in the world; it is an unshakeable belief in the nobility of life in spite of its apparent cruelty. The world has never seen a life like yours and after you are gone it will never see another like you again. You are, in a word, an original soul, a beautiful mind, but your gifts are not your own; they belong to the rest of us; not just to your family or to the people you know, they belong to the world; even to people who hate you and oppose you at every turn, it is to them that you must be willing to give the most.

We need you to shine. People who have never met you and will never see your face need you to spread your wings in tight places so that the power to fly will be real to them. The children of Bangladesh and the Sudan need to hear how you refused to dim your light even amid the horrors of an unspeakable situation so that somewhere in the bruising darkness they will feel the glow of what you do and know that life will make away. So keep shining like the sun-the world needs you.

Issues

2008-05-06T20:14:00Z

Did you listen to the song? If so, let’s begin with something of an observation: you will never be successful at becoming the person you desire to be until you learn how to manage your issues. And make no mistake about it–we all have issues. We are all living with unanswered questions, unresolved insecurities and certain irreducible fears that live at the center of our lives and at times make us less than who we are. Now I know that we all have problems but the difference is this: problems happen to us but issues happen in us. Our issues are the experiences, questions, and longings that penetrate deep into the core of who we are; and even when our problems change, our issues remain the same because try as we might to deny it, all of our lives have been constructed around the

presence of an irreducible shame, a seminal moment, a dark night of the soul, if you will.

And I wish I could tell you that one day all of your issues will be resolved, but nothing could be further from the truth. Even in the Bible, great men and women were constantly struggling with their issues, and a part of what made them great is the fact that they took the sadness of their inner conflicts and transformed what should have been something dark and full of dissonance into something remarkably melodious and beautiful.

None of us are perfect–but we can use the worst in us to make the best in us come alive. Sometimes before we can help–we must hurt. Your weaknesses keep you humble, they keep you grounded; and when you least expect it sometimes they even make you great. Anything that has the power to make you cry has hidden within it the power to make you reach for something greater than yourself and this is the essence of true greatness.

These are the issues of our lives; and each morning as we rise to face the coming of the day, knowing all the while that a reason to cry lurks beneath the surface of the smiles we bare…and yet we smile because it's good to be alive.

Smile

2008-04-29T22:00:00Z

Never underestimate the power of a smile. You’d be surprised at how powerful a smile can be when used properly and in the presence of people who long to be understood. A recent study revealed that women smile more than men and this fact alone might have something to do with why they also live longer. Smiling releases endorphins which function as the body’s natural anti-depressant, so its kind of hard to smile and not feel better; which is amazing when you think about it because people are always looking for ways to feel better about themselves but they never consider how easy it is to get there.

We are never as far as we think we are, and what we want out of life is never as impossible as it seems. Half the struggle in life is finding the

courage to show up, and I say since you’re here you might as well enjoy the moment. Smile. Your smile tells the people who love you that you’re just as human as they are. It tells the people who want to help you that you welcome their support, and it tells all the people who are still trying to figure you out that when it comes to this subject you will always know more than they do, so don’t even waste your time. Smiling lets your enemies know that you are not intimidated by them and try as they might to knock you off your game—you’re not even worried about it because you can’t lose at being yourself.

But there is something else. Smiling relieves you of the responsibility to respond to stupidity and keeps you from becoming petty and small. When you smile you say to people that you’re in control, you tell them that they can’t make you respond to their foolishness. Your smile tells people that you brought your joy with you and there’s nothing that they can do about it.

I believe that you ought to be able to smile at least half as long as you’ve cried. Never let your struggles separate you from your joy. And I know that smiling won’t fix all of your problems; and it won’t make everything better overnight but it can remind you of whom you are. The simple act of smiling has the power to create within us a single spark of joy which might to our surprise set the totality of our lives ablaze with passion and self-confidence. You’d be surprised at you can do with a smile; but perhaps most of all, you’d be surprised at what a smile can do for you.

Sing Girl!

2008-04-29T18:20:00Z

I love this video. For years I have been a fan of Jill Scott but this video took me beyond being a fan and introduced me to her as a philosopher of the human condition. In the video she sings about a relationship between two individuals but her song interwoven with an understanding of the deeper transactions of the human cause. She sings not only to what is happening between them but she also sings to what is happening beyond them and within them as well.

This is of course what Ellison called the lower frequencies and often when we are engaged in the scared art of trying to love other people the experience of loving them is conditioned and complicated by their silence, and by all the ways they have been shaped and misshaped by the

vicissitudes of life. Even in the simplest of human gestures there are a multiplicity of meanings and implications at work behind the languages we employ to communicate the fundamental truths of our lives. We are at our core such complicated creatures and loving other people demands that we master the subtleties that come along with living ones life in the presence of an enduring mystery. And the irony of every of relationship is that while we hope to find someone who will bring answers to our questions, what we really find, however, is someone who is as lost as we were; and yet the experience of being lost together is what makes life together so remarkably transformative.

A love that has not yet felt the need to plead its case in the presence of unrepentant ears is a love too immature to be trusted. Because at its best, that is to say because we are often at our worst relationships are complicated situations and we must be willing to endure the mystery until it has worked its way into magic. This is the love of which Jill Scott sings. It is not love at first sight nor is it the love of a wedding day high in the Everglades set forever in the bosom of the sun. She sings of a love formed in the crucible of an abiding confrontation with despair. Hers is a love made weary after years of courageous giving. It is deeper than a thousand midnights and wider than the space between your ears. Her love, and consequently her song is sung in the key of remembrance. It is real. It is broken and needs no instrumentation because its tonality is the result of what happens when hope collides with sorrow. There in the strange and tenuous musing of wanting to let go but needing to hold is where great music comes from. She sings from her soul and when the soul begins to sing the music is always acapella because the hand can never keep up with the heart.

Sing girl!

Everything Must Change

2008-04-25T21:16:00Z

You must never forget that the people who hired you didn't hire you because of what you knew, they hired you because of what you could learn; but when you begin to complain about the different changes being made at your job you implicitly suggest to them that maybe you have exhausted your capacity to grow; and no manager wants to work with somebody who won’t grow. Being able to adjust to new dynamics tells your boss that you’re prepared to go anywhere she goes. It signals to the people who monitor your progress that you can bloom wherever you are planted. And that kind of attitude will make you an asset to any

organization. Change is not an insult to what you’ve already done—it’s an opportunity for you to do more. Without change we would never grow, we would never become anything other than what we are. People don’t like change because it means that we no longer have all the answers. When things change it is an indication that our answers are no longer valid, but companies don’t become great because they hire people who have all the answers—they become great because they hire people who ask great questions. You don’t need to have all the answers. What you need is the courage to ask a great question and when you question you make you clear to everyone involved that you’re investing in the change rather than complaining about it.

You go to work to be paid--not to feel good about yourself; so don’t expect to be loved, validated, appreciated, or even liked by the people you work for. The only thing that they owe you is a paycheck and once they’ve given you that, your job has fulfilled its obligation to you.

If you need to feel validated or appreciated—go home. Feeling good about yourself is why you have family and friends. The people you work with are professional partners, that is to say, they don’t really know you and they are not obligated to help you maintain a positive attitude about yourself.

Let’s be clear about this, your job is what you do so that you can become what you love. Too many people strive to be great at work but are mediocre at home and what they don’t realize is that your job is not your masterpiece; your masterpiece is at home.

Your children, your marriage, your relationships, your friends, your significant other, and your passions constitute the living legacy you are creating with the enduring witness of your life, not your job. When your time on this planet is done the people you used to work for will have somebody sitting at your desk within a month, but the people who loved you will never be the same. They are the ones that will speak well of you and cause your memory to live on into perpetuity; and you should want them to have better things to say about you than the people you work for.

Be your best wherever you are but do your best work at home!