Hopeful Thinking

Our country, and even the world right now, is fraught with a deep lack of understanding for one another. We have sequestered ourselves into our little tribes of commonality, preferring to hear only the perspectives and opinions we share. We feel more divided than ever. This is an illusion, in most ways. For we are all deeply connected to one another whether we are willing to recognize it or not. But the borders we have drawn around our own ideologies are very real. We have a hard time listening to others. It feels unsafe. The rhetoric surrounding the subject of how to improve the quality of our world—and for whom—has revealed a deep layer of resentment on the part of those who feel left behind by social progress. You can see it in the rage of their tweets and posts. You can feel it in the way we avoid discussing it with the people we love the most for fear that our differences will divide us. I have always believed that history does not repeat itself in the way we think it ...

There’s a spiritual maxim which tells us that ‘we always get what we ask for.’ It’s a tenet of the law of attraction. It rings a bit like scripture, and it is, but this philosophy looks at the phenomenon of prayer from a different angle. Bluntly put, it means that if we are experiencing something today, whether good or bad, whether we realize it or not, it’s because we somehow asked for it yesterday. That seems like a harsh accusation to lay on someone who’s experiencing grief or hardship. Why would we ask for problems? The implication being that we are a failure at even daydreaming? Of course not. We never ask for sorrow. We have simply been trained to trust it more than joy. Our culture has a tendency to promote a paradigm of service to others at the expense of self. That second part is the flaw. ...at the expense of self. That’s the part which only ends up encouraging a polar opposite of “service to others” to occur: The exploitation of others to the benefit of self. The mo...

As I write my column this morning, it is the Fourth of July. I imagine the thousands of parade participants who, at this moment, are marching in parades down the Main Streets of America. Do they all know what they are marching for? Do they all march for the same thing? The short answer is yes. The long answer is a series of winding roads charting up the same mountain. Two in particular. One definition of the word ‘patriot’ is “a person who vigorously supports their country and is prepared to defend it against enemies or detractors.” That seems reasonable enough. Another offers, “A real patriot is someone who loves their country enough to speak up when they see something that needs to be changed; not someone who blindly assumes that their government knows best and is always right no matter what.” Definitely fair as well. The differing tones of those two definitions are trail markers along each path up the mountain. One is a more reserved and conservative viewpoint and the other...