Hopeful Thinking

Modern culture loves the word flawless. You look flawless, dahling. I feel flawless, dahling. Well, good for both of them. I don’t buy it.   Flawless isn’t a goal or an accomplishment. It is a state of being too far above our pay grade to comprehend. Seeking flawlessness is like a dog chasing its tail. It’s already there. No need to work so hard to obtain it. Part of the problem is the way we think about the word flaw. We don’t really know which of our characteristics are truly flawed and which ones are more properly categorized as features. Where is the line in the sand? We would love to know, but is that search worth it? Stop chasing your tail. So now that we have dispensed with the need to seek flawlessness, let’s grapple with the alternative: acceptance of things about ourselves which may each walk like a flaw and talk like a flaw but might be more appropriately thought of as doorways. It’s difficult to acknowledge being wrong. You’re probably flinching right now...

What will you wish you had done with your life while on your deathbed? Of course, that sounds like a morbid thought, but consider it for a moment. While lying there, after hopefully a long life, what will you look back on with fondness? With regret? With longing? And here’s a most important question: What will you look back on which seemed like a huge deal at the time, but was really not very much at all? To what do you give too much importance now that will mean virtually nothing in the final moments of your life? Think about the dramas around you. Some of which you may even be perpetuating yourself. Think of the grudges you hold. Think of your enemies. On your deathbed, will you wish you had reconciled? Will the slights and injuries you sustained be worth it in the end? We have so little time on this earth. So little time to make amends. So little time to do the things we always dreamed of doing. So little time to rebuild the bridges we have burned. Make the most of what ...

It isn’t what you think it isn’t. It’s probably closer to what you think it is than you realize, but not necessarily in the ways you’d expect. Finally, for the record, I don’t claim to know what I’m talking about. I will do my best anyway. The words racism, bigotry, and hatred have lately introduced in us a brand new level of fatigue. We have become exhausted of our despair. We are uncomfortable in conversations with loved ones. For many, to have been so mistaken about the deep fears and negative biases still present in our country has been eye-opening and tragic. None of us knows what to do next. It is terrifying to see the violence escalating all around us. Hold tight. In the end, I truly and most sincerely believe, all shall be well. There is only one true human trajectory and the overall trend is always upward. It has always been upward. So, fear not in that regard. The concern is what to do in the meantime to hoist that natural trend even more in favor of all humanity. Es...

We love to declare that nothing is perfect. It makes us feel better for the flaws we see everywhere and in ourselves. We especially take comfort in the idea that no one is perfect because it lets us off the hook for our own insufficiency. We feel it is preferable to call out our shortcomings in advance just to make sure that others know our damage is not unknown to us. We make fun of ourselves first, that no one beats us to it. Yet I think we’ve been looking at the wrong part of ourselves when deciding whether or not we are perfect. I think we need some schooling on what is and isn’t perfect about our existence. Years ago I purchased my first “self-healing” cutting mat. It’s designed to close the thin gash made from scoring it with a razor when using it to cut paper or fabric. The slight scar left behind isn’t really gone or utterly invisible, but it is minimized. It prolongs the life of the mat versus those whose scars accumulate and too soon gauge the surface beyond use. Cl...

I want to talk about God. It’s such a loaded word. It has so many layers of social and cultural meaning that it’s hard not to imagine It to be an entity unto Itself. I’m working on an academic project, part of which involves reading the Bible from beginning to end. I came across an interesting verse which surprised me. Without going too deep for the limited space available here, in Exodus 4:24, it describes how the Lord met Moses and was about to kill him. But the line didn’t make any sense to me. Why would God wish to kill Moses right after he gave him a big mission? After a bit of research, including reading various interpretations of why God might want to kill Moses out of the blue like that, I found out that the original Hebrew of the text didn’t say Moses by name. It just had the word for the male pronoun ‘him.’ Translators had made that sentence into the first line of a new paragraph rather than the last line of the previous one and declared the “him“ to be Moses. The te...

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...