roads in Time

 


So many things to say to myself, and yet my mind refuses to be organized enough, long enough, to hold them together. So

Maybe I'll start with breakfast. No, coffee. I stretch my coffee club coffee to make it last until just a day or few before the new month's bag arrives.  Membership in a coffee club adds to life's happy anticipations, and the June chapter should arrive about June 5th or so. 

Now breakfast. This Time of year in 1954, when I arrived home from my freshman year at UF Gainesville, my mother taught me a treat. A hamburger-size very lean ground beef patty on a slice of whole wheat bread, up near the burner in the oven, to broil long enough to char the meat on the outside, but leave it raw inside. Salt and pepper to taste. Nowadays I buy a package of 96% or 97% lean ground beef, turn the stove burner on HIGH, turn on the fan and open both doors, and, while two slices of Dave's good seed bread toast in the toaster oven, in the sizzling hot skillet, sear a thin patty of the beef charred crisp on each side but totally red raw in the center. Smear mayo (finishing up that jar of Blue Plate) on both slices of toast, lay my hamburger patty on the toast, and enjoy with another cup of hot & black.

What's going on? AI is suggested as not unlikely precipitating Earth's next mass extinction event: say what, the machines we create will solve The People Problem their way? Shades of Genesis 11, the Tower of Babel. How many mass shootings over Memorial Day Weekend, Americans arming ourselves, not for essential self-protection, but in case we get a chance to shoot someone. In the spreading European War, Ukraine drone missiles hit Moscow neighborhoods; in Time, this will erupt as WWI did, someone taking the assassination of a high national figure as the affront that gives the excuse to launch All Out Total War. Governor thinks he can be elected President by showing his axe as a budding would-be petty dictator by bullying the state's major employer, seizing control of the state's public education system, and banning books, Alas, Kristallnacht. In road rage, a towering bully of very little brain chokes a much smaller pizza delivery driver and throws him to the ground unconscious with brain bleed: like drunk driving that kills innocent people, road rage that results in personal harm should be made a capital crime (no, I'm dead serious, we should be held responsible with our lives for our decisions and actions that destroy the lives of others).

As well as mostly humdrums if you let yours be dull, life is a short Time of highs and lows. Of lows, on a moment's notice yesterday, we drove to Bonifay to be there when the van arrived from Pruitt Health, transferring Malinda to Bonifay Nursing & Rehab. It was a withering Time of If Looks Could Kill, conveying searing outrage. Second Time this has happened in my life, in 2011 with my mother and now with a daughter: I pray this does not happen in your family. The guilt and shame. But have enough sense to examine the roads, including those not taken. Looking back forty-five years, a decision to smoke tobacco almost unceasingly has done serious work on blood vessels in the brain; some smokers get away with it and only harm those around them with secondary smoke, some smokers develop lung cancer, some smokers develop weak blood vessels with bursting aneurysms, multiple brain surgeries, and strokes. Lesson for helpless family: this is extremely difficult to deal with emotionally; step back and be deliberately rational in your responses, and don't be consumed with the shame and guilt that only widens the self-destruction. 

In my half-life as priest and pastor, I have found, am finding, that everything that happens to me in life strengthens my ability not only to help others, but also to deal with my own Time as it develops day to day. Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy. Lord have mercy. 

Below, a poignantly relevant essay in my email this morning. Life is a process of "becoming" in which every decision and action makes us who we are continually evolving to become, not only as a species, but each of us as individuals. I am not whoever or whatever I was before following an ambulance to Pensacola in May 2018, and I leave May 2023 having followed another to Bonifay, as something or someone yet even more Other yet still not a finished product, still experiencing and becoming. Even so, amen, come, Lord Jesus, maranatha, so be it.

Before reading Jonny Thomson's essay from The Well, a couple of permanently lifelong favorites that stay in my mind

++++++++++++

Somewhere, perhaps unknown to you, someone is following you as you make your way through life, going your way if only because they know no other way to go. The power of leading others is inevitable ... (clipped from the worship bulletin at First Baptist Church, Gainesville, Florida one Sunday morning, Spring 1956)

++++++++

How can I face the stars we've planned, how can I bear love's deeper dart, when merely holding one small hand uses up nearly all my heart? (don't remember)

++++++++

He lives to learn in life's hard school, how few who go above him, lament their triumph and his loss, like her, because they love him. (Whittier, "In School Days")

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They Cast Their Nets in Galilee

The poem His Peace appeared in the 1924 book Enzio's Kingdom and Other Poems by William Alexander Percy.
The last four verses of the poem became the hymn They Cast Their Nets in Galilee, and entered the Hymnal 1940 with the tune Georgetown, composed by David McK. Williams in 1941. The tune received its name out of friendship for F. Bland Tucker, who was then rector of St. John's Church, Georgetown Parish, D.C.

His Peace

I love to think of them at dawn
Beneath the frail pink sky,
Casting their nets in Galilee
And fish-hawks circling by.

Casting their nets in Galilee
Just off the hills of brown
Such happy, simple fisherfolk
Before the Lord came down.

Contented, peaceful fishermen,
Before they ever knew
The peace of God that filled their hearts
Brimful and broke them too.

Young John who trimmed the flapping sail
Homeless in Patmos died.
Peter, who hauled the teeming net,
Head down was crucified.

The peace of God, it is no peace,
But strife closed in the sod.
Yet let us pray for but one thing --
The marvelous peace of God!

Poem's moral: life is strife that is only completed as dirt is shoveled onto your grave.

++++++++

“Death,” he writes, “presents itself as both inevitable and impossible.” You can know rationally that you will die, yet struggle to understand your nonexistence. Put another way, you cannot be conscious of your own nonconsciousness.

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The Road Not Taken 

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

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Not "in your face" but it matters not to me that I keep repeating myself with poems and hymns, it's my blog, nicht wahr?

RSF&PTL

T

        

  


with Jonny Thomson • May 30, 2023

Welcome to The Well, ideas that inspire a life well-lived. Every Tuesday, Jonny Thomson, philosopher and editor for The Well, guides you through life’s biggest questions with the world's brightest minds.

Hello everybody!


This week is all about strategic decisions.


In our Interview, we talk to the bestselling author and psychologist, Lisa Feldman Barrett, about emotions. We learn that emotions are not things that happen to us but are tools with two jobs. First, our brain uses emotions to summarize what’s going on in our very complicated bodies. Our conscious awareness is far too busy to care about things like hormonal levels or potassium levels, so our brain just says, “You’re sad.” Second, emotions help us make strategic decisions. When we recognize a feeling as “sadness,” we are then presented with an opportunity to deal with the cause of that sadness.


In our Quote of the week, we examine just how important such strategic decisions are. As Roy Bennett teaches us, life is filled with choices — and we have a choice far more often than we care to acknowledge. You choose to be kind or not. You made a decision to respect someone’s dignity or not. And yet, we often willfully ignore the fact that we had a choice. Why? Because choices are scary. When you have chosen something, it forever and inerasably will be yours to own. Life is one long “choose your adventure” book — and you can only choose it once.


Game books out everyone,

Jonny


Interview of the week

The biggest myths about emotions, debunked

with Lisa Feldman Barrett

We often imagine our emotions as external forces. We talk about being “overcome” by happiness or “overwhelmed” by grief. So much of our discussion about feelings treats them as objects to deal with. We speak as if weak people “give in” to feelings, while strong people “take control” of them.


But as Lisa Feldman Barrett reveals in our Interview of the week, emotions are not mythological monsters that we have to fight. Instead, we should see emotions as diagnostic tools. Right now, reading this, your body is a specific mixture of hormones, glucose, salt, and “every metabolic factor you can imagine,” all of which adds up to a certain affective state of mind. The brain then “tells a story about what’s going on in the body” — a story called “anger” or “lust” or “grief.”


The benefit to these emotional diagnostics is that we can replay what worked before. For example, our body will say, “Oh, this is anger, I know how to deal with this.” Emotions trigger a prescribed and remembered survival mechanism from the last time you experienced that feeling.


The problem, though, is when we get locked into behaviors that might not actually work or when we react in a way that we might not actually want. However, we are not slaves to our past emotional responses. We all can learn to see emotions as the stories or summaries they are. And we can use that information any way we choose to.

WATCH VIDEO

Quote of the week

Over the years, I’ve wasted many happy hours on the Fallout series of computer games. For those not in the know, Fallout is a post-apocalyptic role-playing game involving lots of gore and freakishly large mutants. It also features the “karma” system. In Fallout (and most RPGs, actually), the actions you take define how your character evolves. Kill someone? That’s bad karma. Save them? That’s good. Over the course of the game, you can earn noble monikers like “Herald of Tranquility,” as well as ignoble ones like “Stuff of Nightmares.”


While I’m not yet sold on the idea of cosmic karma, I can get on board with the Fallout karma. As our Quote of the week reveals, “Whatever choice you make, makes you.” In his short book Existentialism Is a Humanism, Jean-Paul Sartre gave us the line, “Existence precedes essence.” What he meant was that no one is born as a finished item. There is no innate essence to your character, and you are never your final self. We choose. We live. We exist.


The choices you make today echo in the future. Like some Fallout-karmic brush, your choices are painting a future self that you’ve not even met yet. Until the day you die, you will carry the weight of today’s decisions.


What moniker or epithet have your real-life decisions earned you?

LET ME KNOW

Question of the week

Every week, we ask our online community for their insights and experiences. Our favorite response will be featured in next week's issue!

If you had the ability to erase something that you did in the past, what would it be?

"Life is a bit like a mosaic. A lot of pieces comprise the whole image. Take one piece away and the image is incomplete."


– D.O., The Well community member

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Jonny Thomson is a philosophy teacher and Big Think contributor.

He runs a popular Instagram account called Mini Philosophy (@philosophyminis). His first book is called "Mini Philosophy: A Small Book of Big Ideas."

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“Death,” he writes, “presents itself as both inevitable and impossible.” You can know rationally that you will die, yet struggle to understand your nonexistence. Put another way, you cannot be conscious of your own nonconsciousness.

Image: Bonifay 308