The Louisiana Flood of 2016

I'm a person for whom words come a little easier than most, but I've remained silent the last few days, save for reaching out to various folks, to check in, to offer support. It's because things like this can feel so vast and overwhelming, like they've swallowed up the world and all of us with it. In writing to a friend this morning, though, I found some words that I'd like to share that sort of sum up how I'm feeling in all of this.

I've often been asked, both seriously and with venomous sarcasm, how I can maintain hope in the face of all the terrible things in the world, why I choose to hold to my positive viewpoint. I look around at the efforts of everyday people during the last few days and feel validated. These are the times when we shine as a species.

I believe that this, not the violence, greed, and selfishness, all products of thought held prisoner by fear, is the truth of human nature. At our deepest, when the world has gone dark and the unfamiliar has taken hold, wiping away all the surety we've built around us, our instinct, our most primal drive, is not to take, but to give, to reach out and, in a driftless time, to moor ourselves in one another until things are set aright. This is the beauty of humanity, when everything else we fear losing has gone away and we are left with nothing but one another.

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On Breaking the Cycle of Suffering

            How often do we hear the statement, “I had to do it, so they should have to do it, too,” or any of its variants? It is a statement used, most often, to justify maintaining a status quo which was an unpleasant or difficult experience for one or more generations of people. At its root, it comes from a place of frustration and unhealed pain, both of which are valid emotional responses. They are, however, antithetical to productive long-term policy making. It has been used consistently to avoid, and in some cases to outright fight against, altering existing procedures, both on the small scale, in things like businesses and academia, as well as within our larger social constructs, like political and economic policy. It creates a vicious, unproductive cycle in which those who are the victims of a flawed procedure use their suffering to perpetuate that which hurt them, in turn, when they are in a position to stop it, choosing instead to become the perpetrators who hurt the next generation. It is the reasoning of hurt children looking for someone to blame, or at least someone to punish, and we must put a stop to it.

            Rather than deciding that those who come after should suffer the same painful experience, is it not more rational to decide that, because you suffered it, action should be taken to change it so that it will be a better, more pleasant experience for those who come next? And it’s easy to say that, if they don’t like it, they can change it, but they have no more power without your help than you did the first time you found yourself facing a broken, hurtful system.

            It is not whining to express fear, nor is it weakness or coddling to show that you’ve learned from a painful experience and are capable of working to make it less so for the next generation, with the expectation that they, in turn, will do the same for those that come after. It will not make them weak. It will teach them to reflect, to be flexible, and to place empathy over retribution, teamwork over tradition. Connections will be stronger between generations when we work together to build something better, regardless of what that is, and what we build, then, will be stronger, as a result.

            So next time you find yourself wanting to preserve something, or deny something, to others because that’s how it was when you did it, take a moment, instead, to reflect on how it felt to be powerless and suffering and what it would have been like had someone established and in a position of greater power and influence reached down to say, “Here, let me help.” Then reach out that hand.

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A Thought: On the Beauty of Change

Life is growth. Growth is change. And change is the purest, most beautiful form of pain there is. Read more!

A Thought: On Drowning

When at risk of drowning, the solution is not to add more water, but rather to work, one handful at a time, to remove it. Read more!

A Thought: On Where We Choose to Live

Remember that every moment could be your last, so try your best to always be in a place you can look back on and say, "I was glad that was the last place I lived." Read more!

A Thought: On the Choice to Fail

A mistake only becomes a failure when we choose not to learn from it. Read more!

A Remembrance

I traditionally post a remembrance on New Year's Day, but I was a bit too busy with family and friends to have found the time which is, I think, a form of remembrance, all its own. I love you, and miss you, little brother. Read more!

A Thought: On Reconstruction

As children, the world builds us, piece by piece, with little choice in how we're made. As adults, and I think this may be what makes us adults, in truth, we can finally dismantle what the world's made of us and make of ourselves what we choose. Read more!

A Thought: On the Timing of Destiny

I used to believe that we were brought to situations and people at the times in our lives when we needed to be there. I still do, but for a different reason.

Now I believe it's because we are always, if we approach life openly and honestly, with a modicum of self-awareness and a lot of curiosity, capable of learning from those places in which we find ourselves and those with whom we do. Read more!

A Thought: On Leaving a Light On

Having never really had a place to call my own, a real home, in the physical sense, for a number of reasons, I have made it a habit to forge one of my own, inside myself. I build it from memory, bright and dark, and of the bits of others that I've collected along the way (always traded for parts of myself, in kind, of course). And I do my best, even, especially, on the darkest nights to leave a light on for those who need it. Read more!

A Thought: On Those Who Would Do Us Harm

If you give to those who would do you harm nothing but peace, love and understanding, those are the only things which they will have to use against you. Read more!

To Maya Angelou

In 7th grade, in Mrs. Blackwell's English class, Maya Angelou became the first poet to ever truly reach me. Without her, without that first tiny push on the door, I would likely never have thought to allow in all the others who have done so since. Without her, I may never have put pen to paper, never written a poem, essay or story, never have found my voice.

If it's true that we are carried past death by the legacy we leave in others, then I, humbly and with deepest gratitude, carry her, as she has carried me, with each word I write. Read more!

A Thought: On Music and Shame

In response to a friend's post about whether we're ashamed of the music we used to listen to, I wrote probably more than I should have, but this was the last and most relevant bit:

I think the real power in music is that it lets us time travel, in a sense, with the right song forever able to carry us back to a particular moment in our lives, even if it wasn't playing then, necessarily, but just captured the feel of it so completely the first time we heard it years later that it melded itself forever to the memory.

So to give it up, even were that possible, is to give up that ability. Just not worth it for the sake of saving face, to me. Read more!

A Thought: On the Language of Music

There is so much power in the universality of music. I firmly believe that, if Babel is what shattered the words of the world into something incomprehensible from one place to the next, before it, we all sang. Read more!

A Thought: On the Spread of Ignorance

All moral objection aside, to mock the beliefs of those who preach ignorance is to virtually assure that those who listen to them, knowing no better, will be too ashamed to seek out truth.

In essence, then, do we, by doing so, hinder passively the spread of reason as much as those who do so actively.

It is better to put forth truth into the world with reason, infinite kindness and patience than to waste breath in chiding those who would do otherwise. Read more!