Pass - Overview

I have an okay life and I am grateful.

I have to remind myself of this every so often.

Community is a good thing, but I can feel selfish for wanting it right now.

Even if others are craving the same thing. 

It is an essential part of the human experience to be able to connect and know you are not alone.

In Genesis, Adam dealt with this as the only one of his kind - and it was a world that was good and he was very good in his Creator's eyes?

Was it a miscalculation or error on God's part to leave His very good creation as one of a kind and incomplete? I certainly don't know.

But what I do know is that I tend to value things more when I recognize how greatly I desire them in my lack of them.

In Plato's Republic, it was noted as a political truth that the citizens grow used to a standard of living progressing to beyond their ability of their society to sustain through their resources, so they would rather go to war with another country for new resources than scale back their lifestyle.

It is a troubling lens through which to view world history. 

I am more fond of Niccolo Machiavelli's political work The Prince, not because I advocate his theories of staying in power, but the motivating factor behind him writing it. He was so passionate about political communities and, being exiled, longed to return to them enough to offer this as a bizarre olive branch to those in power if only he could rejoin them.

It did not succeed, but it speaks to a longing of community and interests. Sometimes those driving factors have unintended consequences and side effects. Things intended for good were turned to ill purposes. Perhaps these ill times can also be turned to healthy purposes.

Currently, with this time of recommended isolation, there have been growing pains to adjust and adapt to this new schedule and standard of living.

It fits differently, providing unfamiliar gaps and restrictions on my time. Some others have discovered small joys in exploring these gaps to see how far they reach. Others have despaired at the constrictions on areas where they enjoyed freedom to exercise. On a day to day basis, I oscillate between the two - it depends on my focus and attention. It is easy to forget myself and my complaints when I am focused on something else. But in isolation, I have to deal with myself more frequently than in the company of others where I can place my attention externally.

It is so analytical and cold to state it in such terms. But it is good to be able to support others and allow them to support me. It is a give and take relationship, and in the absence of my having a choice whether to engage or disengage, it is unsettling.

Free will and self-control are two factors which have haunted me in my life, and my acknowledgement of their weight of responsibility has propelled me forward - self flagellation to provide momentum to a flagellum of an idea.

I admit that it might be a grossly simple way to frame it, but I could have 143 other options which would also be a gross way of explanation.

I don't hate myself, and I don't want to complain or berate myself into a self-destructive spiral. But there is a difference between choosing to be alone for a time and being strongly told that I will isolate for a time. From the outcome, it has the same effect, but for the object, it is internal forces or external forces of pressure and it feels different to give time to personal expansion than to be told to compress and hold myself from risk of contamination.

These are disparate thoughts in a desperate time. I am grateful to be surviving, but acknowledge that things can and should be better. I hope we all learn from this experience, but not everything has a greater lesson or purpose. It takes time and memory to try to sort out sense and narrative. I have some time at the moment to reflect, but the mirror has a tendency to get features flip-flopped and see only the short sighted present and a long way into the past rather any good view of what the future holds.

I don't know what the future holds. I am not a futurist. But I hope I survive to see it when it comes.

Rights - Wronged

I tend to play for keeps
So I lose a lot of me.
When I am focused in the flow
I forget about everybody.
Even if I happen to win,
The cost is too much,
My victory thin.

If you want to play
Tell me so.
I take my fun seriously
And my awareness is slow.
I notice unimportant things
And don't see the nose on my face.
My eyes strain in the distance
Though nearsighted in time & place.

The future was far
But you were right here.
I worried about the unknown
And in the present you disappeared.
In glancing at my rearview
I see where you were past.
When I put myself first
I left you waiting in last.

It does not do to mourn.
You deserved better than what you got.
It is an expensive lesson for us to learn.
How what didn't happen could have been a lot.
Choices are made
I accept my blame.
The price was paid.
And we've both received change.
Where I am is different than I expected.
And I am sorry I didn't "ride or die" for you
With my free will, you were not chosen as elected.

I am not bitter at others
For the way I behaved.
I hope you have better friends
Who know your value & have you saved.
As a contact I wish I had kept in touch.
Without an honest view of relationships
I've stumbled through roads blinded & rough,
Fallen through cracks, hung by fingertips.
And learned in time how to trust enough.

I look back to when we were friends
Not through dark clouds or rose colored lens.
It is not how we started but whether we've found ourselves by these ends.

Fragment - Focus

I had a plan for a post, but I have forgotten it at the moment. The catalyst for my reaction today is due to timing. It is difficult to manage, and I tend to notice it more when things don't align than when they perfectly do.

I visited my family today & they were working on a jigsaw puzzle. A lesson from this is that people's personality & problem solving methods really surface during the process. It is a given that not every piece locks with another & it takes time & effort to achieve the rush of connecting them for a bigger picture.

I am reminded of when my grandparents were driven by my aunt & uncle over the last holiday season. My uncle loves to engage others around him & really brings life & light to a room. He also has a particular enjoyment of convincing my mother to be his big sister & share in his joy of childhood fun & hijinks. They decided during this visit to hold an informally official puzzle building competition. When it was described to me, I did not realize the subject was a 75 piece children's puzzle. It was a challenge of dexterity & timing - a sprint, not the marathon distance of effort I had envisioned. So my grandparents & I witnessed members of my family crowing & cheering over the participant's assembly methods time after time. It was exciting, it was enthralling, it was a simple children's puzzle. I was shaking my head in incredulity of the absurd situation. How we were able to wring joy & competition out of a low stakes educational tool. Some people worked the edges first. Some dumped the box out & tried to cut corners. Each person has an idea of how they could shave seconds off their time with their strategy & execution.

I look back on that fondly, but I do not find peace through that vein of meditative picture problem solving. In the past weeks, I have been working on crocheting an afghan blanket as a gift. It is something I have done multiple times before, and is usually more time consuming an endeavor than an engaging one. Unless I have a pattern in mind that forces me to be more proactive in my creative execution, the time drags. I almost lean into the mindlessness, but it does not feel like a full use of my faculties. Typically I watch TV shows or listen to podcasts to maximize my utility of absorbing something while crafting something else. But taking in media is its own can of worms. I often get entangled in the stories & want to unwind them upon someone else to be free of the isolation of experience. It is a solitary practice to craft & consume, and I begin to crave company & balance.

I have a relational mind. It spools linearly, but tangled like a crochet pattern & series of looping knots. If I neglect to keep you apprised of my train of thought, I might be two rows higher in my stitches & lose your attention as to where I now am. I am getting better at communication through experience, but timing is ever difficult to nail with individual people. I need time to acclimate to each person's rhythms and patterns of behavior. How to best convey and receive information in ways so we shall understand one another. But I am not the only one growing in time. Often my references for how a person interacts with me are out of sync with where they are now in phase.

So timing is difficult. I have had to be a little more decisive with how I spend my time lately, as in times past, I liked to be passively invited to things & accommodate others' schedules. It comes from being in a large family & being accustomed to the needs of a larger group. It was easier to have an empty schedule and be able to pencil myself into the lives of others. But I am realizing this simply does not do. I feel guilty cancelling on my commitments, as I feel obligated to keep my word. But it is a startling reality that people often do not have the same relationship & respect for others time that I have held. Others grow impatient with vague shapes of schedules & try to carpe the diem out of their day to the juices & bones, and any wiffle waffler who cannot decide can be run over or taken for a ride. I understand this control impulse in the abstract, as it is very attractive for a control freak to have stability & decisiveness in a structure.

So learning how to catch & release time in schedules is taking some patience to retrain myself in the discipline of management. I shouldn't dwell on the fishes that have gotten away or resent others for their hauls, but to learn from my mistakes & tend my lines as best I can. But timing with others is an art as well, of reading situations & asking good questions to keep referential tabs, so as to better map possible intersections of trajectories in the future. How to avoid collisions through carelessness with outdated information. (These would be misunderstandings of the person which can cause conflict & debris of damaging words.) Too technical on my metaphor for my tastes even, I have fallen in love with my metaphor & wanted it to fit. Maybe it makes sense to others as a possible explanation. There will be others which will serve better as frameworks for a different situations.

Timing. So much of storytelling & humor rests on timing of the teller & the ability to maintain the attention of the listener to play & prey on their expectations, fulfilling & subverting them. I realized today that occasionally, a thought comes that I want to share with a specific friend. A song, a movie, a topic. But, I occasionally forget the timing of things and people when focused on the topic I want to share. Sometimes such sharing is thoughtless & careless in that it might be relevant & topical for ME, but is like grabbing a puzzle piece from a familiar box & trying to connect it where I think it should fit. Things would be so satisfying if the edges would fit. But lately, I realize that my timing is off for what I am sharing & with who I was trying to connect. That corresponding puzzle piece I am trying to connect to might have been lost with that other person. They have moved on in a different direction & if I want to connect, I have to know which boxes to check to fit that picture. And that takes effort & maintenance on the relationship status. And there are some people with whom I have not been able to maintain that familiarity.

My realization was that the specific friend that I wanted to share that piece of memory with was the friend from the time & place of that shared memory. It may not be the person who is, but the person who was. The people we are now are no longer the people who we were then. And that absence can ache like an old wound, like a lost tooth of growth. I am grateful to the permanent teeth of the friendships that have lasted through chewing past meat & gristle of heavier topics through time's tide. But there are still days when I remember the attachments which have fallen away & with them the lost vitality of youthful metabolism which could process those sweeter times, never considering the possibility they would ever be lost.

Mindfulness - Memorial

What should I mind?

It is a question I have been asking myself lately. I pick it apart into the different interpretations and layers of what and how I should answer. 

"Mind (1) - memory"

a) Recollection: 

What should I remember? Memory is a curious thing, depending on the lens and emotional ties I have to the setting. There are depressions in my mind like a record, times when I made a mistake or miscalculated an action. Times when I should have kept my mouth shut, others where I should have said something, & in my hesitation missed my window of relevance. There are memories of which I am fond, when I managed to be present for something wonderful. Scenes that play before my inner vision, causing me to wince or smile accordingly.

b) Power of remembering/c) Retention in memory: 

What should I keep fixed in my memory going forward? How should and will I focus upon and deal with these records I hold. There are people and places which I treasured, but have lost the rhythm to sync comfortably with where I am and where I was. How to bridge these gaps and use what I've experienced to build new memories.

"Mind (2) - Commemoration."

This definition focuses on celebrating or consecrating a past event. What important things have happened that I want to hold sacred and whole.  Occasionally, I want to whimsically declare a certain day as worth remembering as an annual event. But I forget to write it down as so, or even if I do, I often misplaced the notation. Besides, there are enough official days celebrating something or another. Every day is special to some group for some reason. Whether it be "talk like a pirate", "bacon", "pancake", or the often invoked "opposite day." These everyday celebrations are often forgettable as well. I looked up today out of curiosity. Apparently, the historical website saw fit to say that in 1985, Indiana University basketball coach Bob Knight threw a chair during a game. In 1919, Benito Mussolini formed the Fascist Party. As history goes on, something interesting will occur on any given day. But what should be recognized? I have a while to figure this out, and if I keep aware, this may grow into a offhand hobby.

"Mind (3) Opinion."
I don't know. I saw this in a draft on the same day in 2020, from initial thoughts in 2015. I don't know why I didn't publish this. It is very on brand for me still. My opinions have likely changed in the intervening years, but my approach in analyzing them has remained consistent. Most of my opinions are connections looking for conclusions and avoiding contradictions. I should generate more of them as an exercise & perhaps share less than I do in their formation period. The seeds of the ideas should grow at their own pace & time & not be rushed along before they are ready. Otherwise they might be choked & lost among weeds of doubts and/or wither under the harsh scrutiny of full daylight.

It is my opinion now in 2020 with hindsight that I should have published this five years ago. But time will prove whether it is better for the delay. Words can find their mark in their own timing. I hope this proves encouraging & helpful to you, my reader, as this reminder has been to me.

Rocks - Rivers

I recently got to catch up with an old friend I haven't been able to see in a while. It was nice to reconnect & see areas where we have both grown & been excited about each other's steps in life.

My friend is a rock, and I am a river. He holds the line firm with a face of stone looking into the future. Time may wear at him, but he stands & resists it hardily. If you chip away at him, pebbles of wisdom & layers drop off. It is a challenge to try to go deeper with him. Not because he is shallow, but because he makes you work out an approach for how to break through. Making sure that you are using good & worthy tools of questions. He will challenge weaker efforts to breach him as laughably insufficient & not well thought out. But his layers are analytical & lovely, and reward long efforts & exposure to his presence.

I am a river. I go for the lowest common denominator & my thoughts stream from there. I will wear people down patiently with a steady flow of words. I want to give words of life & affirmation, but if I am not careful, I can overwhelm my audience with too much information. Often I am content to burble cheerfully along, carving a rut forward along my path over time, recycling water & words through gassing off my mouth & accepting new information & feedback to add depth to my memory's banks. I can get held up by roadblocks & resistance, frustrated that I cannot break through to a person or overcome a problem. My focus collects in these problem areas of my flow being broken, I redouble my efforts to pressure through. Sometimes I succeed, other times, that wall holds firm & I end up getting sidetracked & pressing off on a different tangent to work around the edges of the conflict to a different destination.

It is a go

Workout - Jesus

As I have mentioned before, I enjoy running & doing obstacle course events. I find the running portions much easier than upper body challenges. I am disproportionate & play to my natural strengths for as far as my legs will carry me. When I bother to work out, the bulk of it is cardio, as conditioning towards what my edge often is is easier to sharpen my speed and endurance.

However, one of my friends has patiently persisted in asking me why I have not taken on the services of a personal trainer. This might provide an avenue by which I could correct my imbalance of focus and guide me towards getting to the peak of my potential performance. To reach the top, rather than just being content to hustle with my bottom limbs pulling the weight. They told me last night, "Kaleb, I know that you CAN finish these events. I have seen you do things out of a sheer force of will. But the question you need to ask yourself is 'How hard do you want to make it for yourself to finish?"

I have explained away my reasons for not hiring a trainer before, which will soon follow and be elaborated upon, but this query stuck with me. I have encountered it in another area of my life in regards to my faith, and my answers were ever, "As hard as it needs to be as long as I am the one finishing." My friend is not a Christian, and I am, & I realize that the same struggles I have had in my spiritual habits are ones I must revisit in my physical habits as well.

Reason #1: I am stubborn and have an intense desire within me to want to work out my own salvation through sweat, blood, and tears. Whether it causes me pain, suffering, and effort, I long to be able to beat myself into submission and perfection with my own hands. Like Aaron Burr in Hamilton, "I am an original, I am inimitable." But you get nothing for it if you just wait for it to happen. It is only when I reach the edge of my abilities and become frustrated that I recognize the benefit of someone else possibly helping me to overcome this barrier of my own limitations. Christ did this for me with extreme patience, while I whaled at the walls in vain. But it was only when I gave up and looked heavenward that I was truly ready to accept that I couldn't do it on my own. I value the things I work for, and until I am able to appreciate the work it takes I am apt to be a little ungracious of the value of the help offered.

Reason #2: I don't feel comfortable asking for help if I believe the task is something I can do myself. I am aware that this is a selfish, proud, and vainglorious thought, but one I need to rediscover and relearn multiple times in my life. I insist on breaking myself first to find that I need to be fixed in my habits. I have learned better habits through exhausting the potential of lesser ones and firmly setting them aside. When I was younger, I had a short fuse, and I prayed about it. I burned to please and self-destructed when I did not manage to accomplish that which I wished. I hated myself and felt that God would never love me when I couldn't manage to do good like He was asking. These self-destruction breakdowns managed to hurt others as well as myself, and gradually God helped me to be more gracious towards others, and eventually myself. It was in my teens that I went through a study of Romans and the doctrine of grace really landed home for me. That God would call me His son and love me and adopt me as his namesake before I did anything worthy of love is very freeing. That I don't have to impress Him, but that I might share the same gift of grace with others that was granted to me is much easier. I now want to rejoice in successes far more than to focus upon my failings as stumbles along the way. It is a walk with Christ, and though I found it more difficult to manage as a spiritual and physical toddler, I don't think as much about my falls, or even my walking unless someone brings my attention to how curious a thing balance is for bipedal creatures. But I want to climb and swing well as well as just run, and a trainer might guide me physically as Christ has helped me spiritually. It requires that I humble myself and ask for help.

Reason #3: I have commitment issues. I tend to be hesitant to commit to new things because I am prone to hyper-focusing on them to the exclusion and ignorance of all else. Once I decide to do something, I pour my energy into it until it exhausts me or I am exhausted of it. Moderation is a problem for me, as I don't always balance things well. If I juggle too many commitments, I will tire myself out or not pay sufficient attention to keep all the objects in the air, and things will tend to drop off around me. For me to take working out seriously, I will have to reexamine the place I have allotted to it in my life as "something to pursue in free time when I am feeling up to it" to "Something I am actively setting time aside to pursue." And it is bothersome to spend money on things I do not use. I already do that with streaming subscriptions to entertainment. People used to put their money where their focus was, but there are ever so many things to focus on these days, so money often is lost through distraction. All the same, I didn't like the idea of paying for a trainer if my commitment is half-hearted and distracted. I was the same with my faith as well - I didn't want to become a member of a church because I did not see a need to attach my name to any one congregation over another. We are one body in Christ, why should it matter if I sign in your ledger? I should go where the Spirit leads me to go and seek pasture for where my spiritual needs are fed. However, I did join a church this past year, and I did it for the benefit of not seeking my own benefit, but out of a conviction that I should be held accountable by a body of believers to serving the benefit of others. Things are ever so much easier for me when I am not solely focused on myself and am looking inward for fulfillment, but looking outward for how I could grow and that growth could feed and support others who need shelter, comfort, and sustenance. Perhaps working with a trainer would not be only for the benefits to my physical fitness and abilities for glorying in God's creation to my full potential, but also that I might have the energy to better serve others by this training of strength and endurance.

My friend knows through experience how much a personal trainer has improved their physical life and habits, and is an evangelist extolling the virtues and benefits he has found through it. I feel the same way about Christ and His role in redeeming my life and habits. We both see how our surrendering our wills to a greater and wiser person's guidance has exponentially grown our achieving of our potentials, and wish each other would join our journey so that we might better keep pace in our walks and runs with common experience and recognition.

But these were the reasons which held me back in committing fully in my faith, and I will have to examine in considering my commitment level to a healthier lifestyle which would be easier with a trainer to keep me accountable and aware.

"I don't want to pay the cost if I am not serious." Both in my salvation and in my fitness.

"Change of lifestyle would be too hard or undesirable."
This is a difficulty of vision and taste. God has helped me with changing my tastes from poorer choices to better ones. It is usually through replacement and refocusing on something that is better and more fulfilling that I tend to drop and/or forget to maintain the unsustainable and draining areas of my life.

"What would I lose of time, money, and energy?"
Once again, a problem of focus and emphasis, somewhat negative in tone, but also valid in that in order to pursue some habits, I must choose wisely what is truly important to me lest I lose relationships with family and friends, maintenance on housework, or ability to support other causes I want to further progress. Time is both physically spent and mentally spent, and is not a renewable resource, so I need to pray and consider what best to do with it.

"It works for you, but is not for me."
In terms of spiritual disciplines or physical training regimens, this is a way to politely acknowledge without committing to any change of behavior. Sometimes this is a valid point, but growth is ever possible from wherever I currently am. If my faith were a mustard seed, I could move mountains, but physically, I still have difficulty with chin-ups.

"I can will my own way to greatness"
Without giving appropriate time to properly prepare, the mind may make some headway, but it is made more difficult when other necessities have been neglected. "Wherever you are, be there" as Jim Elliot once said.

Suffer - Full

I recently read Everything Happens for A Reason & Other Lies I Believed by Kate Bowler. It opens with a rawness that is like a gut punch to an empty stomach. Tonight, I read the first chapter of One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voscamp. That was a strike to a different area - making contact with a heart full of loss & grief, fit to burst at the slightest touch.

It comes down to the question: "Why would a Good God allow suffering?" I haven't read C.S. Lewis' "A Grief Observed", but his "The Problem of Pain" is one of my favorite works by him for the thoughts it provoked in me to consider. But, in short, the refrain is that pain is much less abstract when it is inflicted on you in your own life.

Pain makes it hard to think clearly about anything except its source. And it is persistent, despite anyone else's efforts to comfort, console, or even try to snap us out of our suffering. It is different when it happens to you.

It is isolating & overwhelming all at once. It would be fascinating if only sone relief could be given from being the focus of the pain. Johnny Cash's cover of Hurt lent a different angle than the original Trent Reznor version. One with the struggles of a young man who is figuring out how to navigate his wreck of a life by relating it to a friend. The other imbued by an old man's mortality & how its current state is not what it once was, and is wondering whether it is worth the effort to continue to fight to maintain a quality of life. Both are about the current struggle, but through the tragedy of a misspent youth fading before it had a chance to bloom, or through the lens of a life in rearview which had potential unrealized & fully realized regrets. The song ends on a strong refrain of defiance in the face of the current tragic state, claiming that if they had another chance, they would choose the same path again. It is beautiful & heartbreaking all at once.

Years ago, I read Edith Schaeffer's "Affliction", and it is unflinching in it's examination of suffering & whether it might have an ultimate purpose in shaping us into better tools for executing God's gracious will. Like a knife being sharpened through grinding, like silver being proved pure through a refiner's fire. I think I should read it again to better refresh my memory on this particular angle.

I don't have answers for the questions of pain & suffering. Sometimes, I don't even have the heart to engage with it even in fiction. I love Laini Taylor's young adult fantasy novels, but after reaching the conclusion of "Strange The Dreamer", I haven't been able to muster faith in the sequel's ability to overcome & redeem a plot point left hanging. And I love her work. I have borrowed the sequel "Muse of Nightmares" twice & have yet to crack the cover. I keep looking at it with longing for my curiosity to be satisfied & rewarded, but I leave it in limbo, because I am not certain that I would be able to shake the world of the book when navigating my daily life outside of it. This is entirely something which is not really happening, but the imagination can amplify even false things to such a scale that the unreality intersects into the real. Words lead to images, which lead to thoughts, and those ideas linger in minds long enough to leave impressions even as the details fade to an absence.

Life features many losses, and in the longing for the missing support, I can be blinded to potential gains & blessings around me which might grant me opportunities for a greater & fuller life to spill over into others with exceeding abundance.

In another group study, I am going through the book of Ecclesiastes. Recently discussing chapter three which famously lists a time & season for all things under the sun. There is a time to rejoice & a time to mourn. A time to embrace & a time to refrain from embracing. And one of the group members is currently going through an acute time of suffering due to a recent event. It is rough, & I recognize the hurt & pain, for which I cannot give reason or proportional comfort. But I can pray that my heavenly Father might grant peace, wisdom, & comfort to navigate the brokenness of this world, and heal our wounds when we encounter its sharp edges from that brokenness.

If you are going through a time of suffering, know that I love you & grieve with you, even if I may not know you personally or well. I just know that Christ died to redeem my life from the wretched wrecks I managed to make of it with my reckless decisions. Out of love, He sought to reshape & reform my pieces into His image. I still have imperfections, but I long for perfection.

I am reminded of a part of a verse from Come Thou Fount of Ev'ry Blessing:
"Jesus sought me when a stranger
Wandering from the fold of God
He, to rescue me from danger
Interposed His precious blood."

And if Christ can love a stranger, I would like to do the same. As a friend once told me "Kyrie Eleison indeed to all of us."  Which is a good Greek reminder to call upon in times of trouble.