Long-haired misfits and mortality
The days are getting shorter. Right now, the sun is shining at oh so early and is still visiting with us late into the evening. Summertime is the great “live life” season, because it's easier to party when the sun is warm and the sky is clear. The dark, however, is coming. It's walking calmly toward us in expensive, ergonomic black leather shoes and we must be both ant and cricket, hoarding away food and strategies for joy to hold us through the evening months even as we are jubilant and sweaty on the hottest of days. This is a season of gradual waning, and it points to the dwindling number of days we have left to connect to our lives before we face our own big dark.
I tell you right now that I want to fill my days with as much gusto, creativity, and love as I possibly can. I don't think I'm alone in this, and I want to know how it's done. The question is this: who knows how to live well? Should I ask a minister, ask myself, go to my parents for their thoughts? None of those are bad tactics, but I tell you what: just like many other research projects, a great step for learning how to live well is to learn about people who lived fantastically well. Check out the great heroes of our history. Martin Luther King Junior, Mother Theresa, Gandhi? You might not be able to invite them to your house for a picnic and an interview, but you can set their histories down on your kitchen table to complement your cup of tea. Reading books about their lives, these people who lived so very, very well, is about as close as we can come to speaking to the dead.
Who do you think I'd like to learn from? Given one person in all of history, which one person do you think I want to whisper to me the secrets of living well? The answer might surprise you: it's Jesus. Slam the cupboards shut and lock the door folks. The same woman who just whirled around a sacred fire and went naked hot tubbing with oodles of long haired misfits wants to talk to Jesus. On the other hand, it makes a lot of sense. You don't have to worship Jesus to recognize that the guy knew how to live.
You see, Jesus spent his days in the most meaningful of activities. He was teaching, traveling, learning, and connecting, which are all things that I very much want to do in my life. Don't get me wrong: I don't want to be Jesus. But I think he's got it going on when it comes to seizing life by the horns and giving it a good shake. So, when I sit myself down to read his histories, I'll be asking him this: “How did you organize your priorities? Where did you get the motivation and the gumption to follow up on those priorities with such focus? What were your thoughts on sleeping in?”
And maybe Jesus will murmur back at me from the pages of my library book, in a sort of quiet cosmic dialogue: “Who are you, Betty? How does who you are balance with who you want to be? How are you spending your time and what's your message and are you awake to the possibilities out there?” Maybe it'll take more than one cup of tea and a library book to figure that out, but I think our questions will be good ones as we mentally follow the time-lines of our lives.
This summer, we've got yards to tend, cheap Christmas decorations to buy, calendars to keep updated and oh my goodness let's not forget about back to school. My point here is that ant and cricket aren't mutually exclusive. It might just be that the work we do to prepare for the long dark awaiting us is the same work that we need to do to live life well. So playing in the pool is just as important as remembering to buy milk and stamps. Diversifying our mental portfolios is just as important as following one important message. Now is the time to frolic and fight; the work of our wills should be bent to the time in our days, and who knows? Maybe someone will go to the library and find themselves reading the story of your life-just so they can see how it's done.
I tell you right now that I want to fill my days with as much gusto, creativity, and love as I possibly can. I don't think I'm alone in this, and I want to know how it's done. The question is this: who knows how to live well? Should I ask a minister, ask myself, go to my parents for their thoughts? None of those are bad tactics, but I tell you what: just like many other research projects, a great step for learning how to live well is to learn about people who lived fantastically well. Check out the great heroes of our history. Martin Luther King Junior, Mother Theresa, Gandhi? You might not be able to invite them to your house for a picnic and an interview, but you can set their histories down on your kitchen table to complement your cup of tea. Reading books about their lives, these people who lived so very, very well, is about as close as we can come to speaking to the dead.
Who do you think I'd like to learn from? Given one person in all of history, which one person do you think I want to whisper to me the secrets of living well? The answer might surprise you: it's Jesus. Slam the cupboards shut and lock the door folks. The same woman who just whirled around a sacred fire and went naked hot tubbing with oodles of long haired misfits wants to talk to Jesus. On the other hand, it makes a lot of sense. You don't have to worship Jesus to recognize that the guy knew how to live.
You see, Jesus spent his days in the most meaningful of activities. He was teaching, traveling, learning, and connecting, which are all things that I very much want to do in my life. Don't get me wrong: I don't want to be Jesus. But I think he's got it going on when it comes to seizing life by the horns and giving it a good shake. So, when I sit myself down to read his histories, I'll be asking him this: “How did you organize your priorities? Where did you get the motivation and the gumption to follow up on those priorities with such focus? What were your thoughts on sleeping in?”
And maybe Jesus will murmur back at me from the pages of my library book, in a sort of quiet cosmic dialogue: “Who are you, Betty? How does who you are balance with who you want to be? How are you spending your time and what's your message and are you awake to the possibilities out there?” Maybe it'll take more than one cup of tea and a library book to figure that out, but I think our questions will be good ones as we mentally follow the time-lines of our lives.
This summer, we've got yards to tend, cheap Christmas decorations to buy, calendars to keep updated and oh my goodness let's not forget about back to school. My point here is that ant and cricket aren't mutually exclusive. It might just be that the work we do to prepare for the long dark awaiting us is the same work that we need to do to live life well. So playing in the pool is just as important as remembering to buy milk and stamps. Diversifying our mental portfolios is just as important as following one important message. Now is the time to frolic and fight; the work of our wills should be bent to the time in our days, and who knows? Maybe someone will go to the library and find themselves reading the story of your life-just so they can see how it's done.