Whether you have followed our little blog from its inception over the summer of 2008 when we lived in Baltimore, or whether you’ve recently found us, you no doubt have noted that the purpose of this blog is essentially to have a central location where we can post pictures, almost entirely of the kids, and tell you a little about our comings and goings. It seems better than filling your inboxes with photo-laden emails and allows you to check in with us on your schedule rather than ours. In as much, there is not too much, or really anything, on here that is overly personal in nature. I don’t exactly understand using a blog as a journal for all the world to potentially see, since by nature I am a fairly private person. But I did just want to suspend this tradition ever so briefly to share a few thoughts and feelings that may summarize my life over the past two months.
The way our church works is that congregations are geographically determined, so when we moved from our old house to student housing we went to a new congregation, and then when we moved to the new house we changed congregations again. We now find ourselves in a congregation that is a very good fit for us and we are enjoying meeting new and interesting people and are fortunate to have already made some good friends. I assume most people who read this blog are friends and family back up north, and I hope someday you might be able to visit us here so you can see our house and meet some of our friends. And in particular you will want to meet my friend Sarah, who is the reason that after far too long I’ve gotten back into running and even lifting and, more importantly, putting the hours of 8pm-2am to good use for reasons beyond academics.
I am, at my core, a thinker. I like to contemplate things that are well beyond my little sphere in the world. And I like philosophy and theory and I’m ok with ideas for the sake of ideas, although then I do try to figure out how to translate those into practices that will make some contribution so they don’t live and die in the world of ideas. As Maxine Greene wrote, “If the ‘doing’ of philosophy moves (us) to do more thinking about their own thinking, it is justified. If it intensifies…wonder (and) enhances awareness of what remains unsolved, philosophers may have accomplished what they have set out to do.” I appreciate experiences that make me think about my thinking, about the way I see the world, about my place in the world, and which intensify my wonder and enhance my awareness and encourage me to push against things that are, as of yet, unsolved.
In my thinking I often try to connect experiences with texts. I think this trying to run a string through multiple experiences as well as texts is probably the way I have gained the most insights into myself and into life. Otherwise I think we can be so concentrated on the trees of life we miss the forest. And while the particularities of an experience are important in and of themselves, I think there is often deeper meaning to be had if we have the eyes to see.
Over the past several years I’ve read hard core philosophy for school and nearly exclusively fiction--and juvenile fiction, at that--for fun. Sometimes I was seeking magical far off lands of escape from the myopic-ness that can settle in with infants and toddlers and all of the mundane physical tasks that require so much energy just to keep their world in orbit, all the while potentially consuming your own world and loosening your grasp of what you thought your place in it was. But there is another reason, too, which I heard best expressed a few weeks ago on NPR via an interview with author Sebastian Faulks. Here it is, from his Morning Edition interview with Linda Wertheimer:
WERTHEIMER: You've also got a good and evil thing going with books. You have a character who has nothing but contempt for fiction, who reviews without reading, who hates writers. And then you have this very sweet man who is the lawyer for the driver of the Circle Line train. She is the driver of the Circle Line train. He is a reading man and he wants to talk to her about books. On Page 196 he says, “You like reading.” Could you just read for a bit?
Mr. FAULKS: “And what about reading,” said Gabriel as they moved off again. “You like reading, don’t you?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“Why?”
“Don’t know. Suppose it's an escape from the real world.”
“But surely it's just the opposite,” said Gabriel. “Books explain the real world. They bring you close to it in a way that you could never imagine in the course of the day. People never explain to you exactly what they think and feel and how their thoughts and feelings work, do they? They don’t have time or the right words. But that’s what books do. It's as though your daily life is a film in the cinema. It can be fun looking at those pictures. But if you want to know what lies behind the flat screen, you have to read a book. That explains it all.”
WERTHEIMER: That was great.
Mr. FAULKS: It is a paradox, isn’t it, that some people think of books as being an escape and a kind of virtual world. But I think that what Gabriel is saying - and I agree with him - is that they are actually the opposite. If you read a really a fine writer - you know, J.D. Salinger, Henry James, or whoever it might be - they have the time and skill to articulate all those things and to enlarge our understanding of the world we live in. ~~~~
And I agree. Along these lines I appreciate expansion of our understanding of the world that even silly little fiction books can provide. Because, at the end of the day, all they are is a group of characters, a group of people, who openly tell you their thoughts and feelings and dreams and hurts, who let you project yourself and other people in your life and your view of the world onto them, and they never take nor give offense at such musings. And when your projections don’t map onto their story, or onto their thoughts or feelings or experiences, then that’s when it can be interesting. Because then you have to do some reconciling, and that can be a very healthy and expansive process. And thereby books and texts can expand our understanding of the world in which we live. So all of this is to say I try to connect experiences and texts and see how they interact and see what they reveal about me and about people and about the world and see what might be possible that we have yet to imagine.
One recent experience that was cause for reflection was attending Austin’s mother’s high school musical (she was the music director), Once on This Island. Most of the lyrics from the closing song are as follows:
And the spirit of Ti Moune [female protagonist] touched their hearts
And set them free to love
And she stands against the lightning and the thunder
And she shelters and protects us from above
And she fills us with the power and the wonder
Of her love
And this is why
We tell the story
If you listen very hard you hear her call us
To come share with her our laughter and our tears
And there's mysteries and miracles befall us
Through the years
We tell the story
We tell the story!
Life is why
We tell the story
Pain is why
We tell the story
Love is why
We tell the story
Grief is why
We tell the story
Hope is why
We tell the story
Faith is why
We tell the story
You are why
We tell the story
Why we tell the story
So I hope that you will tell this tale tomorrow
It will help your heart remember and relive
It will help you feel the anger and the sorrow
And forgive
For all the ones we leave
And we believe
Our lives become
The stories that we weave
At my core I’m a thinker, not a story teller. I prefer to do my weaving privately, even though my best philosopher friend John Dewey always reminds me that genuine development comes from human contacts and associations. Recently I’ve been drawn to this idea of development and growth through social interactions, both in terms of some of the things I’m trying to work on professionally as well as the way it can apply to one’s personal growth. Going back to the song, I like the image of our lives as stories that we weave, because it is not fatalistic or deterministic—we are the weavers of our own stories. And as the keepers of our stories, it is up to us whether we share our stories, these pieces of us--our weavings--in part or in whole, with others. Some parts we share with acquaintances--probably those around the edges. Some we share with friends--probably those with deeper hues and where the texture changes. And hopefully we have some few people or even one person with whom we are comfortable enough and safe enough to lay out the entire tapestry of us--even the parts with frayed edges, or mismatched patterns, or unfinished sections, or holes inflicted by cigarette burns--and have it perfectly received, and thereby have us perfectly received. And then, in this way, we become the keepers of other people’s stories. And that, it seems to me, is a very sacred thing. And in those moments of story sharing, which simultaneously weaves not just two people’s stories together but also the two people themselves, there is a great deal of potential to learn about ourselves, and the other person, and people in general, and friendship, and life, and love, and even God. And sometimes, we find people who bring us close and explain exactly what they think and feel and how their thoughts and feelings work, who take the time and agonize over the right words, who don’t want us to view their lives as a flat screen, but who will explain it all. And when we share our stories with these people, and really let them see us for who we are, and we see them for who they are, there is no greater gift that we can give or receive. And ultimately, it allows people to love us more than we may think possible, and for us to return their love, and acceptance, and understanding to them. And deep interactions, such as these, just might be what life is all about.
Sometimes it seems hard to know who we are to the world, who we are to others, what they see when they look at us, and what they think when they think about us. And so we use the people in our lives as mirrors for ourselves. We let a person hold up a mirror that shows us who we are to them and who they see us to be. And then we compile these vignettes of ourselves and extrapolate what we are to the world and what our place in the world is or could be. Recently I’ve realized that some of the mirrors I gaze in are fun-house mirrors whose reflections are in fact distortions of my reality, and of me. I’ve realized that the people who know us only around the edges are more likely to be fun-house mirrors, even if they are well intentioned, because they just don’t see or know or love us deeply enough to provide a meaningful reflection of who we are or what we could become. You have to choose which mirrors to look in, and you have to choose which reflections to believe. And it seems to me that it is the mirrors of people with whom we trust the fullness of our stories and with whom our stories are most closely woven that we should gaze in the most and the longest. And those are the reflections we should believe. Those are the ones we should label as truth. And those are the images of ourselves that can help us push against things that are, as yet, unsolved. That can carry us over dead places in the future. That can help us better know who we are. And that can help us along the way to who we want to become.
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