A Little Slow

I just recently I came across a quote that struck a chord within me.

"I am slow to learn and slow to forget that which I have learned. My mind is like a piece of steel, very hard to scratch anything on it and almost impossible after you get it there to rub it out."

To be brutally honest, I am a slow learner. Ask my bride. It was never much of a badge of honor; and a quality that is not highly respected in our culture. No one ever says, "He is a hard worker and he is a slow learner. We love that about him!" Usually the comment is a little less glowing and uttered with a certain amount of frustration. When will he catch on? A mental picture of a football squad waiting impatiently at the end of the agility run waiting for the slow kid to catch up seems to be the best illustration.

But there are a few things that are best learned slowly.

We live in a culture seeking immediate answers to every question. This must be a the root of the dysfunctional political climate. These guys only have 4/6/8 years to fix problems that have festered for decades. And they must fix them with an eye on reelection for the next go around. None of these factors lend themselves to long term reflection, to learning slowly.

Religion is perhaps the gravest offender of trying to learn quickly in the face of blindingly quick societal changes. By the time a book is published on how to do "church" it is out of date, swept away by generations that have already rejected the premise.

Education carries the greatest responsibility, but the rants are common and justified by my teacher-daughters/bride about the disconnect between applying modern solutions to age-old problems. It takes years to implement and like religion, is long past effectiveness by the time it is in the classroom.

A bit of self confession here. I was not a good student. Now my kids can blame me when their kids are a little slow and place blame where it belongs. My running joke all these years was that I finished in the top 75% of my high school class. For a joke to be really funny it has to have an element of truth...
But what I learn is there for good. I was always ashamed of my poor performance in school. Learning for me was a chore. Math is still a mystery to me and the higher math is especially confounding. The softer disciplines I enjoyed, but still struggled because the conclusions by the teachers I found mundane. It wasn't until years later while being tested in a job interview that it was discovered that I scored in the top 2% of the testing group for inductive reasoning. Deductive reasoning is taught in school, inductive is not. So I had to sit for additional testing to see how this happened. At least in my head this explained why normal linear logic seemed dull to me. It took me a while to understand the difference. Inductive reasoning also is a long course result, not a step by step process.

My point here is that some learning has to have time to work. Spiritual disciplines (which drive so much of my life) are measured in decades, not moments. Development of moral and ethical approaches to culture or business come about through years of experience and meditation. My bride and kids and kids-in-law all get exasperated when on long distance drives I do not listen to the radio, but sit and "think". It is my slow cooker learning process. Almost all of them want to ride in the other car.

Finally it occurred to me that we need both kinds of learners, slow and fast, deductive and inductive, logical and intuitive, short term and long term. You see I think the "slow learners" are the visionaries, the vision casters. We may not be the best at writing employee handbooks, but we are the best at inspiring the troops to look beyond today's problems to tomorrow's promises.

Godspeed to all the slow folks out there, what we bring to the table may be the best yet. By the way, the quote above was by Abraham Lincoln about himself in the book Team of Rivals. I take some comfort in that.
Don

We Know All Too Well..

Yesterday I followed an interesting FB conversation between a well-intentioned guy and a defensive gal. As the guy kept posting I kept thinking to myself, "Dude, stop digging, the hole is getting too deep to get out of." About that time he simply said he was going to stop talking. Finally.

The topic was prompted by a lady who posted something about being nostalgic when seeing older couples who have been married for 50+ years and how sweet and admirable that is in today's culture. She went on to say that they had of course had tough times and weak moments, but had somehow persevered through it all to the promised land of the golden years. It was a kind enough post and certainly didn't seemed accusatory of anyone.

But as I read the back and forth from the two who read the post and were impacted in completely opposite ways, it occurred to me that even the most innocuous comment can have unexpected consequences. The guy had a long marriage with a lot of trauma and was grateful for the steadfastness of his wife for all the trouble, and for her faithfulness in that time. The lady felt that she had tried and tried and had finally pitched it all in to save what she could of herself and her family. She felt the article was an indictment of her failure and the post raised the regret that never lurks far from the surface. And there is significant truth in her perspective. There is no way the guy or me to understand the complete devastation that this calamitous event causes. We can guess, we can conjecture, we can even empathize, but we can't know; not the deep, soul-bruising, crushing, suffocating first hand knowledge.

But having logged 38 years in this particular journey there are a few things that I do know.

- Long-marrieds know all too well how tenuous the bond is that they agreed to all those years ago. Better than anyone we know that it was not some unbounded love. In fact, I will tell you with full assurance and openness that there are years, yes, I said YEARS, where love has disappeared with no guarantee that it would return. There were long periods of time when one or both of us were unlovable.
- Long-marrieds know that the fight is never over. It settles down some when the major wars have been fought (career wars, sex wars, money wars, teen wars,.....) I think at some level we learn that it is simply too exhausting to keep battling when it is easier to let a lot of things slide. After about 40 years of age, almost no one changes. Neither partner is perfect, both are annoying in their own way, both see the ironies in the other but not in themselves, and neither is going to change much. But by year 35 or so both are so arm-weary that they let the gloves drop a little. Long term marriages are made up of two very tough-minded people, this trait never goes away. They have to work it out.
- Long-marrieds know that having kept this tenuous union together this long is not a matter of skill, or perfect love, or intelligence, or even faith. It is kept together by a curious combination at various times of pure, dumb luck and a deep-seated exasperating stubbornness. There is a saying that surviving soldiers are not necessarily heroic, but lucky. The divide is not skill, but luck...
- And somewhere along the line we all learn that we each live "Plan B" (I've written about this in another blog, so the idea is not new to my faithful few readers) We each think at various times that this was not what I bargained for. This was not the marriage that I dreamed of during the wedding rehearsals. This marriage has at least one (and the designated person isn't always the same one) partner that says and/or does the wrong thing. This was not the deal I signed up for. 
- And long-marrieds have learned that there is not a greater feeling in the world than to realize that the person they sleep next to every night is the one person in the world that has gone through every battle, suffered every disgrace, had their back day in and day out, wept with through the long and lonely nights, clung to when the storms of life have conspired to tear them apart, held them when there was nowhere else to turn. They realize that this has been the partner in the journey where the greatest highs were shared, the deepest and most intimate love was enjoyed, where the greatest accomplishments were partnered. But the longer they have been married, the less they take this for granted.

So when we see these folks holding hands, or grabbing a quick kiss, the hands are scarred and tired, and the lips have said some ugly things. But these two souls are hoping to finish the race even though the track took them places they never would have imagined. And they feel great empathy towards others who could not finish the race as they had imagined in the beginning. It is not my intent to point out how much better anyone is than anyone else, it is my point to say that really good people get crushed in this marriage deal, and really bad people sometimes fair better than they deserve. Long-marrieds know this all too well..

Godspeed, to all the long-marrieds, to the just started-outers, to those who have had to revision their future.
Don

What a Shame

Philip Seymour Hoffman died about a week ago of an overdose. There has been memorials, testimonies by other celebrities, a general shake of the head of a culture and the muttered, "What a shame." And it is a shame. He was talented, he had a certain level of fame, it appears he was a kind and loving father, he was unassuming in his neighborhood in NYC. But he dies prematurely due to a series of poor choices. It wasn't cancer. The plane did not fall out of the sky. A gunman didn't take him down in a shopping center. He bought the drugs, he prepped the drugs, and he stuck the needle in his arm. And he died by his own hand. Even as I write this it sounds cruel, unforgiving. That is not my intent. You see, I think we all die a bit by our own hand.

We are the sum of our decisions. It is as simple as that. As I reflect on my now almost 60 years I can point to a few key decisions that changed my life forever. Who I married has given me great joy. It could have turned out so differently if I had chosen someone else. Playing out that decision resulted in children who have brought me joy and comfort and sleepless nights. But it was the result of the first decision. Career choices have been marked as good and bad, but would I be in the spot I am now if any one of those decisions had been different? Because each one presented an array of options that I picked and followed the path. So I am sum of those decisions.

You may be thinking, "But wait, I didn't choose the cancer/divorce/slick road/bad boss" But you did choose the responses to all those things. While the event may have been random, your response was not. And we are formed by the decisions in the midst of those trials, not by the trials. Just in the past couple of years have I realized that my attitude, my demeanor is a result of my decisions. There are a couple of terms that I learned while getting my Masters. Orthodoxy is what we believe in our heads. Orthopraxy is what we do with what we believe. Orthodoxy drives or forms orthopraxy. In other words, what we really believe is what we live. Our decisions are a reflection of what we believe. We can't act our way to better thinking, we think our way to better acting. Religion and self-help gurus and diet plans all get this wrong. Until we decide in our heads, it will never lastingly apply to our actions.

Each of us die a little by our own hand. For me it is insecurity about my place in the world, for you it may be a bitterness about your childhood, or for another it may be a addiction. But our decisions about whatever the circumstance, if the decision is harmful, is from our own hand. And it is a shame.

I think the Creator looks down and wants the best for us, but allows us to make our own decisions, to live and die as a result of our own thinking. That is why so much emphasis is on "faith" the embodiment of our thinking, our decisions.

Godspeed to all on the journey. We each decide the journey's course, the backpack we will carry, and the companions we will travel with.
Don