Cheer up! We're all going to die!

Tonight at the UU Sangha I attend, we started a discussion about fear, and politics, and how to talk about them both. That is to say, our Dharma study was a reading of the Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings, and after we read them one member of the group started to discuss the Ninth one:

Aware that words can create happiness or suffering, we are committed to learning to speak truthfully, lovingly and constructively. We will use only words that inspire joy, confidence and hope as well as promote reconciliation and peace in ourselves and among other people. We will speak and listen in a way that can help ourselves and others to transform suffering and see the way out of difficult situations. We are determined not to say untruthful things for the sake of personal interest or to impress people, nor to utter words that might cause division or hatred. We will protect the happiness and harmony of our Sangha by refraining from speaking about the faults of other persons in their absence and always ask ourselves whether our perceptions are correct. We will speak only with the intention to understand and help transform the situation. We will not spread rumours nor criticise or condemn things of which we are not sure. We will do our best to speak out about situations of injustice, even when doing so may make difficulties for us or threaten our safety.

I'll call this woman Lisa, which is certainly not her real name. Anyway, Lisa said she knows she has trouble with this precept, because whenever she talks about politics (for example) her words never "inspire joy, confidence [or] hope." In fact, her hairdresser recently told her, "You always bring division, antagonism, and negativity with you whenever you come here." [The quote might not be exact.] Then she went on to say that she knows exactly why she talks this way—namely, that she is afraid. Lisa believes the worst about the political currents or possibilities in our country and world today, and she is afraid of all of them. (If you hadn't guessed, she is for example afraid of climate change and Donald Trump.) And this fear causes her to speak in very negative ways.

Then another woman—whom I'll call Liza (also not her real name, but her real name is very close to Lisa's)—said basically the same thing about herself, too. A third member of the group—a man, this time—got us off the theme of politics (thanks be to God!) but expressed a lot of anxiety about how his kids are turning out. His kids are 18 and 21, and only in the last couple of weeks have I started to hear any of the story. Admittedly it sounds grim, but I won't go into it now.

As I listened to all this, I was struggling with whether to say anything of my own. What I wanted to do was to teach, to instruct, to lecture. (You know, the kind of thing I do here so often and so effortlessly.) 

I don't do this

I never endorse politicians. They always disappoint you. Politics is a dirty, nasty business, and the power of the President is trivial compared to the power of the institutions that drive our government. Honestly, it's not clear to me that Presidents can achieve anything they want, let alone everything. In 2008, Barack Obama promised to close the prison camp and the naval base at Guantánamo Bay. Guess what? They are still open. So much for the power of the Presidency.

So fine, I won't endorse anybody. They are all liars and crooks, and they will always disappoint. Whatever. Now, with that said, I challenge you to watch this 30-minute advertisement with dry eyes.

  

           

Like father, like son

This morning I realized that I've written two things about Father that are two sides of the same coin.

• On the one hand I've written that, from a professional point of view, he was much better at thinking than at deciding. (Peter Drucker says you can't expect the same person to be good at both.) (See for example this post or this one.)
• On the other hand I've written that he more or less pissed away some 30 years of retirement, doing plenty of little things but none of the big things he had wanted to do. (See for example here.)

And of course these are exactly the same thing. Because Achieving Something Big requires more than just intelligence, research, or planning. It requires lots and lots of decisions. What's more, they have to be good decisions, or mostly. There are so many things that can go wrong in any enterprise—many a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip—and you have to steer successfully around them all before you reach your Achievement. And the only way to make good decisions reliably is to have a lot of practice at it. And this means that Achieving Something requires executive skills … which were exactly the skills that my Father did not have.