Aging Capriciously

“There is a time for sowing and a time for reaping, a time to give birth, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to uproot what is planted.  A time to tear down, and a time to build up.  A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to embrace, and a time to shun embracing; a time to be silent, and a time to speak.” – (Solomon, Ecclesiastes 3:1-8). 

This psalm from Solomon is perhaps the greatest quote on time ever. It is undeniably recognized the world over for its profound wisdom.  It reflects a world where everything has a place and a purpose and the role of time is an overarching foundation for the purpose of life.  Today we weep for a lost friend or spouse, tomorrow we rejoice over a marriage or birth.  Today we fight a war for justice and tomorrow we negotiate for peace.

We think we control time. We believe that we control life and even our own destinies.  The reality is that we have control over some things and some (perhaps the vast majority) we do not.  Solomon’s wisdom counsels us to accept the ups and downs of life. It speaks to life as a flow wherein everything has its place. It counsels us to develop our own wisdom as we progress through life and face its inevitable joys and sorrows.  Do not be saddened by the burdens of life, for tomorrow is always a new day and it will bring new times and new opportunities. You have as much to be optimistic over as you do pessimistic. Optimistic people are happier and live longer.

We may not always be able to control time but we can always choose how we want to spend our time.  We choose our attitudes and we chose the meaning of time to us at any given moment.  I can decide to do what I think is important today or I can spend my day in trivial pursuits.  I can work today to make the world a better place or I can bemoan the lack of good TV programs and its excessive commercialism.  Some days I will be successful and others I will not be in controlling my time.  Perhaps today is a time for failure and tomorrow will be a new opportunity.

What is your time for today?  Life is often a series of cycles, do you live and accept your cycles or do you try to force your time according to some schedule? Do you accept the ups and downs of life? What downs are the most difficult for you to accept?  

Is the day running out and you still have a lot to do?  There does not seem like there is enough time in the day to do everything that needs to be done.  How often do you feel that your day has run out and you have not accomplished anything?  The thought of time running out is intriguing for it suggests that time is like a lake with no inlet but only an outlet.  The water runs out like the time in our day until there is none left.  But how can this be true?  What is time anyway? It is certainly not like water. 

I begin some days with great intentions to work, exercise, write, get some chores done or start a new project. Something interrupts my momentum and it can be all down hill from there.  A friend calls unexpectedly.  I run out of something and have to go to the store to find a replacement. The car breaks down. The weather is good, bad or terrible. There are a million things that can turn my best plans into rubbish.  I started off on the right foot, but the left foot never hit the ground.  Slowly the ticking clock gets closer and closer to bedtime.  Time to quit.  Time to leave.  Time to go someplace else. The plane is waiting. The taxi is waiting.  My friend is waiting. 

Some days my momentum never starts.  I don’t even start off on the right foot.  I have all of these good intentions but I just do not have the energy. Perhaps life seems overwhelming or I feel depressed or I ate too much the day before.  I want to crawl into a hole and hide.  I feel like a failure and the day has not even begun.  I need to get kick started.  I need a coach or something to get me motivated.  As my day begins to run out, I may try to put on a last minute burst of work to get some things done, or I might just say the heck with it.  I will do it tomorrow.  Time runs out and I have not even left the starting gate.  I was picked to win the Kentucky Derby and I can’t even run around the block today.  The other horse have left the gate and I want to go back to bed.  

Maybe, how we feel at the beginning of the day is life sending us a message. “Take it easy today; you have been stressing yourself out too much.”  Or, “Get in gear, you are full of energy and today is a great day to get things done.”  We need to allow life to talk to us and to follow our natural rhythms of ups and downs.  Not every day is a barn burner or “I just climbed Mt. Everest day.”  Life is a series of energy cycles. Allow a cycle of work, play and rest to become part of your life.  Maybe we would all live longer and enjoy life more if we had more “down” days.  Maybe it is time to forget about the clock ticking, the friend waiting, time to leave, and time to quit.  Do what you feel like today.  Go with the flow as we said in the sixties.  Too much time running out makes life miserable. Take control and turn time off. 

Does your life seem to follow natural cycles of play, rest and work?  How do you think your life would be if it did?  What would you have to change to create a more natural cycle time in your life?  When was the last time you had a day just running out and you really did not care? 

We take it for granted that we know what it means to repent.  John the Baptist wandered around the Holy Land telling people to “Repent ye sinners, the end of near.”  Throughout history, one prophet after another has warned us to “repent, repent.”  A sarcastic observer might argue that there is more sinning going on than repenting.  I perceive two possibilities here.  One is that we do not truly know what sin is or how to repent from real sin.  The second is that we don’t believe or perhaps really care if the end is near.  I would like to explore the first of these possibilities today and save the second for some other time.

Two weeks ago, Karen and I went to a Blue Grass Gospel jam at the Methodist church in Lewis. Lewis is a little, emphasis on little, town about 4 miles out of Frederic. They tell me that once upon a time a famous person stayed at a famous hotel in Lewis.  I can only think that it must have been a long long time ago.  If you blinked once, you would not see Lewis as you head up 35 to Siren and points north.  Nevertheless, I should not disparage Lewis since they have a wonderful group of people who get together every few weeks to do a Blue Grass Gospel jam.  This night there were 21 participants. The gender breakdown was 8 women and 13 men. Of the total, about seven or eight were young kids.   Eight of the performers could sing as well as play and there were instrumentals on guitar, mandolin, fiddle, bass, Dobro, harmonica and of course banjo. 

There was plenty of coffee and snacks and people were all friendly. Many of the spectators sang along with the performers and clapped in rhythm to the tunes. We had attended one of these before and it was a fun time for all. This jam started at 6 PM and ended at 9 PM.  At the start of the jam, a young father with his wife and two children did the opening set.  The wife played bass fiddle, the man a guitar, daughter did fiddle and son did banjo.  They were very good.  The only dissonant note was the introduction.  The father started off by noting that the world was now more evil than ever and that we should soon expect to see the coming of Christ who would end this evil world.  Thus, we should all praise Jesus and be ready for his coming.  I did not follow this logic or should I say line of reasoning. 

My thoughts were not exactly on getting ready for the end of the world.  Neither do I think that this world is so evil that it needs to be ended anytime soon.  In fact, I wondered what his two teenage children were thinking about his morbid gloomy thoughts.  Teenagers are not usually noted with thinking too far into the future so no doubt they would be caught unprepared were the world to end soon.  I also wondered why he would start a family if he were so preoccupied with the evil in the world.  Why bother bringing any kids into such an evil world?  This kind of morbid gloomy thinking seems to riddle those who want us to repent and it seems to miss the point.  It is like they have missed the point of the message, Repent, Repent!

The way I see it we all need to be humble (we all sin, make mistakes, screw up and hurt others) but we can all be redeemed from this “sin” by asking forgiveness and something the doomsayers never seem to mention but we must also make amends to those we hurt.  To be honest, I also take issue with the idea of sin that is often portrayed by many religions.  The older I get the more I think evil really exists and evil might be a good metaphor for sin,  However there is a large list of “sins’ that I think get lumped into this pot by organized religions and many of these self-proscribed “holy men.”  Let me list a few things that have been called SINFUL and that I doubt should be on the list:

Now you might agree with some of my above list but I will bet my last dollar that some of my list causes you to shake your head and say “How can he say that.”  The answer my friend is blowing in the wind.  It is simply that there are many things that are immoral and perhaps unethical but they are not sins.  Sins as defined by the Catholic Church that I grew up in are things that cause you to go to hell or purgatory.  Purgatory is for venial sins and hell is for mortal sins.  Everything on my above list would no doubt cast you straight into hell or at best purgatory if you died an unrepentant Catholic.  Repent, Repent!

However, if you need to go straight to hell and do not pass purgatory but go directly to the fires of eternal damnation for cheating on a test, I would say that the crime does not fit the punishment. This is a serious issue being challenged by a group of people who has noted the problems with punishment in our public schools today. The issue has been called the “school to prison pipeline” and it involves an overabundance of punishment that is taking place in our schools that does not fit the crime or that is unfair in terms of who receives it when. I have been a teacher since 1976 and you can believe me when I say that there are major problems in all of our school systems today but the solution is not more punishment or treating students like sinners.  Repent, Repent!

A second problem I have with the Repent, Repent crowd is their gloomy emphasis on the evil bad sick world with live in.  OSHO states that “to be blissful” is the greatest courage.”  Jesus might have preached the coming of a new world but he also went around healing people and finding ways to decrease the burdens people had in their life. Jesus not only brought admonitions about living for today, he also brought a law to love each other and to help bring joy into each other’s lives. Those with repentance on their lips would be much more tolerable if they also preached joy and happiness and brought a light to see the good and justice in the world. In the Bible, it was written that God would save Sodom and Gomorrah if just ten righteous people could be found. I have a difficult time believing that there are not at least ten righteous people in the world today.  If God is going to wait to destroy the world until there are no righteous people, it should be around a long time. As a matter of fact, with all the repentant sinners around there should be thousands of righteous people, unless they are all hypocrites? 

I think I should be prepared to meet my maker any time.  Being prepared seems like a reasonable way to live.  However, I will not live as though I and everyone else in the world are going to die any second in some kind of apocalyptic holocaust. There is too much beauty and goodness in the world for any kind of a God that I can imagine to destroy the entire world because of a few sinners. The good people in this world vastly outnumber the sinners. Only by the farthest and most skeptical measure that could be imagined does the evil in the world outweigh the charity and love that surrounds us.  If you don’t see this, then you need to start giving out more love and charity to others.

“There is an unchanging law of giving and receiving in the universe. Jesus’ doctrine, “Give and it will be given unto you”, is based on this law. Mostly Jesus’ teachings are taken at their surface value; however, these words of wisdom have a much deeper meaning from the spiritual point of view and are based on universal laws.”  (Sabeen Shalapy).  Ms., Shalapy has a wonderful site where she shares her views on gratitude and living a more fulfilling life.  She preaches love and not doom. Perhaps we need as much preaching about giving and loving as we do about doomsdays and repentance.  Love, Love and more Love is needed in equal measure to Repent, Repent and Repent. 

Are you working to help spread more joy and happiness in the world?  Have you succumbed to the negative warnings of a few doomsday prophets?  Do you see the beauty and love that surrounds you?  Do you believe in the cardinal virtues of Faith Hope and Charity?  What can you do today to add a measure of love to the world? Can you at least hope for a better tomorrow? 

Time can and often is represented by a symbol or object. Some of the more notable symbols include: pendulums, the New Year’s baby, count down music, sun dials, rust, cobwebs, dust, the Grim Reaper, tarot cards, astrology signs, old shoes, antiques, and there are many more. These symbols or objects have all become associated with the passage of time for various reasons. The Grim Reaper represents death while the New Year’s baby represents birth.  Rust and cobwebs both represent something old.  Count down music, sun dials and hour glasses represent the passage of time.  Each object has a history and its own association with time.  Merely seeing one of these objects creates a myriad of associations within our minds as to time and its relevance to our lives.

Perhaps one of our most familiar and lovable associations lies in our fascination with antiques.  Some people love antiques simply because they are old.  In the original Star Trek series, Captain Kirk loved old books. This perplexed Lt. Spock since he felt that e-readers and the computer reader were much more practical. Spock was way ahead of his time but now even the old retirees and baby boomers are today using Kindles and Nooks.  Spock could not fathom the need to associate with a symbol of the past. Spock was not only practical (as most of you can attest who are using e-readers) but Spock was also not nostalgic. Of course, Spock was not supposed to have emotions.  

Most antiques represent some type of emotional association for us.  The old desk that was just like our grandfathers desk.  The egg beater that was just like the one our mom used to make us pancakes with every Sunday morning after church.  Antiques remind us of the past and of our own transience in the present. They bring the past to life and help us to live it over and over again. Our Grandfather and mom can live on in the antiques we surround ourselves with.  Symbols have meaning in the present due to the emotional attachments they help to recreate. 

What are some symbols of time that are important to you?  What symbols help you connect to your past? What are some antiques that you most dearly love?  What meaning and emotions do these have for you? Why? Do you value old things more or new? Why? What if there were no antiques in the world?  

May 1 is in many parts of the world a day to celebrate.  In some countries, May Day recognizes the role of labor and the worker.  Elsewhere, it is an opportunity to celebrate.  In England during May they would dance around a pole called the Maypole. It is a dance that some believe was celebrating spring and the nearness of summer.  Others speculate that the origins of the dance stemmed from ancient pagan fertility rites.  Maypole dancing was described by the Puritans as ‘a heathenish vanity’ and was accordingly banned (Wikipedia). Today, you can dance all you want and not have to worry about being burned at the stake as a “heathen.”  Isn’t progress wonderful?

In the USA, Memorial Day (usually at the end of May) celebrates the sacrifices of our soldiers and veterans to help keep America and the world safe. We also celebrate the end of May as the beginning of summer.  It is a time when beaches, parks and outdoor venues open their gates. Students see May as the “end” of school; a time to graduate, look for a real job and of course attend graduation or prom parties.  Have you noticed how graduation now seems a much bigger deal than it did years ago?  High School teens have elaborate graduation parties, rent tuxes, expensive gowns, limousines and go to places I could not afford until I was in my forties.  Time keeps marching on and customs all over the world keep changing.  This May will never be like last May for any of us.

What customs do you have in your life associated with May?  How have they changed over the years? Were the changes for the better or worse? What is special about May this year for you?  

Where have all the hippies gone?  Long time ago. Where have all the hippies gone? Long time passing.  Gone to corporate lawyers.  Gone to Wall Street bankers. Gone to the suburbs.  Long time ago.  Long time ago. When will we ever learn?  When will we ever learn?

No doubt many of you will remember with some nostalgia, the Vietnam War Protests, the Free Love, Free Speech, Civil Rights and Women’s Liberation movements of the sixties.  The goals (even if they were never articulated as such) of the hippies and protesters of the sixties was to create a just society that was more clearly aligned with the principles and values of the founding fathers.  In 1776, the pragmatism as well as the culture dictated that not all “Americans” would share in the dream of the right to pursue life, liberty and happiness. Not all members of America were included in this founding father’s dream and by the early sixties; this smoldering situation was ready to burst into flames. America was rife with injustice and inconsistencies and a generation brought up on the ideas and values of American freedom and justice for all were ready to fight and march and protest to change things.

Looking back nearly fifty years, I remember my first wife Julie had been attending the University of Wisconsin at Madison in the sixties when it came to several students’ attention that the local Eagles club was excluding Black people from membership.  My wife joined a protest with several other students who picketed the Eagles Aerie.  Some years later, we both joined a group called PACE, which stood for People Acting through Community Effort.  We researched banks and organizations that had instituted Redlining in our community and we helped to organize boycotts and protests of these organizations.  So where have all the hippies gone? 

I often wonder when I look at the past few decades of greed, incredible debt, huge deficits, 10,000 square foot homes and increased intolerance towards the poor and immigrants where the hippies have all gone.  Who was it said, “I have met the enemy and he is us.”  Did we simply run out of energy or was the seduction of power and wealth too strong to overcome? Did all the hippies morph into bank officers and corporate CEO’s or were they brainwashed into moving to the suburbs and watching NFL football every weekend? 

If I go onto Amazon.com and look up the subject of “sixties” under books here are the first few titles of over 17,000 books on the subject that you will find:

The images and titles of these books no doubt bring back memories to many of you. Hippies, protest marches, psychedelics, peace signs, changing times, pot and hope are only a few of the icons we raised.  These are now the stuff of “once upon a time” and old faded memories.  I wonder where all the hippies went?  Are they sitting around reading books on the sixties and wondering how pot bellies replaced beach bodies?  Or are they all applying for social security benefits and hoping to find that foursome on the golf course in the sun? 

For me, the dream of the sixties became the exigencies of the seventies.  I went back to school in 1971 after serving in the military during the Vietnam War from 1964-1968. I got married, had a baby and became focused on supporting my family and “getting ahead.”  I became the “me” generation and wanted to be rich and successful.  The only true metric of any value seemed to be to make more money.  I wanted to be known for something and to be SOMEBODY. I also wanted to be secure from debt and poverty. 

To this day, I can’t say with any honesty that I have escaped these desires.  I vacillate between Gates and Buffett and OHSO and Tolle.  It is like being torn between two competing dreams both offering the path to happiness.  What is the real secret of life?  Does it lie in material fulfillment or spiritual fulfillment? The world is a large labyrinth with paths leading in both directions.  I find myself often lost in this maze of admonitions, directions and proverbs. Did the other hippies get lost in here as well? 

Were you ever a hippie or protestor?  Where did your hippie go?  Why is being a hippie now considered wrong by some people?  What values did hippies have that we should admire?  Should we all be part hippie? What is wrong with protesting against injustice? Why are so many people against the Occupy movement?  Would we rather the young generation simply tolerate injustice and get along with business as usual?  

A New York minute is an interesting term.  A New York minute is a fast, frantic, in-year-face, speedy and harried measure of time.  It is the opposite of the stereotypical Southern minute where time is slow and unhurried. Years ago, if you had been to Alabama and New York, you would have seen the difference in time immediately. Of course, today everyplace is changing and (I fear) there has been an exorable move towards the NY standard.  I am from New York and despite having lived in the Midwest for over thirty years; I still get accused of being on New York time. Probably because I do almost everything fast and have been multi-tasking before the word was coined.  In my own mind, I have slowed down considerably from when I was an “East Coaster” and I enjoy the Midwest because things (at least when I first arrived) seemed slower and mellower out here. Perhaps, it has to do with the farm cycle versus the industrial cycle.

It is interesting that we allow time zones to measure our time but we don’t use “specific place” zones, except in slang.  For instance, how would a Minneapolis minute compare to a San Francisco minute or a New Englandminute?  Today, they might all be about the same.  Thus, the term a NY minute is slowly passing out of use as we all become mini New Yorkers.  However, there are still places in the world that are not on NY time and perhaps you will get to visit one someday.  Even in parts of the US, there are places where the culture is not vested in moving fast.  One can take a trip to the Boundary Waters in Northern Minnesota or up Lake Chelan in Washington to Holden Village.  At these places, the emphasis is not on how many things you can get done or how much you can accomplish in 24 hours. There is a totally different emphasis.

In the Boundary Waters, you smell the flowers and you live according to paddle time or fishing time.  At Holden Village, the emphasis is on spirituality and finding your true center of being.  At both places, you forget time and you begin to live by the more ancient cycles of the sun, moon and stars.  I have been to both of these places and I want to go back someday. The peace and serenity you find at each is truly beyond description.

Have you ever been to New York? Where would you like to go that is not on NY time? How do you expect time would be for you there? What if time was like that for you right here and now?  What if in your own residence, you could set your own time standards? What would they be?  Would you slow your life down or speed it up? What do you think a good measure of a life well lived would be? 

Yesterday, I went to a Men’s group meeting in Luck, Wisconsin.  This is an interesting group of men led by Mr. Dan Beal, a former high school principal.  They have been meeting every other Wednesday for over eight years now. Each meeting, one man hosts a subject or idea or topic for discussion.  With plenty of coffee and snacks, the group meets for about two hours and shares their ideas on the subject.  Good fun, fellowship and camaraderie are had by all.  In addition, one always learns something from sharing ideas with other people. The subject for yesterday’s discussion was selected by Russ Hanson and dealt with selecting a single decision in our lives that we most regretted and then speculating on “what would our lives have been like”if we had chosen another decision.

I tried very hard for a week to think of a single decision that I regretted and that I would do over. I could not come up with one. I called my friend Bruce and ran this by him.  He said “It does not seem doable. How could you make another decision?”  I agreed with this perspective but it seemed somewhat arrogant to say that there was nothing in my life that could not be changed or perhaps another road I should have taken.  I decided to use the following decision as the basis for my contribution to the group. I wrote it out as follows:

I made this decision when I turned 18 years old.  The year was 1964.  I made it a time right after high school when I could not get into college and the Vietnam War was building up.  The decision I made has profoundly affected my life ever since.  Indeed it is probably the single most important decision I have made in my entire life.  Its repercussions still affect my life to this day.

I decided to go into the USAF.  You may ask why and here are my reasons:

Thank you for allowing me to share my fateful decision with you all here today. I can only hope that if the Hindus are right and I am reborn again, I will make the right choice on my second time around.

By the way, for those of you who might have missed it, there is a moral to this story: Clothes really do make the man!

Well that is my talk and my contribution to the discussion.  Now it is your turn. What decisions have you made that if you had your life to do over, you would change? Why would you change it?  How would your life be different today if you had? 

Right on time!  This phrase could be seen as a compliment.  I would guess most of us would take it that way.  Another way of looking at it might be to say, you were correct or exactly on the time we agreed on. Whatever way you look at it, most of us appreciate it when someone is “right on time.” Generally we reply to a compliment with a “thank you.”  However, few people ever seem to answer: “thank you” to someone who is on time.  I wonder why we don’t seem to recognize people who are complimenting us for being on time?  Do we simply expect people to be on time? Therefore, it is not really worth a real compliment. 

If you think about it, being on time is not such a common phenomenon.  In fact, if you think about it, it is not very common at all.  How many times each week have you gone to a meeting that started late or that several people showed up late for?  How many events that you showed up for on time started late?  I have often seen them delay a plane take off because a bunch of people were arriving late.  Of course, I feel bad for the people who might miss their flight but I am also concerned over my connections and missing my departure schedules. You are sitting on the plane wondering how long they will wait for the late comers.

Being on time is not a natural state of affairs.  People who are on time have to work at it. It is not easy to be on time.  A great deal of effort, responsibility and planning are needed to be “right on time.”  Any time someone does something that makes your life more pleasant, isn’t it worth a compliment?  When people show up on time, it makes my life easier and more pleasant. No one today has a great deal of time to waste just sitting around waiting for someone who is irresponsible and thoughtless. Yes, sometimes accidents happen.  However, have you ever noticed that they always seem to happen to the same people? The same people are late over and over again.  Thus, maybe we should note those people who work at being on time. 

What if you started thanking the people in your life who were right on time?  How would they react?  Would they feel more appreciated? Would you like to be more appreciated for the effort you make to be right on time?  Would being acknowledged for or acknowledging the effort by others to be right on time make any difference in your friendships or in your life? 

A common refrain in many organizations is “Always time to do it over, never time to do it right.”  How often have you seen this in your company? When I was consulting, it was one of the most popular problems we dealt with.  I would repeatedly hear employees use these words to describe how things were done in their workplace.  It was no wonder that American quality fell behind that of the Japanese during the eighties. We became a country where we did little or no long term thinking or planning. Our planning horizon was sixteen weeks.  This is the length of time between quarterly reports. Our goal was firmly fixed on the corporate stock price. Could we have a more fickle or less worthwhile target?  We are so busy doing things short term that we find it easier to fix the problems this creates rather than thinking things through and avoiding the problems in the first place. We ignore the old admonition that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

When I look back to the date I started consulting (September 1986), I ask myself, “Have we changed?” As a nation and as a people, are we looking any more long-term? Have we moved away from simplistic measures of success? Are we looking at more forward thinking or are we still primarily reacting to changes?  We have just gone through one of the worst recessions in history and have we learned anything from our experience?  Many would argue that it was short-term thinking that was the major cause of the recession. We spent and spent and bought and bought and borrowed and borrowed like there would be no tomorrows.  A few wiser people tried to warn us about this long-term debt and increased deficit spending, but most of us were too busy “shopping until we dropped” to worry about the future. We were like the grasshopper fiddling while the summer slowly passed by.  Finally, the winter came and you know what happened to the grasshopper. 

We are now in the situation of slowly recovering from this recession.  Many are still unemployed. Many are still homeless or in foreclosure.  Many are still in debt up to their eyeballs.  But we are still asked and perhaps willing to build billion dollar stadiums for the pleasure of watching our favorite sports teams on Saturday and Sunday.  Sports seems to have become the “Opiate of the Masses.”  No times or recession can be too bleak as long as the NFL is still playing on Sunday.  We can wait until November to find a new savior who will pull us once and for all out of this recession and restore us to our rightful place as the most powerful and prosperous nation on the face of the earth and indeed in the history of mankind.  Our new savior needs to do this with little or no effort on our part and certainly not ask us to save more or put off until tomorrow what we want to buy today.  Its not our fault if the country was in recession, it is the fault of the politicians who mismanaged the economy.  How dare they ask us to spend less and save more. Why is it taking Obama so long to fix things?  

Do you think long-term or are you primarily always reacting to short-term crisis?  Do you plan for the future or are you focused simply on what problems and troubles today will bring?  What role does long-term thinking play in your life?