Everybody is in a hurry today. Nobody has any time today. We do everything we can to keep busy today. The hell with everyone else. The hell with tomorrow. The hell with life. I am busy so you can just get out of my way. The roads are full of maniacs passing on double yellow lines. Other maniacs riding your bumper to the next stop sign about 100 yards away. Passing on the right, then left, then right again until they wind up next to you at the next red light. Where are the cops these days. Speed limits and time seem to have no meaning anymore.
When I first came down to Arizona, I would ask people “How are you doing?” “Living the dream” was a common reply. “What is living the dream?” I would ask them. “Well, I can golf everyday now.” Ah, yes, you retired so that you could stay busy hitting a little round ball around 18 holes. So that you could try like hell to hit the tiny ball into the tiny hole eighteen times. What a life! At first I did not understand. When you retire, shouldn’t you make some time to just relax? Karen says well maybe they relax by swinging their expensive golf clubs. I doubt it.
Years ago, I learned that one can be or do and life is a balance between each. Being involves spiritual activities that make us better people. It is meditating. It is going on a retreat. It is praying. It is reading a good book. Doing is moving. Doing is animated. Doing is hitting a pickle ball back and forth over a net. Nothing is wrong with doing but something is wrong with a life that is filled only with doing. I have met too many people that spend time doing but spend no time being.
“Hi, Paul, would you like to get together for a coffee next week?” “Gee, John, I would love to, but I am really busy next week.” “Well, than how about the week after that?” “Sorry, but my great aunt and her son are coming over that week and I need to get the house cleaned. Tell you what I will check my calendar and get back to you. Not sure but I think I have an opening next year.”
There is a mania in this country with going nowhere fast and doing something all the time. I rush to get somewhere so I can get busy staying busy. The business of America is more about staying busy than doing anything really useful. The country band Alabama penned a song many years ago which went as follows:
I’m in a hurry to get things done
Ohh I rush and rush until life’s no fun
All I really gotta do is live and die
Even I’m in a hurry and don’t know why?
Don’t know why? I have to drive so fast
My car has nothing to prove
It’s not new
But it’ll do zero to sixty in five point two
Ohh, I hear a voice
That says I’m running behind
I better pick up my pace
It’s a race and there ain’t
No room for someone in second place
I wonder what life would be like in America if more people meditated and less people were in a hurry. What if people spent more time praying than watching TV? I would give you better than ten to one odds that if more people prayed and/or meditated that we would have less crime, less war, and less violence. Society and the world would be more peaceful if people spent more time meditating. We would have more time for friends. More time for settling differences peacefully.
The average USA citizen spends the following amount of time in each of these activities each day: — Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2022
Sleeping 9.02 hours
Eating: 1.23 hours
Shopping: .66 hours
TV: 2.79 hours
Religious/Spiritual .13 hours
Volunteering: .10 hours
Educational: .44 hours
Working: 3.23 hours
You can see from the above chart that the average USA citizen spends approximately 8 minutes per day in religious or spiritual activities. I wonder whether this statistic would find any greater amount of time spent by the religious right in America doing prayers or meditating than for the average person. The time spent per person is just about enough time to say a blessing at supper time. To repeat what I said above “What if people spent more time meditating and praying and less time rushing to get somewhere?” Would we have a better country? I believe we would. We would probably have:
- Less road rage
- Less drug use
- Less alcoholism
- Less traffic accidents
- Less wars
- Less violence
On the positive side, just imagine how relaxed people would be. If people were more relaxed, there would be nicer people walking around. Imagine the following scenarios:
Ariana: “You just took the parking spot I was going to drive into.”
Alex: “Oh, I am very sorry. I did not see you waiting there. Just give me a second and I will pull out and park elsewhere.”
Ariana: “No, that’s ok, I can find another spot. There is plenty of spaces in the parking lot.”
President Biden: “Look, President Putin. I am sorry for all the names I called you in the past. I have so much on my plate and too much to do. Sometimes, my age gets in the way.”
President Putin: “I did not want a war with Ukraine, but you kept bad mouthing us and surrounding our country with more and more NATO members. We just want to survive like you do.”
President Biden: “I think it is time for peace talks now. We can back off and leave Ukraine alone if you can promise to pull troops out and restore Ukraine to its former territories.”
President Putin: “Lets start the peace talks now and see what agreements we can come to.”
Well, you can call me Pollyanna and laugh if you want but if Putin and Biden could sit down and meditate together and then pray together for peace, I seriously think the world would be a different place. Maybe we could even get Netanyahu to pray and meditate some.
Over time, I have noticed that the most popular post I have on my blog site is my Home page “Who is Dr. John Persico Jr.?” I realize that most readers want to know my credentials to see if anything I am going to say has any credibility. Am I someone you can trust? Can you depend upon my words or my facts? Am I just another wannabe Guru so full of my own opinions that I have no room for other points of view?
Those who march to the proverbial beat of a different drummer live with risk, but they also are not bored. We only experience life when we are open to the unknown and the unpredictable. Walk through a cemetery at midnight. Take a train or bus to someplace you have never been before. Read a book in a new genre. Watch a movie that is offbeat. Try some foods that you think you might not like. Meet some new people. Embrace the strange and esoteric. Life is not a cherry; it is a seething caldron of uncertainty and innumerable possibilities. You will never truly live if you simply stand at the edge of the caldron and wait for it to stop bubbling.
Despite attending forty 3-day Jesuit retreats and regularly going to church with my spouse, I remain adamantly somewhere between an Atheist and an Agnostic. See my blog 
I can see some positive sides to a church ideology that addressee inner spirituality, but I think it has serious drawbacks. You can focus too much on what I will call the “inner spirituality” of church members. The reasoning behind the emphasis on inner spirituality can be faulty. The theory is that if each member becomes a better Christian, they will be better neighbors towards others. If they feed the hungry and cloth the poor, they will be ridding the world of the evils that Jesus preached against. Unfortunately, these propositions are not evidenced by historical fact. For hundreds of years many Christians supported slavery and sexism by doing little or nothing to condemn or speak out against it. Furthermore, many Christians were major protagonists of racism and sexism. If their ministers spoke out against it, it obviously made little difference. Being a card carrying member of a Christian church never seems to correlate with ending war, sexism, racism, homophobia or even poverty. I think without an equal emphasis on “Outer Spirituality” Christianity is a worthless religion.
There are many definitions of spirituality. What does it mean to be a spiritual person? Some people lean towards accepting a higher being or creator. Some lean towards accepting a more conventional religious perspective. Many on-line definitions list several factors necessary to be a spiritual person. My own definition is much simpler. I think being a spiritual person involves two elements. The first is seeking meaning in one’s life. The second is seeking purpose. Meaning is inner spirituality. Purpose is outer spirituality. Meaning and purpose must go beyond what is simply good for oneself and must embrace what is good for humanity and the universe. Thus, a truly spiritual person is one who finds and balances inner and outer spirituality.
I suppose in one sense, “life is not fair” means that life is indeed following a bell-shaped curve and some of us are on the undesirable end. In other words, some of us are too short, too fat, too unappealing, or any number of other less-desirable traits that we find on the extremes of the bell-shaped curve. Last night I was watching a 3-year-old do stunts on a sized down motorcycle. I could not do these stunts if my life depended on it. This young boy was a natural on the motorcycle. He took to it like a fish to water. We have all seen and perhaps envied some of the more fortunate on our bell-shaped curve who can do things we only dream about doing. For those of us on the wrong end of the bell-shaped curve, life will never seem fair.
I understand why so many people want to believe in heaven and hell. It would be much easier to go on living peacefully if I could really believe that there was someplace better to go to than this earth I now reside on. Too many bad days now seem to intrude on my equanimity. You and I and everyone else that resides on this 3rd rock from the sun are abused and tormented every day with disease, starvation, accidents, environmental devastations, and pandemics. I could handle all of these things but for one thing. It is called “mans’ inhumanity to man.” The stupid cruel things we do to each other over and over again. The wars, murders, and injustices that we inflict on other human beings. And it is not just the average person that inflicts these cruelties, it is the “best” people in the land. In fact, it would seem that the inhumanities done by those with the most money, most intelligence and those we call our leaders are the worst of all the brutalities and savagery that we see in the news each day.
Faith is number five of my seven essential virtues for leading a happy and successful life. Every Friday I start my day with the following prayer:
I decided that I must first understand what Faith really means. To do this, it is helpful to deconstruct how we think about Faith and how we use the word. I thought about how we use both Trust and Faith in common language. For instance we use trust in English as follows:
I think you can readily see that there is a certain degree of overlap between the two concepts. However, Faith generally seems to convey a more sectarian or theological concept of belief whereas Trust is generally used in more secular terms. Thus, we don’t “trust” God but we have Faith in her. Faith seems to be a term that is not contingent upon any kind of physical or logical proof. We might not trust a person with our money without proof that they are “bonded” or trustworthy, but we would not expect such displays of material evidence when it comes to having Faith in God. So what is the relevance to this in our lives? What good is Faith if we can substitute trust for faith and have more security in the long run?
The answer seems to be (IMHO) that sometimes we can trust without evidence but generally we are better off trusting with some element of surety that can mitigate the risk of our trust being unfounded or mistaken. Whereas, there is little or no evidence that can prove your need or desire to have Faith. You must have Faith like a parent has love for a child. It is unconditional. You have Faith simply because you want to believe. You have Faith because you accept something without conditions. You need no proof or evidence to support your Faith. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Should you have Faith without proof? What would a life without Faith be like? Would we be safer or happier with less Faith?
Fortunately, the 3.4 percent of respondents have been more than enough to help me keep my Faith. (Should I really need such sustenance if I have Faith?) Yes, I have Faith that my writing is making a difference to the world but alas, I have no proof for the empiricists, the materialists or the skeptics. I have to ask you as well as myself to believe that I am. It is Faith that keeps me motivated. Without Faith, life would appear to be a futile waste of time. Faith helps us to carry on when everything and everyone is saying to quit. The woman in the life raft, the athlete with a severe injury, the parents with a disabled child, the poor fighting hunger, the righteous fighting injustice are all sustained by the power of Faith.
Faith can believe everything
Samson was the strongest most well-built man on the block. He had muscles chiseled in stone. His muscles had muscles. He stood 6 feet 4 inches tall and did not have an ounce of fat on him. Samson worked out seven days a week, twice each day at the Philistine Gym on Gibeon Street. He worked out before he went to work each morning and after work for two hours each evening.
wanting something more because you can’t have it. Delilah had only one other person she admired, herself. Much like Sampson, she could not pass by a mirror without staring at her reflection and thinking “how beautiful I am.”
Delilah grew more and more desperate in her attempts to get Samson to notice her. Finally, she hit on the idea to simply approach Samson and remark on his wonderful hair. So, one day while he was practicing his dead lifts, she sauntered by and casually remarked on how beautiful his hair was. She proceeded to compliment him on his marvelous muscle definition. She followed up these compliments with the suggestion that they go back to her place after working out and she would cook him a nice microwave dinner and brush his hair. This idea delighted Samson and after working out, they both went to Delilah’s house.
Delilah waited until the night before the World Weightlifting championship. At around midnight, she used the key that Samson hid near his door to let herself into Samson’s apartment. Moving as stealthily as a cat, she entered Samson’s bedroom. Samson was a sound sleeper and he had no inclination of what awaited him. Delilah took the surgical scalpel that she had borrowed from a medical admirer and in one quick slash, she lopped off Samson’s braid. Samson was totally unaware and did not move a muscle. Delilah slipped back out the way she had come and placed Samson’s key back where he hid it.
As the little boy grew up, he became an even more devout believer in God. Everywhere he went, he saw the hand of God. In the clouds, in nature, in the weather, in the oceans, in good times and in bad times he believed that God was present. The little boy thought how hard God must have to work to try to keep life sustained. Each night he would pray to God that when he grew up, he would be able to help ease God’s work somewhat and do his share to help make the world a better place.
Aging Capriciously 