“You are going to feel like hell if you never write the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves of your heart — your stories, visions, memories, visions and songs. Your truth, your version of things, your own voice. That is really all you have to offer us. And that’s also why you were born.”
Anne Lamott
“You are going to feel like hell if you never write the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves of your heart — your stories, visions, memories, visions and songs. Your truth, your version of things, your own voice. That is really all you have to offer us. And that’s also why you were born.”
Anne Lamott
This post introduces a new blog category — Hindsight is 20/20.
Valuing hindsight stems rightly from an appreciation that if we can identify what would have either prevented or made us better prepared to weather prior events, we can better prepare for future events.
For us octogenarians+, life is increasingly viewed through a rearview mirror. The lens of wisdom and knowledge gained over many years shape the backward-looking analysis of hindsight. Such revelations are opportunities for self-awareness. Past understandings and experiences can be deeply embedded in our psyche shaping our present lives and relationships. “…we look back at times and reflect and examine. Such is introspection and learning. We try to get a different angle on the road taken.1Ashley Bullock, PhDhttps://modern-minds.com/we-finally-get-it-hindsight-is-2020/ Hindsight can be perilous journey, producing “If had only known then what I know now..” laments. Regret, remorse, grief, pain and guilt may occur. On the other hand, hindsight can be analogous to a positive side of regret:
In his book “The Power of Regret” the writer Daniel Pink argues that regret is an unavoidable fact of life and that it should not be thought of as something negative and shameful, but rather embraced as something helpful and instructive. What we regret, he says, can teach us about who we are. It helps to reveal what we want, what we fear, what truly matters to us and what doesn’t. It is an emotion that can help us tune our moral compasses, strengthen our values and keep us from repeating the same mistakes over and over again.
My goal is for “hindsight-insights” to become “tsunami stones” for our daily life.
Tsunami Stones
In 2011, the northeastern coast of Japan suffered from a chain reaction of related disasters that caused tens of thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of displaced residents with no home to return to. First, the most powerful earthquake Japan has experienced in recorded history (magnitude 9.0-9.1) occurred in the Pacific off the coast of Japan. This earthquake triggered a massive tsunami, which not only razed a large area to the ground, but also led to the meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Residents in the affected coastal towns had only minutes of warning before the tsunami struck. However, in the tiny coastal village of Aneyoshi, there was no destruction when the wave hit. Why? After a destructive tsunami in the late nineteenth century and another in the 1930s, the residents of Aneyoshi relocated their village to higher ground, carved a message on a stone and placed it at the highest point the waves had hit: “Do not build any homes below this point!” Similar “tsunami stones” are scattered generously across the northeastern Japanese coastline. Not all of them say exactly the same thing, but their purpose is clear: to warn future generations of the very real danger of tsunamis. The sense of risk, however, has faded with the passage of time, and Aneyoshi is one of only a handful of villages that have continued to heed the warnings generations later. It’s easy at times to look back through our own lives, remember the disasters we ourselves have lived through and remain wary of the things we’ve seen cause problems. It’s less easy to look back further, pay attention to history and heed the warnings of prior generations.
“May you have the hindsight to know where you have been; The foresight to know where you are going; And the insight to know when you have gone too far.
Your house, containing everything you own, catches fire. After saving your loved ones and pets, you have time to safely make a final dash to save any one item. What would it be?
August 6, 1945
Not many Americans have Aug. 6 circled on their calendars, but it’s a day that the Japanese can’t forget.
The bombs killed an estimated 200,000 men, women and children and maimed countless more. In Hiroshima 50,000 of the city’s 76,000 buildings were completely destroyed. In Nagasaki nearly all homes within a mile and a half of the blast were wiped out. In both cities the bombs wrecked hospitals and schools. Urban infrastructure collapsed.
“Everything was burned. People were walking around with their clothes burned off, their hair singed and standing on end. Their faces were swollen, so much so that you couldn’t tell who was who. Their lips were swollen too, too swollen to speak. Their skin would fall right off and hang off their hands at the fingernails, like an inside-out glove, all black from the mud and ash. It was almost like they had black seaweed hanging from their hands.
But I was thankful that some of my classmates were alive, that they were able to make their way back.
Swarms of flies came and laid eggs in the burns, which would hatch, and the larvae would start squirming inside the skin. They couldn’t stand the pain. They’d cry and plead, ‘Get these maggots out of my skin.’
The maggots would feast on the blood and pus and get so plump and squirm. I didn’t dare use my bare hands, so I brought my chopsticks and picked them out one by one. But they kept hatching inside the skin. I spent hours picking those maggots out of my classmates.”
Chieko Kiriake (5 years old 1945)
Social Media
Supposedly, being on social media is free. But you know that’s not true. It costs you time—hours of it, in fact, each and every day. It costs you attention. It costs you the anxiety it induces. It costs you the ability to do or think about anything else when nothing exactly is demanding your focus at the moment. It costs you the ability to read for more than a few minutes at a time. It costs you the ability to write without strangers’ replies bouncing like pinballs around your head. It costs you the freedom to be ignorant and therefore free of the latest scandal, controversy, fad, meme, or figure of speech that everyone knew last week but no one will remember next week.
Brad East
Motherly images of God
“under the shelter of your wings”
A recurring maternal image of God’s care in Scripture is that of a mother bird sheltering her chicks under her wings. Jesus uses this imagery in the gospel of Luke when he weeps over Jerusalem:
“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her. How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!”
…it’s important, for me at least, to stop and savor these motherly, maternal images of God’s love and affection. A mother’s heart is a profound and powerful window to look through when contemplating the love of God. There is no fiercer love on earth, and something divine shines through that fierceness. And it is good for your soul to know that you are loved like that.
Richard Beck
Your story is worth listening to.
Peter Levine said that “trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.” Empathetic witnessing means holding your story/experience without rushing to fix, solve, minimize, bypass, or shame you. Consider who might be an empathetic witness to your story (this can include a therapist).
Kat Wilkins
Pondering
Can I believe in something I can’t understand?
God’s Will
For generations, the providence of God, as mysterious and perplexing as it was, created capacities for emotional resignation, humility, and patience. And I wonder if the reason our politics has become so emotionally reactive is due to the fact that we’ve lost some of this perspective, that God moves in mysterious ways. To be sure, we need to practice Lincoln’s humility when reading history. We need to stand quietly before the inscrutability of God rather than pridefully proclaiming what is or is not “God’s will” in any given historical event. Our posture is patience and trust rather than redpilling ourselves into conspiracy theories.
I trust that God is at work in history, even in the disasters. How, I don’t know. To what purpose, I cannot say. Maybe God is rejecting America, and if so God has his reasons. We are not Israel after all. The hope of the world never depended upon us. But like Lincoln, I really don’t know what is going on. So I act with what light has been given me and wait in humility, patience, and trust. And this trust gives me just enough emotional distance from today’s news and future election results that I experience a peace that seems increasingly rare.
Richard Beck
Luxury Beliefs
Luxury beliefs are ideas professed by people who would be much less likely to hold them if they were not insulated from, and had therefore failed seriously to consider, their negative effects.
…there is a special class of bad ideas and policies that proliferate in good part because those who hold them, being insulated from their effects, have never seriously thought about the consequences that would ensue from their implementation. The reason why the concept of luxury beliefs has resonated so widely is that it gives a name to people who treat as a parlor game questions that potentially have very serious consequences—just not for themselves. In other words, these beliefs are a luxury not because they are costly to acquire or serve predominantly to accrue social status but rather because those who hold them have the luxury to adopt them without being exposed to their real-life consequences.
Yascha Monk
Consumer Driven
The consumer-driven religious life has resulted in Churches that major in personal fulfillment with little attention to doctrine and sacrament. It is a new form of Christianity, one that differs from its own Protestant ancestry as much as its ancestry differed from the Catholic. And though it has its largest representation within Protestant or non-denominational Churches, both Catholic and Orthodox communities are not immune to its power and its thought. Orthodox Christians are sometimes as guilty of “shopping” for their parish (or jurisdiction) as any mega-Church seeker.
Fr Stephen Freeman
Every Human “Every human being is a human being. Every human being is fearful—fearful of being discovered as less than they want to come across.”
John Huffman, Sr
Defending the Accused
“He’s just intense.” “You are overreacting.” “You’re being paranoid.” “You need to forgive him.” “Just turn the other cheek.” “You are being too sensitive.” “You must be reading into things.” “You need to think the best of him.” “Are you sure he meant it that way?” “You need to look at your own self first.” “Did you do something to provoke him?” “You’re blowing things out of proportion.” “No one’s perfect. You shouldn’t expect him to be.” “He treats you that way because he cares about you.” “I can’t believe you’re telling me this. Stop gossiping.” “We’re all sinners, so you should be gracious with him.” “I’m sure he didn’t realize how his actions made you feel.” “You are trying to ruin this family/organization/church/group.” “You took something really small and made a huge deal out of it.” “Well, you must have done something to cause him to treat you that way.” “You’re probably stressed out right now; don’t let it cloud your judgment.”
If you’ve experienced any of these types of responses, I’m so sorry. It is disorienting and painful to be treated this way. And the commonality in these responses is that they, at best, minimize your concerns and at worst, attack you for raising them.
Scot McKnight
Will Rogers had it right: “One must wait until evening to see how splendid the day has been.” Right now, it’s pretty splendid.
1,102 days ago an unexpected medical trauma brought me to the brink of death. By the providence of God I survived.
“It’s an open question whether a full and unaverted look at death crushes the human psyche or liberates it.”1Junger, Sebastian. In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife (p. 74). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.
For me, it has been liberating, an occasion for memento mori(“Remember! You will die!”); abolishing an illusion of immortality and producing a new relationship with death and dying. . …death is not something to be denied, avoided, or even begrudgingly accepted. Death makes the expanse of a lifetime finite and therefore precious.2Katherine Wolf -Devotionals Daily
I continue to pursue the subject of death and dying. Could there be a more relevant subject for a living being? Some, particularly Christians, say life after death is most important but I contend as long as people believe they are immortal, life after death is irrelevant.
The closest thing to morality in the modern world is oftentimes to avoid making people uncomfortable, unless of course it’s making people uncomfortable about making other people uncomfortable. But if death makes people uncomfortable—and it sure does—then it is very tempting for Christians to want to soften the blow as well.
“Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind.” Mary Schmich
Two Worlds
There are always two worlds. The world as it operates is power; the world as it should be is love. The secret of kingdom life is how we can live in both—simultaneously. The world as it is will always be built on power, ego, and success. Yet we also must keep our eyes intently on the world as it should be—what Jesus calls the reign of God.
Richard Rohr
Forgetting God
The Russian writer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, when asked about the terrible evils of the Soviet Gulag, and other nightmarish manifestations of modernity, offered a very simple explanation of all that had befallen our world: “We forgot God.” I would add to that the observation that every time we remember God, we allow ourselves to step into the truth of our existence. The secular delusion disappears.
Fr Stephen Freeman
Miracle
After lecturing learnedly on miracles, a great theologian was asked to give a specific example of one. “There is only one miracle,” he answered. “It is life.”
Have you wept at anything during the past year? Has Your heart beat faster at the sight of young beauty? Have you thought seriously about the fact that someday You are going to die ? More often than not do You really listen when people are speaking to you instead of just waiting for your turn to speak? Is there anybody You know in whose place, if one of you had to suffer great pain, You would volunteer yourself? If your answer to all or most of these questions is No, the chances are that You’re dead.
Fredrick Buechner
Readers
Earlier this week, a new Reading Agency survey, The State of the Nation’s Adult Reading, reported that half of U.K. adults do not regularly read and 15% have never read regularly for pleasure, while 35% used to read but have stopped. Attention is an issue overall, with 28% of U.K. adults saying they have difficulty focusing on reading for more than a few minutes. Comparing this data with a study conducted in 2015, the Reading Agency’s research found that these figures mark not just a notable decrease in the number of U.K. adults reading regularly, but also a stark increase in the number of non-readers. With only 50% of the nation now saying they read regularly, down from 58% in 2015, the decline has gathered momentum in recent years, with 15% of the nation now saying they do not currently read for pleasure and have never done so regularly. That’s a rise of 88% since 2015, when just 8% of U.K. adults were non-readers.” The research also indicates a potential for this trend to continue growing, with younger adults being less likely to read than all other age groups. One-quarter of young people across the U.K. (aged 16-24) say they’ve never been regular readers, while an additional 44% already identify as “lapsed readers.” https://www.shelf-awareness.com/issue.html?issue=4776#m64565
Sports(Olympics)
Sports, like other art forms, are potential channels of transcendence. It’s why we watch and admire athletes. It’s why athletes sometimes can’t tell you why they made some choice on the field or what they were thinking in the moment. They were so in the flow, so self-forgetful, so present to teammate and circumstance that they lost themselves. The beauty that results, for them and for us, is marvelous. Our breath catches in our throat. David Foster Wallace called watching Roger Federer “a religious experience.” In a sense, he wasn’t wrong.
Brad East
Momento Mori – These lyrics hit a lot harder at 60 [82] than they did at 16…..
And you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it’s sinking… Racing around to come up behind you again. The Sun is the same, in a relative way, but you’re older… Shorter of breath and one day closer to death.
—Pink Floyd
Clocks
“Sometimes it really upsets me— the way the clock’s hands keep moving, even when I’m just sitting here not doing anything at all, not even thinking about anything except, right now, about that clock and how it can’t keep its hands still. Even in the dark I picture it, and all its brother and sister clocks and watches, even sundials, all those compulsive timepieces whose only purpose seems to be to hurry me out of this world.”
– Linda Pastan
Consciousness
Consciousness is not the seeing but that which sees me seeing. It is not the knower but that which knows that I am knowing. It is not the observer but that which underlies and observes me observing.We must step back from our compulsiveness, and our attachment to ourselves, to be truly conscious. … take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it. Wisely, [this step] does not emphasize a moral inventory, which becomes too self-absorbed and self-critical, but speaks instead of a “personal inventory.” In other words, just watch yourself objectively, calmly, and compassionately. When we’re able to do this from a new viewing platform and perspective as a grounded child of God, “The Spirit will help us in our weakness” (Romans 8:26). From this most positive and dignified position, we canlet go of, and even easily admit, our wrongs.
Richard Rohr
Holiness
Someone taught me long ago that there’s a difference between “gifted” and “godly.” Ideally you need both, but godly is always better than gifted and a jerk.
Holiness is both gift and demand. Something we are given and something we prosecute.
Holiness is not moralizing, not separatism, nor self-deprecation.
Holiness is the attempt to be consumed by God and to reflect Jesus to others.
Christian leaders are held to a higher standard in terms of language, financial dealings, relational integrity, and scrutiny. One must be beyond reapproach.
In effect, your walk must match your talk. You can’t have a private life without recourse to holiness.
Now, importantly, holiness is not perfection or sinlessness.
Holiness always means dealing with the flaws in your character, mistakes of judgment, and seeking reconciliation when you are in the wrong. In fact, learning how to faithfully resolve your own mistakes rather than deny them or cover them up is a mark of holiness.
Michael Bird
Truly Human
While it is true that “God became man so that man could become God,” it is equally true that God became man so that man could become man – truly human. To be truly human we must sing and dance, create art and tell stories. We engage in commerce and build cities. All that is human life and existence is a gift from God and has a God-given purpose and direction.
Fr Stephen Freeman
View from the Front Porch
Thank God it’s Monday
Thank God it’s Monday. OK, so I am retired and it is easy for me to say since I don’t have to go to work. But, I must tell you I adopted that prayer long before I retired. At some point, I realized that “”Thank God it’s Friday”” reflected an attitude toward work and the week and to life that I did not share. Of course weekends have their special opportunities but it is during the week that life is lived and experienced at its best and worst. Living for Friday betrays a more general attitude about our life that says we believe the best of life is somewhere ahead of us. We are pulled through life by a carrot on the end of the stick. It is an “”I can’t wait until…”” philosophy. I can’t wait until… school’s out for summer … I get my driver’s license … I get married, have a family … start my career … retire … get to heaven (die?). I have come to realize how much that I was missing by wishing for the future rather than experiencing the present. That probably accounts for some of my lack of memory that I have written about. I attribute some of the “”I can’t wait until…”” philosophy, at least for Christians, to a truncated view of salvation. If we only view salvation as going to heaven when we die, our view of life will be skewed. Somewhere along the line I began to understand that salvation is not just about “”pie in the sky””, it is present and real. We enjoy the reality of salvation here and now. Salvation is living under the reign of God here on earth as well as in eternity. That has profound implications for how I live and especially I how I view Monday. posted 2006
It has been more than a year since I began writing in earnest about death and dying. ( If you missed those posts, you can read them HERE ) Writing about death and dying revealed the wisdom of planning to die well. Accordingly, I committed to develop a plan to die well. This post is a report on my “Dying Well Plan”
The dying part of my plan is progressing well. For octogenarians the process of dying is often tenuous and unpredictable. Thankfully that is not yet my experience. I have a number of maladies that could quickly alter my mostly comfortable journey. Each day requires vigilance to avoid pitfalls which could change life’s circumstances.
—“People who want to die well must be willing to confront their finitude.”
When we avoid thoughts of death, we unconsciously assume that tomorrow will look a lot like today, so we can do tomorrow what we could do today. But when we focus on death, that increases the stakes at play in the present, and clarifies what we should do with our time. If you insist on ignoring your own demise, you are likely to make decisions that cause you to sleepwalk through life. You may not be dead yet, but you’re not fully alive either.
Confronting one’s finitude is key to dying well and is, in my opinion, the least challenging step. Developing a “Dying Well Plan” inherently directs one’s attention to their mortality. Daily life as an octogenarian is rife with reminders. i.e. —Lots of prescription medicine—Looking in the mirror each morning—doctor appointments— Walks through the cemetery—frequent naps—funerals—”senior moments”—Diminished competence …to name a few. Those and many other experiences serve as memento mori(“Remember! You will die!”). What is different today is not that daily life has changed drastically, but I am now paying attention rather than ignoring or denying reality. In that regard I am reaping helpful benefits:
…death is not something to be denied, avoided, or even begrudgingly accepted. Death makes the expanse of a lifetime finite and therefore precious. Death is like the gilded frame that gives definition to our living days. It’s the built-in counterbalance that throws all beauty and goodness and aliveness into greater relief.
Katherine Wolf
I can honestly say that confronting my mortality is making me feel more fully alive. It is a work in progress. There is a tendency to think of developing a dying well plan as an exercise for older or elderly persons. That is a fallacy. Dying well is contingent upon living well. Living well is a project that spans our entire life. When we avoid thoughts of death, we unconsciously assume that tomorrow will look a lot like today, so we can do tomorrow what we could do today. But when we focus on death, that increases the stakes at play in the present, and clarifies what we should do with our time.1https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/05/death-memento-mori-happiness/674158/ Greeks thought about death as a matter of routine. Socrates taught that the principal goal of philosophers is to rehearse for dying and death. The ancient Hebrews agreed. Qohelet, the “Teacher” of Hebrew scripture, instructs his listeners to remember their God while they are young, “before the days of trouble come, and the years draw near when you will say, ‘I have no pleasure in them’ . . . and the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the breath returns to God who gave it.” Prepare now, the Teacher says, for to dust you will return.2The Lost art of Dying – Dugdale
I an increasingly convinced that memento mori(“Remember! You will die!”) should be an integral part of the church’s liturgy. Those of us in the West today will fail to die well if we refuse to acknowledge that we are finite creatures.
Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.
