When people we love are suffering, we want to make it better. But sometimes – often, in fact – you can’t make it better. I’m reminded of something my supervisor said to me when I was a student chaplain: “Don’t just do something. Stand there.
A while back, my brain started playing a game similar to the why game. This one is called What’s Even The Point.
I am insulated from the weather by my house and its conditioned air. I eat strawberries in January. When it is raining, I can go inside. When it is dark, I can turn on the lights. It is easy for me to feel like climate is mostly an outside phenomenon, whereas I am mostly an inside phenomenon.
Even the most extraordinary genius can accomplish very little alone.
People ask me all the time if I believe in God. I tell them that I’m Episcopalian, or that I go to church, but they don’t care about that. They only want to know if I believe in God, and I can’t answer them, because I don’t know how to deal with the question’s in. Do I believe in God? I believe around God. But I can only believe in what I am in – sunlight and shadow, oxygen and carbon dioxide, solar systems and galaxies.
It has been January for months in both directions, and I, of course, do not know what’s coming.
Art isn’t optional for humans.
Kurt Vonnegut, wrote that one of the flaws in the human character “is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.
I must choose to believe, to care, to hold dear. I keep going. I go to therapy. I try a different medication. I meditate, even though I despise meditation. I exercise. I wait. I work to believe, to hold dear, to go on.
Disease only treats humans equally when our social orders treat humans equally.
How can you regain confidence when you know that confidence is just a varnish painted atop human frailty?
As a person, he told me, your biggest problem is other people. You are vulnerable to people, and reliant upon them. But imagine instead that you are a twenty-first-century river, or desert, or polar bear. Your biggest problem is still people. You are still vulnerable to them, and reliant upon them.
The past is neither fixed nor fixable.
Heartbreak is not really so different from falling in love. Both are overwhelming experiences that unmoor me. Both burst with yearning. Both consume the self.
Halley’s comet will be more than five times closer to Earth in 2061 than it was in 1986.
What’s “natural” for humans is always changing.
Most of the energy that powers air-conditioning systems comes from fossil fuels, the use of which warms the planet, which over time will necessitate more and more conditioning of air.
It occurs to me that technology often brags about solving problems it created.
How can this be happening? You do so much yoga.
I thought about that old Faulkner line that the past isn’t dead; it’s not even past. One of the strange things about adulthood is that you are your current self, but you are also all the selves you used to be, the ones you grew out of but can’t ever quite get rid of.
While the world wasn’t build for the humans, we were built for the world.