2017: Exposing Cynicism—Keeping Hope Alive
Here we are, the year two thousand eighteen. Time to reflect back on what the hell happened. And at this rate, a blog every 365 or so days is about all I can commit to, so full disclaimer: it’s gonna be a long one. It so happens that my December 28 birthday comes at the end of the year too, and marking another year on earth also gets the old noggin pondering life. Maybe it’s especially appropriate given I was born among the darkest days of the year here in New England, that this year I’m thinking a lot about how we keep the light blazing amidst the darkness. The thing is, reflecting back on 2017, my 32nd year on Earth, I can’t help but think it was a great one for me personally. It was the year my son joined our family, bringing about a wholeness I didn’t even realize I was missing. It was another year of good health for me and my family, filled with the laughs (and a healthy serving of frustration) that come along with raising a two-year-old. It was one where I expanded my role again at Oxfam too, which has been a place that consistently challenges me to grow, and from which I come home feeling good about the fact that I’m contributing, even in a small way, to make the world a better place. Ah yes, the world… It’s the the world that had a less than stellar 365 days. The strange thing about my good year is that it happened amidst the tumult. The reality of having a vile narcissist run our country has sunk in, and it has played out in damaging ways for people in the US and around the world. Amidst the daily drama, people continue to perish due to completely preventable causes; hunger, violence, extreme poverty, climate change. I’m exposed daily to aspects of that reality through my work at Oxfam. 2017 was a tough one to stay optimistic about not only due to the awful things happening here and across the world, but because we remain divided in ways that feel insurmountable, and therefore remain impotent in the face of these real challenges facing us all. It was a year where we had to come to terms with the fact that people we know and love have very different perspectives and feelings about our shared society. A year where we have had to deal with the uncertainty that comes with an inept, loose-cannon president. It all takes a toll. On the bright side, it was also year where I both got to experience U2 live...
I just uncovered some rare, precious, free time. What do I do with it?!
Does this sound familiar at all? I have a couple hours to myself at home, with no plan and nothing in particular that I need to get done. The possibilities are endless. So endless, in fact, that I’m paralyzed by the options. What the hell should I do with this gift of unplanned time? I’m not a person who is particularly good at relaxing. I am often seeking out relaxation, but rarely do I feel like I’ve attained that state. And I’m pretty sure this is in no way a dilemma that is unique to me. We have more options than ever before and we are forced to make countless choices throughout our day. (I thought about trying to add them up for a day, but I’m getting overwhelmed just thinking about it!) So there’s the problem of too many choices, which feels of particular concern in our day and age. I think underneath that though, there is a more fundamental issue at work. For me, I feel uneasy about not ‘doing’ something at any given moment. Time feels precious—certainly it did as I started the blog after my cancer diagnosis eight years ago, and it does again in a big way now that I have a child. Time is precious in that it feels as though it is passing much more quickly, as marked by my daughter’s speed-of-light development before my eyes. I savor every moment with her. I also savor the time I get with my wife and by myself—when my daughter is napping or in that rare case as when I started writing this blog, she’s at daycare while my wife and I have a day off. It is as I hold this tight grasp on time that my dilemma persists. How do we fill our time most meaningfully? I think it goes right back to what I have defined as the purpose of this blog, an exploration driven by these two questions: From where do we derive meaning in our lives? How can we live more meaningful lives? It isn’t often enough that I stop and think about my time in in those terms. I think maybe there is danger in obsessing—trying to optimize every second to the point that we’ve got it all planned out. But I do think there is value in taking audit of how we actually spend our time, particularly those stretches that aren’t pre-planned. It’s easy to fill up our days with the stuff we have to do. Work and sleep snatch up like two-thirds of our day right off the bat. What about the rest? My realization as I...
Coming to terms and #resisting an alternate reality
Here we are. A reality TV star leading our country and alternative facts filling our brains. Have we legitimately entered some kind of alternate reality? How did we get here? I don’t know about you, but i’m still wracking my brain on that one. Some nights while I lie in bed, I run through the night the world flipped over. It fell after a hope-filled day; we’d finally have a woman leading our country. Slowly, that hope was swallowed up. The numbers betrayed us. A firewall swiftly fell. I remember lying half-awake, feeling the weight of the news sink into my sleep. I remember waking up the morning after election day, hearing a plane overhead. Something bad was going to happen. Were we under attack already? How the hell did this happen? And where do we go from here? I have family and friends whom I love, and whom I believe voted to put a villain at the helm of our ship. How could any reasonable, any good person look at this man’s actions, hear his words, and support him? I struggle deeply with this question, as I’m sure many of you do. Maybe you’ve even asked this question: is the dark reality that these dear friends and family are, in fact, bad people? That’s how divided we are right now. And finding a path back to unity feels terribly far away. Because the reality is, of course, that we all have unique perspectives. We see the world very differently from each other. That’s the only reason this cancer survivor bothered to share his perspective through this blog in the first place. Perspective shapes our decisions in life. It shapes everything. I can appreciate that. But then, that means there aren’t implicitly wrong or right perspectives. It means my perspective is no more right than the perspectives that led people to vote for Donald Trump. How can that be? It feels critical to me that we try to understand each other’s perspectives. I don’t think that’s the end of it though. Because while I avoid binary thinking like the plague, I also do not subscribe to moral subjectivism–a notion that we set our own individual moral truths. The truth is out there. It’s true that our perspectives are ours alone. But I think there might be some deep flaws in how we arrive at our reality. There are cracks through which our perspectives grow distorted. And through that distortion there may lie a very ugly world. I don’t know where the cracks in my perspective are exactly, but I know for sure that I’ve got them. And I know...
MLK Day: A Call to Action in the Name of Love
I’ve written before about how difficult it can be to remain optimistic in the world we live in today. Today, the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, is a day to be optimistic. We’ve come so far thanks to the tireless work of so many before us. And yet, the issues that plague humanity seem to multiply infinitely ahead of us. Is this how it feels for every generation? As an activist, I was awe-struck after watching the film Selma last year. I immediately decided to read Martin Luther King Jr.’s autobiography, some excerpts from which I will share here. I continue to be filled with awe by these words and the actions that they inspired. MLK and the people marching with him, they got shit done. They changed laws. They created laws. Just as important, if not more, they were able to change the hearts and minds of people across the United States and even the world. There’s a heart-wrenching moment in the movie where Dr. King, consoling a grandfather who just lost his grandson, Jimmie Lee Jackson, says to him, “There are no words to soothe you. But I know one thing for certain: God was the first to cry.” How many people have died in this fight against injustice. How many continue to die in the face of it? How many more must we lose? With each, I now picture God shedding tears; crying at the loss of the person and the loss of the humanity that he created. We are a humanity that daily fails to take care of each other. “I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality, and freedom for their spirits.” Surely, God created us with the belief that we possess everything we need to take care of each other. But do we truly believe that all people deserve the same as us? “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly” We’re all bound up in this together at the end of the day. That only becomes more apparent as the web of globalization reaches out further, touching every corner of the world. At the same time that everything becomes more visible, however, it all becomes less visible. Whereas the people marching in Selma were standing up for the dignity and rights of each other, hand in hand, we often are trying to stand up for the rights of people we will never even...
A new life. A new chapter.
If men were the ones who had to carry and give birth to babies, I’m pretty sure humankind would have died off a long time ago. I knew going into it, that the moment my wife gave birth to our child would be an intense one. And it was. The four days that we were in the hospital were filled with the whole range of emotions. The four weeks that we’ve been home since then hasn’t given me much space to stop and reflect back, but I thought I’d attempt it here on my blog through a few vignettes. One of the stories about labor that stuck with me was described by the comedian Louis C.K. on a podcast I listen to (WTF with Marc Maron). He talks about this moment right after his wife delivered where he had to decide whether to attend to her as she was cut open in the other room or stay with his little newborn daughter who was lying helplessly crying. It was this concrete moment where the addition to their family instantly became real. He knew he had to stay with his daughter. I found myself in a similar situation, though there was no choice to make. Just twenty minutes after she gave birth to our daughter, my heroic wife was rolled off into the operating room due to a complication. Watching her be rolled out of the room, still shaking and with tears running down her face, was gut-wrenching, to say the least. I wanted to go with her. Like Louis, however, my role as a dad had begun. I sat with my daughter on my chest, her warm skin touching mine, welcoming her into this world, praying that mom would come back to us soon. We spent this quiet time alone together, she adjusting to a new, scary place, and me adjusting to the notion that this baby was mine. Mom did come back to us. And we three went to bed that night thankful that we were at one of the best hospitals in the country, as we slowly soaked in our new reality. Sleep came easy to our exhausted bodies. Sleep that has become a precious commodity now! That morning, I held my daughter in my arms as she slept, with my wife asleep on the other side of me, and looked out a window that featured a beautiful Boston skyline. The aroma from a bouquet of flowers filled the air. It was perfect. I thought more about her; the meaning behind the name that we had given her. The idea that we could finally call her by name. Our daughter was...
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