Advice Advice
Part I - I get by with a little help from my friends.
I know this guy, Miles. He always seems relaxed and happy, which is surprising, because I'm pretty sure Miles is homeless...by choice. (Come to think of it, a lot of the homeless people I've ever known seem relaxed and happy -- but that's another blog for another day.) Miles plays a mean bass guitar and is generally pleasant to talk to.
So anyway, this one time I was talking to Miles and, knowing that I'm into physics, he gave me an anonymous looking DVD titled, "9/11 Mysteries Pt 1: Demolitions". I'm not much of a conspiracy theorist, but, open-minded guy that I am, I took it and watched it. It made a series of well-researched and surprisingly coherent arguments that the twin towers were professionally demolished.
The next time I saw Miles, I approached him and told him I had watched the DVD, and thanked him for sharing it with me. I asked him, "So, you really believe that this is true? That this kind of hidden, wide-spread evil actually exists right now in America?" And with the same relaxed, happy vibe that Miles applies to being a homeless-by-choice bass player, he said, "I do believe it's true. But you know what? It shouldn't come as a surprise. These things are the way of the world, and it's all the more reason to look to the Kingdom of Heaven."
That's the kind of statement that slips right beneath your skin and just stays there. I came back to that thought once, twice, and gradually, it became fully integrated into the way that I see the world: "It shouldn't come as a surprise. These things are the way of the world."
We seem to have a barrier, a thin, invisible barrier that we just can't tear down between big, sweeping philosophies and the nitty-gritty of our everyday lives. If we know that "hey, no one's perfect", than why are we so surprised, hurt or offended when people screw up? This concept makes gossip completely irrelevant to me. This person said that, this girl did this, can you BELIEVE that he would say that to me?! Honestly? Yes. Of course I can believe it. And furthermore, it really shouldn't come as a surprise. What did you expect? Perfection?
Maybe the tone of this sounds snide or cynical, but I don't mean it in that way. I really mean it in the most encouraging, forgiving, loving way possible. We're all flawed. I mean REALLY. And not just past tense flawed, but constantly flaw-ing, all the time. Don't throw the first stone, sure. But don't throw the first pebble either or even the first speck.
Part II - Right there with you.
I know this girl, Rina. Like one out of thirty people in this country, she lives in New York. She's gotten about as much maturity out of her 21 years as I have in my 25. Maybe part of that has to do with her time in the military, or moving around a lot. She's currently a very talented art student. For whatever reason, we find ourselves having some very stimulating, coherent conversation.
We were talking about the often augmented view that many people share about relationships, and conversely, their often diminished view of the importance of singleness. For many people, the rhetoric of "having a relationship" versus "the lack of having a relationship" eventually manifests in the hugely unbalanced (and wildly profitable) system that is our modern society (not unlike the phallocentric focus of "having a penis" versus "the lack of having a penis"). Just stand in any checkout line, anywhere. Even lighthearted views of singleness imply a fleeting pit-stop before the next relationship: single and ready to mingle!
Having this conversation with Rina helped me clarify what I already knew but couldn't articulate. That at the heart of so many peoples' struggle with shallow, cyclical companionship is a refusal to simply be alone. You really can't blame them. Once someone has experienced the overwhelming feeling of being emotionally, physically and sexually held, loved, needed, wanted and accepted, anything less can feel like pure hell. An empty void. The Lack Of. And so we'll do anything to avoid that bad feeling, or more precisely, the lack of those good feelings.
The big problem with this, other than the obvious mental trauma, is that over the course of 5 or 10 years, people who should be accumulating hobbies, experiences, knowledge, and other truly interesting personal quirks, are instead accumulating baggage. Lots and lots of baggage. In my own personal experience, this is an epidemic. It's the reason why you just don't meet that many truly, mind-blowingly amazing people, fully formed and beautifully sculpted, well-read, well-informed, wide-eyed and confident.
In the last year I've tried to really become comfortable in my situation, in this reality, to try to just let it be and not fill that hole with the next person, the next person, the next person. It's hard at first, to be lonely, but there are only so many times you can just keep going through this destructive cycle that hurts other people and yourself. And I think that I've really achieved something special. I think I really have become comfortable being myself, to the extent that even when I come across someone who is beautiful and special and a potentially amazing partner, that that person is still something outside of me, something whole in itself, not something that I crave in order to be completed. People shouldn't complete each other. People should be full, overflowing with wholeness, so that they really have something special to offer another.
Part III - Lean on me.
I have this friend, Amanda. Her friend Jack died earlier this year in a car accident. She's watched as many of her other friends have turned to binge drinking to numb the pain, which is particularly disappointing to her, as alcohol was likely involved in the crash. Amanda's lingering pain was recently compounded by a break-up. It's a time of pain and confusion. We talked about all these things over coffee.
Without some great advice from Miles, I wouldn't have been able to share with Amanda the view that her friends aren't trying to be bad people, that they're just in pain and young and foolish and beautiful and coping however they can. No one's perfect. It shouldn't come as a surprise. These things are the way of the world, and it's all the more reason to look to the Kingdom of Heaven. This helped her.
Without great conversations with Rina, I wouldn't have been able to cleanly articulate my evolving view of relationships and singleness. I offered a different path, that singleness can be something bold and valuable, exciting and practical. And it's a twofer: not only are you bettering yourself, but when you eventually find that special someone, you'll have that much more to offer them. She told me that she had been meaning to take more time to write stories. This helped her.
As we were leaving, she thanked me and told me that I had told her some pretty useful stuff. And I told her, "It's only useful if you use it."
Part IV - The Method
Speed and velocity are basically the same thing, except for one thing: as a vector quantity, velocity includes direction, whereas speed doesn't specify direction. It's kind of like knowledge and advice: much the same, but advice is a vector. It is directional knowledge, knowledge informed by its audience. In this way, it's also like art. My college art history professor used to say, "Art is not created in a vacuum." Too often we know the whats, wheres and whens of art, but not the why, the reason that the art was created, to react against something, to encourage something, to anger or please.
This is why, in my opinion, there are many less good-advice-givers out there than there are good-knowledge-havers. It's one thing to gain wisdom, but it's another to be able to pass it along. If you haven't noticed, people generally need to make their own mistakes. There is a beautiful, masochistic gravity that pulls us towards the same pitfalls that hundreds of generations have suffered before us. I don't know why.
I do know that the few people who have succeeded in elevating my understanding have done so by stooping to my level. You may, of course, attempt to let down a fishing line and pull others up with a sharp hook. Good luck with that.
Because of this, it makes sense that someone at 18 can be more easily advised by someone at 25 rather than 50, the 25 year old having recently been through similar struggles themselves. This is a familiar system, I guess. It's called "friends". And not that the 50 year old is unable to help. They are potentially the most capable, having been through a long life and seeing the entire picture. But that's very special, and very rare.
In A Generous Orthodoxy by Brian McLaren, he takes a page (or two) from the Methodist method: "...imagine a group of people ascending a mountain, each one always having someone a step above and ahead of them to emulate and follow, plus someone a step behind and below to encourage and bring upward and onward."
So thank you for the help, Miles, and thank you, Brian. Hey, Rina, what's up? Amanda, lean on me. Advice is a powerful spice; the tiniest bit goes a long, long way, and only when we're open to it can we stomach it at all. If you're open to this, please, take and enjoy. I hope I've met you where you are. And if not, cool. Have a nice day.
I know this guy, Miles. He always seems relaxed and happy, which is surprising, because I'm pretty sure Miles is homeless...by choice. (Come to think of it, a lot of the homeless people I've ever known seem relaxed and happy -- but that's another blog for another day.) Miles plays a mean bass guitar and is generally pleasant to talk to.
So anyway, this one time I was talking to Miles and, knowing that I'm into physics, he gave me an anonymous looking DVD titled, "9/11 Mysteries Pt 1: Demolitions". I'm not much of a conspiracy theorist, but, open-minded guy that I am, I took it and watched it. It made a series of well-researched and surprisingly coherent arguments that the twin towers were professionally demolished.
The next time I saw Miles, I approached him and told him I had watched the DVD, and thanked him for sharing it with me. I asked him, "So, you really believe that this is true? That this kind of hidden, wide-spread evil actually exists right now in America?" And with the same relaxed, happy vibe that Miles applies to being a homeless-by-choice bass player, he said, "I do believe it's true. But you know what? It shouldn't come as a surprise. These things are the way of the world, and it's all the more reason to look to the Kingdom of Heaven."
That's the kind of statement that slips right beneath your skin and just stays there. I came back to that thought once, twice, and gradually, it became fully integrated into the way that I see the world: "It shouldn't come as a surprise. These things are the way of the world."
We seem to have a barrier, a thin, invisible barrier that we just can't tear down between big, sweeping philosophies and the nitty-gritty of our everyday lives. If we know that "hey, no one's perfect", than why are we so surprised, hurt or offended when people screw up? This concept makes gossip completely irrelevant to me. This person said that, this girl did this, can you BELIEVE that he would say that to me?! Honestly? Yes. Of course I can believe it. And furthermore, it really shouldn't come as a surprise. What did you expect? Perfection?
Maybe the tone of this sounds snide or cynical, but I don't mean it in that way. I really mean it in the most encouraging, forgiving, loving way possible. We're all flawed. I mean REALLY. And not just past tense flawed, but constantly flaw-ing, all the time. Don't throw the first stone, sure. But don't throw the first pebble either or even the first speck.
Part II - Right there with you.
I know this girl, Rina. Like one out of thirty people in this country, she lives in New York. She's gotten about as much maturity out of her 21 years as I have in my 25. Maybe part of that has to do with her time in the military, or moving around a lot. She's currently a very talented art student. For whatever reason, we find ourselves having some very stimulating, coherent conversation.
We were talking about the often augmented view that many people share about relationships, and conversely, their often diminished view of the importance of singleness. For many people, the rhetoric of "having a relationship" versus "the lack of having a relationship" eventually manifests in the hugely unbalanced (and wildly profitable) system that is our modern society (not unlike the phallocentric focus of "having a penis" versus "the lack of having a penis"). Just stand in any checkout line, anywhere. Even lighthearted views of singleness imply a fleeting pit-stop before the next relationship: single and ready to mingle!
Having this conversation with Rina helped me clarify what I already knew but couldn't articulate. That at the heart of so many peoples' struggle with shallow, cyclical companionship is a refusal to simply be alone. You really can't blame them. Once someone has experienced the overwhelming feeling of being emotionally, physically and sexually held, loved, needed, wanted and accepted, anything less can feel like pure hell. An empty void. The Lack Of. And so we'll do anything to avoid that bad feeling, or more precisely, the lack of those good feelings.
The big problem with this, other than the obvious mental trauma, is that over the course of 5 or 10 years, people who should be accumulating hobbies, experiences, knowledge, and other truly interesting personal quirks, are instead accumulating baggage. Lots and lots of baggage. In my own personal experience, this is an epidemic. It's the reason why you just don't meet that many truly, mind-blowingly amazing people, fully formed and beautifully sculpted, well-read, well-informed, wide-eyed and confident.
In the last year I've tried to really become comfortable in my situation, in this reality, to try to just let it be and not fill that hole with the next person, the next person, the next person. It's hard at first, to be lonely, but there are only so many times you can just keep going through this destructive cycle that hurts other people and yourself. And I think that I've really achieved something special. I think I really have become comfortable being myself, to the extent that even when I come across someone who is beautiful and special and a potentially amazing partner, that that person is still something outside of me, something whole in itself, not something that I crave in order to be completed. People shouldn't complete each other. People should be full, overflowing with wholeness, so that they really have something special to offer another.
Part III - Lean on me.
I have this friend, Amanda. Her friend Jack died earlier this year in a car accident. She's watched as many of her other friends have turned to binge drinking to numb the pain, which is particularly disappointing to her, as alcohol was likely involved in the crash. Amanda's lingering pain was recently compounded by a break-up. It's a time of pain and confusion. We talked about all these things over coffee.
Without some great advice from Miles, I wouldn't have been able to share with Amanda the view that her friends aren't trying to be bad people, that they're just in pain and young and foolish and beautiful and coping however they can. No one's perfect. It shouldn't come as a surprise. These things are the way of the world, and it's all the more reason to look to the Kingdom of Heaven. This helped her.
Without great conversations with Rina, I wouldn't have been able to cleanly articulate my evolving view of relationships and singleness. I offered a different path, that singleness can be something bold and valuable, exciting and practical. And it's a twofer: not only are you bettering yourself, but when you eventually find that special someone, you'll have that much more to offer them. She told me that she had been meaning to take more time to write stories. This helped her.
As we were leaving, she thanked me and told me that I had told her some pretty useful stuff. And I told her, "It's only useful if you use it."
Part IV - The Method
Speed and velocity are basically the same thing, except for one thing: as a vector quantity, velocity includes direction, whereas speed doesn't specify direction. It's kind of like knowledge and advice: much the same, but advice is a vector. It is directional knowledge, knowledge informed by its audience. In this way, it's also like art. My college art history professor used to say, "Art is not created in a vacuum." Too often we know the whats, wheres and whens of art, but not the why, the reason that the art was created, to react against something, to encourage something, to anger or please.
This is why, in my opinion, there are many less good-advice-givers out there than there are good-knowledge-havers. It's one thing to gain wisdom, but it's another to be able to pass it along. If you haven't noticed, people generally need to make their own mistakes. There is a beautiful, masochistic gravity that pulls us towards the same pitfalls that hundreds of generations have suffered before us. I don't know why.
I do know that the few people who have succeeded in elevating my understanding have done so by stooping to my level. You may, of course, attempt to let down a fishing line and pull others up with a sharp hook. Good luck with that.
Because of this, it makes sense that someone at 18 can be more easily advised by someone at 25 rather than 50, the 25 year old having recently been through similar struggles themselves. This is a familiar system, I guess. It's called "friends". And not that the 50 year old is unable to help. They are potentially the most capable, having been through a long life and seeing the entire picture. But that's very special, and very rare.
In A Generous Orthodoxy by Brian McLaren, he takes a page (or two) from the Methodist method: "...imagine a group of people ascending a mountain, each one always having someone a step above and ahead of them to emulate and follow, plus someone a step behind and below to encourage and bring upward and onward."
So thank you for the help, Miles, and thank you, Brian. Hey, Rina, what's up? Amanda, lean on me. Advice is a powerful spice; the tiniest bit goes a long, long way, and only when we're open to it can we stomach it at all. If you're open to this, please, take and enjoy. I hope I've met you where you are. And if not, cool. Have a nice day.
posted by DM at
12:06
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