I don’t write very often, maybe once or twice a year and only when it’s impossible not to. This time it’s my fifty-eighth birthday as I begin my thirty-first year “in recovery”, whatever that means and for what that’s all worth. It’s not that I believe I don’t have a voice, but it’s that the voice often tells me I don’t have anything important to say or that there are already too many people saying things for me to be heard (thank God) or that we don’t need one more person saying things that don’t really matter. It’s all a footnote to Plato or someone else. Do I want to be someone who barely contributes anything to the ecology of positive effect in the world through my blather? Sometimes, yes, just ask or I will tell you without you asking. Believe me, I can do, have done, enough damage without putting it all “out there.”
When I do write, it’s usually about the “human condition,” mainly because I struggle with it so. I believe others do too, and I could be sorry, but I take great consolation in this; though, I don’t wish it upon my worst enemy, most of the time. In fact, that’s partly what the human condition means (https: //en. wikipedia.org/ wiki/Human_condition), that we are “mere mortal” and life often seems “nasty, brutish, and short,” but this is no way to live or die. This condition of being “only human” is a term I first heard about from the humanists at the university. I believe it was partly to remind me that I was not one of the gods, and rightly so. I have taken that all encompassing term and integrated it into the context of the faith and belief system in which I operate. Some people call it “recovery” or “life on life’s terms.” Maybe we are all recovering from someone or something, even if it is our own self-inflicted ways or our culture. Either way, we all struggle with it, more or less, or flourish and thrive in it to various degrees on the continuum. I like Red Green’s philosophy that “We are all in this together, and I’m pulling for you.”
It’s really about health and wellness, taking care of ourselves through exercise, diet, and nutrition, fulfilling relationships with friends and family, passion for work and career, rest and relaxation, enchanting hobbies and experiences, service to others, community support, and even prayer and meditation or finding your center in a myriad of ways. We all strive for it even it if it’s in all the wrong places. I can talk about it all day long but healthy application of it often eludes me. It often emanates to and from, ebbs and flows inherently so, perhaps, in a bigger meaning and purpose in life, and one that may or may not involve a perspective of a greater power, divine universe or entity, if you will. People name it differently and view it in various ways, but it has a common thread and origin or connection, as do we, it seems. I’ve been taught to place “principles before personalities” and focus on the “similarities and not the differences.”
Either way, it’s about how we respond to our environment, those “people, places, and things” we come into contact with. It’s how we treat others, how we “manage” to move, for the most part, in an ethical, legal, and even moral realm as one sees it so (without being moralistic, self-righteous, and arrogant.) In fact, for better or worse, just try moving outside that realm and someone will let you know or, at the very least, if you are fortunate, you will know. Moving outside that realm can be called “the descent”, that place we go “down to” where we learn the real lessons in life the “hard way”. The teaching and learning is often in the mis-takes in life, in our relationships. I often say, we live and learn or live and die . . . sooner — spiritually, emotionally, and then physically, usually in that order. It seems to be the reverse order on the way back to life from near death, but calling on the divine is usually shortly after or right before. In fact, some would say, there is no other way to do life, no avoiding getting it less wrong on the way to getting it more right. There is no way to do it perfectly, that is, whatever it is, this thing we call life. Perfection is not attainable and, even though we don’t need to perfect mediocrity, the sooner we realize our limits and the need to find acceptance in our imperfection, the more peace and freedom we have.
I deal with people every day who are coming to terms with their not so glamorous and unhealthy choices and in fact, all I have to do is look in the mirror because I am one or have been and can be on any given day. The minute I forget that, then that is the exact moment I start judging and looking down on them. If I’m judging someone or gossiping, all of I have to do for a reality check is remember that I have done that or something like it or worse, or could or will do that, or at the very least, don’t know the circumstances or the survival instinct that created their choices. I often get complacent about what I think I cannot do, and I am then necessarily more vulnerable and susceptible to doing it. Finding peace and humility is critical! Leaving the people we connect with and the spaces we inhabit in as good or better condition than we found them is the goal. Leave no trace as the hikers would say and do no harm as another adage goes, especially to the most vulnerable among us.
So as I close out this evening of my birth in the early years of my second half century on this earth, and the beginning of my fourth decade in recovery, all I really know, as Socrates said, is that I do not know, but that doesn’t keep me from wanting to, from finding out more, or finding and leaning on those who do. Actually, much of the time I resist this. And they say that what you resist will persist and if we do not “transcend our pain, we will transmit it” (Richard Rohr). I like the philosophy that says, it’s not the dogma or the fanatic or harsh application of beliefs that will create a positive legacy in and on the world and those we come in contact with, but it’s the love and compassion with which we do it. We cannot shove it down their throat and expect them not to choke to death or resent us or want to do us in or run. This “second half of life” that I am already well into leads me more and more to reflect on the belief that we need to love ourselves just the way we are but not so so much that we stay that way. We also will be judged, I am told, by the way we love others and that is about all.