Peace and Quiet

The fruit of Silence is Prayer.
The fruit of Prayer is Faith.
The fruit of Faith is Love.
The fruit of Love is Service.
The fruit of Service is Peace.
~Mother Theresa

We live such frantic lives these days, rushing to check email, our Facebook friends and all manner of activities, attending events, working on projects... not to mention our manifold career and family responsibilities. And when the children are in the home, rushing here and there to soccer games, baseball games, hockey practice, scouts, and friends' houses.....

We feel good about not having to haul water from the well as they did in the old days, or chop wood, but maybe that wasn't such a bad thing. They were active instead sitting in chairs and moving from the computer to the easy chair to the car seat during one's commute to the seat at the office.

I like the title of that Nicholson film, "Something's Gotta Give." Don't know what, don't know when, don't know where, but as much as I like to say "embrace life to the full" I also understand you need to pull back now and then to re-center. It's a matter of balance.

How you doin' in that department?

Hitchhiking Across Antarctica

"Loneliness is the leprosy of our era." ~ Mother Teresa

I keep a scrap book of quotes from my readings. It's a useful tool for organizing pithy insights from various sources. I don't recall where this one came from, but it stuck me with enough force to record it in my book.

The observation, comparing loneliness to what is now called Hansen's disease, is quite interesting. Leprosy is not like the plague which wiped out a third to half of Europe in the first millennium. Though two to three million people have the disease worldwide, I know of no serious scientist who is concerned about a worldwide epidemic. The media is not stirring up a panic about this unfortunate malady as they have about bird flu which has now killed just over one hundred worldwide.

So the comparison to leprosy has a different meaning from just a communicable disease. One photo of a leper tells why this is. Lepers are shunned. They are ugly. They are outcasts. They're pushed outside the cheerful social exchanges that make up community.

A Google search on loneliness unveils millions of web pages on this theme. How ironic. The world has too many people, yet so many so lonely.

Many books and poems have been written on the theme. Maybe knowing that we are not the only ones who have ever felt this way is helpful. So the lonely share their painfully lovely, lonely self-expressions.

I'm reminded of Billy Joel's observation in Piano Man, "They're sharing a drink they call loneliness, but it's better than drinking alone."

Whole books on the theme have been written. Perhaps some of the great music we appreciate was squeezed from a lonely heart. For sure you hear it in Tschaikovski. Certainly most creative artists reach into deep spaces of the soul to draw on something there akin to inner isolation. Maybe what makes this experience painful is when we get trapped there, unable to connect to others, and unhappy with our selves. Like the leper, we may feel ugly... unable to see our true beauty; or desperately unaffirmed, unloved and incomplete.

There is a difference between loneliness and solitude. We are all, to a lesser or greater extent, travelling a solitary path. As the old Negro spiritual puts it, "Nobody knows the trouble I seen, nobody knows my sorrow..." To the extent we are able to forget ourselves and notice those around us who also have need of being affirmed, loved, valued, appreciated, to that extent we can make this world a better place and escape the prisons we've made for ourselves within our selves.

The following is a poem I wrote describing something of what loneliness has at times meant to me.

Hitchhiking Across Antarctica

So desolate here. So desolate and cold.

You grit your teeth to keep them from chattering.
By the time this is over you'll be lucky to have any teeth at all.

If only you can stop this shivering.

Standing alone, waiting for someone to come along.

So desolate here. Unbelievably cold. It doesn't seem possible.

Is this where it's all going to end?

"What was the meaning of it all? Why am I here?" you ask yourself.

You lean forward into the fierce wind.

Oh for but one spark of human kindness to re-kindle

the cold dark embers of your heart.

You stare out across the virgin snow, fingers numb with cold

under your worn mittens. You've lost all sense of touch.

It hardly matters because there is no one there.

Your arms are so stiff with cold you can no longer reach out.

"Where is everyone? How long, oh Lord?"

You have only the load on your back,

but it is more than you can carry.

And even this you can't take with you when you go,

if it comes to that.
You keep waiting, but no one comes along.

It's a frost cold chill, this loneliness.

It's like hitchhiking across Antarctica.

By What Measure?

"So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence." ~ Bertrand Russell

It's an interesting comment. On one level it reveals a value system that is common among many intellectuals. Intelligence has high value.

But in the Gospels, there are other values of importance. Being good, for example. Or being compassionate. Or being wise. There are so many educated fools that the very expression has become a byword.

I remember listening to a mean spirited diatribe by Andy Rooney against Mel Gibson and his film Passion of the Christ a few years back on Imus in the Morning. Rooney essentially dissed Gibson and the film because "the smartest man of the last century, Bertrand Russell" was an atheist.

So there you have it. A smart man's ideas are more valid than a holy man's. What do we do, then? Give everyone I.Q. tests to decide who gets to declare what we should all believe? It's nonsense. Newton was a smart man, and a Christian.

Sir Isaac Newton has been near universally ranked as the greatest mathematician of all time. Of Newton, Einstein said, "Nature to him was an open book, whose letters he could read without effort."

So?

This only proves that smarts does not bring us all into agreement. One difference between Newton and Russell, however, might be that Newton was quite humble about his smarts. Before his death he remarked, "I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." I doubt either claimed to have perfect knowledge. And maybe Russell would have been embarrassed to have Andy Rooney put him on a pedastal like that.

There was a time when I thought being smart was the thing to be. I looked down on people who couldn't spell. Then, in college I met a guy who was valedictorian in his high school and lo, he was an atrocious speller. He wanted to co-write a play with me because I was an excellent speller and he felt I could communicate his message more effectively than he.

This threw a monkey wrench into my notion of smarts. And later when I learned he raped (at the time it was "heavy coercion") a friend of my girl friend, more head spins were occurring for me. Personal character has to be part of the equation.

By what measure, then, should we be measured? I can't recall anyone saying Mother Teresa, St.Francis of Assisi or Gandhi's significance had something to do with I.Q. Where did this strange measure come from?

There are other faulty measures of value, too. But it's getting late, and before too much fog settles in I'm going to pass on that.

The Verdict On Twitter

Do you twitter? That's how the article began in the Wall Street Journal or some other high culture rag where I first heard of the site. Twitter is the name of the site, it was explained, because it is something akin to a bird twittering, short chirps in brief bursts.

The website, http://www.twitter.com/, is essentially a web based social network of sorts that is different from MySpace or FaceBook, but offering an easier version of a similar thing. When you log in to the site, it asks, "What are you doing?" You have a one hundred forty character limit. You don't have a lot of space, so you need to be efficient. It's a twitter, not a sonata.

Like Plaxo, and some other social networking sites that have shroomed, you also have a chance to "follow" people in your network, and they can choose to follow you.

I became interested in part because I am inquisitive, and in part because I am in marketing/advertising. I like staying in touch with what is happening, what's new, to evaluate what it is and determine its value as both a business opportunity as well as a social phenomenon. I have posted a couple vids on YouTube and built a MySpace space, which I don't think I could find again. Made a podcast of myself singing four part harmony. And maintaining a blog sprang from the same impetus, to learn through doing.

After several months of twittering, I have made the following observation. I find it interesting that I would bother to write on the Internet what I am doing at any time. I mean, in thirty years of journal writing I have almost never written what is going on in my life, what I am doing. Rather, I usually write about what I am thinking or feeling, what I am experiencing on the inside or my inward wrestling with ideas, concepts, situations. So this twittering business just feels strange to me.

Add to this that other people can follow you... I am impressed that some people can be so transparent. They lay their lives bare, it seems. As for me, it seems doubtful that people are going to also share their warts, their inadequacies, self-doubts and fears in the same manner with a host of unknown followers.

I wonder, too, what people like Mother Teresa would think about twittering. Would she take time to invite others to follow her? Would she take time to tell all the details of her day while on the fly pouring herself out to the handicapped, hungry and needy?

Then my mind flits to Jesus. WWJT? What Would Jesus Twitter? "Just finished healing a blind man. Put mud on his eyes. He washed and could see."

Would Socrates tell what he was doing all day? Or, would he just ask questions? "Are you doing the right thing or just doing what you think the gods will approve?" or "Where do we come from? And where are we going? How can you know for sure?" Or "Why are you here? Why is there air? And who is Bill Cosby?"

At the end of the day, the verdict is still out for me. It's interesting to observe emerging trends in social networking, and probably difficult to predict where they will lead. For now, I'll play along and see what happens. That's why I Twitter anyways. How about you?