I passed a (barely) teenage boy in the grocery aisle whose black shirt greeted me in large white letters: “Here I Am. What Are Your Other Two Wishes?” I involuntarily smiled one of those knowing smiles. I remember as an adolescent feeling such exuberant watch-out-world-here-I-come, I-can-be-anything-I-want-to-be grandiosity. Later that day I thought how appropriate it would have been if on the back of the boy’s shirt, to add some balance to the front, were the words, “It’s Only One Six-Billionth About Me.”
Wise people and prophets in every age have advised us to hold our divinity and our mortality, our “I’m king of the world” blessedness and our “We’re poor little lambs who have lost our way” frailty, in healthy tension.
When Julius Caesar paraded through the streets of Rome, fresh off victories in Gaul or Germany, a lowly slave stood by his side in the chariot, holding Caesar’s crown. As adoring throngs cheered the august one, the slave performed his other role, occasionally whispering in Caesar’s ear three Latin words, sic transit gloria. In modern English: “All fame is fleeting.”
Rabbi Simcha Bunam of Peshischa taught that we should carry two scraps of paper in our pockets. The message on one reads: “The world was created for my sake.” The message in the other pocket reads: “You are dust and ashes.”7 When we get to feeling too much the truth of one, we need to remind ourselves of the truth of the other.
In my experience, for every narcissist who needs to hear the dust and ashes message, there are between two and twenty little lost sheep who need to hear the one about being great with divinity.
January 12
She grew up on a tobacco farm in Henrietta, Tennessee. At age twenty four, Pat Summitt stood on a podium in Montreal, having won an Olympic medal. Standing there, she felt imbued with the insight that “if you won enough basketball games, there’s no such thing as poor, or backward, or country, or female, or inferior.”
This Olympian coached 38 years at the University of Tennessee and won more basketball games (1,098) than anyone, male or female, in NCAA Division I history. Those victories included eight national championships. In her sixties, suffering from Alzheimer’s, Summitt has published her memoirs in a book aptly titled Sum it Up. Here are some of her summary findings about basketball and life:
Discipline. Over the 38 years Summitt coached the Lady Vols, one hundred percent of her players graduated. She required them to sit in one of the first three rows of every class. Missing class was not permitted or excused for any reason. “If you cut a class, you didn’t play in the next game. Period.”
Motivation. She considered motivation much harder than teaching because “you have to give more of yourself, constantly rack your brain to think about how to start somebody’s engine.”
Commitment. While most authorities on commitment emphasize risk-taking, Summitt says it is equally about tedium, “the willingness to persevere through problems without quitting and, more important, without demoralization.”
Focus. “If you chase two rabbits, you won’t catch one.”
Explaining her extraordinary lifetime achievements, Summitt channels Nora Ephron: “Above all, be the heroine of your own life, not the victim.”
I have found myself mulling over one of her comments. About Tyler, her only child whom she idolizes, Summitt mentions that “his default disposition is set on thoughtfulness.”8 My troubling take-away from this wise woman’s comment is: “On what is my default disposition set?”
January 13
For over thirty years now, in icy January I remember “the man in the water.”
On January 13, 1982, less than one minute after taking off in a heavy snowstorm, Air Florida Flight 90 crashed into Washington D. C.’s 14th Street Bridge over the Potomac River. Four of the five crew members and seventy of seventy-four passengers perished.
I have remembered two things from the live television coverage of the crash. One was the temperature—24 degrees. The other was the sight of about a half dozen survivors of the crash clinging to the plane’s tail section as it sank below the icy waters. What I have remembered most was the man in the water. For several days, no one knew the middle-aged, balding man’s name. But all who watched cannot forget what he did.
As a helicopter crew dropped life vests and flotation devices, he passed lifelines they lowered to him—that could have pulled him to safety—to others. Three times he handed off to strangers his ticket to salvation. By the time the helicopter crew made their last round trip to hoist the one last survivor, the tail section and the man in the water had disappeared.
The coroner determined that the cause of death for only one of the seventy four bodies was drowning. His name was Arland Williams Jr., a balding, forty-six-year-old federal bank examiner and father of two.9 He had lived his life conservatively until that January day when he magnanimously gave it up for total strangers.
Richard Dawkins discusses in The Selfish Gene10 how in nature red in tooth and claw bees sting (and die) to protect the hive. Birds risk their lives to warn the flock of an approaching hawk. Our species alone, he argues, has the power to choose to rebel against the designs of our selfish gene.
Our species, fully evolved, might look a lot like Arland Williams Jr.
January 14
“If we only wanted to be happy, it would be easy, but we want to be happier than other people, which is difficult since we think them happier than they are”—Baron de Montesquieu
You wonder what Montesquieu, eighteenth century Enlightenment philosopher, would make of the pursuit of happiness in this Facebook age. Today when friends showcase their luxurious cruise and cute puppy, their “What, Me Worry?” faces and accomplished children, we the befriended, with our less-than-luminous lives, may feel just a tad shabby.
I have read “The Story of Ferdinand,” a children’s story, to my grandchildren several times. It is about a bull in Spain that preferred smelling flowers under his cork tree to snorting and butting heads and fighting other bulls. One day five men came and picked out what looked to them to be the biggest, baddest bull of all, and took him to Madrid to chase and bore a matador. On the day of the bullfight, when Ferdinand the Fiercest got in the ring and saw the flowers in all the lovely ladies’ hair, he got as close to them as he could, quietly sat down, and enjoyed sniffing the pleasant smells. Ferdinand would not fight, no matter how many times the Picadores stuck him with spears, so they packed him home to his beloved cork tree. The last page of the story shows Ferdinand smelling flowers, accompanied with these final words: “He is very happy.”11
Written by Munro Leaf and published in 1936, this story was burned in Nazi Germany because being true to oneself—not conforming to the herd—was not tolerated, much less advocated.
In “Disiderata,” Max Ehrman wrote: “If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.”
Why allow Photoshopped images and spotless profiles spun by Facebook friends get you down?
January 15
Some of the new words in dictionaries are “google” used as a verb and “sexting” for sending sexually explicit pictures over a cell phone. If I could coin one word to become part of our vocabulary, it would be hopenomics.
The word economics comes from two Greek words, oikos meaning house and nomos meaning law. An economist was originally one who “laid down the law” in managing the treasures of a household (or city or nation). The emphasis in the word is on stewardship—distributing assets wisely, responsibly, and resourcefully.
Most of us mean to be conscientious economists. We draw up budgets, pay off credit cards, give children allowances, and diversify investments. We intend to care for our assets wisely and responsibly. What would it look like if we applied commensurate intentionality and acumen to hope?
What