After my presentation the other day, I had lunch with an African American woman. She was nearing 70 years old, yet, she was still a ball of energy working for the child protective services unit at the local social services agency I presented to.
She said to me, "I get what you said about how we often trust as adults the way we learned to trust as children." She went on to tell me the story of growing up with her mom who battled Schizophrenia. She said it was always young Caucasian police officers who came and put her mom in the straight jacket and took her away. She said I never understood it, my mom was a good mom, why are they taking her away? She said it shaped the way she came to trust men and police and Caucasian people. Yet, there we were, having lunch. Her and me the white man. No one could have shown me more love and admiration. It's clear she's connected a lot of events from her past to where she is today, and that shapes where she goes from here. What a gift that is to the young people and families in her community. I was eating dinner alone last night. I listened in to a conversation between 4 construction workers eating at the table behind me. One of the men, a man probably in his 50s, began talking about his high school football days. In his story, he was the only high school freshman to ever start on a football team in the county he grew up in. Then, he injured his knee and never played again. The future he dreamed of was lost so he decided to join the military, but because of the injury, even the military wouldn't have him. As I listened to him, I realized so much of the peace I heard in my new friend's voice at lunch the other day was the work she'd done putting together the puzzle pieces of her life. This man was still trying to do that over dinner with his friends, but getting nowhere. I felt his struggle in that. I felt the weariness of a life of trying to put the puzzle together with people who might not be the best at putting puzzles together. I told someone the other day, reflecting on my birthday, I've come to appreciate every moment of my life. Every moment, past and present. I appreciate every moment not as good or bad, but simply as a moment in the puzzle of my life. My mission these days isn't to determine if that was a good day or a bad day - that can often come with judgment, especially from self - but rather, where does this day fit into the puzzle of my life. When you can come to realize every day fits into the puzzle of your life and who you are becoming, you can come to live in total gratitude. And peace. These days I am often able to recognize lives that have put their puzzles together, and those that are struggling to do so over food and drinks with buddies. One fills my heart with joy; the other breaks it. Because I have been both in my life. Every life has a puzzle. Not every life has put theirs together. It's helpful to remember that.
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I spent some time last night pondering why birthdays feel so good to me on Facebook. I get it. Everything about Facebook is designed to influence the neurotransmitters that flood me with feel-good chemicals.
But it does feel like a bigger flood on my birthday. Maybe it's volume. Certainly, more people engage with me online on my birthday than they do most other days. But this feels bigger than volume. It feels deeper than the water. It feels more real. Maybe that's reaching, trying to make the virtual world feel more real than virtual. Maybe it speaks to my inner longing for connectedness and community. But that's really the feeling that comes with each of those birthday greetings. Community and connectedness. Maybe it's because we all have birthdays. When someone says happy birthday, I know they have a personal frame of reference for their greeting. There is some emotion in them tied to their birthdays that equips them to connect to some emotion in me that comes with mine. There's also this notion of being seen. When someone says happy birthday, they know something very significant about me. I was born this day. And to have so many people seeing and knowing the same personal thing about me, and celebrating it, all at the same time, that's an intense shot of feeling seen. I think that's a big part of it. You can spend a lot of time online and have a lot of people see you without you ever feeling seen. I did feel seen on my birthday. Not the seen that comes with attention, but the seen that comes with being known. So, thank you for reaching out. Reaching out with everything ranging from a simple happy birthday greeting to beautiful words of encouragement. It all played a role in a day full of connection. And feeling known. I know social media and other forms of electronic communication can be good and/or evil, depending on the hearts and minds of the users. I appreciate all who made all of it such a good thing in my life yesterday. I'm truly grateful for the lovely hearts and minds in my life. I don't think the virtual world will ever make a great substitute for hearing the words happy birthday while enveloped inside a warm birthday hug. But maybe the virtual world isn't supposed to be a substitute. Maybe it's the delicious icing on the relational chocolate birthday cake. And at the same time, maybe it's a sweet reminder to never give up on the cake. Either way, thank you all. Thank you for making it a truly special start to another year. 4/27/2024 0 Comments Where do i go from here?I turn 60 today. I find myself asking, where do I go from here?
I ask that not because I'm turning 60. I ask it because I ask that of most days now, and indeed, of many situations in general. I ran my first marathon several years ago. I think that was the start of that question: where do I go from here? At the finish line of that race I determined I hadn't finished something, but rather, I was at the starting line of my next challenge. So, at the start of each new day now, I challenge myself, where do I go from here? Or, sometimes, caught up in my emotions, whether I'm happy or sad, if I'm glad or angry or lonely, or if I'm feeling particularly victorious or defeated, I try to ask myself, where do I go from here? If I feel any distance growing in my relationship with my boys, I ask, where do I go from here? If I am feeling the momentum from a particular article I've written or talk I've given, I find myself asking, where do I go from here? Where do I go from here? It's a powerful question. It acknowledges no matter how high or how low a moment or a circumstance or a period of time gets, it's only a starting place, never the end. It acknowledges I do have some say-so in where I go from here if I'll simply stop and acknowledge my say-so. That question is a reminder that life is never something we settle into, but rather an ongoing invitation to us each and every day to embrace her with new love and life and determination. I turn 60 today and I find myself asking, where do I go from here? That's nothing short of a miraculous shift in my life given that I crawled into my 50s far more prone to ask, where will you be taking me from here, life? The song, Say I Won't, by MercyMe, became a theme song of the latter years of my 50s. There are lyrics in the song that proclaim: I'm gonna run No, I'm gonna fly I'm gonna know what it means to live And not just be alive The world's gonna hear 'Cause I'm gonna shout And I will be dancing when circumstances drown the music out Say I won't It's poetic, really, that I took up running in my 50s. It would be easy for me to think, I really want to keep running into my 60s. But the reality is, no, I don't wanna run. I'm gonna fly. I have discovered what it means to live and that's exactly what I intend to keep doing. So I'm gonna fly. Because that's exactly what you can do once you start asking, where do I go from here? You ask it and realize the answer to that question is far more in your control than you used to realize. So, I encourage you, no matter how old you turn today, or no matter how up or down you might feel today, stop and ask yourself, where do I go from here? Ask it and be grateful in knowing that if you have the freedom to ask that question, you have some say-so in the answer. And life is inviting you into that answer. Where do I go from here? Don't ever stop asking. What is evil?
Evil is the arch-nemesis of beauty. Evil survives and spreads on knowing much better than us the power and unstoppable force of beauty. We sometimes forget the power that beauty has in forever altering the world. Evil never forgets that, though. Not ever. It pummels us in cruel and ugly ways to distract us away from creating beauty, and to create doubt in us that there is much significance in beauty at all. Because we are beauty's creators. We are its momentum. Destroy our belief in beauty and beauty in the world is ultimately destroyed. One of the most beautiful things about beauty is once we believe in it and continue to pour it into the world it never comes back. It just keeps going. And growing. Like a beautiful song. We must remember that. That once we have sung our song of beauty into the world the beauty lives on in those who have heard it. Once we've sung it, the hearts of the world become one giant thank you note. We must read that note often. And be reminded that there is no greater offering each and every day than beauty. We must never be dissuaded from singing. Or writing. Or planting. Or loving. When we throw beauty into the world the world catches it as if receiving a long-lost friend. And it forever treasures it. Evil doesn't want us to believe this is so. But in spite of evil, we must. We must believe. We must keep singing. Beauty is this world's long-lost friend. We forever hold the power to reunite them. I asked AI this morning, what is crowdsourcing?
AI said, crowdsourcing is a method of solving problems by tapping into the collective knowledge, skills, or resources of a large group of people, typically through the internet. Maybe crowdsourcing isn't a bad idea. That is, unless we're bad at picking the right collective. Then it's a really bad idea. The problem with crowdsourcing, many times, is we already have a solution in mind when we go looking for our collective. We aren't looking for a collective to help us come up with a solution, we're looking for one to support the solution we've already come up with. Seth Godin says, "The hallmark of a curious person with goodwill is that they’re eager to change their minds." I think I'd repurpose that great quote to say, the hallmark of a good crowdsourcer is they are eager to find a collective that might change their mind. I know many of the challenges I've faced in life have come as a result of me charging ahead according to my own will. To fuel my charging, I've often surrounded myself with people who would support that will. A crowd who would encourage my charging. I have followed paths that purposely circumvented people who might suggest I was on the wrong path. In my mind, not because they might tell me I was wrong, but because I was absolutely certain that THEY were wrong. When we are always certain our way is right, it's exceedingly easy to pick out the people who are wrong. I had a friend share with me recently that she is having a hard time knowing what path God wants her to take. I told her I've come to discover God is never really good at telling me what path I should take, but he's very good at letting me feel unsupported in certain paths I want to take. You know how I have come to know that? The quickest way I've come to identify I am on a path God might not support me in taking? I know it because I'll go talk to people who will support my path and not my God who might challenge it. I am far more eager to find people who will support my solution than talking to a God I know might try to change my mind. I am asking all the right questions in my life, I am just crowdsourcing with the wrong collective. We live in a day and age where it's possible to find support for every solution and path we come up with in life. You look hard enough, you'll find the answer you long to hear. That makes it more challenging in many ways to live out a great secret to a more fulfilling life: being eager to find people who might actually change our minds. I no longer believe in right or wrong paths as much as I believe in right or wrong guidance. I no longer believe in right or wrong answers as much as I believe in rolling through life with right answers we cultivate from the right source. I think it's a beautiful thing that we get to crowdsource, we simply need to be very cautious about the kind of source that crowd turns out to be. 4/22/2024 0 Comments Gratitude, The Difference Between The Beauty We'll Preserve And The Beauty We Won'tI wrote these words yesterday morning:
"Maybe that's the ultimate power of gratitude. Maybe it exposes beauty in the world that would forever go unknown without gratitude." Sometimes my writing is me reflecting in real-time. Typing away the thought that pour uncontrollably into me. Sometimes my writing is words pouring into me that I'll reflect on much deeper for some time to come. Yesterday was the latter. I was fishing with Ian, standing on the side of the lake. It was cold and dreary and what some might call an ugly day. As I stood there staring out over the grey water, I found myself wondering, is this a beautiful lake? Standing here, right now, in the midst of all that could be felt as gloom, is this a beautiful lake? And all I kept hearing, a voice of sorts, was if you see it as so, then it is so. A lake by definition is not beautiful. I can't find a definition anywhere that will describe it that way. Maybe beauty really is in the eye of the beholder. And without beholders, can anything ever really become beautiful? (As I write those words, God is reminding me my word for 2024 is behold). I had a conversation with a dear friend about gratitude last week. A conversation that undoubtedly shoved me down this path of deeper reflection on the power of gratitude. But I said, I think it's developing this capacity to be grateful for the seemingly small things in life, or the things that feel harder to be grateful for, that ultimately makes gratitude a powerful character trait in our lives. Because in many ways, I'm coming to believe the world is a blank canvas. Beauty is the vision we paint upon that canvas. It's the story we write about all that we behold. Is gratitude the paint brush and the pen? And so I ask myself again, is this a beautiful lake? I've come to believe that's not the right question. The right question is, am I grateful for this lake? For this moment to be standing next to it with my kid? Do I have the power to see and feel and write a beautiful story on the surface of these waters? Yes, this is most assuredly a beautiful lake. Today is Earth Day. A day I didn't know was coming in the heart of my reflecting yesterday, but something I now know was preparing me to respond to this celebration. Preparing me to respond to the question, do we have a beautiful earth? I would answer that I've been blessed to see so much that I am grateful for on this earth, so yes, indeed it is beautiful. I do long to see more spaces that I can see and write beauty into. I long to do more of my part finding ways to ensure every generation to come has the chance to see and write their own beautiful stories. Gratitude, the difference between the beauty we see and the beauty we don't. And gratitude, the difference between the beauty we'll preserve and the beauty we won't. Happy Earth Day all. What a beautiful earth it is!! Earlier this week, Max Homa was sitting in a Chick Fil A drive through getting ready to pay for his meal. That's when the server informed him a lady in the car one row over had already paid for it.
Was she completely unaware that this was Max Homa, the golfer who'd just finished third and won a cool million bucks at last weekend's Masters golf tournament? I'm pretty sure he could afford his own spicy chicken sandwich combo. Well, it turns out she was very aware of who he was and what he'd done. Homa is her young son's favorite golfer, and she wanted to pay for his meal to thank him. It can seem like such a meaningless transaction. Or on the other hand, outrageous maybe - a seemingly ordinary mama shelling out 15 bucks to pay for an uber famous golfer's lunch at Chick Fil A. But I think it's much more than that. Gratitude takes titles out of the equation. Gratitude takes the size and means of the gratitude extended out of the equation. Gratitude is simply a human to human expression, or a human to God expression, or just quite simply a human expression, that says I notice you and what you have done, and it means something to me. Max Homa, you mean something to my kid, and I need you to know that means something to me. In response to the act of kindness, Homa said he still has to pinch himself when people show him such kindness because he plays the game of golf. To this mom, it was much more than that. To this mom, it was a golfer having a beautiful influence on her child's life. And as a dad, I have felt that overwhelming need to say thank you to people for that kind of influence on my own boys' lives. Gratitude was her way of saying we aren't in different worlds. You aren't of the golf world and I'm not of the parenting world, we are of the same world. Gratitude bridges worlds in a beautiful way. It's the loveliest kind of invitation to look into one another's worlds. Gratitude looks beneath the surface of what someone or something is, and looks deeper into the beauty they add to our lives. Gratitude is the way we express the beauty we've discovered. So many people are contributing beauty to the world in ways they don't know. Gratitude is our way of helping them know it. Maybe that's the ultimate power of gratitude. Maybe it exposes beauty in the world that would forever go unknown without gratitude. If so, it makes gratitude not only a good idea, but pretty necessary to the mission of making the world a more beautiful place. And it can start in places as simple as the Chick Fil A drive through. I myself think that's a fine place to start 😊. I've begun watching the show "This is Us."
Today, after watching one full season, if someone were to ask me to identify the message the show's writers are trying to convey to the audience, I'd simply say it is this: People are complicated. That is the message. And that is a fact. People are complicated. The show beautifully untangles the impacts of intergenerational complications. Complications are inherited, often multiplying along the way. Relationships that aren't great at accepting or navigating each other's complications are often the primary multiplier of them. I mean, once you accept this, that my spouse or my friend or my family is complicated - which for some of us can take a lifetime to to get to that place - to fully accept complicated, we respond one of two ways. Ideally, we respond with curiosity. Curiosity is emotionally engaging. It says I accept that you are complicated, and I want to explore the depths and nature of your complications. That you are being complicated isn't the story, your complications are. I want to know THAT story. As the complicated suddenly feels seen. The other response is to withdraw. To retreat from the complicated natures of one another. To hide from what we see instead of investing the emotional and spiritual and mental energy required to untangle the unseen complications. It's why I've come to believe that curiosity is the foundation of a thriving relationship. Not curiosity about the moon and the stars, but about the scars. It's not accepting challenging behaviors, but being curious about the complicated stories those behaviors are telling. Because challenging behaviors are never the story. It's always much more complicated than that. You can spend decades together hiding from behaviors, inciting them, denying them. You can spend decades in a relationship full of behaviors without ever coming close to understanding the complications beneath them. Some relationships will survive that. They will exist. They won't be broken in word. But no relationship will grow inside that. It won't thrive. It will never produce beauty in spirit. There are some thriving relationships in the show This is Us. And the writers are brilliantly using curiosity to help them grow before our eyes. Curiosity about each other's complications. At the same time, they are making us curious right along with them. I wonder if the writers hope to make us more curious about one another. I wonder if they hope to bring some of us out of hiding and into curiosity. I wonder if their hope is to make broken relationships whole again. It's a complicated question, for sure. One we can either run from, or get curious about. Curious or withdrawn. It's always one or the other. The difference will be felt for generations to come. My word for 2024 is behold. It's a word that challenges me to take in as much beauty as possible, to put myself in the path of oncoming beauty as frequently as I can, with anticipation that each moment of beauty is only the beginning of the story.
It's based on God, and his frequent call in the bible for us to behold. Behold as an invitation to discover the beauty beyond the beauty. But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid! For behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people: Today in the city of David a Savior has been born to you. He is Christ the Lord! And this will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger.”… Behold. As I prepare for the week ahead, I am struck that this time last weekend my the world was busy preparing for a solar eclipse. People were traveling across the country, arranging watch parties, scrambling to snag the last pairs of glasses. News channels racing to claim their spots in the path of totality. My world was preparing itself to behold something spectacular. And they did. It was a beautiful thing. Curt Thompson described what I witnessed eloquently. He said: "The eclipse, with its stunning display of cosmic alignment, served as a powerful reminder of the interconnectedness of humanity and the natural world. It transcended geographical boundaries and cultural differences, uniting people from all walks of life in a shared moment of wonder and awe. In witnessing this celestial spectacle, we were reminded of the inherent beauty that exists in moments of collective appreciation and unity." A collective appreciation and unity. A beholding. But here I am, not even six full days removed from the event, and it's gone. There is no more talking about it. No more pictures shared. It feels like the awe has faded into a distant memory. To be truthful, it doesn't feel like a memory at all. The eclipse and the unity it encouraged feels more like a moment now and not an invitation. It feels like something we watched together while missing the invitation into togetherness. Like many who observed the baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger, I wonder if we saw the beauty, but missed the sign? It is not too late. Life is constantly calling us into moments of collective appreciation and unity. We simply have to be more committed to holding on to the moments that we behold together. We have to imagine them as something larger than an eclipse, something more meaningful than a baby. We have to see the eclipse as ours. The ocean and the mountains and the streams as ours. We have to hear the birds as our birds and see the dolphins emerge from the ocean as our fish. We have to see the sun and the moon as our day and our night. Our. Because behold, that is what the eclipse was asking us to feel in accepting the invitation to experience total darkness in broad daylight. It was always something bigger than that. Behold, we are all in this together. It's only been six days. We still have time to hold on to what we beheld. We still have time to discover the beauty beyond the beauty. Unity. It's ours. Yesterday, I had the chance to speak to a group in Lynchburg, Virginia. Like always, I walked away with a lesson at least as powerful as anything I left behind.
I arrived at the event early. This allowed me extra time to get to know the hosts of the event. In those conversations, I discovered the owner of the host company was familiar with Randolph-Macon College (RMC) where I work part-time. His son had visited the college recently, exploring the possibility of playing football there. His son ultimately went a different direction. He chose a school closer to home and to wrestle, not play football. But his father told me the football coach at RMC they spent time with, coach Arruza, was one of the finest coaches he'd ever met. He told me it was clear coach Arruza was a man of great character and that he was as committed to building character in the young people he coaches as he was to building successful athletes. None of this surprised me. I've known coach Arruza for several years now. He's a man I openly welcome into my own boys' lives. I often say he's as walk the talk as any man I know. So nothing about this father's experience surprised me. But what a reminder, standing there, 130 miles from RMC, hundreds of days removed from an interaction between a father and a coach, and that interaction is living on, alive and well. That interaction, seemingly long gone, was risen and influencing a moment in the present. It certainly made me feel more comfortable and at peace as I prepared to speak to the group. But it also reminded me that what I was about to say, and how I was about to say it, might have a life of its own that I couldn't begin to predict. It's easy in a day that is full of so many moments to start writing some moments off as less meaningful than others. But that's because we simplify moments to what we can see in them. We judge moments by what they appear to offer us in the here and now. But life and moments are more complex than that. Life takes our moments and transports them. We fill the suitcases of the moment, then life travels with them, often to places we never get to become aware of or actually visit ourselves. What a beautiful life miracle, then, to be standing in one of those moments yesterday. To see what life decided to do with the interaction between a father and a coach. It's not lost on me that I'm now writing about that moment. I'm sharing it with you. I wasn't even there, yet, in a way, now I was. How cool is life? But as powerful and cool as life is that way, we have to remember we are the fuel for that power. We pour into life something that sends a man back home with his son believing he'd just met one of the finest coaches and high character men he'd ever met. Our stories, our character, who we are, it travels. Which makes every moment in life a very meaningful one. There's no doubt in my mind that coach Arruza has hosted thousands of those recruiting visits over the years. There's no doubt in my mind it would get easy to just go through the motions of those visits. But that's not at all who coach Arruza is. His character is beyond routine and complacent. And that's the story that got transported 130 miles away and some 400 days or so later. What a blessing it was to hear it. What a reminder that today, you and I will live out stories that life is going to transport somewhere. We have no control, really, over where life takes that story, but we have a whole lot of control over what that story will be. Make it a good one. Make it one you'd be proud to hear many days and miles from now. Make it one you'd be proud for someone else to hear. |
Robert "Keith" CartwrightI am a friend of God, a dad, a runner who never wins, but is always searching for beauty in the race. Archives
May 2024
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