I heard Dr. Curt Thompson recently say, if we sit in the midst of beauty long enough, beauty will not only find our joy, it will also discover our wounds.
That caught me off guard. Why would beauty go looking for my wounds? Why would beauty risk turning beauty into anything but beautiful? I still don't know, really. But after reflecting on Thompson's words, I began to feel the truth of them. I have written often about the peace I find in the woods. About the joy I experience during a mountain hike. Or simply sitting looking out over a valley. Peace. But the truth is, it's in those peaceful moments when I find myself reflecting on life many layers below where I would typically reflect on it. I often try to force peace into my life by avoiding the things I don't want to think about. Things that disturb me. Beauty, in all of its unforced peace, though, has deep interest in discovering those very things. Maybe because beauty knows something about us that we don't yet know: it's our whole selves that make us beautiful, not pieces and parts of us. Beauty doesn't search our hearts and minds and souls for pieces and parts to judge, it searches them in order to fully know us. Maybe that's why we hide from beauty at times. Not just the beauty of the woods or the mountain, but also the beauty that can be found in relationships. The beauty that can be found in quiet moments of prayer or meditation. The beauty that can be found in a quiet drive along a forgotten country road. The noise of the world protects us. Busy distracts us. But beauty, beauty stops us in our tracks. And in the stop, beauty goes to exploring. Exploring us. Isn't it ironic, we go into the woods exploring beauty, and its beauty that ends up exploring us? The trick is to get good at our often unknowing avoidance of beauty. The trick is to get good at knowing beauty doesn't see as ugly the parts of us that we see as ugly. The trick is to get good at knowing that in the midst of beauty, we add to beauty - we don't take away from it. The trick is to find more beauty in our lives, and embrace the beauty that beauty finds in us. I encourage us all. Find more beauty in the world, and let the beauty of the world find more beauty in you.
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When I moved a couple of years ago, I took the opportunity to downsize my closet. I downsized a lot of things, really. When my buddy Solomon agreed to help me move, I told him don't worry, it won't take long, I'm going to be a minimalist.
After helping me move, he said, you weren't kidding. So I walk into a fairly empty closet these days. I walk into an apartment without a lot of furniture or things hanging on the wall or much scattered on the floor that might trip me up. I've cleared a lot of things out of my life. That's for sure. It's helped me realize something. A lot of the challenges in my life have nothing to do with the stuff in my closet or in my living room or piled up in the back seat of my car. I've come to realize transforming my life into something new and into something I can fully love isn't about transforming the spaces I live in. It's about transforming the space where life lives in me. It's about transforming my mind. Too often when we think about simplifying life, we focus on getting rid of the stuff we don't need on the outside. When in reality, change comes when we start getting rid of some of the stuff on the inside. We think making room for the new me is parting with things that were part of the old me, but really, making room for a new me starts with getting rid of some of the thought patterns of the old me. A new me isn't about giving all of my old shoes to Soles4Souls (as much as I highly encourage all of us to do so)!! A new me is about getting rid of my shame and guilt and resentment and sense of abandonment and bitterness and self-doubt and discouragement and so many things of my mind that suffocate the life out of me in ways a messy closet never could. Messy closets are often an easy way of saying "that's my problem." Which is the easiest way to avoid owning that "I'm my problem." Messy closets suck the life out of a living space. Messy minds suck the life out of - well, life. Emptying your closet makes room for new stuff in your closet. Emptying your mind makes more room for life. It's a journey. An often complicated journey. Emptying your mind of toxic thought patterns - and the people and places and things that contribute to those patterns - that is not as easy as a trip to Goodwill. It just isn't. But, when you start to breathe in the new life that comes with new thought patterns - that comes with surrounding yourself with encouragement and hope - you begin to lose sight of some of the things in life and begin to focus on what's truly important in life. You wake up with a desire to live out and not clean out. And that is the most beautiful kind of transformation. If I'm not careful, I can get focused on missed opportunities.
I can get focused on the opportunities denied to me because someone else did or didn't do something to make an opportunity a reality in my life. I can get focused on life circumstances that refuse to align more in my favor. If I'm not careful, in processing missed opportunities, I can turn myself into a victim of missed opportunities. I can turn myself in to someone who wasn't enough. The subtle voices of insecurity and doubt that live just beneath my every breath suddenly have full control of every breath. But while I am processing missed opportunities, new opportunities zip right on by. Opportunities don't compassionately wait for us to resolve our feelings about opportunities we've missed; they simply roll on and take their place in line. The growing line of missed opportunities. If you have missed opportunities in your life, one of the most helpful things you can do about that is call them what they are. Missed opportunities. It doesn't matter how or why they got missed, they got missed. If you want to wrestle with something, wrestle with the reality that you're about to miss another opportunity. It's right there, today, in front of you, waiting for you to grab it. No one is going to steal it from you - seize it. Otherwise, you'll forfeit it. I think when we get to a place of owning that we give up more opportunities than anyone could ever steal from us, we'll quit giving them up so easily. As we wind down another year, be reminded the year is not over. There are opportunities to be had. Momentum to carry in to 2024. Momentum to seize, not forfeit. So, seize it. I have just started watching the show Friends. Part of me wishes I'd never read Matthew Perry's book, Friends, Lovers, and The Big Terribly Thing before I did.
I also know I would have never watched the show if I hadn't. In his book, Perry tells of the prayer he once said to God: God, if you'll just make me famous, you can do anything you want with me after that. Perry said of that prayer, "I held firm in my belief that fame would fill that unaccompanied hole in me. But now it was just me and vodka attempting and failing this seemingly impossible task." As I watch the show, from the very beginning, I realize I am watching a man's answered prayer. And I know from the very beginning, he realizes it was never going to be the answer he longed for. I realize as I'm watching a man become more and more famous with his humor, his unaccompanied hole only grew larger and larger. Perry would say, "I'm certain that I got famous so I would not waste my entire life trying to get famous. You have to get famous to know it's not the answer. And nobody who is not famous will ever truly believe that." Perry talks about the agonizing pressure that came with each episode. The pressure to be funny. The pressure to make people laugh. He said if he didn't get the laugh he was supposed to get, he would freak out. Every single night. It's hard watching a show knowing that. It's hard watching a character be so lovable when you know in that moment he could not love himself less. I also relate to Matthew Perry. I understand the lengths we'll go to to make other people love us as a way to cope with the love we've never found for ourselves. Only this guy is doing it in front of millions. Millions who would plan their weeks (back when you had to plan to watch your television shows) around showing up to see one of the funniest men they'd ever seen, all the while having no idea they were watching a man dying inside. I wrote once about my obsession with popularity. How in middle school and high school I wanted elected to every position of school-age fame I could get. I wanted to be captain of this and president of that and voted most likely to succeed at everything. And I was fortunate to have many of those positions. I also wrote about my first college class: "I remember my first college class. There were more people filling the endless rows and seats of that class than there were in my entire high school graduation class. All the popularity in the world means nothing when you are suddenly surrounded by a sea of strangers. Strangers who have no interest in electing you the president of anything. Strangers who have no interest in asking you to join their team, let alone making you their captain. I don't remember what that first class was, but I do remember what it felt like to be lost. As I look back, it's easy to wonder if that was the beginning of lost in my life. The beginning of alone. Or is it possible that day, in that class, my eyes were opened to something popularity had always hid from me?" I look back now through the lens of Perry's life and wonder if I wasn't saying some version of his prayer without saying the prayer - God just make me famous and you can do anything you want with me. I've certainly never experienced the kind of fame Perry did, but in my own little layer of life, I have felt famous at times. And I can look back now and know that it never filled what I was clearly trying to fill. And that in many ways, I've never stopped trying to fill it. I will journey on in this Friends experience. After reading the Matthew Perry book, I feel like I am journeying on WITH a friend. A friend I admire. Again, not on his level but on his level enough to know, it takes great strength and courage and fight to show up every day to bring joy to the lives of others even as you struggle to bring joy to yourself. These days, my prayer has definitely changed. Today my prayer is, God, let me make you famous and then you can do whatever you want with me. It's my prayer. I pray it hard. But there are days I find myself leaning on the old prayer. God make me famous. I'm thankful for the words and the work of Matthew Perry. I'm thankful for his reminder: those who have never been famous will never truly believe that fame answers none of the voids you wanted it to answer. I've never been famous, Matthew, but I believe you. Please rest easy, friend, maybe it's not consolation - maybe it is - but your fame filled more voids than you'll ever imagine. Something tells me that in the end, that became your ultimate prayer. If asked to offer a one word life goal, progress comes to mind. I want to live a life of progress, of getting better, of moving toward the purpose I was created to fulfill.
One of the things that often stands in my way of progress is activity. It's easy for me to believe that if I'm active I'm making progress. But not all activity is progress. Not all activity is a step closer to living a life of purpose. In fact, activity can often become a distraction. It can become a reason we sometimes unknowingly adopt to avoid living out our purpose. How do I know the difference? There's an easy measure. It's this question: If I stop doing this activity right now, will my purpose suffer? If I stop scrolling on my phone right now, will my purpose suffer? No. If I stop writing this article right now, will my purpose suffer? Yes. My phone is often an activity, my writing is almost always progress. The point is moot, obviously, if you don't know the purpose you're trying to fulfill. If you don't have an endgame in mind, it's very difficult to distinguish an activity from progress. Without knowing if my next step has meaning, it's hard to distinguish a meaningful step from a simple step. I'm not suggesting EVERY step has to be filled with meaning, but if you want to live a life of meaning, more steps than not will have to be progress. You can't get somewhere by taking a lot of steps to nowhere. More than ever, we live in a world that bombards us with potential activities. It's up to us to discern whether they are activities or progress. There can be a lot of meaning found in knowing the difference. There can be a lot of meaning found in going somewhere instead of nowhere. And often, that meaning is purpose. 11/23/2023 0 Comments Home can be as simple as breakfastPost divorce, one of the things I wrestled with a lot was the idea of home. Most of that came from me moving from a house to a small apartment.
For the longest time, I'd return the boys from time with me at my apartment to home. Their home. My former home. And there was a void. A home void. I've come to understand more than I ever did that home is not a physical dwelling. Home is a feeling. A sense. I've come to understand it's possible to live in houses all your life and never find home. And it's equally possible to prepare 3 Thanksgiving morning breakfasts and share them with the people you love most and feel completely at home. This morning, I am thankful for home. I am reminded that God has prepared a home for me. I can get caught up imagining the streets of gold. The mansion on a hill. But this morning I imagine the joy God will feel preparing breakfast for me, and the joy I'll feel eating it with him. This morning I can fully imagine the joy of home. Home. A friend recently introduced me at a speaking event as one of the most grateful people she knows. That caught me off guard. One, no one had ever included gratitude when introducing me. And two, my friend has a giant circle of grateful friends. It was especially humbling to know she sees me that way.
In the aftermath of that introduction, I wrestled with it. Mainly, I found myself asking, are your truly grateful? Are you worthy of anyone identifying you as one of the most grateful people they know, let alone this wonderful soul? And the answer I kept arriving at was yes. Yes, I am a truly grateful person. I guess that starts with recognizing that, by my own personal definition, there's a very big distinction between feeling lucky or fortunate and being grateful. I believe people can go their whole lives recognizing they are very fortunate, privileged, lucky - and never attribute any of that to anything beyond themselves, or - well, just plain luck. I'm not saying that critical or judgmental. I don't think we can ever go wrong recognizing the good in our lives. But gratitude, being grateful, it begs us to take our fortune a step further. It begs us to identify a source for our fortune and then offer thanksgiving to that source. To me, maybe it's the most valuable part of whatever fortune we have, the opportunity to say thank you for it. Maybe that is the serve and return that is intended to make us all whole, this marriage of giving and thanksgiving. For me, my thanksgiving always begins and ends with God. I have written and spoken a lot of words in my life, but there is no doubt, it's not even close, the words I've uttered most, either inside my soul or right out loud, are thank you God. Thank you God. When my car starts in the morning on the way to work, thank you God. As I prepare to eat, thank you God. When I pick my boys up for a weekend and they approach the car, thank you God. When I stand before an audience speaking about things I never could have pictured myself speaking about, thank you God. When I look back on the struggles of my life, and live out the current struggles of my life, and feel God in them, right there, without even a hint of abandonment, thank you God. Would my life have meaning at all were it not for the chance to say, thank you God? Would my life have meaning at all if I didn't feel God's warm embrace as he draws me near and whispers, you're welcome? But then my God doesn't stop there, and like my friend, God catches me off guard when he says, thank YOU Keith. Thank YOU for the goodness you pour into me and mine. God calls me by name and reminds me, we ARE in this together. This week, if you feel fortunate or lucky or privileged or blessed, maybe take it a step further. Maybe consider a source for those feelings. And offer thanksgiving. Offer thanksgiving and know, that is the marriage that holds us all together. Giving and Thanksgiving. Happy Thanksgiving dear friends. The older I get, the more I realize the secret to life isn't found in what I know, it's found in what I do with my life when I don't know.
It's how I handle I don't have a clue. Because the reality is, and some of us will be more open to admitting this than others, we don't have a clue. Even when we think we do, we really don't. The bible tells us the story of Abraham, the father of all nations. And the bible says in Hebrews, "By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going." Even though he did not know where he was going.... How often, when we feel called to a place, to an experience, to a possibility, to our future, to our legacy - how often, when called, do we think this call must be to a wrong number, because I don't know how to go there? When I move to toward the limits of what I know, I move within the limits of my own strength. When I move with faith outside the limits of what I know, outside the limits of what I could ever possibly know, I walk with God. And Abraham. And Moses. And Noah. And all of you who have felt so strongly about where you have been called to go that you totally dismissed the reality you had no idea how to get there. Yet, there you are. Oh, how I long to be a star chaser and not one waiting on stars to align. Oh, how I long to be the pursuer of answers and not one waiting on answers to arrive. Oh, how I long to bask in the beauty of what I don't yet know and not a prisoner to all that I do. Oh, how I long to see I don't have a clue as a measure of my faith and not my foolishness. Oh God, I don't have a clue, but you do. So little of your clue is found in what I know; so much of it is found in the even though I don't know. Maybe a great place for all of us to start today is by confessing, I don't have a clue. But you know what, nonetheless, I'm going into the world today seeking it's beauty. Adding to its beauty. Even though. I don't know. Research shows that the more empathy a patient feels from their medical doctor, the better the outcomes they report from their treatment with that doctor.
Additionally, research also shows that the more empathy a doctor demonstrates for their patients, the less likely it is that doctor will experience burnout. (https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/.../should_we_train...) But is that just a doctor patient thing? Is that not true of any relationship? Is it not true of pastor and congregation? Is it not true of supervisor and team? Is it not true of romantic relationships and friendships? Is it not true of father and son and mother and daughter? Is it not true that no matter how much I know, what I know loses its value the more I'm incapable of connecting with you and communicating that I see and feel your struggles? In a world that is intent on innovating our way out of struggles, intent on gaining knowledge that will make extinct our hardships, people are disappearing in the midst of them. Are we more intelligent and yet at the same time more disconnected than we've ever been? I mean, is it possible we've become too smart for human relationships? And is it also possible that platforms like the one I'm writing on right now are using our longing for human relationships to feed us knowledge that only serves to make us more disconnected? I don't know. I don't. But I do believe, in the grand scheme of things, it feels like we're on a journey to know more about the world around us than the people beside us. I believe it largely comes with good intention; we all want a better world. But what if the research is right? What if a better world starts with me feeling like you see me and me feeling like I see you? What if a better world is less innovating and more integrating? Integrating you and me. If we have really outsmarted human connection, it might be time to start dumbing down the world a little bit. At least to the point where we all fully know the value of you and me. Maybe then we truly will be smarter than we've ever been. If you are reading this, you are receiving the greatest gift there is:
Breath. And I don't know if you know this, but most of us will receive that gift approximately TWENTY ONE THOUSAND more times today once you are done reading this. Each breath, each one arrives woven within THE spirit of love, asking upon arrival, upon EACH arrival, what will you make of me? Breath - the spirit of love - is it capable of detesting anything? And if it is, is it possible the one thing it detests is being overlooked? Taken for granted? Misused? We assume breath, but breath arrives with an unassuming sense of urgency. There's so much to be done. So many people who need seen and loved and healed. Isn't that the lifework of breath? Breath arrives to us not to be collected but shared. One of the harder things for me to accept about my life - something I often detest about me - is the amount of breath I've collected. The amount of breath I have overlooked and took for granted and misused. But breath, sweet precious breath, it is the gift of second chances, and more.... It keeps showing up and it keeps asking, what will you make of me? Because it believes you CAN make something of it. And maybe, deep inside, that Spirit wants you to know it NEEDS you to make something of it. For you and for the world. Because 21,000 breaths are a lot. They are a lot of love and a lot of possibility and a lot of chances. Until the chances are gone. Because breath is the gift of second chances, until it isn't... Do you hear the sweet whisper? What will you make of me? I do. |
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
November 2024
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