Lesson 12 - The Tying of the Cat

People believe some crazy stuff.  Of course, they don’t think their belief is crazy.  We never think our belief is crazy.  But everyone has something they believe is true that others might consider wacky.

I had a student who is more than old enough to know better who was convinced that a girl could get pregnant all by herself simply by doing complex gymnastics moves.  I have met full grown adults who believe that if you go Trick-or-Treating on Halloween that you will immediately become possessed by a demon.  Then there are the parents who won’t allow their kids within 3 miles of a movie theater because they are “evil”, but will sit at home and watch gory horror films about demons and witches with their kids.  Same said parents won’t let same said kids watch Disney animated movies because they are also “evil.”

Seriously.

And, please, don’t read anything into those examples about what I believe or don’t believe about these things.  I think I’ve made my proclivity towards sci-fi, action, and fantasy clear by now.

The point is, people believe some interesting things.  It causes us to wonder where they picked that up from?  Where did they learn that?  Why do they believe that?  Who taught them that?  Why choose to die on that hill, and not another?

Let me tell you a story.  We are about at that point in this post, yes?  However, just to be upfront with you, this is a completely fictional story.  Also, for the sake of honesty and integrity and other words that end in “y”, I did not create this story.  So, if you have heard it before, I apologize if I don’t tell it the way you had heard it before.  This story is about the point more so than the details.

Once upon a time long ago there was a Rabbi.  For those who don’t know, “Rabbi” is simply the Hebrew word for “teacher”.  This Rabbi was in charge of one of the weekly prayer gatherings in his area.  The Rabbi took great pride in making sure everything was organized well and ran smoothly.

One day just as he had gotten things started in his prayer gathering, a cat snuck into the room.  As everyone was trying to pray and be focused, this cat began whining and meowing and making all manner of racket.  This made the Rabbi not happy.  He tried to catch the cat but could not.  It stayed out of his grasp as would hide behind random objects in the room.  The cat had ruined his good planning.

The next week, the Rabbi started up his prayer session again deciding to shake off the last weeks travesty of a spiritual gathering.  But just as he thought things were going good, he discovered the cat had come back and snuck in as it began to screech and whine just as loudly as the week before.  Angry, the Rabbi again tried to catch that cat, but once again he failed.

The next week he decided to be smarter than the cat.  He arrived earlier than usual making sure everything was in order, and then proceed to hide outside and wait to see if the cat would show up.  His patience and planning paid off.  The cat showed up right on schedule and the Rabbi snatched it up before it could sneak inside.  Being the kind man that he was, he didn’t harm the cat, but instead tied it to a tree just out side of where they were meeting.  Once the meeting was over, he released the cat and let it go on its way.

The next week he did the same thing.  He waited, caught the cat, tied it to a tree, and then released it after the meeting.  And so it was that every week he continued to do this just to keep the cat from sneaking in and disrupting the meeting.

Unfortunately, the Rabbi was an old man and some time later, he died.  His disciples loved him and tried to honor him by taking over his weekly prayer session.  As such, they made sure there was someone waiting outside to catch that cat.  They would do so, tie it to the tree, and then release it after the meeting.

Well, after a number of years, the inevitable happened.  The cat grew old and also died.  The Rabbi’s disciples knew exactly what to do.

They bought a new cat.

Every week they would take the new cat and tie it to the tree.  The disciples did this week after week, year after year until finally that cat grew old and died at which point they would find another cat.  The tradition passed from disciple to disciple for generations until finally the tree itself died.

Undeterred, the distant followers of the Rabbi simply planted a new tree in the same spot so they could continue to tie a cat to it.

And so, for generations upon generations, the followers tied a cat to the tree every week as the Rabbi had done.  As time passed, books were written about the Tying of the Cat.  They talked about the meaning of the cat and the symbol of the tree and the significance of tying a cat to it and what it all meant and it’s implication on life and God and salvation.

All because some dude didn’t want a cat screwing up his meeting.

People believe some crazy things.  But what matters even more than what they believe is why they believe it and how they came to believe it.

As I mentioned last week, motive is everything.  Intention is everything.  What you do is important, but why you do it is much more important.  The “why” always dictates the “what”.

The reality is that, most of us don’t really know why we do what we do or believe what we believe.  When I ask people, the most common answer I get is “I heard from (insert random non-expert: here).”  The internet.  A TV show or movie.  Their grandmother.  Their parent.  Some person in a random conversation they were close to.  Sometimes they don’t even remember where they heard it.

And yet, they insert it directly into their belief system and regular practice with out ever having sought out it’s purpose or validity or usefulness.

It becomes belief without motive.  At least, not their motive.  And as such, their own motives become muddy and uncertain because they begin to live at cross purposes with their own motives, intentions, and desires… and those of someone else who wasn’t anymore in the know than they were.

If you as a person do not choose to take control of who you are as a person, what you believe and why you believe it, you will always be living at cross purposes with yourself and never be truly fulfilled in life.  Choose to know what you know.  Find the reality obscured by the myth.

Set yourself free.
     Otherwise, all you will be doing is tying a cat to a tree and you won’t even know why.

Lesson 11 - It's a Piece of Cake

Do you know what’s hard about life?

Everything.

Which is crazy, right?  Because, life really isn’t that hard.  Life could be so much easier for most of us.  It’s like we aren’t even trying.  Or maybe we are trying in all the wrong ways and wrong directions.

Or maybe about all the wrong things.

Ego, pride, vanity… the things that keep us focused on ourselves.  How awesome I am or should be and you aren’t.

Always trying to impress others with our awesome awesomeness.  And whenever this is our goal, it’s almost guaranteed to end in awful.

It’s a tricky line to walk.  The line between trying to look good for the sake of narcissism, and looking good simply because taking care of oneself and appearance is healthy physically, mentally, and spiritually.  Having the appropriate appearance in a given context is useful for putting people at ease and gaining trust.

Motive matters.  Always.

You remember going to banquettes and dances and such in high school, right?  You took time look your best and spent money on the pretty flowers or dress or tie or tux.  You wanted your date be impressed with you (maybe a little vain?) but also you wanted your date feel like you cared enough to try hard (much more selfless than the other reason).

And this is probably ok because banquettes and proms are nerve racking enough as it is.  Put a bunch of growing, changing, socially awkward people in a room and make them have conversation in a setting and context they are not normally accustomed to, and, well, awkward and embarrassing things can happen.  To others.  Not me that one time (only one?) my junior year.

Ok, ok.  Since you asked, I’ll tell you.  Don’t say I never did anything for you.

Every year in high school we had a number of scheduled banquettes and formal gatherings.  There was a Thanksgiving banquette.  The Christmas Banquette.  The Valentines banquette.  There was also Fall Fest, but that was different.  Less tuxedo’s and more over-alls.

This one particular banquette, I was in between girlfriends.  Which is not the same as being lonely and pathetic.  You can prove nothing.

As such, I was trying to decide what I was going to do.  Ask someone randomly or go stag?  Run the risk of awkwardness or sit at a table with other dudes, or be the third wheel to some other happy cuddly sickening couple and pretend I wasn’t all sad and lonely.  (Wow, that made me sound really pathetic.  You can prove nothing.)

I decided to be awesome and brave and chivalrous and ask some equally unattached female to “hang out and be losers together” or some other such romantic words.

So, I asked a girl I was on the gymnastics team with.  She was super nice and friendly.  A really cool person.  She was more on the quiet side, which is totally fine, except I was also a bit on the quiet side.  But I figured, it’s only one evening, we will get through it just fine.

And so we did.  I put on my finest tie and jacket that I borrowed from someone else, brought the prerequisite single rose and arrived to escort her to the grand shin dig.  She looked lovely.  Hair beautiful, dress amazing… girls do that whole “cleaning up” thing so much better than we guys do.

Everything was going just fine.  We weren’t dating, so there is always that unspoken question of “so… what is actually going to happen here…” but we just kept it friendly, chit chatted, I opened doors and offered my arm for walking and pulled out chairs.  I was trying very much to be a gentleman and make sure we both had a great time.

Completely unrelated…

Do you know what I hate?  Plastic forks.  They do nothing well.  Unless you are trying to eat thick mashed potatoes with them (and why would you when a spoon is better), they pretty much just break at the slightest provocation.

Sooo…

We had just finished our main course at the meal and the dessert was served.  It was something chocolatey with some strawberry in a sauce on top.  As I was delicately and deliberately eating with gentlemanly class like a real man (read: stabbing mindlessly at my dessert), my fork snapped in half.  The business end launched itself across the planet to God-knows-where, probably maiming some poor innocent person, and the handle I was still holding slammed down onto the edge of the super classy dessert sized paper plate, flipping it up into the air, causing my entire dessert to launch it’s up into this beautiful arc, and land ever so gracefully sticky side down on my dates dress.

Her look of shock was outshone only by my look of absolute horror.  It’s one of those things you can’t really take back, and when the entire table and maybe half the room saw it happen, it’s not something you immediately recover from.

To say that the rest of the evening was a bit awkward is an understatement.  She never got mad, but I could tell she wasn’t happy.  The tension was so thick you could never have cut it with a plastic fork.  Because they break!

I felt so bad.  I had really tried.  I had tried to be nice and friendly and considerate.  I was focussed on her.  Which was good.  But I wasn’t focussed on what I was doing.  Which, as it turned out, was bad.

But I hear you say, “sure, that’s embarrassing, but accidents happen and it’s just part of life.”

Agreed.  It’s true.  Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, the wrong thing happens.  The truth is, other than being slightly less attentive to my fork than I should have, I really didn’t do anything wrong.  Stuff happens, and it just happened to happen to me.

Perhaps that’s the point.  Even when you try, you don’t always succeed.  Ask any billionaire how they came to be billionaires and they will tell about the couple things they did right, and the hundreds of failures they had to learn from which got them there.

No matter how hard you try to be a better human, to be a more selfless, less vain and egotistical human, there are going to be failures and setbacks.  It doesn’t mean we don’t try.

And that’s the flip side.  Often, we don’t try because we expect the failure.  We know we can’t win them all, and maybe not even most of them, so why bother?  It’s so much easier to just float along with the crowd of whatever and not shake up the boat.  Why be better and draw the attention of others when you can just blend in to the mediocrity?

It’s easy to do.  It doesn’t take much effort to blend in.  And most of the time there are few obvious penalties to blending in, even if there are also few obvious benefits.  

Why write our own story when we can just cost along and let the story write itself?

Back to high school, there was this one day when a couple of the guys in my class got into this huge argument.  It got so bad that they decided they were going to throw down.  So they and the crowd around them, me included, all crammed into this one room to watch it happen.  A bunch of people standing around watching two kids beat each other bloody.

And we were all hyped up to see an actual fight.  Most of us had never actually seen real people get into a fight before.  What was that going to be like?   Would there be kung-fu goodies?  Would it be super lame?

It started with lots of pushing and the occasional jab and clumsy grazing of fist to head or arm or whatever.  It was completely lame, but we were all gawking just the same.  

As we were standing around just letting it happen, one of our other classmates barged into the room.  This guy shoved his way through the onlookers, and got in-between the combatants.  He shoved one against the wall with his forearm and held the other one away with a handful of shirt.  After he did so, he did something strange.  He looked around the room at each one of us.  He looked everyone one of us in the eye and asked what was wrong with us?  Why did we just let this happen?  Why didn’t a single one of us even try to stop it?

I’ve done a lot of embarrassing things in my life.  But that moment remains one of my most shameful moments ever.  It should have been me to stop that fight.  Or any of the other people there.  But if not them, it should have been me.  I should have tried.  I shouldn’t have just followed along like some apathetic zombie.  I should have stepped up and tried to make things different.

There is a quote that goes something like this.  “All that is need for evil to thrive is for good men (and women) to do nothing.”

The world is what it is because most of us don’t really try.  We complain a lot about what it is, and then proceed to do nothing about it.  The same is true about ourselves.  We complain about our problems and failings and fears, and then proceed to do nothing about it.  We just float along doing what we’ve always done, or some variation of it, but ultimate make no real change.

But what if?  What if you actually tried?  What if you tried a different way?

        What if you did something new?

Lesson 10 - Soft Like Concrete

Over the last couple chapters or all of them, the idea of self comparisons with others has repeatedly poked it’s head into the discussion.  At one or more points, the idea of our egos being to blame has also been suggested.

Not to suggest an overly simplistic question that I’m sure all of you have a correct answer to, but, what does that really mean?  And why is that bad?  And why have i just turned one question into three?

It’s a compulsion.  Sorry.

Let me ask a different question.  Is there a difference between having an identity and being completely self focused?  Or, how about this one.  Is there a difference between personal growth and maturity, and having to be better and win and all cost?

When the questions are asked like that, the answer seems obvious.  But when the question hasn’t been specifically delineated and we are left to assess our own life without the question and answer check list, it can get pretty muddy.

And muddy is icky.  I really don’t like mud.  I know it’s only wet dirt.  But dry dirt brushes off relatively easy.  Wet dirt sticks and stains and gets in the cracks of everything.  It’s slippery and dangerous even.  Mud is only funny when someone who isn’t me slips and falls into it face first.  It’s never funny when I fall on my face, no matter how much everyone else maybe laughing.

This is because falling hurts.  So said Commander Obvious.  Remember when you were a kid and you would fall in the grass playing tag or football or whatever other things we did in the grass?  There was this window in our age range somewhere between 8 and 18 where falling down didn’t really hurt that bad.  We might get a small bruise or a scrape, but otherwise we pretty much got right back up and continued doing whatever we were doing with joy and glee.

But before and after that, it was a big deal.  Before the age of 8ish, we would hit the ground and cry like a baby.  After the teenage years, we would hit the ground and pretend like it didn’t hurt like, something… painful and hurty (shut-up, i’m not an english major.)  But during that golden range of resilience, we had to do something pretty stupid before we really suffered for it and it almost always had something to do with trying upstage someone else in some macho alpha dog beat our chests as we hurdle the fence in my neighbor’s back yard and caught my shoe lace on the way over but managed to catch myself with my liver.  Or, you know, something else like that which didn’t happen to me when I was 10 or so.

It’s always funny to everyone else.  And it’s always funny when it’s someone else.  But when I land on my face, it’s never funny to me.

By the way, have you ever actually done that?  Landed relatively squarely on your face?  

When I was roughly somethingteen years old, me and two other friends who’s names will remain unspoken conspired to build two of the gnarliest(it was the end of the 80’s, beginning of the 90’s... we said stupid words like that.  You are lucky I didn’t say they were “rad”.) launch ramps for jumping our bikes and skateboards that had ever been conceived of by pubescent testosterone sacks with more bravado than brains.  I mean, it’s what you do when you out grow planks of wood set at angle on fireplace logs for the sake of launching ones bicycle into the stratosphere.

After collecting all the rickety and half rotted wood we could find, we shed some skin and collected some splinters as our feat of engineering came together.  When all was said and done, we had built two almost quarter-pipe launch ramps that stood around four and half feet high at the point of full take off.

We were the envy of our block.  All the “ladies” loved us.  The little kids wanted to be us.  And why not?  We were “manly men” and all that.  Daredevils of awesome awesomeness.  

But we weren’t stupid(he barely said with a straight face.)  We started off slow.  We put them back to back for “safety” purposes.  This way, we could start off by riding up one and across the top of both and then down the other side.  Eventually one of us, I honestly don’t remember who, managed to actually get some air.  He made it almost across the flat space in between the two ramps before landing.  

He almost crashed, but saved it at the last second.  Which was good, not because he didn’t die, but because we had learned something.  When you land on a steep landing ramp, you must come down nose first or else the bike will just flip out from under you as you try to ride the back tire down the ramp.

This was new to us.  Previously we had done all our jumping on to flat surfaces which require you to either land level or slightly on the back tire to keep from crashing through the handle bars and into the pavement in some spectacularly crunchy fashion.

So, armed with this new information, the next guy did the same thing, except a little faster.  But instead of a shaky landing, he nosed over as he came down and completed a beautiful rockstar landing.

Well, now we were all stoked.  We had seen it with our own eyes.  It could be done.  Soon, all three of us were jumping from one ramp to the other with the grace and ease of ballerinas.  In fact, we got so good at it, we started to get a little bored.  Which is when one of us decided we should put some space between the ramps.  Not a lot, just a little to make the distance greater.

That almost ended badly.  We didn’t know how much faster to go for sure, and with space in between, you didn’t want to come up short.  Which is exactly what the first guy did.  Fortunately, again, he didn’t crash.  But he did have to step off when he landed on top and caught one tire in the gap.

But no harm, no foul.  We simply just solved the issue.  We found a piece of plywood to put across the gap.  From there, we just kept at it till we had mastered that distance.  At which point we would widen the distance between ramps and do it again.

We continued to do this until we had put the length of a full sheet of plywood (read:  eight feet) between the two ramps.  This does not include the distance of the top of each ramp which was a couple feet each.  That piece of plywood was just barely crossing the gap.

Did that phase us?  Not even a little.  At this point we had learned to judge the speed and distance and were launching ourselves into the sky with such skill that even Evil Knievel would have been proud.

At this point you might be asking yourself, “So... where were their parents during all this stupidity?”

My answer is “Yes.  Yes...”

Back to the story.  Because our skill had become so great we started going faster and faster with the intention of going higher and higher.  And it was working.  Every time one of us would go, the next one would start farther away to get more speed before hitting the ramp and attaining higher altitudes than previously thought possibly.  But more importantly, higher altitudes than the friend who had gone before us.  

Now, it was no longer about beating the ramp.  It was about beating the other guy.  We had to be the one who did the jump that the other guys couldn’t beat.

Historically, even though I was the tallest of this group of friends, I wasn’t necessarily the fastest or most daredevilish.  But I had decided that this time, I wasn’t going to blink first.  I was going to keep pushing till they backed off.

Why I decided that starting toward the ramp from three houses away was a good idea I will never know.  One detail that we had all over looked was that, in our quest to attain higher jumps, we were also attaining greater distances.  You can’t do one without doing the other.  But because our gains had been so small and we were still landing safely on the landing ramp, we hadn’t noticed the gains had been there.

Fortunately I figured it out.

Unfortunately I didn’t figure it out till I was already in the air.

I hit that ramp at near lights-peed.  That’s the speed you can attain from three whole houses away.  Everyone knows this.  It’s scientific bicycle fact.  And at such speed, time weirdness and relativity goodies occur.  For example, while in the air at such great height and speed, I had time to look around, smile at the small crowd of local onlookers, pose for the nonexistent camera’s, consider whether the cute girl was going to want to go out behind the bushes with me because I was now going to be super awesome, and I even had time to consider what might transpire there should she make the suggestion.

It was at that moment I decided it must be time to land.  Nosing the bike over into proper landing position, I was struck by the fact that the landing ramp looked awfully flat suddenly.  Then I was struck by the fact that I wasn’t looking at the landing ramp and instead was looking at the pavement past the landing ramp as my relativistic speeds had propelled me well beyond the entire ramp.

If I hadn’t already nosed over, I might have pulled it off.  Maybe.  Instead, I hit the ground nose first with force of a tactical nuke.

My front rim bent in half to something that resembled a hard taco shell.

My front forks crack and bent at expensive angles.

My gooseneck, the thing that holds the handle bars to the stearing hub, snapped clean off as my body plowed through the handle bars and into the not-nearly-as-soft-as-it-looks concrete.

The handle bars themselves, however, were completely unscathed, so, that was nice.

I, on the other hand, was much less unscathed.  You see, as I pointed out, this was right around the turn of the 80’s into the 90’s.  This meant that safety gear included a tank top, shortish shorts, and no helmet.  I don’t even think I had socks on.

After my bicycle exploded into it’s various components, as I said, I continued right on into the pavement, and then after bouncing a couple times, continued to slide the entire distance of a two car driveway width.  I know this because I had such a great vantage point of where I was about to land, before I landed, and I remember very clearly, unfortunately, the entire tumble and slide and noted very specifically where I finally was able to pull myself to my feet.

There was a lot of skin missing on one side of my body.  Fortunately it was contained to the space between the top of my head and my feet.  Right leg, right arm, bits of my face and head, all nicely rashed.  Palms nicely raw, right knee very open and bleeding.

After I realized I wasn’t dead, I dragged myself to my feet, saw the carnage of my bike, then started feeling the carnage to my body, and did what any other self respecting teenage man-boy would do.

I cried all the way home.  Which, fortunately, was just across the street.

Amazingly, nothing was broken.  In fact, I don’t even have any scars from it.  If I hadn’t somehow managed to roll as I grenaded the earth I’d probably be dead from head trauma.

I had huge scabbing scars for weeks, though.  But not on my face, thank goodness.  I was much to pretty to handle that well.

I had no bike.  So I couldn’t jump anymore till I put one back together from a borrowed frame and left over parts.

But you know what?  I was totally fine with that because I had done it.  I had beat them both.  No one out did that jump.  It doesn’t matter that I hadn’t landed it.  I had done it.  I wasn’t embarrassed about biting it so hard.  I was hardcore and had just poked the bear and walked away from it.

At least, that’s how I felt till I finally had a bike again.  I went back to the ramp, rode up at approach speed, and panicked.  I tried again and panicked again.  The best I was ever able to manage was to simply ride over the top of it.

I couldn’t do it.  I had lost my nerve.  I was scared to death.

That’s when the embarrassment set in.  I was out there, in front of my peers, and I didn’t have the courage to do it anymore.  I may have crashed hard when I hit the pavement, but I hadn’t fallen till that very second.  That pain hurt worse than any bruise ever had.

My ego wanted me to win.  To be the best.  To beat them.  To show them who the man really was.

My ego wanted to be seen so badly that it caused me to not think at all about the consequences of my actions.  It made me feel invincible so that I would keep at it.

        The ego wants to survive at all costs.  That’s why it has to die before it pushes us into a fall that we can’t ever recover from.  It’s the “not recovering” that matters here.  If we don’t recover, the fall happens to completion and as we know it’s not the fall that hurts.  It’s the sudden impact with the concrete at the bottom that ruins our day.

Lesson 8 - The Brazier Entanglement Theory

You know what I hate about change?  It’s so frustratingly hard and completely lacking in fun.  It seems like it should be simple, right?  Decide what needs to happen, and then just do it.

Easy peezy.

Of course, it never is.

You know what else should be easy?  Doing the laundry.  It’s a simple process.  Water on, soap in, cloths in, door closed, wait till the buzzer makes that annoying sound, cloths out, put in dryer, put fabric softener dryer sheet thingy in dryer, clean out lint trap, close door, set timer, turn on, wait till buzzer makes that annoying sound, pull out cloths, put in basket, carry to bedroom, dump on bed, fold cloths, put in proper cloths holding place.

Easy peezy.

But it never is.  There is always the one sock you can’t find.  The pair of underwear that fell between the washer and dryer during the transition phase that you just can’t reach because your arm is one inch too short and you have to get a hanger or a stick or a tree fairy or anything else small that can reach in and grab it.  The shirt that will not iron out smooth even if you used a steam roller on it.  The stack of cloths you had finally folded perfect for a change that you accidently knocked off the bed as you reached for another item of clothing and had to refold all over again.

Between that and picking out all the remnants of the tissue that I had left in my pocket that shredded itself onto every item of clothing, or trying to get the grease stains off my favorite shirt because my wife left her chapstick in her jeans and neither one of us bothered to check before sticking it in the wash machine.

But you know what I hate most?

Washing my wife’s bras.  

I don’t hate the bras.  I like them.  Actually, I pretty much only like what they are designed to hold.  I don’t actually have any feelings about the bras themselves.  But I have developed a theory about bras.

It’s called the Brazier Entanglement Theory and it goes like this.

If you put one bra in the wash, it will some how wrap itself around itself and some random long sleeve shirt, tying both into a wrinkled mess.

If you put two or more bras in the wash, no matter how you separate them in the layers of clothing, they will find each other and knot themselves together, along with at least three other pieces of clothing, so tightly that only God himself has any chance at all of getting them apart without tearing a hole in the fabric of space and time.

None of the other clothing items do this.  Only braziers.  It defies all logic and reason.  I’m convinced it’s a fundamental law of quantum mechanics distinct, but closely related to, quantum entanglement.

Just not nearly as cool or as useful.

And it happens every time.  Every.  Single.  Time.

No amount of clever arranging or organizing the clothing in the machine makes any difference at all.

I’ve told lots of people this theory.  One lady responded that if I would simply clasp them together in the wash, this wouldn’t happen.

“Please… what does she know???” I said in my head as I pretended to take her advice seriously and thanked her for the suggestion.

I mean really, a woman knowing how to properly take care of womanly garments?  Better than me?  A man?  Who doesn’t wear them?

Ignoring her completely, I went back home and continued to kick the laundry tire for a long time.  One day they had so knotted together with every other piece of clothing in the laundry, I was literally able to grab one item of clothing and pull out the entire load.  I stood there over the wash machine and spent half an hour pulling everything apart.

It was at that moment that it occurred to me…

“What if I clasp them before I put them in the wash?” as if it had been my own very clever idea and not stolen from the nice lady who had kindly tried to help me.

So the next time, I did that very thing.

Not a single item of clothing was tangled.  No shirts in a bra.  No bra-on-bra action.  In fact, since I’ve started doing that, I’ve only had a couple minor episodes of entanglement.

If only I’d known sooner.

Pride is such a fickle thing.  Our ego wants so hard to keep us from change that it blinds us through our pride to alternative avenues to anything.  It makes change not just hard, but completely undesirable.

I didn’t want to listen to that lady, because then I would have to admit that she had considered something that I hadn’t.  And if I took her advise, and it worked, then I would have to admit that she was also correct and I wasn’t.  That her way was better than mine.

And I hate to be wrong.  Being wrong suggests that I am less capable than I thought I was.  It makes me look less than I am and my ego wants to keep me puffed up and looking sharp.  Never letting me look bad, and never letting me appear to be flawed and in need of help.

Change is hard because in order to become a better person, or remove flawed habits and patterns of behavior, we have to recognize these very things, and believe them.  Be willing to admit to ourselves that I was my own problem.  I have to be willing to see that I don’t have to be better and smarter than everyone else at everything every time.

But more importantly, I have to be ok with it.  I have to be ok with it and have it not bother me at all when someone else succeeds faster than me, or succeeds where I failed, without making excuses or putting down their success.

Change requires the complete destruction of our hubris and egoist desires.  If we were to examine every time we showed evident flaws of character, we would see that every event was a direct result of extreme selfishness on our part.  Our selfish need to be seen a specific way, or to be a specific thing that just isn’t true or real.

Recognizing that these perceptions just don’t matter removes such a huge burden from our lives.  So much stress and angst just disappears.

And the thing is, once the change happens, we look back and wonder why that was so hard and ask ourselves why we didn’t do this sooner.  We can be so close to the problem that we can’t see the solution.  We can be so close to the problem that we can’t see that, usually, we are the problem and the answers were right there the whole time waiting to be clasped together.

Lesson 7 - Shoulder Surgery Sucks (A.K.A The Story of Stupid)

I don’t know why I do stupid things.  No, wait, I do know.  I’m an idiot.

I think we covered that already.

But, have you ever noticed when you do something stupid, it never seems stupid at the time?  You never stand there and say to yourself, “Alright.  Let’s do something stupid that will guarantee I get my leg torn right off.”

It’s only after the fact, looking back at the carnage of our decisions, do we see more clearly our ability to choose poorly.  Only at that moment do we stop and say, “Ah yes.  So this is what stupid looks like.”

One day I was getting my masters degree (only one day…?), and a buddy of mine said, “Hey, let’s go help this professor move all of his earthly possessions into a giant truck.”

I said, “No.”

He said, “It’s ten dollars an hour.”

I said, “Sounds like fun, when do we start?”

So off we went to do great and selfless things in the name of money.  And do we did.  There were boxes packed, giant clocks wrapped, and furniture moved.  Fortunately, this man used only furniture made entirely of solid oak and other fantastically heavy materials.

…

It was a long day.

At one point, my friend and I were moving a particularly large, solid oak, dresser from the upstairs bedroom to the downstairs waiting truck.

I mentioned the stairs, right?

This dresser was heavy and the staircase was too narrow for more than two people to carry it.  But being the manly youngish men we were, we looked at the dresser, the stairs, then each other… giving that “lets git er dun” look… grabbed hold, and off we went shedding pieces of our spine all the way.

All went well till we got to the stairs.  Before we descended, my buddy needed to change his grip.  This was horribly inconvenient because my grip was quite great.  So we set it down, letting him alter his grip, all the while I was not releasing my grip at all.

This would have been fine, except that I still needed to pick it back up.  You see, picking up awkward furniture usually requires at least two different grips.  One that allows for easier lifting, and then one that allows for easier carrying.  I had a great carrying grip, but not a great lifting grip.

But hey, I was young, and strong, and made of man parts.  So I decided to do what everyone says you should do, which is lift with your legs.

This is great and all, except it doesn’t matter if you lift with your legs if your grip is bad creating terrible shoulder torque.

About six inches into that lift, my left shoulder went “pop.”  Not in the good fun way that makes your mom squirm uncomfortably when you crack your neck or fingers.  But in that expensive way that surgeons and physical therapists really enjoy.

What makes it bad is that I knew better.  I actually stood there before we lifted and calculated the risk.  I calculated the inconvenience of shifting grip and then re-shifting once lifted vs. lifting it awkwardly and punting my spine through my rib-cage.  I knew that what I was about to do was a bad idea.  But I chose it anyway.

I chose poorly.

Except, that wasn’t the really stupid part.  The stupid part was how I didn’t stop working.  I didn’t even set the thing down.  I just went, “um, ouch… I think something bad just happened…” and continued carrying the thing down the stairs, as well as all the other stuff we needed to carry.

Except, that wasn’t the really stupid part, either.

The really stupid part was how I convinced myself it wasn’t anything major and that it would get better in a few days or weeks, and then proceeded to do nothing about it for 6 months.

Even though it wasn’t getting better.

Right.

After 6 months when I couldn’t tolerate my useless arm anymore, I saw a doctor, who had it scanned, or pictured, or drawn, or whatever it is doctors really do when they check you out, and declared that I’d torn my Labrum.

That’s the cartilage in your shoulder joint that your bicep muscle attaches to.  Obviously, it wasn’t completely detached.  I would have known that immediately as my bicep muscle snapped like a rubber band and coiled up into a ball by my elbow.

Instead, it was only a partial tear which just made it really really unstable.

And instead of going to a doctor right away, I just sort of pretended that it was going to be fine.

Shoulder surgery sucks.  The recovery is unpleasant as well.  You can’t move your arm for many many days.  Which makes it hard to dress, undress, bath… my wife had to help me there.  (I was actually pretty ok with that last one.)

Sleeping was next to impossible.  Moving just right was very painful.  And this doesn’t even get you to the rehab part.

Physical therapy was unpleasant.  Important and good, but unpleasant.

It’s been almost 5 (8 now?  I think?) years since then.  My shoulder is weaker than it probably should be, and it doesn’t have 100% of the flexibility that it once had.  I still work it, and it still slooooowly continues to get better.  But I suspect it’s about as close as it’s going to get.

All because I was stupid.

I convinced myself that something was smart that actually wasn’t.  I didn’t want to acknowledge that I could hurt myself.  I didn’t want to consider the ramifications of my actions.  I just wanted to be done.

I find that, often, the obvious is staring us in the face, but we refuse to acknowledge its presence.  When what we want and what is true are side by side, we lie to ourselves and chose poorly.  It’s like playing Russian Roulette and thinking those are good odds.

Have you ever notice how often we use the word “ignorant” incorrectly? It doesn’t mean someone is stupid.  It just means someone doesn’t know something.

If I had been ignorant of the dangers, it wouldn’t make me stupid.  It was in knowing the dangers and ignoring their reality that made me stupid.

There are so many things we come to believe as individuals.  Some of which are true, some of which are not.  Maybe what we believe that is incorrect is a product of legitimate ignorance.  However, I’ve found that with most people, there are some things that they know to be one thing and they pretend that it isn’t so.  It isn’t ignorance.  It’s a desire to believe what they want regardless of reality.

I have a friend who likes to jokingly say, “don’t confuse me with the facts.”

Learning isn’t about ego.  Change isn’t about ego.  Growth isn’t about ego.  Ego is an illusion, and yet often we make everything in life about our ego.

And that’s just stupid.

Blog 11: Let Go My Ego.

So, my wife is out of the country.

I've been alone all week. And it's cold. I'm the guy who has to have the house cool at night because he gets too hot when sleeping. I'll spare you the details of how that works in any practical way. The point is, this week, without my wife... I had to add two extra blankets to the bed. Not only that, I had to fold them in half and lay them on my side. That's how cold it was without her there. When you consider, normally, I have to hang one leg out of the covers just to keep from bursting into flames, well, that says alot.

Oh ya, I said I wasn't going to start giving details. Sorry.

Did I mention it's lonely here?

My point?

Actually, I don't have one there. This is mostly a cry for sympathy.

Is it working?

Hey, I forgot... Hello everyone.

Yes yes, I realize that I was so caught up in my own lonely, cold, pizza-eating self-pity that I forgot to say hello. I'm sorry. I'm a bad man.

Well, on to more important things.

I'm going to come right out and say a couple things to start off. I try to say what I believe honestly and clearly, all while being as open and inoffensive as possible. I'm not out to harm anyones sensitivities. And, so far, no one has complained, so... victory is mine! (man, Family Guy is funny... sorry, bad reference.)

I say all that because I'm going to begin with this. I believe in God. I believe God is real. I believe God is a real being. I believe in the Christian God. Who also happens to be the Jewish and Islamic God. Who, as it turns out, was also part of many of the early pantheons of gods that many early cultures believed in. He is referenced in Babylonian mythology. But that isn't the point here. The point is, I believe He is real. I will concede that, for the most part, we don't know what we are talking about when it comes to the nature of God... but I still believe He exists.
Which means, by extention, I believe in the existance of the devil. Satan. Lucifer. I believe that he too is real. My beliefs of him are much more traditional than my beliefs on the nature of God, but again, the history and specifics are all irrelevant for this discussion.

The point is, I believe they exist. But today, I'm not focusing on them so much. It's important for me to say that because of the question I'm about to ask you.

The question is this.

Who/what is a persons/mankinds worst enemy?

If, after reading what I said just before that question, you still say "the devil"... well, you don't get a cookie. The answer "the devil" doesn't count for this quiz. For two reasons.

One. If you are christian/religious, then you already assume that he's the baddest baddy around. It's a given. So we aren't going there.

Two. If you aren't a christian/religious, then you don't believe in the devil anyway, so going their is virtually pointless. So I guess what I should have asked is...

Who/what is a persons/mankinds second worst enemy?

Ok, fair enough. Actually, both questions are accurate depending on which group you fall into, but you get the point.

Just think about yourself for a moment. Short of the originator of evil, who is the worst enemy you have? What is the worst enemy you have?

Many of you probably find the answer obvious. But just in case you don't, if you want the answer, go look in a mirror and tell me what you see?

You are your worst enemy. I am my worst enemy. We are our own worst enemies.

Now, if you gave that answer, you are correct, but that is still a bit of a vague cop-out answer. What does that mean? Why is that true? How can that be true? In what way is that true?

I'll make it simple. One word. Three letters.

Ego.

You want to know what makes our own lives so difficult sometimes? It's our own ego. I'm not saying other things don't contribute. I'm just saying this is at the top of the list.

Ego.

What is it that causes us to react in any given way? Or maybe I should say, what causes us to react negatively to stimulus?

Let's say you are driving in your car, and someone cuts you off. Do you get cranky about it? Some of you might not. And those who do, some of you probably keep it inside without screaming. But even so, the feelings arose.

Why?

Ego. You got wronged. The cut you off. Pulled in front of you when it was your turn to be somewhere. They can't do that to you. You are more important. It inconvenienced you. You. How dare they? Don't they know you have places to be? Don't they know they are moronic jerks?

Ego. In that scenario, your status was more important than theirs. You were self centered. You were Egocentric. You weren't concerned with their needs. Only yours.

Now, you might say, "that isn't wrong." Fair enough. It's not. At least, not always. What if that person who cut you off had a pregnant woman in the back seat, but you just couldn't see her? And they were racing to the hospital? Sure, not real safe, but would you have gotten upset if you had known that? If you had known there was actually a reason for the seemingly rude behaviour?

Ego is what causes you to NOT stop and think about it. It tells you to react on self interest.

How about this. You are working on something. Your car. Your computer. Some project. It doesn't matter what it is. But you are working on it. And you've done it before. You know what you are doing. While you are doing it, some one comes up and tells you that you are doing it wrong.

How does that make you feel? Do you get angry inside? Or at least a little cranky inside? Does it frustrate you? If so, why? What if they had said that what you are doing works, but there is a much better way of doing it?

Would it matter? Would you still be upset? Probably?

Look, we don't like to admit it, but we usually get a little upset when this happens.

But why? (insert the word "ego", here.)

What is happening at that moment? Well, you've done what you are doing many times. You know what you are doing. Do you need someone telling you what to do? Or how to do it? Or that they can do it better? Cause really, that's what they are saying. If they can recognize that you aren't doing it a good way, then, they must think they can do it better.

How dare they. Coming up to you and implying that you don't know what you are doing? That you might not know what you are talking about? That's an insult to your abilities and intelligence. That is them saying they are better than you.

Now, you might not have all those words come into your head. But the emotions show up that go with them. At least some of them.

That is your Ego. Your ego doesn't want to be told what to do or that it doesn't know what it's doing. It doesn't like the suggestion that someone else might have a better way, or might know something you don't. Your ego interprets all that stuff as if it's a threat or challenge to who you are.

Because nothing is more important than your Ego. At least, so your ego thinks.

Just to be clear, I keep saying "your ego." But I'm talking about mine as well. I'm no better. I have an ego. I get pissed off when someone tries to tell me my business. Oh, I might smile and nod and be polite, but inside, I'm screaming at them to shut their pie hole and mind their own business. Inside, I'm telling them that I don't need some half wit moron telling me what is true or not.

And that may work for us really well, right up till the moment we are slapped in the face with irrefutable proof that they, in fact, were correct. Not us. Not me.

Them.

Well, the ego can't handle that. The ego can't handle the fact that sometimes, we don't know what we are doing, or at the very least, someone else might be able to do it better, or know more about it.

Our Ego is our worst enemy because it convinces of things that many times just aren't true. Trying to protect us from the appearance of failure in our minds. "No, it can't be my fault. There is no way I am wrong. It must be Ted's fault."

Have you ever done that? Something went wrong at work and immediately without hesitation you said, "I didn't do it." or "It wasn't my fault."

I've done it more times than I can remember. It's down right embarrassing as I think about it.

That's ego.

Our Ego tries to control our world. Tell us what to think and how to react. And, really, I don't think this is anything that most of us don't already know.

So why prattle on about it, then?

Because Ego is why Christianity, and religion in general, is so screwed up. Ego is why many people refuse to learn more about those who are different or think differently. Ego is why "christians" spend most of their time fighting with each other over who is more right instead of working together to save lives.

Ego is why so many people never find salvation.

And I'm not just talking about non-christians. Ego is why so many "christians" never find salvation.

Because ego won't let them be wrong. Ego won't let them be wrong and realize they have something to learn. Ego won't let them open their eyes and see truth. Ego won't let them open their heart and love.

Ego won't let them see God.

Ego only lets them see themself. And that is the exact opposite of salvation.

Now, some of you are probably shouting "that's the devil at work."

Well, sure. I believe that. But here is the truth.

We don't need the devil to make us be that way. We are more than happy to do that on our own.

For us, the devil only prods us to do that which we already want to do. If that weren't true, it wouldn't be called "temptation." Because if we didn't want to do it, we wouldn't be tempted.

But let's back up the time machine. Back to Lucifer. Before he fell. Who tempted him?

No one. All he needed was his ego and a lack of self control.

Now, we could argue whether or not Lucifer had an ego. But that's a metaphysical argument for another time. I'm just going to say that I think he does and did no matter what his physical make-up actually is.

The point is, we are our enemies. We cause ourselves to have problems with others. We create our own conflict. Sure, someone else might start the trouble. But we don't have to help it out.

I'm talking spiritually and relationally here. If someone steps up and is trying to harm you or your family, I think we are dealing in a slightly different realm. I'm not talking about that.

Spritual and relational. Self centered vs other centered. Egocentric self importance vs open selfless compassion and self confidence.

Wait, what?

That's right. Selfless and self confident go together. Selfish and self confident almost never go together.

If one isn't comfortable with themself, they are not capable of seeing beyond themselves to focus on others. We are too caught up with trying to make ourselves comfortable instead of just being comfortable. And more importantly, the selfish person is trying to get other people to see them as confident and comfortable, while a truly confident and comfortable person doesn't care who sees it. They simply aren't worried about it.

And because they aren't, they can worry about other things. Like other people.

I'm sure you realize it, but this is one of the biggest themes in the bible. What were the words of Solomon?

Pride goes before a fall? A haughty heart before destruction?

The entire gospel is themed around this concept. They just never used the word Ego.

Jesus and Paul and the others kept talking about emptying ourselves to self. Paul called it "dying to the old man."

Did you ever notice in scripture that it was the person of WEAK faith that was trying to force everyone to do things a certain way? And the person of STRONG faith was able to be comfortable doing just about anything because his "faith" permitted it?

That's because the person of STRONG faith had nothing to prove to anyone. The person of WEAK faith is trying to prove himself to everyone.

The person of STRONG faith can roll with life because of that. The person of WEAK faith cannot.

That is because the person of STRONG faith has removed his/her ego from the equation and allowed God and others into their life. The person of WEAK faith is still letting their ego show everyone how everyone one how great they are, and trying to fill others with their big egocentric based focused. Trying to conform the world to the whims of their ego. The whims of their view.

They don't want everyone to revolve around God. They want everyone, including God, to revolve around them.

We can blame Lucifer for all this if we want. And don't get me wrong, he deserves a whole lot of blame.

But in the end, we have no one to blame but ourselves. No one makes us act a certain way. We choose to. No one chooses for us.

Pride and ego. Flip sides of the same coin.

The question is, "What is driving you?"

Happy Sabbath, peace, and good night.