Category Archives: Awareness

On the meaning of acceptance

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All the greatest wisdoms come down to acceptance. It is key.
Accept:
… the present moment.
… your situation.
… how you feel.
… each other.

And, yet, our language somehow frames this as something passive.
I’ve written before, “accept, then act,” and this is right, but let’s look at what we are accepting, and how we are acting.

I accept that our universe is full of limitless resources. Energy, material, and time. Even the material contains more energy. Every single atom is full of immense energy, which can be released and directed. I accept that I have intelligence and knowledge, and access to enormous amounts more of both. I accept that I have the love and support of some of the smartest, kindest, and wisest people on the planet. I accept that I have a body which is strong and healthy and genetically blessed.

I will act accordingly.

Don’t Put Limits on God

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It’s natural that our comprehension of God is limited by our imagination. That’s why scientists get rankled at the notion that science takes the wonder out of the world. An astronomer spends her life wrapping her mind around the biggest, and wondrous, concepts in the universe, a biologist spends his life wrapping his mind around the most intricate, and wondrous, details of the universe, and so on.

Often, scientists are agnostic. Their concept of the natural world is so amazing, the supernatural holds no attraction for them.

But many of these intellectual types do have spiritual, and even religious, beliefs. And, as a result of the mind-expanding concepts they deal with on a daily basis, their concept of God (by any name) is HUGE. They are mystified by the conflicts about keeping Christ in Christmas, keeping God in schools, whether or not God blesses America, who gets married, and whether our national pledge also affirms God. And that’s the American perspective. They are equally mystified that God cares whether men wear beards, women drive, or a religious figure is depicted in a picture.

From that perspective, God doesn’t have a country. He doesn’t even have a planet. Earth is a mote of dust in a mote of dust in a mote of dust in a mote of dust in God’s full creation. He doesn’t have a holiday…in fact the whole of human history is an eye-blink in His creation. God is present in school and Christmas and a foxhole because God is everywhere and everywhen to an unfathomable degree, not because of national policy.

You don’t have to be a scientist yourself to understand this, but anyone reading this has a responsibility to keep a proper sense of perspective. If you really realize the grandeur of His creation, you can’t help but glimpse that these conflicts are insignificant. Irrelevant. Petty. Needlessly fearful.

If you’re worried about whether God is in…anything…you’ve forgotten Who you’re talking about.

Still think God cares about who the US president is? ...what's printed on US currency? ...what's on the lawn at city hall?

Why Multiculturalism?

Got a question earlier, from a friend, as a response to my last post:

why would [we] give precedence to [celebrating other cultures] over efforts to celebrate what we have in common?

I’ll say this: we make special effort to celebrate our diversity because

  • it’s what makes us interesting,
  • because there’s often something to learn,
  • because celebrating what we have in common is all the richer in the context of our different backgrounds,
  • and finally because celebrating what we have in common happens without any effort. It’s easy to go bowling with your buddies who are mostly one race, political party, economic status, marital status, and age.

Doing anything else is always at least a little out of our comfort zone.

The Trouble with Multiculturalism

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I came across this article today, and I’m told that the author comes across as well-spoken, succinct, and dispassionate.

To use his words, his “intellectual myopia is striking.” Other than mentioning Chinese cuisine, his perspective only covers two cultures, “the West” and “Muslim.” And his fear is that if we Westerners participate in any celebration of other cultures that include Muslim, that we’ll basically turn into Saudi Arabia and take drivers licenses away from women. And he associates Muslim culture with 9/11 attacks and paints that as part of a larger concerted attack on our freedom.

It’s not dispassionate. It’s fear-mongering.

This honestly angers me. There are attacks on freedom in our country. Warrant-less wiretapping, indefinite detention, literal *imprisonment* of more of our citizens than any other country, religiously-motivated pseudoscience taught in schools…and not one bit of it came from embracing anything other than the worst elements of our own culture.

But then, a bit farther down in my news feed, I came to this, and my faith in humanity got a little boost:

Joyful child and camel

Simple genius doesn’t come from playing mental chess

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My friend Stephen Yoder posted the following on FaceBook today:

This morning I made my son laugh while he accompanied me on my morning commute. My elder boy asked (in the thick of traffic–i had no time for a planned answer) “dad, what do you think about gays and lesbians?” I said, quickly, “good people, son. They just use their privates differently than I do.”

I am utterly unsurprised by his opinion. I am, however, in awe of the brilliant simplicity with which he expressed it. I think most of us are too aware of the controversy not to struggle over how to craft the answer that is most likely to impress upon our children what we believe on this important subject. He eschewed this mental chess playing and thus rendered the best answer. I love him for it.

Can we all share this, retweet it, like it, give it a +1, repeat it to our children, shout it in the streets, write it in the sky, affix it to carrier pigeons, insert it into ocean-going bottles, and write it in giant letters of fire on a planet at the end of the universe?

We Live In the Future

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Dan dressed as Neo from The MatrixI’m on a train from Washington, DC to New York, currently passing through Philadelphia. We’ll be at New York’s Penn Station in 90 minutes. I just looked up from the book I’m reading on my iPhone and saw a building with a sign on it: Penn Proton Therapy Center. Now I’m writing a blog entry on my iPhone. I don’t feel like spending a couple of dollars on 3G access (I live in Europe, so I’m roaming here) and WiFi hasn’t been installed on this train yet, so I’m writing this in the Notes app instead of directly to my blog, which is hosted in a data center in…er…I have no idea.

Stop and read that again. Only, this time, pretend you are the average human. Remember that the average human does not have access to the Internet and can’t get to this blog. In fact, the average human lacks running water.

Continue reading →

New Year’s Resolutions

The nice thing about the New Year is the strong symbolism of a clean start. The hard thing about the third week of the year is feeling discouraged about anything you didn’t (re)start cleanly.

But every day, every hour, every moment, is charged with the same power. An almost-toddler learning to walk, a baby bird learning to fly, a child learning to ride a bicycle…they all look the same: after every thud, there is a standing up followed by an exuberant thrust. It doesn’t matter if the last attempt lasted 1 second or 100, the thrust has the same energy.

…until it’s time for a snack and a nap. Tomorrow’s play is just ahead.

 

Baby exuberantly learning to walk