Losing Track of Time

The Persistence of Memory, by Salvador Dali.
Some days I could use a bit more persistence.

Sometimes I send emails and post things to the Internet while I'm traveling and don't tell my computer we're in a different time zone. I don't know if that's ever caused significant confusion for anybody; often I'm just off by an hour or two.

But this summer I quite confused myself when, after looking at my computer's calendar settings to see what day of the week something was happening, I accidentally moved my computer's date settings ahead by several months.

I didn't realize the problem until I was looking for something in my "sent mail" and discovered it seemed to have been sent several weeks in the future. I changed my settings back, but when the future became the present and then the past, my correspondence was out of order and intermingled.

"Don't get ahead of yourself," advised my friend S :-) Maybe that's the only lesson to learn here.

When we visited the clock and watch museum in Pennsylvania (see previous post A Brief History of Time Keeping) I was fascinated to learn how new are our notions of time and how to measure it . America's railroad operators initiated the movement to promote a common standard. "The day with two noons" in November 1883 was an attempt to keep trains from colliding and reduce the number of passengers in one city from missing their connections in another.

Do you think I could miss a deadline and cover it up with an explanation that I'm simply operating off a lunar calendar or that my clock wound down a few weeks ago?

Saturday Hike - Devil's Head Trail

Travel Interlude

It can be a painful interlude, or a happy one: being in-between. Today I find myself between "away" and "home." The conference I was attending in North Carolina ended midday Thursday. I had decided to leave myself some wiggle room just in case there was a lead I wanted to follow, so I arranged my flights for a Friday morning departure. If nothing came up, I'd still have an interlude: a place to be, to be autonomous, but with options. Yes, I've learned to like staying in hotels. Cable television. Plenty of hot water. Places nearby to explore... and minimal chores, tasks, or pressures.

So I enjoyed my extra time in Charlotte. I made a few connections and had a few conversations that might not have happened if I'd been rushing for an afternoon flight. And had dinner out, caught up on some email, took a bath, watched TV. Still had to get to bed early since my wake-up call would come at 4:00, but it was nice to be relaxed. 

Little did I know I'd have another interlude as well. My trip home was bound to meander; United honored my frequent flier miles but would only be able to take me home in fits and starts. When one of my three flights was canceled I ended up with another night in a hotel. This time in Omaha, Nebraska.

Some of the other travelers were not so pleased with this gift of time. They had weddings to get to, or dogs to feed, or were just fed up with being on the road. Almost everyone in the rebooking line at the ticket counter seemed frustrated to be there. They got on their cell phones (as we were encouraged to do) and tried to work out satisfactory plans with the people who work at the call center. Then they got off and complained to one another about how stupid the call center workers were, summing it up with a complaint about having to talk to a "foreigner," someone who clearly "did not speak much English!"

I felt ashamed to be an American. How could you seriously believe that if someone has a different accent from yours, he doesn't speak the language or doesn't know what he's doing? And are you sure the ignorance or intractability is on the other side of the line, and not your own? My companions in line also expressed a belief that they were talking to people in India, perhaps not realizing that the likelihood of this was decreased by the fact that it would be 2 am there. 

At any rate, this anti-India sentiment motivated me to be extra-nice to any Indians I might happen to meet while in United's care. I made friends and had a far-ranging conversation with the Gujarati man who drove the hotel shuttle and later dropped me off downtown for some sightseeing; I also chatted with the Patel girl at the front desk.

If you ever have the chance to explore Omaha, NE, I'd encourage you take it. There's a fun, funky downtown with lots of things to do within walking distance, interesting shops and restaurants, and a well-reputed zoo and gardens not too far away. Omaha prices are better than Denver's, too. This weekend the world's second-largest indoor rodeo, too, yeehaw! I saw a good number of cowboy-hatted individuals walking in the direction of the stadium. But I skipped that, still needing to retire at a reasonable hour to catch my morning flight.

Interlude over. I'm on my way back to Denver.

Radical Abandon

So, maybe you haven't heard, but David Platt's book Radical is sweepin' the charts in Christian publishing these days. I finagled a free copy - again, with the promise that I would use it and tell others about it - and am about a third of the way in. Looks pretty solid to me. Seems like an authentic call to break free of the American dream and really follow Jesus. But it's also a fun read. Here's a bit from chapter 1.

"'The youngest megachurch pastor in history.'... the label given to me when I went to pastor a large, thriving church in the Deep South... From the first day I was immersed in strategies for making the church bigger and better. Authors I respect greatly would make statements such as 'Decide how big you want your church to be, and go for it, whether that's five, ten, or twenty thousand members.' Soon my name was near the top of the list of pastors of the fastest-growing U.S. churches. There I was... living out the American church dream.

"But I found myself becoming uneasy. For one thing, my model in ministry is a guy who spent the majority of his ministry time with twelve men. A guy who, when he left this earth, had only about 120 people who were actually sticking around and doing what he told them to do. More like a minichurch, really.

"So how was I to reconcile the fact that I was now pastoring thousands of people with the fact that my greatest example in ministry was known for turning away thousands of people? Whenever the crowds got big, he'd say something such as, 'Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.' ... I can almost picture the looks on the disciples' faces, 'No, not the drink-my blood speech! We'll never get on the list of fastest-growing movements if you keep asking them to eat you!'

"Jesus apparently wasn't interested in marketing himself to the masses. His invitations to potential followers were clearly more costly than the crowds were ready to accept, and he seemed to be okay with that. He focused instead on the few who believed him when he said radical things. And through their radical obedience to him, he turned the course of history in a new direction.

"Soon I realized I was on a collision course with an American church culture where success is defined by bigger crowds, bigger budgets, and bigger buildings. I was no confronted with a startling reality: Jesus actually spurned the things that my church culture said were most important. So what was I to do?"

Source: Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream, by David Platt. Colorado Springs, CO: Multnomah, 2010. pp. 1-2.

>> You can get the book from CBD for US$9.99.

Worried about Hail Damage?

Awoke this morning to a sound now becoming familiar: roofers. Sure enough; opened the blinds and there they were, two doors down. This might not penetrate my consciousness if I were getting up early and going to an office every morning, but I'm not, and I notice.

It all started when half a dozen separate roofing companies sent their armies of lackeys around my neighborhood with what must have seemed, to many, a watertight argument. They would climb on your roof and tell you, for free, if they saw any sign of hail damage, and if they did you could have them repair your roof at (most likely) no cost to you, since apparently most insurance companies cover such repairs completely. The racket sounds a little suspicious.

Do you think there would be a market for a business like this but with a humanitarian twist? Here's what I'm thinking:

"We will inspect your roof and give you a written report of what we see. You check with your insurance company, and if they authorize the repair we will re-roof your house at no cost to you. Well, no cost except the $100 tax-deductible donation you make to Shelter Now to help put roofs over the heads of vulnerable families in flood-ravaged Pakistan. Even if you decide not to bring the roofers to your house, here's a flier about the program."

 I've been thinking again about a column G.K. Chesterton wrote about a centruy ago comparing modern civilization - with its focus on providing for the rich but not the poor - to the Titanic:

"Quite apart from the question of whether anyone was to blame, the big outstanding fact remains: that there was no sort of sane proportion between the provision for luxury and levity, and the extent of the provision for need and desperation. The scheme did far too much for prosperity and far too little for distress - just like the modern State."

Source: G.K. Chesterton, "The Great Shipwreck as Analogy," in The Illustrated London News, May 11, 1912. Access it here: http://www.gkc.org.uk/gkc/books/titanic.html

Accepting Inertia

In counterpoint to Monday's blog post on overcoming inertia, I'd like to dedicate this moment to singing, instead, the praises of letting things stay the way they are. I hope you won't mind the contradiction. After all, wisdom is not a formula; it's insight rightly applied.

And as you've no doubt discovered for yourself, change doesn't always make things better. If you are the innovator, the early adopter, the champion of change, that's fine - but we don't all have to be that person. In a society that pushes us to constantly reinvent ourselves, to keep up, to upgrade, it's good for some of us - and maybe sometimes, all of us - to stop. To stop striving. To cease tweaking and improving. To give up questioning every darn thing.

As Richard Swenson writes, stress is "an internal physiologic adaptation to any change in our environment" (The Overload Syndrome: Learning to Live within your Limits). And while one of the measures of the body's health is its resilience, its ability to persevere and adapt to change, we live in a world in which the rate of change is ever increasing. Every year we have more options to choose from, more decisions to make, more freedom to pursue more and more change. But that means more and more stress.

So, what can you choose not to change, not to reevaluate? What "roads not taken" will just have to remain that way? Would it be a relief to let yourself off the hook? To recognize it would be fine - maybe better - to decide you're just going to stay in that house, keep your job, drive that old car, stick with your insurance provider or phone company, lay down that big self-improvement plan, and even stay in your mediocre church?

The "motivational time machine" that is so handy for overcoming inertia can be helpful in such cases as well. Is the change, decision, or endeavor I'm considering - or feeling pressured to consider - going to matter five years from now?

I think of the real estate agent who used to come around pestering me to buy a house. I can't afford to buy a house. I don't know if I will ever have one. "Renting is just like throwing your money down a rathole!" she told me, one time, in frustration. (This was in the days when real estate was a much more reliable investment.) Finally, I told her what my rent payments are. I may have also mentioned some of the things I do with my money instead of using it to make mortgage payments. I don't know if this conversation did anything for her, but I left feeling better. That's right, I realized: I have it good. Someday things may be different, but I don't need to accept the world's pressure to be ambitious and acquisitive. I can just accept things the way they are.

When I was in college and got stressed out I'd go sit down by the river for a while and watch it flow past, unperturbed by whatever it was that was troubling me. Or I'd walk through the old cemetery on campus. Both the giant trees and the graves they shaded did wonders for my sense of perspective.

Overcoming Inertia

I call it "the motivational time machine," and it's my trick for overcoming inertia.

I first discovered its power with short-term teams. Inevitably two or more team members would have a conflict, perhaps based on a misunderstanding. One or both of them would decide that though the other person's behavior was obviously deplorable and hugely distracting, the nice Christian thing to do would be to pretend there wasn't a problem. After all, she probably can't change the fact that she is a horrible person, and why be the one to make trouble over it? Soon it would be all over and you could go back to your real friends.

In the context of a small group living and working together very closely for a couple of months, however, that's all it would take to poison team life for everyone. So, whenever I caught the whiff of such problems, I'd ask the probing questions, get a couple different perspectives on what was going on, pray a bunch, and offer up the best suggestions I could think up for untangling the conflict. Whether or not those conflicts got untangled was often the key to whether the last couple weeks were the best part of the trip, or the worst. Butting in was not my favorite role to play but I'd remind myself it was better to do it and risk making things worse than to hear the team members confess at debrief, "I just wish we'd all been closer."

There's the trick right there: Climb into the motivational time machine. Imagine how much you'll regret the problem if it isn't fixed. Anticipate the negative consequences of your inaction. Look at how much joy or peace or effectiveness it's costing you, every day. Picture the good things that might result from facing the problem and doing something about it. If you're willing to pay attention to the problem now, won't you be glad, later?

It applies to simpler and more concrete things as well: Shouldn't you do something about that funny way the car, washing machine, or computer is behaving? What about the thing you've been meaning to buy, or the thing you've been meaning to throw away? The closet that needs cleaning, the pile on your desk? Put away the "should" and think: Will I be glad I did? Will it feel great to have it taken care of? Will it get worse if I ignore it? Consider the relative cost of those plane tickets if you buy them now, vs. waiting until the last minute. Or what about making the phone call Monday, versus pushing it off every day until, finally, on Friday afternoon, you realize how much time and energy you've used up all week long coming up with strategies to delay that one phone call. Will you wish you'd taken care of that earlier?

Sometimes the easiest way to find the motivation to do the right thing now is to travel to tomorrow and see how the world will be different because of how we act today.

See also: Accepting Inertia (9/14/10)