It's OK to say "I don't know."

Parker Palmer (Let your life speak) tells how a depressed person once asked him why it is that some people recover from depression and why some end up killing themselves. All he could answer is, "I have no idea."
He felt guilty about giving that answer--about not giving that person more help. He felt he had let her down. But then, two days later, she sent him a note which thanked him for his words (I have no idea) and told him how it made so much more sense than some of the simplistic religious explanations.
It turned out she didn't need an explanation; what she needed was to hear that someone beside herself struggled with answers to the basic questions of life. She felt liberated. As Palmer explained, "my not knowing had freed her to stop judging herself for being depressed and to stop believing that God was judging her. As a result, her depression lifted a little." (p. 59)

How do you respond when someone asks you a question that you don't have a ready answer for? If you're like most people, you try to come up with some answer even though the truth is that you "have no idea."
Can you have to courage to say "I don't know" or "I have no idea" when that is actually the truth? It may be very important for someone else to hear that.

Challenge for the day

Engage in some totally meaningless, spontaneous laughing. If you dare, try it when you're with friends. The benefits are worth the risk of looking silly. I assigned this to my students, and one reported:

I decided to experiment with this meaningless laughing by laughing outrageously loud when something only remotely funny occurred in the show I was watching. I actually really enjoyed the experiment because it made me really happy. The laughing somehow injected energy into my body almost like I had taken a happy pill. After laughing ridiculously loud throughout my 30 minute program I was ready to release my energy which I did by walking through the woods.

Go for it!

Unhelpful sympathy, helpful sympathy

From that book by Iain Matthew that I cited a couple of weeks ago:

"Sympathy can be ruinous. 'I think it's dreadful--I don't know how you put up with it. No. I really can understand, you must feel awful.   . . . . There is a kind of sympathy that leaves the sufferer exhausted. . . . it is important to respond in the right way . . . not just to console, but to help someone bear pain creatively.'"

IMHO: That's the reason the image of the suffering Christ on the crucifix is so consoling. Don't go around the pain, go through it to the other side.

Creativity in Business

A student reports: "1,500 CEO’s polled by IBM said creativity was the number one factor behind leadership competency."

The Joys of Solitude

As an assignment over the weekend, I asked my students to go and see a movie--totally alone. They groaned and kvetched, and some couldn't see the sense in it. But once they'd done it, they reported that that they were surprised at what a good time they had, were more focused on the movie than ever before (even if it was not a good film), and most said it is something they would do again. Go figure.

It's a wonderful skill to develop, especially at a young age: to enjoy your own company.

Our Deepest Fear

This quote from Marianne Williamson was given me by a friend:

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."

The Benefits of Solitude

These are quotes from "The Power of Lonely" by Leon Neyfakh in the Boston Globe. Among other things, he writes,

an emerging body of research is suggesting that spending time alone, if done right, can be good for us — that certain tasks and thought processes are best carried out without anyone else around, and that even the most socially motivated among us should regularly be taking time to ourselves if we want to have fully developed personalities, and be capable of focus and creative thinking. . . .

Solitude has long been linked with creativity, spirituality, and intellectual might. The leaders of the world’s great religions — Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Moses — all had crucial revelations during periods of solitude. The poet James Russell Lowell identified solitude as “needful to the imagination;” in the 1988 book “Solitude: A Return to the Self,” the British psychiatrist Anthony Storr invoked Beethoven, Kafka, and Newton as examples of solitary genius. . . .

Teenagers, especially, whose personalities have not yet fully formed, have been shown to benefit from time spent apart from others, in part because it allows for a kind of introspection — and freedom from self-consciousness — that strengthens their sense of identity.

Anyway, it's worth reading the whole article.

Asking for help

No kidding. Twice now I've asked for help with something that had me confused and help was there before the sun was high in the sky.  (See post for March 4)

3/4.  Asked at 7 am.  Situation resolved by 11:30.

3/9  Asked at 7 am.  All fixed by 8:30 am.

I'm digging this. Darn, how often I forget to ask. How about you?

A couple of brain twisting quotes

Sorry I missed a few days of posting. Sometimes you need to let the ground lie fallow for a while.
Anyway, these quotes come from various sources and somehow relate to one another. Don't think too intensely about them, though.

There are mighty few people who think what they think they think.

How will I think what I think until I see what I say?

It is not easy to know what you like. Most people fool themselves their entire lives through about this.

We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are.

Amazing Grace!

This is too beautiful to make up:
   I was directing a schola at a funeral this mornng which was very well attended. As I looked out over the congregation, I caught sight of a woman I haven't talked to in many, many years. We'd had a spat back around 1995, and as I looked at her I realized that I was way overdue  to let go of that grudge and the bad feelings that went with it. So I said a prayer and asked for help.
  Not two minutes after the end of the funeral, she walked up to me, gave me a big hug, and we stood chatting amiably for a while. Then a big hug and a cordial good-bye.
  Coincidence?

Words of challenge, words of hope

I'm using a soul-rousing book for prayer lately: The Impact of God: soundings from St. John of the Cross by Iain Matthew. He writes about St. John's call for us to be "inclined" to a certain emptiness of transitory and worldly things. He acknowledges that it is difficult to reach this point in our spiritual lives, and then mentions a few things which can help us along the way.

In order to encourage us, he has us think of what it is like for us to "experience its opposite:"

the weariness of an over-demanding self-image; the claustrophobia of being 'full of oneself'; and the freshness that comes from being told that we do not have to be like that.

IMHO: The beauty of a life of spiritual growth is that if we are attentive, we become aware of God's desire to lift us out of ourselves. In essences, He calls to us saying, "you do not have to be like that; I want more for you and I am here to help you attain it."

This can be hard to hear for those who have grown up with the overemphasized notion that God loves me the way I am. Of course He does. But that love is so great for us that His grace is there to help us with the way I am" part. But for many, those words have been perverted into nothing more than a justification for  remaining right where we are.

Some will quickly quote St. Paul: "by God's grace, I am what I am," but fail to realize that St. Paul speaks these words only after God' grace had touched his life, transformed it, and turned him to a way of life he never would have dreamed possible back on that day when he was holding the coats of those who had stoned St. Stephen to death. Once again, these words are often emasculated and thereby robbed of their power

Multitaskers

A gentle warning from a famous inventor:

Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun's rays do not burn until brought to a focus.        - Alexander Graham Bell, 1847 - 1922

Classroom Assignment

   Every semester I give my students an assignment to do some on-line research on multitasking and to post their results on a bulletin board we use. Most of the students who do the assignment decide thatit would be a good thing not to multitask when they are doing their work or projects. Some of them even start to turn off the ipods and radios when they are working or driving. The decide this all on their own; all I have to do is get them to do the research.

   Every semester a small handful of students report on articles that present multitasking as a good thing, and even perhaps offer tips on how to do it better. On closer inspection however, we usually find that the articles in favor of multitasking are written by organizations which manufacture or sell things that make multitasking possible.

   You do the math.