What it all boils down to...

The larger philosophies and theologies and ideologies and ideas about life, amongst people, at least, boil down to this question, I think...

Given that people can be kind of shitheads, sometimes or much of the time...

What kind of people are we going to be in the face of that?

Are we going to make excuses for why we should be able to be whatever kind of shithead we want to be?

Are we going to spend our lives condemning ourselves and one another for what shitheads we are or have been?

Or are we going to reach deep and be better and forgive the fact that we can be such shitheads, much of the time? And work constructively to change ourselves and prompt thinking in others to change, as well?

Most of us both lie between the two extremes of rationalizing our worst behavior or condemning ourselves and one another into perpetuity for it and simultaneously entertain those extremes...

You know what makes childhood such a special time, I think?

Because it's the time in our lives when we, no matter what shitheads we often are...people so regularly forgive us our shitheadedness...

It's in adulthood when people start holding our mistakes over our heads that we stop believing in humanity as much, I think...our cynicism is fed by the cynicism of others, as they deal with us as spoiled goods rather than as flawed human beings...

The truth is that what we need for life is what we offer to children...

More commitment to more authentically forgiving and loving ourselves and one another...

The petty among us will demand different, I'm quite sure...that's what makes them petty, after all...

But humanity would be a lot better off if we all weren't so petty...if we faced ourselves more honestly, rather than perpetually avoiding the more challenging realities in our lives...

And we face ourselves more readily with more genuine forgiveness, love and compassion is my more than ample experience on this one...

Forgiving myself, when I've needed it, has been the most confusing experience I've ever had in my life, I think...

Forgiving Brandi has been about as difficult...until recently, I wasn't completely sure I had to...but I'm more confident that she needs -- and deserves -- the forgiveness...

Most pain does...

And its forgiveness that, as I give to myself, I want and need to give freely and generously...

No matter how you cut it, it's harder to forgive others than it is to forgive yourself...because you instantly know that you need forgiveness...but while you may know someone else needs forgiveness, your heart just feels pain...

But I want to give forgiveness freely to Brandi and anyone like I would for myself...this is the hardest experience I've ever had with the stuff...but I know life is better on the other side...

What it all boils down to is are we going to rationalize or condemn our weakness...or are we going to embrace our more genuine strength by forgiving our weakness...

That's the only true strength there is in this world, I'm convinced...other forms are necessary, too, of course...physical and intellectual, of course...

But the genuine moral strength that comes from forgiveness and love and compassion is the only true strength that offers any real hope in the world...everything else is momentary and illusory...

What life comes down to is are we going to aspire in that direction? Or not?

It is a choice with the most profound and serious consequence...and it is the choice that makes all the difference in the world, I am convinced...

And it is a choice that only we can make, no matter what laws people passed or encoded into tradition to make it so...

It is the most profound question of conscience...and it is a question of conscience that I have scarcely questioned since I was a very little boy...or rather I have, but everything I know tells me and my conscience only ever gives me one answer to that question...

To forgive...

The only question I have as an adult is why do people resist this matter of conscience so strongly? How does it serve them? How does it serve us? And how does it get so interwoven with almost all of the most serious matters of uplifting good that is done in the world and its absence so conspicuous in all of the most serious evil done in the world?

But what it all boils down to is are we going to get lost in the darkness?

Or are we going to search and fumble for the light?

I nor anyone can be drug into the light, as Plato suggested in his Allegory of the Cave...

But we can find our way out of the cave, if we seek out light from shadows...

And that light comes with a clear heart, I think...

Hopefully, today is a day of clarity for me...God knows I need it:):)...

Love,
Ben

Finding strength over the horizon...

After reflecting about 9/11 on my friend Carson's blog...

http://content-writer.blogspot.com/2006/09/it-is-nice-for-you-to-help-people911.html

It occurs to me as I consider both wanting to both honor and to not live in the past as it concerns that terrible tragedy 5 years ago...

That something else is on my heart, today...

That my friendship with Brandi is now, officially, I think, in the past...

As much as I have genuinely wanted friendship with my ex-girlfriend and once best friend, that
we're at a point where I need/want to see over the horizon...

Brandi was a good friend, as long as I knew her...she was a great girlfriend, despite our inexperience and red hot love...

She was one of the stronger people I knew...not strong enough for us to have a friendship or a relationship, it turns out....but stronger than your average bear...and I assume she's got more strength than she is betraying for me, these days...

I'm a pretty strong person, really...so it never really occurred to me that others would be weaker, when the chips were down, before they were in ways that have had more serious consequence in my life...Brandi deciding that she's not strong enough for friendship is only one of those ways...my relationships with my professors in grad school were the first situation to really surprise me...my relationship with my parents in adulthood is the other relatioship that has seriously disappointed me...

Strength involves a lot of work...it involves a lot of responsibility...it involves looking at realities squarely -- about ourselves, primarily -- and facing them honestly...

And the last 5 or 6 years has demonstrated, for me, at least, that it is something that most people struggle with or lack in serious ways...

The trouble is that weakness can't really lead us anywhere...it just has us putting off the more serious work that makes us stronger...strength does not mean and has never meant for me to never give into weakness...to the contrary, we often recognize strength from our failures, is my experience...and the experience I see in others too often to really assume differently...one of the worst forms of weakness is self-righteousness, because it is the weakness that is most afraid of looking at ourselves most honestly and challenging ourselves to be better...self-righteousness is borne of fear and insecurity, rather than more genuine strength and wisdom, which, like the tree amidst a storm, bends without breaking...

Conscience is our guide through that experience...no government, no teacher, no boss, no leader can protect us from our weakness...

Conscience is our most powerful guide through that experience...

I am disappointed, obviously, that Brandi seems to have perpetually decided to take the weak path...the path of her fears rather than the path of her hopes (or what I can only assume is the path of her fears, since she is too afraid to let me see anything different)...

But I need to see over the horizon of our past...

It's funny, isn't it?

Brandi and I broke up a little more than a month before September 11th...around the 5th or 6th of August, 2001...she signed a lease on a new apartment, and I moved her into her new place...

And despite the clear and consequential tragedy that was 9/11 in my life as much as in the lives of all Americans and people all over the world...despite my own serious reactions to that day...a serious consideration of military service only dissuaded by my Grandma Sutherland, the grandmother most committed to the armed services in my family...scared calls to Brandi about whether we needed to get gas masks or other protective equipment...fear for our friend, Wendy, who was heading to Bangladesh amidst a time of serious antagonism between Muslims and Westerners...

Despite all of my serious reactions at that time...

The strongest reaction I have today is that I miss Brandi, my best friend from my late college years and the closest friend I ever had in my life...before she decided that she couldn't handle a friendship...

For some reason, that minor tragedy in my own life outweighs, in my heart, the tragedy of my fellow Americans...I don't know why...I just know where my heart is at, today...

It occurs to me, today, that when most people say "Forgive but don't forget" what they really mean, often, is "I'm not forgiving"...and that a lot of the "Never forget" discussion around 9/11 and even the Holocaust and so many tragedies in human history are code for "I'm not willing to forgive"

That has consequence in life, I think...terrible consequences, generally...for individuals as well as for all of us...

I need to forgive Brandi because I don't want to grow old at 33...I don't want to live my life in the past, as so many people my age and older do without always being completely honest with themselves and others about that fact...

I don't want to have all that grief on my heart...I want to leave it behind and to look at the world with fresh eyes...like I did when I was 18 (bitter with my father, and mother, as it turned out, still, but looking at the world with more freedom and more future and opportunity than I ever had in my life)...

I didn't admire and love Brandi for her good looks or her money or her background...

I loved her and admired her for her strength...for the overwhelmingly loving person that she was...for the really remarkable person that she was...

I'm sad to have that taken away from me for reasons that make no sense to me, at all...

But I want to live my life looking forward to more strength like that, and stronger, obviously, in my life, rather than looking back at a lifelong friendship that could have been...a friendship that Brandi decided that, no matter how much stronger than most folks she was, that she just wasn't strong enough to handle...

The last 5 years have me feeling like Job more than any other in my life...

And this is the overcast that most responsible for that feeling...

I need strength, right now, to look beyond the horizon...I'll spend tonight and as long as I need to find it...

Love,
Ben