Another New Year

I LIKE TO JOKE that I view this stage of life, the 60-somethings, as a kind of second-coming-of-age. In the first coming of age (moving into and through adolescence), some faith traditions talk about an “age of accountability”. The age of accountability begins when a child matures to the point of being able to think abstractly and to understand right from wrong. The thought being that now they are at the point of becoming accountable for their own thoughts, deeds, decisions, etc.

WHAT IF, in the second-coming-of-age, we entered an age of non-accountabilty? Oh wait. Maybe we do. We can pretty much eat what we want when we want. We go to bed when we want, and get up when we want (with the exception of those mandatory times in the middle of the night.)

So, for those of us living in the age of non-accountability, can we forget about the annual New Years Resolutions charade or at least call it something else?

Exactly one week after New Years Day, on January 8th, I will turn 60-something-else, and Elvis, with whom I share this birth-day, will still no longer be with us. While I don’t claim to speak for all 60-somethings, I can say that for me, significant life change predicated on personal effort is unlikely. Not that I’ve completely quit growing as a human, spiritually and emotionally (well, maybe emotionally. I probably quit growing emotionally at age 14 or so), it’s just that there is a lot of evidence to support the case for my inability to sustain resolve-driven behavior.

Regardless of how hard I resolve; I’m probably not going to eat better, exercise more diligently, behave better, floss daily, or watch less TV. So why set myself up for another dose of annual disappointment and dashing the hopes of my loved ones and dentist by pretending I might.

HERE’S AN IDEA: A LIFE THEME
I have a dear friend who told me of a psychiatrist friend of his who doesn’t make resolutions, but he has an annual “life theme”. One year, for example, his theme was, “I’m not going to give a s#%t this year.” The next year his theme was, “I’m going to give a s#%t, I’m just not going to do anything about it.” He even looked to the next year when he planned to “Celebrate his apathy, if he ever got around to it.”

MAYBE A LIFE PLAN WOULD HELP
I used to give a little sermonette to young teens who sat and stared at me with glazed over eyes, and mouths hanging half open. I would explain that when it comes to being an adolescent the Bible leaves us in the dark a bit about answering the important question “WWJD?” (What Would Jesus Do?). Scripture pretty much skips Jesus life from 12 to 30. It would have been really cool (and helpful) to know what he did do as a teen and young adult. But, no. Luke, in his gospel gives us a hint (Luke 2:52), writing of the tween-age Jesus: “And He grew in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man.” That’s all we get.

Then I would explain this to them: taking our cues from this small verse our ambition should be to grow: A.) mentally, B.) physically, C.) spiritually and D.) socially.

Using that outline for looking back and looking forward to a new day, a new year, I can see myself:
A.) Reading more and deeper, journaling more, not watching Fox News, CNN or MSNBC.
B.) Taking advantage of our travel to walk more, hike challenging trails, eat smarter.
C.) Read again the likes of Chesterton, Lewis, Rohr, etc. Take advantage of the solitude that age affords to meditate and pray more.
D.) Quit using my introversion as an excuse, meet people as we travel, party more, be bolder.

All of these sound practical and mostly enjoyable to me—like things I should be able to do without the hard work that discipline implies. But I still can’t bear to call them resolutions knowing that to do so would mean the main motivation for doing them would be the heavy cloud of guilt that would come from breaking the resolve.

I have the answer and a decree! They shall not be called “resolutions”. This will be The Grand Experiment of 2017. As one of my very favorite authors says:

“Calling it an experiment gives you permission to fail.” —A.J. Jacobs

Anyone up for an experiment?

from the internet. used w/o permission.

P.S.: If 2016 has seemed longer for “some reason” than other years, that may be because it is; longer by one second.

“On December 31, the world’s timekeepers will add in a “leap second” to keep all our clocks in sync with the Earth’s rotation. They do this because the Earth technically takes a bit longer than 24 hours to complete a full rotation (86,400.002 seconds, to be exact). So a “leap second” gets added every few years.” Read more from VOX here.

WHAT WILL YOU DO with your extra second? I might suggest using it to get a head start on your 2017 Resolutions, or your 2017 Life Theme, or your 2017 Life Plan, or your 2017 Grand Experiment. Whichever you choose—Cheers and best wishes to you and yours from Pops, his Amazing-Missus, and the Grand-Girls (and their parents).

About Babies

LET ME INTRODUCE YOU! This is Brooke and Kyle's little baby and our sixth Grand. It is no secret if you read this blog at all, that we have five beautiful, gifted GrandGirls. Will this little one be another girl or maybe a boy? We won't know until it makes its grand entrance sometime in May. One thing is certain, as you can tell from it's picture here that it is a lovely and loved child.

So, it's Christmastime, that wonderful time when many of us celebrate the birth of Jesus, our hope and peace. What if, and I'm just imagining here, ultrasound technology had been available to Mary and Joseph? I hope it's not impious to picture the young teenage parents at the clinic. The technician says, "It's a boy!" and Mary says to Joseph, "The angel was right!?"

I'm guessing that only a young, expectant mother can begin to understand the emotion of that moment, when it all first becomes real, when a human sort of advent begins. In my over-imaginative mind, I picture Mary laying her hand gently on her belly and saying, "I hope he has his Father's eyes."

As it turns out, not only does he have his father's eyes, but he said, "If you've seen me, you've seen my father."

If you'll allow me, an old man, to use that masculine reference "Father", I would only hope this season that I too could have my Father's eyes--that I will somehow be able to see people as He sees them. To see His creation as He sees it. To somehow see beyond the hate, the division, the bleakness; and to see the beauty of it all.

Last year about this time I posted here on the old About POPS blog some thoughts about Beauty and Pain. I invite you to check it out by clicking this sentence.

Merry Christmas Ya'll.

Merry & Bright; But Not That Bright!

If you are a child of the 50s/60s, maybe you remember suffering a malady of temporary blindness every Christmas morning. Sixty some years later, it doesn’t seem there are any lasting ill-effects. It was all well-intentioned, an attempt by fathers everywhere to capture the childlike wonder on that special day.

Every dad, theoretically, wants Christmas morning to be special for his family. This spirit of well-meaningness is personified in the affable Clark Griswold as chronicled in the movie “Christmas Vacation”. We laugh and relate to Clark’s story because in some ways it’s our story too.

If, from Clark, we can learn what NOT to do, could it be that there’s an outline, a plan for the guy who wants to get it right, leaving the family with happy memories of Christmas 2016?

If we go back a couple of centuries we find this advice:

1. Deck the hall with boughs of holly,
2. ’Tis the season to be jolly,
3. Don we now our gay apparel,
4. Troll the ancient Christmas carol,

5. See the blazing yule before us,
6. Strike the harp and join the chorus.
7. Follow me in merry measure,
8. While I tell of Christmas treasure,

9. Fast away the old year passes,
10. Hail the new, ye lads and lasses!
11. Sing we joyous all together,
12. Heedless of the wind and weather,

Fa La La La La La La La La

Let’s interpret this line by line and see if it works in the 21st Century.

1. Decorate the house.
2. The season is fraught with the potential for stress and frustration. Don’t worry, be jolly.
3. Feel free to wear whatever crazy sweater you want.
4. Crank up a Christmas playlist and sing along at the top of your lungs.

5. Build a good fire, if you have a fireplace.
6. Maybe you don’t have a harp to strike, but a ukulele or kazoo will do.
7. Encourage others to join in the merriment.
8. Definitely tell the Christmas story.

9. Savor every moment. They pass quickly.
10. View tomorrow with a youthful optimism.
11. More singing.
12. Turn off the TV and the hyper-reporting of Oklahoma’s TV weather prognosticators.

Fa La La La La La La La La

And by all means make memories, take pictures and video. Today we can do that without blinding our children and grandchildren as our dads did to us with that bank of flood lights they would turn on with their 8mm movie cameras just as we awoke on Christmas morning to see what Santa had left under the tree. Usually by 11:15a or so our eyesight would recover so we could join in the merriment.

If you’re not familiar with those lights dads used for their film to work in indoor settings, you can still see them today keeping the french fries warm at McDonald’s.

Fa La La La La La La La La

The Thing is

“It’s Your Thing—do what you wanna do.”

That’s the title and first line of a 1969 Isley Brother’s song. It has a sort of live and let live vibe to it, doesn’t it? The zeitgeist. More on that in a minute.

The other day I was sitting in a “waiting” room at the AM/PM; waiting. That’s what you do. I overheard this conversation between a lady and her brother-in-law who had driven her to the clinic:

HER: What are you doing on that phone; Facebook?
HIM: Candy Crush.
HER: You really like that, huh?
HIM: It’s sort of my Thing.

Your THING?! What kind of guy makes Candy Crush his Thing? Maybe I’m judging too quickly. I don’t actually know what Candy Crush is. Maybe if I tried it, it would be my Thing too. Probably not.

Then I had this moment where I imagined asking the guy, in a condescending manner, “What do you mean, Candy Crush is your Thing? How can that be? Is it your only Thing? Or is it just your Thing when your sitting in waiting rooms with your sister-in-law?”

Then I imagined him saying, “What’s it to you, wise-ass?” I imagined him to be the kind of guy who would use a word like that, while giving you a look like maybe Candy is the only thing he would like to Crush.

Then I imagined him saying, “So, what’s your Thing?” And I panicked, because I couldn’t think of a Thing right then. I mean I had already scrolled through Instagram for new photos of the Grand-Girls, and now I was pretty much just checking out the people in the waiting room trying to guess their ailments and wondering about my chances of getting out of there without catching whatever it was they were spreading. But that’s not a good, manly Thing really, is it?

So for the rest of the time in the waiting room I occupied my mind in a kind of transcendental survey of noble Things I could adopt as my own. That kind of stuff has always been important to me—well for at least as long as I can remember. I believed I wanted to pursue noble things, worthwhile things, at least as I understood them to be.

I worry sometimes about becoming irrelevant—not having a Thing, one of those old guys who has been bypassed by the pace of technology and popular culture and the vitality of life. I used to know stuff. There was a time when I could have told you for instance, which artists were up for the top Grammy awards. Now I recognize few of them. I don’t stay up late enough to see them on Jimmy Fallon, so I’m out of touch. And frankly, I’m becoming so geezerish that I’m of the sincere opinion that most of them are not truly Grammy worthy musicians anyway.

I used to have a utilitarian understanding of the kids’ slang and could use some of it in sentences in a way that seemed natural and credible. You might say I had my on fleek moments.

Maybe being able to converse with the kids isn’t a worthwhile Thing for me anymore. Maybe I’ll keep trying though, and that will make me one of those corny old, cardigan guys. I’ll say stuff and the Grand-Girls will roll their eyes and say, “Oh, Pops, you’re silly.” And maybe I’ll say, “That’s sort of my Thing.”

There was a time, not so long ago, I would have said my Thing was being a “creative catalyst”. It all started when I attended a meeting in New York City with a group called the International Arts Movement. I became a part of the movement and even served on their board of directors. It gave me a language, a vision, and a plan to encourage young creatives, and to look for ways to bring them together in a catalytic way to collaborate and to work as only artists can. It was my Thing for several years and I loved it. I cherish the friendships and memories of that experience.

I am convinced, more than ever, that our world needs the beauty, goodness and truth that art and the creative processes alone can bring. We need creatives to do their Thing and we need it more desperately every day.

There’s another line in that Isley Brother’s song that says:

"I'm not trying to run your life, I know you wanna do what's right."

That brings me back to the start of this post—the 60s zietgiest; or my version of it. The live-and-let-live kool-aid was sweetened for me as a journalism major at the University of Tulsa. We were taught that news reporting, REAL news reporting was objective. “Don’t make value judgements,” we were taught, a guiding principle I tended to think applied to life beyond the reporting of news as well. This synced with my desire to not have my values judged, and my Judeo-Christian upbringing to “Judge not, lest you be judged.”

Maybe that’s the part of the current zeitgeist (as I perceive it) that is so disconcerting for me. It seems that “lines” are being drawn so hard, so furiously, so emotionally. Maybe a better song for the day is Tina Turner’s mid-80s hit, “What’s love got to do with it?” and her cynical lyric, “what’s love but a second hand emotion?”

Don’t get me wrong I am still hopeful and a bit idealistic. I do believe that there is something within us that will prevail. After all, we are created in the image of a Creator, who created us with a capacity to understand that it all comes down to love, ultimately and eternally.

So, my apologies to waiting-room guy, if you’re listening, “I’m sorry for judging. If Candy Crush is your Thing, crush it my brother, crush it!”