pregnant with thought

A few thoughts from a still-expectant father (nine days overdue).

1. As a jungle kid raised in the belly of the Amazon, I didn't get a lot of television time. The longest period of exception was 1991, during which my family was on furlough in Calgary, Alberta and Orlando, Florida. I was eleven years old - an easy victim for the seduction of the boob tube. As a result, I can even now sing advertising jingles for literally dozens of youth-targeted products. A note to parents everywhere: the childish mind is a sponge, and television is a big, brown, muddy soup of poop-water. Protect your children! Shut the @$#%^ing thing off!


2. Never let yourself believe that the legality or cultural acceptance of an action correlates directly with its rightness. While the two may from time to time overlap, the interrelation is incidental. The true rightness of an action is a function of an independent REALITY that can only be experienced tentatively. There are plenty of actions that are both legal and generally acceptable, but in Reality are most likely both wrong and hurtful to human well-being. Likewise, there are a good number of actions which are illegal and culturally frowned upon, that may in fact be good for people. I suggest, therefore, that you not cruise boldly towards the rocky cliffs of your ending on the boiling waves of law and popular morality, but rather paddle with fear and trembling in the placid and less-traveled waters of the truth.


3. We are called to truly live, which is to say, to live abundantly. This is more than just being, this is also affecting. For while learning to "just be" is absolutely essential to a life of peace and tranquility, to go no further than that leaves us as passive objects. To really live well we must actively engage the world, struggling constantly to lessen the difference between the world as it is (or appears to be) and the world as we sense it ought to be (or, perhaps,is).

The need to strive for an impossible balance in this dialectic of the paradoxical states of Being and Acting is one of the mysteries that, fully embraced, can bring real joy into our lives. For if we can truly admit that what is essential to our "rightness" is also beyond us, then we can begin to turn over the anguish of our disability to the Deity in whom it is resolved, and get on with enjoying the fragmented messiness that is our reality.


4. I am not a great man. But if admitting that I am not a great man makes me one... well then, I guess I am.