I Believe

Your basic energy signature is the sum of all your thoughts and beliefs.  You define your personality, physical attributes, and behavior.  You are the only one who can create or change your thoughts and your beliefs.  And your beliefs create what you experience as life.    -Bruce I. Doyle III

  

  

We've been talking in one of our classes about beliefs--how we develop them, why we defend them, what they mean to us. With first-year college students, their beliefs are still very strong because the students are at an age at which they feel that they're right about most things, but they're also very fragile because the students are constantly being exposed to new ideas, concepts, and information. It's fascinating and rewarding to be able to work with people of this age, and even more so when we're able to explore topics such as beliefs, in which they're extremely interested.

One of the things that we discuss is whether or not it's possible to live life without beliefs. Personally, I'm pretty sure that the fewer beliefs that I have, the more smooth and enjoyable my life is. I've found over the years that my beliefs always limit me and never open up my mind or heart. They limit my actions, they limit my reactions, and they cause me to judge and to reject and to accept. They help me to form biases, and they force me to reject new information because it may conflict with what I "believe."

One of the saddest things that I've noticed is that as I've changed my beliefs, I've recognized the things that I've rejected in the past that I would accept now, based on my new beliefs. That's why I want them out of my life--I can't trust them. If my belief causes me to treat another person or group of people in ways that are less than loving and compassionate, then those beliefs are damaging to me, not helpful, for the way that I treat others because of the beliefs is not the way that I want to be treating others.

Can I let go of all my beliefs? It sounds like a daunting task that has little chance of success, when all is said and done. But can it be done? I believe so. But it's going to take a lot of self-examination, day after day, of my motivations for doing things--am I saying this because I really feel it at the moment, or am I saying it as a result of a certain belief? Did I say I don't want to get together with that person because I really can't or don't want to, or because that person challenges a particular belief of mine? And as I examine and identify more beliefs, perhaps one day I'll be able to free myself of them and see the world with unsullied eyes--eyes that accept the world with wonder and passion rather than eyes that judge and categorize based on a belief that may or may not be valid.

You Are Still a Kid

Happy are they who still love something they loved in the nursery: They have not been broken in two by time; they are not two persons, but one, and they have saved not only their souls but their lives.    -G.K. Chesterton

The idea of keeping the child alive in my spirit is a very important one to me. When I look around at the adults with whom I have a lot of contact, one of the things that I see regularly is that those people who are letting life bring them down tend to also be the people who don't have the ability to see the magic and wonder of the world, those people who show absolutely no indication at all that they've actually been children. They've fully and completely "grown up," and they're now serious people who have nothing to do with the things that children love.

But as children, we loved more purely--until a certain point, we were able to love things just as they were, not for what we could get out of them. That point was different for each of us, that point at which we started to love things for the benefits they could bring us. Those benefits could have been status, other people's admiration, money, clothing, or whatever--we learned that the world wasn't magic, that it was something we could manipulate for our own good. And we stopped seeing the world as a magical place once we decided to use the world to help us to "get ahead," which in reality was actually falling behind.

That's why it's so important that we pay attention to that part of us that was a kid--so that we don't fall behind any further, so that we continue to be able to love things purely for what they are, not for any benefit they can provide for us.

The adult doesn't have to be a different person than the kid was--there are many, many aspects of ourselves when we were kids that can help us to be happier and healthier people. When we were kids we were more easily satisfied and we didn't think nearly as much about what other people thought about us, and both of those traits are generally regarded as traits of people who tend to be happier than others. I'm sure you can come up with more of them. And that kid is still an important part of you--perhaps it's time that you uncovered that child that you were and allowed him or her to see the world and revel in its wonder and magic, instead of constantly seeing the world through jaded and disillusioned eyes. Let the kid do the seeing for you, and you'll be amazed at how beautiful the world and everything in it can be.

And an important first step may be to love something from the nursery again, be it a stuffed animal, a bouncing ball, a favorite toy, or anything else that elicited sincere, loving feelings. Don't allow it to remain buried under the years of crud that other adults told you was important. Your life and your happiness are too important for you to allow that child to remain out of your life--bring him or her back into your life, and enjoy his or her company!

Weaknesses

I have quite a few weaknesses. More importantly, I have no problems admitting that I have them. I remember names and faces very poorly; while I'm a decent runner, I'm very poor at running on trails; I judge people rather quickly based on superficial evidence; I'm not good at putting stuff away in its place; I'm good at organizing but poor at writing things down; and I could keep going on and on, but it would serve no purpose, really. To me, the most important thing is to be aware of my weaknesses so that I can try to compensate for them in other ways.

For example, even though I judge others quickly, I also have developed the habit of recognizing my judgments and then asking myself if that judgment is justified. So almost as soon as I find myself judging someone else, I also find myself thinking, "But wait a minute. . . is that actually true or justified?" While I have a hard time writing things down, I also have developed the habit of having index cards and pens with me very often, which allows me to write things down more often than I would otherwise. It's not a perfect solution, but I've tried others and it's what works the best.

Knowing my weaknesses helps me to know when I'm going to have to apply extra effort, such as in my teaching--keeping track of grades is hard for me, but setting up a system in which it will be easier is a rather simple thing for me to do--a bit time-consuming, but not difficult. Because I have a hard time putting stuff away, I try to have at least one or two places where I can drop everything and then later sort through things.

These are simply ways to compensate for some of my weaknesses. These "weaknesses," of course, are more a result of societal norms than they are truly weaknesses--in a different culture, they might be considered very normal traits. Being a poor trail runner only affects me if I run trails; otherwise, it's a completely unimportant element of who I am. But knowing this weakness helps me to decide not to run with some friends who are good at it when they're going out for a long trail run--I would slow them down and probably be miserable myself if I were to go with them.

There's absolutely no problem with having weaknesses--we all have many of them, and that's fine. Problems arise when we ignore or deny them, when we pretend we don't have them or we don't admit to them and commit ourselves to do something in an area of weakness. Then our stress levels rise and things become less enjoyable to do, and that's never a good combination.

What are your weaknesses? If you know them, you can compensate for them or simply avoid having to do things in those areas. And if you're able to do that, you can concentrate on your strengths and get even better at those things--and that's always something very positive.

Relay

I just was fortunate enough to be able to do a relay with some very incredible people on a team. The relay was just over 230 miles, and it took three days. We had a team of six, so each of us ran about 40 miles over those three days, through mountains and valleys, past lakes and rivers, in the heat of the afternoon and the cool of the pre-sunrise morning (on one day we started at 4:30). It's obviously an endurance event to a certain extent, but it was also much more than that--it was six people who supported each other, encouraged each other, helped each other, and did the job that they had committed themselves to do in order to help the team.

Relays are a great exercise in letting go of any sort of need to control things. While I was doing my legs, I had control over what I did, of course, but as soon as I hit the hand of the next runner, I was simply an observer, and I had to trust that person to do the best that he or she could do at that time. Usually, that meant a couple of hours of spectating as I waited for my next leg to come up, but it also meant getting to the next exchange zone so that the current runner wouldn't reach it with no one there. And yes, glitches happen sometimes, but for the most part what we learn on a relay race is that we can rely on one another--that we can let go and trust that others are going to come through on what they've said they're going to do.

And even when the glitches do occur, they happen because of honest mistakes, not because of any other reason. A mistake doesn't mean that you can't trust a person any more--a mistake means simply that the person made a mistake and is hopefully a bit wiser now because of it. But mistakes on the part of others are often good because they force you to find a way to compensate or to find out how much you have in you. For example, when my teammates weren't at one exchange zone when I finished a leg, I just had to keep on going. They had misread the directions and ended up at the following zone; my choices were to stop and wait for them or to keep going, and I kept going. They realized their mistake rather quickly and came to me about a mile later; I got in an extra mile of running and it was no big deal.

But for 99% of the time, things went really, really well. We helped each other; we encouraged each other; we ran for and with each other. We enjoyed our surroundings and each other's company, and we kept on racking up the miles as the hours passed.

Over the course of three days we covered just over 230 miles as a team. I ran about 40 miles, and for the other 190 miles I had to trust my teammates to do the best they could do--and they did so. It's nice being in a situation over which I have no real control except for my own contribution--and in which it's necessary for me to trust others. Our society tries to tell us that it's important to trust only yourself and to take care of everything you need yourself, but our society is wrong. Independence can be important sometimes, but interdependence and cooperation are much, much more important to our world and to our spirits.

A Bit at a Time

One of the things that gets me kind of sad when I work with young people is the way that they feel they have to do things very quickly, and perfectly. We've created an environment for them in which they don't feel comfortable taking their time, in which they feel tremendous pressure to do things fast. They don't want to work for a week on the project--they want it done now. This is a problem that has been around for some people for quite a long time, but one that seems to be getting increasingly worse as pretty much everything in our society becomes faster, from finding information on the Internet to cooking meals in the microwave to having printers at home that can print almost anything almost immediately--remember typewriters and type setters?

This is sad to me in one part because these young people--just as many of their elders--are not learning about process.  They aren't learning about taking the time to do things well, and to let some things happen slowly because that's the best way to have them happen. There are some dishes that we can cook, for example, that take a lot of time because different parts of them take time to prepare. I like making stew, for example, because there are several different parts to the process that all take a bit of time to prepare, but in the end you have a very delicious dinner to eat. When I make a pumpkin pie out of real pumpkin, the pumpkin has to be cooked first, and then the rest of the process can be done. It's not like taking a premade frozen pie out of a box and throwing it in the oven, or buying the completed pie in the bakery section of the supermarket. The process of making it over time gives us not just an extremely tasty pie, but also the sense of accomplishment that comes from taking on a task and seeing it through to the end.

I'm writing a book right now, and I'm working on it about an hour or an hour and a half a day. I don't need it done tomorrow, and by following this process I'm allowing a lot of ideas to develop and grow in my mind. Of course, I have to be true to the schedule--if I stop spending the allotted time on it each day, it will never be finished, of course. But I know from experience that if I set aside an entire week of just writing, all day every day, the book won't get done at all. For me, it's very important to take my time and to pay attention to the process of writing, rather than trying to get it all done in the shortest possible amount of time.

I wish we could teach young people better about processes. I wish we still taught them how to cook good meals instead of ripping open packets and throwing things into the microwave. I wish we taught them how to tear apart engines and put them back together. I wish we taught them about taking our time to make and be friends rather than expecting new people to be our friends immediately. As a teacher, I notice that the young people who have grown up on farms or ranches have a huge advantage in today's world, for they've learned about processes and cycles and patience from day one--after all, you can't make a crop grow any faster and you can't make an animal deliver a baby any quicker. They tend to be much more likely to understand the processes involved in almost anything they do, from reading to writing to mathematics to business, and they're much more likely to be patient when things take their time to reach the point we want them to reach.

Be patient. Recognize that the things of this world work in their time, and that our attempts as human beings to speed things up generally haven't made us happier or healthier (with the obvious exception of many advances in the medical field). The more closely we observe and appreciate the processes of life, the more patient we become, and the more in tune with our planet and the things on it we grow.

Learning of Value

I saw something a bit disturbing last week.  I had to stop at a drugstore to pick something up, and while there I saw a kid about thirteen years up buy a Monster drink, about 24 ounces of caffeine fix.  That in itself saddened me, to think that this very young kid has been seduced by marketers and peers to think that a caffeine fix is a positive thing in life.  I was shocked, though, to see the price affixed to the can:  $3.49.  This kid was spending more on one drink than anyone making minimum wage earns in half an hour of work--and I feel taken when I have to pay $1.19 for a large soda at a gas station when I'm traveling.  I couldn't help but think that this kid never had been taught of the value of money, and of the concept of exchanging the money for something of comparable value.

I see this principal all over as I go through my day.  I see rims on car wheels that cost upwards of $500, just for a little bit of decoration on a vehicle.  I see people spend four or five dollars for a cup of coffee, hundreds of dollars for cell phones that they almost never use, thousands of dollars on huge television sets that they almost never watch.  All around us are ads and commercials that keep us wanting to buy things, that keep us dissatisfied with the way things are, and those ads and commercials are trying to convince us that if we just buy some more stuff--no matter what the cost--we'll be happier and more content.

But somewhere along the line we have to learn to make our own decisions about value.  There's a common law of economics that states that many poor people will stay poor because of the decisions that they make about how to spend their money.  How many people have you known or known of, for example, who have little money yet who buy a very expensive car with high monthly payments?  And how many people are in trouble right now because they bought houses that were more expensive than they could afford?

While I wouldn't say that the answer to our money issues would be to skimp and save every penny and never have any fun in life, it is important that we learn about value and about when to spend how much.  A few years ago, for example, my wife and I had cell phones.  At the time I worked half an hour from home, I was on the road with sports teams a lot, and my wife also was on the road quite a bit.  The cell phones made sense, even though we didn't use them much--at least we knew that if anything happened, we could contact one another.  (This was in the days when we still had a landline at home.)

Then we moved someplace where we didn't need the phones any more, for we both worked close to one another and we weren't on the road much.  Suddenly, the $75 every month to keep the phones made no sense, so we got rid of them.  They were now just a luxury item, no longer as necessary as they were before.  They simply didn't have the same value that they had had before.  And even though it had been quite convenient to make an occasional phone call from wherever I happened to be, that convenience was no longer worth the amount of money we would have had to pay to maintain it.

It's unfortunate that money is such a huge part of our lives, and that it affects our lives so very strongly.  But that's the way things are, so the best that we can do is learn to define the value of our money for ourselves and to exchange our money for goods and services that have equal or even greater value.  While a woman I know who is broke can go out and spend almost a hundred dollars on a new hairdo, I know that she really can't afford it, and that its value is not nearly as much as she thinks it is.  When my wife and I go on vacation in a few weeks and spend $400 for three nights in a hotel room in Yosemite National Park, though--which is much more than we've ever spent on a hotel room before--we both have considered the cost, the location, and the reasons for our vacation, and we both agree that there is great value in the price that we'll pay.

Money is here, and it's a part of our lives.  We can live with it and have it work for us, or we can squander it and lose it and become angry and frustrated with our loss.  The choice is ours, but one thing is for sure--the path to happiness doesn't lie in exchanging our money for goods or services of little value; rather, we need to make sure that the money we spend is money well spent.  Only then can we avoid the resentment and frustration that will come over having wasted money when we didn't need to.

Is the anger growing?

Sometimes in this world it seems to me that the anger of all the people in it is growing and growing, building in intensity and strength every moment and exploding into violent acts and hateful words more and more often. It gets to be overwhelming sometimes, learning about the murders and massacres and conflicts that are resulting from the rage that people are feeling. It's difficult to deal with, for it almost forces us to take sides and to support one side or another, even though taking sides is rarely something that helps us to live our lives fully--it simply puts other people on a different side of the fence than ours and keeps us from learning from them and about them. And as we grow more isolated by taking sides more and more often, we cut ourselves off from so many different influences that we never, ever can reach our full potential anymore.

People have always been angry, and all through history we've done terrible things to each other for very little reason. One of the curses of our current world is the access we have to so much information and so many news sources. Because we see much more news than we used to, it can seem to us that things are constantly getting worse in the world. Because more and more people are able to express their own anger and prejudices on things like comments sections after news stories, it may seem that there's more discord in the world, and that people are less civil than we used to be.

But consider the possibility that in our world of today, people now have voices who never used to have a voice, and those voices are heard wisely. In the past, the only people who were heard from were those who had been chosen to be heard from--news organizations chose whom they would interview, and then they would publish or broadcast those interviews. Nowadays, though, the angry guy next door may go viral with a hate-filled video that he made himself, or the woman across the street may get a zillion likes for her prejudiced comments or posts on a social network.

Much of the problem that we're facing now is that the world is now pretty much unedited. What we see and experience hasn't been filtered--we see it without having had the benefit of someone else deciding whether it's worth seeing any more. Now, there are some benefits to this new way of seeing things, because we used to miss a lot of good things when our access was limited, but there are also significant down sides because we're now exposed to things that truly are inappropriate and also very often completely untrue.

There are many, many people who are willing to spread lies because those lies support their opinions and beliefs. And those lies stoke the anger and frustration of other people who want to be angry and frustrated because they feel that the world isn't going their way. And often, people reach a point at which their anger and frustration boil over into inappropriate actions and words, and then we see another horrible incident that makes us feel little hope for the world.

There are many, many people though that we don't hear from. There are many people who are spreading love and compassion and healing. We've got to actively search them out if we want their messages to influence our lives more than the messages of the people who hate. We've got to make an effort to hear the people of the light more so that we have a balance to what we hear from the people of the dark so often, without ever having to try.

There is a lot of anger in the world. There always has been, and there always shall be. Our choice is whether we listen to it, whether we give it strength by paying attention to it and letting it influence us. We can hear it and recognize it for what it is and keep in mind that a small number of people always have the loudest voices, and then search out the other voices that make life more positive--as long as we really want to do this.