OUT OF THE ORDINARY – The Amazing Story of... EVERYTHING!

In 1998, Steve Hartman, a young CBS reporter, undertook a fascinating experiment with his On The Road* series. He would go to a map of the United States, close his eyes and point blindly to a spot somewhere in the country. Then he’d go to that place, or, more precisely, to the nearest burg big enough to have a telephone directory.

Once he arrived in AnyTown, USA, he’d go to the first telephone booth he found, open up the White Pages to a random page, and once again covered his eyes and pointed. Whichever name his finger settled on would be the subject of his story. Then he went and interviewed that person.

Whether it was Bill, the ebullient banker from Boise, Patti, the paraplegic paramedic from Peoria or Ulysses, the unemployed utility worker from Utica, it turned out each person had a fascinating, compelling story to tell.

WHOSE STORY IS IT ANYWAY?
I don’t recall feeling that Hartman’s concept was anything much more than entertaining, but its return to mind many times since then suggests otherwise. It reminds me of something it turns out I’ve been learning on my own all along: that everyone—and everything—has a story. Every one of us has faced challenges, celebrated triumphs, loved and lost, created something unique and coped, in one way or another, with whatever life has thrown at us.

This is why those random, average-Jane-or-Joe interviews were so significant. Their lesson reminds me, every time a make a judgement about something solely in the context of my own experience and values, that I just might be missing something. Like when I lambasted the woman driver who cut me off this morning as I was trying to exit the crosstown.

          I realize now is that all that negativity 
          was based not on her story, but mine.

Believe me, I had no trouble characterizing that woman as aggressive, thoughtless, greedy and just about any other negative judgement you can think of. But what I realize now is that all that negativity was based not on her story, but mine.

I'd been running late myself. I imagined myself to be nicely in control of my life and, truth be told, was probably thinking of nothing more than the lovely, sweet, frothy cappuccino I was about to pick up at Espresso Royale. To me at that moment the woman had no story—other than that single-minded self-indulgence I’d so conveniently ghostwritten for her.

I don’t know what that woman’s story was. But I do know she had one. Maybe it was that she’d just found out her child was injured at daycare. Maybe she’d just lost her job and pondered a future with no income and no savings. Or maybe she was off soaring in the rarefied air of new love. Whatever.

EVERYTHING HAS A STORY
Wouldn’t the world be a kinder, gentler place if we all understood that everything—every person, every creature, every growing thing, indeed every stream and grain of sand—has a story? Not just the story we may have written for it—one so often about what it can do for us—but its own story about how it got there, why it belongs there and, if not, where it needs to go.

     What happens to one organism or one thing 
     has an effect on…well, everything.

Each of these people, each of these things, is significant, not just to the other people and things closest to it, but to the universe. Okay, maybe that’s over-
reaching a bit…or is it? Indeed, there is a growing body of research, not to mention a groundswell of people around the world who know it but perhaps can’t prove it, suggesting that what happens to one organism or one thing has an effect on…
well, everything.

This so-called “butterfly effect”—the fact that a small change at one place in a system can result in immense differences in a different place or a subsequent state—can occur in many ways, perhaps most notably, ways we don't notice and can never fathom. That's why I so often say that wonder is at least partly an act
of faith.

Children and Nature author and visionary Richard Louv reminds us that people won’t love what they don’t know, and that in order for folks to care enough to protect and preserve our dwindling supply of Natural wonder we need to help kids learn about Nature and their place in it.

For by learning the stories of animals, plants, water and the land—and of the places each inhabits—they begin to write their own.

* Hartman did On the Road for seven years, until 2005, and then, in 2010, reprised the series on a global scale. 

HOW TO BE IN THE MOMENT – 101 Little Tips

TIP #2: Give Someone the Benefit of the Doubt.

PHOTO: Chris Owens - Flickr

Next time you sense the wagging finger of your judgment, imagine a plausible, forgivable reason for the offense. 

See, you've just extended the rest of your fingers and turned the wag to a wave—your gesture of understanding, patience, peace.

TIP #3: Give Yourself the Benefit of the Doubt.

Who are all these people whose voices we hear inside—controlling, judging, berating. Who do they think they are?

Remember, those voices are not yours. While perhaps well-intentioned, they have their own baggage. Trust your 
own voice.

SOME KIND OF MUSIC – When the Words Aren’t There

 "The most precious gift we can offer anyone is our attention. When mindfulness embraces those we love, they will bloom like flowers." - THICH NHAT HANH
   
New York clinical psychologist Alan Dienstag, a guest on NPR’s excellent Speaking of Faith program, was talking about his experiences leading a writing group for people in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. I was especially moved by his accounts of the inevitable transition out of the group by participants no longer able to communicate in ways that contributed to the meetings.

He recalled one such woman who, it seemed, had reached that point. As her disease advanced, he continued seeing her privately, helping her hang on to what few connections her brain was able to make, especially those with Nature.

A smile’s light suddenly broke through her opaque expression, and he knew this had reached her.

Even after she could no longer vocalize her experiences of the birds, animals and plants, she and Dienstag would still just walk around and look at things. Later, when she’d retreated still further into “almost a mask-like blankness,” he began talking with the woman’s husband about whether their sessions were the best way to spend her time.

Meanwhile, Dr. Dienstag was preparing to go on vacation. He knew the woman shared his love of the beach. So, as he was leaving their session, he told her that’s where he was going.

A smile’s light suddenly broke through her opaque expression, and he knew this had reached her. He asked her, “What do you love about the beach?”

Then, in Dienstag’s words, “She kind of drifted away…and she got very quiet. And again I waited and I thought…she can't really answer that question. And she turned to me and she said, 'There's some kind of music that lives there.'"

NO IDEA
I witnessed a similar breakthrough in my mother during her last few years in this life. No one seemed willing to say whether she had Alzheimer’s or not, but it seemed clear that she—or at least that bright, articulate part of her spirit once visible to us—had gone somewhere.

I joined Mom for dinner every Thursday evening. I’d catch her up on the latest news of family and world. Most of the time I couldn’t tell if she understood me or not. Even when I’d try to engage her with a question, her expression would remain blank, her eyes unfocused.

I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt, hoping that, at some level, she heard and understood me—perhaps like what we sometimes hear about people coming out of comas and remembering people who’d visited and talking with them.

She lifted up her head from her osteoporosis-bent body, fixed her cloudy eyes right on mine and said, “Oh, you have no idea!”

Once in a while, Mom would look at me and start talking exactly as she might have ten years earlier. The first few words would have that familiar, bright, engaging intonation I remembered. “Well, you know I’d…” Whatever it was she’d intended to say, the thought would evaporate into thin air. That was it. I didn’t know what to do.

Sometimes I'd just assume that what she’d intended to say pertained to what I’d been telling her, so I’d go back and provide more details. Or I’d try to guess what she’d meant to say, but she wouldn’t respond to my questions. This had happened several times when I finally said, “Mom, it must be awful knowing what you want to say and not being able to find the words!”

It was a long shot; I figured it would go right through her. But she lifted up her head slowly from her osteoporosis-bent body, fixed her cloudy eyes right on mine and said, “Oh, you have no idea!”

Nature can affect us at any number of levels and in ways we might not expect. Both of these women, even though nearly stripped of their ability to interact with anything outside of their own skin, still managed to find and express a point of connection.

BRING ME DOGS
How haunting these glimpses into the hidden layers of mind and spirit. After all, we know so little about those places. At least so far, we can’t interview anyone who’s been there and come back in any condition to tell the tale.

Perhaps my mother’s comment comes as close as we’re going to get to a report on what that’s like. I suspect each of us lives with a shard of fear that we could succumb to Alzheimer’s, ending our days in what seems like it must be a living hell. Would we be acutely aware of our alienation, or might Nature (or would God) mercifully provide us an antidote to the loneliness—perhaps the emotional equivalent of adrenaline?

I want to believe that, just as a person can lose his or her hearing or vision or legs and still adapt and carry on with a happy, productive life, one with a cognitive disease like Alzheimer’s might fall back on some other, as yet unknown, capacity for happiness. Perhaps it’s an imaginary world or maybe just a heightened level of spirituality.

Whatever it is, I pray the reason we don’t yet know about it is simply that we haven’t been able to find it. We should all be grateful to the researchers who are looking.

Might Nature … mercifully provide us an antidote to the loneliness—perhaps the emotional equivalent of adrenaline?

If I’m ever in that position—unable to communicate, possibly even close to death—my fondest wish would be that someone give me the benefit of the doubt that I gave my mother that evening. Believe—no, expect—that, in some way, at some level, I’ll understand.

It’s not so different from how enlightened parents teach their children. Just as they expect their kids to understand some things other parents might assume are beyond them, I’d like my loved ones to expect that I can hear them, understand them and appreciate their presence.

And I don’t want this credit to end with just the obvious physical and mental contacts. I want them to understand that I’ll still need spiritual nourishment too. As Dr. Dienstag did, take me outdoors and let me feel the air, smell the earth, witness life. If anyone says it’s pointless, ignore them. 

Give me the chance to touch my grandchildren or great-grandchildren and pass on, in ways far surpassing words or even thoughts, my love and my spirit. Bring me dogs too, so I can exchange with them that sublime blessing I’ve always been able to share with animals.

They’ll understand.

OF SCHISMS AND SCRIMS – Seeing Through Our Own Reality

Sometimes the membrane separating one reality from another is very thin. I used to discount all those “paranormal” events people claim to experience—feeling presences, hearing voices, sensing others' thoughts.

Those were other people's realities, if they were even real at all. That was until one perfect June day a few years ago.

I’d taken a break from a long bike ride, and when I woke up from a delicious, breezy cat nap in the dappled shade of a small tree, I felt my deceased dad’s spirit. His closeness moved me to tears. Of course, I couldn’t actually see him, but at that moment the sunlight, the leaves and the breeze all insisted he was there.

     As the light of our awareness and faith rises 
     behind the sheer material, we see a different 
     scene altogether.

Are such experiences just illusions of our own making? I don’t think so, but I do believe they require our openness, our readiness to see them. Perhaps, having just awakened, I was in that astute place one inhabits briefly before the ordinary concerns of life ooze back in like mud.

What separates us from other realities? It might be space, time, experience or any number of other factors. Or might these schisms of understanding be due simply to our own inattentiveness? If we pay attention, can we begin to see “through” the membrane and at least start to recognize differing realities?

Like the image on a theatrical scrim, what we first perceive seems to be all there is. But then, as the light of our awareness and faith rises behind the sheer material, we see a different scene altogether. And that deeper illumination takes us to deeper truth.
          If we want to see the world around us 
          as beautiful...we must be so ourselves.

I’m driving to work and someone cuts me off. I get angry. I see the other driver as mean, greedy, thoughtless and stupid. In other words, I invent a reality to justify my anger. The parallel reality— which I can only imagine, but which is nonetheless every bit as valid as my invented one— may be that the other driver is a single mom who's just found out that her toddler has been seriously hurt at day care. She’s on her way to the hospital. With that understanding, it's not so hard to believe that I'm actually in her way.

This is just one example of how learning to recognize parallel realities can empower us. There are countless others, in our relationships, in our appreciation of Nature, in our faith journeys. How we view Creation is a reflection of what’s within us.

The lesson is that, if we want to see the world around us as beautiful, or to see our fellow human beings as good and innocent, we must be so ourselves. It doesn’t take a great stretch to reach the powerful conclusion that by changing ourselves we can, indeed, change our reality.

"You've got to believe it to see it."
  DEWITT JONES, National Geographic photographer turned motivational speaker