The Eight Misconnections of Disappointed People

“I’m so disappointed.” They are possibly the most devastating words a parent can issue to a son or daughter. Not angry; anger is engaged, working, opposing, caring. Disappointment is a conclusion reached after an experience or series of experiences. It is drained of emotion, empty. It is the first cousin of despair. No person wants to be the source of another’s disappointment.

What happens when life itself disappoints? I have over the years observed and thought about people who in their latter years find themselves disappointed with what life has served up. They have somehow misconnected with their own journey, misinterpreted the signs, took the wrong fork.

Eight of these misconnections seem to have more damaging and long lasting results than others. Here they are, in brief, although much could be said of each one.

1. Seeking a goal vs. living a value.

First of all, you must get your values right. How you live is not a matter of adding up the stuff you’ve accumulated or the goals you’ve reached, but upholding the principles on which you stand. When Socrates spoke of the unexamined life, I think he was referring to a life that careens toward this goal and that but never stops to ask why, for what purpose, to what end. The goals becomes unfulfilling an, soon enough, meaningless. Their accomplishment fails to fulfill their promise.

2. Depending on your talents vs. fully preparing.

You reach your potential by training, discipline, self-testing, not by charging forward armed only with raw talent (no matter how much raw talent you have). In his book The Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell sings the praises of preparation, discipline, and hard work, citing successes like The Beatles and Bill Gates. When great talent meets hard work, great things happen.

3. Focusing on self vs. engaging with the world. Most self help books are wrong. The path to happiness lies not in self-absorption but in leaving self to connect with the world. The paradoxical result of “engaging outward” is the discovery of your best self. This action is not really “giving of yourself,” but rather connecting with the world to create yourself.

4. Living realistically vs. living as if the best will happen. Realism is the denial of the future, because the realist looks at the past and predicts that the future will be no different. We are excellent at creating the future we are imagining. This is not pie in the sky optimism, but a frank acknowledgement that we can tip the scales in a positive direction by engaging the future in a positive frame of mind.

5. Planning for life vs. planning for events. The FDs (“future disappointed”) never stop planning for a life they never get around to living. The saddest refrain of all is “I can’t wait till I retire.” Life is to be lived, not planned for.

6. Reliving vs. new living. The FDs, whenever they hear a thought, remold it to fit what they already know. They rarely grow, rarely allow the unfamiliar, the uncomfortable, the challenging into their lives. The narrative of their life has ended, long before their physical life ends. New living expects the unexpected and the discomfort that accompanies it. Comfort is a devilish taskmaster. It can overtake your life and preclude any chance of happiness.

7. Assessing fear vs. assessing possibilities. Fear is a lousy counselor. Fearful people are governed by prejudice, narrowness, submissiveness, and immobility. There are many more possibilities inherent in experiencing something different than in doing the same thing over again. Check out the different ways animals respond to a fear stimulus: flight, freezing, sweating, cringing, shaking, crying, shrieking. When fear is your advisor, those are the responses advised.

8. Violating the weak vs. protecting the weak. The surest measure of the quality of your life is how you treat those you can control, abuse, or ignore. The choice not to control, abuse, or ignore them is the most moral and therefore most human choice available to you. Parents, pastors, managers, generals, elected officials, judges, or simply the strongest person in the room all have a measure of power and control over others. Exploiting those others, injuring them, failing to lend them a hand diminishes you, reduces your humanness, and creates the worst disappointment possible: disappointment in yourself.

Heart of Bucks

In the heart of Bucks County, the leaves are falling, abandoning the trees they so recently adorned during a surprisingly colorful autumn. So pretty, while it lasts. So bare and raw when gone, until the snow cover brings the pretty back.

The heart of Bucks County. Where is it? What is it? When M. Knight Shyamalan came to Doylestown in 2002 to film the movie “Signs,” he presented an anachronistic version complete with a rural sheriff (sheriff!?), who knows everyone’s first name, and a pastor whose defection from the ministry throws the entire town into a faith crisis. Goofy, but still pretty.

A while back, I attended a high school boys’ basketball game between my children’s school, CB East and CB West. At a propitious moment, the West fans, a lot of them, got up and waved dollar bills across the floor at us, the opponents. We stood accused of being rich and spoiled, I think. Not so pretty.

My friend Vince, a devoted, now retired, teacher from the Evil Empire (Philadelphia), once screamed banshee-like as our car passed the CB East High School and Holicong Middle School complexes. “Look at the size; look at the fields; look at the gym,” he babbled. I was sort of glad he couldn’t see the pool and the auditorium. Since that day the schools have only added to the glitz and glamour.

Vince worked in one of those rundown urban schools infested with math texts written before Descartes, where the closest thing to a pool is the toilet in the boys’ room that just overflowed. Since those days, Philadelphia schools have only sunk lower.

Do I live in the heart of a quaint and neighborly county, or a rich and privileged region with no heart at all? Well, I’ve resided in Doylestown over 30 years, and the answer is not simple.

Yes, there are lots of big houses and big lawns. Parents revere their schools as pre-collegiate institutions with really good interscholastic sports. College is not a must for our kids: familial dispossession is a viable alternative. Neighbors do not know one another as well as they should, and there is a slightly immodest tendency for us to believe that all our privileges are a simple result of our own hard work.

Here in Central Bucks we are not diverse. Among our youth, drugs are a problem because this is America. Nonetheless, the typical Bucks County teen is polite, articulate, hardworking, moral. No kidding. Just check out the kid waiting your table at a nearby restaurant.

A heart beats quietly beneath the gusting leaves and drifting snow. I saw it in the dozens of volunteers that operate our myriad youth programs, in the service groups give time and talent to causes of every stripe, in the neighborly way we stop our carts in the supermarket and catch up with old acquaintances.

Then there are the hearts of gold. I’ve discovered our county is filled with quiet heroes, like the store owner who, at his own expense, provides athletic opportunities for underprivileged youth.

As a former Board member of the Family Service Association of Bucks County, I saw the golden hearts day in and day out. They run the Teen Centers, havens for lost youth. They counsel troubled, broken persons. They organize fundraisers and social events for the benefit of families in stress.

One February I represented the Board at a dinner hosted by an upscale restaurant. The 40 or so guests included men and women served by FSA. They were among the least fortunate of people contending with a variety of challenges.

At my table were folks from AA and other drug treatment programs. Beside me was a pastor and his wife, who were kept busy with a flock of poor and down-on-their-luck people, including immigrants with no one else to give a hand.

Along with the restaurant management, workers and chef, a local bank helped fund the dinner. Two bank managers waited tables. We all posed for a group picture and then made our way into the anonymous night.

They selected February for the dinner because everybody gives to the needy at Christmas and Hanukkah. A couple of months later, in the bleak of winter, they are forgotten. A really nice dinner at a really nice restaurant is a welcome respite when no one else is noticing.

That’s my Bucks County. Full of silent givers and stealth carers. They come out when all the leaves have fallen crispy brown upon a hard, forbidding earth. What they contribute to the dreary winter scene is a bit of warmth, a bit of light, a bit of hope. What they get in return is a place with more to offer than pretty leaves that never last.

Article on Teachers

Hey, check out my most recent article from October 20 on teachers. It appeared in the Sunday Inquirer, Currents Section:

http://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/20131020_Teachers_inspire_for_a_lifetime.html

The Impromptu Papacy

Pope Francis and the Impromptu Papacy

As his “impromptu papacy” careens along, Pope Francis continues to make headlines. After half a year, he decided to sit and chat, about 10,000 words worth, with a fellow Jesuit about whatever the interviewer wanted to ask. Maybe it’s time for us to sit, take a breath, and take the measure of this thoroughly unexpected head of worldwide Catholicism.

First of all, what’s not different is the fact that the pope upholds Catholic doctrine, as his recent speech to gynecologists descrying abortion makes clear. What he did the following day illustrates what is different.

He went to an Italian town stricken by poverty and unemployment, and he amplified on Jesus’ contention that we cannot serve both God and money. Those who place the acquisition of wealth above any other priority, he declaimed, are idolaters whose greed deprives humans of the dignity conferred by productive work.

During his talk that day, he departed from prepared remarks, a favorite maneuver. Going off-script is one of three distinctive characteristics of Pope Francis that have gripped even casual observers of the man’s approach to leadership. He is most interesting when he is winging it. That’s when you can clearly detect the soul of this unabashed lover of God and God’s creation, especially the weak and the marginalized.

When he spoke to the unemployed about his own father’s journey to the Americas to achieve a better life, a life devastated by the Great Depression, they knew he understood their deep frustration and humiliation, their stark fear. His imagery is always personal, vivid, unadorned, and memorable.

The second element of the Francis trademark is in fact that imagery, his preference for a metaphorical moment. We saw it when he asked us to bless him as he was introduced as pope. It was patent in the amazing scene of a pope washing the feet of young prisoners on Holy Thursday. And when he held a cross made of the bark of a boat that had transported desperate refugees, when he pleaded for immigrants at the very port where a similar boat capsized killing many of those immigrants, we felt his message in a way no words could ever transmit.

The third characteristic of this pope is his enduring and endearing willingness to engage us. When asked questions, by the press, by a fellow Jesuit, or by a wide-eyed child, he just answers. No vetting, no prior constraints, no worries about the inevitable misunderstandings. He just answers, and the chips fall where they may, often right into the headlines. One of those headlines, by the way, tells us his Twitter followers have pushed him to second place among all world leaders; only President Obama has more.

Like all popes, he also receives thousands of letters. Unlike all popes, he is willing to engage these writers on their own terms. An atheist pens an open letter to Francis, and the pope answers with an open letter to the same publication. A pregnant single woman writes with great anxiety; she discarded her boyfriend when he demanded she abort the child and now wonders what priest will baptize this baby. The pope picks up the phone and says, “I will.” Maybe the most effective pro life statement ever.

There are numerous instances of going off script, direct engagement, and metaphorical moments. You might ask why he would resort to metaphors. Aren’t they subject to misinterpretation? Perhaps, but think a minute. The pope washed the feet of a young Muslim woman in juvenile detention. Did he leave Catholics with any doubt about whether Muslims should be accorded dignity and respect? How about young people? How about women? How about prisoners?

Is there a priest somewhere who now has a question about whether to baptize the child of a single Mom? Are any of us left with any question about the worth of that mother or of her child? Metaphors can be as unequivocal as the strongest statement of dogma.

Noted scripture scholar John Dominic Crossan contends that Jesus used stories, parables, to teach his disciples for one reason: he wanted to challenge them, get them questioning, talking, rethinking accepted wisdom. He was less interested in transmitting narrow, static statements of doctrine.

I see Pope Francis also challenging us, making us question the deepest meaning of our faith. In a world envious and worshipful of great wealth, he points to the unemployed and says, “Someone is worshiping a false idol.” In a world mistrustful of those who are hard to understand, hard to look at, hard to respect, he asks, “What if you just bent down and washed their feet?”

In a world wary of hucksters, tired of dogmatists, sick of violence, and fed up with duplicity, he says, “What is your question?” And then he smiles, looks you in the eye, and gives the answer welling from his heart.

It’s a heart warmed and lit by the Gospel of Jesus Christ, a heart completely open to the irresistible call to proclaim it. He has become for many of us — if I may use a metaphor — our Good News anchor.

Who Got No Reason to Live?

I am a male, five-foot-four. In ninth grade, I was five-foot-three-and-a-half, and Mom insisted, “Don’t worry; you’ll shoot up.” She was assuring me that I would someday be taller. She was right, but “shooting up” was a bit of an overstatement.

Her concern, however, was not misplaced. Statistically, short men really do get short-sheeted in life. They get paid less than tall men. They get less attractive dates, a poorer selection of clothing styles, and, overall, less respect. Who ever sang, “Tall people got no reason to live”?

Even the language sasses the vertically challenged. They get the short end of the stick (which end is that, anyway?), short shrift, short circuited, and short changed. Even seemingly positive uses of the adjective have a hidden barb. A short cut is a better, more efficient way to a goal, but we are often admonished never to take one, that it’s somehow sneaky or morally suspect to take a short cut to achievement.

Yes, society is at times ambivalent about the height thing. Women want to be tall when they are pretending to be supermodels (at weddings, proms, the Academy Awards) and short all the rest of the time. Munchkins are loveable short people, although no one actually aspires to be perceived as a Munchkin.

Indeed, tall gets the nod in most instances. Confident people walk tall; moral people stand tall; strong people are tall in the saddle. Yes, you can tell a tall tale, but isn’t that really a nice spin on lying? I give motivational talks and was once introduced as a man who “although short in stature is tall in character.” Sorry, Bubba, I’m short in stature and short in character, just like Harry S. Truman. I walk short, stand short, and sit short in the saddle, and I’m proud of it.

I fit beautifully in commercial airplanes, coach class, where seats and overhead compartments (they really are overhead to me) are made for people exactly five-foot-four. No one over five-eleven should even be allowed on planes: Sorry, big boy, you’re oversize, we’ll have to check you into baggage.

I can easily rinse the shampoo out of my hair using a conventional shower head. I fit in both a Cadillac and a Miada. My whole body stretches comfortably on an average sofa or a twin bed. Revolving doors hold no terrors.

I almost never have to duck.

Yet society casts its most beatific smile on the tall ones. Take the space program. Back in the 60’s, they were looking for people to shoot into orbit, to fit into the tiniest possible area within a tiny container, which they even called a “capsule,” like it was an Advil. Every ounce was a liability. So, who got to squeeze into the “capsule”? You guessed it, six-foot-three-inch gorgons from the ranks of military test pilots. Idiotic, a waste of taxpayer money, the very reason there is a fuel crisis today.

Whom should they have chosen? Well, think about it. Cramped space, lots of rocking and weaving and careening, moving at breakneck speed, confronting sudden and unforeseen challenges with ineffable calm. Isn’t it obvious where they should have looked? That’s right, they should have shot jockeys up there. Eddie Arcaro, space hero!

But noooooo! The height bigots would have none of it. Common sense be darned. Just make the “capsule” bigger, use more fuel, anything to perpetuate the myth of “The Tall Man.”

And don’t get me started on greenhouse gases. Every time Shaquile O’Neal exhales, he contaminates more of the atmosphere with CO₂ than the entire Seven Dwarfs, with Snow White thrown in.

What can we conclude from all this? I am sure some among you will simply accuse me of having “Short Man’s Syndrome,” a disease invented by the same people that prescribe growth hormones for healthy boys who aren’t tall enough to get on the roller coaster. You know, the folks with Stupid Man’s Syndrome.

What we can conclude is that good things come in all packages, as do the bad. That shortness is not inherently inferior to tallness, unless you’re painting walls.

And, if it turns out your lollipop is on the short end of the stick, celebrate. It’s easier to reach.”

Happy in the Middle

I am a middle class American. Somewhere between a Ford Focus and an Chevy Impala. It’s my identity, my bias, and yes, my preference. I don’t want to be poor because homelessness and hunger feel like components of an unpleasant lifestyle; they scare me. I don’t want to possess great wealth because I’ve done nothing to deserve it, and so I would feel guilty.

I understand the middle class, have lived among us my whole life. I know us, our hopes and fears, aspirations and anxieties, frustrations and fulfillments. I know why a parent from Philly drives spouse and kids 350 miles to get in a long thin line of cars to Duck, NC, where we spend our sole one-week vacation in a big wooden house on the Outer Banks, and I know that this cannot be explained to someone who did not grow up middle class.

Middle class people are likeable, most of us. We take the middle part very seriously. We remember all the times we got so drunk we blacked out, because there weren’t too many. We know we got taken as often as we haggled out a fantastic deal. We brag only about the latter. If we overindulge our children, we know it, defend it, and regret it. Same when we are too strict. Behind us we leave a lifelong litter trail of abandoned resolutions: to exercise and lose weight; to read more and watch TV less; to finally give that rock band a try. So we remain a bit overfed and under-read; the guitar maintains its lonesome niche in the attic.

The best thing about my fellow middle classians, however, is our savory take on this journey we call life. Like the stuff we can’t help. We can’t help loving our spouse and our children, can’t imagine a better place to be than in the stands when our kid’s soccer team is playing. If we can’t make the game, we can’t help thinking about the fact that we’re missing it. Once there, we are truly embarrassed when we cheer too loudly, but the lesson seldom carries over to the next game.

Our first reaction to intolerance is a gentle admonition to live and let live. We are incensed by adults who are OK with being unemployed, by parents who are OK with being absent, by diners who treat waiters like servants. We’d be thrilled to win the big lottery, just like everyone else, but we don’t live our lives as if such a thing will ever really happen.

Some very clever author once wrote of this group that most of us lead lives of quiet desperation. The esteemed thinker got it very wrong, mistaking desperate moments, moments of sadness and moments of regret as the sum of a lifetime. He somehow missed the ecstasy of the first look at a yowling new daughter, the devoted application of time and talent to a job that feeds a family and contributes to wealth, the pursuit of happiness of dependents over self, and the hundred thousand helping hands extended over a lifetime of inability to ignore a person in need. I think the clever writer mistook our quiet lives as desperate rather than merely uncomplaining.

Not to mention boring, which we certainly are. Gosh, when a movie producer wants to shoot a flick in one of our suburban tracts, he has to plant at least seven or eight psychopaths among our neighbors just to get the plot underway. Otherwise, cinemagoers would be sitting through two hours and change of relatively happy, faithful, sane folk backing out of driveways and off to classrooms, to workplace cubicles, to the aisles of supermarkets. Who wouldn’t cry out for Freddy Kruger, Edward Cullen, Jason, and Carrie and a few barrels of blood after forty minutes of that? Stephen King and Stephanie Meyer has done the cause of wakefulness in suburbia a distinct service.

Not that we set out to be boring. We just don’t spend time trying to figure out how to be interesting or fascinating, at least not once we’ve snagged a mate. I guess we find ourselves less involved in interesting matters than upper class or lower class people. I don’t know, because middle classians are the least class conscious of all the classes. The uppers, especially the newly upper, seem to have developed a competitive need to maintain and enhance upperness. It turns them into folks with an interest in being interesting.

Real big time uppers appear to go one of two ways, both interesting, only one attractive. The attractive one is modeled by folks like Bill and Melinda Gates, whose wealth is a direct result of giving several billion people things those people are happy to pay for. Their more recent penchant for giving large wads of that money back to kids who need educating and adults who need healing has made Mr. and Mrs. Gates all the more appealing.

Paris Hilton and Donald Trump embody the other upper. Her life swim leaves a wake that puts the obscene in obscenely wealthy, while his relentless quest for TV face time speaks of something novel: unquiet desperation. For the life of us, we middles cannot fathom her need to get so drunk so often, his need for his face and his name to be seen so often. We have to believe there are thrills she can afford that do not require the brain squishing aid of ten cosmos. Both of them seem to have a sincere loathing for people less rich or less camera-worthy than they.

And now, already, I feel guilty. Who am I to berate Paris or The Donald? They could be going through difficulties I can’t even imagine. If they wanted to be left alone, we middles would be the first ones to oblige them, even though People Magazine would have you believe differently.

Don’t get me wrong. They are both interesting in an uninteresting sort of way. You know, like a really good plate spinner at a circus or a really bad movie. I mean, have you seen “Plan 9 From Outer Space”? They really do use an old shower curtain to separate a commercial pilot from the “rest” of the plane. Come on!

Which leads to the more serious middle class lapses. While a superficial fascination with inexplicable celebrity is mostly harmless, we are not at our best when we seek such things for ourselves or our children. Our competitiveness can take on an unpleasant, even mean quality.

Also, we are sometimes too subject to fear. It can drive out compassion and tolerance, virtues we normally prize deeply. We then require direction. When those poor Amish girls were murdered in their tiny schoolhouse, our righteous, fear-driven rage was righted by the Spirit-driven response within the Amish community who sought to heal through forgiveness rather than “bring closure” through vengeance.

As we confront the specters of violent extremism, suicidal child killers, and insufficiently regulated immigration, we search for the best that is within us knowing that fear will shrink our hearts and close our minds and block our vision. It is no accident that some are clamoring for higher walls and deadlier guns.

Yes, we are at our worst when our valor fails and our fears rule. Luckily, we are usually able to call on reserves of courage and venture once again into an uncertain world but a world with slightly more hope in it than despair, more love than hate, more joy than anguish, more laughter than tears. More good than evil.

Not a lot more good than evil. Just more. But to us middles, that make all the difference.