Heavens' Honing; Heroes and Outliers

                                                           Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash

"He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose."

"And through everything we've learned, We've finally come to terms,

We are the outsiders."

All my heroes are outliers. The Cambridge definition of outlier is “a person, thing, or fact that is very different from other people…” That could mean a whole hell of a lot of things. To help clarify here’s a shallow skim-of-a surface list of mine. They are: A poet to the Yukon, a photographer of the Sierra, a martyred missionary to the Waorani, a writer of a nonfiction narrative about the fields near Roanoke, and a Parkinsons afflicted writer grappling the problem of pain. Prophets pointing us to a ‘better country,’ while showing us present beauty. Writers whom, in the words of Annie Dillard, wrestle with this question,  “Why would an omnipotent, omniscient and merciful God allow natural evil to happen?”

Perhaps I am mistaken in my choice of heroes. My failures are not a result. Nor my triumphs. My decisions may have cost me what the Jones’ have and I don’t. In a world of tangibles it’s hard to see the value of intangibles. To quote Madeleine L’Engle, “What would have happened to Mary (and all the rest of us) if she had said no to the angel?”

To anyone choosing a hero I would give this advice; wait. Wait until you are in your forties or fifties so as not to choose the wrong one. What if you were to choose as your hero one who enjoys freedom? Then one day sitting at breakfast in Dallas with a specialized accountant for the rich, and an executive for BHP among others you realize your choices, fate and living quarters don’t compare well to others. Those insecurities rush in. Perhaps you should have chosen that money-making, fitting-in archetype instead.

Having heroes is like the back surgery I just had done. The world pushes hard against our spine. We are unaligned. Realignment is sometimes as easy as a crack from a chiro. Picking up an essay from a role-model keeps us on track. Other times gotta hideaway with that Spofity playlist, some journals and tattered tomes.

Choosing a hero is easier than becoming one. Maybe we choose them according to our souls wiring. Do the chords resonate because you’re attuned to them? It’s not always comfortable being an outlier. If that’s who I am then that’s who I should be shaped to be. Heaven and heroes honing me to be my best.

Beauty Saves Me

 I am going to tell you a dark secret. One that’s touched my sister, my daughter and myself. Through us it’s probably touched you too though you may not be aware of it. We have a bent toward depression. By grace we don’t meet the full clinical definition. Often it hovers. Some days it lands. “With a shiver in my bones just thinking about the weather, a quiver in my lips as if i might cry, by the force of will my lungs are filled and so I breathe.” I dislike mornings. Daytime motivation comes hard sometimes.

My dad was 5150’d. Late in his life, angry seventy-plus years of it. When he was released, I asked him if he’d thought about God. “No,” he said. “I thought about nothing for the whole time. Nothing.” That darkness, that ‘nothing’ wasn’t ever talked about. Seems he would just disappear. I think it would be easy to spiral, spiral, down. Beauty saves me.

It's why Spotify is a constant stream I drink from. I suspect it’s why I’m an extrovert. I seek your companionship. Call it selfish. It’s your beauty I choose to bask in. Your laughter that brightens the dark. Your shared Instagram memes crack me up. Your insights, crafted-ness and God-given perspective that cause me to gasp in wonder and awe. Silly and authentic. My sober guard comes down and darkness flies afar.  

“I not only have my secrets, I am my secrets. And you are your secrets,” wrote Buechner. Authors asking questions of the human condition. The Buechners, the Dillards, the Yanceys and Mannings whose anchor chains and mud hooks keep me moored to hope. “Our secrets are human secrets, and our trusting each other enough to share them with each other has much to do with the secret of what it is to be human.”

Book Ends

Death book-ended the week. Her friend and my friend. Different environments; her friend lived in the high desert. Mine, the Santa Monica mountains. Cancer and conversation a common connection. The spouse and I encircled in their Venn diagrams; chapters and lines.

There are simple straight metal bookends. Grandma owned a set of small, white, marble Roman pillars. There are flat ones designed by pragmatists and stone carvings that adorn the works they silently guard. Some slide and some are immovable. Marking off beginnings, middles and ends.

“In sin my mother conceived me,” begins one story. Starts and stops aren’t always in our control. But between the bookends; volumes are. Life coaches will tell you that book-ending the day helps you focus on achieving a goal. Funny thing though; goals aren’t the end. They are steppingstones.

Bookends hold books in place; words, ideas, terse aphorisms, stirring Annie Dillard descriptions (‘of hope laid bare’). Bookends are little tchotchkes with a hard and tight embrace around the mystery of expression.

Death does that—it should. Gets you to think about living and dying and story sandwiched between the two. The struggle; hammering out life, goal to goal, story to story—between the bookends.

“The words of the wise prod us to live well. They’re like nails hammered home, holding life together.”

Shooting For Fame Completely Misses The Mark

Chariots Of Fire from Anchorsaway Ministries on Vimeo.

I’m never going to be a famous writer.  But the idea of fame completely misses the mark.  It. Is. Not. Even. Close.  I won’t be famous because I won’t leave my life and live out of a car ( a la Steven Pressfield) with only essentials and a lap-top to spend all my time typing up stories and writing my first novel.  I won’t be an Annie Dillard stealing away to a cabin for a year to write.  So many authors have stories like this.  But I confuse the act for the art.  I miss the heart of the writer which is the reason they break away.  The art drives them.

My search for a Pressfield quote led me back to The War of Art.  I am reminded; the art is the most important thing.  I write to write.  I’ve been writing since junior high school (a poem was a great way to sway a girl to go out with you).  Through junior high and high school I kept a journal.  I am compelled to put pen to paper, a need to process and synthesize life with ink. 

The struggle is to make time for family, and bills, and all the life interruptions while still writing.  This is where I feel I’m not dedicated or disciplined enough.  I choose other things over writing.  One doesn’t become a famous writer without writing.

Its not about fame.  Its about creating.  God is a creator.  We are created in His image.  Using what we’re given blesses Him that gave it.  Through my writing others come alive!  The pursuit of fame is a dead end.  Pleasure is the right pursuit.  I am reminded of two quotes from the film, “Chariots of Fire.” 

Harold Abrahams: If I can't win, I won't run!Sybil Gordon: If you won't run, you can't win.”  
Eric Liddell: I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast. And when I run I feel His pleasure.”  

I choose pleasure and hope you are lifted along as well.

The Writer As Recluse

Anne Lamott says that, “Being a writer guarantees that you will spend too much time alone, and that as a result, your mind will begin to warp.”  I suspect that the writer is wired to be alone.  For instance Annie Dillard took up residence on an island and wrote, “Holy The Firm”.  For two weeks Philip Yancey “holed up in a Colorado cabin” to ponder the questions raised in “Disappointment With God.”  Do we get alone to fuel our writing or does being a writer make us comfortable being alone?

In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Hemingway wrote, “Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.”  This is the struggle we as writers face.  Most obvious is the fact that we sit at the computer alone.  Sure my wife sits in the same room reading but I lose sight of everything but the flow of ideas in my head and the letters on the page.  Ideally we write uninterrupted and each idea is immediately set to ink.  The thoughts themselves spring best as they bubble up in quiet; at least that’s how it is with me. 

We aren't all a Steven Pressfield, leaving behind our families to live from our car with a typewriter so as to spend our days writing.  A healthy life is spent in community after all.  I’ve a wife and child I love and friends whose fellowship I enjoy.  Still one has to admit; though it took Pressfield seventeen years he’s cranked out twenty-one books including The Legend of Bagger Vance, Tides of War, The Virtues of War; A Novel of Alexander the Great and Gates of Fire.  There may be something to the ‘lonely life of the writer.’

For those like me that aren't as talented or as driven as a Pressfield or a Dillard there will be this ongoing struggle to live our lives out in fullness and develop depth to our art.  The battle for us will be to balance the beauties of normal life alongside the voice that ever calls us to write.  The skirmish for those that love and live with us will be to have more of us vs. loosing us to write.  For we write best alone but we live best in community.  I trust that somehow in that tension God will allow me to create my best pieces and share them with the world.

Finding Fulfillment In Being Wired Differently

If I used EPO or resorted to blood doping I would still be the slowest of all cyclists. Genes and nature have given me terrible lungs and a bad blood delivery system. I do still have a big ego though so when I am passed by fellow cyclists I want to give chase. I know though that I am limited by asthmatic lungs and unresponsive muscles.

I am wired differently than other cyclists. On a larger scale I am wired differently than every other human being. Which is why it’s great when authors and teachers give you tools but don’t tell you what you have to do. It’s what my favorite books on walking with Christ have in common: they lay groundwork but encourage you to listen to the Holy Spirit for direction. He will work differently with each unique person.

When I go out riding with friends I set this parameter: I am slow. If you want to race or ride fast do not ride with me. It is a truth I’ve had to adjust to my whole life that in any athletic event my asthma and my genes keep me slow. My head and heart say to push, go all out, fight to win but physically it’s not realistic. I must know myself and my own parameters.

When seeking God’s will for my life it must be within the boundaries of my distinctive strengths and my unique weaknesses. God will guide but it helps if I work within my boundaries (which according to Psalm 16 have fallen for me in pleasant places). Ego or not I am not an Annie Dillard or John Steinbeck. In moving forward in my unique giftedness I will be most profoundly fulfilled.

Quote of the Month/Summer: Holy the Firm

"And that is why I believe those hollow crisps on the bathroom floor are moths. I think I know moths, and fragments of moths, and chips and tatters of utterly empty moths, in any state. How many of you, I asked the people in my class, which of you want to give your lives and be writers? I was trembling from coffee, or cigarettes, or the closeness of faces all around me. (Is this what we live for? I thought: is light, and living, human eyes?) All hands rose to the question. (You, Nick? Will you? Margaret? Randy? Why do I want them to mean it?) And then I tried to tell them what the choice must mean: you can't be anything else. You must go at your life with a broadax....They had no idea what I was saying. (I have two hands, don't I? And all this energy, for as long as I can remember. I'll do it in the evenings, after skiing, or on the way home from the bank, or after the children are asleep.....)They thought I was raving again. It's just as well."