Projection of Personal Perspective
One thing I’ve learned over my relatively short life thus far, is that people tend to expect people to view life through the same eyes that they do. Generally, a dishonest person feels justified in their dishonesty because they figure everyone else is just as dishonest as they are. A liar figures that they’re being lied to. A trustworthy person generally trusts other people. At some point or another, most people eventually realize that this is not the case, and then tend to gravitate toward other people that think as they do… Look at San Francisco.
One of the reasons I’m afraid of Barack Obama as President is his overwhelming need to talk and negotiate with other, often hostile, foreign leaders. Even without knowing what his pre-political profession was, I could tell he’s a lawyer, primarily because that’s the thought process of a lawyer. He somehow believes that he could talk hostile countries out of their hostility, most likely because he could be talked out of his own opinions with a sufficient argument. How do I know this. It’s a system that I employ with my own children. If you believe you should be able to do something that I say you shouldn’t convince me otherwise. I’ll consider it and I’ll likely acquiesce, provided that the argument was reasonable and well thought out.
This is NOT an attitude that should be possesed by a PoTUS. He should have vision, and operate under that vision. He should be looking after the interests of the citizens of his country, not trying to appease world opinion. He shouldn’t be trying to win friends by humiliating his people. He shouldn’t trade respect for pals.
Do the Right Thang
One of the hardest lessons that life has taught me is the fact that it’s usually easier to do something convenient than it is to do what should be done. I mean, speaking generally, it’s a lot easier for me to put a dirty plate in the sink than it is to rinse it off and put it in the dishwasher… especially since it’s also easier to wait for someone else to empty the diswasher than it is for me to do it myself.
Life tends to throw obvious instances of this fact in your face. For example, there’s trash on the ground right around the wastebasket, but you didn’t put it there. What do you do? Most of us would walk right past it… unless we’re in Iraq, at which point we call in the Bomb Squad. Someone left their lights on in the parking lot. I COULD go tell someone in the store, or I could say to myself “I hope they have cables”.
But what about when it actually costs you something to “do the right thing”. I’m only going to be a minute, should I put money in the parking meter?
Give up the Butt (smoking cessation)
This is more of an entry to my future self more than anything else. The mind has a way of editing the past so that it doesn’t seem as bad as it was. Sort of in the fashion that an oyster makes a pearl out of a grain of sand. In this case, I’m referring to the fact that the number of times I’ve quit smoking is probably higher than the number of report cards I’ve gotten during my entire scholastic career.
Look, quitting is hard, made even moreso by the fact that I’m LIVING with someone that smokes, smokes FREQUENTLY, and has no real desire to smoke LESS. It takes a lot of discipline, and analysis of the reasons for smoking. So far, hunger, exhaustion, and boredom seem to rank at the top of the list, and each time I DID manage to quit, I do recall addressing one of the requisite issues. Fact is, I plan on having quit again before the month closes out. If it’s anything like the LAST 3 times I tried to quit, it’s going to be another challenging series of me talking to myself, and myself trying to talk back.
Look, if you happen to pull this off again, make sure you read this before you get the urge to smoke “just one, because one won’t hurt”. Don’t do it. I repeat “DO NOT DO IT”. Sure, one won’t hurt. But it won’t just be one. It’ll be one now, and then it’ll be “Well, that wasn’t so bad”, and next thing you know, you’re down $25 a week. You’re about to SUFFER for this, don’t make it all in vain…. again!
Momma’s Boy
I’ve heard it said that each child is different, and you should never expect your children to act like one another growing up. Xi’an sure enough proves that true, as he’s so much different than Elana was at this stage. I’ve NEVER seen a kid so irritable before in my life. I love having a son, but I figured I’d have a few years before he became so combative. With Elana, and even Kailani to some degree, I get a manner of deference. They treat me as if what I say is something that should be listened to. Not so much with Xi’an. Now, granted, he’s only 5 months old, and that’s going to be the major factor involved, but you’d think that he’d be a little less grumpy around me. He see’s or hears Trish, and he lights up like a Christmas tree. He sees Grandma or Grandpa, and he’s at least calm. With dad though.. I get a “Who the f*(^ is you?” look and a ’stranger’ cry. It’ll be interesting to see how he changes as time rolls forward. For now, he’s mom’s problem.
Teaching Technique
“Wax on, wax off”. This phrase, for people in my generation tends to promote images of a little Japanese guy giving a kid from New Jersey what he asked for, in a roundabout way. The movie from which the phrase comes, “The Karate Kid”, which I managed to catch on TV over the weekend, and growing up was one of my favorites. Watching it again as an adult, and a parent, I realized one thing, he played an effective role as a father figure for Daniel Larusso. Maybe I recognized this now, because I get to experience first hand, a child’s refusal to learn by conventional means.
Paraclete
There’s this cat that I work with, Ant, who is a relatively young Christian. He’s got trials and questions, the occasional misunderstanding and slip-up, but he’s real about his walk. I’ve got to say, this dude is indespensible to me in my own walk with God.
It’s really easy to get discouraged when the community of brothers doesn’t provide what should be an essential service in the Body of Christ, discipling. I mean, that’s what we were originally called to by Jesus himself. Instead, we spend a lot of effort creating ‘Church Members’, getting people involved in programs, doing all kinds of other stuff, but NOT doing the primary thing to which we were called… training up others. I once prayed to God, “Let me be for someone else, that which I couldn’t find for myself.” Obviously that means I had to somehow create something from nothing. I had to be a father to my children, without knowing what a father is ’supposed’ to do. I had to learn how to be a strong black man, a role model (in as much as I can at least) to other young black people in the community. I had to be a mentor, counsellor, listening ear. I had to learn to be a faithful man and good husband. All these things without tangible examples. And THEN I had to teach someone else those things… someone else who MIGHT not be able to pick up these traits on their own and would otherwise get lost in the shuffle.
Ant is one of those people. As a young christian, he’s seeking truth. That’s how I got to where I am, by seeking. Now I see someone following the path that I was once on, and I’m doing what I can to see to it that he doesn’t have to struggle where I struggled. That way he gains wisdom from my hardships, and can then work on his own path, instead of retreading the wheel, making the same mistakes over and over again. As has been written, “What is, has been already; and what will be has been before” (ecc 3:15)
Mission Statement
This site has existed in many forms and incarnations over the last 6 years, with various different purposes. Somewhere along the line, I allowed myself to start editing myself before allowing what I wrote to be published. Most likely it was to curb what specific other people were able to read about themselves on my site. I suppose that was the beginning of the end, because at that point, the substance of my writing began to be more… scripted. Well, this entry marks a change in all of that. Again, the primary purpose of THIS site will be to keep the creative juices flowing, to allow myself the joy of writing, and maybe someday write something worth reading. Maybe I’ll get back to the point of writing to my future self, telling him what I’m expecting of him in time. Maybe it really will live up to it’s name and become a “FutuREFLECTION”
