If you're like me this year, the holidays arrived sooner than expected. In our family, the season is a bit tender after my mother-in-law died unexpectedly before Thanksgiving. That's come with an extra layer of responsibilities for my wife, given that her mother left her estate, shall we say, without all the ribbons and bows tied neatly on the package.
To add to that, our aging car popped a cylinder valve on Christmas Eve Eve as my son and I drove home with Christmas dinner groceries. Now there's a "present" I'd like to give back! Some friends in town graciously lent us their second car for a bit until we learn how many days and thousands of dollars we will be out. (Here's a public shout-out to the generosity of Nick and Jenny!)
I suspect I am supposed to be learning something. Resilience? Gratitude? Adaptability? Surely all those and more. But most of all, it's a lesson that showing up, in vulnerability, reaching outside of myself to others and to the world, unlocks connection and healing and grace. I want to do more of that in this coming year.
So in that spirit, I want to share with you an opportunity to join me in collectively showing up in the world. Long-time readers may remember that, for the past few years, I've taken up the practice of choosing a "word of the year." I was admittedly a skeptic when I first learned about this practice. It seemed perhaps a little gimmicky, a resolutions-substitute that might prove equally ho-hum.
Yet the effort has proved fruitful beyond my expectations. It's given me a way to anchor myself, especially as the world gets increasingly complex and uncertain.
While there's several ways to approach the practice, I have my own twist on it. I want to share that take with you, as well as lead you through how you can do it yourself. So if you're looking for a different way to orient yourself in the coming year, or just curious about what a word might do for you, here's me inviting you to watch your inbox tomorrow (that's Monday 12/30!) for more information.
However you show up, what matters most is that you show up. We need you. I need you. The world needs all of us to get outside our heads and our screens and reconnect with life.
Oxygen
"Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction."
~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand, and Stars
I'm a big believer in going inward - just not for its own sake. The interior life is meaningful if, and only if, it has the result of leading outward. What we are on the inside is reflected in what we do on the outside. If we are warm, generous, and thoughtful, that will naturally show in our actions. If we are fearful, self-absorbed, and hesitant, that will diminish our capacity to act when the moment requires.
Fuel
If someone were to ask me which of the world's spiritual traditions best understands the interior life, I'd put my money on Buddhism. But it took me awhile to recognize that. I walk a Christian path, and there is certainly an interior focus in several strands of Christian spirituality that I find compelling. I had some misconceptions, though, about how Buddhist interiority compared to my Christian perspective.
For one, I felt Buddhism was so interior that it essentially abandoned the outer realm of life together - politics, economic life, and justice therein - for a supposed interior tranquility. And two, that interiority was so absolute that it led to a kind of functional nihilism, where nothing in the world mattered except the cessation of all desire and conception.
I later learned that both my assumptions were common misunderstandings of Buddhist teaching among Western folks. I have since repented.
And yet, one of my favorite Buddhist writers, the late Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh (TNH), was aware that the misconception I and others held did reflect on a tendency in certain forms of Buddhist practice to effectively abandon the life of the world. This is why the kind of Buddhism he advocated has become known as "engaged Buddhism."
Such a practice takes seriously what happens in the world to cause human suffering. TNH was a constant advocate for peace, running afoul of both sides of the Vietnam War and sent into exile as a result. (Martin Luther King Jr. nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize.)
Some years ago, one of my own Christian theology mentors told me he went to a retreat with TNH, where the topic was on the "kingdom of God" - an ostensibly Christian subject. My mentor, a man of deep Christian practice, informed me that TNH's teaching was the most fruitful and creative he had ever heard, after a lifetime of his own teaching and practice.
TNH went on to give thousands of talks, write dozens of books, and become a world-recognized advocate of engaged spiritual practice. He was a model of how a deep, authentic interior life inevitably results in a life fully lived in the world.
Heat
Victor Hugo, the great 19th-century French novelist, made a distinction between "visible and invisible labor," arguing that contemplation was a form of doing. What do you make of this distinction? Is thought a kind of action? Could it be? Or must it result in an outward expression?
I know many people, including dear friends, who I fear will never get outside themselves and share their gifts with the world. They are full of music - melodies, harmonies, songs. They are full of words - poems, stories, insights. They are full of art - colors, shapes, and movements. But they've shared little of these things with the world. What in you does the world need that you have yet to share?
May you go confidently outward, into the world with joy and purpose, in the coming year. And be on the lookout in your email tomorrow for more information on how you can choose a "word of the year" with me!
Until next week, I'll see you down the path.
Chad