Dear X,
I like the quote you sent me in your last letter: The universe is too big to hold onto but it is the right size for letting go of. I have kind of a junky room. The rest of my house is uncluttered, mostly because I share it with Adele, but my room? Not so much. Over my desk I have several pictures of Adele and some angels. My theology does not admit such things as angels, but the image has a strong appeal for me. (I love the Harry Potter books even if I think the whole idea of magic is silly.) I have one word tacked to my wall: patience. I discovered how important patience is one winter day when I was driving to Huron, SD, to be present for the funeral of the mother of my best friend. I became impatient with how slowly the person in front of me was driving. I started to pass him and discovered two things of the world I had just created for myself. I was on a patch of black ice so I had very little control of my car and about a quarter mile ahead of me in my lane was a semi-trailer truck traveling at a speed differential to me of about 130 MPH. The only thing I could do was allow myself to slowly drift into the ditch on my left. Fortunately, three conditions prevailed in the direction I was going. The ditch was shallow and had a field beyond it. There was about two feet of snow just beyond the shoulder of the road. And there was no telephone pole waiting for me. I sailed out into the field about eighty feet. I suffered no damage to my minivan. I was not hurt in anyway, but my car was completely stuck and these were the days before cell phones, so I walked back to the road and flagged someone down. (I was sort of amazed that nobody stopped to see if I was okay. I would have, but maybe everybody else assumed that an impatient idiot like me needed to learn a lesson. Which I did, of course.) I asked the person who stopped to ask someone in the next town to send a tow truck. She asked if I was okay and pointed out that I had a nose bleed. I don’t remember being hit in the nose, but I suppose it is stressful to sail off the road at 70 MPH. Eventually my car was pulled back onto the road and I was on my way again. I realized though that I had come close to death because I wanted to arrive in Huron, SD, at, say, 2:15 pm rather than 2:25. What an idiot. When I returned home, I printed out in large font the word “Patience”, mounted it on a piece of colorful paper and put it up on my wall. The Church gets lots of things wrong and one of them is that patience is not regarded as one of the cardinal virtues.
Anyway, patience is one of the ways I cede control to the universe. I am usually completely entertained by observing whatever is going on around me. It’s one reason I rarely interrupt people. I see that I am not going to change people around me – even if I wanted to and even if I could – so I do a lot of listening. Being patient includes being okay with being wrong and being okay with people around me being wrong. I don’t like being corrected and generally it is useless to correct other people. It communicates disrespect. There is no way of correcting other people without implying that you believe they are wrong about something and that you believe that they are unable to figure it out for themselves. There is also arrogance in asserting that what you know is more correct than what they know. Finally, I have found that when I propose to correct someone else I am usually more interested in showing off how superior I am to the other person than I am in contributing to the knowledge of the other person.
Thomas Merton, a famous Catholic scholar and theologian, said that the shortest prayer is “Fuck it.” By fuck it, he means “I am not in control here. My control is not worth much. Even if my contribution or control had value, attempting to transmit it, I probably would not have a significant positive impact. Besides, all of us have gotten along pretty well without me running my mouth. So whatever it is I am being presented with, fuck it.”
All of this is why the website I have built for myself is www.notthatitmatters.net.
So, yeah, I propose to be patient.
Here’s a picture I took about fifty years ago:
I like it because it is so expressive of the jubilant spirit of the family dog in those days. His name was Hershey Bar. He was a miniature poodle and lived to have someone throw a ball for him to retrieve. I suppose that if he had been patient, he could have waited for the ball to come back down to him, but, no, he loved life and activity so much that he had to leap up to catch the ball in the air. So, can I be a patient, zen-kinda guy or do I want to be passionately engaged?
Your friend,