Archive for the ‘Disciplines’ Category

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Can You Think?

June 29, 2023

OK, I never thought I’d ever quote that famous behaviorist psychologist B.F. Skinner, but this thought was too good to pass over without, well, thinking about.

The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do.

John Wesley, among many other Christian writers and preachers, talked about using experience, tradition, and reason while coming to understand scripture.

If I took Facebook as an example of the level of thinking in the world right now, I’d be forced into skepticism about the ability of humans to think. Perhaps other forms of communication, as well.

Some people are worried about artificial intelligence technologies such as ChatGPT taking away our ability to think. On the one hand, I wonder about our ability to begin with. On the other hand, I have heard teachers explain that ChatGPT can be used along with thinking. 

How, you may ask. Have the student (or you can try it) think and devise a topic sentence. The big question. Then write three or four supporting statements. Then turn ChatGPT loose to research and write some paragraphs. Then go back and rewrite that prose into English (or whatever).

My first geometry teacher told us that we’d learn about shapes and angles, but also that mostly what we would learn was how to think. Solving proofs of theorems is a great model. I use it to this day.

Try thinking sometime today. Read a passage (not just a single verse which can lead you astray). Think of possibilities. Not just one interpretation. What if the writer meant this? Or that?How did the original readers take this? Go sit in a park or by a pond or river and just think.

This reminds me of a story I heard many years ago. This could have been about me at 10 years old. It seems a little boy was sitting in class in school. He was staring out the window totally oblivious to the class. The teacher noticed and stopped talking. Soon, all the kids were staring. He realized something was up and his attention returned to the classroom. “What were you doing?” asked the teacher. “I was thinking,” was the reply. “Don’t you know you’re not supposed to think in school?” she said. When the entire class burst out in laughter, she realized what she said.

But, too often it’s true in school and at work—we’re not supposed to think. Be that little boy. Think.

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Traveling

June 16, 2023

Traveling.

Yesterday was another travel day. Two-and-a-half days of software conferences. A delicious anniversary dinner Monday. More good food during the week. Four-hour flight Las Vegas to Chicago. But that means about seven hours of total travel and wait time hotel to home.

Both flights to and from were packed. People queued up orderly. Boarded. Got settled. I never heard a discourteous word. People helped anyone struggling to stow baggage. Perhaps we’ve recovered as a society from the unsettled nerves and frustrations of the Covid pandemic. Maybe that will rub off into other areas.

How good it is to travel and be emotionally drained by witnessing belligerent and obnoxious incidents.

Maybe it’s a discipline. Maybe it’s a lifestyle. Maybe it should just be who we are. Courteous, agreeable, helpful.

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A Few Simple Guides to Health

June 13, 2023

Yesterday was a travel day. I never had a chance to sit and think and type. I’ve long since given up trying to use a laptop in an airplane seat. Checked into the hotel and went to my first sessions at the software conference I’m attending.

Meanwhile, I finished a book on nutrition and overall health. You Can’t Screw This Up, by Adam Bornstein. Subtitle: Why Eating Takeout, Enjoying Dessert, and Taking the Stress Out of Dieting Leads to Weight Loss That Lasts.

I recommend the book. 

Bornstein offers guides to eating, but I think most apply to spiritual health as well as physical health.

1. Stay Nourished

2. Remain Sane

3. Avoid Guilt

These reminded me of Michael Pollen’s rules for eating:

Eat food (meaning real food, not ultra-processed)

Not too much

Mostly plants

Later, Bornstein offers these thoughts:

1. Stop trying to be perfect

2. Eat more satisfying foods

3. Eat fewer hunger-increasing foods (snack junk food)

4. Include foods you love

Try the ideas of not heaping guilt upon yourself, especially for not being perfect, which we’re not.

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Using Perspective

June 8, 2023

Too often we slip into the feeling that “It’s all about me.” 

Roadworkers arrive and begin setting up equipment in the neighborhood. They are doing it specifically to annoy me.

Someone fails to show for a lunch appointment. They did it just to spite me.

Maybe the situation has nothing to do with us. Maybe when viewed from the perspective of the other person—they are merely showing up to do the repair work required; they had a crisis large or small with work or family and couldn’t make lunch.

As a wise person said, “Don’t worry about what people are thinking about you, because they are not thinking about you.”

Often when Jesus was asked about something, he tried to get the person to divert focus from within themselves and their prejudices and their rules in order to gain the bigger perspective of seeing life from other’s points-of-view.

Perhaps that is a good discipline to cultivate.

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Resilience

June 7, 2023

The ability to recover from something that distorts you. 

Many companies write to me about their new technologies or applications or also how well they are doing. A word has become one of the marketing terms du jour. Resilience.

They wish to convey that they are a resilient company producing resilient products that will make their customers, well, resilient.

So I thought, how does that apply to each of us? What does it mean for us to be resilient? How can this be acquired, if indeed, it is a quality that can be acquired?

My life has experienced many bumps. Events happened to distort me. Bend me. Cause stress and grief. Yet, I have (so far) recovered like a good foam mattress.

To recover implies that there is a good place to which to recover. Press on a piece of good, dense foam and release. It will recover to its original shape. 

We must have that firm, original shape to which to return. If we are too pliable, we will remain in the new shape. If we are too firm, we will break.

Just so in our spiritual and emotional lives. We must be able to absorb any shocks and yet have that inner strength to regain our shape. Too brittle, we break. Too soft and we just blow with the prevailing winds. That calls for a solid foundation in teaching, experience, and spiritual life.

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Throw Out The Bad

May 25, 2023

Do you catch yourself rummaging through drawers looking for your “good” knife? Or, patting your pockets searching for your “good” pen?

That means you have “bad” ones. Throw those out.

[Note: I picked up this idea from a new book from Kevin Kelly, Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier.]

This thought can extended. Do you find yourself sitting thinking bad thoughts about someone or something? Do you catch yourself in a bad habit? Are you associating with people who lead you into bad attitudes?

Throw also those out along with the knives and pens. Clean house of bad tools, thoughts, relationships, habits. Simplify life. Live cleanly.

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To Whom Are You a Slave?

May 23, 2023

Anyone capable of angering you becomes your master.

Epictetus

You open Facebook (or Twitter or email or whatever). You see a post from someone you know. The facts are completely wrong. The words are skewed to achieve maximum emotional impact. Your emotions are triggered. You immediately reach for the keyboard to respond.

You are a slave to that person.

You are in a conversation. The other person says things that seem like a personal attack. You respond personally. You attack. Your personality buckles into angry responding. 

You are a slave to a new master.

I have learned the pause—that moment before my fingers reach for the keyboard. That pause that lets me scroll past the nonsense.

I’ve talked of the pause before. It is one of the hardest things I’ve learned to do. Of course, the best way is to avoid needing the pause at all by simply realizing that I can control most of what I see. I can refuse to spend time in Facebook and Twitter. I can choose those people with whom to meet.

There are things in life that I cannot control But those I can control, those I had better exert effort to control.

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Finding A Consistent Time

May 22, 2023

Research into when the best time in your day for strength training popped into my morning reading. Morning? Midday? Evening?

It turns out that it doesn’t matter. The best time of day for your strength training is that time that fits best into your lifestyle. It’s that time of day when you can consistently go to the gym or basement and face your weights.

Some people insist that you must rise from bed early in the morning for your meditation and prayer time. You must have a thick pillow upon which to sit. Perhaps light candles or incense. Play a chime.

The best time is the time that you can consistently find some quiet space in your day. The best place is where you are. If you have a ritual, fine. If not, great. You can sit anywhere not too comfortable. You can lie on your back or side. You can walk (keeping your eyes open, of course).

I have taught on the method of Ignatius of Loyola, a founder of the Society of Jesus—the Jesuits—within the Roman Catholic tradition. His method included morning, midday, and the evening Examen. That’s fine if you live in a monastery. For some of us (most?), that is a difficult discipline within our lives.

Benjamin Franklin, the American philosopher and statesman, also had a routine asking of himself in the morning “what good shall I do today” and in the evening “what good did I do today.” That’s a good discipline.

What time should you meditate, pray, work out, exercise, read? That time during the day when you can consistently devote time mindfully to the practice.

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Perfection or Not

May 18, 2023

This nutrition information from the Arnold Schwarzenegger Pump Club newsletter actually fits a wider use. “If you fall off the wagon or just want the a nice meal out, eat, enjoy, and then return to your normal eating the next day. The way to better health is not accomplished by following a path of perfection and restriction. It’s about staying on a path of consistency.”

The same can be said about the path toward spiritual maturity. Much as the Pharisees of both Jesus’s time and our own time talk about holding others to a path of perfection and restriction, the better path is consistently (as Micah puts it), “To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”

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Epidemic of Anxiety

May 16, 2023

Everywhere we look we are told there is an epidemic of anxiety. It makes people anxious reading about anxiety. Youth are seeing therapists because of anxieties induced from either expectations from parents for success or from hearing parents arguing usually from stressing over money issues.

Religious people do not help when they today, like the Pharisees of 2,000 years ago, tell us how to live in every detail of our lives. One almost thinks it is a sin to breathe, since seemingly everything we do and think is a sin.

Jesus often reprimanded those Pharisees for piling burdens on people. I have to believe that even the Pharisees were anxious underneath their veneer of superiority lest they be discovered in a sin.

Here is one thing Jesus taught as reported by Matthew in the “Sermon on the Mount”:

Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? Therefore do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.

Matthew 6

Step back from your cycle of thoughts (I’d suggest daily) and seek the greater perspective. Look first at the big picture of God’s kingdom and what he does for you. You can with this perspective tackle the things you can control and live with those you cannot. Not that this is easy. The suggestion is easy, the practice is hard. And if you need a therapist, by all means seek out one.

Posted in Attitude, Awareness, Disciplines | Leave a Comment »

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