I have taken to acknowledging the shortest day and the longest day of the year in recent trips around the sun. I do appreciate the bittersweet notion that as we embark on the coldest days of the year, the days slowly but surely begin to grow longer as if to promise that spring will be here before long.
In a different way, I appreciate the bittersweet notion that as we embark on the warmest days of the year, the days slowly but surely begin to grow shorter as if to remind us that autumn is on its way.
There’s a poetry and a symmetry to the four seasons. It’s really all one needs to accept the existence of God. This universe has a design, suggesting a higher power, a designer, a Creator.
You are welcome to believe it’s all random. As for me, I believe the heavens declare the glory of God.
The local convenience store (Kwik Trip for my Badger friends) has begun rounding down now that the penny is being retired, so my occasional pint of ice cream is now $3.95. (Actually, it’s still listed as $3.99 but the lady gives me a nickel in change instead of a penny.)
What does that mean for my humble opinion, heretofore known as “my two cents”? Do we round down to zero, acknowledging its true value, or do we adjust for inflation and say that it’s “my five cents”?
Of course, the debit/credit card reader will still record the exact $3.99, which the store might eventually retire, as the insidious campaign for a cashless society creeps forward.
Oh, not everything has to be insidious. I’ll just accept the 5 cents change for my $3.99 pint and put it in my nickel jar.
What do I do now? Summer has snuggled against me on the love seat, putting her paw up to invite me to rub her shoulder with my right hand. Do I write or do I reassure my little girl?
She resolves the dilemma only briefly by sitting up. When I scrunch between her shoulders, she leans back down and lifts her right foreleg to offer me her chest. I love having a snuggle buddy, but I must write. Writing is what I do.
On the other hand, I love making Summer feel safe and comfortable. The words can wait.
Many people in the political class say and do horrible things. The character assassination and outright lies have escalated to unbelievable levels.
Charlie Kirk and Rob Reiner were on opposite poles of the political debate, but they each recognized the humanity of the people with whom they disagreed.
“When people stop talking, really bad stuff starts,” Kirk has been quoted as saying. “When you stop having a human connection with someone you disagree with, it becomes a lot easier to want to commit violence against that group.”
Reiner did not mince words when Kirk was assassinated — he called it an “absolute horror” that should never happen to anyone. “I don’t care what your political beliefs are, that’s not a solution to solving problems,” he said.
The aftermath of a person’s violent death is a ghastly time to be condemning their political views. Whatever their politics, they don’t deserve to be brutally murdered.
The irony is that Kirk and Reiner seem to have been similar in their willingness to engage and befriend people on the opposite side. It’s frightening to see peacemakers slain.
You would think we could agree that murder is not something to be celebrated or advocated.
Still, I have no control over such hateful and hurtful comments; I can only control my own response, and so I quote myself from the day after Kirk’s murder:
“I have been called to love my neighbor, and everyone I meet is a neighbor, and the ultimate solution to what ails us as a species is to consider the intrinsic value of every life we encounter day by day, minute by minute.
“Only when we turn from the rage and the hatred will we begin to see hints of the peace on Earth that every rational person seeks.
“I can’t remove the evil roaming about this troubled world. All I can control is my own heart, and I choose to love God and to love you.”
“If this be my destiny …” said the old man who hijacked my body, as I stood after spending most of the last three and a half hours in the same easy chair. I needed to pause and get my sea legs before I walked to the kitchen to plug in my laptop and pick up my journal. I’m 211 pages into my 30th journal since I got serious about journaling 10-plus years ago, this one 240 pages for me to apply ink to paper.
“If This Be My Destiny” is the title of a comic book story from my childhood. Maybe I’ll look up which comic book story a little later. For now it’s a launching point.
If this be my destiny, I guess it’s a pretty good one. God bless the broken road that led me straight to this place, a comfortable house in the country filled with memorabilia from two lifetimes, mine and the precious soul who built it with my assistance, whose ashes still patiently wait on a shelf for their final resting place. It’s not a large house, but perhaps a little bigger than one person can handle by himself, or perhaps I haven’t been trying hard enough. Again, if this be my destiny, I really have no cause to complain.
If anything has fallen short of expectations, I would say it was me. Much is expected of he to whom much has been given, and I ought to have made more of my life than I would have expected. I am not thoroughly disappointed in myself, but that’s partially because it appears I still have some time to fulfill those expectations — although no one knows the number of his days, so I really ought to keep working on that.
I’m not saying this in hopes someone will say, “Nonsense, you have done thus and so.” It’s just an honest assessment of what I’ve done with the gifts God gave me. I dare say most of us might say the same thing if asked to give an honest assessment.
The appeal of the “It’s a Wonderful Life” story is that George Bailey is Every Man. I think every person has had moments where we think, “I wonder if anything I’ve done has ever made any difference in anyone’s life. Would anything be substantially changed in anyone’s life if I hadn’t been there?”
If we examine that question — as George must in his story — of course the world would be different, and substantially less than it is, if any of us had not been here to lessen other people’s burdens, to brighten other people’s lives, or to love the other people we love.
It’s a wonderful life that we share with one another. That’s why we mourn whenever any of those other people departs this mortal plane, which is in fact our destiny in the end.
I have not done everything one might say I was destined to do, and I have not been all one might say I was put on this earth to be. That’s why I am grateful to apparently have a ways to go on this journey — although, if something unexpected happens and I’m gone tomorrow, I really must thank God for this most amazing life.
(P.S. Of course. “If This Be My Destiny” is the title of the story in Amazing Spider-Man #31 that continues in issues 32 and 33 and cumulatively marks the high point in writer-artist Steve Ditko’s work on his character. If I’m going to wax philosophically over the title of a comic book story, let it be that one.)
As long as I’m dipping into the archives for a day, why not some shameless self-promotion? Here are the titular entries from the two books I published this year, See the World! and The Man Who Crossed WhimsyAvenue.
It might be too late to get them in time for Christmas, or maybe not —ask your favorite bookseller.
(Yes, you may recall I set a crazy goal to publish 12 books in 2025. What can I say? It was a crazy goal.)
See the world!
I have a new resolution: See the world.
It’s not what you think. I’m not planning to reallocate my resources so I can go explore ruins or exotic islands and rain forests and teeming cities.
No: I aim to see the world.
I resolve to look around me and see not just the sleeping dogs and dust bunnies but the way the sun brightens and nourishes everything it touches — and the rain, too, in its turn. I plan to be aware of how the air fills my lungs differently when I consciously take in a breath as opposed to leaving the automatic pilot in control.
I plan to notice the echinacea and the compass plants that have bloomed in recent days, and I intend to watch the bees and the beetles visit the new flowers to do their thing. I plan to watch the pelicans fly high overhead and contemplate what they see from their vantage point.
When I resolve to see the world, I expect to see things that sadden as much as delight me, but I expect most of all to see things that fascinate me, for the world is nothing if not fascinating. See how much there is to see! Perhaps that’s why our eyes glaze over and we forget to look: There is just so much, and when we try to see it all, our senses overload. But how much we miss when we pass over and shut it down!
I’m not talking about the sensory overload from doom-scrolling and media shouting and artificial intelligence and algorithms — no, I’m talking about what I see when I lift my eyes from the screen to the hills, to the sky, and to the wonders right next to me, just beyond my reach, whether it’s a rabbit frozen in my back yard hoping I don’t see or it’s a weed growing between the cracks in an ancient sidewalk.
See the world! I’m not talking about taking a journey through soul-sapping airports for hours and days to see what there is to see far, far away, although you’re certainly welcome to do so. I’m talking about seeing the world where you’re planted, being aware of the wonder and the beauty and, yes, the appalling and the ugly, the right here and the right now.
We grow accustomed to our surroundings, to our world, to our quotidian, so much so that we stop seeing it, and in doing so we rob ourselves of life itself. We are meant to see the world — every part of it, every second — and to drink it in, and savor it, and change what we can and accept what we can’t, but to see it all.
Look! Taste and see! Isn’t it fascinating?
The Man Who Crossed Whimsy Avenue
A man was walking along, deep in thought, lost in worries about this and that and another thing, when suddenly he realized he had stumbled into a wonderland.
Everything was bright colors and magic buses and this can’t be real, but it was real enough and whimsically nonsensical.
“You there!” cried a friendly enough looking police officer. “Why are you dressed so drably? Why aren’t you smiling? Are you quite all right?”
“I’m not sure,” said the man. “Where is this?”
“Ah, it’s another one,” the officer said gently. “You were walking along all worried, right?”
“I don’t see how that’s anyone’s —“
“Right, right, right,” smiled the officer. “That’s absolutely correct, it’s not my business. Well enough. You just didn’t notice you’d crossed Whimsy Avenue. No worries, you’re going to be fine, move along.”
And the officer walked away. Now the man looked around and saw that, no matter where he looked, he saw something impossibly amazing.
“Here now, watch where you’re going,” said a cat with a cockney accent in a tuxedo.
“Woof,” said a friendly dog who sniffed at his hand and looked around for balls.
Above, the sky was orange — not the majestic orange of a setting sun, but the orange of an orange (you know, the fruit) or construction paper.
“I can show you the way to Normal,” huffed a gray-haired woman in glasses, “but you won’t like it there, not ever again.”
And that was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. It seemed the woman had been a tense old thing until one day she happened upon Whimsy Avenue — although she found some people called it Whimsy Street, for some reason — and she never looked back, although she did still tend to fuss about.
“Don’t mind me, I’m just an old fuss bucket. No harm intended,” she would tell people.
There may be some tales to tell about the man and the fussy gray-haired woman on Whimsy Avenue, if I can find my way back there myself …
“Peace on the earth, good will to men, and there are some other words there,” he sang.
She looked up from her knitting.
“You’re kidding,” she said. “You don’t know the words to ‘It Came Upon a Midnight Clear’?”
He furrowed his brow. “Not all of them.”
“That carol is one of the —”
“That’s why God invented hymnals,” he said. “We sing the words off the page. We don’t have to memorize them.”
“Oh, honey.”
“What?!”
“How can you sing a song like you mean it, if you don’t know what you’re singing?”
“Come on, it’s Sunday morning, we have to sing, I only had two cups of coffee, and now you want me to sing like I mean it?”
“At least know the words,” she said. “Get your phone out. Look it up.”
“Fine,” he said, pulling out the phone that he always carried in his shirt pocket. He tapped out “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear lyrics” and touched the button that said, “Search.”
(Actually, he typed “it came,” and the autofill gave him a list of options — “upon a midnight clear” was the second option, behind “it came from outer space.”)
“All right, here goes,” he said, reading the words out loud. “It came upon a midnight clear, that glorious song of old, from angels bending near the earth to touch their harps of gold. ‘Peace on the earth, good will to men, from heaven’s all-gracious king.’ The world in solemn stillness lay, to hear the angels sing.”
He looked up. “Kind of pretty, I guess.”
“Keep going,” she sighed.
“Still through the cloven skies they come with peaceful wings unfurled, and still their heavenly music floats o’er all the weary world; above its sad and lowly plains, they bend on hovering wing, and ever o’er its Babel sounds the blessed angels sing.”
Now, he didn’t need a prompt.
“And ye, beneath life’s crushing load, whose forms are bending low, who toil along the climbing way with painful steps and slow, Look now! for glad and golden hours come swiftly on the wing. O, rest beside the weary road and hear the angels sing.
“For lo! the days are hastening on, by prophet seen of old, when with the ever-circling years shall come the time foretold when peace over all the earth its ancient splendors fling, and the whole world send back the songs which now the angels sing.”
His voice wavered over the last few words, and he composed himself for a few seconds before saying, “Huh. It’s like a story.”
“A pretty good story,” she said softly.
“I guess it helps to know what you’re singing,” he admitted.
“You goof,” she laughed. “Aren’t you the romantic who whispered to me last night, ‘You ask me if there’ll come a time when I grow tired of you? Never, my love!’”
“That’s different,” he laughed.
“You know all the words to THAT song,” she giggled.
“It means something!”
“And now you know ‘It Came Upon a Midnight Clear’ means something, too.”
“I guess it does,” he said quietly. He tapped on his phone for a few more seconds. “Wow.”
“What did you do?”
“I found another story,” he said. “Check this out: ‘The First Noel, the angels did say, was to certain poor shepherds in fields where they lay …’”
