How I Relate to Another Being is How I’m Living Life Now: The House of My Hearing Has Many Doors

Relationships are, clearly, at the heart of our lives; or maybe I should say that for most of us, they are our heart. Especially a marriage and those longstanding partnerships. They can be so miraculous, exciting, engaging, frightening, painful, and confounding that we lose perspective on the central role they play in our lives. Something comes up, a disagreement or hurt, and we focus exclusively on that. To the degree we feel engaged, we want to disengage. We can lose sight of how the relationship influences not only how we think of ourselves but all other relationships.

 

Despite the many relationships we have, we often think of ourselves as me-alone. Me separate from others, separate even from our world. But we’re never as fully separate as we might imagine. And core relationships have enormous power to reveal that. By recognizing this as a possibility, the relationship itself comes alive. The character of our lives improves.

 

Recently, I noticed that any marriage, or any core relationship, models for us what relationship itself means. It can become a school for learning how to deepen other, important emotional connections. For example, each friendship, in its own, unique way contains the possibility of developing a degree of the openness and emotional intimacy that a core relationship might develop⎼ a similar caring and being cared for, mutual discovery, trust, and exploration. Or if the core is dominated by resistance, pain, dishonesty, and projections, so might other relationships.

 

Such discovery and caring makes us vulnerable. When we’re open, loving, we’re vulnerable. That’s just what caring means. When we care we don’t wear bulletproof vests or build concrete walls around us. When we’re “open” our senses and feelings reach out. When we reach out, others can reach in. And this dynamic helps us grow in character.

 

This, of course, can also be frightening. It can scare us into shutting down. But being frightened can itself be a sign that something we’re feeling is meaningful and worthwhile. That we’re in a state where what we don’t know about the future of the relationship, or anything, might exceed what we do know. And we’re willing to risk that.

 

And this not-knowing is always with us. We might assume that when we’re open or vulnerable we’re less safe. But maybe we’re safer. If we’re more able to perceive what’s there, what’s real⎼ if we’re more cognizant of just how much of the future we don’t know, and more aware of what we’re doing and saying, then we can make better decisions. A relationship can help us recognize what’s real.

 

We can better recognize that right here, in this moment, this person⎼ is my life. I breathe; they breathe. I feel; they feel. Zen teacher and author Thich Nhat Hanh called this inter-being⎼ we inter-are with others. Likewise, Australian Zen teacher Susan Murphy borrows an Aboriginal term, us-two, to describe relationships. Our relationship with another person, being, or place is not between separate, disconnected things. Instead, me-and-you and everything are dynamically creating this moment together.

 

As I sit with them, whoever they are, I sit with myself….

 

*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.

The Power of a New Word: What Deepens and Clarifies Our Readiness to Feel, Hold, and Cherish Our World Can Save Us

Learning a new word can galvanize our thinking and reveal feelings and realities once deeply buried. Of course, the ability to think, speak, and write in an organized language itself does this in extraordinarily complex and diverse ways. Language becomes such an integral part of us it can filter and augment all we experience. Once conceived and developed, human languages revolutionized all of history. Maybe, in a small way, learning certain new words can also be revolutionary.

 

Just recently, I have found this to be so. Susan Murphy, in her new book A Fire Runs Through All Things: Zen Koans For Facing The Climate Crisis, gifts us with important insights and powerful new words. One such word is hyperobject, coined by philosopher Timothy Morton. The term refers to unfolding processes that are beyond the scale to which our human comprehension has evolved. The processes are almost impossible to pin down and block our normal methods for sensing and responding to danger. But are all such processes dangerous? Aren’t many healing and creative?

 

The danger posed by climate change is one such hyperobject. In our new situation today, human life in large scale societies, maybe all life, is endangered by the climate shifts and instability that we’re already experiencing; and it’s getting worse.

 

But I’d argue that the danger posed by DJT, with his cronies and devotees, is a close second. The two are arguably inter-related, as the second increases the depth of the first. And in neither case can we, nor have we as a people comprehended the danger.

 

I don’t think many of us in the U.S., maybe more so for those of us privileged by this culture, have really comprehended what life under DJT would be like. Maybe many people of color, women, LGBTQ+ and others have unfortunately an easier time imagining the oppressive possibility. They might better imagine what life would be like with such a violent person in charge who’s trying to be a dictator, who expounds hate as a political tactic and puts his own cravings and image as more important than anyone else’s life or sanity.

 

Can we imagine a government that considers truth and science as unimportant or a threat? That rips away the rights and constitutionally protected political voice of the people? That destroys the rule of law and robs all of us who are not active supporters of DJT of the legal assumption of innocence unless proved guilty?

 

But at the same time, there’s enough of the “old” world left to provide the entertainments, consumerism, distractions that helped foster the crisis we face. There’s an entire virtual world available to encourage us to hide from reality. We can see, smell, and read about damaging fires, floods, hurricanes, wars, etc., notice the shifting and diminishing animal populations and extinctions. Notice the horrors of DJT threatening judges and their children and displaying manufactured images of President Biden in chains dumped in the back of a pickup truck.

 

And then we watch tv, a movie, or sporting event or get involved in social media and everything feels “normal” again….

 

*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.

Reading, and Sensing an Immense World: It Takes a Universe

A wonderful friend and former colleague recommended a book to me that I found fascinating. It’s called An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, by Ed Yong. It speaks to so many issues and concerns of our world today.

 

We both live the truth, and an illusion. The world we perceive can be so clear, immediate, and vital to us. Yet it sits imbedded in innumerable other worlds, universes, though we don’t and can’t perceive almost any of them. We mistake what we see for all that is there. What we perceive is not the world but one our human brain and body have evolved to perceive.

 

For example, Yong points out that we humans “cannot sense the faint electric fields that sharks and platypuses can…[nor] the magnetic fields that robins and sea turtles detect.” Our ears can’t hear the ultrasonic calls of hummingbirds or the infrasonic speech of elephants and whales. We can’t perceive the infrared radiation that is the heart of what snakes detect or the ultraviolet light birds and bees sense every moment.

 

Each species has what Yong, borrowing from Baltic-German zoologist Jakob von Uexkull, called an umwelt or perceptual world. A tick does not perceive a tree, green leaves, blue skies. It doesn’t ignore them. It simply is incapable of sensing or knowing them; they are outside its umwelt. Likewise, we can’t sense the tick’s world.

 

Too often we ignore, or are ignorant of these co-existing realties, and we harm other species by imposing our perceptual system bias on them. For example, our submarines use underwater noises that confuse whales and drown out their calls. The glass panes in our homes appear as bodies of water to a bat’s sonar. We hurt our cats and dogs by interfering in their use of their primary sense activity, sniffing, and unknowingly impose our human visual bias on them.

 

If we can’t understand what the other worlds are like to live in, Yong points out maybe we can use our reason and imagination to honor and recognize them. For example, we can imaginatively enter the world of a dog, or even more so, an elephant. Scents, unlike light, do not move in straight lines. They go around corners, up and down, swirl, and twist in all directions. Humans have fine noses. But a dog not only has more sense receptors, a larger olfactory bulb and scent-brain than we do, but a more complicated nasal structure.

 

When we humans exhale, we purge odors from our nose. But each nostril of a dog is divided in two so it can exhale carbon dioxide while inhaling more aromas. This is one reason they can detect low blood sugar levels or tumors in humans or discern a single fingerprint on a microscopic slide even after it was outdoors for a week. They can smell in the air an oncoming storm.

 

For dogs, everything around them includes the scent not only of what’s here, now, but the past and future. And smell has the most direct link to the brain of any sense. And since that link goes right to the brain’s emotional center, I imagine their world is dominated by emotions. Some might doubt the rich emotional lives of many animals but this science argues otherwise….

 

*To read the whole article, please click on this link to The Good Men Project.

 

The Dread That Was Sitting Beside Me Was Now Me: We Appear Like Two So We Can Be One

It finally caught me and then my wife. A thing we have dreaded; a thing that has pursued all of us for over 3 years and has touched everyone in one way or another in multiple times and ways. That has caught most of us. That we hoped and might have imagined was over. COVID.

 

In 2022, the CDC did a study of Americans 16 and older and found 77.5% of us had antibodies from infection. Clearly more of us have been affected since 2022, at least two more, and all the people we all know who have been sick in 2023.

 

It was said, over and over, we’re all in this together. And that is the most fearful thing, and the most hopeful. That maybe we will wake from a collective sleep and realize our mutual relationship, or that it’s not even a relationship but a continuum, or web of interrelations.

 

In the most basic way, someone passes the illness to us. We may pass it to someone else. Which gets to another part of this I had nightmares about: getting others sick. My spouse as number one. I couldn’t stand the thought of her sick, especially from me. She tested negative Thursday. But this morning, Friday, a sniffle, a cough, and a positive test. And I was scared all over again, but for her. When we realized I was sick, we had started sleeping in separate rooms, wore masks, etc. But at home, with only one bathroom and kitchen, isolation proved impossible.

 

The symptoms started for me on Tuesday. My wife and I were in New York City, on one of our few vacations since COVID. I was climbing the steps to go into The Museum of Natural History, a museum I knew well in my youth but not in recent years. And I tripped. One foot seemed to fall asleep on me. Then it happened again when we took stairs down from the fourth-floor dinosaur wing. And again, descending from the third floor. I realized something was off. I feared a stroke, but everything else in me was working perfectly⎼ or so it seemed.

 

Then at night, after a wonderful dinner, we returned to our hotel. And my head started feeling too heavy to sit on my shoulders and was spinning from the weight. My throat was absurdly dry and scratchy. My stomach a bit queasy. Most of you know the signs. And now I knew.

 

When I turned out the light, I realized that lying with me in bed was something so big it had become myth sized. Larger than any one human. Darker than night. A myth that felt very modern but in one form or another has been with humans forever, or maybe more so once we moved from grassy plains to enclosed spaces. To big groups instead of small ones. A possibly deadly illness that we could catch and pass on from one person to the next.

 

And I was frightened. Here it was. And I knew not what would happen to me or to us. Suddenly, I was not in my own hands. I realized we were never totally in our own hands.

 

And just as I fell asleep, someone knocked on the door of our room, The noise woke us up, and was repeated again and again. I yelled out in response, “Who is it?” “Me,” they answered. Was this a puzzle posed by the universe? “Who?”

 

I got up and went to the door. I looked through the peephole. A young woman was standing there, apparently alone, but my view was obstructed. I opened the door. Once she saw my face, she knew she was at the wrong door, apologized, and turned away.

 

It took a while, but finally peace and quiet replaced the knocking.

 

The next day, I tested positive….

 

*To read the whole post, please go to this link to The Good Men Project.

What Might Being at Peace Mean? The Deep Joy Embedded in Presence that Inclines Us to Laughter

Each morning, before meditating, I follow a version of the Buddhist practice of dedicating the meditation to relieving the suffering of others. I wish that I, my wife, and anyone close to me who is suffering, or every being anywhere, be at peace. The practice calms me. But I must admit that it’s not always clear what being at peace would realistically be like in our world today or if my notion of peace is like anyone else’s.

 

It’s clear to me that saying it and meaning it, doing it with sincerity, is possibly a beginning of an answer in itself. Telling ourselves being at peace is possible is a door to being there. Or maybe it’s a door to persuading ourselves we deserve it.

 

So, what do I mean by being at peace? It can sound to many of us like contentment or being satisfied; and it does share something with those two states of heart and mind. Yet, it’s closer to calmness or happiness, both of which might be components of peace.

 

But contentment, satisfaction, and even happiness have a bad rep in many quarters today. There’s so much that is terrifying right now, so many threats, so much injustice, how can we want peace? How can we be content, happy, or satisfied? Don’t we want discontent, fury, and outrage? Don’t we want determination and commitment to change?

 

And so many of us, even critics in my own mind, seem to doubt we deserve it. It seems we’ve been educated in discontent with ourselves.

 

I think fostering discontent with political policies that harm people is simply responsible behavior. But discontent that arises from conducting a war with ourselves is an entirely different story. It assists those who would do us harm. It undermines our work to create a more compassionate and equitable country by undermining our ability to be compassionate with ourselves. Being at war with ourselves exhausts inner resources that could help us imagine positive actions to take, and then take them.

 

And maybe recognizing this is a key to feeling at peace ⎼ accepting and being able to live in our own minds and bodies. ‘Accepting’ not in the sense of being unaware of the reality of what we are and what we face, but instead very cognizant of it. It’s not easy to accept that we can’t always be strong or feel good or know the answer, or to not automatically attack whatever feels threatening. Being at peace begins with not being at war with ourselves.

 

Our thoughts often take the form of stories, or internally created and enacted stage-plays or scripts. “All the world is a stage,” said Shakespeare. These plays can be noticed through mindful observation and are described not only in meditation teachings but the psychological approaches of Transactional Analysis and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

 

Self-criticism can be helpful, if it motivates us to be aware of painful patterns of thought and behavior. But it can also separate our inner world into warring parties. The self-critic is one character or side in the drama. The criticized is another. Too often, we react to the critic as if it was a celestial judge. When we abstract ourselves from the moments of our lives and try to reduce our world to only an idea of it, we suffer. Our ideals can be impossible to live up to, yet we all have them. We are all imperfect, full of contradictions. To the degree we hold an ideal too tightly, to that same degree we can hurt ourselves for not meeting that ideal…

 

*To read the whole blog, please go to The Good Men Project.

Touching Life in All Its Forms: Summer, Walking, and Treating Living as Learning

I so enjoy spring and summer. Despite the drought this spring, and the continual rains that have so far marked the summer, I feel like I’m once again a child on vacation. I hear the song “Summertime” in my head, and feel that every day I can play, do something new, create, get together with friends. Everything is so alive. In both spring and summer, so many birds, peepers, cicadas, etc. speak up, and seem to speak to me.

 

So, taking a walk during the summer or spring, in any natural setting, or in the blocks or parks of a city, immerses us in this beauty. It can be a meditation if we bring full attention to it. We don’t need to do a formal walking meditation. We just walk normally, and let the exercise remind us it’s not just what we do that determines how we feel, but how much awareness we bring to it.

 

Since the beginning of the pandemic, two things I’ve been doing even more frequently than before is reading about and practicing meditation, and taking long walks or hikes. And I’ve found a few things that increase the joy I have when walking. One particular reading that inspired me was Old Path White Clouds, the Story of the Buddha, by the revered Zen teacher and activist Thich Nhat Hanh. It was recommended by a friend and co-worker. The book gives us a wonderful insight into the deep history of meditation and mindfulness practice.

 

In the book, the Buddha is described as walking “just to enjoy the walking, unconcerned about arriving anywhere at all…[not] anxious or impatient… [T]heir steps were slow, balanced, peaceful…yet they covered a good distance each day.”

 

I’d like to walk like this. How did the Buddha and followers do this? One method described was making a moment of walking a moment of practice and potential insight, “observing each breath,” step, and part of the breath. In other writings, Thich Nhat Hanh explicates further how to be at one with the walking, so we notice the whole universe walking together.

 

It’s so easy to get distracted or lost in thoughts or worries, or to lose awareness of where we are. So, whatever reminds us to pay attention to where are, who we’re with, what our body-mind is telling us, can help our overall sense of well-being.

 

Even before we start, we can stop. Close our eyes partly or fully, and just greet our body, be aware of what’s going on right now. Or we feel our feet on the earth, or the pace and depth of breath, how tense or relaxed are our shoulders and belly. Then we walk.

 

Walking, the capacity for upright, bipedal movement, is, after all, a major defining characteristic of being human. It can be great fun when we do it just to do it and it’s not solely a means of transporting us from where we are to where we aren’t. Or we don’t do it only to meet exercise goals recorded by devices like a fitbit or apple watch or satisfy societal created images.

 

Such motivations can lead us to walk only to get it done, to check off a box in an accomplishment ledger. This focuses us on the future, and we miss what’s here, now. And 10,000 steps can seem a lot; one step can be simple and easy….

 

*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.

The Darkness Closest to Us: Don’t Get So Absorbed in the Universe of Words that We Lose the Universe of Being

One thing I love about many of my good friends is that they’re honest with me and willing to find and kindly tell me about holes in what I’ve said or argued, and to hear what I didn’t speak.

 

A great friend and college roommate found a point in a recent blog of mine that I had left unexplained and that had filled him with questions.

 

The lines were: Black holes the shape of trees, buildings, and hillsides stood silhouetted against a gray sky, a massive gray cloud filled by moonlight, yet with no moon visible. And the darkness appeared to begin in close to myself and lessen as it spread out into the distance. And he asked: “How did the darkness appear closer to yourself?” Or “why did it appear darker the closer you came to yourself?” Did you realize the implications of what you said?

 

Perceptually, the world was darker closer to myself because the only physical illumination was far off, from the lights of a nearby city, or from the moon itself.  But I rebelled against my own first understanding of the psychological or metaphorical meaning of the line. I heard “dark” as meaning sinister, something negative or evil. But I didn’t mean sinister or evil.

 

I later realized other meanings of dark, as in unknown or unknowable. As in beyond words. As in unrealized possibility. As in the unknown before from which everything after emerges. Before we speak there is an emptiness, a silence. Buddhists, Taoists, mystics speak of this.

 

Lao Tzu spoke about the emptiness out of which the universe, or fullness of life, emerged:

“In the beginning of heaven and earth there were no words,

Words came out of the womb of matter…”

 

Of course, since we don’t know what will happen or what will emerge from the womb of time and matter, we can feel frightened. We don’t know if what emerges will be helpful or hurtful. We don’t know if we’ll have the ability to face the unknown or do something with it we can be proud of.

 

We often think we know so much about ourselves, maybe too much. We might think we are so clear, obvious, unchanging. In fact, we can never fully know or fully capture ourselves or be contained in any number of words, thoughts, judgments.

 

Each word, each thought is an abstraction, a recording, or occasionally, as philosopher J. L. Austin argued, a performance or action. Think about an officiant saying. “I now pronounce you man and wife.” Or when we are overcome with beauty and all we say is “wow.” Words facilitate remembering and can help us evaluate, analyze, think about something. They can be so beautiful⎼ or painful to see or hear. They can lead to rumination or take us out of it. There’s so much that just can’t be spoken. Yet here we are talking.

 

In every moment, we have this choice….

 

*To read the whole article, please click on this link to The Good Men Project.

 

I hope you have a wonderful celebration of Juneteenth, and a Happy Father’s Day.

Companions Who Walk with Us Moment by Moment

COVID has been devastating to our communities and culture, terrifying to so many of us. But it had one positive result for me, and others. Our relationship with other species in our neighborhoods was enriched. As we became more distanced from other people, birds, turkeys, fox, peepers, possum, deer, bear, rabbits, eagles, owls⎼ all our non-human neighbors, depending on where we lived, jumped more frequently to the center of our attention, and became, sort of, friends.

 

Of course, the bear that crushed our bird feeder one early morning and knocked on our front door was a little scary and we had to chase it away. And one night at about 3:00 am one of our cats stood up on our bed, hissed loudly, and woke us up to a raccoon coming in the cat door. The raccoon got stuck and I had to push him out with an oak cane.

 

In the spring morning, the gold and purple finches, cardinals, and red winged black birds added color and songs to the air, and later, the peepers such comfort. And taking walks with such companions as oak trees leaning against each other to speak, and ravens coughing as they flew overhead added wonders to my day.

 

But hearing about the climate emergency and the extinction crisis we face⎼ I felt so bereft. I felt such grief over the increasing instability of nature itself, weather disasters, and the loss of species ⎼ for example, frogs, peepers, and salamanders, about one-third of amphibians ⎼ 12% of bird species, all threatened with extinction, as well as ash trees which used to fill the forests near my home. We must all take this emergency very seriously.

 

These species are not just companions. They are intimate mirrors of our lives and mental state that we can see them everywhere. The deep red of the Japanese maple in the garden, which is more of a bush than a tree⎼ what amazing feeling is right there. A crow flies overhead and its harsh call echoes in our body.

 

We often think of ourselves as located behind these two eyes, a mind isolated in this shell of a body, a shell within a shell within a shell. And only within this shell can we locate what is most intimately ourselves. Or we think of the red color and harsh call as coming from “outside” us.

 

Yet, is not that Japanese maple and the crow also, in some way, intimately ourselves?

Don’t we carry those colors and sounds in us? We don’t just hear and see and feel them. We give them life. The red of the cardinal is how our mind gifts color to the electromagnetic or light waves bouncing off the bird’s breast. Color is the way we perceive a wavelength of light to which our eyes are sensitive.

 

The harshness of the crow’s voice is how our mind translates the sound wave frequencies emitted by the bird. That red, that song is intimately us. No us, no song, just wavelengths.

Because conscious perception is awareness aware of itself, it simultaneously looks within as it looks out. It is a deeply felt mystery that we live. When we stop playing the shell game, the world is most intimately ourselves.

 

*To read the whole article, please go to the Good Men Project.

 

A Strange Illness: Reflecting on What Plagues Us and What Links Us to Everything

Since COVID, it’s clearer than ever that illness is a lot stranger than we might think. Illness isn’t just a matter of catching a bug or being a victim of a pandemic or exposure to environmental pests or pollution, or of aging⎼ although pandemics, bugs, aging, and the environment are certainly involved. So much seems to be involved.

 

When I was in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone, West Africa, I caught a bug, or a few bugs of different kinds. And when I became ill and had to leave the village and country where I lived, I found out the people I left behind felt responsible for my illness. Not that they thought they should have taken better care of me. They believed someone in the village had caused me to get sick. For them, the germ of all illness was bad thoughts and intentions spread from one villager to another.

 

And in the U. S. many feel illness is a sign of weakness; that we or the sick person is somehow deficient, not strong enough to fight it. At work, we might denigrate someone who stays home to treat an illness ⎼ or we used to before COVID. Now, we hopefully just wish them to get well.

 

Ill can have several meanings and connotations, most are relative or comparative. To be ill is to be in an abnormal, unfavorable, undesirable state, and that we’re hurting, threatened, suffering, or have some defined condition called a disease.

 

In Buddhism, the word for suffering is Dukkha, although the translation is debated. Zen teacher Steve Hagen, in his wonderful book Buddhism Plain and Simple: The Practice of Being Aware, Right Now, Every Day, says Dukkha is in opposition to Sukkha, or satisfaction, so instead of suffering we get unsatisfactory. But more accurately, he says, imagine a bicycle wheel out of kilter. Every time the wheel spins around to the “off” spot, there’s a bounce or wobble that’s bothersome, produces pain, and makes us unhappy. Suffering is being out of kilter. Another Zen teacher, David Loy, analyzes suffering as the sense of something  missing, lacking, in ourselves, in life.

 

We can see suffering all around us. In Buddhism, the first of the four noble truths Buddha realized in his enlightenment was Dukkha, recognizing suffering, being out of kilter is just part of life. The other three are that there’s a cause of suffering, a way to let go of or cease suffering, and a path to that cessation. So, is all life tied to illness? Is suffering the same as illness? Or a response to it?

 

Part of me says, “you know what it is to be ill.” But do I? I know when I hurt and something in my body is off.  But when I try to define illness, I can get lost in the complexity. And sometimes I am ill or in pain, but I’m not suffering. The pain sort of reassures me I’m alive.

 

There are conspiracy theories, exaggerations, lies about illness, especially the pandemic⎼ but there’s also science. The mind and body, despite having separate labels are never separate; they are two words for ways to view one reality. When we feel powerless, or depressed emotionally, for example, we’re depressed physically. Likewise, when we do things like mindfulness meditation, we improve immune response, digestion, heart rate, etc. and the breadth of our awareness. We don’t suffer as much, depending not on what’s happening but on our response to it….

 

 

*To read the whole piece, please click on this link to The Good Men Project.

Poetry the Universe Writes to Itself: Aging and the Gifts of Friendship

Friends can bring us back to ourselves. Over Thanksgiving with old friends, we each see ourselves in the others. Three of us have known each other for 57 years and we’ve come together for over 40 of those years to share the holiday together. We were freshman in the same college dorm at the University of Michigan. Our future wives entered our lives not long afterwards, anywhere from one to seven or eight years later. We see in each other how we’ve aged, faced threats and tribulations, pains, and losses, inspirations, and successes. How we are facing life now.

 

And it’s all out there for us to talk about. Right in front of us. Each friend with their own gifts and limitations. We give each other tips, perspectives to help us prepare for the next months, years, moment. We talk about illnesses, present and past work experiences, roof repairs, water pics, other friends, podcasts, music videos, movies, books, philosophy, and sleep. Sleep is so tenuous for half of us who, each night, have no idea how much or where in the house we will sleep. Nothing is assumed. We speak of dreams and family members. Deaths and losses. The threats to our world.

 

And then there’s the joy. So much to be grateful for. For the food, certainly. And sure, it’s an old stereotype, but all the men played football in one form or another when we were young, yet none of us attended a football game after our sophomore year. After a few years of college, it seemed so meaningless and violent. But sometime in our 50s, we began to pay attention once again and listen for scores. Especially Michigan v Ohio State. This year, we watched together, shouting and cheering. Even the women were drawn in by the drama and emotion. And then my wife and I had to leave early to return home. Ohio State was ahead by 3 points.

 

But about 3 hours later, still on the road, my wife checked her phone for the score. Michigan 45, Ohio State 23. We won. We actually won. We called our friends. What a celebration ensued.

 

And when we arrived home ⎼ we have 3 cats, but we couldn’t find any of them. They hide from our cat-sitter even though she feeds and talks to them. Sometimes, they punish us for leaving by not showing up. But this time, in 5 minutes or so, one emerged from the basement, one appeared by the door as we brought in the suitcases. Twenty minutes or so later, the third came up behind us, crying. They all cried for food and contact. And when my wife and I sat down later to eat dinner, they sat with us.

 

This year, something extra sat with us. There was a darkness in the house not attributable to the night. A warning in the air, or in me. How many more of these returns do we have? Aging is not about winning but presence. In the dark was a reminder to take in this moment more deeply. To embrace it as much as possible. To do everything I could to give back. This is all there is ⎼ feel it. Enjoy it. Be thankful for what we can be thankful for. Be kind, caring, even if it hurts. Pet the cats, love my wife. And maybe we will let more of the light in….

 

**If you live in Georgia, please vote on Tuesday, Dec. 6, to help protect your right to vote, the right for women to make their own health care choices, to protect the environment, Medicare, and Social Security ⎼ to help stop the politics of hate. Bring water, a photo ID, and friends. No matter where you live, you can help get out accurate voting information.

 

***To read the whole post, please go to The Good Men Project.