Listen to Wisdom, whether screaming or whispering and, let Wisdom win your heart every time.

The Book of Proverbs in the Hebrew Bible has at least four different words to describe folly, foolishness and the person, the fool, whose life embodies the ways and means of folly. I didn't know that until I read a paper by Gary D. Nation. If you google him, you'll find his paper, "Character Deficiency Syndrom".

I confess I qualify by my actions for a medal in all four depths of foolishness. Nation says the simplest fool doesn't know the consequences of their foolishness. At the next level the fool knows the consequence, but doesn't believe they will suffer such. At the next level the fool completely understands the consequences, knows they will be experienced, but doesn't care. This fool has a "bring it on" attitude and may, according to one proverb, be incurable. Somewhere even deeper into foolishness, the Hebrews had a word for it, is the fool who mocks every thing and every one, to the point of having no standing in the community,  For this fool, nothing has value and creation is a hopeless, loveless, faithless blob to be used and abused.

What's the antidote to foolishness and the only hope for fools? Wisdom.

I define wisdom as the experience and trust of one's higher power in the moment of choice. This definition, I realize can cut both ways. A fool, experiencing themselves as their higher power in the moment of choice, can I suppose be called wise in their own foolishness. My hope is to push the metaphor in the other direction. The Book of Proverbs does this very thing. In Proverbs Wisdom opposes foolishness, every level of foolishness, even the deepest, most pernicious.

Wisdom...I know I have a choice, the choice between virtue and vice. That's as simply as I know how to describe the vast moral world open to every human being. I found this description in John Calvin's comment on Proverbs 8, so don't give me credit. What I can say is this:  I've chosen vice. I've also chosen virtue. I know right from wrong. Vice is wrong. Virtue is right. Wisdom is the voice of virtue in the moment of choice. Right now wisdom screams and whispers and the wise listen and follow and the fools heap up the foolishness. Be wise. Live wise. Listen to Wisdom, whether screaming or whispering  and, let Wisdom win your heart every time.

Updates available...Install updates...How do you update yourself?

Install updates…don’t you wish it was that easy to update yourself?  You'd choose the available updates  then you’d just reboot.  Can this work for you? It works for me, but I have to work it!

I want to push this metaphor...install updates

What – updates get created:  someone constantly watches the interaction of users and the program or application; they receive reports and feedback and decide to respond. They create an update.

So what? - What difference does the update make? The update fixes bugs; adds features; refines underlying programming; overhauls graphics; what else? Complete overhaul? Add your own..."So What's"

Now what - Fix bugs...let this be a living parable. I think of a parable as an open story, every metaphor ready to dip me into a stream of running meaning. Install updates...list the bugs you need to work on; list the features you want to add to your life. I want to add a deeper sense of my own emotional life. To do this I've decided to simplify my life by becoming aware of my tendency to "stay busy" in order to avoid contact with my own emotional experiences.

 Refine the underlying program...here's a tough one. Try this: reframing. I had an awful exit experience from a 35 year career. I finally found peace when I saw my experience closely matched one of Jesus of Nazareth when he was kicked out of his home town synagogue for preaching (the truth!). The congregation not only kicked him out, they tried to kill him. What did he do? He walked through the crowd, never looked back and went on with his life. When I reframed my experience as one not unlike his, I began to see some benefits. When I reframe, I am refining the underlying program (my life story and my interpretation of it as beneficial to me) and I am installing updates!

 Overhaul graphics....Let the metaphor be a symbol. Paul Tillich says a symbol pointing beyond itself;  Install the update...what image of yourself do you want to add or revise that points beyond itself to the person you hope to be? I want to be a successful musician. So I have this little cartoon character I've developed: "Preacher Mullet and the Skulls". I imagine myself playing as Preacher Mullet and the Skulls and we're a big hit. I ask myself, "What are the top 5 things I have to do to make my dream come true?" The answer I dislike the most is "practice the key of E"!  Now I'm updating my graphics by using  a metaphor that pushes me to see myself differently and most important - act accordingly.

Install updates....a metaphor I came across and how I'm using it to see myself differently. Go for it.

Smile, Sail, smile some more...

Returned yesterday from the sail. Great fun with a friend as we sailed from Soldier Creek, AL going East to Pensacola Beach, FL. We stayed in a marina the first night and the second night we docked at a restaurant.

We sailed home on Thursday and once we put up the sails we sailed for about 6 hours. Finally cranked the engine to back into the dock at home.

Smile, sail, smile some more.

Took a two day break and then headed out Saturday for Red Fish Point Anchorage at the East end of Big Lagoon. Our yacht club's annual raft-up brought 8 boats out. I had way too much fun (alcohol) Saturday evening. Survived a crash landing into the cockpit, was put to bed by the Captain of the Pinta (read Joshua Slocum's Sailing alone Around the World), awakened the next morning to discover I wasn't broken, but severely sore and moving slowly. What fun!

Smile, sail, smile some more.

Sailed back over to Innerarity Point, FL and picked up my wife. We sailed back to Redfish Point and Pensacola Beach and enjoyed ourselves. Here's the best thing about sailing with your best friend...the power of propinquity. Dropped her off Tuesday about 1:30 pm and got the boat docked about 3:30 pm. Unloaded, cleaned up, folded sails, etc. and home by 6 pm.

Smile,sail, smile some more....

Some things I reflected upon...The power of propinquity...the need for friendship...the wonder of a steady breeze...how little you actually need on a sailboat to have fun....

Somewhere along the way our keel cable shredded...probably my fault and we'll have to haul out and repair. But, good will come of it. I have several projects I'd like to do while the boat's out of the water.

Smile, sail, smile some more...

Traveler will Travel....7 days of Hobo Sailing

Make a list. Review the list. Pack as light as possible. Organize the stuff you pack.

That's the plan I follow when I get ready to get ready to either go camping or spend a few nights on our Catalina 22 Sailboat, which is camping.

Many years ago when we camped with our children and with other campers with children, I got to the end of a day, washed the last dish and pan and said, "Camping is cooking, eating and getting ready to cook again." I still hold this as the true definition of camping. Same goes for camping on the sailboat. I minimize the cooking by eating lots of sardines, tuna and peanut butter. I have to have my coffee and oatmeal in the morning. Boil water, use a coffee press and you don't have much to clean.

We're heading East out of Soldier Creek, AL. On Google Maps find Lillian, AL. Its on Perdido Bay. Find the bridge to Florida. Now go south along the west bank of Perdido Bay (The Alabama Side). You'll come to Soldier Creek. We'll cross Perdido Bay going toward Innerarity Point. Around Innerarity Point we'll turn east and sail towards Pensacola, sailing down the Intracoastal Waterway, dodge a few barges, and sail across Big Lagoon to the East end and camp in that cove between the sand Island and Ft. McCrea, which guards the west side of the Caucus Channel.

Day 2 we sail further East stopping at Pensacola Beach. We may get as far as Navarre, FL, then come back to Big Sabine. This will give us about 7 hours of sailing. That's enough!

Day 3 will be 8-9 hours back to Soldier Creek. I'll drop my passenger, spend a night at home then head back out for another three or four days by myself. I'll chase the wind and see where it takes me.

Until next Tuesday....Travel (and play in the Key of E!)

I'll be sailing the Catalina 22 on the left. It was built in 1984.

Travel...where? Anywhere & Everywhere...enjoy your travels

Reading Mark Twain's Life on the River. He describes his life on the Mississippi River. He runs away to become a Pilot. He tells his dream of fortune and fame. He tells of his disappointment, going from boat to boat with no offers of employment. He decides, in Cincinnati, with $30 left, to head south to explore the Amazon River. He gets on a lonely little steamboat for the trip to New Orleans, then suddenly...

"When we presently got under way and went poking down the broad Ohio  I became a new being, and the subject of my own admiration. I was a traveler! A word never had tasted so good in my mouth before. I had an exultant sense of being bound for mysterious lands and distant climes which I never had felt in so uplifting a degree since. I was in such a glorified condition that all ignoble feelings departed out of me..."

Oh how I need this paragraph, the idea, the metaphor: Traveler. I am a traveler. You are are a traveler. We travel from acceptance to receiving and beyond, "bound for mysterious lands and distant climes". How far do you have to go to be a traveler?

How far? Not very far. Twain says it happened as soon as they got underway. I got off my pallet this morning (I sleep on the floor. My back likes it!) and I was underway. Where am I going? Mysterious lands and distant climes! Far or near, who knows. I am a traveler. The truth tastes good. I exult, as Twain did, in the "the sense of being bound".

What is that for you?
What is the meaning, deep meaning that you are bound for somewhere today, tomorrow, and every day and moment, with every breath and swallow.
Now what? What will you do with all the wonder of being a new being...a Traveler.

Keep playing in the Key of E. Yesterday while playing, I started working some sweeps in the various chord positions and I am noting different patterns, different patterns, not the same old same old. Travel the neck of the guitar, traveler.

Accept and Receive...how I'm doing retirement...so far...

Still practicing in the Key of E. Been about a month now and beginning to move into some new patterns. My fingers got stuck doing the same old same old. Easier than changing, just playing the same old same old. Kind of a parable for life before retirement. Now, life after retirement presents its own challenges. Create your own routine or not. Keep doing what you were doing only for free, or not. Or, you can grieve.

Retirement is first and foremost a huge loss, big loss. I have 8 file drawers of over 25 years of sermon resources. I carefully filed all that stuff every week. I used the lectionary as my filing system. My files run from Advent 1 to Christ the King Sunday and there are three years in the cycle; so I have 52 files times 3 plus a lot of extra files for such things as Stewardship and other topical material. My favorite topics seemed to be the spiritual exercises I found most difficult: forgiving and prayer and grief. I can hold a grudge with the best of them. I've never found a pattern of prayer I can practice for any length of time. I  am an instrumental griever, not naturally, but when I shut down my emotional grieving, my grief worked its way into the other channel - which is "work". Instrumental grievers dig the grave for the dog, while the emotional grievers shed all the tears and tell the sentimental stories. Anyway, retirement is a loss and losses must be grieved: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and somewhere down the line, acceptance. 

Someone has said acceptance of one's self and one's total picture: good, bad, successes and failures and all those ordinary, average days that seem to fill in between the highs and the lows, acceptance of all you were and did is the best gift you can give your future. Acceptance clears the way for receiving the help the universe has waiting for you in the morning, and in your dreams tonight. Sweet dreams. 

Keep playing in the Key of E. E minor is good too!

Play for an hour in the key of E...and do it until you know it, the key of E

Played a jam not long ago. I was out of my league, way out of it. I was playing someone else's guitar, a Fender Strat, which my friend says is the hardest guitar to play because you have to pick it in the right place to get a fat tone. That was the least of my worries. I didn't know any of the 3 songs I was in on. At one point the lead guitarist just looked at me as shouted, "play", when it was my ride.

I played. I wasn't really playing anything, not improvising, just moving my fingers as fast as I could more out of fear than faith...I wasn't musical, wasn't listening, wasn't having fun.

I asked the lead player afterwards what I needed to do. He asked me, "do you play your guitar every day?"
I said, "Yes." Truth too. Then he asked me, "Do you practice an hour or more every day?" I said, "No".

Next day I played for an hour only in the key of E. My left arm went numb. I got worried. Backed off to 30 minutes the next day, still in the key of E. I'm still working 20-40 minutes a day, usually in two sessions (or else my left arm goes numb) and I'm still playing in the key of E.

Join me in the key of E. Practice, Practice, Practice. I want to be able to say something on the guitar that springs from my heart of hearts.

Hot weekend in '98 RAV Ruins a guitar neck...

Bowed necks play lousy. Classical guitars left in hot cars - not good. Another lesson learned the hard way.

But what other way is there to learn a lesson. You can lead a horse to water...I've been told many times, "don't leave a guitar in the hot car." It never seemed to bother them before.  Robert Worley once wrote, "Activation occurs only on the terms of those being activated, not on the terms of the activators." That's about the same as "You can lead a horse to water..."

Activation...taking care of your stuff
Occurs....can or can't, will or won't, you'll know it when you see it...
those being activated...a leader stands before a group or an individual and recommends a course of action, an activity...and those whom the leader addresses will or will not respond. And those whom the leader address will determine by their actions the pattern and the outcome of the leader's efforts. The leader may hope otherwise, but it will not happen.

Difficult lesson to accept.

Patience, compassion rule and begin with listening

Old guys rule. Yes, but how?

Patience...what is patience?
Step 1 - Listen
Step 2 - Make sure you listened. You can make sure by you're listening by counting in silence until the person you're listening to speaks again after their initial statement. You might have to do this 2 or three times, because once the speaker realizes you're listening, they will talk. Just listen.
Step 3 - Wait, listen some more. Temptation will be to begin formulating your response. Resist. Wait. Wait. Wait.
Step 4 - Slowly say to yourself what you thought you heard. If you can do this instead of saying to yourself what you'd like to say next, then you've probably listened. I say probably, because this kind of listening will take a lot of practice to develop.

Patience begins with listening skills you can develop.

My mentor for many years, Ron Southerland, taught me, "Let the story unfold. To do otherwise is to get involved in some very egotistical ways." When we stop listening and start formulating a response, we've decided against letting the story unfold.

Listen, let the story unfold. This is how OGR!

Push your metaphors. Exercise them till they're exhausted.

Yesterday I suggested a way to get deeper into your emotional process. Let me give you some footnotes:

Emotional process is an Edwin Friedman idea. He develops it his book A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix. This is an extended discussion of the idea of being stuck, emotionally and conceptually, what Friedman calls "Imaginative gridlock", and of how "Quick fixes" reveal a failure of nerve relative moving beyond one's stuckness, one's boundaries. Friedman points to the "nerve" of explores like Columbus and Magellan and how they broke through the imaginative gridlock of 15th century Europe to found new worlds.

Here's a quote:  "Anyone who has ever been part of an imaginatively gridlocked relationship system knows that more learning, will not, on its own, automatically change the way people see things or think. There must first be a shift in the emotional processes of that institution. Imagination and indeed even curiosity are at root emotional, not cognitive  phenomena. In order to imagine the unimaginable, people must be able to separate themselves from surrounding emotional processes before they can even begin to see (or hear) things differently." p. 31

Exhausting one's metaphors is an idea I found in "How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed is a non-fiction book about brains, both human and artificial, by inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil." 
Kurzweil is discussing how he works toward new ideas and approaches. He says he gets a group of thinkers together and asks each thinker to teach the group the basics of their field as it applies to the challenge before the group. He then asks the group to create metaphors for these basic concepts as they relate to the challenge. Then he has the group scrap these initial metaphors and work to create another set of metaphors. Pushing people to imagine and create beyond their initial set of metaphors leads into new territory...he calls it going beyond the safe boundaries. 

Here's my point. Exhausting metaphors is an imaginative experience. It is also emotional. I find pushing through successive layers of metaphor engages my emotional processes and  brings me to places where I see and hear things differently.

Work on it!

Shakespeare's Hamlet - Read it if you've had a sudden change in your life

To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer
The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune,
Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them: to die, to sleep
No more; and by a sleep, to say we end
The Heart-ache, and the thousand Natural shocks
That Flesh is heir to?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_be,_or_not_to_be

Hamlet experiences a deep, sudden change in the direction of his life. What does he do? He works on his emotional process. He defines himself. He takes responsibility for who he is and who he is going to be. 

What - Change, unplanned, unanticipated, unwanted - Hamlet calls "The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune...a Sea of troubles...The Heart-ache...the thousand Natural shocks That Flesh is heir to...

So What - Here and now I have to decide how I will handle change.

Now what - These are Hamlet's metaphors for change; what are yours? Write a poem, create a dialogue, do whatever creative things you can do to express your thoughts in new metaphors. The next step is to discard the metaphors you've created and push on, beyond settled ways of thinking to new ground and when you've done that you'll find a new way of handling your life.

I'll share from my own experience. I read Nathaniel Branden's, Honoring the Self. P. 38-9 (Kindle version) he says, 

p. 38 “I suggested they were being too hard on themselves...I had not yet discovered the functional utility of their self-condemnation, within the context of their private model of self-in-the-world.

Slowly I began to realize the survival value of their self-blame.”

I parsed that for myself using my "what, so what, now what" approach, spending a few minutes answering each of those questions: for example, "What is the functional utility of my self-condemnation", etc.

Here's where I shook out..

I’m no longer living in a context where self-condemnation helps. I live in a context where I define the “freedom within limits” that I’m willing to tolerate and which will yield the highest and best use of my self for the purpose of “thriving”.  This is honoring my self.

Honoring my self vs. Self-condemnation.

There is no one anywhere I know of that will continue to benefit from any effort I put forth toward self-condemnation. I believe there are many who will benefit from my efforts to define the freedom with limits that I’m willing to tolerate yielding the highest and best use of my self for the purpose of my thriving. This is honoring my self.

hum...I like where things have turned out and as Branden suggests, I repeat to myself... "Right now I am choosing

to define the freedom with limits that I’m willing to tolerate yielding the highest and best use of my self for the purpose of my thriving. And I take responsibility for this."

Problems don't go away...work on them anyway!

Leaders often think that if “things get better,” problems will, if not disappear, at least become few in number. Certainly people will not focus on problems so much. People will become more satisfied and feel better about things. Leaders are surprised to learn it does not work that way. When things improve, discontent often follows.

But there is a difference. The problems now are of a higher order, if that is any comfort. Lovett H. Weems, Jr.http://www.churchleadership.com/leadingideas/updates/130501.html

What - Problems - If I go back to pastoring, I will keep a running list of every problem/ concern/ issue. I will keep a running list of who, what, when, where, why and how and I will post this on my office door. I will update it as problems move to a higher order. I will also track and report my emotional process.

So What - I totally missed this one. I thought problems went away. Wrong. Problems remain and require emotional processing. By this I mean the difference a problem makes is where it takes me emotionally as I seek to lead forward into the vision. If I run from the problem, the clue that I'm running from it is I have yet to clearly define it and clearly describe how this problem is impacting me emotionally and why. The clue is the problem is not on my radar. I need to track my emotional processing as carefully as I track any other dynamic unfolding as leadership addresses the problem. Emotional process means how well leadership is defining itself in the face of the problem. "Some will run, but that ain't like me." (Sonny Throckmorton, The way I am) How leadership defines itself is up to the leader of the leaders. If the leader of the leader stays well defined, all is well. I failed to stay well-defined in one or more key areas. I know now what these key areas were and will be, because problems don't go away; and I'll be able to address these "problems" in the future. I've learned something!

Now What - Make the list. Do the due diligence on the list and keep working on it. No secrets. Keep the problems in front of the leadership. Keep the vision and the problems clearly before the leadership and keep my own emotional processes clearly in focus as I work on the problems. Problems don't go away.