No Pain, No Gain, But the Misery Is Optional

No Pain, No Gain, But the Misery Is Optional

By Charles Peek

I’m moved to write this month about a particular piece of wisdom that has stood me in pretty good stead for many years, at least when I paid any attention to it!

Old friend and mentor, Louis Kiker, used to keep reminding a group of us: no pain, no gain, but the misery is optional!

A dear friend of ours has recently had to make a painful decision and in responding to her, I quoted Louis.  In her response back, she mentioned that she and another friend had just been talking about Louis and his very sound, wise admonition.

If we listened to a sound track of our thoughts, they would often include “You make me mad” or “This is driving me crazy” or just WTF!  Those seem like but are not honest expressions of feelings.  It may be very true that I’m mad, even mad at something you said or did, but being mad is mine to own. You didn’t make me mad. Sadly, I need little help with that! Nothing can drive me crazy without my consent.

There’s something empowering, freeing about learning that we have some control over our feelings. In fact, we can control our feelings, can “educate” our feelings just as we do our thoughts.  In fact, part of “mindedness” is that our feelings are trained by our thinking.

At a wonderful set of rock sculptures in China, a sizeable cliff face is dedicated to a Buddhist parable—a wild bull, the same bull harnessed, and finally the bull tamed so it needs no harness. On the occasion of our visit—12 years ago and a day ahead of a fellow traveler telling us the sculptures were the best thing in China—our fine guide told us that this parable expressed how the Chinese feel about education.

The cliff face rang a bell with us.  Our good friend, the late Richard Wood, used to have pinned to his philosophy office bulletin board a photo of a small child at the height of a tantrum, and next to it a photo of Michelangelo’s David (the same David we missed in Florence but our friends Chris and Elaine Mello got to see—on loan, Chris speculated, from Las Vegas!).

There is pain in life—it is unavoidable. But there is something wrong with us if we let it make us miserable for very long.  I’m not speaking of the consequences of long-term pain nor of the kinds of mental collapse that leave us not ourselves. Any intense pain in my life has been short lived and, though you might get some arguments about it, I’ve not yet suffered a mental collapse. At least that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. But, short of not being ourselves, we then are “selves”—and this implies some power over our own experience of the world and of others.

I recall so vividly a visit I made years ago to my friend Merle Hayward’s mother.  She was confined to a room in a care home by blindness and frailty—and was the most positive human being you could imagine…not an ounce of self-pity.  Just shortly before, I’d been calling regularly on a woman similarly confined but only by her own cherished laments.  No wonder Jesus always asked what someone, lame or blind, wanted of him—you can’t assume people don’t relish their pains, an idea I was first exposed to in the “Lacerations” section of The Brothers Karamazov.

This is not to say there isn’t plenty in China that might drive people crazy.  Here is a report from the current party congress about a change to the Chinese Constitution: “Approved by a party congress in Beijing, the change adds a clunky new phrase — “Xi Jinping Thought for the New Era of Socialism with Chinese Special Characteristics” — alongside the hallowed names of Mao and Deng Xiaoping.” The report is not optimistic about how any of these phrases might actually be understood, only certain that they will have a great impact!

               [Wonder what Confucius would thnk of Xi Jinping Thought–or expression!]

Well, these days, the USA has no business pointing the finger at China.  We have our own insanities to deal with, and might well live in fear that some of them could become part of our constitution and will, in any event, have their own bad effects one way or another.

Still, in the midst of many aids to remaining sane, to suffering pain without making oneself miserable, surely one of the best and most effective stays against confusion is friendship.  What ancient culture did not arrive at the same conclusion?

I’m reminded of this just this morning and yesterday afternoon (October 23-24) by a phone conversation with Steve.  We were interrupted twice, once when he lost cell-phone coverage out in small-town Nevada.  Very similar situation here, one Senator Fischer pointed up to her friends in the in the Department of Agriculture when they visited her ranch.  I’m not usually her fan, but kudos where they are due for being heads up about how much of rural America is a communications desert.

Steve will not be my age for five more months, something of which he occasionally reminds me. Still, for a young guy, he is a marvelous person, highly successful, very bright, with a good crap detector and honed sense of humor.  He’s been a wonderful and generous friend, often so in youth when I needed one most, and he has faced more than his share of the pains that living brings with it yet remains utterly immune to being miserable.

[Steve Schneider through the window of the Bieroc, McCook, Nebraska. The Bieroc is the                                                 home of storytelling in McCook!]

We met about 1955, he remains my oldest friend, and it is always a joy when I hear a voice on the phone say, “Hey, Peek, Schneider here.”  I’ve loved his whole family, they’ve loved us, and of course in all that there’s a special value for me as an only child. (Steve’s one blind spot is a lack of appreciation for my politics! This, when I’m sure, the problem is really his!)

I’m equally reminded by our currently troubled friend, who did the very best and first thing any of us should do in pain—reached out to her friends. How often our friends have rallied to us in our times of distress!  What does it say about us that so often, our first response to pain is to isolate ourselves from comfort, God’s or Friends’?

Looking back on our lives, how rich they are with friendships begun in high schools or colleges, graduate schools or universities, parishes or professional societies, clubs and service organizations, celebrations and mournings. We come into contact with friends every time we go somewhere, every time we open Facebook—every time we consult our memories of our lives and times.

Friendship, fellowship, community—these are the vital force that keep the craziness and meanness of the world from driving us crazy or making us mean. Each day in the world we now live in here in the USA—and apparently over there in China as well, where we still have many friends—they mean more and more. It is our love for our friends and theirs for us that will see us through whatever troubling times seem now upon us. We dare not let the troubles rob us of our richest treasure.

To all our family and friends, let me say that you are God’s gift to us, the surest sign of Grace Abounding; and to any of you hurting, let me echo Louis: no pain, no gain, but the misery is optional.

Kearney, Nebraska     October 29, 2017

PS: If you want to read a good story about this, look at Cather’s “Two Friends”!

 

The Adults Are in Charge Now!

The Adults Are in Charge Now

by Charles Peek

A younger friend—friend actually of my son’s—a very patriotic fellow, a veteran, a concerned citizen—chided me recently for my Facebook lament that the current occupant of the Presidency might jettison all the good work done by the agreement with Iran.  He laughed at my gullibility and concluded telling me how happy that he was that the “adults” were now in control in Washington.

I like this young man.  All the qualities I listed above seem to me good qualities. I left out that he is loving to his pets, which I also think is a good quality. And for the life of me, I don’t know how to go about addressing his concerns or his claims in any way I think he would possibly hear! Nor do I want to belittle the sincerity of his concerns. How then to respond?

I could take a trip down sarcasm street and ask him just which people in the upper echelons of the administration he was calling the adults.  Surely, he isn’t making reference to the many cabinet officials who urged the President not to abandon the deal with Iran, who told him it was working, it was doing what it was designed to do, it has the backing of many international figures, including some Israeli’s who at the first opposed it.

But I knew very well which Washingtonian he was calling the adult.  And part of my problem is that we simply don’t agree on what the qualities of an adult are.  I don’t think rule by disruption is an adult quality, and I don’t think my parents would have either. I doubt if those chasing around to minimize the damage of the President’s many tantrums think there is much of an adult in the Oval Office. Whether disruption is just his “you’re fired” style of politics or a sign of a disintegrating personality I’ll leave to the judgment of people closer to the scenes “of the crime.”

I don’t think it matters to my friend that most of the world disagrees with him; this only seems fuel to the fire.

Of course, it was clear from his chiding that one quality of an adult is that an adult is not gullible.  I’d agree.  Of course, I can’t think of anything more gullible than people still believing in the President after seeing how he behaves, how inept he is politically. But I suspect that the very ineptness is one of the things his supporters like.  It isn’t the “usual politics”—it isn’t the usual “pussy-footing” around issues.  Ideas like caution and due diligence and homework—well,  they didn’t like those ideas as teenagers and still don’t respect them today.  (I’m not sure how they got along in the military.)

But I was charged with gullibility because I dared to think the Iran deal was enforceable…that is, I thought we could verify whether or not Iran was living up to its part of the deal regarding developing nuclear weapons—which was after all, the main thrust of the deal for us.  We weren’t negotiating for nice guyism on their part. We didn’t expect it, didn’t get it, and as much as anything this seems to be what has gotten Trump’s goat.  They don’t respect us like they should!

Well, no, they don’t much respect us.  Or at least the hard-liners don’t. (The deal, at least in part, strengthened the hand of moderates against the hard-liners.) And it would be un-adult to stop and ask if we have given them some reason not to respect us.  That doesn’t matter. They should respect us because we are us. Lots of people don’t seem to realize that there are a lot of people in the world for whom that kind of exceptionalism is a hard sell!

So, I suppose I could, then, address verification of the treaty.  And here is why I think it is reasonably verifiable.  There’s nothing today someone can’t find out if they want to badly enough. (That would include Trump’s tax returns! It will certainly soon mean all the evidence of his collusion with Russia in the last election.)  We stopped for half a minute outside a Dairy Queen in Holdrege the other day, then drove about five minutes, arrived where we were going, and I checked my phone for messages. There was a message from Samsung Pay that Samsung Pay is good at DQ!  True, my GPS couldn’t locate where I wanted to go, but that’s because it isn’t a very good GPS, not because where I wanted to go couldn’t be found. The technology, though, allowed someone to know right where I was!

My reasoning here, however, would fall on deaf ears.  It isn’t really that the treaty can’t be verified that matters.  It is that we don’t have the clout in the world that makes people play nice, and we should have because we are such nice people!

Many of those my friend calls “adults” blame trade agreements, many blame “political correctness,” many blame the Civil Rights Movement, many blame immigration, or immigrants, or Muslim immigrants, or gays and lesbians.  People have stolen our jobs, our college admission place, our freedom of speech (and religion), our commercial success, our cherished institutions.

“They” have changed “our” world—and public statements by the President and his supporters make it clear that “they” are not white, not western, not male, not straight.  And that’s who “we” are, the endangered species of white, male, straight citizens of the USA. That’s the “we” that’s not getting the respect due “us.” Ask Steve Bannon, he’ll tell you!  Ask the moneybags who are buying our Republic lock, stock, and barrel. Ooops…there’s another issue, something else to blame, all the people who want to take our guns and leave us defenseless. No wonder white, male wing nuts with military arsenals feel free to go daily on killing sprees, that we struggle to create safe-havens in a violent world, a violence fed by continuing military conflicts.

But then, I doubt Trump or his supporters truly want to fix things. There’s a cute description out and about of the “Trump Doctrine”: “Obama created it/I broke it/You fix it.” The situation, however, may be bleaker. Probably lots of folks who think Trump is an adult don’t deep down believe things can be fixed. They are, instead, nihilists at heart. Nihilism has bewitched many minds to where “fence it in and tear it down” seems like an answer, doesn’t even seem like a contradiction, because at heart things seem terrible to them and there doesn’t really seem to be any magic way out. Mother’s being pushed over the cliff and there doesn’t seem anyway to save her.  Anger is all that’s left.

So, it doesn’t make any difference that no responsible study finds the trade agreements or immigration or Islam or Civil Rights or transgendered soldiers to blame…nihilists won’t really care who is to blame.  Their feeling: If you don’t feel the problem the way we do, then why would we ever be interested in your solution? Lock her up! (Oh, yes, they are still singing that old hymn!)  Drain the swamp! Make America Great Again!

Where’s Dr. Phil when you need him? “How’s that working” for us? How are we doing with the new adults in D.C? How did petulance and tantrums ever become adult? How can I ever tell my friend what it feels like to hear him call the current executors of greed and violence “adult”?

A prayer came our way recently from Theresa Bushnell, Nancy’s Yoga teacher.  We use it often and, so far, it seems the only approach we know to take to dilemmas like mine:

On this and every day, bless our hearts.

Bless our well-educated and sure hearts. Bless our less educated and unsure hearts.

Bless our blind spots and bless our clear vision.

Bless our scared, disenfranchised hearts and our sure-footed ones.

Bless our angry hearts and our hearts filled with love.

Bless those with hatred and racism in their hearts and bless those who tirelessly work for social justice.

Bless the hourly workers living in poverty and bless those who shine a light on those disparities in order to have all of us walk into them more consciously.

Bless the visionaries and bless those who are too near the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy to have a vision.

Bless the liberals and bless the conservatives.

Bless the wealthy and bless the wealthy who use their privilege to help others.

Bless those who run toward trouble to help and bless those who feel helpless.

Bless those trying to break through and bless those who extend a hand to help.

Bless the people who agree with us, and bless those who don’t.