My blog has been inactive for some time now as I’ve focused on other things.
One of those things is my second book, Unleashing Your Inner Insect, which will be released on Kindle on April 1.
Why April Fools’ Day? Unleashing Your Inner Insect is satire, poking fun at the personality type industry. You may know your Myers-Briggs Type, but do you know your inner insect? Only this book can tell you if you are an Ant, a driven team-player, or a Mosquito, skilled at infiltration and always looking out for #1. 😉
John A. Bredesen, author of The I.T. Leaders’ Handbook and The I.T. Leader’s First Days, writes, “I have read numerous business books over the years and taken many personality quizzes. They are so ripe for satire. Unleashing Your Inner Insect is the perfect skewering of the genre. I laughed out loud during several parts, which really annoyed the HR rep who was trying to do my annual performance review at the time.”
Ready for some comedy in the guise of a self-help book? Check it out!
Recently I reflected on my responses to two people who were talking about how certain news items were affecting them, and I realized that what I said to them was what I, myself, needed to hear:
Whatever outrage we feel should be directed toward productive change within our means. Otherwise it just simmers with no outlet, and that harms us.
Of course we’re going to be upset over many of the things happening in the world. I don’t think it’s healthy to simply shrug off instances of gun violence like the racist attack in Buffalo, New York, and the anti-Taiwanese attack in California the following day. (As I wrote the first draft of this post, news was breaking about about yet another mass shooting, this one at an elementary school in Texas.)
But simply allowing the news to upset us doesn’t do anyone any good.
So what should we do?
First, we should ask ourselves: Is the thing that is upsetting me one of my priorities?
If the answer is “yes,” then it’s time to take action.
But what if the answer is “no”?
First, we can ask ourselves if we need to reshuffle our priorities. I’ve recently done that. While I’m still concerned about slavery, these days I’m even more concerned about climate change and voting rights, so I’m channeling more of my energy to those issues and significantly less to anti-slavery activities. I still try to keep slavery in mind as I make purchasing decisions. If someone asked me to throw an anti-slavery chocolate party, I’d still try to say “yes.” But I devote much less attention to it now, simply because I can’t tackle everything.
If your priorities haven’t changed but you still want to act on an upsetting piece of news, you might decide to act in a small way, such as dashing off a letter to the editor. Or, if you have the capacity (I suspect few of us do, so please be honest with yourself about this), you can add this new issue to your priorities.
And if you don’t have the capacity to add yet another priority and can’t think of a small, achievable way that you can make a difference, it’s time to change tactics.
When taking action isn’t realistic, it’s time to let it go.
There’s nothing wrong with picking up a book, calling a friend, or otherwise engaging in some form of escape.
“Escapism” is often used negatively, and certainly it can be unhealthy to cope with the news by downing a bottle of wine or spending all of your time in a fantasy world. But I believe that escaping into a good story or a favorite hobby is far better than spending unproductive time seething over something you can’t change. An escape can distract us and, even better, it can recharge us, possibly giving us the break we need to be able to move beyond outrage to action.
The world is full of upsetting news. It’s easy to let ourselves dwell on our outrage and our fear for the future.
But it’s more productive and better for us to keep these things in mind:
I can do something, even if it’s small, to make a difference.
I can’t do everything. If I try, I’ll just end up being ineffective.
When I’m physically or emotionally exhausted, or when I’m upset by a situation I can’t change, it’s a good idea to let it go and do something that makes me happy instead. I don’t need to ignore the bad news, but I may need a break.
Addendum on 5/25/22: How I Followed My Own Advice
Readers may be interested in knowing what I did after I published this post yesterday.
Knowing that gun control is not one of my top priorities but that I wanted to take some sort of action, I reached out to my two senators and my representative and asked them to prioritize gun control legislation before people forget the tragedies that have happened this month.
Then I walked away from my computer and made dinner while listening to The Silmarillion.
I may write about gun control in a future blog post — it’s something I’ve entertained off and on for a while. But for now, I’ve taken a small, practical action and avoided simply stewing in my emotions.
When I was a child, my mother got very excited about an upcoming children’s television special–something I don’t remember her doing before or since. She told me that I had to see The Hobbit. Catching her enthusiasm, I sat down in front of the TV at the appointed hour and was pulled into an enthralling tale of wizards, elves, dwarves, dragons, and a strange being I’d never heard of: a hobbit. Two hours later (I assume it was two hours with commercials), I had hobbit fever. I pulled The Hobbit and, later, The Lord of the Rings off my parents’ bookshelves and devoured them. Somehow, either as a gift or purchased with my own savings, I obtained the original soundtrack to the special and listened to it again and again. I insisted on seeing Ralph Bakshi’s The Lord of the Rings (and at the time, I liked it). I fervently wished that hobbits were real and that I could meet one.
I was obsessed.
I don’t remember any other cartoon affecting me quite so much. What was it about this one that so enchanted me? First and foremost is Tolkien’s story, neatly condensed into a 90-minute format. Although this Rankin/Bass production is shorter than The Battle of Five Armies, the shortest of the movies in Peter Jackson’s trilogy, it somehow manages to capture most of the book, except for Beorn. (I’ll come back to Jackson’s trilogy in a moment.)
The voice actors are also good, especially the narrator and Gandalf, both voiced by John Huston. The cast includes Orson Bean, Richard Boone, Cyril Ritchard, and Otto Preminger. Paul Frees, whose voice can be heard in many a Rankin/Bass movie, voiced Bombur and “Troll #1,” and voice actor Don Messick was Balin, a goblin, the Lord of the Eagles, and “Troll #3.”
Then there’s the music, some of it sung by Glenn Yarbrough. I’ve read The Hobbit aloud to both my husband and my child, and in each instance, I had a hard time not singing Tolkien’s songs as they were written in this film (they are not exactly the same, so if you do start singing the Rankin/Bass tunes to Tolkien’s words, eventually you’ll have to start improvising).
Put it all together, and you get this:
In just over three and a half minutes, the folks at Rankin/Bass have distilled the essence of the party’s first encounter with the goblins, and they’ve done it well.
I think few, if any, people will dispute that Peter Jackson did an amazing job with his Lord of the Rings trilogy, finally giving fans what we’d been wanting. Understandably, we were all excited when we learned he’d be directing The Hobbit as well. And then, many of us were disappointed.
There was value to Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy. I thought Martin Freeman was a perfect pick for Bilbo, and I was glad Ian McKellan was once again playing Gandalf. I thought the first movie wasn’t bad. I very much enjoyed Bilbo’s encounter with Smaug in the second movie. But the further into the trilogy I got, the more disappointed I was with Jackson’s additions: unbelievable action sequences that weren’t in the book (as if the book wasn’t action-packed enough) and an unnecessary love triangle.
By using three movies to tell the story, Jackson had room to include what Rankin/Bass left out, particularly Beorn. But with three movies to fill, he ended up padding a masterpiece. What the Rankin/Bass production gets right is letting Tolkien’s tale shine through. The Hobbit works better as an abridged work rather than as a story that has been supplemented with additional plotlines.
If you are a Tolkien fan who was disappointed in Jackson’s trilogy and who hasn’t seen the Rankin/Bass version, I encourage you to seek it out. And if you have young children you want to convert into little hobbit fans, by all means show them the cartoon. It’s definitely a ’70s production and not up to today’s cartoon standards, but in the end, it will still do an excellent job of telling Tolkien’s story. Forty-five years after it was released, it’s still the best film version we have, and a pretty good one at that.
When my child was young, we would attend church together. Just before the sermon, one of the pastors would give a children’s sermon. Many of the children, my own included, would sit on the steps leading up to the altar, where they would listen to the children’s sermon and answer the pastor’s questions.
On one particular Sunday, the pastor asked the children why we go to church. Up until that day, my child, if she had answered any of the questions at all, had not said anything particularly memorable. But this time she gave an answer that moved me: “To bring people hope.”
I can’t take credit for teaching her that. It was one of those times when children seem wiser than adults. If we go to church simply to worship God… well, God can be worshipped any place, at any time. If we go because we should, then church is merely a duty we assume out of a sense of responsibility or guilt. If we go to get something out of it, we are focused on ourselves. (I’m not saying that we shouldn’t get anything out of it or that it is bad to want things that benefit us, but I would hope we go for additional reasons.) But to go to church because by going you can somehow bring others hope? What a beautiful reason to go! It was something I had never thought of before.
Bringing hope to others feels like a marvelous way to make a difference in the world.
But what if you aren’t feeling very hopeful yourself?
These days, my store of hope is a bit low. Climate news is grim. I despair over U.S. politics. The area where I live seems to be in an unending COVID-19 wave, and with news of a new, worrisome variant, I wonder if the pandemic will ever end. While I believe that each one of us has the power to make a difference, these problems seem overwhelming.
If you’re running low on hope, how on earth can you bring it to others?
My gut feeling is “simply by showing up.” I feel like one of the best things you can do when you are feeling hopeless is to reach out to others anyway.
Is my gut feeling wrong?
Mental health experts advise that people who feel hopeless spend time with others and take action on what worries them.
While there’s more to advice for people who are feeling hopeless than just those two things (for instance, a social worker writing for Verywell Mind advises that you question your beliefs), my hunch that you should just show up anyway is on target.
Mental Health America advises: “Not many things are lonelier than watching the world burn when no one around you can see it. Find someone else who can see it, and talk to them about it. Solving the biggest problems in the world is going to require cooperation.”
And Healthline offers this wisdom: “… it’s worth considering that loved ones might be grappling with similar emotions. Opening up gives them a chance to share their own struggles so you can support each other.”
You don’t have to fake optimism. But spending time with other people who care about the things that trouble you can give you a team to work with and a reminder that you aren’t the only person who’s concerned. You have companions on this journey, and there’s nothing like undergoing something difficult with others by your side to give you a sense of hope.
To put it in nerdy terms: Imagine how Frodo’s journey to Mount Doom would have gone without Sam. When things look utterly bleak, your presence can help others continue on the journey… and they, in turn, can encourage you.
Note: Future posts will be irregular for a while.
I’ve been a rule-breaker with this blog from day one. My blog should be focused. Food writers writer about food. Pop culture bloggers blog about pop culture. On the website I created to promote myself as a writer, editor, and professional communicator, I blog about making a difference and about underappreciated bits of culture that bring me joy. I should have a well-established brand and should stay on brand. The problem is that I’m a person, not a brand, and part of what makes me, me is that I have many interests. I think this blog is better for my bringing my real self to it, rather than a professional persona. Honestly, how many years of writing tips and tricks could I have offered had I stuck to the rules and stayed focused? And could I really offer years of material that was significantly different from what you might find on other writing blogs?
I’m about to break another rule: I’m going to post irregularly for a while. Life feels very busy, and much as I enjoy the blog, writing posts has become one more item on my to do list. A good blogger posts regularly, and for a long time, I’ve tried to do that. I’ve changed the frequency of my posts over time, and I’ve sometimes given myself time off, but I’ve tried to announce everything ahead of time. I wanted to prove to anyone who was considering using my services that I can deliver writing on time.
But recently I realized that there are plenty of people out there who know I’m reliable. I don’t feel the need to prove that any longer.
So rather than suspend my writing for the blog altogether, I’m going to move to an irregular schedule. Maybe I’ll take a break until sometime after Christmas, or maybe I’ll post before then. I’m not sure at this point. But I do promise that I will continue to post from time to time, and if and when I feel ready to embrace a more frequent, regular schedule, I’ll announce that.
I’ve said before that I think music from anime series is well worth listening to, including entire soundtracks, such as the Hunter x Hunter soundtrack.
At the end of my post on shamelessly listening to anime music, I included the end credits song to Kekkai Sensen (or Blood Blockade Battlefront), one of the many songs my child has gotten me hooked on.
And then a year or so ago, she started playing the soundtrack to the second season, Kekkai Sensen & Beyond (Blood Blockade Battlefront & Beyond). Covering different genres and sung in different languages, the soundtrack is excellent.
It opens with “Block Scholars,” a fusion of jazz and hip-hop…
… and moves on to the Brazilian-influenced “Poupees Vadoux,” complete with a cuica, one of my favorite instruments (it may be a silly one to be a favorite, but hearing one always makes me happy).
And that’s just the beginning. Several of the songs are jazzy, but stylistically they’re very different from each other. “Dare to Say” is an up-tempo big band piece, “White Beyond” is a vocal ballad, and “Minor Doll” reminds me of the jazz fusion that bands like Weather Report and Spyro Gyra were coming out with in the 1970s and ’80s.
There’s classical influence, too, including “Rhapsody in Blue,” which uses Gershwin’s original piece, and “Pebble Walts,” which reminds me of Claude Bolling’s Suite for Flute and Jazz Piano.
In a couple of places above, I’ve mentioned how songs remind me of pieces or bands that I know. While the album doesn’t feel derivative to me, there are times when I can’t help but wonder if I’m the only one who hears echoes of music I know while listening to this soundtrack. For instance, doesn’t “A Queen of the Night” sound a bit like something Steely Dan would write?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhQ5Dg6gdEw
I know most of what I’ve chosen to share with you has had some ties to jazz, so here’s something completely different — the hard-rocking “Determine On.”
I’ve only scratched the surface here. There are several more songs I’d love to include, but the purpose of this blog post is not to recreate the entire album, so I’ll just say: Give it a listen. The Kekkai Sensen & Beyond soundtrack is available on Spotify, or you can purchase it on Amazon. (You’ll have better results if you search using the Japanese name, and I might as well ‘fess up now that one of the Spotify playlists that will come up when you search is mine. I’ve paired every song on the soundtrack with a song that I think complements it, so every other song on the playlist is not from the soundtrack.)
If you’re concerned about the environment, you may know that one of the best choices you can make for the planet is to eat a more plant-based diet.
But what if you or someone you love really loves meat?
I’m not a huge meat-eater and, despite my weakness for dairy (I love cheese and ice cream), I sometimes eat and enjoy vegan meals. (If you’re looking for a great vegan meal, I highly recommend this stuffed delicata squash recipe from the Washington Post.) My husband, however, feels strongly that a meal isn’t complete without meat.
While I sometimes make vegetarian or vegan meals for dinner despite my husband’s preference, I do try to make most of the meals we eat with some meat in them.
But I don’t necessarily use a lot of meat to make dinner.
You don’t need to use ground beef by the pound.
Instead of meatless meals, we often eat meals where meat is more of a condiment than the main portion of the meal. I do sometimes cook meat-centric meals, but most of the time, the meat isn’t the main event.
I suppose if I were the sort of person who just cooked without a recipe, I could just do this on my own, but I almost always use a recipe to at least guide my cooking. So I turn to recipes that aren’t for traditional Western meat-and-potatoes-style main dishes. I’ve found many of these recipes are on budget-friendly cooking sites (I’m a big fan of Budget Bytes) or in international cookbooks (such as Extending the Table).
How much meat do these recipes use? To give you a few examples, Budget Bytes’ bibimbap recipe, which my family enjoys, uses half a pound of ground beef for four servings. The feijoada recipe in Extending the Table serves eight people and calls for as little as a quarter pound of sausage. And bang bang chicken, also from Extending the Table, feeds four people with just one chicken breast.
Note: The sources I mention here also include plenty of meals that use a pound or more of meat, so you have to search through them for meals that use less meat, but the recipes are there, and they are delicious.
The secret’s in the sauce (sort of).
These low-meat dishes tend to have a few things in common, all of which contribute to making them satisfying alternatives to meat-heavy meals. First and foremost, they’re flavorful. Bang bang chicken uses garlic, ginger, peanut butter, soy sauce, and red wine vinegar for flavoring. Budget Bytes’ one pot sausage and sun dried tomato pasta, which uses 8 oz. of sausage, gets its flavor from garlic, sun dried tomatoes, Parmesan cheese, and (if you like) a pinch of red pepper.
Often, too, this dishes combine different textures. Think of the different textures you’d encounter in a bowl of bibimbap. Or, in another Budget Bytes’ recipe, imagine the combination of shrimp, corn tortillas, a crunchy cabbage slaw, and a creamy mayonnaise-based sauce. The complexity of these dishes makes the meals interesting, so that even a meat-lover like my husband is happy.
Eating lower on the food chain is a wonderful goal, and if enough of us pursue this kind of eating, it can make a difference for our planet. But you don’t have to give up meat entirely. Moving from meat-centric meals to meals that include meat as just one component of the dish can significantly reduce our meat consumption if we make them a regular part of our diets.
When I recommended Blue Highways, William Least Heat-Moon’s story of his journey around the United States via its backroads, I mentioned that the book was one of the influences behind my dream career as I was finishing high school. Another influence? The Foxfire series, which has more in common with Blue Highways than you might think.
A high school project on steriods
Foxfire began in 1966 with a frustrated high school English teacher at Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School in Georgia. Looking for some way to engage his students, he talked with them about a magazine, which they decided to focus on the stories of local residents, whose folklore and ways of doing things were already fading. The magazine was a success and by 1972, anthologies of articles were coming out in a series of books. Several of those first books sat on my parents’ shelves, and I would poke through them, fascinated with the oral histories, collections of folklore, and instructions on how to do everything from raising a log cabin to making a fiddle.
Oh, how I envied those students who got to interview interesting people and write about them.
And that’s the reason I think of Blue Highways and the Foxfire series as being cut from the same cloth. Just as Blue Highways is, in my mind, more about the people than the places, so Foxfire has its roots in people, even when the focus of the article is on hog dressing.
Immerse yourself in burial customs, moonshining, horse trading, and “more affairs of plain living.”
Drawing on content from the magazines, the books cover a range of topics. Some chapters just focus on an individual–the most well-known being Aunt Arie, a favorite of Foxfire readers. I can’t define what sets her apart from the many other people interviewed throughout the series, but I do remember turning to the chapter on her again and again. She seemed to be someone you’d love to sit down and talk with.
But many of the articles are focused on crafts, lore, or nearly forgotten pastimes. Foxfire 4 includes a chapter on knife making based on interviews with two different men. Filled with step-by-step photos and carefully labeled illustrations, the chapter also includes informal narratives about the knife makers. Author Tom Carlton writes this about Troy Danner:
Several people told us that Mr. Danner used to be the best blacksmith in that part of the country. … He finally had to quit, though, because, as he said, “I just got old and wore out.” He said that at one time, he could stand for a whole day shoeing horses and putting wagon tires on wheels. Once he shod sixteen horses at his little shop in one day, “and boy you could feel the sweat run out of you too!”
“Knife Making” by Tom Carlton, Foxfire 4 (1977), p. 60
Besides that chapter, Foxfire 4 alone includes five chapters featuring interviews with individuals or couples plus chapters on wood carving; fiddle making; wooden sleds; gardening; bird traps, deadfalls, and rabbit boxes; horse trading; making tar; logging; water systems; berry buckets; and cheese making. There’s also a chapter with supplementary information related to stories from the previous three books in the series.
Tell me a ghost story.
As I flipped through my parents’ books, glancing through a story about log cabin building or skipping over a piece about ginseng, one of the chapters I turned over and over again was “Boogers, Witches, and Haints” in Foxfire 2. It was just the right level of scary for me, and I loved reading the stories as they were told by a number of people from Appalachia. My favorite stories were the “ball of fire” stories, especially one of a few told by Hoyt Thomas:
And one night it looked like th’world was afire back in there. Like a big forest fire, y’know. And it come on around, and at twelve o’clock it went right square up in th’middle of th’sky and made a question mark. Just as pretty a question mark as you ever looked at.
“Boogers, Witches, and Haints,” by David Wilson, Foxfire 2 (1973), p. 328
But you, dear reader, are probably thinking, “That’s not a ghost story!” So here’s one with a ghost in it.
When my gran’daddy was a little boy, he had a aunt that died. She run a old-time loom. Worked herself t’death.
She died, and th’old man tore th’loom house down where she worked. Wanted t’get it out a’th’way. And he was going’ a’courtin’ three weeks after she died–courtin’ with another woman. Gran’daddy said he heard th’boards a’rattlin’ just like th’old loom a’runnin’. Heard th’loom a’rattlin’. Said they had a big fire a’goin’–a big blaze–and she walked up t’th’door.
Th’little baby–her baby–they had t’hold him to keep him from goin’ to her. Kept sayin’, “There’s Mommy! There’s Mommy!”
“Boogers, Witches, and Haints,” pp. 332-3
The stories don’t give me chills like they did when I was a kid, but they were deliciously spooky then. And the photos still strike me. Besides portraits of some of the people interviewed in this chapter, there are simple black and white photos of cornstalks in a rainstorm, the sun hanging low over the mountains, a tree with a sign nailed to it: “AT THE END – YOU MEET GOD.” The photography is wonderful and somehow very appropriate.
Foxfire magazine’s still around.
While the last numbered Foxfire book, Foxfire 12, came out in 2004, the magazine is still around. When I started thinking about writing about Foxfire a year ago, I ordered the Spring/Summer 2020 issue. As times have changed, and many of the people who shared their stories 50 years ago are long gone, the magazine’s topics have changed. This combined issue included three articles on drug addiction and a history of Clayton First United Methodist Church in Clayton, Georgia. There were stories of craftspeople–just like the blacksmiths and weavers who were interviewed decades ago–only these were a photographer and a prop maker. Closest to what I grew up with were the interviews. Vivian Carver, born in 1939, reminisced about when she was dating her late husband:
Me and Olin knew each other growing up. Our first date, we were painting and fixing up the church. After we finished, we had a hotdog supper. …
“Remembrance: Interview With Vivian Carver” by Willow Fisher and Jacqueline Love, Foxfire, Spring/Summer 2020, p. 51
Sharon Stiles, about the same age as Vivian Carver, said this about growing up with her grandmother:
We helped her in the garden, we helped her bring in wood, we helped wherever, whatever she needed. We carried water, because we didn’t have water at the house; we got our water from the branch. [Without refrigeration,] we took our milk or our butter and kept it in the stream. Later, one of my uncles, who had a store in Hiawassee, [Georgia], bought my grandmother a refrigerator, so we didn’t have to go to the branch however many times a day you needed to take the food or needed water. And after my grandmother had worked for a while, she was able to make enough money to get us water at the house. That was a big deal. You didn’t have to go carry the water, you could go to the back porch and there was your water. You didn’t have hot water, you only had cold water, but at least you had water.
“Making the Mountains Home: Interview With Sharon Stiles” by Kami Ahrens, Foxfire, Spring/Summer 2020, p. 73
Times change. I know that. And I don’t expect people in Appalachia to live as if they belonged to an era long gone. But Foxfire, at least the glimpse I got through one issue of the magazine, has lost some of its enchantment for me. As a child, I was visiting with people who were very different from me every time I opened one of the books. Now I can read about a prop maker who uses a 3-D printer… just like one of my family members. It is, I suppose, a little too close to home, like seeing a McDonald’s in Rome.
Despite my melancholy over the changes that have been brought about by time, there’s a lot I still cherish about the book series. I may never have the opportunity to speak to someone who’s been to a “barn raisin,'” but I can hear their stories secondhand in the Foxfire series.
I’ve written plenty of posts about how small things make a difference.
But recent events in the lives of my loved ones have really brought home how easy it is to make a difference through ordinary acts… and how unglamorous those acts can be.
I want to leave a mark on the world…
I suppose it could be called a midlife crisis, but not too many years ago, I really wanted to do something big to change the world. I was working for a university. We often talked about how we were preparing future leaders to make a difference. I would think, “I don’t want just an indirect role in preparing future leaders. I want to be among them.” I read biographies of people like Elizabeth Fry and William Wilberforce, and I wanted to be like them.
We need people to do big things, but I was discounting how many opportunities I had to make a difference in my daily life, even though they weren’t glamorous.
Making a difference is simply showing up.
A friend of mine has suffered a major loss. My first reaction was to want to do something, like helping with a specific task. Those things are important, but it became clear early on that the best way I could support this person was to simply show up and be with them.
That’s not going to change the world. But, combined with the actions of other people, my showing up can make a real difference in one person’s life.
Making a difference can be tedious… even downright awful.
Even dream jobs can be filled with tedium and rotten days. But many of the tedious and awful things we do, whether on the job or in our daily lives, actually make a difference.
One of my family members recently needed to go to the emergency room at 3:30 a.m. It wasn’t a “call an ambulance” sort of emergency, but it couldn’t wait until morning, so I drove them.
Let me make two things clear:
While it wasn’t fun for me, I realize it was more awful for them. They were in serious pain and were sick to their stomach, and my navigational software wasn’t working properly, so the poor person was having to read me directions on top of everything else.
I was no hero. I was tired. I was unhappy that I had to travel to an ER that I didn’t know, rather than our local emergency room, because the person felt (rightly, I think) that they should go to the same hospital where they’d had outpatient surgery related to their emergency. The best I can say for myself is that I didn’t complain, and I tried to get to our destination quickly.
This act of service was decidedly unsexy. When my passenger started throwing up in my car (thankfully they had a bag handy), the noise and smell made my stomach turn. I was out of sorts the next day. And while I know my loved one appreciated being dropped off at the ER, this was not one of those moments that they will always remember as something amazing that someone did for them. It was simply a trip to the ER with me muttering “dammit” when I missed a turn. Nevertheless, it was the most important thing I could have done with my life at that moment.
This is what make a difference looks like…
Making a difference looks like doing a housemate’s chores when they are exhausted.
Making a difference looks like running out to buy tissues and chicken noodle soup for someone who has a cold.
Making a difference looks like saying, “Don’t worry, we can take it easy today” if the person you’re visiting on your vacation isn’t feeling great… even if you have to cancel some really fun plans.
Making a difference looks like changing a diaper.
Making a difference looks like walking the dog.
Making a difference looks like checking in on someone you’re worried about.
Making a difference also looks like bigger things — volunteering, protesting, donating. It may even look like the really big things, such as starting a nonprofit to tackle a problem. But don’t be fooled. Some of the best ways for us to make a difference — as trivial as they may seem — are staring us right in the face.
Religion is a touchy matter, and it can become even more touchy when a person changes their beliefs, possibly estranging themselves from family and friends. Even so, if you’re willing to journey with me into this territory, I highly recommend two recently published books — one fiction, one nonfiction — about people who questioned and changed their beliefs but retained respect for the faith they were raised in.
Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
Transcendent Kingdom, Yaa Gyasi’s second novel, is about more than questioning one’s beliefs, but that questioning plays a major role in the book.
Gifty is a Ph.D. student in neuroscience at Stanford University. She is haunted by her background: her broken family; the racism and xenophobia they faced; and her Pentecostal upbringing, which weighed heavily on her as a child. In Gifty’s words: “Back then, I approached my piety the same way I approached my studies: fastidiously. … I wanted, above all else, to be good. And I wanted the path to that goodness to be clear.”
By the time she was 11, her father had left the United States for Ghana, never to return; her brother had died from a heroin overdose; her mother was no longer able to care for her; and she was on the way to losing her faith. But while she resents how her strict religious upbringing affected her–“It wasn’t until my freshman year in college, in biology class, that I learned what and where a vagina truly was”–she also refuses to hate it. As an undergraduate student, she got into a discussion about religion, specifically Christianity, with some of her classmates. When one described religion as dangerous, saying “Religion has been used to justify everything from war to anti-LGBT legislation,” Gifty countered, “Belief can be powerful and intimate and transformative.”
Reflecting on the disagreement, Gifty tells us, “… though I hadn’t worked out how I felt about the Christianity of my childhood, I did know how I felt about my mother. Her devotion, her faith, they moved me.”
Meanwhile, Gifty has exchanged her religious faith for a faith in science. With an almost religious fervor, she hopes that her hard work will save her from the fates of her brother and mother.
I think when people heard about my brother they assumed that I had gone into neuroscience out of a sense of duty to him, but the truth is I’d started this work not because I wanted to help people but because it seemed like the hardest thing you could do, and I wanted to do the hardest thing. I wanted to flay any mental weakness off my body like fascia from muscle. Throughout high school, I never touched a drop of alcohol because I lived in fear that addiction was like a man in a dark trench coat, stalking me, waiting for me to get off the well-lit sidewalk and step into an alley. I had seen the alley. I had watched [my brother] walk into the alley and I had watched my mother go in after him, and I was so angry at them for not being strong enough to stay in the light. And so I did the hard thing.
Transcendent Kingdom, pp. 36-37
But as she pursues her Ph.D. research, Gifty realizes that science is failing her just like her childhood faith did, and so her quest for answers, for meaning, continues.
If you are looking for a clear sense of closure, you will be disappointed. Gyasi will give you hope, but she will also give you ambiguity. It is Gyasi’s willingness to sit with that ambiguity that makes Transcendent Kingdom such a beautiful book.
Sealed: An Unexpected Journey Into the Heart of Grace by Katie Langston
Sealed is a memoir chronicling Katie Langston’s journey from the Mormon faith to Christianity. While Gifty and Langston are lightyears apart in terms of their basic biographies, there are striking similarities between them. Like Gifty, Langston grew up in a profoundly religious home, and like Gifty, she was fastidious in her piety. From an early age she was haunted by the idea that “you can do something horribly wrong without knowing it.” Because worthiness through purity was central to her faith, Langston relentlessly pursued purity, even confessing to minor sins she hadn’t committed. “I was thinking of words that rhymed with lamb and I accidentally thought ‘damn,'” she told her mother. “I’m not sure, but I’m worried that I whispered it out loud.”
As she entered her teen years, she began to be troubled by what she had been taught. Faced with a God who requires you to earn your way to the Celestial Kingdom, Langston learned to hate him. “I hated his rules and requirements, his worthiness, tests, his severity,” she writes. “Most of all, I hated him for the fact that I was beginning to suspect that he had never loved me–and never would.”
Langston continued to be troubled by her faith into early adulthood. She checked all the boxes (and more) expected of her as a Mormon woman, serving as a missionary, getting married, and starting a family, but her endless fears of unworthiness fed her resentment toward God. When she first heard Mormon speakers arguing for a different view of God–a God whose favor does not need to be earned but who loves us as we are–it was a breath of fresh air leading her on a journey that eventually caused her to leave Mormonism to pursue ministry in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
Despite rejecting the faith of her family and the community she was raised in, she ultimately writes about that faith sympathetically. She cannot belong to it, but she loves her family members who embrace it, and she still cherishes some of its deepest values. “My [Christian] baptism was the final uncoupling with Mormonism,” she writes, “the last, definitive break. … Simultaneously, my baptism was the culmination of everything Mormonism taught me to value. Connection, togetherness, hope for a future unity: these are what God desires, and as creatures made in God’s image, we desire them, too.”
Like Gifty, Langston may have left her childhood faith, but she refuses to condemn her loved ones who still hold to Mormonism or to proclaim that faith as evil, even though she no longer agrees with it. Both books are honest, loving approaches to the story of someone questioning their faith, well worth reading if you are interested tackling this sensitive subject.
Full disclosure: I know Katie Langston, though not well, and we are both employed by the same organization, sometimes collaborating on projects. I read Sealed because I learned of it through my work and, as someone who lived in Utah for a couple of years, was interested in the topic. Katie did not ask me to review her book (she probably doesn’t know about my blog), and I did not do it as a favor for her; I am reviewing it here because it moved me and felt like a good companion to Transcendent Kingdom.
Here in the United States, where I live, we thought we were entering a new “pandemic-is-ending” phase. As many of us got vaccinated, we felt protected — and, indeed, the number of cases was dropping for a while, particularly in areas where people embraced the vaccine. Mask mandates ended. Places that had voluntarily closed beyond any government-imposed shutdowns began opening their doors. If we were paying attention, we knew that COVID-19 was still raging in many places outside the U.S., but we still felt like we’d turned the corner.
And then the delta variant changed things. Now some places are requiring masks again. Some schools, workplaces, or voluntary activities, no longer trusting that enough people will do the right thing, are making vaccines mandatory. We are once again asking, “What’s safe?”
It’s time to don our masks again
… and, if for some reason, you, dear reader, are able to be vaccinated but have not yet done so, it’s time to take care of that.
I know enough about my regular readers to guess that those who have been able to get the vaccine probably have done so. I also don’t think I can convince people who are strongly against the vaccine to get vaccinated. But if you’re on the fence, please consider these reasons to mask up as reasons to get vaccinated as well. And if you aren’t crazy about voluntarily wearing a mask again, read on.
Another year of isolation will be very hard on many of us.
When the pandemic-related shutdowns began last year, many people were concerned about the toll these shutdowns would take on mental health. Indeed, the isolation was hard on many (probably most of us), and especially so for young people. But the majority of us got by one way or another. This includes people I know who were in high-risk groups and who lived alone. It was a difficult time, but they weathered the storm.
But if people in high-risk groups have to self-isolate again in the near future, I think it will be far more difficult on them the second time around. Loneliness can be brutal. If we’re truly concerned about the toll that the pandemic can take on mental health, it’s important that we work hard to beat it. Masking up and getting vaccinated are both excellent ways to do this, as well as staying home when you are sick.
If people feel unsafe, this could harm many businesses.
Another concern people had last year was the effect shutdowns would have upon businesses and other organizations, such as arts groups. In fact, some businesses have failed as a result of the pandemic. Of course businesses fail all the time, particularly during economic downturns or as a result of failing to adapt to cultural changes, and it’s always hard to see organizations you love disappear.
But watching places we loved close due to the pandemic seems to add insult to injury. Some people may blame the shutdowns, although I don’t think it’s that simple. Within the United States now, a number of people have postponed travel plans because of the delta variant. It doesn’t take government-imposed shutdowns to slow consumer spending.
The happy news is that many independent businesses and cultural organizations have survived because they were able to adapt and stay afloat long enough to reopen their doors recently as people began to feel safer going out.
But if we continue to experience wave upon wave of COVID-19 cases, people may feel unsafe enough about going out that these businesses will once again suffer… and sooner or later, many more will end up closing.
If it helps, here’s a list of things that are more uncomfortable than wearing a mask.
I understand the discomfort of wearing a mask. Yes, it sometimes can feel more difficult to breath — particularly if you are exercising — when you have a mask on.
But it may help to think of all of the things you may have endured, or watched others endure, that are far worse than a wearing a mask. (And I’m not counting COVID-19 in this list, though it certainly could be included.)
For example…
Giving birth (in fact, many part of pregnancy can be more uncomfortable than wearing a mask)
Appendicitis
Passing a kidney stone
Waking up in the middle of the night with a charley horse
Prepping for a colonoscopy (If you are of the age to do this and have been avoiding it, please don’t let the prep discourage you from getting a colonoscopy. No, the prep isn’t pleasant, but it is far better than dying of colon cancer.)
An intense job interview
Asking someone on a date (unless you are supremely confident or don’t care about the outcome)
A gastrointestinal illness that has you vomiting long after you’ve emptied your stomach, leaving you so wrung out that you just fall asleep on the floor near the toilet after your umpteenth trip to the bathroom, and you are so feverish that the cool tiles actually feel good (or was that just me?)
I’m sure you could add to this list. The point is: You’ve already endured extremely unpleasant things. You are strong, and you can do this. Let’s put on our masks and (if we haven’t already) get our vaccinations and get this thing under control.
Note: I have a family commitment and will be taking about a month off the blog. The next post should be on Monday, September 20.
