Perspective

It's hard to believe I have been away from my daughters for twenty-seven months.  It still seems surreal in so many ways.  There are instances each day I stare out some window and reflect.  I think about so many things.  I get lost in thought for unspecified periods of time.  Eventually I slip back into reality and remind myself that this is indeed happening.  It is not a bad dream.  It's not a nightmare from which I will soon awake.  This is all real, so very real.

The realness and gravity of my present plight is always understood when I feel the pain.  The pain of separation.  The pain of failure.  The pain of hurt.  Pain is a stark reminder of something wrong, something that is wrong, something that went wrong.  I am learning how to balance the consequence of this pain; the tears, the involuntary flashes of hopelessness, the brokenness.  I allow the pain to take its course in my heart, in my feelings, in my mind.  It must do its work.  Pain opens my soul and exposes its depths.  I find balance by looking into the unknown, beyond the feelings, into the unforseen world that is to come.  I strive to find meaning in what sometimes feels like a bleak situation, a fate that cannot be changed.  I am determined to transform this personal tragedy into a triumph, to turn my predicament into a human achievement.  I have discovered a secret strength that carries me through the dark moments ... when I am no longer able to change a situation, I must change myself.

History is filled with stories of remarkable courage in the midst of horrendous circumstances, be it unspeakable tragedy, indescribable grief, surviving conditions that appeared to be insurmountable.  The human spirit has displayed time and time again that it can overcome any obstacle, any barrier, any pain, any tragedy.  Rising above, reaching beyond is not found through attempts to change existing circumstances.  No one can change death.  No one can change an act of betrayal.  No one can change the devastating results of a tragic event, an unjust situation, a personal failure.  No one can change another person's acts of hatred, of cruelty, of hurt, of injury.  But one can change one's self.  The key to overcoming is discovered internally, gauging the situation, advancing here, retreating there, correcting your invisible route, and changing your perspective.

Change is an inevitable law of nature.  It exacts its toll on all of our lives.  Seasons change.  Times change.  Life changes.  Change comes from uncontrollable circumstance in our lives.   Change comes from controllable circumstance -- mistakes, failure, selfishness, and its counterparts as well -- perfection, success, altruism.  Our lives, our world, metamorphose themselves through change.  The only change we control is in altering ourselves.

One paradigm that has changed in my life is in my expectation.  It is not really important what I expect from life, but what is of importance is what life expects from me.  The life I speak of encompasses every aspect of that life that envelops me, the life that I touch, the life that I feel.  I am not writing from a perspective of my life or an individual life, but life as a whole.  The life I describe is everything living that circulates in the sphere of my world.  I must allow the shift in my thinking to be lived out in this sphere.  What I expect from life brings with it one set of goals and hopes, one set of expectations and results.  What life expects from me brings a completely different set which resists the intransigent desires of self.  What life expects of me embodies others.  It places the feelings, goals, and dreams of my children on a higher plane than my own.  It considers my behavior in light of how it may impact them.  This is living within the paradigm of what life expects of me.

I have found clarity as I look into the future, as I consider so much.  This lucidity helps me see it's what you do with a given experience that really defines who you become.  When your perspective of life changes, your inner self is altered dramatically.  Living in the realm of what life expects of me enables me to understand that I never have to prove to anyone that I matter.  The pressures of performance, image, status fade to a bigger idea that encompasses so much more than my life.  I have been enlightened through looking at personal tragedy.  With great tragedies come great truths.  Such truths either bring people together or tear them apart.  And the response to this growing closer or being torn apart changes dramatically when you see this in light of the two perspectives.  What I expect from life brings one response.  What life expects from me brings a response that is the opposite of the former.  I believe the latter is the better way.  It enables love to work in wider scope, it creates space between opposites, space which allows room for error in the process of people growing together.  Love is perfect.  People are not.  And this space allows people to fail, yet gives room for the perfectness of love to remain.

Two Lines in the Sand

 Siberia is a vague vast sweep of nothingness, a harsh desolate terrain, surrounded by somber depths of mountains.  In this remote distant land, far from the haunts of man, at the end of the world, the Gulag had its beginnings.  The system of Soviet labor camps and prisons saw close to 50 million people walk through its gates.  Once sentenced and shipped to Siberia, prisoners were filled with the belief that they would never again return to civilization.  This was the disembarkation point from life.

No outsiders visited the prison camps of the former Soviet Union.  Little information about the millions who lived, suffered, and died there is known.  Millions will remain nameless for all time.  When one entered the Gulag, they were subjected to treatment that was inhumane.  Conditions were incomprehensible.  Horrors committed were unspeakable.  No one can fathom the atrocities that were seen and felt and experienced.  Such acts were carried out by guards who saw prisoners as waste, complete human waste.  They looked at their lives through a self-absorbed lens, a calculated and menacing impertinence.  Most were filled with contempt, anger and hate, finding great joy in the immense sufferings, the tortures of their fellow man.  Out of this environment of complete chaos and mayhem, came one of the greatest voices and most brilliant intellects of the twentieth century ...  Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Life in the Gulag was a fierce inner battle with one's own mind and heart for survival.  Avoiding death was the daily ritual.  Within months of confinement, the desire to live faded, just as your hopes and dreams did upon arrival.  Prisoners in the Gulag would pray.  They said their prayers inwardly, praying to a God whom they found difficult to believe in.  They did so out of obligation to a hopeless hope, a sense of maybe, frantic for their pleadings to be heard, hoping God was listening.  They were not prayers born from a vigorous, strong, uncompromising, I-can-defy-all-odds type of faith.  No, they were born from desperation, for in their surroundings there was no evidence of God.  The only evidence seen was that of hell, a pure living hell.

Like other prisoners, Solzhenitsyn lived and worked in very bleak conditions.  One day, the depression, the desolation became too much to bear.  Surrounded by death, enveloped in evil that was so blunt and so terse, the hopelessness overwhelmed him.  His endless days of working in fields of backbreaking labor and slow starvation, of never ending mental, physical, and verbal abuse had stolen any desire to live.  He felt no purpose in pressing on; his life would make no relevant difference.  A despair completely enervating had overcome him.  Laying his shovel down, he walked slowly and despondently to a makeshift bench.   A devouring void of emptiness encompassed him.  A drowsiness and hopelessness steeled on his eyelids.  His eyes were bleeding with mortality.  His lips were pale.  He knew at any moment it would be over.  Some demented guard would approach, order him up, and when he failed to respond, he would be bludgeoned to death.  As he sat, head hanging down, waiting for the end, he felt a presence.  Next to him knelt a fellow prisoner, an old man with wrinkled skin, withered hands, a tortured face that revealed the years in the Gulag.  Bent over, the man found a stick and drew two lines in the sand, two simple lines.  They formed the sign of the cross.

As Solzhenitsyn stared at the simple outline, something happened.  His entire perspective of life changed.  He knew he was merely one man.  He knew he was weak, frail, and broken.  He knew he was surrounded by evil of epidemic proportions.  Yet in that moment, he also knew that the hope of all mankind was represented by the lines in the sand - and through its power, anything was possible.  The cross birthed hope.  Not in his environment.  Not in his circumstance.  Not in his surroundings.  The rags he wore would remain.  The implausible conditions would not fade.  Unconscionable crimes and torture would not desist.  But in that moment, the battle for his life was won.  Those humble, crossing, solitary lines propelled him to stand back up, pick up his shovel, and go back to work - not knowing that his writings would one day impact the entire world.

Through the selfless and compassionate act of the old man, Solzhenitsyn saw something bigger than his life, bigger than the guards, bigger than the powerful empire they represented.  He saw beyond the shackles and the chains, beyond hate, cruelty and death.  He saw the cross. And that cross saved him.  Without it, he would have been beaten to death and thrown in an unmarked grave.  Left alone.  Forgotten.

Solzhenitsyn survived the Gulag.  He would go on to become a Nobel laureate.  Never could he fathom or imagine a future so bright while incarcerated in the darkness of the Soviet prison camps.  May his story give you strength to stand against hopeless odds, defying them, overcoming and surviving.  That same power that lifted him can lift you.  Today.  Right now.  Let his story teach you one more thing ...  those most conscious of another world have the greatest impact on this one.

The Power of Regrets

No matter where your life is or what your life is, choosing it changes everything.  When the landscape of your hopes and dreams lies stretched behind and familiar places shimmer in the distant past, it's easy to be filled with dark, torturous thoughts of regret.  Life's failures and misfortunes can be so painful, so frightening, we want to forget them, hide them, deny them.  Rather than making them an accommodation, accepting and growing, we bury them.  Regrets put us outside ourselves; they divorce us from our egos and force us to see the larger picture, to recognize that our choices are in fact a tapestry and each choice is a thread in the vivid weave, yet each thread is essential to the integrity of the cloth.  I don't regret having regrets.  They remind me where things went wrong.  Be it bad choices, missed opportunities, failure in risk or relationships, they display my shortcomings, allowing me to learn from my mistakes, my neglects, correcting them, and bettering myself as a man, a father, a partner.  They enable me to see the next opportunity, reminding me to seize it and not let it slip away.  Looking back is painful, for we are human, we are imperfect people.  We make inexorable choices which hurt ourselves and others.  We want to ignore our mistakes, our imperfections, our failures.  Often, the only way to make peace is to remember the past.

Regrets motivate me to be a better person.  I value little moments that I understood to be important, but sometimes failed to live out.  Moments with my daughters, moments with the love of my life, moments with friends and family.  Life is about treasuring people and demonstrating this to them.  It's creating environments for your children to dream big dreams, to experience the joy of living, granting them opportunities to build wonderful memories.  Life is found in loving someone and giving everything you have to that individual and bettering their world.  And it's discovered by assisting others, making a difference, helping them become who they want to be.  In such acts, one finds fulfillment, true and enduring fulfillment.

Looking at the past, examining regrets, teaches me to never give up.  When you fail, when you fall down, pull yourself up, wipe the blood from your wounds, bandage them, and move forward.  There will be scars.  Permit those scars to remind you of what hurts, what hinders, what wounds.  Allow them to become a levy of protection from life's storms, shielding you from people who want to hurt you, discourage you, destroy you.  Never let them deter you from reaching for everything God has for you.  Though scarred, you can recover, by being honest, admitting failures and weakness, apologizing and choosing to live a life not of perception, of image, but one of honesty, integrity, not immune from failure or setbacks, but one that acknowledges them when they come and in turn ensures that the compartmentalization of two different lives, word and deed, merge into one.

There will always be inequity in life.  It rains on the just and the unjust, the rich and the poor, the happy and the sad.  Life is not fair.  It never will be.  One child dies in Haiti, one survives.  One wife gets cancer and succumbs to a horrid disease, leaving a husband and child with unanswered questions and broken hearts.  Another survives, experiencing a long healthy life, leaving a husband and child with a beautiful family intact.  Some men are killed in war, some wounded, some survive.  Life is unfair.  We must live with this in mind, value our relationships and make the most of our dreams and our hopes.  Life is not fortuitous.  Life is what we create with what we have and are given by God.

Remembering will lead to memories.  Memories join the past to the future.  They are for those moments when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are; they pave the road to where you want to be.  By looking back, you see a glimpse of where you've been, and see a hint of where you're headed.  Regrets, losing, failure, parts of the past, bring enormous pain.  They also make us more resilient.  Without them, we might have more, but we would be less.

The beginning of the end lies in remembrance.  We are not very good at remembering.  Our endless capacity to focus on the future rather than the past is one of our great national virtues.  It's also one of our great national vices.  Though we hardly seem to note it, even in passing, some things must rest at the forefront of our consciousness.  Don't underestimate the power of that revelation.  The past isn't where you die, it's where you find out that you get to keep on living.

A View From the Edge

Every now and then, you reach a fissure or fraction in time.  For a moment, a moment not bound by minutes, or hours, or days, your world stops.  You stand on the edge.  The edge of everything you have come to know.  The edge of the present.  The edge of the past.  The edge of who you are.  A dividing line, a point of transition.  A rim.  A crest.  A brink.  It's like a scenic overlook as imagined by Einstein or Kepler from which you can actually witness two possible worlds.  On one side you see a world of perfect shapes filled with order, and hope, and good; you see the realization of what you want and need.  The other, a different world entirely, a place of misaligned shapes filled with disorder and confusion, the opposite of your envisioned realization.   Separating those worlds are lines, lines of constraint and limit.  Vertical demarcations of choice and belief.  Transfixed, leaning over the edge, you see how narrow the lines are, the margins between both worlds are minute.  The degree of separation is a tiny miniscule space, a space that divides victory and defeat, happiness and despair, fulfillment and emptiness.  The lines tell the real story.  Life is a battle of polar opposites;  winning and losing, success and failure, love and hate.  The best human possibilities lie close to the worst.

  

I sit at the computer and stare through my words.  I remember another time and space.  The remembering is turned into a kind of re-happening.  The grass is deep green and the sky is perfect blue.  I lay in the middle of a field.  I remember the monotony.  It's a strange boredom.  The sun and the heat.  The damp and the moist.  The humidity.  The day is calm and hot and utterly vacant.  Except the thoughts in my head.  They lead down a path which winds through an opaque jungle of memories ending at an overlook.  I stare from the edge.  Endless staring.  Two worlds, a world that is, a world that ought to be.  I see beyond a fence.  Unlimited space.  Freedom.  Never ending.  I look up.  Blue.  Limitless blue; boundless and ceaseless.  It stretches forever.

I take my material where I find it, which is my life, at the intersection of past and present and the future.  Thoughts are like traffic.  Traffic feeds in my mind, it goes in circles, then imagination flows and the traffic merges and shoots off down a thousand different roads.  All I can do is pick the road and go for the ride.  I do.  I see the lines.  Points that separate, margins in life, fine narrow borders that divide.  Real and imaginary marks found in ventures, in pursuits, in risk, in relationships, crossing most aspects of living, splitting worlds.

Perhaps you find yourself in a world where you don't want to be.  You crossed a narrow line.  Shattered dreams, failed relationships, a dark personal situation.  You're paralyzed by fear.  You're on the ledge.  You see where you want to be.  You can't see how you will get there.  You are lost, fragile, broken, empty.  Your mind is captive to the past.  The bad stuff never stops happening.  It lives in its own dimension, replaying itself over and over.  You are pinned downed, landlocked, unable to reach across that line.  You hear a voice from deep within.  It whispers.  It reminds.  It promises.  It has been here before.  You feel a presence.  It is beyond you, outside of you, so much larger than you, your life, your circumstance, your present reality.  Everything goes quiet and you look up and see the sun and the sea of immeasurable blue, and the immense serenity flashes against your eyeballs and in that moment, that precise moment, your whole inner world gets rearranged.  Everything has shifted.  You see the future from the edge.  You get a glimpse.  You feel an approximation of hope.  You sense it.  Now believe it.  Those are His arms you feel.  Trust Him.  That is His voice you hear.  Believe Him.