The Topic of Cancer

Cancer is an indiscriminate bastard. It takes so many and passes by others whether or not we've painted our doorframes with medicinal and spiritual blood. Young and old, fit and fat, cancer with its hundred heads doesn't have a type or target. It settled in my grandfather's brain. It revisits my father's skin regularly as if testing for weaknesses in his defenses. My mother beat it back twice and almost lost her voice doing it. It began unobtrusively behind the knee of my first choir director and advanced until he could retreat no more. My list could go on, as I’m sure yours could as well.

The day after I wrote this passage just a few months ago, I woke to the following two pieces of cancer news. An old friend was celebrating the six-month mark after his leukemia-necessitated bone marrow transplant. At the same time, I found waiting the obituary for the sportscaster I most identify with my youth. Stuart Scott was only nine years older than me and the worst word in this sentence is was. I am aware that was will apply to us all eventually, but cancer seems bent on robbing so many of their is and will be.

***

As I said at the beginning of this series, I didn't think I'd live to see forty. Most of the time, I'm glad I did. All of the time, I am mindful of those who didn't for whatever reason. It also makes me wonder how we can care more about the losses around us than we do right now, particularly the ones that seem so unfair. It makes me wonder if the four-year-old girl I saw in my daughter's home country making gravel by hand has become one of those losses. It makes me wonder if the guy I grew up with who was in jail at 12 for selling drugs made it to adulthood. It makes me painfully aware that many of the people I’ll wonder about next are already gone.

Everybody Hurts…Sometimes

Little injuries from years ago have an accumulating impact on my body today. When I played sports, I played through them. Ignored them. Refused to admit I had them. Now, I am a product of them. And when I move and feel their legacy in my joints and bones, I also feel the need to repent for the injuries I may have caused others in my clumsy path from birth to today. To make amends for them, at least in some small way. If you think I'm still talking about physical injuries, you're not old enough yet.

***

I remember, when I was growing up, listening to more seasoned people talking about how their old knee injuries allowed them to predict shifts in the weather. Now I’m them and my old knee injury only allows me to predict how much less I’ll be able to run in five years. I’m not sure if that means they were overstating their psychic arthritic joint abilities of premonition or I am merely incapable of reading the signals mine are sending me over the noise and distraction of my life. Whichever it is, I’m just as bitter about not having that superpower as I am at not having a hover board or self-lacing Nikes.

My Fanhood

When you run out of hands fingers for your championship rings, you're doing it right.

I still love sports. Few elements of American culture have the ability to call out the best in us the way the games we play do. Or highlight the worst in us. Our commitment to each other and our utter greed. Our shared sense that life should be fair and our continual pursuit of ways to game the system in our favor. Our desire to push the human body beyond perceived limitations and our willing blindness to the fact that the pursuit so often ends in a sacrifice on the alter of performance offered in the most unhealthy ways.

Where else but in sports are the ills of our culture—racism, sexism, poverty, usury, hubris, violence, and more—so clearly seen and celebrated? Where else can the best parts of us—heroism, honor, charity, fairness, competition, belief, teamwork, and more—break through and subdue, if even for a few moments, the ills I listed just a moment ago?

Please don’t read this as some sly, ironic takedown of sports. I meant the words I started this passage with. But love is never simple. And loving something means never blinding ourselves to its entirety. That would be lying, not love.

***

On arguments regarding historical greatness:

Michael Jordan is not the greatest player in NBA history. Neither is LeBron James. Or Kobe Bryant. Or Wilt Chamberlain. Or Kareem Abdul Jabbar. None of them run out of hands for their championship rings. None of them owned a decade in its entirety. None of them were coaching their teams while winning championships. None of them give as much credit to their teammates as he does. And I’m a Lakers fan; so saying this hurts me deeply. But it’s Bill Russell. Eleven rings don’t lie.

Like I said, love is never simple, even regarding sports.

(This) White Man’s Burden

My daughter holding her newborn brother's hand. To be clear, this is not what I'm doing but why I do it.

I still maintain hope that, one day, we can accomplish Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream of judging people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. A caveat: this would not negate our ability to see color, merely integrate the notion that in our differences we are still all of the same worth, something our culture is still too broken at this point to do. This has been my hope since I first heard those words as a child. But now, I understand that Martin was speaking about the character of white people.

***

My mom took me to task once for wanting the world to be fair. We were driving, the two of us, in the middle of nowhere across the high desert on the way to my aunt and uncle’s place in the mountains. It may or may not have been the trip when she let me drive the car, illegally, to get some practice behind the wheel.

I thought, at the time, she was critiquing a complaint I was in the middle of making about something I should have been allowed to do as the 14-year-old master and commander of my own destiny. That misunderstanding later evolved into another as I reinterpreted her words to mean the unfairness I called out would never change. That unfair is just the way things are immutably.

I think I see it now. What my mother was trying to get me to understand is that merely diagnosing something as unfair is never enough. If we aren’t working to make those diagnoses cures, well, we’re merely part of the unfairness. And some of that work must be identifying how we’ve been part of that unfairness from the start.

Otherwise, we cannot uphold the vow to first do no harm.

Family Extends

On my patriotic leanings:

I'd rather live in a country that bankrupts itself to help people who cannot meet their own needs than one that grows rich on the backs of those very same people. I'd rather live in a country that seeks justice than one that is only concerned with what it deserves. I'd rather have less so that others have enough than have more and cause others to go without.

***

On racism:

I taught a humanities course that focused on race in America several years ago in Milwaukee, a place that has been referred to as the second most segregated city in the United States. About halfway through the term, in the middle of a discussion of the writing of James Baldwin, one of my students leaned back in her chair and sighed.

You know, racism is only a problem because we keep bringing it up, she said. If we’d just stop talking about it, we’d see it’s not a problem anymore.

The girl next to her shook her head. I used to think that way until my dad told me about what he goes through being black, she said. I guess I just haven’t seen it as much because my mom’s white and people don’t assume I’m black too.

The first girl stared at her for a full minute after the conversation moved on, replaying everything she’d said about race that semester, if I had to guess what she was doing. I can’t recall her saying anything else aloud for the rest of the term. Her retreat into silence still grieves me.

On a related note, I was recently told, anonymously, by a student in my world literature class that I need to “stop white shaming” my students. Weird given that I am, in fact, white.

Make of those two stories what you will.

***

People ask me about adoption pretty regularly. Sometimes they want to hear my family’s story. Sometimes they want to talk about being a transracial family, though they rarely possess the term transracial to describe us. Sometimes they want to ask questions about blackness they wouldn’t think to ask a black person. Sometimes they want to ask questions about adoption they shouldn’t say outside their heads. Sometimes they want to ask if I think other people should adopt, which is so often code for asking whether of not they should. Sometimes they want to pin a medal on my chest I didn’t ask for and don’t think I deserve. Sometimes they want to accuse me of some kind of racially or nationally or religiously or socioeconomically privileged agenda in our choice to adopt. Sometimes they want me to speak for adoptive families I am not a part of. Sometimes they want me to make our adoption a bumper sticker of affirmation.

They never ask me those questions about my biological children. I hope it occurs to them that my daughter realizes this, even as I’m pretty sure it does not.

No Such Thing as Political Love

Your political leanings are not right. More often than not they should be left out of the work that needs to be done. There is nothing progressive about loving others. Nothing is accomplished when we are conservative with our engagement of the worst elements of our humanity. If anything, the way we politicize our views of the world keeps us from listening, loving, and being graceful when that's all we can and should do. Seriously, try to wear yourself out in doing what is most helpful for the least of us rather than arguing about things that only matter to those who have the most. I’ve read this sentiment somewhere. The print was red I think…

***

Increasingly, I grow tired of the words advocate and ally. I understand the intent and feel better about them than the alternatives. But the results are the same. We plug our efforts into a cause and that cause into the same binary perception of a war have been told we are fighting, whether that fight be cultural or religious or personal (though putting or in the last phrase feels completely artificial). We exist, so it would seem, in shifting states of us and them where winners or losers are judged to be on the right or wrong side of history and what matters most is winning.

The problem—and we all really know this deep inside—is that the game is never fair and the way it is rigged so often means winning is still losing when we embrace a larger perspective. I would argue this notion of living guarantees no one ever wins or loses because, shockingly, life is not a game of horseshoes (a game of horseshoes!).

Instead, we should stop playing and take reconciliation seriously. It’s our only hope. Sure, it’s messier and more difficult. For reconciliation to work, everyone bears fault and blame and responsibility, though not, to be sure, in equal measures. And most of all, everyone must be honest. Unvarnished even. To be reconciled is to expose our rough and wounding edges to ourselves as much as we do to each other, letting their proximity and our steadfast, repeated recommitment to love each other like we love ourselves sand those pieces of us down until we fit together as equally valued, equally seen souls.

Student at the Podium

Photo Credit: http://positively-smitten.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/ps-public-speaking-4.jpg

Teaching has instilled in me many lessons. One of my favorites is highly counterintuitive. I want my students to surpass me in their work and thinking (which, in my case, is not that big an ask). What’s interesting is that wanting them to be better than me makes me push more diligently to improve my own work. It’s not competitive instinct. Neither is it a professional jealousy. Rather—and it has taken me a long time to see this—it is my way of honoring their effort. I’d rather my students see me as the writer working right alongside them than that guy who got published and talks about it.

***

In the same way doctors make awful patients, teachers, it would seem, make deficient students. At least that’s been the case with me. I suspect the act of working to make sense for others disables the ability to do so in me at times.

For example, here’s a life lesson only recently learned. I hate clichés. I try not to write with them or, more importantly, live them out. At the same time, I teach my students not to fear clichés in the early stages of their writing. Clichés, I tell them, are merely easily accessible expressions for the deeper sentiments their scene or sentence demands—a depth that is just not consistently reachable without completely destroying any storytelling rhythm one has achieved while still trying to figure out what they want to say in general. Clichés are only harmful if you don’t go back and make them better, more expressive, less expected by the audience once you can see the larger picture. If they remain in your final draft, well, that’s just lazy.

Back to that life lesson. The fear of living clichés is the most insidious cliché of all. The thing is, clichés can only be seen in reflection, not while we’re in the process of living. Trying to avoid them as you go is paralyzing and actively makes cliché your experiences in the process. For more on this, see hipster culture.

Rather than avoiding them, we should choose to live more and more consistently reflective lives. Then, like any good writer, we can avoid lazy storytelling by revising for originality before moving forward with living better, more expressive, less expected lives.

Mirror Weakness

Myers and Briggs are liars. Strengths Questing inspires a form of tilting in which the windmills exist, but the knight—errant or otherwise—does not. You are not any of the cast members of Friends, no matter what BuzzFeed tells you. Personality inventories offer concrete notions of the self to those who take them too seriously that are as much fiction as any character invented by any writer ever. I’m not implying these “tests” are irrelevant or do not reflect certain character traits we often possess. Rather, it’s what we do with the results that’s dishonest; lies coming in the form of turning very faint glimmers of the complexities comprising who we are into stable, quantifiable badges we wear at corporate mixers or excuses we use not to push into our weaknesses when that’s exactly all we need to do.

***

On pressing into weakness:

I’m going to be a little lot vulnerable here. I have devoted most of my adult life to writing. And 22 years on, I can say one thing with certainty. I don’t know if I’m any good at it, and my suspicion is that I may never be more than passable.

This isn’t a case of compliment fishing. I’m not asking for people to tell me I am. Please note the lack of question marks.

Rather, I’m being as honest as I know how to be. Writing is an uncertain enterprise. I am never certain I’ll have an idea when I sit down to the keys. I am never certain the ideas I do have are worth writing. I am never certain I’ll be able to write in in such a way that does my ideas justice. I am never certain anyone else will see my stories and ideas as worth publishing, and my stack of rejections doesn’t necessarily help with that. But most of all, I am never certain what I write will matter to anyone else.

Add all that up and the fact that I don’t know if my writing is any good or not is really the most lucid conclusion I can draw.

And still I write. Maybe it’s stubbornness. Maybe it’s pride. Maybe it’s a distinct lack of creativity in that I don’t see any other options. I guess maybe I’m just too curious. About the next corner. The next idea. The next reader. Maybe it’s that I just haven’t reached the end of hope yet. So I write.

41 for 40

For most of my childhood, I expected to be dead by 30. I had no compelling reason to believe this. My health was excellent. There were no hereditary conditions driving my fear. But it was real and present and I fully expected to die young.

Maybe it was the Cold War ethos of the 80s; the thought that the bomb was just a day away from dropping. Maybe it was the end of days talk that still runs through churches periodically and seems to coincide with my general notion of how insignificant I am. Maybe I’m just a fatalist.

Then I hit my 30s and I was left wondering what happened and what I’d let happen as a result of fearing I’d never make it that far. Anyone who knows me knows I don’t sleep. Haven’t for a long time. I guess there could be a connection. Then again, correlation does not automatically signify causation, or so my grad school friends are fond of saying.

So, now I’m just over the edge of 40 and I decided I needed to take some stock in that. A decade older than I thought I’d ever be. Middle aged and everything. Three kid having and everything. Gray hair finding and everything. Formerly minivan driving and everything. Get-off-my-lawn-yelling and everything.

The results became the following 41 ideas that are not lessons for others, merely vistas I’ve stumbled upon along the way. They were written individually over the past six months. Interestingly, when I looked at them as a whole, I seemed to be speaking to myself in groups of two. So, over the next four weeks, I’ll be sharing them in pairs I didn’t know I was creating, five days a week (with an extra thrown in one day). Most are short and some a bit longer. But all are gestures at the core of who I am.

Look, I figure turning 40 allows me to invoke honey badger privilege with this one. I do what I want. What follows, then, are the first two of those ideas. I hope you’ll follow along and, if you feel so inclined, let me know what you think. I’m open to conversation on any and all of these thoughts.

Love and Grace (If You Will)

Love done right is exhausting. If you aren't moved from the center of the frame by how and whom you love, you aren't doing it right. If you aren't challenged and discomforted by how and whom you love, you're not doing it right. If you love only because you get something out of it, you're not doing it right. If you love only the people and things you’ve deemed deserving of your love, you're not doing it right. If the way you love doesn't cost you anything, and possibly everything, you're not doing it right.

***

Grace is the most difficult and most necessary choice we make, and we don't make that choice nearly enough. The capacity for grace in humans is evidence of the divine. The lack of grace in humans is evidence of our need for that divinity. I am increasingly convinced that grace—dirty, costly, unrequited grace—is more important than love because love can't be real without it.

And let's be very clear: grace is not ours to give. The moment we begin thinking of it as our gift to others is the same moment we’ve made it about ourselves. When we see grace as something we have to give, we see ourselves as superior to those we are seeking to give grace. This echoes the notion of tolerance, which inherently establishes one group as tolerant and another as tolerated. Most people I know hate feeling merely tolerated. In the same way, most people hate it when those who claim to be helping them are really helping themselves.

Grace, rather, must be a lifestyle, something people cannot separate from who you are. It's not a pose or a tool in the toolbox of being a good person. It is the toolbox.

accessing the writing inside

I love the moments when my least confident writers discover that the liability they thought they had when it comes to formal writing is actually a strength when applied intentionally.

It's the golden hour, not some immediate cure all. In no way does this new found knowledge rehabilitate the deficiencies that have accrued, sometimes over years, in these students' writing. This isn't some Hilary Swank movie after all.

Rather, there is the glimmer of a desire that wasn't there a moment earlier coupled with a hope that hasn't been part of the equation. I had this experience with one of my students in the fall. He hated writing. By all accounts, he still does. But, if his word is to be trusted, he hates it a little less than before. Here's how that happened:

In preparation for the term research paper in that class, I ask students to create an organizational device that plays to the way they are most comfortable working with information. The device need only organize the their key research and interpretations in an order that aligns with the demands of the assignment. The form and function is completely up to them.

Here's what he came up with:

In many ways, this is exactly what the assignment exists for. Nowhere is this type of thinking privileged in the traditional writing process. And yet, it is exactly what we should be calling out in students - a correlative frame of reference bridging concept from one articulation (the way it is processed in their heads) to another (the way it is processed, here, in formal academic exposition).

The result was a student who likely would not have met minimum competency requirements using the traditional methods of organization doing so using his artistic ability to guide his written work.

Howard Gardner knew this when he started theorizing multiple intelligence types more than 35 years ago. Traditional measures only measure abilities traditional to some. Couple the work that goes into digesting new information with the way a person is most comfortable doing said digesting and the outcome is greater fluency and use.

From this, I can't help but think that this is what should be guiding the work we do in helping students who process the world digitally use their digital sense to access and perform the information they study in our classes.

In other words, how we can use more technology to make their writing less technological.