Vacation

Going on vacation tomorrow. Going to do some fishing, hiking, eating, game playing, reading, guitar playing and maybe a little bit of sleeping. Ok, so realistically it will be mostly sleeping with some of that other stuff mixed in. But that's ok, right?

Life: Not like in the movies

Sometimes we wish our life was as simple as the movies we watch, or at least I do at times. I think part of it is the singularity of focus. When we're watching a part of a movie, there is usually only one thing going on, one thing that is gripping our mind and emotions. We can really dig into the feeling and depth of what is going on in that scene. When someone gets crushed by the person they love, or when someone is experiencing the joy of a success, we completely invest ourselves in the character's situation.

Life is never really like that, though, is it? For one thing, there's never just one thing going on with us and the people we love, especially when we're close to them. In the same day you're experiencing the birth of your first child, someone close to you will have a broken heart or be battling a serious disease. And this will always be the case, unless you live your life isolated from any family or community. Even if you did, you wouldn't be immune. Often the moments of beauty in our own lives can be overshadowed by worry or dissatisfaction with where we are financially, professionally or relationally. Or something from our past may dilute the happiness we could experience from a moment, not to mention worrying about the future.

What if, despite the chaos of our worlds, we could have a singularity of focus? Sometimes when I look at children playing a game, coloring a picture or even enjoying their lunch, I can't help but notice that nothing is invading their moment. They're not worried about what's going to happen later that afternoon, or trying to shrug off a moment of pain from their past. They're simply living that moment for all it's worth. When did we lose that, and could we ever get it back? It would take a lot of embracing and accepting of where we are, and sometimes that's tough to do.
But why is it so easy to suspend ourselves in the moment and feel such a full sense of emotion when we're watching movies? I think it may be simply because it's not us, and it's not our lives. It's not instinctive to us to worry about the a fictional character we're watching. When the credits roll, we don't have to worry about whether the "happily ever after" couple can maneuver the realities of a marriage or talk Private Ryan through the guilt of having his comrades die in his place. It's a lot easier to do when we're just watching a movie.
I think it would help us to realize that if we never live fully in a moment, we will never feel the spectrum of human emotion. Not that we should have fluxuating moods that rival those of middle school girls, or that we should ignore the pain and happiness of those around us, but we should be able to experience loss, tranquility, excitement, satisfaction and every other emotion in the moments they arrive, whether in us or those we love. We can exchange our middle-ground numbness for full investment. When we learn this practice, I don't believe it will make us unstable or unwise. On the contrary, I believe it will lead us to understand our reality and the realities of life for those around us. We will be better friends and better humans. Humans who know the freedom of feeling the delight (or pain) of a moment like a child.

War

Given our country's recent history, war has been a hot topic of conversation for several years now. I know people who have protested all wars and I also know people who call them tree hugging hippies who are just ignorant and naive. Of all the dialogue I have heard on the subject, not much of it has seemed constructive. In fact, much of it seems to miss the point.
To make the issue more complicated, people employ religious beliefs to argue for or against national violence, and many times they use the same religion or even the same religious writing to justify their black or white view of war.
A conversation in a Christian circle might go like this:

"Don't you think Jesus showed us how to deal with violent people who threaten us? Didn't he teach us to not repay violence with violence?"
"Well what about when God commanded for people to be killed and told Israel to go to war?"

And that conversation might last for hours.

Approaching it from this perspective, it can all be pretty confusing, and most people end up on one polarized side of the issue. Regardless of what conclusions we come to about pacifism, aggression or subversive resistance, I think there are some things we can all agree on.
Most of what bothers me about hearing these conversations is that it all seems to easy. It's too easy to say, "War is just necessary sometimes for reasons A B and C. Oh well, people are going to die. That's just how the world works. Those ******** have it coming anyways. They are evil." It's not that the person believes war is necessary sometimes that bothers me. What bothers me is that it's not even something to be taken in with graveness.
I think there are a number of reasons that war is taken so lightly now. One would be the nature of modern warfare and technology. If you ask a veteran of WWII about whether we should go to war, he may say yes and he may say no. What he will not say is, "Eh, who cares? They have it coming. Let's bomb 'em." He will take it seriously because he knows from an up close and personal perspective what killing and death looks and feels like.
People I hear talking about the current wars seem to talk about killing and death nonchalantly. It is a mere side effect of a necessary drug. Or even worse, sometimes it is the drug itself.
Regardless of whether you can justify it in your thinking, I think we will all get a lot farther in discussions of war we first take in the gravity of what it means for the people on both sides of the conflict. We should never treat it as an impersonal string of logic, because we are not staging a philosophical discussion for education or entertainment, we are making decisions with people's lives.