i had a chance to sit down with nancy last thursday. actually, i sat and she stood up, nancy cuts my hair. i go to see nancy about every other month, and for an hour we share our lives with each other. i look forward to our conversations because nancy is my friend. nancy also has a better understanding of style than anyone else i know, and that is why i trust her with the all important haircut. my vanity and high maintenance lifestyle become abundantly clear to me every time i go see nancy. last week nancy and i talked about giving with wisdom.
a good friend of mine commented on an earlier post by giving a quote from gordon cosby, "The most helpful experiments are accomplished by people who are too naive to know what they are getting into. The wise and experienced know too much to ever accomplish the impossible." I don't know the full context of cosby's comment, but it got me thinking about wisdom in giving. nancy told me a story about how a man approached her and her grandmother and manipulated them in to giving some money. the man got the money, and nancy got to give to the poor. sounds good, right?
weeeeeeelllllllll, i don't know. i feel a little uneasy if i give it the ok stamp. similar to a feeling i had when another friend asked me if it was ever ok to lie, and gave the situation of hiding jews during the holocaust and being questioned by german soldiers on the hunt.
the uneasy feeling comes from using a lie, or manipulation or whatever you want to call it, in order for a person to get what they want. a homeless person wants food, and a scared german wants to protect their jewish friend. the result is good but the methodology is broken. business books classify a productive member of a company as one who produces good results, methodology is secondary. i want friends, and i want to feed homeless people.
i am going to go out on a limb here and make a few statements that may be wrong, and that i have not done the work to fully prove, so if you disagree or find a flaw, feel free to comment:
lying creates results that naivete is not able to see. when a person lies, not only do they have to somehow make the lie look like reality (which isn't reality at all, and thus requires that the liar lives somewhere other than reality, even if for a moment), but, depending on your belief system, they have done something wrong. to move on in reality, the lie has to be reconciled, or else the liar lives in a warped reality.
truth creates one result. it is clean, there is nothing unaccounted for, everything reconciles, and the story is simple because it is the truth and the truth is simpler than a lie; truth exists in reality, a lie does not. it is easier to talk about reality than it is to talk about something contrived. truth creates one result that has several names but i will call it beautiful. naivete can be defined as artless simplicity. a naive person can talk about how they feed a hungry person, but a truthful person can tell you why it is beautiful. truth allows a person to give freely and receive freely. truth knows that it takes courage to do something with real consequences. truth knows that it has something to fear, that there is a real enemy.
the path to knowing and applying truth is wisdom, and the beginning of wisdom....is what we are all searching for.
patrick did free lunch this weekend because i got to see my best friend get married on the beach in florida. i had a few feelings as i was listening to patrick tell me the stories from the weekend...by the way, patrick has the award for the most hilarious free lunch weekend, and you will have to ask him about it because he tells it best...i felt pleased that free lunch was happening in my absence because this is a step in the vision of creating a model that others can repeat. i felt loss that things are not the same as they used to be. i am following this vision that was given to me, and trying to stay true to my role in the story, and i know my role will change with time. i will miss out on certain things because i am required to fulfill another responsibility. i felt proud of patrick because he added something that i could not add. patrick is really good at striking up conversation and making people feel comfortable. patrick is clear about his purpose too, he likes the idea of feeding hungry people, and free lunch serves as a conduit for his purpose which is much bigger and of more consequence than merely feeding people...
i have opened up a number of different subjects in this post and i am trying to figure out how to tie them neatly together and come to some conclusions so all this reading amounts to something. but i am afraid i don't have many conclusions, and i don't even know the question that allows me to find the next step. maybe i opened up more than i can handle to write about...i have a tendency to do that sometimes...
if someone tells a lie in order to get a lunch, they might come to expect that they have to lie to get anything from me or anyone else. a lie does nothing to build a relationship, it only destroys. i want to build a relationship with the people i meet, and wisdom would tell me that i should not allow a person to lie to me in order to get a meal, even if i intend on giving them one. how do i do this? how do i recognize a lie? how do i reconcile a lie in a relationship? how do i move on? how do i offer truth? how do i guard against lies? how do i build a relationship with someone who has possibly never experienced a truthful relationship? what is my responsibility?
i have more questions than answers, but i know a few things. it is beautiful to see a vision come in to reality, it is beautiful to see desires fulfilled, wisom gives sight to see things that are beautiful and i have only seen the tip of the iceburg.
if you know some way to finish this post, please comment. and if you find yourself at the end of this post feeling as if you didn't get to the end (which is how i feel right now), read the comments. i am friends with some good writers.
help!
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4 comments:
...and then i found $5.
sorry...i honestly think its better left with loose ends...i think its good for us all to think about how to live life with honest intentions but i also think that we can only change our actions...the only thing we can change if someone lies to us is our response, and we wont always be able to do something about it if they do lie to us. unfortunately i think its our job to figure out how to protect ourselves when we do get in a situation like that. wow sorry i wrote a novel...not what i had planned...
Jimmy Buffett (one of my favorite philosophers) once said, "Answers are the easy part, questions raise the doubt."
You've opened good doors here, Jason. You have asked questions that many of us gloss over and don't even take the time to ponder. But in asking those questions, we have to stare them in the face and at least start on the path toward answers.
And, looking at this from someone who's been lied to in a terrible way, dealt with it, learned from it, and moved on...I'm okay with not having an answer to everything. The pursuit of wisdom is that road on which we are trying to answer the questions, and the answer is born out of the journey. We have changed along the way, and learned about human nature, and we can't do that in one moment...rather it is from the conversations, the ruminations, the slow processing, and the hours spent in prayer.
I think it all comes back to a word YOU used: beautiful. If we could simply ask a question and have an answer, it wouldn't be as beautiful. Instead, we raise the sails in search of the buried treasure...and what we hold in our hearts in the end is the adventure we experienced along the way.
I still say that Nancy is MY friend.
i disagree. it may be more difficult to know the truth, but i think the truth is always the simplest answer. it is you and me that has to be refined, truth does not have to be refined. truth is truth, and it will never change. in my completely incoherent post, i was trying to address the issue of knowing the truth and applying it. the application of truth typically produces something abstract, difficult to contain with words, transcendant, and i would describe that as beautiful. beauty is attractive. and some people will want to know where the beauty is coming from, and maybe a few of those people will want to understand how to produce something beautiful.
so the question is, how is it that we can serve in truth, and encourage others to function in truth?
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