What's Important

When packing for a trip like my recent canoe trip, you have to decide what’s important to take along. Funny thing about that, much of what I take along is not used during the trip. So I try to pack minimally and usefully, what’s really important. I always bring more than I use. It’s that hoarding or Supply Officer in me mentality. You never know when you might need a Left Handed SmokeShifter, so you toss it in the bag.

Then we get to the launch site and I dump more stuff out of my bag into a bag I’ll leave behind. Why carry all that stuff in the belly of the canoe. Weighs too much. So you feel a little better that you’ve lightened your load. Proud even. You try to take what’s really important.

When you get back, you start unpacking all that stuff and you snicker at yourself because you didn’t use this gadget or that gadget or these pants or that hat or that lure. Turned out, they weren’t all that important. There were several things you brought along that were very important and you’re glad you had those.

Life is kind of the same way. What’s important today may not seem important tomorrow. What you pack with today may not be what you pack next time. The journey seems to be about what to pack, knowing what’s important, really important, and not that important at all.

I’ve changed the things on my really important list many times I suspect, and probably will do some more. But it’s a good exercise for a human, what’s really important today and will it be so in a week, month or next year.

Hurts Enough To Leave

This is a favorite Can’t Be True story of mine.

There was a young man walking down the street and happened to see an old man sitting on his porch. Next to the old man was his dog, who was whining and whimpering. The young man asked the old man “What’s wrong with your dog” The old man said “He’s laying on a nail”. The young man asked “Laying on a nail?, Well why doesn’t he get up?” The old man then replied “It’s not hurting bad enough.”

Several versions of this story are out there, notably one that has the dog howling. They can’t be true because what dog would lay around for a long time in a spot where all it could feel is pain? I’ve seen some dogs that did some dumb things but not that dumb.

So why is the story a favorite of mine? Cause it has a basic truth built in that we instinctively believe. Creatures want a better life. Humans want a better life.

That’s how America as we have known it for some 250 years got started. “The history of this country was made largely by people who wanted to be left alone.” Eric Hoffer, 1973

If you need a good quote for almost anything, look up Eric Hoffer Quotes. For a guy that didn’t go to grammar school, he did a whole lot of thinking about life and wrote well. Check him out. Back to my story though.

People make changes when things hurt bad enough. That’s why we have immigration. Say what you want about immigration today, everyone else is, but people are looking for something better, to be left alone, to find a better life, to work at something, maybe for the first time in their lives. They are willing to risk their meager lives in a meager place to journey to some place where they might improve their lot in life.

Now there are some lessons in that story as well, Millions of stories in fact. And they are all true, even the ones that were lied to.

I have served and adored imigrants to this country. In Texas, when I did Steel work after the army, I worked alongside Mexicans that worked incredibly hard. I had church members in Fargo that came from Africa that worked harder than anyone I knew. They jumped right in and overcame some terrible times in their past. They contributed in so many ways to our community. I married them and buried them in their short time in this land of freedom.

They all had one thing in common, they wanted to stop hurting so much. The hurt didn’t go away after they got here. But they had more times without hurt than they would have had they stayed where they were. As we see millions of people come into the US today, we can respond in so many ways, from ignoring it to being overwhelmed by it. I have little certainty as to what the proper actions are in every case, but I am certain that when someone is hurting, I can seek them out and find out why? I might just be able to relieve a bit of their suffering.

Never Bored

When I was young, maybe 14 or 15, I could do stupid stuff and get away with it. I don’t remember much in the way of boredom in those days. My parents didn’t seem to mind me being gone for a day, heaven only knows wherever my bike could take me.

Some days I would go up to the high school in Garfield NJ and go into the grocery store next to the school. I would buy a small can of lighter fluid, take some free bags, all paper in those days, maybe rummage around for a cardboard box to use as a ship and exit the store with my boat making supplies. There was a drain pipe under the parking lot tall enough to walk through before I was 6 feet tall. It had a small stream of water running through it so you had to walk with your legs stretched out to the sides and you kind of waddled along in order to keep your feet dry.

Preparing the ship was easy; rip the papers to shreds, pile them into the box, squirt the lighter fluid all over the boat and light it on fire, from matches which were also free inside the store. Set the fiery boat into the stream and watch it float aflame for a hundred yards or so till it reached the outflow on the other side of the parking lot. Maybe it was a Viking thing, but lighting stuff on fire and watching it burn was part of my Boy Scout training.

Can you imagine getting away with that today? Not a chance. The FBI, the Sniper squad, the Fire department, maybe even a Chaplain would all be summoned to investigate this dangerous scene.

I don’t remember ever being really bored in those days. Always seemed to have something to do. Stupid is the only real descriptive of some of those activities, but never bored. OK, so what are we doing today?

I live on the Lake

I live on Holmes Lake. At least that's what I tell people. I like saying I live on a lake. It's a bit of a lie though. To live right on the lake, I would think I would need to be in a houseboat, ON the water, ON the Lake. I don't. But I still tell people I live on Holmes Lake. Another thing, I look out my back window and I can't see the lake. How can you live on Holmes Lake when you can't even see it? What I see is the dam. And the sky, and the moon, over Holmes Lake. I connect the dots I suppose and if I can see the moon and the moon can see the lake, well there you go, I live on Holmes Lake.

It just sounds so good to me to say that I live on a lake. Coming from places like New York State or Minnesota where lake living is a way of life, a way to brand yourself even, I like the sound of it. Say it with me, I Live on the Lake. It makes me feel special, like I've got a cabin up there in the woods, my own lake to paddle and fish. Nature at my beck and call. It's my getaway.

I used to live under the elevated subway in Queens. Called it the L as I remember. Every few minutes, another subway train would go screaming past the windows of our apartment. Who dreamed up such a transportational intrusion into daily life? When I didn't know any better, I would tell people I lived under the L at the end of the TriBoro bridge in Queens. I don't think it had a good branding effect. Who in their right mind would want to say they lived under a train?

Where we came from and where we are currently, often lead to thoughts of where we will be. Sometimes people ask me if we plan to stay in Lincoln. I don't like to answer questions about my life with an easy answer, so I say something like, Yes, until we die. I don't tell them what I'm thinking though, that heaven is my next home. For now, Holmes Lake will do. But one day, Heaven will be my home, and that sounds pretty good. I'll have a timber frame cabin, a lake and the fishing will be, well you know, out of this world.

Early Morning

My father was a morning person, often on weekends he would roust me out of bed with no warning to go off to some project he was doing for the city. We might paint fire hydrants with reflective yellow paint and glass beads so the firemen could see them at night, or maybe he was working on a sign and bulletin board stand at one of the town parks where park visitors could pick up some of the latest information about the city. We’d make bird nest boxes, or clean up the river side of the Passaic river, a nasty source of pollution and trash.

My mother was a night time person, coming alive as the evening went on, slept in till 9 or later after working late at the restaurant.

I took after my mother.

And I disliked my father for waking me up so many times on so many weekends.

For the first two months in the army, at basic training at Fort Dix, we got up at 5am. We only had five minutes to be shaved, showered and anything else you could squeeze in or squeeze out in that 300 seconds. Then you showed up in formation with your uniform on for inspection and then march off to breakfast. I don’t see how we did it. Come to think of it, we probably cheated and got up a bit earlier to get ready. I joined the army to get away from my dad and his early morning shenanigans. But they were even worse than he was.

After basic, nobody really cared what time you woke up as long as you made it to your training on time, at 8 most mornings. I trained for helicopter repair and I enjoyed the two month course so it wasn’t hard to get up for that.

After work, the uniform came off and we commenced to all forms of recreation and amusement, entertainment and play. More often than not, this meant going to the bar. That’s where I learned to drink alcohol like water, more alcohol than water. And I went back to staying up late to finish up my amusements and entertainment. It’s amazing what happens at night.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been really trying to go back to the mornings. I’m sure my circadian rhythms need restructuring, maybe my whole brain does. And it has been a challenge. My wife yesterday suggested several times that I pay attention to my body and let it find the rhythm for me.

So instead of getting up at sunrise this morning, about 6.07, I got up at 3.54 according to Siri. My body got up so the rest of me got up. I don’t know why, but my Siri is a British dude, I like Bits and I like the accent, but at that time of the morning, I need a more coaxing voice. I’ll have to look into that. Hey Siri…….

The lunar nightlight was very bright as I climbed the hill to the top of the dam behind our house and every footfall was well illuminated, every pebble noticeable. Heat at 4am in the moonlight is different but still a factor, and it was quite warm and humid this morning. I decided to be thankful for it and give nature credit for not being cold like she will be in five or six months. In fact, my walk was filled with peace and gratitude the whole time, 50 minutes or so.

The wind in the pines reminded me of camping trips in New York State or Yellowstone, a sweet hissing and whistle as it winds past the needles and cones. It took me back to several nights in a tent under the stars and trees. It felt good, peaceful.

I ran some, walked some, thought some, wondered some at the stars, the quiet, the moon and the Doves that I startled and they startled me. I kept an eye out for Coyotes but saw, nor heard them.

It all makes me like my dad more. I don’t like my mom any less, but I like him more, because he prepared me on those weekend mornings to learn to rise early. I’m trying.

They are Fascinating

People are fascinating. So many people came into my life as a hospice chaplain. The great dis-appointment for me was that I did not have enough time with them to get to know more about them. They died before I got to some of the things that made them great.

I was often taught that only God is great, and that may be so. But I came to see greatness in many people, even those that were tough to like or love.

I have mad interrogation skills. Before I made a visit to someone on hospice, I would look for information in our nurses notes or other places to see what I could learn about my new client. Often I would learn about their illness, how long, how tough has been their struggle, their family, their work life, their service to the country. Lots of information that I took into each visit. And once they allowed me into their lives, I was able to start conversations with them and ask them many things. I could ask questions in a way that you didn’t even know I was asking. Handy skills for loving people.

Some times I would tell them a story about me and I would be creating an invitation to tell a story about them. And some of the stories that came out are incredible. Everybody has a story of course, and many will share, not all, but many. And if you are careful with their story, handling it like a baby, with love and interest and affection, you would find out that you may not be the most fascinating person in the room.

And boom, just like that, the lights go on. You get outside of yourself, you look around, and you are set free to discover that people, most of them anyhow, are really fascinating. Try it today. Vow to talk about yourself just enough to get someone talking about themselves. At End of Life, it was my privilege to hear some fantastic and rich stories. But you don’t have to wait till someone is dying, you can take up this ministry or way of caring right now. Listen for the fascinating. It’s out there.

Who called it Retirement?

I don’t know who called it Retirement, I’ll Google that later. Retire from what is my question. The only real, lasting retirement in this life is death. When you die, you really retire. Yea, I get it, you can retire from a job or career. I won’t argue with you. But something is incomplete when people ask you what you do and you say you are retired.

Go ahead, I dare you, ask me what I do today. I live. Enjoy each day. I invest. I put some part of me into the market. I serve, making someone else’s life a little richer. That’s my idea or Dream for retirement. It might be a little slower, it might be a little faster. It’s certainly refocused, but it hasn’t changed much.

So go ahead and ask me what’s it like to be retired. I’ve got an answer for you, long one of course.

First Day of the Rest of the Days

Retired yesterday. I feel about the same today. Woke up earlier today, walked the lake with dog and Debbie. It’s another day. Took a while coming. The stroke in December started talking to me, telling me it was time for a change. As it spoke to me I came to realize my own mortality, age, time and place in life.

Health crisis are often an awakening, not always but often. It was something I should have been awake to for a long time. But when you are asleep, well, you’re not really awake, are you?

So the stroke woke me. The last six months have been drawn out once I made the decision to retire. I don’t like saying I’m going to do something and then not doing it for half a year. I like deciding to do something and then doing it, hopefully this week if not next. But that six months is past. Now we are at the first day of the rest of the days. And I’m awake.

Maybe I was in denial before the stroke. Something nagging at me that my health needed overhaul, mental, emotional and especially physical. So I stopped putting it off and made the decision to retire. Good first step. My eating habits have improved. Good second step. My exercise habits are better, not great yet, but better. I’m thinking about other steps, faith, family, fellowship, fun, relationships, respite, recreation and remuneration. Wow, four Fs and four Rs.

So the point is, I’m still listening to my body and brain, soul and heart. I’ve got some slow down time here, good for listening. One thing right away I will do is pray. Pray for the person in deep distress yesterday. Pray for the daughter that is making a decision about her fathers future living space. Pray for the young person making job decisions. Pray for the crops coming off the fields. Pray for the dog down the street recovering from a leg amputation. There is lots to pray for.

Tip O’neill, Speaker of the house during Reagans time used to say, all politics is local. Prayer is that way as well. Maybe life is too. Its what’s close to you, local to you. That limits and expands your prayers at the same time, making you look around at what’s nearby instead of what is far away.

That’s how I’ll move through this day, one day at a time. Local eyes open to the local happenings. Listening to my surroundings.

Team Purpose

Teams come together for a purpose. Without a purpose, there is no such thing as a team. Some teams have grand purposes, high standards and ethical mandates. Include teammates with passion and drive and you can put together one heck of a team.

The heart of the team is purpose. A shared purpose to be more exact. Give a person a clear purpose of mission and put the responsibility for the completion of that mission in their hands, give them resources and watch them go off to accomplish what often amounts to the impossible. In fact, tell them that no one has ever done this before, but the time has come for someone to do it and you can be the one to make it happen.

This is the way legendary teams work. Great people come together for the accomplishment of a great purpose.

The leaders of these teams are story tellers. They have other skills of course, but they major in keeping the story alive that motivates team members to accomplish the purpose. Without this living story, the purpose fades and the motivation flutters and the team members fade away.

I used to think that you should pick where you work by the quality of the purpose. I now think that you might do as well to pick the quality of the team first. Find a great team, and the purpose will come to them. Find a great purpose and there may not be a team yet in place to make it so.

Either way, you need both of these factors, passionate team members motivated by lofty purpose.

It would be well for you to think through your own personal purpose before you run off to join a team. Mine has been for many years, To Stretch Others. To get the best out of them. To lead the team to be a more dynamic and high functioning team.

On occasion I’ve succeeded at stretching others. Other times, it was all for naught. But I wouldn’t give up on my mission or alter my purpose because of it. Figure out your mission in life first. Maybe you have some idea already. Test it out, see how it works, keep at it. We need you to be better at it.

TeamWork is....

So are you part of a team? How do you know you are part of a team? Did someone tell you are on the team? Do you feel like you are on the team?

Just because someone said you are on the team doesn’t mean there is an effective team to be a part of. The name team is applied to many groups of people. But many of those teams do not operate and function well together. Some teams have very few active team members but a lot of names on the team roster.

One of the easiest ways to know you are on a team is to examine the collaboration of the team. Do we know each other and each others strengths? Is someone on the team thinking of my place and my skills on the team and how I might contribute to the mission of the team? Are we clear on the mission and how each team member is contributing to that mission? Are we all included in team planning and strategy?

If any of these are missing, then there is vast room for improvement of the team.

When your life depends on the man or woman next to you, like the routines found in combat or other dangerous work, you learn quickly how teams work, or someone doesn’t come home at night. That is why the military and first responder training is some of the best Team training anywhere.

We had three C’s in the military, Command, Control and Communication. They left out the fourth C, probably because it was understood automatically, Collaboration. If you are on a high functioning team and enjoying it, it’s certain that it is a group of people that are all very skilled and all know each others strengths and weaknesses. And they push forward those skills and cover for those weaknesses. They collaborate.

If you’re not on team like that, why not? We need you on the team.

Are you dying? Who's to say?

Hospice is where you go to die. I’ve heard that many times. I don’t believe it for several reasons, but it still is common to think that you are not going to live long once you are on hospice. The numbers often bear this out of course. Many people that come on hospice live for a week, two or three. I see that every week. But many live for months, some years, and some five years or more.

Now this brings up some questions for me. Who decides how long I will live? I don’t know anyone that can decide how long I will live, unless I committed a capital offense and my life is forfeited by the state and they put me to death.

But short of such criminality, who decides I have a certain amount of days left on this earth. Currently, no one does. We give certain people, most often doctors, the power to suggest that we have a short time left to live. And most doctors don’t take that power lightly. And they all know that their predictions are not a sure thing. I’ve watched doctors and nurses make this prediction, and they are usually right, not to the day or even week, but often to the month and nearness of someones death.

Another question that comes to me as I observe people die is this, Now that someone has said that I am about to die, do I believe that or do I make up my own mind about how close I am to dying. Or do I flat out deny that I am dying?

It often seems that the dialysis patients that come onto hospice usually die within a few days of their last dialysis treatment. But even there, I’ve seen a small number of these patients live for months, even a year or more.

Who decides what day I will die? Or is it even a human decision at all?

A very important question in this line is once I believe the doctor, or the nurse or other health influencer in my life that I am very close to dying, what do I do with my remaining days? Do I pray to get it over with as quickly as I can, hoping to die tonight, or tomorrow? Or do I try to maximize whatever time I have left. I have seen both approaches.

I go back to a Native American saying, Today is a good day to die. There is a stoical sense in this saying, that I’m always at peace with my death. It will come when it comes and I am prepared.

I’m not saying that is easy, certainly not. I am saying, that the questions change once I think that way. I don’t need someone to tell me I’m dying. I already know that. I want to be around those that tell me I’m alive, right up to my last breath. And beyond.

I think about death every day, I’m trying to do better at thinking about life. You don’t half to think about death everyday, but I suggest you think more about your day to day life, while you still can.

Health

So I changed quite a bit after the stroke. It’s easy to say that I should have changed before the stroke. But post stroke, reality sets in. If you don’t make changes, no one else will. And I could die. If you can learn that lesson while you still have good health, God bless you.

My wife has done her best over the last 20 years or so to keep herself in good health, good shape. She’s had some ups and downs I guess, but for the most part, she’s been working toward good health for a long time. Cancer was one of the bumps in the road that gave her added discipline. She decided after her brush with breast cancer, that she would not put anything in her body that gave the cancer a chance at coming back. Not if she could help it. She’s been pretty focused on that for a while now.

Something like that happened to me after my stroke. I decided two things, food and exercise were going to get their due attention in my life. Those were the two main things. Another was stress levels. Another was being outdoors. Maybe these are all related to good health.

Whatever good health looks like to you, a couple of things need to happen for you to have it. You have to take an honest assessment of your health status and you have to find the discipline and determination to make it better.

I honestly don’t know where the determination came from for me to stop eating junk food and take charge of my diet. I know that the stroke was the lets get serious moment, but where does the daily will power come from to eat well and wisely, healthy eating that is? I am surprised by that change in my brain. I have not lacked for willpower to accomplish certain things in my life. But I’ve allowed work and age and other peoples expectations to overly influence my health decisions. Much of that has changed since December 6th, 2021, the day of the stroke, my Pearl Harbor moment if you will.

Who has time to exercise or make nutritious meals today, or tamp down the heavy stresses that affect most of us? Those were the questions that I needed to answer for myself. I’m still answering them. Truth is, I’m responsible to live a life that suits my body and brain well, that brings good health to my heart and head. Nobody else is responsible for that. My wife has been a great coach and supporter in my health quest, but even she is not responsible for my health. I alone am.

I suppose under it all, you’ve got to want to use your life for something good. Otherwise you may lose your ambitions for good health. I see more than a few people that could have more years in their existence but because their health is too far gone, they give up and throw in the towel. You have to reach into your thoughts and rediscover what makes you tick in order for you to want to keep on ticking. Then, and likely only then, will you have the motivation and the discipline to get your health house back in order. Please don’t wait to get outside and walk and run, or change your diet, or change the stress factors as much as you can. You have this day, why not start right now.

It’s a great blessing to wish good health upon others. I wish for the best of health for you.

Tough Decision Easy to Make 99 days.

Months ago, I decided to retire. Tough because I like what I do, but easy to make for several reasons. I’ve kept my promise to stay 8 years, or almost. May 5th will be 8 years, almost there. I’ll retire in June, Lord willing and I look forward to that day for the most part. I get bored easily and that part has me stumped, but I think I have so many interests, that I cobble together a busy retirement.

The stroke I had on December 6th of last year threw a sour note into the retirement plans. For the most part it has affected me in a qualitative way. Am I doing my best work? It affected my memory a bit, especially names of people I should more easily recall. That bothers me some. It’s made me question how useful am I in a work that is filled with hundreds of names in a week. I deal with it, but it still bothers me. That has been a question on my mind and it has contributed to my questions about retirement.

I’ve had so many rewarding experiences as a hospice chaplain, so many smiles have come forth from tired cheeks, so many tears from frightened eyes, so many grateful moments from weary caregivers that I know the worth of these last 8 years and I look back with a confident and pleased sense of accomplishment. But I’m ready to do different things than collect rewards or thank you cards. Don’t take that wrong, I’ll always appreciate a hearty thank you, but there is more for me in retirement. What that is I can’t say for sure, a work in progress and contemplation.

The stroke and the pandemic were a pair of wakeup calls, more like earthquakes really. The stroke said, you only have a small number of years left on this earth and you only have a short time to get your health back in order. I’m guilty of letting my health suffer while I poured my heart into my work. I never did figure out how to do both well. Lord knows, I tried, but I missed the mark. In the last few months, this has begun to change. My wife had been working on me for years in her sweet way to bring changes to my eating and exercise but they hadn’t taken hold like they should have. Until the last few months that is. A stroke and watching people die every week will change you about as well as anything can. The pandemic changed my work in ways I don’t want to explain. I’d rather forget, but I can’t. No need to trouble you with my feelings about it all. It just made a mess of so many things and so many of the good things we can bring to a family in hospice were cut short or severely interfered with during this pandemic. I’m pretty sad about some of it. But it seems to be tapering off and we have learned a lot about how to care for people in the middle of a severe health crisis.

So I think about retirement almost every day these days. It’s coming up fast. I’m looking forward to it. I want to finish well in the meantime. Nothing splashy, just constant and dependable. With 99 days left, I want to be fully present each day and with each person. It’s kind of a chance to maximize what I do each day, knowing I’ll only be doing it for 99 more days.

In the army, you got an unofficial title when you went from 100 days to 99. You were called a Two Didget Midget. I only had that once before. It’s back again. Today I became a Two Didget Midget. I’m celebrating tonight with a glass of Iced Tea. And I’m planning my day for tomorrow at work.

There’s an old saying among pastor types, Pastors never retire, they just go out to pasture. The pastures are looking green right now.

Existential Pain

I’ve listed types of pain in previous posts, this one is fundamental, “Why do I exist?”

That question is as old as humans are. Either we are here for a reason or we are not. The world has plans for us or it doesn’t. God has an interest in you or He couldn't care less. Life is a little better because you are alive or your life matters not at all.

I like to believe we are here for a reason and I think you are free to discover that reason. I think it is valuable to find that reason earlier in life so you can dedicate your life to some good purpose.

I sat with a man this week that started out with a description of his early life, his time in the army and how he finds himself an old man now in his 90s. He said to me, you're born and all too soon you're about done with this life. He was feeling wistful, almost laying in a bed of regret because he hadn’t done more or gone more places.

He spoke little of those that he had helped along the way. In fact, looking to be a blessing to others was far from his theme and story. I decided not to judge him, but maybe in some way learn a little from him.

I don’t wan’t to be like that in my 90’s. He asked me how old I am, and I told him 64. Just a young fella he said. He’d give anything to be 64 again.

That was my question to think about what I’ll say in a few years, will I give anything to be younger? Or will I be so satisfied with what I have done, and who I have lifted up and what I leave behind, that I will not feel that I have left anything undone.

I settled on trying to make life a little easier for others. As one of my mentors, Fred Smith wrote about his mission, To Stretch Others. You don’t give others materials or money as much as you give them inspiration and courage and you shape their lives with your generosity and time.

When I’m 92, I look forward to remembering this blog post and saying to myself I lived they way I intended to, a giver of life, a stretcher of lives.

Your Reason

Pain Types---Existential

Why do I exist?

“The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I think this question lies dormant in every human heart until we awaken it. What is my purpose? Do I have a purpose? Do I figure it out on my own? Do I get help to figure it out? Who has the best advice? Should I strive to be like someone else, one of the great leaders? How will I know when I have lived up to my purpose? The questions go on and on.

I suspect there are some people who pay little attention to these questions, living day to day so to speak. And then there are others that make the purpose quest an active part of their daily lives by asking simple questions, like what should I do today, who should I talk to and so on?

A daily purpose plan, weekly monthly and even yearly. Some people go that way, loving their calendars. Bless them.

I’m more of a one day at a time kind of guy. Funny thing, I think it started that way for me in the Boy Scouts. Do a good turn daily. That was our motto. Don’t expect anything in return, just do something good. It was a daily thing. And that sent me off with a time element to my purpose statement. And somewhere along the way, I began to fill in my reason for existence. To help others.

In fact, my personal motto for many years now, comes from Fred Smith, To Stretch Others.

So I learned that my purpose every day was to stretch others, to bring out the best in them, help them to achieve what they don’t always believe, but can still conceive.

I wish I had found this purpose and applied it to my early life much more than I did, most of my early years were devoted primarily to myself. Maybe that is OK, but I missed out on helping others. To be fair, I helped others a lot as well. But my point is simple, it took me a while to find my purpose. It took even longer to find a job or career or profession to apply it in.

When you come to the last chapter of your life, your EOL as we say, End of Life; you tend to think about these things. Did I have a purpose, did I do good, was my life well lived and so on. Why did I exist and did I do more than merely exist but exist with bells on?

This can become a pain point, or a distress point at EOL. Was my life productive and valuable to me and others or was it filled with misspent time and wasting of my talents? These are questions that are hard to ask out loud, but you can be sure that they are floating through the minds of those that are closing out the last chapters of their lives.

I see a lot of existential pain. It is the uncertainty if I’ve finished my work and my life and family on this earth and would others call it a good life, or more importantly, do I think it was a good life. This is where I get to do really good work with these people, by stretching them even more in their last days. We often review their lives, and validate their purpose and describe the rewards of such a well lived life.

Most people have done far more good than they allow themselves to believe. It is an incredible privilege for me to be able to rediscover the good things they have done in their lives and help them to stand tall before they die.

I don’t do it with every person, some are not Christians, but I love to quote the Lord when he offers his Well Done My Faithful Servant to those that follow Him. Most people want to know what God thinks of them and their lives. My years of Bible study, really God study, have well equipped me for helping them find the good that God sees in them, and embracing God’s goodness in them.

Well, I’m afraid I have mixed several subjects in this post. Main point being, ask yourself some questions about your existence today. Why are you here? Why are you reading this? Reach out to a friend if these questions perplex you and leave you unfulfilled. You are here for extraordinary reasons and I look forward to stretching you more.

Pain

Pain might be definable, but still hard to describe or even understand. Physical pain, is a sensation of some kind, your senses or nerve endings jar your body and tell you that something is not right, or something is different. When you hit your funny bone, a shiver of electric pain travels up your arm, maybe all the way to your brain. I’m no expert, but it feels like it rattles your brain a bit and you can even feel it in your eyeballs.

What kind of pain is that? I don’t know how to describe it. But I feel safe in calling it pain.

Now it’s a physical pain. And in the scale of physical pain, not that high on the scale I would say. There are deeper, more traumatic pains that would make us crumble to the ground and pass out that are higher on the pain scale. We’ve probably all experienced serious pain.

I like the word sensation in my attempts to define pain. Two reasons for this. One is that your body is talking to you and asking you to investigate the pain and the source of the pain. That’s a pretty useful mechanism for body repair and maintenance. Brand and Yancey wrote a book about the usefulness of pain, Fearfully and Wonderfully Made, and it was kind of novel to our thinking back then, in the 80’s I believe. Lepers have lost the ability to feel pain in their extremities, consequently pain that is not sensed has a chance to do more damage and go undetected at early stages. So they lose digits and endure infections and worse in the absence of the sensation of pain.

So pain itself has a purpose. We might not feel good about it, but imagine how much worse it could be if we had no way to sense or detect pain. If your hand is in a very hot place, burning taking place and the damage is done by the time you smell your flesh burning.

So the word sensation seems like a good place to start talking about pain. Something is sensed that is not right, not in its right place, not performing rightly. It’s an unwelcome intrusion, but an important and necessary one.

Another reason that I like the word sensation is that we can use our senses to tell us that something is not right with other types of pain. How do you tell if someone is experiencing pain in regard to finances? Or family dysfunction? In future posts, we’ll explore these pains and their ability to be sensed.

You use your senses, and then some extra senses that we might not think of.

It might help to add another word to our lexicon of pain. Distress. Sometimes I find that these two words are interchangeable, distress and pain.

Next post will start describing these other pains, or what we might label psychosocial pains.

Kinds of Pain

Pain is part of life. In fact, so many of us live with pain and hardly know how to talk about it, or even treat it. This post will begin a series of posts about pain, more specifically, a list of pains.

• Medical, physical pain

• Existential pain

• Spiritual pain

• Emotional pain

• Financial pain

• Reconciliation pain

I’ll add one or two more, but for now, this simple, unexplained list will give us a platform to explore all types of pain. If you have a suggestion for other types of pain, speak up.

Love and Fear

If you want to move or get motivated to move or do something, respond to your loves or fears. These two phenomena are the great motivators. Love something like fishing, and you’ll find it easy to go fish. Love someone like your wife, and you’ll find it easy to tell her you love her and bring her flowers. Love is a great motivator. I am very interested in love because I think it is the best way to live. A life of love.

But the other side of living in love is living in fear. I can’t say which one is winning at any moment, love or fear. But I see a lot of people that live much of their lives in fear. This causes some fear in me as well. In this time of Pandemic, it does not take much to see fear in society. And that fear motivates so many to act out of their fears instead of their love.

This is thing that concerns me most. How do we take our fears and turn them into our loves? Or better yet, how do we increase our loving responses to the world and decrease our fearful responses? I’m fairly certain it starts with our mindset.

Much of our mind is affected by our senses. The basic senses of smell, taste, feel, touch and see are going non stop and work more or less automatically, we can’t really shut them off. That can be a good thing, a bad thing. But it is a thing.

As you can imagine, what you watch and hear are quick and fast acting sources of information that lead to fear or love. If you watch a steady diet of sad, depressing, horrible news, your brain is going to have to work much harder to have a high level of warm and loving responses. All that tragic information goes in and your brain processes it and who knows what come out.

At some point, you can learn to take some control over what goes into your brain through the basic senses. This gives you some control or balance. Less anxiety, more peace perhaps. This is why you hear more people say they don’t watch the news, it’s mostly depressing. Or like me, you wistfully wish there were more people in the news business like the late Paul Harvey, specializing in news that motivated you through love and stories of love. He had some sad stuff in there as well, but he was just more positive and hopeful.

Should you turn off your TV? Maybe. But what will you replace it with. What information will you allow to reach your brain cells and how will you react to it. Do you run the risk of living in denial since you have limited your fear inspiring data sources? That’s possible. Denial is not the best place to be either, it can work for a short stint, but eventually reality catches up with you and you can’t deny it any longer.

I think the most good can be looking at our mindsets. Understanding how our mind works and the difference between Reactions and Responses. And there is a huge difference between those two. Maybe that will be my next post.

3 Fears of Death

One of the greatest motivators in life is facing your own death. But to do it as much as our hospice team members do is to lose a part of yourself with every death. And it can render you paralyzed after a few years. I get tired of thinking about death and talking about it. Heck, I’m around it all the time and often experience 1 or 2 deaths a day. For some of those people I am the only one in the room with them when they die. I hold their hands. I look into their eyes and I breath in harmony with their breaths, continuing to breath after they have taken their last lungful of air. One of those deaths is enough to make me grieve for months, maybe a year of more.

What I try to do is to help the dying with their fears. I have my own fear to be sure, but I am there for their fear. There are at least 3 fear tracks that I notice.

Some people, usually parents fear for their children, grown children. They want to be sure they are OK. Seems like we never stop parenting. Mothers are especially likely to experience this fear. Are my kids going to be OK? Fathers feel it too, but there is something in the one that gave you life that is especially triggered. As a child, the more peace you can bring to your parent or guardian as they die and reassurance that you will be fine, the more likely they will die peacefully.

Some people are afraid of the process of dying. They are not worried about the final breath as much as the breaths just before the final breath. Will there be pain, struggle, trouble getting air, agony or other kinds of suffering? This is where the hospice nurse really shines as they educate people about the process. Time and time again I have seen a nurse hold the hand of someone near death and gently educate them about those last breaths and how they are going to help them avoid suffering and an agonizing death. Miracles take place literally as I watch people lose their fears about suffering at death. It may take several conversations, but nurses that have experienced many deaths of their patients are loving guides and bring great relief to the dying. I often tell people to get close to their hospice nurse, they will become one of your best friends as you care for a loved one that is dying.

The third fear is what happens after death. Where will I be. Some never experience this fear because they believe there is no afterlife. That often precludes this fear. But most people I’ve cared for ponder this question while they are resting in bed at night as the dark hours come on. Is there a heaven? Will I go there? What about Hell? I don’t deserve to go there.

In a very small nutshell, those are the 3 fears that I regularly encounter. When you're healthy and feeling great, you rarely consider any of them. And why should you? You get to choose what you think about, right? That’s true. Any prolonged thinking about death, your death, my death is often seen as an intrusion, an unwanted conversation or even argument.

I suggest that you think about it anyhow. Not morbidly, but exploratory. The people that are the most peaceful at the end of their lives and die with dignity are those that allowed themselves to ponder the meaning of life and the last act of a human life, death. There is more to be gained by these ponderings than you might imagine. Admitting your fears is crucial to dealing with your fears and living fully each day.