Mowing the Lawn, but Why?

I had a conversation with my friend Jeremy, who is in high school. It went like this:

J: I’m saving up my money!

RB: Wonderful. What are you saving up money for?

J: I want to buy a lawn mower.

RB: Really? What do you want to buy a lawn mower for?

J: I want to start mowing people’s lawns so I can make a lot of money.

RB: That sounds great. What are you gonna do with all that money?

J: Oh, save it, and then buy something better.

RB: What are you gonna buy that’s even better than a lawn mower?

J: I don’t know... but I gotta get the lawn mower first.

RB: Jeremy, do you even like mowing lawns?

J: No.

This is a kid, so we see right through his “logic.” We know it’s absurd.

He wants to obtain a lawn mower so he can get something better than a lawn mower, but he’s not even sure what that “better” thing is yet.

From time to time, we all work towards a goal solely so we can surpass it in pursuit of a loftier goal that we can’t name.

We might not do it in such obvious ways as my friend did. But we all do it.

We all chase someone else’s dream. The iPad for example – as soon as it came out, I wanted one. I didn’t have a clue what good it would do for me, nor did I know of any part of my life that could be improved by owning one. Yet I wanted it anyhow.

The antidote to not chasing something is to sit with the desire long enough to find out what’s behind it. However, sitting is hard. It’s much easier to pony-up to the Apple store than it is to quietly observe our own greed.

The acknowledgement that we can’t ever get everything we want is an important spiritual-religious theme. It’s timeless. The proverbial itch will never be scratched. Here are four different historical re-tellings of this same concept:

· Buddhism teaches that when we create attachments to impermanent objects, there is suffering (Buddha, 5^th century B.C.E).

· In the Bible, the book of Ecclesiastes teaches that as death is unavoidable, the pursuit of worldly living is vanity, mist, and vapor. All achievements and possessions are ultimately profitless, like chasing the wind (4^th century C.E.).

· Renaissance Italians in Florence, Italy, set up a giant bonfire of the vanities (1497). They believed that if they burned the objects of their desire, they would be less tempted to want them.

· Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones sang about the perennial shift from optimism to disillusionment in their song, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” (from the 1969 album, Let It Bleed album). The conclusion of their song seems like a fitting place to end here: “And if you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you need.”

Spiritual-religious advice: Be incredulous about what you want, because it might not be what you really want.

LCK - Making a Good Impression

Lord, I heard a mother say to her little child the other day: "Be careful what you say. I want you to make a good impression."

That is what most of us are busy trying to do each day, dear God. We are trying to make good impressions. We are trying to be so very careful because if we are not our impressions will not always be very attractive ones.

Maybe that is our problem. Maybe we are trying too hard. Maybe we impress the least when we try to impress the most.

The more careful we are at getting our impressions right the more often we end up getting them all wrong.

Please help me, Lord, to present myself as I am and not as I think someone else wants me to be. Keep me from dressing up my true self in appearances that no one who truly knows me well would recognize as being the real me. Whatever I am, on any given day, let it be honestly me not some close approximation of the real thing.

Help me to love myself as I truly am so I can put everyone who meets me at ease. Make a good impression on me, dear God, so I won't have to be so concerned with making one on everyone else.

The "How stressed can I be?” Contest

Religion-Outside-The-Box originally ran this contest when it only had a few hundred people on the mailing list. I’m thinking that now that there are more members, we ought to run this is utterly sarcastic spiritual contest again.

The contest is this easy, the person who is the most stressed wins.

Simply use this convenient scale to calculate how many different stress-filled events you’ve managed to simultaneously survive over the last 12 months. (You can add additional points if you’ve had multiple experiences of an event.) Or just be creative and calculate your stress according to your own scale.

Stress-filled events may include, but are not limited to:

· Worry

· Change

· Responsibility

· Trouble

· Illness

Total all your applicable stressors and e-mail me with your point total

Grand prize: Perverse satisfaction & pity.

Runner-up prize: More stress because you didn't win.

Note: Artificially inflating your stress for the purpose of winning this contest is strictly frowned upon and may result in disqualification.

Spiritual-religious advice: Take it easy on yourself... or, chance winning this contest.

What are we waiting for?

I few years ago, my brother-in-law, Bob, had me laughing hysterically. What he did was struck me as so funny that every time that I thought about it, I was amused again.

The background was that I told him about someone I knew who was diagnosed with cancer. So, the air was a bit tense. Bob pondered a moment and then said, quietly, almost as though he was thinking aloud, "What a relief that would be."

I didn't say anything. I waited. And he elaborated.

Bob verbalized a mock phone-call with his doctor, "Really, Doctor, I have only a year to live? Wonderful, that's just wonderful. Thank you." He hung up the pretend phone, sighed, looked relaxed in the shoulders, and a sense of content glowed about him.

"If I only had a year to live," Bob exclaimed, "I wouldn't be so worried about things. I'd enjoy my meals, I wouldn't rush, I'd take it all in with simplicity and grace."

"If I only had a year to live, I could finally just relax and really start living."

Funny how thinking we're going to live forever might take some of the joy out of living.

The truth is, of course, none of us know if this is our last year, last month, or last week on earth.

Spiritual-religious advice: Perhaps we should all seize the day. . . carpe deim. . . if only for a week.