Friday, October 28, 2011
we've fallen for TED.
if you haven't heard of TED, it's about time you did. Check out this awesome 15-minute talk by Esther Duflo: http://www.ted.com/talks/esther_duflo_social_experiments_to_fight_poverty.html
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
absence makes the heart
it's amazing what distance can do to a relationship.
since college - where we lived mere inches away from one another at times - Heidi and i have spent less than a week within 2,267.9 miles of each other. approximately. we spent a few months with no contact at all - never suspecting God to be leading us along the same path. in separate time zones with separate schedules and separate lives, we often struggle to keep accountable to each other. some weeks (like this one) we're on the phone every night, too excited to wait for office hours. we talk about new boots (i hope you keep them!) and new friends and new struggles, how excited we are about SOMOchristmas and the Justice Conference. but some weeks just miss the mark ... and miss the call. we can't seem to meet in the middle. we send demanding texts. we write careless e-mails. cordiality is spared in an attempt to change the world and how!
so they say absence makes the heart grow fonder, and i know what they're getting at. everything tastes better when you haven't had it in forever. marilynne robinson, one of my favorite authors, writes, “to crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. for when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? and here again is a foreshadowing -- the world will be made whole. for to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. so whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again."
there's something so heartbreakingly human about missing someone. recognizing their absence. sensing the void. when i saw Heidi after a year apart, all the stressful conversations and utterly human miscommunications melted away in the Houston heat. without the adequate amount of time to become dissatisfied with something or someone or ourselves for that matter, we lived le vie en rose. everything coming up daisies. the glass half full. but given a little time, the ennui kicks in.
maybe it's just my personality. maybe i'm a little jaded in our post-modern world. we take ourselves very seriously. after all, this is real life. sometimes absence is nothing more than a refreshing vacation. sometimes it just feels nice to fall off the radar. but then again, it gets lonely going stag. the life of a hermit, though not without its benefits, is a introspective - and thus extremely dangerous - one. but it is during this absence that i begin to understand more clearly that it isn't necessarily Heidi that changes in between our rendezvous. i'm the one that changes. i look differently at myself. and my heart grows. somehow.
this may be the first time in our lives that it's okay to say "this is about me. my need to get over myself and give people a break." especially the people in our daily lives. you know, we want to fly half way across the world to love on strangers, but God forbid we have to love our actual neighbor. love our families. love our friends.
maybe the heart doesn't always grow fonder. fondness doesn't seem to go deep enough ... it doesn't seem to encompass the wholeness of the sensation. maybe we learn to let go of the little things that drive a wedge between ourselves and the human beings we love. maybe it's the way my brother chews potato chips. maybe it's when people say "i could care less." (you couldn't care less. unless of course you could, in which case you probably oughtn't say it at all.)
so ... maybe fonder isn't the right word. maybe absence just makes the heart grow up?
since college - where we lived mere inches away from one another at times - Heidi and i have spent less than a week within 2,267.9 miles of each other. approximately. we spent a few months with no contact at all - never suspecting God to be leading us along the same path. in separate time zones with separate schedules and separate lives, we often struggle to keep accountable to each other. some weeks (like this one) we're on the phone every night, too excited to wait for office hours. we talk about new boots (i hope you keep them!) and new friends and new struggles, how excited we are about SOMOchristmas and the Justice Conference. but some weeks just miss the mark ... and miss the call. we can't seem to meet in the middle. we send demanding texts. we write careless e-mails. cordiality is spared in an attempt to change the world and how!
so they say absence makes the heart grow fonder, and i know what they're getting at. everything tastes better when you haven't had it in forever. marilynne robinson, one of my favorite authors, writes, “to crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. for when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? and here again is a foreshadowing -- the world will be made whole. for to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. so whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again."
there's something so heartbreakingly human about missing someone. recognizing their absence. sensing the void. when i saw Heidi after a year apart, all the stressful conversations and utterly human miscommunications melted away in the Houston heat. without the adequate amount of time to become dissatisfied with something or someone or ourselves for that matter, we lived le vie en rose. everything coming up daisies. the glass half full. but given a little time, the ennui kicks in.
maybe it's just my personality. maybe i'm a little jaded in our post-modern world. we take ourselves very seriously. after all, this is real life. sometimes absence is nothing more than a refreshing vacation. sometimes it just feels nice to fall off the radar. but then again, it gets lonely going stag. the life of a hermit, though not without its benefits, is a introspective - and thus extremely dangerous - one. but it is during this absence that i begin to understand more clearly that it isn't necessarily Heidi that changes in between our rendezvous. i'm the one that changes. i look differently at myself. and my heart grows. somehow.
this may be the first time in our lives that it's okay to say "this is about me. my need to get over myself and give people a break." especially the people in our daily lives. you know, we want to fly half way across the world to love on strangers, but God forbid we have to love our actual neighbor. love our families. love our friends.
maybe the heart doesn't always grow fonder. fondness doesn't seem to go deep enough ... it doesn't seem to encompass the wholeness of the sensation. maybe we learn to let go of the little things that drive a wedge between ourselves and the human beings we love. maybe it's the way my brother chews potato chips. maybe it's when people say "i could care less." (you couldn't care less. unless of course you could, in which case you probably oughtn't say it at all.)
so ... maybe fonder isn't the right word. maybe absence just makes the heart grow up?
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