Non-Required Reading : A Christmas Card of Sorts
Only the ladies in our family can find the camera.
"Safe?" said Mr Beaver ..."Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. But he's good.”
- LEWIS
In the throes of 2020 while on a FaceTime call with a therapist, he innocently commented that it seems as though I am in a “mud pit”. Of course I’m in a mud pit I responded. And I want to play in the mud for a bit and acknowledge that it’s mud; and also on the other side of this mud pit is another mud pit, and so on and so forth.
After a few minutes of my rambling, he politely asked if I ever considered trying to get out of the mud pit?
Touché therapist. Touché
2020 spared nobody from experiencing some form of displacement or duress and living in the shadow of this time can be disorienting, especially in light of all that has changed on both a macro and micro level. To continue with this perhaps clumsy mud metaphor, I find myself a couple of years later still emerging from the pit and wrestling with how best to continue forward.
Cue 2022.
A buddy of mine from college and I launched a line of golf apparel (Good Lion Golf) in the Spring, predicated on the character of Aslan from Narnia of all things; GOOD > SAFE being the mantra and guiding principle for every item we create.
At first it was a bit of a folksy enterprise and novel endeavor related to the game of golf, but I quickly found the premise of good being greater than safe, spilling over into a broader, more foundational perspective as it related to many choices and reactions in life. Perhaps most pointedly as it applies toward: vulnerability, humility and forgiveness, all of which are certainly “good” but not always “safe”. As 2022 marched on, I began viewing most of my interactions through this lens.
Coincidentally during this internal reorientation regarding GOOD > SAFE and still thinking about mud pits, I was reading East of Eden. While sitting at an airport, I read perhaps the most well known section and was shook to my core:
“But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’—that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.’ Don’t you see?…..“Thou mayest’! Why, that makes a man great, that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth and his murder of his brother he has still the great choice. He can choose his course and fight it through and win…. But this—this is a ladder to climb to the stars.”
Touché Steinbeck. Touché.
It would take a far brighter mind and considerably more time to unpack all that is in this quote and certainly thousands of undergrads the world over have done so for the past number of decades. But for this “existentially anxious and angry” 37-year old, I felt a sudden lift. The mud has no inherent staying power. I can exit the mud pit.
As difficult and impossible as it may seem, I do have some level of agency and control over what is given traction to in my life; while I have only so much control over what happens on a given day, I can cultivate a resiliency and hope in my responses, in the face of what can feel like a landscape of never-ending mud pits. What I give traction to matters on a very material level.
So my hope and prayer going forward is this: very little is within our control, but “Thou mayest” continue to hold onto hope, goodness, vulnerability, honesty and forgiveness, even when it feels scary and unsafe, because ultimately, it is good.
Peace
Jonny + Fam
