Tag Archives: Truth

Do You Dare to Bare?

IMG_1184“I think of myself as an intelligent, sensitive human being with the soul of a clown which always forces me to blow it at the most important moments.”  –Jim Morrison

Hello friend,

My 3-year-old told me today, “Well, you don’t have to keep telling me that you love me all the time, Daddy, because I already know that.”  He knows everything. I responded, “Yeah, but that is how I really feel right now, so I am telling you.”  I bet that I tell my kids “I love you” 50 times a day.  Each!  I smother them with hugs and kisses.  My emotions are right on my sleeve.  Thankfully, they are positive ones.  I am trying to keep it real with them.  I want them to know just how much I love them.  But more than that, I am also trying to be an example to them about emotional honesty. I want them to feel confident in telling their Truth, to not shy away from their emotions.

We teach what we most need to learn. I wish I was a good example about owning my feelings and sharing them honestly. I want to be. But I have to admit that it is something I have always struggled with. Like the Jim Morrison quote above, my sensitivity has often gotten so squashed in trying to put on a tough, polished exterior that I have really blown it in some important moments. In trying to minimize and put a shine on my real emotions, I have come off blunt, even callous. I have gotten in my own way.

“But I was so much older then. I’m younger than that now.” So says Bob Dylan, and I hope I am becoming that way, too. Kids are such good examples of honesty. Their emotions are like mercury, changing drastically with the conditions from moment to moment. When they go from crying one minute to laughing the next, most of us jaded parents take that to mean they were faking the crying part. Though I don’t discount that entirely, I think it is actually more that they are so completely in the moment that they can move beyond the source of their tears instantaneously. Unlike us adults, they don’t work so hard to hold grudges. They get it out—honestly and completely—and move on. It is really these transparent kids that are the wise ones in this world. When we become “mature” and “control our emotions”, the unfortunate side effect is often that we hide from our Truth and squash down feelings that must be felt lest they destroy us (through addictions and chronic, mind-numbing activities like television). I have been that old. I want to be young again!

Yes, I have been one of the many bottled-up people in this world. Why do we do it, though? Why do we chicken out? Why do we lack the courage to own our feelings and express them—to tell our Truth—especially to those we love the most? Just this afternoon I was thinking about my great-uncle Lloyd, whom I have always thought of as the most kind-hearted man I have ever known. I was thinking of how grateful I am that he has been in my life and how I hope that I can be that kind of man for the rest of my life (he is about to be 89). It hit me: I have to write him a letter and tell him so! Yeah for me, right? But as I sit here writing to you about this idea of emotional honesty, I can’t help but feel a little cowardly that the only way I dare tell this hero of mine how much he means to me is by writing him a letter. I cannot tell him to his face.

I know how I am (or how I have been?). I would freeze up if I tried to tell him. I would take any sign of awkwardness from him as an excuse to clam up and not finish my thought, not tell my Truth. “I don’t want to make him uncomfortable” or “He doesn’t like to show emotion, so I won’t”. These are just crutches for me, reasons to avoid owning who I really am. The other one—I use this one to avoid honest conversations with my Dad—is “Oh, he knows how I feel.” But that assumes a lot. What if he doesn’t know? What if he thinks my silence means what I used to think his silence meant? What if he goes to the grave thinking that?

I think it is this reason—the brevity of life and the suddenness of its end—that has helped me improve over the years at sharing my emotions honestly. I just don’t want people to leave my life without knowing how much they mean to me. And it isn’t just the shortness of other people’s lives that concern me anymore; it is also my own duration. I am keenly aware that I could go any time, so I am trying to seize every moment, “to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life,” as Thoreau says. That includes building rich, authentic relationships, which requires me to own my feelings. It also includes not denying myself the simple pleasure of telling my Truth.

Telling my Truth, I have found, is wonderfully liberating. I now see those chances to tell it as little “dares”—as in, “I dare you!”—to jump at rather than shy away from, as I always used to. The dare excites me now. Each time I seize it, I become more confident, more comfortable in my own skin, and thus more willing to share my emotions—my Truth—the next time. It is a healthy snow-balling effect.

I also think that it becomes easier to own my feelings and live out loud as I care less and less about what others think of me (see Bob Dylan above; I am becoming younger). The less I look to the outside for validation and instead seek within, the more willing I am to share my emotions and my Truth. Who I am, it turns out, is enough, and I care not for the company of those who think otherwise. So, even as I write this I get more resolved to share my emotions even more freely. It may mean writing it down for awhile—sending that letter to Uncle Lloyd will still feel good—but I will do better with the face-to-face someday, too. Eventually, I will probably become that old guy who—tactfully, I hope–holds nothing back and makes people uncomfortable with his honesty. I admire that guy.

How about you? How bottled-up are you? Open up your journal and start telling your Truth. Tell yourself first. How do you feel about you? Be honest with yourself, and don’t judge your feelings as they come. Just let them flow along with the words, unfiltered. This is when writing is at its best: when you let yourself go. Have you told the people closest to you how much they mean to you? If not, what is stopping you? Try to make the answer something about you, not about them. The part you can control is yours. Pick a person and write out how you feel about them. Do you dare say the words to them face-to-face? If not, how about writing a letter? You already wrote out your feelings; why not just send it? I dare you! Go down the list of your loved ones. Who deserves to know your Truth? Who haven’t you told? The answer to those two questions—and the gap between them—is your challenge laid out before you. Do you accept it? Leave me a reply and let me know: Do you dare to bare?

You are enough just as you are,

William

The Books That Have Touched Me Deepest

DSC_0522“I cannot live without books” –Thomas Jefferson

Hello friend,

My Mom once got me an old-style book bag with that Jefferson quote on it, and I hung it from a lamp in my room for years and years.  It doesn’t just say something about me; it speaks to me.  I can hardly recite it without my voice cracking and my hair standing on end.  It goes right to my core.  I cannot live without books.

I have always loved to read.   When I was in my mid-20s, for one year I kept track of all the books I read.  I averaged more than one per week and was gloriously happy in the process.  The only problem: each book I read suggested several more, so I ended up with a Wish List that was hundreds of titles long.  There is just so much to know!  Whenever I want to wander away in my mind, I just spin my desk chair around and gaze at my enormous bookshelf.  I easily drift away into the many favorites that have become so much a part of me over the years.  They are like old friends, the shelves like a photo album of fond memories.  However, there are also so many there that remain untouched, unopened.  Those are the ones that hound me, begging for my attention.  I vow to get to them all one day.  But how can I keep up?  A sane person would realize that he is too busy to get to the ones he already has and be wise enough to not add to the collection.  I, however, am insane.  Every year my Christmas list is full of more titles to fill the shelves.  What can I say?  I love books.

Last night as I wrote, I found myself needing a mental break.  I swung my chair around to look at my dear old friends on the shelves.  As I pondered my long list of favorites, I found my eyes and my memory drawn to the same titles over and over.  These were the books that burned right into my soul the first time I read them and have remained a genuine piece of who I am over the years.  My honorable mention list is enormous, but these four have certainly touched me the deepest:

  • Walden—Henry David Thoreau.  This book rocked my world and set me on my course probably more than any other.  I had always been drawn to it and finally read it when I was about 24.  Honestly, it felt like Thoreau was writing right out of my own mind.  I completely identified with his desire for solitude and simplicity, and I was similarly disenchanted with society.  But mostly I loved how he wanted to live authentically, to be fully himself and pay no mind to what others expected of him nor thought of him.  I loved that he “wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.”  Those words shake me even as I type them.  This book shook me.  It truly set me on the psychological and spiritual path that I still live on.  I have adopted it as my own.
  • Into the Wild—Jon Krakauer.  The true story of Christopher McCandless’ (a.k.a. Alexander Supertramp) walk out of society and into his Truth—and ultimate death—in the wilderness has been out for nearly twenty years, yet I have never been able to shake him from my system.  He haunts me.  As with Thoreau, I very much identified with McCandless’ ideals and longings.  I believe that Krakauer did as well, and that bleeds into the telling of the story.  I have always enjoyed this type of book that reveals the tragic outcome at the beginning of the account and then goes back to dive into the lives of the characters and traces the timeline leading to the tragedy (e.g. The Perfect Storm, Finding Everett Ruess, and Krakauer’s Into Thin Air), but this is by far the one that still lives in me.  If I opened it right now, I wouldn’t put it down until I finished the last page.
  • Conversations With God—Neale Donald Walsch.  I am actually cheating with this one, because I am including the entire …With God series–some of which I actually like better than the first book–in my sentiment.  Like Walden, this series is a cornerstone in my entire spiritual/psychological foundation.  It came to me at a time, not long after Thoreau, when I had shed the religious teachings of my youth but had not yet found anyone talking specifically about the God I knew.  Enter Walsch and his “conversation” with God.  I found myself saying out loud, “Yes” or “Exactly!” frequently as I read.  I knew I wasn’t alone.  Having read the Bible, Koran, Bhagavad-Gita, and other sacred texts, I found some relief, too, in the idea that holy books did not have to be 2,000 years old.
  • On The Road—Jack Kerouac.  This is pure romance for me.  I was absolutely taken by these mad characters, all based on real people—including himself—in Kerouac’s life.  The “spontaneous prose” that he writes in completely swept me away.  Much like the others, this book gained its place in my heart based on its appearance on my life’s timeline.  You see, just as I was about to embark on the biggest “roadtrip” of my life—wandering around Europe alone for a few months with my backpack—I grabbed a couple of paperbacks at a New York bookstore to be my companions for the trip.  As fate would have it, On The Road was first.  I read it as I sat along the canals in Amsterdam, fantasizing about Jack’s beatific world and the mysterious road ahead of me.  My soul was absolutely on fire!  This was an instant classic for me.

I find myself so happy and grateful as I think about these books.  They have done so much for me, and I feel completely humbled by their magnitude.  As someone who likes to share through the written word, I am, of course, jealous of the astounding ability of these authors.  What I see as the common thread running through the four works is a wonderful execution by the authors in reaching the very core elements of humanity, allowing us to see ourselves bare and real, in all our beautiful Truth.  That is why they make my list, and why they make me.

How about you?  Which books are on your list?  Which ones penetrate right to your core?  Are yours more fiction than mine?  Probably so, as even my fiction title is based on real people!  Can you find a common thread running through your books?  Do yours more often make you laugh, cry, or ponder?  I would LOVE to hear about your list and anything else book-related—this is such a pet topic for me—so please leave a reply.  Let’s talk books!  Tell me: which ones have touched you the deepest?

ALL of you is magnificent,

William