The Next 200 Miles: You and Your Tedious Thoughts

"Give us to go blithely on our business this day, bring us to our resting beds weary and content and undishonored, and grant us in the end the gift of sleep.

Robert Louis Stevenson

You are not your thoughts.

Most of your thoughts are the result of you simply revisiting what you have already thought before.  They're not new thoughts.  You are thinking about the same useless crap over and over.  These sticky thoughts are very, very sticky.  They're hard to shake loose and when they reoccur they take you hostage.  I relitigate wrongs all the time.  I hang onto a current irritation or upset with a ferocious grip.  I go back and think about issues that will always be issues: my health, my loved ones, my finances.  Sticky thoughts.  My Greatest Hits.  I'm dying!  I don't have enough money!  My loved ones will leave me!  Garbage Bag Guy will pile up more garbage bags!

I love the idea that each day we have 6,000 distinct thoughts and 90% of them are repetitive.  (Ed. Note: This is all kind of suspicious.  Who, exactly, is counting these thoughts?)

I went to high school with a man who I believe embodies humility.  He's a tremendous athlete, quite handsome, a graduate of Harvard who had a spectacularly successful business career in finance,  information that is almost impossible to extract and when I bring it up he deflects immediately, and not in a shallow, insincere way but with what I sense is a genuine humility.

When he was in his 50s he told me that he was attending Divinity School at night, that he wanted to become a minister.  I was floored.  I was flummoxed.  I was struck speechless and I'm never speechless.  I always have speech.  "When did you become religious?" I asked, no doubt with some overt skepticism.  He simply said: "I've always been religious."  I'm so used to over-the-top, in-your-face, look-at-me religious people, so on the lookout for the occasional sanctimonious asshole that I forget the world is full of people who pursue their ideal of a Higher Power with perspective and humility and true intent.

We were exchanging some text messages about an upcoming reunion and about some of his old correspondence to me when the discussion veered into grace.  Being a man of the cloth his ideal, of course and naturally, was to talk about the idea that grace is a godly, heavenly thing, given to mortals who don't deserve it and consequently the source of all that is good in this life. He also talked about the practical application of grace in our daily lives.  Being an iconoclast I prefer to emphasize grace the other way around, concentrating on simple, human grace instead of the divine kind, but we both end up in the same place: recognizing the otherworldliness of grace while applying it to our minute to minute existence.

His notes almost made me cry.  They were so passionate while remaining so sincere that they were obviously deeply held and unshakeable.  Isn't that what we're all looking for?  The surety that we've found a way to move forward in our lives with kindness and love, forsaking (Ed. Note: I'm getting full of myself.  This is a good Biblical turn of a phrase.  Dammit!) selfish motives and shallow pleasures?