Of Paul Simon's Song, "The Boxer"

This song resonates with me. To me it is about a young man, thoughtful and sensitive, feeling warmth and affection for his father, a boxer, a brutal man, who makes his living by violence, who breaks other men's bones, cuts them, and tries to knock them unconscious--but who receives the same also, without regret or lament--if only for just enough money for ham & eggs or to help pay the rent. The boy loves the boxer, and the boxer loves the boy, with neither one being able to express it in a way the other can appreciate or receive. Yet the boxer has given the boy resilience and the ability to carry on and survive. This is the relationship between my father and I.

Memory

It is well known that our memory deteriorates as we get older, with short term memory deteriorating faring much worse than long term memory. Based on my own experience, I suspect the problem is that by the time people get to be my age and older, we have so much information stuffed in our heads that, rather than losing information, it simply becomes harder for our brains to find specific pieces of information. Long term memory does not deteriorate as much, and I suspect that is because when we were younger, our brains had much more available capacity. As we get older and our brain gets fuller, it also has a harder time finding places to store new information. I was at a wake Friday night for a working colleague. Someone mentioned a woman that we used to work with, but no one could remember her last name. on Sunday at 03:00 A.M., I remembered her last name.

A Fall on the Ice

On my walk this morning, I was transported back 30 years to Aikido class. My feet arced into the air. My hand and wrist failed to stop the fall, and I took the full impact along my forearm. I was never a good uke; I always tensed when I fell. Rolling on to my stomach while sensing if I had suffered any serious pain or injury, I felt sorry for myself. With my nose to the concrete, I had a ground level view of a transparent patch of ice so elegantly smooth it should been hanging on a wall at MOMA. Hello sidewalk. You were not my friend today.

Why Be Compassionate?

"The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another."

-Thomas Merton

Judgment and Respect (A quote from Teddy Roosevelt)

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

- Teddy Roosevelt

The only people worthy of criticizing you are the people in the trenches with you.

Mercy

"It does not matter what level of perfection you reach.  What others think or don't think of how much you do does not matter, nor does your judgment of yourself.  All that matters is that mercy has taken you for ever, from the origin of your existence.  Mercy called you to love, because mercy loved you.

Holiness means always affirming -- before everything else, in everything else -- the embrace of the Father, the merciful, pitying movement of Christ, his gesture, that is he himself, independent of everything that stirs and has the appearance of life in us….

We must become more and more aware of God's covenant with us, of life as God's involvement with us, and therefore of the irrational influences of our outbursts, of our projects.

Nothingness, destruction, exile is the life proper to the world, especially our life, without this covenant, which remains in me even in the destruction and in the desolation caused by my wicked heart.  Grace holds fast because God leads me to discover what he is and to understand that from my destruction he makes something new bud forth--an identification with him and the Father."

-- Servant of God Luigi Giussani (+ A.D. 2005)

A Point to Ponder from Joseph Campbell

"What's made up in the head is the fiction. What comes out of the heart is a myth."

- Joseph Campbell, The Hero's Journey