Our Lives/Minds

Old Friends and Familiar Places

/ Michael Smith / Leave a comment

Climbing to the top of the hill, I pass some friends I see often when I walk this trail. They aren’t people, they are other-than-human relatives like the bees in the bee tree. And the tree with the hole at the bottom like a window into a shelter where a woodland sprite might live. The blue jays hollering at each other like schoolboys, and on really warm days, the Texas spiny lizard hanging on to a tree trunk watching for an insect to eat.

Many Native American cultures see the rocks, waters, trees, and wildlife as our relatives, and many of the rest of us are beginning to understand that wisdom.

From year to year I can count on these friends. No matter how crazy the world gets, they are nearby, doing what they do. It is never boring. That is partly because each season is different. The winter woodland is full of bare branches and beautiful brown colors of the leaf litter on the ground, with the calls of crows and songs of cardinals. It’s the deep blue water of the pond, with sparkling ripples from the winter breeze.

Flowering plum and juniper on a hillside

In spring, the angle of sunlight changes and the branches and twigs swell with leaf buds. Plum trees bloom and later, flowers like spiderwort, spotted beebalm, and toadflax cover the soft, sandy soil. The air is sweet, and the night comes alive with frog calls.

It keeps on like that in every season. The peak time for one thing ends, and a new thing begins, like a kaleidoscope in which each turn of the season brings a new pattern and new colors, and each one is beautiful.

The place is never boring, even after visiting it for twelve years. I walk past the same oak trees, say hello to the same Glen Rose yuccas, and I might see some of the same crows (I can’t tell individual crows, but they’re observant and smart, and they can recognize individual humans). It’s a comforting stability, with old friends and places that won’t disappear.

Red-eared sliders

I think that sometimes when we are restless and need some new diversion, some new thing happening or new stuff to buy, it’s because we are anxious or feeling low even if we are not aware of it. We want to maintain this distraction from our distress, and if we don’t get it, we call that boredom. It’s like we’re careening downhill in a moving vehicle trying to dodge random crises, and we want something to take our minds off the fear and not fall into despair.

Something that I think helps is to find islands and refuges of stability. That could be friends and family who provide companionship, steadiness, judgment, love, and support no matter what. It might be found in works of music. And I think places in nature can give us a sense that the world contains goodness and that some good things will not abandon us or be taken away.

In nature there are many places we can get to know and count on. A creek does not pretend to be someone they are not, and a prairie will not “ghost” you. The woods will not assail you with news of conflict and violence, and the pond will gladly let you be still and watch the shimmering reflections of trees as the breeze kisses the water’s surface.

A black vulture and the moon

When you go there and stand among the trees or sit beside the water, it helps to be there fully, mind and body. If we can’t let go of the worries about tomorrow or the discomfort of something that happened in the past, we will barely be awake to the woods and ponds. That’s where mindfulness comes in. By paying attention to breathing, we bring ourselves into the present, and by noticing our thoughts and feelings, we can release them and not be caught up in them. And as we stay in the present, accepting whatever is happening without wanting to change it or add to it, those moments can be wonderful. They can be healing.

Some notes from my walk on March 3rd: “Walking around the crown of the hill, I got a look – from 30 or so feet away – at a roadrunner who looked at me warily and then ran on along the trail. There are butterflies, the bee tree is busy, and at least some oaks are starting to leaf out. Lying under bare oak branches and a blue sky with wispy clouds, at least twice I felt the tiniest sensation of a droplet on my face, and there is a very small drop, crystal clear, on my glasses. I suppose it might be rising sap released where buds are starting?”

Newest leaves in spring

Each season is a deepening relationship with this preserve and all that lives there. I hope that you have such a place, whether it’s a National Grassland with thousands of acres or a little patch of wildness in a city park. Get to know it, let it seep into your bones so that you’re like family to each other. Bring your human family, too, and get to know each other.

Wilderness as a Liminal Space

/ Michael Smith / Leave a comment

I read a post from Diana Butler Bass about the wilderness, saying she hated it. My impulse was to go on to something else, because someone who hates wilderness could not have anything meaningful to say to me, right? Bass is a Christian writer (I would say among the progressive Christians) and she was writing in part about the temptations of Jesus after spending 40 days in the desert. But she was particularly interested in the wilderness as a liminal space, an in-between transitional borderland that may feel so unfamiliar as to be disorienting or frightening.

Most of my experience with the wilderness has been in the Big Bend region of Texas, with deserts and mountains relatively untamed by modern humans. Yes, there are roads and visitor centers, but not many. Yes, the Basin is a tourist destination with a resort and hiking trails up into the Chisos Mountains. But in the Big Bend it is easy to get to a place where you are unlikely to encounter anyone, it is quiet, and smartphones are mute and useless for a time. How can you hate it?

Big Bend National Park, the Basin

I admit that the prospect of spending 40 days there with no car and no easy source of water or food makes me uneasy. But in my mind those are just practical considerations; being in that wilderness is something that otherwise sounds wonderful. But I think I understand where Bass is coming from with her talk of it being a liminal place. She says,

The wilderness is an encounter with what is otherwise unknowable. We contend with that which the cozy and familiar obscures. … And there is no wilderness without danger. There is no liminal space without danger. This is the fearsome holy, the unsettling sacred. – Diana Butler Bass

The “fearsome holy” and “unsettling sacred” sound to me like ways of talking about awe. That emotion – awe – involves being taken out of that familiar perception of “having it together” and knowing what’s going on. We generally think of awe as a good experience when confronted with things like beauty or moral courage. The psychologist Dacher Keltner, in his wonderful book about awe, defines in this way:

Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world. – Dacher Keltner, Awe, p. 7

Bass talks about the wilderness opening us up to whatever “the cozy and familiar obscures.” After you strip those things away, what then? She recalled sitting in Wyoming among petroglyphs and thinking about the people who, over a thousand years ago, went into the wilderness. Perhaps they had visions, or maybe, out there with only themselves, they had spiritual experiences that cut to the heart of who they were and what they would do if tempted to be someone they were not. Was their belief or their identity tested by an impulse to throw themselves down from the mountaintop? Was this a place of testing, discovering the strength or limit of who they were and what they believed?

I’ve been to the Big Bend plenty of times, and experienced awe frequently. Not necessarily a primal testing of who I am or what I believe, but the stripping away of the cozy and familiar so that you feel yourself in some more essential way, and you might reconsider how you fit within that vast, beautiful space.

In Mindfulness in Texas Nature, I wrote about places where we can look for miles without seeing houses and cars:

…places where, when we look around us, we do not see a mirror reflecting ourselves. I think there should be places where we are able to say, “This is what nature is like if we leave it alone.” When almost every place reflects back something about ourselves, does that foster an unhealthy self-preoccupation? We are estranged from, and many of us are a little afraid of, truly wild places. – p.123

I wish we could, all of us, come to love wilderness and vow to protect it for each other and for its own sake. Wilderness as a liminal space, a place that brings us back to our essential selves, where we can experience awe or even some dislocation as we get a perspective about who we are and maybe where we want to go with ourselves.

Big Bend National Park

A Place of Sanctuary, Framed in Ice

/ Michael Smith / 1 Comment

I wrote about ice at the local preserve and ICE as a source of fear for us all. I hope you will follow the link over to Substack and have a look. I wrote, “Yesterday I visited my old friend, the Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve. I do it all the time, but this was my first outing after several days with temperatures below freezing and several inches of sleet and some snow on the ground. That was outside; inside, my heart was buried under another sort of ice after weeks of abuse, murder, and lies in Minneapolis.”

It was beautiful at the preserve and I thought about how being there was like “looking away from the abyss.” I said, “I looked away and walked up that lovely hillside to the bluff at the top. When the ground is covered with snow (or in this case, fine sleet), the woods are opened up and the contours of the landscape made obvious. Against the white background, the trunks and branches of oaks form a sort of stark, jagged, and detailed calligraphy, the script of the woodland revealed.”

I hope you’ll give it a read and have a look at some of the photos.

Holding On … To Ourselves and To Each Other

/ Michael Smith / Leave a comment

I wrote this on Substack, before the murder of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. That murder intensifies what I express below, but it also compels me to recall how important it is to hold on to each other. Faith in our government is broken, and we have to find ways to support each other while we also try to keep hold of who we are individually.

We each have an identity, a sense of who we are. It is made up of such things as what we value, what we love, what we choose to do and aspire to. My sense of myself is being inundated lately with outrage, loss, and worry. Our country is turning into something cruel, corrupt, and crazy, and it affects many of us profoundly. But I don’t want to lose myself in outrage and worry; that can’t become who I am, or who my community members are.

The answer cannot be to give up, to stop doing what we can to fight back. I have been a part of several public protests last year and the beginning of this one. I make comments in social media, because it may be a source of mutual support among my acquaintances and occasionally an actual exchange of ideas. I even still contact my political representatives – even if that is like writing a note and throwing it into the fireplace. None of these things feels like enough, nor do many of them feel effective, and that sense of near-helplessness probably affects a lot of us.

I know from my psychology training and from living more than 70 years what a pervasive sense of anxiety, helplessness, and anger will do, especially if they become chronic. Such things as depression, withdrawal, and retreat into distracting rituals, or worse than those may happen. And then what happens to my self, the part of me that cares for family and friends, loves nature and finds joy and rejuvenation there, finds essential truths in religion, literature, and music? These things could be overwhelmed and pushed away from the center toward the edges. That makes room for the worry, rumination, anger, helplessness and loss that cannot fully coexist with the rest of who I am.

And such things cannot really coexist with who you are. I’m thinking about the majority of us, I’m pretty sure, because polling data show tremendous dissatisfaction among most of us, and millions of us have taken the time to march and hold signs saying that the current situation is unacceptable. I worry for all of us, that we might lose a part of ourselves as this national emergency drags on, becoming a chronic trauma.

People at other times in history have borne trauma, and compared to some of them our situation might seem mild. We are not spending day after day in bomb shelters like the London blitzkrieg (or something similar in parts of Ukraine today). We are not suffering widespread famine like the Great Famine in Ireland in the 1800s (or in Gaza today). But we should understand that worse trauma elsewhere does not make ours negligible.

We are in this situation and we have to see it through. We cannot wish it away. And it will take a toll on us, especially for those in Minneapolis as communities try to take care of each other at substantial personal risk. And perhaps now in Maine, and tomorrow in other places as ICE swarms into other cities. Increasingly, people talk about the potential that the country might pull itself apart. And there is the dissolution of the world as we knew it, with allies pulling away from a rogue U.S. and the potential for war increasing. It was easier, a decade ago, to dismiss all this as naive and alarmist, but in the years that followed, much of what we warned about has come true.

ICE Out of Fort Worth, 1/10/26 (participants agreed to be photographed)

Holding on to ourselves is important during an extended crisis like this. When doom scrolling or ruminating about these problems, I can work on coming back to the “center” of who I am. If I feel lost or numb, the thing to do is to come back to myself. Find a way to step out of what is pulling at me and remember who I am.

Wendell Berry describes this sort of thing in The Peace of Wild Things. He writes about what he does “when despair for the world grows in me.” He goes into nature, “where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water.” He joins the birds, who are free from worrying about what will happen tomorrow, or in the next hour; they live in the present. And he is aware of the stars and their light, maybe not visible now, but their light will come. Such things free him.

Mindfulness offers a way to step away even if there is no physical refuge, no pond or tree or quiet room where we can go. The practice of mindfulness can give us an ability to let go of things and come back to the present moment with a greater acceptance, even when there is suffering in the present.

This is necessary in order for us to respond to the crisis in some sort of effective way. Taking care of ourselves – holding on to who we are – must happen in order for us to take care of each other the best we can and do whatever else will help. We know what happens when someone becomes saturated with fear or anger, or descends into numbness. That is not how we get through this.

When we feel lost, we work to bring ourselves back. That may be easier when we have a clearer picture of who we really are. Reading and reflecting on the items below might be helpful for that self-knowledge. I hope so.

  • How I spend my time in work, play, and with others
  • What I value and want to see happen in myself and for others
  • How I tend to understand others’ motives and reasons for what they do
  • How I cope with challenges, and how I recognize blessings
  • What gives purpose and meaning to the world – where I think it comes from
  • Who helps sustain me, and how I give back
  • Are there places that sustain me, and can they be re-visited

The Polycrisis and “The Work That Reconnects”

/ Michael Smith / Leave a comment

How are we doing? That’s a complicated, uncomfortable question. To a significant degree, we seem to be worried, dissatisfied, depressed, and isolated. A 2023 Surgeon General’s report notes that people feel “isolated, invisible, and insignificant.” People often remark that they “don’t have the bandwidth” to do something, meaning they don’t have the mental or emotional resources to think about something or take on a task. Such people are ordinarily capable and even resilient, but these days it’s all too much.

A Yale Medicine website talks about depression and suicidal thoughts among young people constituting a crisis, linking to a Centers for Disease Control report that has been removed by the Trump administration (the removal of trustworthy information being, in itself, emblematic of some of our troubles).

A Gallup poll early this year showed a continuing decline in the proportion of people in the U.S. who are very satisfied with how their personal lives are going. A recent American Psychiatric Association poll showed Americans anxious about current events, family safety, economics, their health, and other issues. 

Why all this unhappiness? I cannot remember a time when we faced so many challenges. Even during the 1960s when the world seemed on the brink of nuclear war, I don’t remember things feeling like this. Maybe it’s because so many things seem to be falling apart in society and government, all at once. Maybe because grinding poverty and gold-inlaid greed have surpassed the Gilded Age in which people became obscenely wealthy at the expense of everyone else. Perhaps because we are continuing to wreck the climate while societies and governments struggle to even admit that it’s real. 

“Polycrisis.” When you do a search for it, you find page after page of articles. There’s even a website devoted to understanding it. An article from a couple of years ago on the World Economic Forum describes it as multiple crises happening at once (like climate change, the Covid pandemic, loss of social cohesion, war in Ukraine and Russian expansionism, oligarchy, resurgent fascism) which can interact with each other producing an effect different from the sum of the separate crises. 

What can we do? Each of us, individually, can make choices that will help, though the tasks seem overwhelming – beyond our “bandwidth.” What comes to my mind is a quote from Tolkien, an exchange between Gandalf and Frodo that (in the books, not the movies) occurs when Frodo is discovering that the fate of his world may hang on what he does with a supremely dangerous tool of the enemy:

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.

“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, chapter 2

This is our time – the time that is given us. What can we do that might nudge us toward a better life and a better culture? Individually and as a society, what do we value and how do we show it in our lives? What ways of living do we choose, and does it align with our beliefs? I think we need to do more than vote people out (even that option seems to be in jeopardy) and get back to what we were doing. Instead, we need to think very purposefully about the kind of society we want to (re)build and the kinds of kids we want to raise. Can we relate to each other as thinking and feeling individuals worthy of the same dignity and compassion that we expect for ourselves? Does that extend to people of different genders, races, and other ways of sorting each other into “us” as opposed to “them”?

Can we relate to the Earth as more than a big-box store and a theme park? We insist on measuring economic health in terms of growth, so that we must pretend that we can never slow down in our extraction of material from the Earth in order to produce more “product” to sell. We pretend that growth can be unlimited, that if the trend line on the graph becomes flat, the economy is stagnant and the ponzi scheme might unravel. But we could dream of a sustainable way of making our living from each other and from the Earth. We could use the same creativity and intellect that we have expended on nuclear physics or computing technology. If we applied that effort to creating such an economy, surely something good would emerge.

But we could dream of such things only if we want to live more equitably, more in harmony with each other and with the planet. As long as we consider such things to be naive fantasies, nothing much will happen. If we are raised to believe that ruthless competition is the only way to survive, that other people are objects that can be useful or not, we will stay on our current path. If we have been taught that the land, water, air, and every living thing was divinely intended to be used and despoiled by us, we keep in motion a scheme that ultimately will run out, regardless of how we might use our technology to keep it going a while longer.

That seems to be the society we have created. Clear-eyed, remorseless competition and wealth creation because we cannot imagine an alternative in today’s world. More technology, machinery, and artificial intelligence as the only salvation from the messes we create. More of what Joanna Macy called the industrial growth society.

Joanna Macy was a teacher of Buddhism and Deep Ecology whose later writings describe what she called The Great Turning, in which we begin to turn away from the industrial growth society and build a culture that can sustain healthy societies and ecosystems. Her writing, and that of writers like Rebecca Solnit, offer a useful perspective on hope for us – what Macy called, in her book of the same name, Active Hope. It is not an optimism that says “it’s gonna be OK” and allows us to wait in passive expectation for things to get better. It is not something we have, but instead something we do. It is acknowledging the actions that are still possible and working to bring about change, even if it’s little by little. I strongly recommend her writings and her work that she called “The Work That Reconnects”. 

Sister Moon

/ Michael Smith / Leave a comment

This morning I walked at Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve for about 45 minutes, underneath a blue sky with the almost-full moon still floating up there, reminding us that we’re just objects in space. And so I remember; we’re on a big, round, blue planet, ever so gradually circling Brother Sun. And we can watch Sister Moon and almost detect her falling and rising as she circles us, mirroring some of the sunlight back to us in the middle of the night so that we won’t forget the day. Or in this case continuing to reflect the sun, framed in morning sunlight, because sometimes it’s better to shine than to go dark. 

To shine seems easy and natural for Sister Moon, at least the way we understand it in terms of science. Does she sometimes struggle to do so, like we do? Maybe get up in the morning and say to herself, “I just can’t do this today.” If she is a barren sphere of rock and dust, then I suppose not. But we don’t have to reduce everything to such understanding. Native American wisdom recognizes the moon as a source of wisdom and guidance, and in the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address she is the oldest grandmother, governing tides, watching over the arrival of children, and serving as a leader of women. In the Canticle of Brother Sun and Sister Moon of Saint Francis, the Earth and the heavens – all of nature – are precious gifts reflecting a wonderful Creator. And so in multiple wisdom traditions, the moon is more than what we can measure with instruments. 

And she shines throughout the year. Even when our planet is so dark, when human hatred and fear threaten to extinguish every light, Sister Moon gives us light in the darkness. When masked, armed men kidnap the innocent and march zip-tied children into the cold, and when soldiers carry out genocide, she does what I often cannot do: continue to provide light, not be overwhelmed by the darkness. 

I would like to be as constant as Sister Moon, but we are not made for such constancy. Being human means simultaneously holding on to the light, doing our best to shine, while also accepting how complicated and imperfect we are. There are times when climate catastrophe, cruelty, runaway greed – the various crises we are facing – temporarily rob us of light. Some days our faces do not reflect the light, even if we want to shine. The important thing is not to accept defeat, to let the light die. We still can imagine something better, we still recognize truth, and we still have within us compassion and empathy, even if some people have discarded it. Such things are our light, and we must let it illuminate us and all those around us.

Turning Away from What’s Essential for Humanity

/ Michael Smith / Leave a comment

The news is full of war, hatred, assassination, and cruelty. Right wing media, from what I can see, appears to be telling people that what we need is power, domination, and ruthlessness. Much of American Christianity is saying that empathy and compassion are weaknesses at a time when we need strength. Our neighbor, we might infer, is whoever is in our tribe and thinks like us. Everyone else is expendable or perhaps needs to be eliminated (by deportation or deadlier means).

The thing is that the world’s major religions disagree. Or – wait – the major teachings of major religions disagree, while the practices of their followers may not. The history of how religion has been expressed in different cultures contains plenty of hatred and murder, war, torture, and slavery. But what do you find in the teachings of Buddhism? You find compassion playing a major role, relief from suffering alongside not being held captive by possessions or attachment to the way things are. What do you find in Christianity, by which I mean the actual teachings of Jesus? Compassion, forgiveness, empathy, and love.

One of my heroes, the farmer, writer, and poet Wendell Berry, put together a small book on the subject of “Christ’s teachings about love, compassion, and forgiveness.” It is titled Blessed Are the Peacemakers, and it is in print and inexpensive. He wrote that in the U.S., Christianity seems to be fashionable, but “It seems to have remarkably little to do with the things that Jesus Christ actually taught.” He went on to write that “…I know of no Christian nation and no Christian leader from whose conduct the teachings of Christ could be inferred.” And so, he decided to put together this little book containing Gospel passages in which Jesus addressed issues of “human strife, forgiveness, compassion, and peacemaking.” It’s a good antidote for those politicians who paint a portrait of Jesus as a Proud Boy, storming the Capital and proclaiming white supremacy.

Similarly, the books of Thich Nhat Hanh spell out the wisdom of the Buddhist tradition. He was born in Vietnam and became a Buddhist monk, then went on to teach at Columbia and Princeton, to write numerous books, and work tirelessly for peace. In Peace is Every Step, he wrote that, “Real strength is not in power, money, or weapons, but in deep, inner peace.” In The Art of Living, he wrote about mindfulness, the ways we are connected with everything around us, and the importance of transforming pain and suffering.

What does science have to say about these things that I’m claiming are essential for our humanity? One place to look is in the work of Dr. Bruce Perry, a child psychiatrist who knows a thing or two about love and connection, and what damage trauma and neglect can do. Using neuroscience and our understanding of human attachment relationships, he writes (in The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog) that humans “…could never have survived without deeply interconnected and interdependent human contact. The truth is, you cannot love yourself unless you have been loved and are loved. The capacity to love cannot be built in isolation.” He goes on to write about love and empathy in Born for Love: Why Empathy Is Essential-and Endangered. As a retired psychological associate, it troubles me to see popular culture asserting that empathy is a defect, and this book is an excellent answer to that claim. We need each other. The ideal of the tough guy who is entirely self-reliant is not a healthy model for raising children. It typically results in adults whose idea of love is more like transaction and manipulation.

Like many people, I look at what our popular culture and right-wing politics is promoting and I fear for how the future will go. Fear, but not despair – not yet. For my brothers and sisters who feel like they are bystanders to the world’s death spiral, I suggest reading Rebecca Solnit (titles like Hope in the Dark) as well as Joanna Macy (for example, Coming Back to Life, with Molly Brown).

What does all this have to do with Our Lives in Nature, the title and theme of this blog? It is all related; how we see ourselves shapes our relationship with the Earth, how we treat each other and how we treat nature are intimately related.

About Truthfulness

/ Michael Smith / Leave a comment

I continue to think about bringing up kids with the skills and values that are needed. I see the world that kids are growing up in, how it is changing, and I wish for a better world. The way we make that better world is through compassion, integrity, and other qualities that are hard to hold onto with so much going on. I wrote about empathy last month, and I’d like to talk about truth this time. (I started this at Rain Lilies on Substack and reprint it here.)

“Did you finish your homework?” “Are you really friends with that person?” Those can be difficult questions. Sometimes being liked or staying out of trouble can make truth-telling hard, for adults and kids. Does it really hurt anything to “bend” the truth?

Little kids may automatically give the answer that the other person wants, the “right” answer, even if it’s not really what happened. “Did you hit your sister?” The right answer, the one that the questioner wants to hear, is “no.” For a very young child that may be the only answer that occurs to them.

In other words, in those first few years kids don’t necessarily sort things into categories like lying and telling the truth. It might not occur to them that the thing that really happened is different from the thing that the other person wants to hear. They simply give the desired right answer. Only later do they understand that they’re choosing to lie.

Teaching honesty usually begins early, before we can discuss things like building trust. Parents might say, “Thank you for admitting what you did; I know that was hard.” They might still get in some trouble, but hopefully they see themselves as a kid who made a mistake but handled it honorably. And that’s important to see yourself (and for others to see you) as a basically good person who made a mistake.

If the consequences of making mistakes are really harsh, then a kid may lie even when they know it’s a lie. They become so afraid of a parent’s or teacher’s anger that they will take a chance on lying. What does this child do? Tell the truth and let awful things happen, or lie and hope they don’t find out? The child may decide to make it a very convincing lie and hope for the best.

If this keeps on going, lying can become a habit. There can be other ways for habitual lying to develop, but this is one. Screwing up gets you in bad trouble, maybe scary trouble, so you just get good at making things up to stay out of trouble. You become good enough at lying that you often don’t get caught. It becomes second nature to make stuff up.

Is lying ever acceptable? It is possible that it could be okay to tell a lie in order to protect someone or save them from needless hurt? There is a wonderful story by Mark Twain that I hope you will read. It’s “Was It Heaven? Or Hell?” and it shows how compassion and caring sometimes outweigh truth-telling. It’s not long and it illustrates the point really well.

But there is that other kind of lying, done only to help ourselves regardless of who is hurt. The lie that is designed to harm someone, or intended to help us get away with something that is wrong. The bully who beats someone up but then claims to have been nowhere nearby when the beating happened. The person who calls folks up pretending to sell impossibly good insurance and tricks them into giving up their bank access and then steals their savings. The leader of a country who tells the citizens that he really won an election that he actually lost, claiming that immigrants voted illegally and bad people stole or dumped votes that were for him.

And when too many people easily tell lies like that, we might begin to feel like we are foolish to tell the truth. Especially when people who should be respectable go on TV and say things that aren’t true and say it easily (wanting us to think “of course, that’s obvious”) and become offended if someone challenges them. We begin to be not so sure what is truth and what is a lie, and to wonder if lying isn’t just what everyone does to get by in the world.

Photo by Gerzon Piu00f1ata on Pexels.com

But if that’s who we become, how will we ever be able to trust anyone? Already too many people only trust folks in a small circle of friends and family. We should be able to talk with someone we don’t know and decide to give them at least a little trust. We could start off seeing them as trustworthy unless there is a reason to think they are not, while at the same time being careful not to trust them with too much.

In other words, we want to think that most people have integrity. Someone with integrity tells the truth and does not mislead people about who they are. They don’t pretend to be one kind of person for some people and act like a different sort of person for others. Think of it as “doing the right thing even when no one is looking.”

Being able to trust others and to believe that they have integrity is important. It allows us to live in a community where people are ready to accept each other as neighbors and maybe friends. I hope that more of us can live in such communities.

How do we remain ready to extend a little trust but at the same time protect ourselves against people who would use lies to hurt us? How do we maintain our own integrity when we see many others getting by through deception and lies? How do our kids manage it? I suppose part of it is finding trustworthy people as friends and acquaintances, reminding us what good, caring, honest relationships look like.

And we can develop the skill of being good observers of others, reflecting on what we see in them and listening to ourselves about what those observations mean. It’s a mistake to jump into things on a whim or listen too much to peer pressure or wishful thinking. Get to know people and think about what you’re learning about them.

All of that is easy to say and suggest to others. It can be harder for us to put all that thinking and reflecting and listening into practice in our own lives. But it really pays off.

About Empathy

/ Michael Smith / 1 Comment

I’m writing again to kids and to anyone else who is interested, about the values that can shape our lives if we choose them. Like empathy.

So – empathy. The thing that lets us know that a classmate is going through something bad, even if they say they’re “fine.” And also lets us share a friend’s joy. The ability that lets us connect with each other, lets us care about each other in a meaningful way.

Empathy is our ability to understand what it is like to be another person in their situation – to sense what their emotions and thoughts might be. If you see someone being bullied, see their expressions and hear their voice, you might feel some of their fear, pain, and anger, and want to help them.

What is it like to be small and have a hurt? And to have someone who is there for you?

It’s not the same as “sympathy,” which is having concern for someone but without the emotional part that happens when we feel what they are feeling. Empathy connects us through emotional understanding, while sympathy really does not.

If you look these things up online, some places in social media and websites don’t get it quite right. There’s some good information here and here. And I learned a good bit about these things during my career as a Psychological Associate. Empathy is crucial to what was required in that career.

I guess a person who is worried about being seen as weak or vulnerable has no use for empathy or else would find it hard or uncomfortable. It amazes me that some politicians and some churches are saying that empathy is a problem, or even a sin.

When Elon Musk says that empathy is a “bug” and a “weakness,” he is wrong. Empathy helps bring about the kind of connection and trust that holds relationships, communities, and societies together. Right now, as a society, very many people are isolated from each other and mistrustful of most others. We need to have relationships in which the other person “gets” us.

It would be great to have more face-to-face relationships that include empathy, making us feel understood by a wider group of friends and people in the community. I think we would feel less isolated and mistrustful of everyone else we see. And wouldn’t that be a wonderful thing?

Looking around me right now, I see too many people who have no time or desire to understand others except to use them, who act as though getting through the day means shoving people aside, and who desperately want to be invulnerable, untouchable, armor-plated like a superhero. Empathy would mean sometimes opening yourself to difficult feelings, connecting so that it could matter – a lot – how another person is doing. You can’t do that with armor on. (You can and should do it while maintaining some sort of “boundary,” but that’s for another discussion.)

So I hope you will grow up being strong enough and wise enough to have empathy for others. Being with someone when they need it, without giving advice or trying to “fix it” and quickly move on, but instead just being present so they don’t carry what they’re carrying all by themselves.

I’m not sure how I managed to write the above without bringing in one of Bruce Perry’s books, Born for Love (written with Maia Szalavitz). Not that I wanted it to be a long essay with a lot of references, but this is a popular, readable book by a psychiatrist who I regarded as a rockstar earlier in my career when I heard him speak and read his books and articles. So, if you can take the time, go get this book!

For the Kids in My Family

/ Michael Smith / Leave a comment

This is heartfelt but maybe preachy, so bear with me. And it’s particularly for Eli and Lilly, should they want to read it at some future time. I was thinking of boys in particular as I wrote it, but it’s for anyone. Especially for those raising boys or having influence in their lives, and for anyone whose life is woven together with the lives of boys.

Lilly and Eli

I hope you will question what means to be a boy, and a man. Don’t just absorb what the culture teaches without some careful thought.

The culture (schools, places of worship, movies, social media, etc.) shapes what we expect of boys and men. But we don’t have to follow the culture when it holds up domination or aggression as ideals. We can turn away when it yells, “do it!” because stopping to think before acting is supposed to be weak. We don’t have to end up as men who are hardened, isolated, determined to win no matter who gets hurt. And we don’t have to raise our sons that way.

So … who do you want to be? I don’t mean work or a career, I mean what values could guide you as you make your way through the world?

Here are a few that are worth thinking carefully about: equality, empathy, truthfulness, integrity, compassion, kindness, and work as well as play.

Equality ought to be easy, right? People talk about it, even in our Declaration of Independence, the part about believing that “all men are created equal.” Nobody is above another person. It’s a great idea, and yet they wrote “men” and left out women. They left out people of color, too. Over the next couple of centuries, we began recognizing what we left out, and a lot of people have tried to correct that.

I hope you’ll think about equality on a very personal level, about you and the people around you. They way you are with girls, women, people of color, people with less money. Older people, like me, often used the right words about others being equal, but didn’t act like it. Our sisters and girlfriends were equal, but … boys and men needed to do things for them, speak for them, and make the important decisions. We said one thing but acted like it wasn’t true. Equality was mainly just a nice word. I think many younger people are doing better, but the problem is still here. In fact, some churches and politicians want to go back to the time when women were supposed to be quiet and obedient.

Women and girls should matter just the same as men and boys. Neither one should try to control the other, as if they were better. This especially includes the old problem of men and boys thinking they can control the bodies and the affection of women and girls. If we really mean it about being created equal, then we each make our own decisions about what to wear, who to hug, when it’s OK to touch or be touched. And of course that goes for any gender, gay, straight, transgender, or other way of recognizing who we are.

And being treated equally goes for any other person who is different in ways like race and skin color, or what country you are from, or how much money you have. I’m not better than a person who is different in those ways, and neither are you.

People who are opposed to these ideas may try to make it seem like we are saying that everybody has more rights than men or boys, like we are getting left out and these others are getting special rights. I guess what bothers them is that we men have less of a special privilege than before. We are used to having a special status, and so just being equal to everyone feels like we lost something. But the deal is, no one has more rights or is “more” equal than anyone else.

With equality, being female doesn’t give girls and women special rights, just the same rights.

And it doesn’t give Black people special rights over White ones, just the same rights.

And so on, with other kinds of differences.

So I hope you will think about the values that you want to guide your life, and I hope that equality is one of them.

I want to write more about these issues, maybe touch on those things like empathy, truthfulness, integrity, compassion, kindness, work, and play. What is happening in our country right now seems to challenge and distort those qualities, and some people are glorifying power and even violence. They would give special privileges to the rich and make women conform to mistaken ideas of what is required to be virtuous. They would re-define truth to be whatever is convenient at the moment. If we think such ideas are wrong, we have to speak up.