Life is messy. I don’t know anyone whose life isn’t a bit messy. My own life is no exception.
I grew up in a family of hunters, but I was more interested in writing a killer sentence than claiming the title of deer slayer. My grandfather, to whom I am forever grateful, bought me a typewriter for my high school graduation instead of the traditional family gift of a shotgun. Still, the fact that my interests and beliefs departed fairly radically from those of my family posed constant messiness.
In 1967, I graduated from college. It was a messy time. I faced the choice of being drafted into the infantry or enlisting in military intelligence. I was led to believe that my tour of duty would include a two-year assignment in Germany—I landed in Vietnam six months later. At that point in my life, given my early conditioning, I didn’t see moving to Canada as a viable choice. I had to choose among messy options.
My career was not a straight line in one profession. I worked in jails, hospitals, drug clinics, schools, and corporations. Each of those changes involved a relocation. We moved from Ann Arbor to Kalamazoo, to Phoenix, to New Jersey, to Toronto (I finally made it to Canada) to New York City to Elk Rapids, Michigan. I went from rehabilitating inmates to coaching executives. The similarities were scary. Each change was messy—more for my young family than for me.
Bottom line: life is messy. I’m sure you could tell your own stories of the messiness of life. Relationships are messy. Careers are messy. Life, in general, is messy. We have to deal with disagreements, death, disease, differences, and disasters.
Life even gets messy when things don’t turn out the way we envisioned. Maybe a family member comes down with an illness or your relationship with a parent doesn’t exactly match your idealized image.. Perhaps your community has to deal with the uncomfortable reality of people being unhoused due to mental illness, drug abuse, job loss, or economic conditions. Maybe your aging parents need to transition to a tiered-care facility, or you have to take away their car keys. Messes abound, but in the end, navigating that messiness is what builds character and helps us define who we are.
Serendipitously, as I was thinking about this post, I read Barbara Kingsolver’s brilliant new book, Partita. It could easily have been titled “Finding Magic in the Messiness.” Throughout the book, Kingsolver reveals the inescapable messiness of just living our life. The story revolves around the main character’s search for the magic of art and beauty in her life in spite of an abusive childhood, the death of a brother, an unfulfilling relationship, and a modest livelihood. And yet Livia (the main character) somehow manages to find a little magic and meaning in her life. I highly recommend the book. Reading the masterfully crafted story will give you a much fuller experience of finding magic in messiness than my pedantic post will.
In the context of that messy backdrop, there are two questions I want to raise in this post. First, how do we find a grain of magic or some sense of meaning in the messiness of our lives? And, second, how do we discern when the messiness turns into madness? What happens then?
We have all encountered rough spots in our relationships with significant others when values, interests, desires, and beliefs come into conflict. We have all experienced the disappointment when our good intentions go wrong. When that messiness gets too much to handle, our hopes for new possibilities diminish. We wonder: what can we do to reignite our passion, find a little magic, or simply dig deeper for a sense of meaning?
For me, three practices have made a difference—meditation, music, and enduring moments. Sorry for all the M’s. It wasn’t intentional or even compulsive. It just kind of happened.
In my meditation, I incorporate several mantras. They help quiet my OCD mind. The mantra, “I am, I can, and I wish,” is particularly relevant to this post. I start with “I am at One.” If I can experience the realization of being at One with the Universe, then it becomes easier to feel I am at peace, to be calm and still, and to be here now.
If I can acknowledge the fact that I am one of eight billion people on a four billion-year-old planet in a Universe formed 14 billion years ago, I can lighten my being. That acknowledgement inspires me to be kind, to extend love, and to smile on whatever comes my way. If I can lighten my being, I can shed more light on whatever moment I am in.
If I aspire to being more awake (“I wish to awake”), then the possibility of realizing a sense of unity, harmony, and healing becomes more real. I am. I can. I wish. These three simple mantras help me find a little magic in my life.
Another practice that gives me meaning is playing my guitar. In Partita, Livia found meaning in her ability to play the piano at the highest level. The magic of art and the beauty of the music enabled her to navigate the messiness in the rest of her life. In the story, she is piano prodigy. Playing professionally is clearly not an aspiration of mine. I am not a guitar guru. I play by myself in my room with no audience except my long-suffering wife, who has to listen to me play and sing the same songs every day. Bless her soul.
Finally, as I mentioned in the last post, a book by Abraham Heschel really moved me. In Sabbath, he suggests that we might want to focus less on building big things in our limited space and much more on being grateful for enduring moments in time. Buildings eventually crumble. Things only clutter. Moments in time become timeless. Ahhh, if only I could put that advice at the front of my mind and in the depths of my heart.
Now let’s get to the second question posed in this post: How do we discern when the messiness in life turns into madness? What happens then?
First, let’s look at the context in which we are trying to lead our messy lives. While we have known for 50 years that burning fossil fuels will cause the climate to warm with disastrous consequences (the warnings of warming), we have pretended to take action but continued to increase CO2 emissions every year across the globe despite global climate agreements. The Trump administration has not only withdrawn from climate agreements, but it has gutted alternative energy initiatives and regulations while supporting the fossil fuel industry. That is madness.
After forming the UN and NATO after World War II, global conflicts have still continued to rise. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), there are currently 130 armed battles going on in the world. The Trump administration not only exacerbated the problem with its unnecessary war in Iran, it has also sided with Putin, the aggressor in the illegal invasion of Ukraine. With the death and destruction steadily mounting, his “special envoy,” Steve Witcoff, praised Putin as a real humanitarian. Meanwhile, we reduced support for Ukraine. That is madness.
After hundreds of years of diplomatically building alliances and trade with our allies, the Trump administration has threatened to make Canada the 51st state, threatened to take over Greenland, imposed unilateral tariffs, and has alienated our NATO allies in Europe. At the same time, he has lavished praise on Xi and Putin—two of the most powerful autocratic leaders in the world. This is madness.
I could go with examples of madness in immigration, health care, attack ad campaigns, deficit spending, the economy, etc., but I only want to make the point that what was already a messy world has now crossed the line into madness. In this administration, there is not a thread of decency, not a flicker of integrity, and not a hint of truth. The reason I decided to cite those examples is to acknowledge the difficulty of finding magic and meaning in a world gone mad.
While there is little we can do as individuals to change the macro environment, we can still ask ourselves when our own behaviors morph from messiness to madness. It is critically important to be able to discern when we cross the line. We need to be vigilant when we start feeling and seeing the border.
I’m hoping we can find a little more magic in our lives by whatever means available to us. I’m hoping we can continue to search for meaning in the messiness of our daily detritus. And finally, I’m hoping on November 3, we can take the first step to ending the madness we have been living with for the last 10 years. May it be so.
