8 Why's, Church and Arcade Fire

We were having a long discussion about what church we wanted to go to.  Really long.  like three and a half months.  What's the deal with that.  I've been going to church my whole life.  For a long time during my youth my dad was a pastor of multiple home churches, I've spent more time in church than Jesus.  So what's with the discussion.

We've gone to a lot of kinds of church too.  The little home churches with one guy playing guitar.  The mega church with more people on stage than Arcade Fire.  The church where everything sucks but the preaching and the preaching is so good it makes it all worth while.  The church where you can't remember a single message but you never encounter a Sunday when you don't want to go.

So here we are again.  What church to go to.  And the bigger question now, the question we have never asked before, why?

This question has to be preempted by the idea that in our house we have already decided that going to church is important for a number of different reasons, so the discussion is not why go to church.  The question is why go to THAT church.

Have you asked that question deeply about any number of things in your life?  

1) Why call that place home? 

2) Why go to work there?

3) Why spend time with those people?

4) Why do that workout?

5) Why eat that diet?

6) Why read that book?

7) Why discipline that behavior?

8) Why drive that car?

You are already going to live somewhere, go somewhere to work, drive something to that place, interact with your kids, eat food, watch tv and read books.  All of those things are already going to happen tomorrow.  Most of the way we go about it is just because that's what we've always done.

Chatting with a Buddhist

We were talking about the difficulty of mixing the spiritual world and the physical world.  She told me a story about how she last saw her dad, he was sick and she was only with him for one more day.  She hugged him and said she would travel back to see him soon and he told her that wouldn't be necessary, that his time had come.  The next morning, while she was on the plane, he died.

He then appeared to her in a dream.  He took her the top of a mountain and told her to fly, and she was terrified.  She said, "I'm afraid of heights, and I'm a human, how can I fly?"  He just kept telling her again and again to fly.

She then told me that the hardest part about our physical bodies is that they are so heavy, that the spiritual body is weightless.

I think that is where I am right now.  I'm trying to understand why God is taking so much away from me.  But he isn't taking anything away from me, he getting me ready for flight.  He is unloading the baggage.  But the odd part is he doesn't want us to give up the physical world, he simply wants it to stop weighing us down.

Whiskey and the Lie of Life Lessons

We go through things in our lives, sometimes horrible things.  Then we sit down afterward and drink, sometimes horrible drinks.  Like Wall Street Whiskey.  I love whiskey and coke, and Wall Street is only $6.99 a bottle and it comes in a glass bottle so I don't feel like an urban outdoors man with an unbreakable bottle playing hide and go seek from a paper bag.  And it has a bad ass name like Wall Street Whiskey, which when you are a licensed financial jerk makes you feel something.    But it tastes like spoiled gasoline.  It burns, and coke doesn't help much, but it does the job of helping you start to unpack the horrible things that have happened.

So we sit and drink (or if we are really lucky we commiserate with somebody else who isn't chased away by the spoiled 85 octane) and start to dig out the bad things.  

Like the time our business partner left.  She came in and emptied out the business while we had all of our customers there.  She took all the clothes from our store and the seats from our lobby.  She took everything she could carry out while people just looked on.  After she left, and we closed up for the evening, my wife sat in the only seat left in our office and I sat on the desk and we cried.  We cried and then we stopped.  We decided that night that we were either going to close the business the next morning or go forward even stronger.

Three years later we shut the doors of that business on our own accord.  They were the most painful three years of my life.  We worked ourselves into the ground.  We had our first daughter and I don't remember much of the first two years of her life.  I drank heavily, hid in every dark hole I could find to hide and worked.

Afterward I talked about all the lessons I learned from that business partner.  All the lessons I learned from that business, from those lost years.  But the truth is those years were lost.  The pain was intense and if we had continued we would have divorced.  But we didn't continue, we quit, finally.  And quitting was good, but what happened was not good.  The lessons learned are often justification to continue doing things that we probably shouldn't be doing.

I don't want to continue learning lessons from pain, to keep putting lipstick on that pig.  I want to learn because I'm trying to learn, because I'm getting better not because bad things are happening to me.  I want to stop bad things from happening, not learn from them.

Sometimes things are just bad, and we should cry, and the next morning we should shut it down.  It's ok to quit today, you don't need to keep learning, just let yourself be ok.

How to escape the Rat Race, stop being a rat

The rat race.  We all know it, most of us participate in it.  We are told to go to school, sit in rows and pay attention.  If we do good enough we can pay a lot of money to do it four more years (or eight if your lucky).  Then if we do well there, we can start to get paid to sit in rows at the office.

School, career, family... death.

So the story goes.  This is always coming from people who are telling you to buck the system, to kick conventionalism to the curb and do your own deal.  Quit that dead end job and become an artist.  Don't be a follower.  It sounds so good, but the truth is the system is not at fault.  School and career and family are not the problem.

You are.  You are the problem.  Stop it. Stop being the problem.

The reason most of us are suffocating is not because of our job or family or school.  Its because we have built a water line in our lives so high that our noses barely sneak above it and every now and then we take in a breath of water and blame everything we can except ourselves.

The truth is, there are probably only two reasons you are unhappy.

1)  You have to much stuff

2)  You don't have the guts to be anything.

Let me explain.  The stuff thing is huge.  It usually starts with our calendar.  We have it filled to the brim and if your job is like my job, if it is not filled to the brim we add meetings to it so we can try and figure out how to get it more full.

Next we actually fill our lives up.  Usually this is two fold because it involves a lot of debt.  Debt is bad and makes you heavy like fat on the body.  I will only spend a moment on debt however, because debt is only part of the stuff problem.  I know somebody who is debt free, no car/home/school/credit card debt.  Nothing, nada.  Owns it all outright.  His house is full of garbage and is rarely clean because there is too much stuff.  He spends so much time fixing his stuff, upgrading his stuff, talking about the next thing he is going to get.  And again, this is somebody who has no debt, but they are still fat and weighed down.  What would happen if they needed to move, what a nightmare.

Secondly, you don't have the guts to be anything.  This is about so much more than a career or an accomplishment.  Most people I know dream about having a business or investment that "makes money while they are sleeping".  You've heard it.  I've said it.  The issue is we don't want to do anything, we want to be so well off we can do NOTHING.

This is where the line from Office Space comes in so well, "Well you don't need a million dollars to do nothing, man. Just take a look at my cousin, he's broke, don't do shit."

I think we really do forget this, we don't HAVE to do anything.  We can all be Bartleby the Scrivener. 

(If you don't know who Bartleby is go to http://www.bartleby.com/129/, it will take you an hour tops and change your life.)

We all want to be so successful people will leave us alone, but we forget that to whom much is given much is required.  The more money we make the harder we need to work, forever.  If you are wealthy right now and you are only concerned about yourself you are a bad person, period.  If you have twenty dollars to your name you have the freedom to only worry about yourself most of the time.  That is simply the way it works.  And the scary truth is, if you have a job and live in America you are wealthy, you might be squandering it all, but you are wealthy.