I have a confession to make.
I’m a hypocrite. An unintentional one, but a hypocrite none-the-less.
Since starting my podcast in 2014, I have ended every one of my 55 shows with some version of “make the most of every moment, for it’s the only moment you’ve got.”
By that I mean, be present in your life, aware of, and better yet loving, what’s happening with you right now. Be in the moment.
The wise Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh put it this way. When asked, “Master, what is a Buddhist?” he responded, “One who breathes, eats, and walks.” The baffled student then said, “But Master! Everyone breathes, eats, and walks!”
“Ah yes,“ said the Master. “But the Buddhist knows he is breathing, knows he is eating, and knows he is walking.”
Wisdom.
I can’t tell you how many times I have grabbed an apple out of the fruit bowl and gobbled it down without tasting a single bite. I am unaware.
Every day I try to sit and meditate for 20 minutes. Like a puppy that keeps straying off, my mind wanders terribly. I must chase it down again and again from the hinterlands of my worries and anxieties, my plans, regrets, hopes and intentions, and everything else that occupies my over-active monkey brain, even in my sleep.
In those 20 minutes, I slow my breathing down to a rate of about 10 breaths a minute. That’s 200 breaths over the course of my “meditation.” One would think that I could be present for a quarter of those, maybe even a half, but it is not unusual for me to be off in the weeds for 199 breaths and present for only one.
But you know? I am not discouraged. I keep at it ~ every day if I can, and throughout my day ~ waiting in line, washing the dishes, eating an apple. For as the great Eckhart Tolle wisely said:
One conscious breath, in and out, is a meditation.
One. Just one. Tomorrow maybe I’ll get two. That’s progress.
So when I say, “make the most of every moment“ ~ please understand ~ I am a hypocrite working hard to live up to his rhetoric…one breath at a time.
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I Am a Racist
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.
Mark Twain
I often hear nowadays, people being accused.
“He’s a racist.”
“She’s a racist.”
“Trump’s a racist.”
“So and so’s a racist.”
What I have yet to hear is: “I am a racist.”
So let me be the first.
I am a racist.
Yes.
I see the ugly thing, creeping around my soul like a roach in the kitchen. I squash it, but sometime later, there it is again.
I know there is a nest somewhere, eggs hatching, a source deep within me, hidden away where it’s easy to deny. There is where I'll find the library of my false beliefs, the lies I tell myself over and over, so often they become grooves cut into my gray matter, like fissures in rock where the water runs down, cutting deeper and deeper, until fissures become swales, and swales become canyons.
When did the first racist raindrop fall? I don’t know. As a child, for sure. How many drops of poison does it take to pollute the vessel of pure water of which we are born? When, exactly, does a person become a racist, and who gets to decide?
I don’t know, but then, neither does anyone else.
I don’t believe in permanence. That’s one thing the Buddhists have taught me.
Everything changes.
We can become aware of that library of false beliefs, that nest of nasties that colors our perception of things, often for the worse. Awareness alone brings change. We can cut new grooves. My challenge as a human being is not to deny that I am a racist, for that would be as foolish as denying I have cancer when I really do. My challenge is, rather, to stop the cancer from metastasizing and poisoning the whole man.
I doubt I will ever fully eradicate my racism. Unfortunately, I suspect some vestige of it will always be with me. But what I can do, and what I do do, is expose myself to experiences that lessen my racism, those being travel, kind and honest conversation, and breaking bread with “the others” whenever I can. These experiences, like wind and rain, smooth rock and, over time, lay low even the highest mountains.
So when I hear the angry crowd shouting, "He’s a racist,” I want to ask:
“Who among you is not a racist? Stand up then and take a bow...for you are surely a god.”
I moved to Substack!
Hi there. If you've read this far, then you enjoy, or are at least intrigued by, my ideas. If you want to learn more, jump over to my new website on Substack, where I continue to write about travel, the second half of life, and other mad musings.