MaybeToday.org

MaybeToday.org turned two years old last Monday (March 1st). The occasion passed with little notice. Considering how much I had planned to write and post last month, and how much I actually produced (oops), I suppose I’m not surprised.

I spent the evening out with my wife, celebrating our 30th wedding anniversary. Having been married on Feb 29th, we usually get our choice of dates on which to celebrate the remembrance, but we very rarely wait until the 1st. I guess I launched the site the day after our anniversary in 2008 – I don’t recall being cognizant of the proximity of the dates, though I surely must have been (March 2nd is a birthday in our house, as well).

We had a nice dinner at Restaurant 45 in Medway, and as is customary on the occasion, it served as a quiet opportunity for recollection, reflection on the past, and a taking stock of how things are going. On the drive home up Rt. 16, while passing a road in Holliston which I used to travel daily to Framingham when we were living in Milford and I was working at General Chemical, it struck me how life experiences very often seem to have an import amplified in proportion to how early in life they occur.

In other words, it seemed like that left onto Brook Street, picking up Western Ave through Sherborn to the southeastern outskirts of Framingham, led to a road so many times traveled that I should be able to find my tire marks worn into the pavement – like an old friend with whom I share so many stories. Likewise, the whole experience of working at General Chemical looms rather largely in the scope of my composite memory of the path my life has taken to the present. But I worked there for only about three years, back in my early twenties. In contrast, I’ve sat a year longer than that in my current office, which is merely the most recent of five offices I’ve occupied in my current building, which is the fourth building I’ve worked out of for my present employer (in some permutation or another) over the past fourteen years. Yet, in terms of being a perceived life episode, I’d have a hard time not seeing the earlier experience as more life-defining.

The high school experience is another glaring example of what I’m referring to. The four years I spent in high school can almost be viewed as four distinct episodes in my life, each imparting a major impact on my life’s journey (or development, if you prefer) in numerous ways. Even the summers back then seem like they were so much longer, so much more decisive. I hesitate to say that time just doesn’t seem as interesting anymore – Lord knows I’d be somewhere between bored stiff and embarrassed to death if I had to relive a day of the inanity that was my adolescent life – but it might have something to do with the relative lack of crises in my life these days. The occasional heart attack notwithstanding, I lead a pretty crisis-free existence these days, and perhaps that equanimity just lends itself to a general dialing-down of the memory-experience meter. Perhaps our memory is a drama that, lacking dramatics, tends toward quietude and stillness. 

Or maybe I’m just stumbling upon another angle to the age-old truism that life seems to accelerate as we age. But I’ve never heard of anyone trying to recapture their forties or fifties, no matter how old they get. One needn’t look far to find people aching to recover their lost adolescence, though. I don’t believe youth offers the vitality we tend to ascribe to it – at least not beyond the physical robustness that aging breaks down. In the life of the mind – in the living-ness of life, in our relationships, our imagining and thinking, and our willing, both loving and sinning – youthfulness is such a crude exactor of purpose, crying out for perfection to wisdom and prudence. And yet, time flies…

Today was Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. I’ve been fittingly pensive and reflective lately, almost to the point of feeling haunted. This is a time of year that used to fill me with energy, but these days seems more likely to leave me thinking about lost opportunities. I became starkly aware last night, while driving downtown to teach my CCD class, of how short a fuse I was on, and how much stress I was feeling. That’s not a good thing for me, and I quickly had to coax myself back off the ledge.

Thinking about how to go about lowering my stress level, I considered how helpful it might be to tune out the political environment, and focus on matters of a less agitated character. As tempting as that may be, it hardly seems the responsible thing to do, and would be easier said than done anyhow. At the end of the day, I have to live in the middle of it all, as does everyone I care about. I may be powerless to effect any real change in the world, but within my tiny little circle of influence, I am not free of the obligation to shed whatever light I may be able to on the greater or lesser questions of the day.

And so I’m left to confront the daily anxiety of backwards-looking regrets and forward-looking resignations. It dawns on me that I’ve never quite come to peace with myself following the crisis of my second coronary stent procedure, almost two years ago to the day. The first one, in May, had almost killed me, but I walked away from it with a sense of relief, feeling I had dodged a bullet, and ready to work my way back to health. But the prospect of the second one, several months later, felt like the bullet I’d dodged had, like a heat-seeking missile, turned around to come back for me. It was a humbling experience: half-expecting to die, unwilling to let anyone know how pessimistic I was, and dumbstruck at the profound chasm between what my life had been, and what it should have been.

And yet the ensuing two years have found me, in many ways, digging the same grave I was working on before: burning the candle at both ends, and allowing busy-ness to trump my need for quiet reflection and reconciliation. But that is hardly the whole story.

Five years ago, on Yom Kippur in 2004, I was spending some time in preparation for my first assignment, the following morning, as a reader in the Sunday Liturgy. As I sat in the basement, browsing my reading assignment for the nth time, and listening to some music, the seriousness of what I was about to embark upon hit me with full force. I realized, with full conviction, that justice demanded that, if I were going to proclaim the Word of God to His congregation in the sacred liturgy, my life needed to likewise proclaim the Word, outside of the liturgy. This was a sobering recognition that I needed to give up the shortcuts and compromises I had become accustomed to, and it was a little unnerving. The song that was playing at the time was a perky and heartfelt piece by Margaret Becker called “I Testify.”

Now, I am a quiet and reserved man, not much given to things like testimony, and I had to smile at the irony of the moment. True to my character, I started wondering what difference it would really make what I did with my life, and how it could possibly be important. At that point, the song changed, and as I looked down at my MP3 program to see what was next, I saw it was Joanne Hogg’s rendition of “My Song is Love Unknown.” I had to smile again at the irony, and said to myself something like: ‘Yes, indeed, and that is a glorious truth hidden from so many souls, so much in need of being told. I admit it.” Driven then by what felt like a silly curiosity, my eyes glanced down at the playlist to see what was next: a song called “One More Reason,” followed by “The Lord Reigns.” Sometimes, the Lord just won’t let us miss the point – either of His purpose, or of His lordship. After having a good laugh, I snapped a screenshot of the MP3 player, and said: “You win, Lord, but the ball’s in Your court.”

Despite my continuing foibles, I can hardly deny that the Lord has truly worked a gradual but profound personal transformation in me over these past five years. It’s not that I wasn’t serious about my vocation before that, and hadn’t in many ways been even more profoundly transformed a decade and a half prior, but I learned to let go just a bit more that night. I certainly can’t claim to have realized that imperative to give up all my shortcuts and compromises, but at least I am constantly aware of its imperativeness, and I can truly point to identifiable areas in my life where I have been able to be both more sensitive to Gospel demands, and more responsive, as well. My personality has both hardened and softened in different ways as my tolerance for moral and spiritual compromise has diminished. And while I’m grateful for the growth in wisdom and piety, I’m even more grateful for the grounding such spiritual life gives to the hope I must cling to so tightly on these autumn days, when I survey that terrible, battle-scarred landscape of my life, which won’t let me forget how very much I need the redemption of that Song of Unknown Love. More hope, less stress: better living.

Just prior to the arrival of our two guests from the Chernobyl area in June, I was reading Pedro Arrupe’s memoir of the bombing of Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945. Of course, the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl has certain things in common with the devastation of Hiroshima, even though the purposes of the human endeavor manifested in each case are radically different. Both the accidental explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor and the intentional exploding of the first atomic bomb in the skies over Hiroshima were products of the modern technology of nuclear fission, and produced not only immediate damage due to explosion and fire, but also various health problems due to the resulting radiation.

At just about the same time, my sister was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and was – at that point – waiting a therapy of radiation to battle the tumor. This created in my mind a juxtaposition of three very different manifestations of the human condition flowing out from the development of the inherently destructive technology of nuclear fission: the willful leveraging of its destructive power for violent and malicious ends; the failure of human effort and management to contain its destructive force in well-intentioned applications; and the potential for its destructiveness to be harnessed and directed toward achieving human good, when it can be willfully contained.

It was hard not to be struck by the irony that the technology which was deployed to such brutal ends in 1945, and the mismanagement of which in 1986 had caused such human suffering, could be a key contributor in potentially saving the life of my sister, among so many others, today. It’s a commonplace that technological advancements tend to be developed for military application, and only later leveraged for constructive purposes, but there’s also quite a bit of work that goes on to develop technologies, or at least technological applications, for commercial purposes. Today is a good day to reflect on the too little-noticed fact that we have very little control over how technologies we develop today will be applied and advanced tomorrow. And if the devastating craft of 1945 can manage to be repurposed for beneficent ends, how also can our best and brightest work today be turned against us by an adequately powerful malfeasant will – and ask: Why are we so disinclined to concern ourselves about genies being let out of bottles?

What a whirlwind! Nasta & Yulia have returned to Belarus after a whirlwind month of activity. These girls were very much like other girls I’ve known, but they possessed a truly remarkable courage. They were just little kids, of course, but they really impressed me in how they handled themselves. There was much more bustle in the house than I am accustomed to, while they were here. There was a constant chatter going on in Russian, which at first seemed out of place in the home – as if the house were a train station or airport, and not my sanctuary and refuge – but which quickly became just another background element of the domestic fabric. I miss it.

Being with and around the girls added an interesting contextual layer to my thinking about some issues that have rapidly come to the foreground of my thought these days; issues around technology & medicine, sickness & dying, etc. A number of public and private concerns have had me reflecting yet again on these matters, which seemingly have never been far from the surface since my own brush with death two years ago.

I think the train of thought got started just a day or two before welcoming these two young kids, whose lives are part of the sad legacy of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster, when I coincidentally picked up a small book that I had been uncertain how to classify in my library, and began to read it. It was by Pedro Arrupe, who at the time of writing it was the Superior General of the Jesuits. Roughly the first half of the book was a recollection of his experiences on the ground in Hiroshima in 1945, where he was stationed as a missionary when the first atomic bomb was dropped. Arrupe had studied medicine for five years before entering the seminary, and he had to call upon every thread of his experience in dealing with the crisis. It was a sobering read, to put it gently. My intellectual circumstances snowballed from there, and I soon had several thematically related posts sketched out in my mind, but have been so strapped for time that I’ve little more to show for it than a couple of drafts, and a bucket-full of good intentions.

I’ve had so little time to write that the idea of publishing a blog is beginning to look a bit silly, and I’ve been finding myself (again) tempted to use the blog for publishing blurts & blurbs, instead of somewhat longer pieces, though that’s really not what I launched the site to do – I wanted to use it as a vehicle for stretching out my thinking. I almost always find the idea of publishing blurts uncomfortable when I’m working on more substantial things, even though the majority of articles I at least mentally sketch out never see the light of day, eventually ending up in the dustbin of good intentions. In my saner moments, I continue to think I should be able to strike a better balance here. My preference would be to find more time to write!

  As January comes to a merciful end, I slump back in my easy chair and wonder how things may change this year. I’m waiting for the last of my recommendation letters to reach Franciscan University at Steubenville, so that I can begin my studies with them. That program will surely dominate my reading list – and my writing, I suppose – for as long as it takes me to complete it. The chair I’m sitting in will soon be moving upstairs, as I’ll be abandoning my basement bunker in favor of a reworked 2nd floor bedroom, for which I have been overly busy building bookcases.

With the economy in the tank, and my employer having just agreed to be purchased by a competitor, I can’t be very certain where 2009 is going to lead me professionally – or financially. I’m going to revive my PMP certification, just in case. We refinanced the house last week, in part to reduce monthly outlay in order to help pay the increased cost of sending Abby to Montrose School beginning next year, but also to mitigate the risk of having a high mortgage payment in times of uncertainty. So many things seem like they’re one false move away from coming apart at the seams.

Around here, winter runs from the beginning of December until almost the end of March, so it is about half over at this point. The end can’t come soon enough for me. I spent a couple hours in the driveway today, trying to break up and remove a covering of more than an inch of ice, which has been treacherous underfoot for perhaps two weeks, but nearly impossible to deal with prior to today due to bitter cold temperatures and/or the lack of sunlight. Remind me never to buy a north-facing house in New England again.

A year ago this time, I had just established the maybetoday.org domain, and was installing WordPress on my hosting server, trying to figure out how to make this all happen, and doing initial design work. I’ve accomplished only a small fraction of what I’d intended to accomplish with this web site, but that’s the story of my life. Perhaps I can take some small comfort in knowing that, as uncertain as many things may be in my life right now, some things never change.

I’ve spent the better part of the past three days trying to recover from an in-house file server disaster. It’s never easy… The main data files were pretty easily recovered, but it was very painful to recover a music collection consisting of about 45GB of MP3s. Like, I suspect, a lot of people, I’m often overconfident that nothing really serious will go wrong. Not that losing my collection of MP3s would have qualified as a catastrophe – my daughter’s fiancé buried his mother on Monday, which puts things in perspective.

But still, it seems far too easy to go through life as if with blinders on, taking only those precautions that don’t interfere too much with the day to day business of getting on with it. I tell myself that I’ll do things differently this year, but I wonder if I’ll actually get around to it. In the mean time, there’s a room or two to paint, DAT tapes to be restored and converted to DVD, refinancing paperwork to be processed, classes to be prepared, insurance companies to be fought with, piles of books to be read and/or shelved, all kinds of things to be written, and – Lord knows – much to be prayed about, and people to care for. It’s good to start somewhere…

A true winter chill has settled in to Massachusetts tonight, as we begin to close in on the winter solstice. I took the dog outside a few minutes ago to prepare for locking up  the house for the night, and I was taken aback by the beauty of the night as I headed down the porch stairs. The sky is crystal clear, the moon and stars: brilliant. The temperature is just below 20 degrees.

As I was wandering around the back yard, I was thinking how I so enjoyed these kinds of nights when I was young and carefree, and walking all over town with my friends at night – instead of being inside doing homework or other useful things. I think I enjoyed them even more when I was working nights, in my early twenties, loading trucks and sampling drums of chemical waste. It’s not so cold as to be oppressive, just cold enough to keep everything crisp: the ground, the air, the shadows, and the mind. There’s something about a cold, brightly moonlit night that clears the cobwebs from the head, and invites clarity of thought.

I had a lot of room in my life back then for thinking, though I can’t honestly say I did a very good job of it – especially as a teenager. But there were plenty of nights, spent – mostly alone – jockeying trucks and loading them up in the yard over at General Chemical, that I would let my mind wander over various ideas:  working out moral problems, trying to understand political questions, wrestling with religious doctrines, and generally trying to find my place in the world of ideas. I wish I could reach back and grab that kid by the lapels, give him a little direction, and dispossess him of a few particularly noxious notions, but that’s just not the way life works.

One thing I might tell that young man, were I to have the chance, would be not to get impatient with life, but to treasure the opportunity that such a life provided for reflection. By the end of the decade, I’d grown quite tired of the kind of labor that provided me that opportunity for reflection because of the lack of mental challenge inherent in the work. I wanted work that allowed me to use my mind, and eventually, that’s exactly what I found.

But what I lost in the process of finding “meaningful work” was the freedom to think for myself. It could hardly be any other way: how could I possibly think for myself if I was busy thinking for somebody else? The great questions of my life would have to wait for my “spare time,” so that I could focus my mind on “meaningful” matters like desktop configurations, networking protocols, technical security schemes, business benefits, requirements analysis, project dashboards, and stakeholder satisfaction.

Life, it turns out, is full of trade-offs – not simple solutions, or “progress.” I should also not have been surprised when my weight ballooned after giving up manual labor – though I’m sure it never crossed my mind at the time. No doubt, I’ve appreciated the financial benefits of my current career – and I’m hardly ready to give them up. But as I find it harder and harder to keep my mind focused, during the day, on matters that seem to me ever more trivial, I have to wonder where this is all leading.

I took a deep breath this weekend, and began the process of applying to Franciscan University’s Masters in Theology program. This is going to be a long road, and I hope I’ve weighed the trade-offs appropriately. For all the good – and there is plenty of it – that the last 15 or so years have meant for me, I can’t deny that I feel myself being called back to an earlier, simpler way, in many respects – even as I look forward to brand new possibilities. Truth be told, there have even been plenty of days over the years (more recently than prior) that I’ve wished I was working outside again. I’m not sure how reasonable that is at this point, but I do need some kind of fresh start.

So, October draws to a close. It’s been a very quiet month on maybetoday.org. I wish I could say that I’ve accomplished a lot here or there, but the truth is I’ve been quite run down this month. I did spend a chunk of time mapping out some ideas for how WORDsearch might be improved moving forward, but it’s hard to think of anything else significant I’ve managed to do in my free time this month.

I will confess to watching much of the Red Sox’ attempts to progress through the baseball playoffs, which certainly cut into my time to accomplish any work after-hours. I think the late hours of these games, driven by MLB’s desire to maximize cross-country viewership for the sake of advertising rates, seriously compromised my ability to function mentally during those weeks when I was watching, and I’m only now beginning to catch up.

My body is so very different than it was before I had the heart attack – I don’t know if that’s a function of changes in my body itself, or of the effects of the medications I’m on now, or some combination, but it’s impossible at this point for me to deny that I simply cannot withstand the same kind of bodily stress that was such a chronic part of my routine existence just a couple of years ago. If I die young, it will not be from lack of understanding of what’s been killing me, but rather from a lack of resolve to deal with it prudentially. Lord have mercy.