Lately I've been struggling or at least wrestling with the notion of doing things that matter. When I was so sick I didn't feel like moving it was harder to care about much, but I still had the time to consider what I want to do more than anything else in the world. I heard Donald Miller a couple of weeks ago talking about finding meaning, the thing that we want in our lives even more than love or success (he got that from a book by Holocaust survivor, Viktor Frankel). It may surely be true, though I maintain that love, the unconditional kind, makes things meaningful that otherwise were empty.
To be sure, when the guy cuts me off in traffic and fails to signal which way he is going, I am not thinking about meaning at all. When the world isn't dedicated to making me happy, it has a way of frustrating. But I think that part of my underlying frustration emerges from spending my time involved in things that are so unimportant, giving lots of energy to things that are pointless to get hyped up over (like worrying about the dingbat who cuts me off). It's not just the thing itself, but the disappointment that I got sidetracked again....
This week one of my college professors died. He was one of the coolest dudes in the world. I had spent some more time thinking about him recently since I heard he'd been in the hospital, but in truth he was always a part of my thinking to begin with. I took him for Old Testament in my freshman year of college. He had done various jobs throughout his life, but to me he was a staple of life in Banner Elk, NC, and at Lees-McRae. But to me, once I took him for a class, he was a friend, a mentor, a collaborator, a practical thinker, and for sure a non-anxious presence. He had the intelligence and personal charisma to do things that some might consider to be more impressive, but the truth is that while there were lots of other fields he could have tended he changed the very soil where he lived. He had a way of making me see importance in the simplest of questions, and he had a way of making me feel significant all the time. He was never famous, but he was meaningful and he made me feel meaningful. The way he did it, though, was with lots of laughter and lots of affirmation and lots of smiles and lots of warmth. That seems like a way to live life.
More on this later....