WE’RE ALL FAILURES

Who of us hasn’t failed at something sometime in our lives? In fact, if we are honest with ourselves, we have failed many, many times. No one is perfect. Even the best of the best failed regularly. Ty Cobb was the best hitter of all time in baseball. His career batting average was .367. That is almost unheard of these days. And yet, as great a hitter as Cobb was, he still failed to get a hit more the six out of every ten times he came to bat. If you fail only seven out of every ten times over a career, you’re Hall of Fame material.

Imagine that: being considered the best in baseball when you fail that often! Get only three out of ten questions on an exam and you fail miserably. Getting six of them correct just might get you a D. Granted I am comparing apples with street cars, but the point still holds: we all fail and we fail much of the time. What we fail at is living up to our potential, whatever that potential is.

That means two realities. First, we can allow ourselves to be satisfied with not doing our best because no one does his or her best all of the time. What’s a little failure here now and then, we may ask ourselves. We all come up short, so what’s the big deal? It’s easy to fall into that trap of allowing ourselves to settle for something that is less than our best. My guess is that if you are like me, you’ve done that settling on occasion, maybe on too many occasions.

On the other hand, always giving it our best shot even though we might come up a little short is what we should expect, even demand, of ourselves. The great athletes always get angry with themselves when they fail to get a hit. What they do not do is either shrug their shoulders and not care or allow that failure to so consume them that they get stuck in their tracks and, thus, continue to fail.

To be sure, failure is good for the soul and the psyche. First of all, it reminds us that we just might not be as good as we think we are. That can and should keep us humble. Second, it allows us to learn from our mistakes, our failures. Good hitters, when they fail to get a hit, go back to the dugout to reflect about why they did not. Sometimes it was indeed their fault. And sometimes the other guy, the pitcher or his teammates, just happened to be a little better on that occasion.

It happens. We fail because we are not good enough at that moment. We fail because others are better at that moment. We fail because we did not give our best. We succeed because we were good enough and because we gave it our best. What we need to do, at least every once in a while, both after failures and after successes, is to take a moment to reflect on why we failed or why we succeeded.

If and when we do that, what we will discover over time is that our failures become less and our successes become more. But we will still continue to fail and continue to learn.

F. E. A. R.

Fear. We are all afraid of something, perhaps many things, certainly of the unknown – and there is much that is unknown to us. That is simply a fact of life. It is how we deal with these fears that is important, vital even, to our physical, mental and spiritual well-being. Fear can paralyze us and, at times, does. Fear of the unknown makes us stop in our tracks so much so that we are immobilized. Such is the power of fear.

Lest we think fear is bad we need to be reminded that it is not, certainly not always and often for the better. It keeps us from heading down the wrong and dangerous road. It keeps us from acts of foolishness that, in the end, would bring harm to ourselves and, even worse, to those we love. We know this to be true because there have been times when we went against our better judgment and brushed fear of consequences aside and had to pay the piper for our foolishness.

But there is another kind of fear that is insidious and, sadly, seems to be very prevalent in our society today. It is the fear, as a colleague pointed out in a sermon I heard while on a busman’s holiday one Sunday, that is engendered from F. E. A. R.: False Evidence Appearing Real. It has become such that we are not sure any more about what is true and what is a lie. Even worse, any real truth with which we disagree is now labeled as fake, unreal, and in other words, a lie.

That should cause us to truly be afraid. When we know longer know what is true and what is not, then all we can do is live in fear. Is this what we have become as a people, as a nation? Is every truth with which we disagree now somehow false simply because we disagree with it or because it makes us look bad or somehow less? Is this how our government wants us to live?

So who’s telling the truth anymore? Remember Pilate asking Jesus “What is truth?”? Pilate’s obvious unsated implication was that “truth is what I say it is because I am the one in power. That’s the truth!” So is what is true what the one in power says is true even if there is false evidence appearing real to the contrary? Is what is true only that which makes us look good and that which doesn’t obviously a lie?

President Franklin Roosevelt, in the midst of the Great Depression, when millions of people lived in real fear because they did not know where their next meal was coming from, told the people that they “have nothing to fear but fear itself.” Real fear, not fake fear, fear arising out of someone’s need to control. Roosevelt was encouraging the people to not allow fear to so overwhelm them that they lost all hope. Hope overcomes fear, real fear, not false evidence (meaning lies) that appear to be real but are simply meant to make us afraid.

I am not afraid, F.E.A.R. aside. I live in hope. The truth, not lies, always wins in the end.

WHAT A BLESSING: JULY 4 AT MT. VERNON

Independence Day will never be the same for me again. Arlena and I were privileged and blessed to be able to spend July 4 at Mt. Vernon, which is, as everyone knows, the stately home of our first President. We were part of a bus tour that also stopped at the War Memorials around the city and then spent some time on the Mall. But it was being at Mt. Vernon on July 4 that made everything else pale in comparison.

As our tour arrived, 101 men and women from 50 countries around the world were naturalized as citizens of the United States. Then “George Washington” spoke to the thousands gathered around the porch to remind us about what being a citizen means. To be sure, 101 of those who heard him truly know what that means. Daytime red-white-and-blue fireworks put a period onto his talk.

We did not tour the home because, blessed again, we had been there the week before as part of a five-day tour of presidential homes in Pennsylvania (one home: James Buchannan) and Virginia: Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe and Wilson. It was almost an historical information overload. Almost. But in these times in this country it was a blessing to be reminded how much our forefathers (and foremothers who supported them) gave to make this country great. It has never lost that greatness in spite of what some people say.

And never will. Why would any of those 101 new citizens have left their homes if not because they wanted to live and work in and become a citizen of the United States? Why do you think there are Pittsburgh Steeler bars everywhere around this country and even across the oceans? Why? Because Pittsburgh is still where their heart is. For those 101 and their new compatriots all around the USA who became citizens that day, their old home will always be where their heart but their home is now here.

Being at Mt. Vernon on July 4, and then watching the fireworks over the Capital from high atop a restaurant while thousands gathered on grassy slopes and in hundreds of boats in the Potomac to do the same, made me proud to be a citizen yet all the while knowing that as great as we are as a country, we can and must and will be better. The better angels among us and the better angel within us will make that happen.

And while the July 4ths yet to come, God willing, will never top this one, as Martin Luther King, Jr. said on another occasion, I have been to the mountaintop called Mt. Vernon. It will always be a reminder to me to be thankful for all those men and women who gave their lives for me to be so blessed to live in this great country. It is so easy to take this blessing for granted, to even honestly and validly complain about its failings and shortcoming. But we should never not be thankful for what we have.

If you have any doubts about that, ask any one of those 101. That’ll clear it up.

THANK GOD FOR THE HEART

The heart lies between the head and the stomach, and fortunately so, because more often than not it tempers the brain, wherever the brain happens to be at the moment: the head or the gut. If it were not for the heart, the brain, left on its own, could become the body’s own worst enemy.

When the brain is in the gut, the body and the mind operate on perceptions and likes. The food looks good, like that big piece of chocolate cake, so we eat it because we are convinced that something so good looking must also be so good for us – or at least the brain-in-the-gut makes it so seem. If the food, like liver, or the person, like someone of a different color, is not pleasing to the sight, we convince ourselves that there must be something wrong, even bad, with that food or that person. Gut reactions can get us into trouble and, of course, be totally wrong.

But, then, so, too, can perfectly rational responses to what we see and hear: the brain-in-the-head can prevent us from going down roads we should go because those roads seem to be the incorrect, even foolish, roads to take. For instance, we come up on a situation, analyze it thoroughly, and then rationally determine that the best thing for us to do is walk away. The brain tells us to have nothing to do with what we see, and so we do not. Sometimes, perhaps too often, listening to our head can prevent us from doing what we should do.

So it is very good for us as a person and as a people that the heart gets in the way. Sometimes, perhaps more often that we realize, it is only the heart that keeps gut reactions in check and lets us loose from rational prohibitions. If it were not for the heart, we would never be Good Samaritans. The gut tells us that we should avoid those we do not like and the head tells us that we should, even must, avoid trouble. The heart, however, says that we must help someone in trouble even if we do not like the person and even if it is dangerous to do so.

The heart tempers. Both the gut and the head are narrowly focused. The heart is as wide as can be. The gut chases after that which is pleasing and avoids that which is not. The brain thinks not of pleasure but only of what is best for the self. The heart reminds the gut that what is pleasing is not always good and what looks bad may very well be very good. The heart reminds the brain that while discretion may be the better part of valor and while prudence is a virtue, the right thing to do is not always the safest and surest.

If it were not for the heart, we would all be very lonely and isolated people, and also very stuck. We would not eat the pleasing food because the brain-in-the-head would warn us of the danger involved because we would probably eat too much and we would not eat what was good for us because the brain-in-the-gut didn’t like its taste.

The heart allows us to be open to everyone and everything but keeps us from going overboard in either direction. It does gut checks and brain scans to help us do what is right. We need to rely more on our heart than on our head or our gut.