“I LOVE Donald Miller” she gushed one morning at work. She was reading his book “One Million Miles in a Thousand Years.” I wondered to myself what the big deal was but I wanted to find out so I asked her if I could borrow it when she was done.
“Is he married yet, he said he thought himself quite handsome?” I quipped teasingly. I had read his earlier book “Blue like Jazz” and I enjoyed that a lot.
“Nah, he’s not that good looking but he’s still single and I wouldn’t mind marrying him”. She sighed looking heavenwards like Don was going to fly into the room.
“It’s just as well” I thought as I flipped through the pages the next day, being a Saturday. I was a little disappointed. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t love Don Miller but this book was nothing like “Blue like Jazz”.
Miller has a gift for writing simple truths in simple ways but it carries an element of twisted blitheness. See he would never use this word. But I am trying to write this piece like him. He says the most obvious things in a non-obvious way - like there is certain rightness to his wrongness and when you come to the end of his thought, the wrongness feels right. Take his sentence for instance “When I was in love there was somebody in the world who was more important than me, and that, given all that happened at the fall of man, is a miracle, like something God forgot to curse.” (Blue Like Jazz Pg. 151)
After reading this, I would think “Wow!” but wait a minute! I couldn’t love someone enough if I did not love them more than I love myself. I mean loving someone, for most of the time involves “Giving”. Giving of my thoughts, my deeds, my trust, joy, integrity, kindness, even my vulnerability (secret side)… my very Self! And yet, given that there is much pain and suffering, even in loving just one person, I would still do it again if the decision was mine to make. So I don’t disagree with Don except where he uses the “curse” word. I think God loves us a lot like we love others, except more unselfishly, more perfectly. I mean He loves us and continues to whether we love Him back or not.
I am at work on a Saturday as I have some stuff to finish up. Butters, another colleague of mine, walks in holding a pan cake wrapped in foil. I look at her, rub my stomach and tell her I’m hungry. She gives the pan cake to me. She says she and her sorority sisters had pan cakes for breakfast. I feel envious in a nice kind of way and say, “Why didn’t you save some for me?”
Keeping in character, she retorts, “You should have come for the study and you would have got some, Lexi made them.”
“But you could have kept some!”
She replies in affectionate exasperation “I don’t have maternal instincts!”
I stood there speechless. When you like someone like that, it’s nice. Like when you feel left out of a joyful moment and thinking of it makes you feel alone, but then someone tells you, its fine and that they will keep some pancakes for you the next time around.
Shamefully, I threw a similar tantrum on Friday afternoon with the Brownie Angel. I have an Angel on my team and she makes the best brownies and chocolate chip cookies in the world! Every time a morsel is in my mouth, I swear I am in brownie heaven. She painstakingly makes them for each training event with the team and being the only guy, I help myself to a little extra. This Friday, I was rooting for three pieces that she had saved for later in a plastic wrap. I didn’t care that she held out the tray offering me a piece. I wanted the ones in the plastic wrap. So she says to me “Okay, take three pieces from the tray and you can give me the wrap back.”
I work with a team of nine women and another half man. The other half is a young lad who’s finding his way in the world and it’s great to see him flex his wings. But it’s the girls who really fly and although I am the only one who does not have wings, I am often floating in the wake of their slipstream.
On Saturday night, we were all invited out to dinner by Kimberly’s parents who had flown in from the US to see her. At the dinner, I felt like there were some of us drunk on joy! I was talking to Ms. I-Love-Don-Miller and then I tell her again that I wasn’t too impressed with Don. And that I think I am better looking. She says with a lot of emphasis –“Women don’t like Don for his looks, Sean, we love his soul!” I was tempted to ask that if I wrote like Don, would there be women out there who would love my soul too, but I let it go.
I learned a lesson today about Listening. You can never get too good at listening. I think listening is the nobler of the other half of communication. You can get only so far by talking until you run out of ideas or emotions, but you could never run out of time when you listen. Listening builds strength in other people. I learned over the years and I have become better at it. But sometimes I am preoccupied while the other person is talking and that gets me into trouble. Sometimes I want to make a point which I think is good but the other person has not finished, and then I cut in, and then the noble intent has flown out of the window. But I am working on it.
Don Miller’s beat poet Tony says the words alone, lonely and loneliness are three of the most powerful words in the English language. I agree but I would say that it’s true in any language. Miller says that they are words like hunger and thirst and that they are words about the soul. I agree but then if one is a sensitive person, one will almost always feel lonely. I too struggle with it and while Don speaks to his pillow in the mornings and imagines it to be a beautiful woman, I think of words like community, sharing of joy, human brokenness and helping people lighten their loads as a great and lonely thing.
Sometimes loneliness has luminous quality to it. I run each evening on a track at a Police Academy. There is a moment during my labored breathing when the darkness has covered everything and the whole place resembles the venue of a rock concert. I see hundreds of young cadets lying all over the place in stillness with luminous LCD screens of their cell phones alight, humming their shared hearts over the air waves. I wonder to myself, if their listeners will ever see the way they are being spoken to, and if they did, would they feel special. I am certain they would.
Being alone keeps you grateful as you have to be broken to see the miracles stealing into the ordinariness of the everyday life.
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