Yoga

I've been making some life changes lately — trying to use the time I have, now that I'm back in Kansas, to improve my health and lifestyle. Among the changes: More exercise. 30 minutes a day on the treadmill. Doesn't sound like a lot, but some is more than none, and I know from experience that getting overambitious early leads to failure. So. Thirty minutes a day.

One other thing: Yoga, a couple of times a week. It's nothing huge — a 15-minute flexibility routine downloaded from an iPhone app. But I've noticed that I'm increasingly limber.

Tonight, friends, I noticed a piece of trash on the floor. I bent over at the waist and picked it up, and threw it away.

Then I wept. I literally could not remember the last time I'd tried to pick something off the floor without grunting and bracing myself. I just did it.

Small victories, people. Small victories.

On Being Humane in Inhumane Times

At noon Friday, Donald Trump becomes the president of the United States.

It’s a prospect that I can barely wrap my head around. At times, it enrages me. Many of my liberal friends have spent the last couple of months giving voice to that rage, breaking off relationships with Trump-voting family and friends. I’ve sought to resist that path, which at times has seemed to incur further rage from my liberal friends. But I understand the temptation to offer a hearty “fuck you” to some people that, in all other cases, I have cared dearly about for years or even decades.

So far, I’ve been able to resist the temptation. I’ve had to remind myself of a truth that I’ve discovered as I’ve gotten older: Almost everybody I’ve ever thought of as my “enemy” – and there have been exceptions — has, over time, also showed me grace I never expected from them. The people I disagree with are not devils. They have their own sets of fears and hopes. They are human, with all the complexity that involves.

This may even be true of Donald Trump.

So. How to be humane in seemingly inhumane times?

To answer the question, let me first express what the goal isn’t: I’m not interested in political surrender, or in coddling people who have “deplorable” beliefs and motives. Justice must be the foundation and object of everything we do. But I do want to leave open the door to reconciliation with people who don’t conform to my sense of justice.

The Martin Luther King Jr. Center has “Six Steps of Nonviolent Social Change” on its website. Here’s Step Six:

“Nonviolence seeks friendship and understanding with the opponent. Nonviolence does not seek to defeat the opponent. Nonviolence is directed against evil systems, forces, oppressive policies, unjust acts, but not against persons. Through reasoned compromise, both sides resolve the injustice with a plan of action. Each act of reconciliation is one step close to the 'Beloved Community.’”

And this is part of Step Four: “Do not seek to humiliate the opponent but to call forth the good in the opponent. “

Reconciliation isn’t the opposite of justice, in other words. It’s an essential component of arriving at justice. I’m pretty sure most of my friends —most of whom laud MLK — don’t have much interest or belief in “calling forth the good” in our opponents. (This assumes there is some good to be called forth; I think that’s generally the case — the real Hitlers in our society are few and far between, I’m convinced. But perhaps this is wishful thinking.)

So. How to be humane in seemingly inhumane times?

These are the answers I have today. I hope that this list will evolve over time. For now….

RESTRICT MY SOCIAL MEDIA ACCESS: I’ve written before how Facebook saved me from total despair and loneliness while I was in the hospital. I don’t believe social media is totally a bad thing. But when attended to obsessively — and here I plead guilty — it shortens my attention span and puts me in the mind of responding to news and opinions glibly, quickly, and with a minimum of actual contemplation. Right now, I’m going to try to limit my Twitter access to 20 minutes a day. That should be more than enough to dip my toes in the currents, right? It helps that I’ve got browser settings that limit my online access to the site; my phone is programmed to deny me access entirely.

I NEED TO KEEP BREAKING OUT OF MY BUBBLE: My relationships with non-liberal friends have grown brittle in recent months. I don’t think that’s entirely my fault, but: I need to keep listening to them. Moreover, I need to stay in touch with outlooks that are going to make me scream in anger regularly. Sites like The Federalist, National Review and others can drive me batty sometimes, making me long for the soft warm bath of like-mindedness. But that bubble isn’t real — or, at least, isn’t the whole picture. Frustrating as it may be, I think being humane includes not allowing myself the convenience of caricaturing those I disagree with, or dismissing them out of hand. Even though I really, really want to sometimes. 

ART, ART, ART: “Beautiful, or subversive.” A wise suggestion from a friend. The most amazing moment I had at the Philadelphia Museum of Art — and I had more than a few — was during a visit where I found works by Langston Hughes, Gordon Parks, and Aaron Douglas placed together. All black men, all Kansans who had fled the state for the Harlem Renaissance. I don’t know if the curator placed those works together with that connection in mind; seeing them together made me weep. At its best, art puts us in touch with our most humane selves. 

TRY TO LISTEN MORE INSTEAD OF WINNING ARGUMENTS: Winning arguments is easy, or at least convincing yourself that you’ve won the argument is easy. It’s not necessarily a path to truth, justice, or reconciliation. As Ta-Nehisi Coates once wrote, in a quote that has been memeified in the years since: “If your chief goal, as a thinking person, is to find a path to making yourself right, you may never amount to much of a thinking person, but you can never be disappointed." I need to try to win arguments less often. 

VOLUNTEER: I’ve not done a good job contributing to my community in ways that stretch me beyond the office or church. That needs to change. I’ll update you on my efforts soon, I hope. 

AGAIN, ALWAYS, AIM FOR HUMILITY: The trick is being firm and confident in one’s beliefs while balancing that with A) acknowledging that there’s a possibility you’re wrong and B) being open to changing our minds when the evidence calls for it. Humans aren’t really good at this; I’ll not claim to be any better. And yet: It’s a hedge against the kind of self-righteousness that leads to the kind of inhumanity I want to avoid. What’s more: There really is a possibility of being wrong.

Your mileage may vary on these ideas. You may even think the aim is incorrect — that resistance, resistance, resistance should be the name of the game now. And it should be! But that resistance should be in the service of ideas that are truer, better, and more humane. That means the practice of being humane is needed, by me at least, more than ever.

Lord, Hear My Prayer

A few months ago, in the face of one of 2016's many disasters, I posted a prayer to Facebook and Twitter — seeking to be quiet, to listen, and to understand rather than spout off about why the disaster proved me right on some political point or another.

The nice folks at the Kansas Leadership Council spotted it and asked A) to publish it and B) for me to write about it. I did. An excerpt.

The Prayer of St. Francis – “Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace” – provided a good but incomplete starting point. I wanted to remind myself that other people deserved to be heard, despite their different fears and different solutions. I wanted to remind myself that people, even when they are at odds with you, usually have the best intentions. I wanted to remind myself that listening is more of a virtue than talking. 

Sometimes, though, the best thing to do is shut up. At least for a little while.

Let me confess: I'm inconsistent about living up to my own advice here. If you want to call me a hypocrite, I have no defense. But I still think the advice, and prayer, are essentially correct. I just need to try harder.

This Is Why Living in Lawrence Kansas Makes Me Happier Than I Was

Evening Walk: Venus

Walking in my neighborhood, after dark. It's not lit as well as my old Philadelphia city block — I probably need to buy reflective shoes or something. The app on my phone tells me I have 2,000 steps to go to make my daily goal, so I keep walking, keep walking, keep walking past my house and my path occasionally lit by the occasional street lamp.

Holst's "Venus: Bringer of Peace" is on my headphones. Above, through breaks in the clouds, I can see a star or two — the benefit of reduced light pollution. The darkness and the music go together; I feel like I'm creating or experiencing my own private segment of Walt Disney's "Fantasia" as I move through the neighborhood.

For a moment, the real world and the digital world playing in my head merge. Everything flows.

And then the music ends.

How 50 years of Star Trek changed my life.

Today marks the 50th anniversary of Star Trek, and I guess I’ve been paying close attention for about 35 or so of those years. When I was a kid, the routine was to rush home from school, turn the TV — pre-cable — to the “independent” TV station, watch cartoons for most of the afternoon, then finish with an episode of “Star Trek” before dinner.

The show shaped my imagination to a remarkable degree. “Star Wars” had all the good toys in the late 1970s and early 80s, but I found I could fashion a captain’s chair of sorts in my bedroom, use a flashlight to simumlate a phaser — and, occasionally, I could get my sister Rachel to make up “Star Trek” adventures with me.

I wanted to be an astronaut growing up, and “Star Trek” was part of that passion. The ambitions changed, but my love for the show didn’t.

Scratch that: My love for the show has evolved. I can see now that much of The Original Series was cheesy — how, in fact, much of The Next Generation was pretty bad, too. There’s probably more bad Trek than good Trek, in all honesty, but bad Trek is like bad pizza. It’s still kinda awesome.

My favorite series, these days, is Deep Space Nine. It was the first to use serialization, and though its run ended before 9/11, the themes that emerged during the show’s war between the Federation and the Dominion — about war and the toll it takes on our highest ideals — turned out to be startlingly prescient.

I dated a woman in college who went to see “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country” with me. She was the first woman I ever thought I could marry. The woman I did marry? We celebrated our 10th anniversary by going to see “Star Trek Beyond” on opening night.

And all this has affected my son. When he was just three years old, I heard him playing in his room, having all sorts of conversations and making all sorts of noises. Suddenly, he yelled out: “CAPTAIN, WATCH OUT!” And I knew he was playing Star Trek, like I had as a kid.

I sometimes wonder about myself, whether it’s right that the stuff I loved as a kid is the same stuff I love as a middle-aged adult. But I love Star Trek. I imagine I always will.

About my plan to abandon Twitter entirely and forever...

I failed. Dammit.

One of my values: Doubt

It’s been nearly nine years now that I’ve had the privilege of being an opinion journalist, at least on a part-time basis. I’ve won a couple of awards for my work, and the column I co-write is distributed to papers across the nation. It’s the kind of gig a lot of people dream of and never attain, and I know that I’m lucky as hell to have had this privilege.

During the nine years, two big personal goals that have motivated me:

• To prove I belonged: I know I wasn’t the person John Temple had in mind when he hired me, along with Ben Boychuk, for RedBlueAmerica. He told me as much — he was expecting somebody who had done a stint at the New Republic, and I’m guessing an Ivy League degree was probably part of that package. I worked hard to prove that while I was green in opinion journalism and had an unusual background for the job, I was well-read enough, smart enough, and thoughtful enough — curious enough — to express opinions at something deeper than a family-argument-at-Thanksgiving level. I don’t know what John’s opinion on the topic is, but I’ve satisfied myself on that score. Oh, there are always going to be people smarter and better-read than I — I argue with them! Often! — but I can generally hold my own at the Grownups Table.

• To keep alive my relationships with conservatives.  Even back in 2007, the country’s increasing polarization was obvious. I was liberal, but had gone to a conservative college, had conservative friends, and though we sometimes contended with each other, it seemed important to maintain those relationships. More broadly, it seemed more important that some of us liberals and conservatives keep trying to talk to each other — rather than at or around or near — because, well, we share a country. A house divided against itself cannot stand, and all that.

I’ve been dubious of the latter project lately. Some of it is election-year exhaustion, exacerbated by the presence of Donald Trump in the race: We’ve been on Full Hyperbole for a year now, and it seems possible things will get worse.

There are a couple of other incidents that have made me want to throw my hands in the air.

In the first, a conservative friend responded to an (admittedly frustrated) post on race with a frustrated post of his own — one that featured, prominently, the words “fuck you.” Directed at me. I’ve got a thick skin, but it didn’t feel like the kind of comment that welcomes further dialogue.

The same day, I heard from a very smart liberal friend who suggested — or maybe I simply perceived in her words — that I am a useful idiot for my conservative friends. In any case, she said, my ability to maintain friendships with people who had such bad attitudes on race was essentially a function of white privilege. “Some of your friends don't seem interested in change; instead, they just want to catch a hole in your liberal logic and can say to their conservative friends, "Oh, I have liberal friends" in a way that shows how magnanimous they are,” she wrote. “I don't think it's a healthy relationship, but that's just me.”

I wasn’t all that sure I disagreed.

All in all, it has not seemed, lately, like there’s much room for pursuing friendship and conversation with people who don’t already share my values to a nearly complete degree.

The problem, for me, is this: One of my values is doubt.

Why I'm Leaving Twitter. (I Think)

Last night, I deactivated my Twitter account.

I’ve done this a couple of times in the past when I wanted to dim the noise of social media that was flooding my brain, but I think this time it’s permanent. I’m not sure. The rush of constantly updated stuff — Information? Gossip? Debate? — has appeal to a guy like me. It’s possible, in fact, that I’m an addict.

Which is reason enough to pull away: I’ve spent too many evenings dicking around, flipping from Twitter’s stream to Facebook’s stream back to Twitter’s stream — all while a book sat just a few inches away from me, begging to be read.

Lest this come off as a “It’s not you, it’s me,” breakup letter, let me be clear: The problem isn’t just me — it’s also Twitter.

I Miss Sidewalks (And I Don't Want to Die Walking to School)

Ok, I'm going to try to make this the last time I gripe about this, but:

I miss sidewalks.

Some of my Lawrence friends have already heard me opine on this topic, but I'm going to put it on the record: Center City Philadelphia was a wonderful place to be a pedestrian — so wonderful, in fact, that we sold our car soon after moving there, realizing it was a bigger pain in the butt to keep a car there (especially price-wise) than it was to have easy access to wheels. Groceries, libraries, parks, schools, and much more were all within an easy 15-minute walk, and every block was bounded on all four sides by sidewalks.

In Lawrence: There is no sidewalk in front of our house.

Scratch that: There is a sidewalk — but we have to cross the street to get to it. Not a big deal, right?

Except for this: School starts on Wednesday. For us, there are two ways to get T's new school — Ninth Street and Yale Road.

Ninth Street has a sidewalk the whole way, though it's also got decent incline. I'll get my morning exercise.

Yale Road has sidewalks in some places — the same blocks where school is. And almost nowhere else, at least not between the school and our house. The Yale Road side is also where students are released after school, so there's going to be a lot of foot and vehicle traffic on that path in the afternoons.

I realize, writing this, I must sound like a cranky old coot. But lordy: Seems to me that residential neighborhoods around schools should be packed with sidewalks, so that there's never a question of whether an elementary school student — or their family — should decide to walk in the street, and thus in the path of traffic.

Eh — I get it. We chose to live on the slightly more suburban, slightly more cul-de-saccy side of town. This is what you get with it. But there are a lot of kids who live in this neighborhood: They're not all being driven to school, are they?

Back in Lawrence (Or: You Can Go Home Again. Kinda.)

Even as we prepared to return to Lawrence, the place that felt the most like “home” during my adult years, I kept repeating the following to myself:

You can’t go home again. You can’t go home again. You can’t go home again.

Lunch with an old friend.

I’d lived here eight years — most of them encompassing the last, most fun part of my extended bachelorhood — then been gone eight years. I had changed: A child, settled firmly into marriage, my body broken by surgery, my spirit humbled (and saddened) by age and the knowledge that life, my life anyway, is not the series of ever-greater achievements that I once expected it to be.

The town had changed, too. There are new, taller buildings downtown, a sign that this small town is determined to join the ranks of cities. Some old favorite businesses are closed; some new restaurants have popped up. The newspaper where I spent my favorite professional years has been sold and reduced staff. My friends are older; in the intervening years, many of them had become parents, or found new relationships, or simply moved on to other things.

The Lawrence I got so much pleasure and meaning from at the age of 30, I said, would not be the Lawrence I found at age 43. At least not precisely.

And that’s true. When I walk into my old favorite coffee shop, the baristas no longer recognize me and call me by name. I don’t have the energy or time, really, to linger on Mass Street until midnights during the week as I once did — and even if I did, I’m not sure who I’d be spending the time with. And the freshman arriving at KU this fall were … Jesus, 10 years old when I left town to begin with.

Ugh.

But here’s the thing.

When we moved into our house last week, we had 10 friends show up to help unload the pod that held our possessions. It had taken us three days to pack it; they unloaded it in under a half-hour.

I find that many of my old friendships are renewing with an easy familiarity. And I find that I’m excited to finally get to join those old friends in sharing the experience of parenthood.

I feel … home.

It’s not a complete fit, not yet anyway, and who knows if it will be? I don’t want to be the same person I was my first go-round in Lawrence. I don’t want to feel as harried as I did in Philadelphia. I still long for new experiences, to learn new things, to read new books, to feel the joy of life that (frankly) I misplaced somewhere along the way. But I also want to face those things armed with some of the lessons learned these last few years.

One of the lessons: It’s good to have a steady foundation from which to launch your adventures. It’s good to have a home. I’m still not sure if you can go home again. But this feels about as close as I can possibly get.

Topeka Is No Joke

True story: When we realized we were moving back to Kansas, my wife and I briefly considered moving to Topeka.

Really. After eight years in Philadelphia, it seemed like Kansas’ capital city might be a good match for us. It’s more urban, more working class, and less white than the state surrounding it. That’s terrain we’d gotten used to. Lawrence, for all its advantages — a smart, educated population, as well as kick-ass music and arts scenes — can sometimes seem insulated from reality, a mini-Portlandia on the Plains. Topeka seemed like a refreshing dose of reality.

The notion lasted about 24 hours. Our friends are in Lawrence. And that seemed to be what we needed most.

Then, right before we moved back, this happened:

Expressing his displeasure with City Manager Tom Markus' budget recommendations, including cuts to the Lawrence Arts Center and the lack of funding for the proposed East Ninth Street project, Commissioner Matthew Herbert made some comparisons between the Lawrence and Topeka arts communities that were not intended to flatter Topeka. 

The Journal-World's Nikki Wentling quoted Herbert as saying: “Congratulations, we just became Topeka, Kansas. I live in Lawrence because it's not Topeka, Kansas. I don't want my legacy to be that I helped to make Lawrence Topeka.”

Herbert later apologized. But his comments weren’t that unusual. Topekans — and Kansans generally — have long decried Lawrence as “Snob Hill” a place where effete liberals gather to sip chardonnay and, well, you get it. Lawrencians have in turn dismissed Topeka as a cultural wasteland of sorts, a place where it’s easier to get mugged than to get a mug of quality coffee. During my first go-round in Lawrence, I participated in the back-and-forth, a rivalry created by, I dunno, the fact that they’re two of Kansas’s biggest cities and they’re just 20 miles apart.

But I’m going to refrain from being a Topeka basher this time around.

Truth is, I should’ve known better: Before we move, my wife and I would occasionally take day trips to the capital city. We enjoyed the fabulous library there — had cards and everything — as well as the Real America dining spots around town: Bobo’s, Porubsky’s, the Mexican cafe that also doubles as a stop for the bus that comes from Guadalajara.

Everybody needs somebody to shit on, I guess. Pennsylvanians had Philly, which in turn had New Jersey, which in truth is lovelier than outsiders really know. Topeka’s a real place with its own treasures, some of which I enjoy. For better or worse, it’s not so insulated from the real world as other places are. I live in and love Lawrence. But Topeka is no joke.

Why I'm Subscribing to the Lawrence Journal-World

My return to Lawrence, Kansas coincided with an epochal moment in the city’s history: After 125 years of ownership by the Simons family, the Lawrence Journal-World passed to the ownership of Ogden Newspapers, a West Virginia company with newspapers all over this great country.

One consequence of the new ownership: A lot of longtime employees lost their jobs.

None of this is a surprise, exactly. Lawrence hasn’t been immune to the newspaper industry’s overall decline over the last decade; the Simons family decided they couldn’t sustain the cost anymore, and Ogden apparently decided the paper would only be sustainable at a smaller size. Even before the sale, there was less LJW than there used to be, as both the staff and the paper had shrunk in fits and starts over time.

Even though I’m a Journal-World alum, I thought about skipping a subscription when we returned. Used copies of the paper are easy enough to find on coffee shop tables or at libraries in town; I wasn’t sure the cost — $18.25 a month — was worth it. I get the New York Times online for $15 a month, and there’s more there there. What can I say? I'm cheap.

A couple of things happened, though. The second one you’ve probably heard about: John Oliver’s lament for the newspaper industry:

You know what? He’s right! Even in its diminished state, the newspaper industry is at the core of much of the journalism that happens in America. Other media — radio and TV especially, but also a lot of aggregating websites — wouldn’t have much to put on the air if they didn’t get some help from their local newspapers.

He’s also right — though less so — that we’re responsible for keeping the papers alive if we want them. In truth, the problem isn’t really audience: Add online to print readership, and most news organizations have bigger audiences than they’ve ever had. But online advertising hasn’t replaced print advertising as a source of revenue, and it’s not gonna. That does mean that newspapers will be more reliant on payments from readers (and not just monetizing their eyeballs through ads) but they’ll probably also have to find some new ways of generating revenue.

Which brings us back to the Journal-World. I chatted last week with a smart friend of mine who contemplated the paper’s future. “From now on,” he said, “the community’s going to get the paper it supports. Before, it got the paper Dolph (Simons) thought it should have.”

Dolph’s willingness to subsidize the paper beyond its natural revenue limitations probably bred some complacency in the local community over the years; many locals wanted to gripe about his conservative politics and Chamber of Commerce alliances (or the paper’s longtime style of referring to the University of Kansas as “Kansas University”) rather than see the ways he served the city well. Now the blinders must come off.

Which is why I’m going to subscribe to the Journal-World instead of catching it for free wherever I can. The community is only going to get the news organization it supports. So I’m supporting it.

606

I sang 606 this morning.

Funny thing about 606 — something Mennonites know, but you might not — is that 606 isn’t actually even 606 in the hymnal anymore. Oh, it was a long time ago. These days, it’s No. 118. However. Mennonites like their traditions, and even though 606 hasn’t been 606 for ages, it’s still known as 606. The hymnal even makes a concession to this in the index. Next to the song’s title, in parentheses, it helpfully explains that name and location aside, this is the 606 you’re looking for.

This is 606. The doxology.

Now. It’s been a few years since I was officially Christian. I sometimes describe myself as “lapsed Mennonite,” but that’s kind of a half-assed way of maintaining connection to the faith. I’m agnostic, if I’m honest. But in kind of a half-assed way.

But damn, that’s some beautiful hymn singing. The congregation I sang with this morning was just a fraction the size of the one in this video, but they gave it their all. I suspect all it takes is two Mennonites gathered together — four, at most — to get a really rousing rendition of this song going.

So yeah. I went to church this morning, my first Sunday back in Lawrence after eight years away. And yeah, we sang 606. And yeah, I might’ve gotten a little teary-eyed.

And yeah, I suspect there’s a metaphor there for my return to Kansas. I just haven’t figured it out yet. I’m still a touch bewildered about how to define myself now. Long story.

But I found myself in Lawrence once before. Maybe it can happen again.