Joel Mathis

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.

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.

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

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.

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

I failed . Dammit.

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-Thanksgi

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.

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

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 year

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 bet

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

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