I'm a Jerk! Are You?
My sister sent me the link to her rector's blog (http://scottsrott.blogspot.com). I read through and found myself connecting with much of what Scott writes about. A recent entry of his discusses coming out of ourselves; of getting out of the "You're in my way" mentality. He writes about how moment by moment we're challenged to realize our place in humanity, our place in line, our place in life. This is where I connect.
Last week I was on the moped when I found myself having the most awful thoughts about the other drivers. Road rage has never been an issue with me. I'm somewhat arrogant in my ability to wait my turn. But the other day I was thinking murderous thoughts, degrading my fellow human beings into categories and races and statuses (stati?).
As this is all about me, let me tell you what occurred to me about me. I'm a jerk. I don't think I've always been one; but it seems to me that somewhere around my senior year of high school I took a drastic shift into jerkness (jerkhood?) and began criticizing everyone else for their incompetence. You know where this leads. Perhaps you've been or are currently there, too.
So, I'm driving along thinking moment by moment how this guy's a moron and how that girl should never have even gotten on the bike to begin with, because, let's face it, girls are just not as focused and decisive in their driving. Then I realized that all Indonesians, with the very few exceptions of those I happen to like, are uneducated idiots who are more concerned with the status quo than progressing humanity toward something healthy, beautiful, and over all "better." That's about the time that I realized that I'm not only a jerk, but also a bigot and a racist. Like I said, I'm pretty sure I wasn't always this way.
As a "good" Christian, I pray and repent and move on to choosing to think better thoughts and to "take captive" these negative thoughts. But really, I'm still a jerk who's now simply trying to act like I'm not a jerk by controlling mental impulses that have an invisible root. Perhaps my own insecurities, my own feelings of incompetence, some may say that perhaps these thoughts come from some guy with horns and a pitch fork. Whatever. Truth is, they're my thoughts. The thoughts of a jerk. And that jerk is me.
I hope realizing my tendency to be an asshole will in time enable me to have deeper causal realizations. Who knows, maybe I'll be a sweet boy once again . . . in the very distant future.
posted by James and Mona @ 12:42 PM
7 Comments
7 Comments:
Don't worry man, you're not alone. Casey
An honest post here. I'm glad we crossed paths in the blogosphere.
If you didn't click through to the David Foster Wallace speech that sparked my post on the subject of living as jerks (I like your title) you should check it out at: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122178211966454607.html
Oh yeah. And who's your sister?
Best,
Scott
I develop the same mentality when driving sometimes, too, unfortunately, or when I have to wait in line at a crowded store. I think impatience and selfishness breed jerkiness. When I'm able to step outside my unwarranted annoyance and consider that the other drivers, shoppers as people trying to merely go about their day as I am, my jerkiness subsides. I wish I could manage such thinking more often.
Thanks guys for commenting. Good to know we're not the worst people on the planet; in fact, we're probably about average...just more honest.
Scott, my sister is Natalie G. She and Norm go to compline for sure, and likely to Sunday morning service, too. Perhaps you and I can visit over a pint when I'm stateside.
Lovely folks! Our organist/choirmaster, Steve Bullock, just realized Natalie had been coming to Compline on Sunday night when he sat with the rest of us in the congregation due to a cold. He raved about her as a musician. They knew each other several years ago. I don't think Natalie knew Steve was leading the music that drew her and Norman to Compline.
I'll buy the pint if you make the trip to LR.
James, here is a lengthy, but poignant, excerpt of a commencement address I came across today that David Foster Wallace gave at Kenyon College back in 2005. It speaks to the gist of your post:
"That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. So let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in, day out" really means. There happen to be whole large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.
By way of example, let's say it's an average day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging job, and you work hard for nine or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired, and you're stressed out, and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for a couple of hours and then hit the rack early because you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there's no food at home -- you haven't had time to shop this week, because of your challenging job -- and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the workday, and the traffic's very bad, so getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping, and the store's hideously, fluorescently lit, and infused with soul-killing Muzak or corporate pop, and it's pretty much the last place you want to be, but you can't just get in and quickly out: You have to wander all over the huge, overlit store's crowded aisles to find the stuff you want, and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts, and of course there are also the glacially slow old people and the spacey people and the ADHD kids who all block the aisle and you have to grit your teeth and try to be polite as you ask them to let you by, and eventually, finally, you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough checkout lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day-rush, so the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating, but you can't take your fury out on the frantic lady working the register.
Anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and pay for your food, and wait to get your check or card authenticated by a machine, and then get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death, and then you have to take your creepy flimsy plastic bags of groceries in your cart through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and try to load the bags in your car in such a way that everything doesn't fall out of the bags and roll around in the trunk on the way home, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive rush-hour traffic, etcetera, etcetera.
The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop, because my natural default-setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home, and it's going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way, and who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem here in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line, and look at how deeply unfair this is: I've worked really hard all day and I'm starved and tired and I can't even get home to eat and unwind because of all these stupid g-d- people.
Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious form of my default-setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic jam being angry and disgusted at all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers, who are usually talking on cell phones as they cut people off in order to get just twenty stupid feet ahead in a traffic jam, and I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and disgusting we all are, and how it all just sucks, and so on and so forth...
Look, if I choose to think this way, fine, lots of us do -- except that thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic it doesn't have to be a choice. Thinking this way is my natural default-setting. It's the automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities. The thing is that there are obviously different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stuck and idling in my way: It's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past and now find driving so traumatic that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive; or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to rush to the hospital, and he's in a way bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am -- it is actually I who am in his way. Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have much harder, more tedious or painful lives than I do, overall."
Jason, thanks. This is the same speech that Scott, above, referenced at the given website. I copied that speech and have shared it with some of my students. Indeed, Wallace's outlook is grim compared with that of faith in Jesus for redemption and restoration, but his point on choosing what and how to think is powerful. The day to day grind is exactly where I find it toughest to live, but it's also where beauty forms and transformation happens.
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home