Smiles (and other gifts)

Like many men, I suppose, I have marveled at how much money and time and effort is spent by people to make themselves attractive to others.  And yet how easy and effective it is to simply cultivate the habit of smiling and looking at people in the eye.  A smile is very attractive, and easily trumps an expensive pair of shoes or suit of clothing to bring positive attention to oneself or to make the recipient of the smile feel good or accepted. Smiles break down barriers.  A smile can also compensate, to some extent, for a body that is less than optimal—that, admittedly,  is a little harder to achieve or maintain. 

It seems that the anatomical structure or facial features of some people lends itself to the composition of an easy or natural smile.  Maybe it is a gift. If so, then one should be thankful for it, and use it to one’s own and others’ advantage.  Gifts generally should be shared whenever possible. 

But I also believe the countenance of people can be intentionally altered by practice and by having an optimistic attitude.  If practice and attitude can do it then I believe it is certainly worth the effort.  A few celebrities who have benefited by a great smile—whether natural or cultivated—are Ronald Reagan, Julia Roberts, Hillary Clinton and golfer Matt Kutcher.

Many years ago I learned a little device that might help some people do any number of things—smiling, thanking others, doing something for someone that is not expected, etc.—that make them more effective with others.  It is to start your day with a few small pebbles in one’s left front pants pocket or a few small rubber bands on your left wrist or finger. Then, as you consciously perform the smile or thank you or good deed, moving the object to the ‘right’ side as you have done the ‘right’ thing.  The idea is to get enough practice at it that you soon won’t need the ‘crutch.’

An easy smile, if it is a gift, may even be scriptural or indeed spiritual: “seek earnestly the best gifts”; “every man is given a gift by the Spirit” ; “a merry heart maketh a cheerful countenance”; “lift up your head and be of good cheer”; and “let us cheerfully do all things.”

Finally, at the company for whom I work, it is expected of employees that they adhere to the 15-10-5 rule with guests: At fifteen feet make eye contact with the person; at ten feet smile; and at five feet express a pleasant greeting using the person's name if possible.  Not a bad habit to cultivate anywhere.   

 

Information Overload

I am sensitive to the fact that people today are bombarded with things to read, to see, to listen to. The time spent in telephone conversations, text messages and other social networking messages young people are sending and receiving, for example, is staggering. But do these electronic-sustained missives really contain content or substance commensurate with the time we spend engaged with them? Are they satisfying and growth-promoting?

As a counterpoint, and since I am inviting others to engage with me, I intend in Omnium-Gatherum to always have something to say that is new, meaningful, thought-provoking or otherwise worthwhile; otherwise there is no point in writing the postings—or your reading them. Even 2600 years ago it was recorded on some metal plates: “[my successors] shall not occupy these plates with things which are not of worth unto the children of men.”

I do not want to be like the lawyer of whom Abraham Lincoln said, “He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas better than any man I have ever met.”

The observation I share today, then, is that sheer verbosity whether in electronic text, ink text, or verbal ‘conversation’ might, if we are purveyors of it, with benefit be reevaluated. (This sentence might be reevaluated.) In professor and editor William Zinsser’s classic guide, On Writing Well, he said to “simplify, simplify, simplify,” and that “writing improves in direct ratio to the number of things we can keep out of it that…don’t serve any purpose.”

Two guidelines each of us might keep in mind are these: (1) Man—and woman—has been given two ears and one mouth; we should use them proportionately. (2) Remember the case of the very pretty woman who was tediously loquacious who complained one day to a distinguished matron that she was constantly tormented but then suddenly dropped by her suitors. “I may be able to help you, my dear,” she said. “It is very easy to get rid of them. All you have to do is to open your mouth and start speaking.”

Letter to a New Widow (or Widow-maker)

This is a slightly altered and shortened version (in respect to the widow) of a letter I recently wrote to a friend whose husband unexpectedly died.  Since all married people will one day face the same inevitability I hope this may give a Latter-day Saint perspective.

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I hope it is now the time for the reading.  I know the grieving will go on for quite some time, and in fact some of it will never go away—neither should it, for you have experienced love with _______, and true love cannot and will not and must not be dismissed; if it were, I believe it would be a grave sin. 

   

You have heard many words of sympathy.  Doubtlessly they have been heartfelt and some have helped.  In many cases they have been awkwardly or painfully delivered because the speaker or well-wisher has earnestly wanted to help you, but felt inadequate in knowing how to give comfort.  Many truly have felt a little of your pain because they have been stunned as you have by _______’s abrupt departure. (I do not use the word ‘deceased’ because his spirit has not ‘ceased’ to be.) But because they loved you, as many have your husband, and because you are half of the equation called _______&_______, they wanted to absorb some of your grief or bewilderment and they didn’t want to see the flame in you, that has lightened their own lives, diminish.  You must understand you are a light in many peoples’ lives, and not everyone has this gifted quality.  People are attracted by light.  Keep the light on for them even as you may feel darkness (temporarily) yourself.

Life, at times will feel an emptiness—a bleak pervasive void that nothing seems to fill.  The sharing that is so much a part of a good marriage will be highly missed.  It is a right response to feel immensely sad for a time because you will not have this sharing and intimacy.  But the sadness will wane, though you will probably not believe this now. Just know that after a period of approved, appropriate and natural grieving (D&C 42:45-46) it will become inappropriate to cling to the past out of a false sense of duty; for as _______ has moved forward so too must you.  It is a Christian duty to be as happy as you can (see D&C 61: 36-37).  The waning of this void will eventually be filled, just as a wound is by scar or new tissue, but it takes time, unless the Lord speeds it up for you as He did for me, and in the meantime it is very tender.  I believe ________ is sorely missing you too; he has to because personality is the same on both sides of the veil between this life and the next.

Something you have learned is that death is an event that does not stop or end a life, as so many think who do not have our strong faith, but death rather consummates it.  Death is, in fact, not an event but part of the process of life progress. If you are trying to live right, God does or allows nothing to happen that is not, or cannot be, for our, or our loved one’s eventual best good.  You must learn from this sorrow whatever it has to teach.  _________’s death was not unforeseen by God, neither is He indifferent to it or to your prayers.  Though it may not seem like your time to have this happen, or your family’s time, it was ________’s time and it was in God’s time.  Bear your sorrow patiently and trust that one day you will have the peace that “passeth all understanding.”  I testify that it comes as promised. 

 

One coincidental observation that comes to the person left behind is the greater knowledge you will begin to gain about the wholeness of the man who you only knew in part.  A funeral typically begins that process.  As you reconstruct your years with ________—through photographs, letters, cards, conversations with family and friends and others who knew_________—hundreds of forgotten or half-forgotten memories will be restored to you, even unbidden and will leap into your mind at the strangest times and places and paradoxically you will come to know your husband even better and appreciate him even more.  You will recover and see the wholeness of this man of whom you are part and you will thank God for this sharing that, if you continue faithful, will see what was just a preamble to what lies ahead for you. 

Now I would like to give to you a few observations from C. S. Lewis, a man from whom I have learned much, from his book A Grief Observed, written after his wife  died.  Her death plunged him first into despair but before he died in 1963 he became reconciled to death and to God and wrote of his journey through the grieving process.  He was brilliant—a convert to Christianity—but he did not have the perspective we have from the fullness of the gospel of Jesus Christ.  His exact words will be put in italics, mine in explanation or sentence construction in regular type. 

·        Your awareness of ________’s death will be your companion every hour of every waking day for some time: [His] absence is like the sky, spread over everything.

·        It is hard to have patience with people who say, ‘There is no death,’ or ‘Death doesn’t matter.’ There is death.  And whatever is matters.  You might as well say that birth doesn’t matter. 

·        Not long, maybe only a few weeks or a month or two after his wife’s death Lewis wrote of: the slow insidious beginning of a process that will make [the departed person] I think of into a more and more imaginary [person].  Founded on fact, no doubt . . . but the composition inevitably becomes more and more [your] own.  The reality [was] no longer there to check me, to pull me up short.  This means, if your experience is like his, that you will selectively remember things about ________ that will become your image of him.  Lewis wisely warns us to not worship the image.  Just remember what you can in gratitude and know that when you see him next (for he will still be yours) he will be ‘added upon,’ and then you will have some great conversations. 

·        After some period of mourning (I don’t know how long—probably months) Lewis said: Something quite  unexpected has happened.  It came this morning early.  For various reasons. . . my heart was lighter than it had been for many weeks.  For one thing, I suppose I am recovering physically from a good deal of mere exhaustion.  After ten days of low-hung gray skies…the sun was shining and there was a light breeze.  And suddenly at the very moment when, so far, I mourned [her] least, I remembered her best.  Indeed it was something almost  better than memory; an instantaneous, unanswerable impression.  To say it was like a meeting would be going too far.  Yet there was that in it which tempts one to use those words.  It was as if the lifting of the sorrow removed a barrier.  [I] remember her better because [I have] partly got over it.  Such was the fact.  You can’t see anything properly while your eyes are blurred with tears.  [It was] the very intensity of the longing that draws the iron curtain, that makes us feel we are staring into a vacuum when we think about our dead. Passionate grief does not link us with the dead but cuts us off from them.   [Now] I have gradually been coming to feel that the door is no longer shut and bolted.   Was it my own frantic need that slammed it in my face? [I may have been] like the drowning man who can’t be helped because he clutches and grabs.  Perhaps [my] own reiterated cries deafened me to the voice I hoped to hear. After all, you must have a capacity to receive, or even omnipotence can’t give.

·        Sorrow is not a state but a process. Here, for instance, is a new phase, a new loss.  I do all the walking I can, for I’d be a fool to go to bed not tired. As for me, I walked, ran, and exercised a great deal following my wives’ deaths; I found the physical tiredness helped me sleep.  I also wrote letters to many people and most especially to my wives; these I ‘sent’ to them on the wings of my prayers to God in hopes they would be delivered.  I believe they were.   

·        For all pairs of lovers, without exception,  bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love.  It follows marriage as normally as marriage follows courtship or as autumn follows summer.  It is not a truncation of the process, but one of its phases; not the interruption of the dance, but the next figure.

You are a seasoned saint, _________.  You will make it and you will yet have joy. 

Out of the Ordinary

The desire to see or experience the exceptional seems to be a universal human trait.  Whether it be travelling to a sightseeing wonder-of-nature, or touching or walking among man’s accomplishments among the architectural ‘wonders of the world,’ or hearing the roar and feeling the ground shake under your feet  in watching technical marvels such as the huge Saturn rockets and space shuttles blasting off (no longer possible), we want to be there and experience that.  Less actively, millions witness extraordinary sports feats such as the Olympic Games every four years; others desire to meet celebrities—of the arts, of athletics, of extraordinary skill or accomplishment of all types.  Again, universally we want to be ‘there’ or we dream of doing ‘that;’ and the closer we can get the better.  A box seat at the World Series or being in St. Peter’s square at the Vatican or feeling the spray on our faces from the Niagara Falls is almost always more to be desired than just seeing it on television or reading about it. 

Why?  What is wrong with the mundane?  Perhaps it is because the 'norm' may not be our potential to excel at something that may be hard-wired into us genetically.

I think it is because we want a personal connection or interaction with the exceptional.  We want to participate—if not personally (which is preferable), at least vicariously. Participation in fantasy is a common response when we can’t personally participate. We want to be part of the scene; we want to be extraordinary in some way.  And the more senses that are utilized—the more realistic the involvement—the better. 

I illustrate this with an example.  I recently read about a world-champion ultradistance runner (distances over 26 miles) named Scott Jurek.  As a poor boy from rural Minnesota he was not extraordinary. Here is what he said about his later extraordinary performances:

       “ I spent a lot of time in the woods as a kid, hunting and fishing, connecting to   wild places.  I never [then] thought I’d be running for sport or for fun.  What I do [as an adult] is out of the norm nowadays.  Running has been this vehicle to get me out into the wilderness.  It gets me out exploring places I might not otherwise see. Preserving that connection has been important.  Doing things that seem out-of–the-norm I think is a good thing.” 

Sports historian Buzz Burrell says of this extraordinary runner: “Scott accomplished what no one else will.  He wasn’t the most talented guy out there, but he studied really hard.  He trained really hard.  He has his brain, his heart and his gut in [the sport] and that’s why he [has excelled].”

 

(More information on Scott Jurek’s incredible determination, numerous world records, and endurance are chronicled in Christopher McDougall’s book Born to Run (Vintage press: 2011).)

Get involved.  Be extraordinary in something.  It doesn’t have to be sports or the concert piano, or designing the space shuttle.  Mother Teresa at 4’ 11” with little education and no wealth was, in many peoples' minds, even more extraordinary than Scott Jurek. Learn of her or observe the many other out-of-the ordinary people who you will never read about but who are the exceptional—the noble and great ones among us. And then learn from them.

The music is in us—now string the bow and start fiddling.