I decided my 7 things on Friday list this week was too boring, so I'm just telling you one thing, because it happened today, and then you get my current self-involved meanderings.
1. One of the most important life lessons I have learned is that I am often wrong. (Oh, boy, I can already tell this is going to turn into two things.) I was raised in a subculture (Evangelicalism) and in a family with a particular type of father, which trained me to think that my opinions and ideas were always right. But the older I get, the more obvious it becomes that I am often wrong. I mean, really, really often. So I try to keep that in mind. In fact, I've become so good at keeping that in mind that sometimes I do things on the assumption that I am wrong, when I'm not.
2. (See? Two things.) So a couple of weeks ago, right before my No Internet Experiment started, I read an article about skincare that said the latest understanding about skin care is the opposite of what we have all been taught. We've been taught that people with oily skin (me) should avoid products with oil in them (and heck yes, I do), but really oil is the best thing for cleaning up oil. (Google "using oil on oily skin" if you're interested, there are dozens of them, I couldn't even find the exact one I read.)
3. (and now there are three). So I actually already have one of the products they mentioned in the article, and you're supposed to put ONE DROP in with your moisturizer and it will revolutionize your life. So this morning I tried it. One freaking drop in my moisturizer. It felt different immediately but I thought I must be imagining it, because how could I tell that there was one drop of oil on my face? But you know what, it made me nuts. You may remember my long search for makeup that I couldn't tell I had on, and this was the opposite. All morning there was something on my face. I finally had to come home at lunch and wash it off and start over. No oil for me, thank you very much.
OK, now for the morality tale.
As much as I love my music, I am a thoroughly mid-level musician. I already told you abut the choir, where I sing with a capable but unremarkable alto. I've also been playing the flute since I was in third grade at a public elementary school in Dallas. A few years later, we moved to a town in East Texas where the band program didn't start until seventh grade. Among all the newbies, I had been playing for four years, so for a brief shining time, I was the acknowledged expert. A position that I held until about halfway through the year when one of my fellow flute players overtook me, as she continued to do until we graduated from high school. I was good, but I was never great.
Anyway. I'm telling you this whole story because even though I'm an unremarkable flute player, there are moments when—without me doing anything different than what I usually do—suddenly my playing sounds divine. I've never been able to figure out exactly what happens or why at one moment I'm a decent, average player, and the next moment it sounds like an angel is playing my flute. It is more likely to happen if I've been practicing regularly, but sometimes it happens the first time I pick it up after weeks of not playing.
I suspect that holiness is something like that (yeah, that's probably not where you thought I was headed). You're going along, doing something entirely ordinary, and suddenly you step into the realm of the divine. The thing that you are doing, in the same way that you always do it, suddenly takes on a wider significance, a deeper meaning.
There is one major way in which the flute playing analogy doesn't work, though, and that is: when those moments happen while I'm playing my flute, I know it. I suspect that when those moments happen in ordinary life, we never know. Something that we say, or do, or the simple fact of our presence, causes a reaction that has reactions, the proverbial pebble thrown into a pond with ever-widening circles of influence. And we never know. We're just going along, trying to do the right thing. Or maybe not even that.
And the reason I'm telling you this admittedly somewhat pompous Sunday school analogy is that I'm trying to make sense of my experience in Cambodia. Was there any point to it? Were we nothing but glorified tourists? Is there anything wrong with that? There are twenty posts I could write about this. Maybe I will. I know it had a huge effect on me, but if that's all it was, it was exploitation in the most basic way.
1. One of the most important life lessons I have learned is that I am often wrong. (Oh, boy, I can already tell this is going to turn into two things.) I was raised in a subculture (Evangelicalism) and in a family with a particular type of father, which trained me to think that my opinions and ideas were always right. But the older I get, the more obvious it becomes that I am often wrong. I mean, really, really often. So I try to keep that in mind. In fact, I've become so good at keeping that in mind that sometimes I do things on the assumption that I am wrong, when I'm not.
2. (See? Two things.) So a couple of weeks ago, right before my No Internet Experiment started, I read an article about skincare that said the latest understanding about skin care is the opposite of what we have all been taught. We've been taught that people with oily skin (me) should avoid products with oil in them (and heck yes, I do), but really oil is the best thing for cleaning up oil. (Google "using oil on oily skin" if you're interested, there are dozens of them, I couldn't even find the exact one I read.)
3. (and now there are three). So I actually already have one of the products they mentioned in the article, and you're supposed to put ONE DROP in with your moisturizer and it will revolutionize your life. So this morning I tried it. One freaking drop in my moisturizer. It felt different immediately but I thought I must be imagining it, because how could I tell that there was one drop of oil on my face? But you know what, it made me nuts. You may remember my long search for makeup that I couldn't tell I had on, and this was the opposite. All morning there was something on my face. I finally had to come home at lunch and wash it off and start over. No oil for me, thank you very much.
OK, now for the morality tale.
As much as I love my music, I am a thoroughly mid-level musician. I already told you abut the choir, where I sing with a capable but unremarkable alto. I've also been playing the flute since I was in third grade at a public elementary school in Dallas. A few years later, we moved to a town in East Texas where the band program didn't start until seventh grade. Among all the newbies, I had been playing for four years, so for a brief shining time, I was the acknowledged expert. A position that I held until about halfway through the year when one of my fellow flute players overtook me, as she continued to do until we graduated from high school. I was good, but I was never great.
Anyway. I'm telling you this whole story because even though I'm an unremarkable flute player, there are moments when—without me doing anything different than what I usually do—suddenly my playing sounds divine. I've never been able to figure out exactly what happens or why at one moment I'm a decent, average player, and the next moment it sounds like an angel is playing my flute. It is more likely to happen if I've been practicing regularly, but sometimes it happens the first time I pick it up after weeks of not playing.
I suspect that holiness is something like that (yeah, that's probably not where you thought I was headed). You're going along, doing something entirely ordinary, and suddenly you step into the realm of the divine. The thing that you are doing, in the same way that you always do it, suddenly takes on a wider significance, a deeper meaning.
There is one major way in which the flute playing analogy doesn't work, though, and that is: when those moments happen while I'm playing my flute, I know it. I suspect that when those moments happen in ordinary life, we never know. Something that we say, or do, or the simple fact of our presence, causes a reaction that has reactions, the proverbial pebble thrown into a pond with ever-widening circles of influence. And we never know. We're just going along, trying to do the right thing. Or maybe not even that.
And the reason I'm telling you this admittedly somewhat pompous Sunday school analogy is that I'm trying to make sense of my experience in Cambodia. Was there any point to it? Were we nothing but glorified tourists? Is there anything wrong with that? There are twenty posts I could write about this. Maybe I will. I know it had a huge effect on me, but if that's all it was, it was exploitation in the most basic way.
But Dean made the point that we can't know the effect that our trip had. Maybe more than we know. Also, maybe less. And that made me think of the flute analogy. So there you go.
Have a good weekend. I will probably post the boring 7 things sometime tomorrow or Sunday--it's about clearing my bookshelf clutter.
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