Let's be Not-Others

This morning I left the garbage disposal running.

I could list some excuses: I was listening to Malcolm Gladwell’s Talking to Strangers, engrossed in the narrative he’s spinning. I was running the disposal to get rid of coffee grounds from the French presses I use to make coffee for me and for Kara, and I was looking forward to that coffee. I was half-thinking about what I’d like to write this morning. I just came off of a couple of days with no power and no heat and no water. My mother was just coming off of more than a week with no power and no heat and no water. People on Twitter were saying mean, cruel, hateful things. People in government were doing mean, cruel, hateful, selfish things. People in corporations were putting dollars before souls.

I have to forcibly stop myself from going on.

But all of that would be disingenuous. All of that would be just a minor contributor. I was definitely distracted. The causes were myriad. But the reason was all me.

I wasn’t focused.

I’m very big on personal responsibility. I think that if I and everyone else really had a firm grip on our own personal responsibility, we could improve the world by huge percentages. If we looked to our own personal failings and decided that, by God, we were really and actually and honestly going to do something about them, we could use that change and discipline as a lever to move the world.

It has to start with us, of course. Because—and this is crucial—you do not have and will never have the power to force someone else to fully obey your will. And when you’re expecting the world to change in response to your passions, desires, and emotions, that’s the impossible that you’re trying to make real.

Some of us don’t like hearing this.

I don’t. Because I tend to move around in the world with a very real sense of “my will be done.” It works counter to my upbringing, as a Christian, wherein I have been taught that I must fully trust, depend on, and desire the will of God in all things.

Spoilers: I fail at this. A lot. And “my will be done” becomes my default position, causing me to make all sorts of bad choices and do all sorts of cringe-worthy things. When I get mad, I get mouthy. I get self-righteous. I say and do the stupidest things.

And all of it’s on me. If I could (or would) own it, I could make some changes around here. I could change who I am, or at the very least change how I respond to certain things. I want to. I want to. I just don’t seem to put into practice what I know to be true. It’s hard work.

So what does this have to do with the life and career of a novelist? What about this is relevant to readers who find this blog while trying to find more books about “Dan Kotler” or “Alex Kayne” or “Citadel” or “Sawyer Jackson?”

My work is a thread that knots together with the rest of my life, in the fabric that forms my reality. The web of reality that is in the shape of me contains that thread. It’s just one of many. And all are effected by my attitudes, my beliefs, my perspectives.

When my attitude is poor, when I am distracted or distraught, when I allow myself to feel powerless, that’s when the shape of the fabric becomes wrinkled, when the weave becomes twisted. I’m literally bent out of shape. Metaphorically speaking.

There are signs that I’m not being present in my moments. Signs like leaving the garbage disposal running, for sure. But also signs like fighting with Kara over something stupid and ridiculous. Fighting over something I know better than to make an issue.

If you were to read through all of my old journals—and it would be a task of years to read them all—you’d notice a few common threads, in the fabric of my life. One of those is the idea that I want to and should change the way I think about certain things. I want to improve on who I am, to become more focused, more present, kinder and gentler, wiser and more responsive than reactive. I always come to these thoughts as if I’m just now thinking them, but my journals show me to be a liar. Or a fool. I’ve been toeing those waters for a very long time. My whole life.

The decision to change is nothing without the commitment to change.

To be fair and a little kind to myself, I have changed, over the years. It may be incremental improvement, but it’s no less worthy of noting and even celebrating. I have, by repetition of the ideas alone, created better habits, taken on better self discipline. This is the root of my success as an author—I finally overcame the barriers within me that were keeping me from a disciplined writing life.

I still have my hangups.

The road to self improvement has a lot of side paths. Rabbit trails abound, and as we work toward moving toward the distant mountain, sometimes we get tired, and just want to sit in the shade of a hill for bit. We get exhausted by the constant push to do better, and we just really want a place to lie down and rest.

There’s a scripture that talks about this, in the Bible. I’m not trying to preach to you here, but you’ve probably heard this one, and I think it’s appropriate:

The Lord is my shepherd, I lack for nothing.
He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters.
He restores my soul: He leads me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.
And even though I walk in the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: For you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.
Your prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies: You anoint my head with oil; My cup runs over.
Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

—Psalm 23 (NIV)

Even for non-Christians, that passage has so much hope in it. It’s hard to ignore the hope in the idea of someone looking out for us, someone guiding and nurturing us, protecting us, leading us to rest and peace.

I’ve heard and read that passage my whole life. But it was only in the past year that it really and truly started to resonate with me. It’s really since the world started seeming hopeless to me that this passage started coming back, over and over, as some kind of salve to my broken, bruised, burned heart.

And you can’t read that passage and take hope from it without noting some of the signs of gentle rebuke, the call for discipline: “Your rod and your staff, they comfort me.”

Shepherds, am I right? They lead with that staff and that rod, they nudge sheep back into the flock, they may even break a leg here or there to keep the more rambunctious sheep from wandering away. Because having to go after that sheep all the time—and the good shepherd does—that puts the rest of the flock in danger. So a little discipline, even if it’s painful, is as much for you as it is for the community you belong to.

I only just clicked, as I typed this, to what that could mean for me, in terms of the changes happening in the world. The pandemic is a broken leg. The ice storm is a broken leg. The rod and staff have been put to use.

Am I comforted?

Weirdly… I am.

I’m not spilling secrets by saying I’ve always been a bit arrogant and self-serving. I recognize these traits in myself. They’re the things I’m trying most to overcome in my own personality. I can be a bit standoffish and reticent and sullen. The word my friends and family have taken to using is “curmudgeon.” It fits. It hurts.

That isn’t the legacy I want to leave. I had always hoped that when the day comes, everyone would say of me, “He never complained. He did the work. He was always ready and willing to give and to help. He was kind and gentle and wise.”

If I died today, I doubt there are any on this Earth who could honestly say these things of me. That’s not ok. But it’s not over.

I keep coming back to committing to being someone better than I was, over and over, because there is a part of me that still holds onto hope, still insists that change is possible. I am not the sum of my worst choices. I am not simply the worst thing I’ve ever done. No one is.

Focus is hard. Being present is hard. Change is hard. Hope starts to fade when we start to believe that the hard things are impossible things. When we start to believe that we simply are who we are, that we’re incapable of change or growth, that failure and pain are our legacy, that’s when things feel dark to us. That’s when we tend to give up. Death is the only conclusion.

But that’s the untruth. That’s the deception.

You don’t have to be a Christian to realize that there is an undercurrent of evil in the world, and it wants you. It wants to consume you, devour you, digest you. But it likes its meat tenderized. It can’t digest us until we’ve been pulverized, beaten down by our own choices and biases and prejudices and self-loathing. The evil that is in the world has no teeth, so our bones need to be powdered and our muscles need to be shredded and our soul needs to be liquified, or it can’t feed.

The evil that is in the world tricks us into being the cooks who prepare our own lives to be devoured. it does this by insisting that we think of ourselves as weak, as victims, as powerless. It does it by fooling us into thinking that everyone around us is “other.” That no one in our sphere can know or understand us. That those who disagree with us are the enemy.

They’re not.

We’re not.

The enemy is lack of hope. The enemy is lack of compassion, lack of mercy, lack of grace. The enemy is reaction instead of response. The enemy is the entropy of good in the name of self-service and self-righteousness. The enemy is the decision that our will be done, and that anyone who opposes that will must be destroyed.

We all face the enemy every day, and we think it wears the faces of those who disagree with us or stand against us. Sometimes we think it wears our own face.

But here’s our rally cry—we are powerful.

Every choice we make is the power of our will. Every response we think through, instead of allowing reflexive reaction to drive us, is our personal empowerment. Every time we see someone do or say something hateful or evil and we make the effort to look past it, to see the glow of their soul beneath that pall of hate, we are grasping the power to change the world. We can change the world, individual by individual. Because each of us is powerful.

We forget. We can be weak. That’s going to happen. That’s alright. That’s why it’s so very important that we have a community, that we work with all our strength to build a community and a tribe not of like-minded others, but of people who realize it’s entirely up to each of us to nurture others, to love others like we love ourselves.

Aren’t you tired of the fight? Aren’t you exhausted by all the outrage? I am. I so am.

So here’s what I believe: I’m meant to serve you. I’m meant to be this not-other I’m talking about. I’m meant to encourage you to be a not-other as well. I’m meant to use words to convince you, and I’m meant to use my life to convince you. I’m meant to serve you with these skills I have, God-given skills and talents. And if you don’t believe in God, then they’re simply gifts, and I’m meant, I’m designed, to share them with you, in support of you.

I hope you’ll feel the same way, and support me and help me and, yes, serve me. We’ll serve each other. We’ll look at the current of evil running through the world, and dam it off. We’ll build channels and paths, build bridges and roads, build walls not to keep the Other out, but to protect all of the Not-Others that we’re now a part of.

What do you think?

Can you and I look past hate, get past our self-serving natures, get over our fear of and anger toward the Other, and become Not-Others? I’m walking your way. I’m feeling around in this darkness, to see if I can find you. Meet me halfway? Or I can come further, come closer to you. It would just be so nice, it would be such a comfort, if you starting coming toward me, too.

And I promise, I’ll try to remember to turn off the garbage disposal.