One thing leads to another, walk don't talk

Recently, a friend posted a piece on precocity, Malcolm Gladwell at The New Yorker Festival in which two paragraphs really caught me

Malcolm Gladwell argued, quite persuasively, that the qualities that produce precocious children are not in synch with the qualities that distinguish productive adults. Children learn things to the extent that they mimic doing them, and precocious children are just faster mimics. Mimicry, however, is obviously not an important, or even desirable, trait in adults. Somewhere along the line, the outer-directed (or -focused) precocious child must grow into the inner-directed adult, and quite often this doesn't happen. One of Mr Gladwell's examples was the Hunter College Elementary School, an extremely selective institution that was designed to nurture future Nobelists and the like. It hasn't produced them. What it has produced is a crop of happy and successful people, but few superstars. Mr Gladwell's hunch is that these kids were so smart that they grasped the great sacrifices that aiming for the top requires - and decided to go for happiness instead. It seems clear that precociousness is not the fruit of ambition; it's simply an inborn characteristic. So it may well be that the gifted children at Hunter lack the deep competitiveness that drives some people toward the attainment of honorable fame.


The downside of privileging the precocious is that it demotes the importance of work. Of practicing an instrument. Of editing a text toward perfection. Of doing all the research that a project requires, unstintingly. Of leaving no stone unturned. Now, you can regard such work as drudgery, the necessary evil associated with achievement. Or you can look at it as the whole point. Achievement? There is no such thing as achievement, not for the achiever. Achievement notifies other people that something remarkable has been done, but it's the doing, not the having done, that matters. The only thing that we ever achieve is, as the French have it, death itself. We are achieved. At the risk of appearing to reinvent an "Eastern" philosophy, I am opening myself up to the idea that mindful work is the thing that counts most, perhaps even more than love. Perhaps the two go together.

And, then later I answered another friend who had written in conjuction with the care she is giving one of our other friends. She takes great comfort in the Christian Bible and was perplexed about someone dear to her who though an avowed athesist had lit candles in the church recently for their parents

Ch-------,

Oh, there is never enough on that subject, we just have other things to do and it is very complicated. Everyone has a religion even if that religion is no religion. We are as a group, a group of thinking primates, apparently compelled to pose and answer the questions, "What does it all mean?" and "How do I make sense of it all?" Why do people light candles and deny a belief in God? I don't really know, I can speculate, but it serves no purpose. I have found from decades of observation that the best thing to do is to keep your beliefs to yourself and do what you think is right, I emphasize you here, not your church, not your family, not your friends, not anyone but you. And, that is a process we spend a lifetime getting down. I can tell from what you've said here that you are actively engaged in the process, and when you say

try to live by God's word that that is what matters

you have got it exactly right as far as I'm concerned. As we say in East Texas where I'm from, up just to the Southwest of Texarkana in Red Hill, Texas

Bring me the baby! I don't want to hear about no labor pains, bring me the baby.

and even more to the point

If you be talkin' 'bout it you no have no time to be doin' it, and if you be doin' it, you no be havin' no time to be talkin' 'bout it, and if you gets to it and you can't do it, well, brother, there you is.

These instructions were generally prefaced by the phrase, "Lil Mark" and followed by the phrase, "Now get yo lil' white butt back out there in that garden and get them weeds pulled and hauled out before noon so's you can come in here and eat lunch like a proper person." Beulah Haskins was about ten years older than my grandfather, black and the caretaker of my grandfather, father and myself when all of us were around the age of ten. Beulah spoke these words to me often when I came in from the summer garden chores complaining about some difficulty, generally the heat or the bugs, in completing my assigned tasks. She has proven, as I get older to be one of the wisest people I have ever known. Beulah went to the Gum Springs Baptist Church north of Red Hill. One of the first 'uppities to not go to our church' as my relatives used to say about Beulah. My family had at one time several sections of land northwest of Red Hill and on the plot that remained, just slightly less than a section, where I went to visit in the summers, there was the family cemetery and the family owned church, St. Luis. Note that I said family owned, we never ceded the church nor the property that my great grandfather built in 1868 to the RC church. We had the Diocese of Dallas and later the Diocese of Texarkana send a visiting priest on Sundays to say mass and on request to say funeral masses, but the church and it's grounds always remained firmly in the hands of my family. Often times we buried our own and the funeral mass was later on when it was convenient for the priest to come out, I've been told. In Red Hill you had four choices for a last name, Henderson, Lambert, Blackwell, or Haskins. If your last name was Haskins, the other three of us used to own your relatives at one time in the past. One thing that Beulah always said and that has held true over the years in my experience is that you can talk all day about God and Jesus but unless you get out there with your mouth shut and show people God and Jesus through your life, you are wasting your time and very likely just might send people running the other way unless you are very careful. I've taken her message to heart and so it seems have you. One of my favorite verses is

1 John 3:18
Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth.
1 John 3:17-19 (in Context) 1 John 3 (Whole Chapter)

If everyone who is so quick to quote Jn 3:16 at the drop of a hat would take 1Jn3:18 to heart then perhaps we could all follow this verse more completely

Hebrews 10:24
And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds.Hebrews 10:23-25 (in Context) Hebrews 10 (Whole Chapter)

I leave you with the best blessing I know

^{Romans 15:13 (New International Version)}

13May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit,

George

Later that same day I wrote a comment on the Gladwell piece noted above in which I said

Love is no more and no less than the mindful work of constantly holding another in what Abraham Maslow so wonderfully called unconditional positive regard. I do not believe that you have so much reinvented Eastern philosophy, especially a narrow branch of Zen, as you have come to live it, understanding it is beyond all of us.

And, now the same friend who wrote the Gladwell piece has written today Wunderkammer where he makes reference to an article on the web that characterizes blogs as Wunderkammer

A Web log really, then, is a Wunderkammer. That is to say, the genealogy of Web logs points not to the world of letters but to the early history of museums -- to the "cabinet of wonders," or Wunderkammer, that marked the scientific landscape of Renaissance modernity: a random collection of strange, compelling objects, typically compiled and owned by a learned, well-off gentleman. A set of ostrich feathers, a few rare shells, a South Pacific coral carving, a mummified mermaid -- the Wunderkammer mingled fact and legend promiscuously, reflecting European civilization’s dazed and wondering attempts to assimilate the glut of physical data that science and exploration were then unleashing.

Well I don't think I qualify as either well off or learned, though we hope gentelman applies, but this posting and this blog as a whole are if nothing else certainly a Wunderkammer.

As my friend, the author of DB, is so fond of saying, "It's all about connections."

As I say, "one thing leads to another." We hope if for no other reason than to honor the memory of Beulah Haskins but also we hope for larger reasons, as well, that we are "having no time to be talking about it", that in fact the talk has lead to the walk, at least more often than not. We fervently hope that this Wunderkammer would serve in some way to amplify the verse cited above

Hebrews 10:24
And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds.Hebrews 10:23-25 (in Context) Hebrews 10 (Whole Chapter)

Yes, let's consider how we might do that spurring. Talking it up is good, but walking it up is better. Given the choice walk quietly rather than talking while standing still.