Responding in kind

When you feel resigned to lose against hate, knowing you have a choice in your action matters. Knowing your response is prompted because of another and not from within yourself makes you pause and look over your convictions before saying anything.

How do you respond when a friend, spouse or relative rejects you? What do you do when your boss tells you you're not good enough? What do you feel when you hear a racial slur?

Understanding that others' hate comes from their own hurt, fear, misunderstanding, or grief humanizes them and also your response to their negativity. Knowing an eye for an eye only leaves you more hateful in the end, you put something positive out there, not to counteract but to heal.

Only sometimes do I succeed at responding to hate with love, but I understand why it can't be a strategy and instead comes from a deep connection with one's own vulnerabilities.

Empathy develops from a practice of self-awareness, discovering the minutiae that make you as human as those around you. The humility it takes to be continually positive without expectation seems awesome from the outside, but I bet it's as easy as flexing your hand when you know it. It's within you because you've become the person capable of it.

East of Eden

"A man, his whole life, matches himself against pay. And how, if it's my whole life's work to find my worth, can you, sad man, write me down instant in a ledger?"

What do we stake our worth on? Are we producing value that lasts, that someone trusts, that we can, with respect for ourselves and our community, put out into the world and let grow beyond our own understanding of it?

What more does it add than to fill our pockets and those of others? Are we too busy waiting for the numbers to go up in our accounts to ask the right questions?

John Steinbeck so simply reveals our vulnerability to the appeal of the paycheck and the measure by which we live.

The Art of Storytelling

Every story has its basic elements from protagonist to context to the outcome and resolution, whether good or bad. That's the start.

But not every story comes off the page, not every story can make your mind photographic or feel the lilt of its words so you get carried away by the flow of paragraphs and pages. A practiced author can make that happen but mass appeal doesn't prove art.

Beyond the page turners are those stories you never want to end because you're breathing through the sentences, rereading to sniff out the planning and placement, feeling your way steadily through the individual words to capture the minutiae necessary to make the recipe just right. The philosophy is in the details.

I'm reading such a book right now. I'm not yet halfway through East of Eden by John Steinbeck and I want to go back and read it from the start to make sure I didn't miss phrases like "the water of people", describing a crowd at the brink of riotous, righteous fervor or the making of pancakes as "little hassocks, small volcanoes formed and erupted on them until they were ready to be turned" or a man so close to remembering a far-off memory as "a little more there was to it, he dug it up and set it before his eyes in the air ahead of the horse's head". All read within a span of three pages.

The story is only an element, perhaps just a context for the author to weave in little tidbits imagined, crafted, found and stored in a separate place waiting to be carefully placed so the reader might catch a hint to pay attention exactly at that moment. 

I've often skimmed passages of page-turners to get to the end. It's an art to tell a captivating story that keeps you hungry but patient enough to savor the juicy details.