Why does someone stick his neck out and take a risk? What is risk anyway?

One saying that I hear once in a while is: “It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” As someone who has loved and lost, I’m not sure I totally agree with that saying. You put yourself out there and sometimes you get your head chopped off. If rejection is the worst that can happen, then maybe the risk is worth it. But what about the damage to your self-esteem, to your ability to love in the future, to your reputation? Maybe none of these matter if the object of your love is worthy.

There’s that word, “Worthy”, the root of the word “Worship”. But would it be right to *worship* another human being? But I digress…

I’m thinking about risk today. I’m coming to believe that life without significant risk is not worth living. And yet I see a lot of people around me never taking a risk. People who work in a regular job that they hate. People married to a spouse they don’t admire, or don’t love. People with talent and potential who take the easy road. Driving the interstate highway of life in the safe family car, never venturing off the road.

The problem with taking a risk is that, if you miscalculate, or if you are not extremely clear about where you want to end up, you will probably get eaten by the lions and tigers and bears that are just off the interstate.

Several years ago, I decided to quit my high-paying engineering job with a large multinational semiconductor manufacturing company so that I could write novels. I had already written one novel, and another was underway, and I had an idea for a third novel, and I felt it was time to write full time. I had a large savings account, and I calculated that I could get at least one of the novels, maybe two, published before I ran out of money. But I miscalculated. I wasn’t good enough as a writer, or writing fiction was harder than I imagined, or something. And I ran out of money. And I never got any of my novels published.

So I went back to the cube farm of Corporate America and got a “real job” again. But that job nearly killed me. The senior management of the company decided to outsource our work to India, and I ended up on the phone at all hours of the day and night working with the Indians. When I complained about the quality of work of the Indians, and about the impact on our product delivery schedules, I was called a racist. The stress was too much for me, and I quit again. I didn’t get a nice severance package. I got nothing.

I fell back on teaching math at the community college, which I love but which doesn’t pay very well. And now I’m trying to figure out how to survive.

I’m not sure which was the greater risk, leaving the company in the first place and running out of money, or returning to the company and having the life sucked out of me. Risk is a relative thing, I guess.

Which would have been the greater risk to Jesus? Embarking down the road that led to his death? Or remaining a carpenter, or perhaps becoming a Rabbi, either of which he was qualified to do? What would the world have been like if he hadn’t made the choice he made?

Perhaps the greater risk to a man or woman is to stay in our safe little life, comfortable with our six-figure income, doing nothing that can get us eaten by the large nasty forces that are just off the beaten path.

Doing nothing.

I’m thinking about “Jacob’s Ladder”, a movie starring Tim Robbins about one man’s fear of death.

In the movie is a wonderful quote, which I often return to for inspiration. It’s a piece of dialogue from Jacob’s chiropractor, Louie, to Jacob when Jacob is particularly troubled:

Eckhart saw hell too. He said: The only thing that burns in hell is the part of you that won’t let go of life, your memories, your attachments. They burn them all away. But they’re not punishing you, he said. They’re freeing your soul. So, if you’re frightened of dying and you’re holding on, you’ll see devils tearing your life away. But if you’ve made your peace, then the devils are really angels, freeing you from the earth.

Meister Ekhart was a twelfth century German mystic who wrote prolifically about religious issues. I’ve read some of his writings and have never been able to find this quote among them. So I don’t know if the quote is just a bit of movie fiction, or if Ekhart really wrote it. It doesn’t matter.

40 days in the desert can be a little like dying, or like burning in hell, though not to the same degree. It’s surprising what we hold on to when confronted by adversity. One of mine is my 42-inch HD LCD television. Although I haven’t tuned to a cable channel since the presidential election, I like to watch DVDs, and I can’t imagine life without my TV. Another is my personal library, amounting to around 2000 books, mostly technical.

But I have less mundane things that I hold on to, like ideas. And a 40-day fast helps to burn some of those off.

One silly idea that needs to be burned off is my belief that I need a daily chocolate chip cookie. I haven’t had one now in ten days. Another is that, if I don’t have dinner with my friends, then they’ll stop being my friends. That one gets burned off when I find that my friends still want to see me when they’ve heard about my fast, even though we can’t dine together.

Another is that I sometimes find myself thinking that I have a hard life. It’s an absurd thought, to be sure. I’m a white male of middle class background living in The United States of America in the twenty-first century, a time when even the poor are better off than kings were a thousand years ago.

But when things do get hard, like when hard financial times strike, or when my health isn’t at its best, it is easy to think that life is hard.

And then I remember Jesus.

I don’t necessarily believe that Jesus died for our sins, or anything like that. I’m not sure yet what I think his purpose was, or whether he had a plan. Maybe he just got behind the power curve and was taken down by the establishment for his teachings.

Yet in his last day on this earth, he certainly had some things burned away even before he gasped his last breath. The horrors of his last hours are hard to fathom. Yet Jesus almost made it look easy. He endured his torture with grace and purpose, perhaps because he believed in his cause. And I believe that his death can be an inspiration for those going through rough times.

If one is committed to his path, he can survive anything. Even the tearing away of his life by devils.

Jesus was a nomad. We romanticize the term “nomadic”, but today we have a less romantic name for it: Homeless.

It’s hard to make a home in the desert. Building materials in the desert are hard to come by. There is no wood, so you must construct your buildings of mud or thatch. But you can’t stay in one place very long in the desert. There’s not enough water, and food is scarce, so you wander in order to find them, just to survive. So it makes no sense to construct a permanent building to live in. Maybe you carry a tent, or perhaps some light bedding material.

Kwai Chang Cane, the Shaolin priest from the television series “Kung Fu”, was a nomad. He traveled barefoot from town to town, looking for work, sleeping under the stars, never knowing where he was going next.

In the same way, Jesus was essentially homeless. He may have had a grand plan, but he traveled from place to place, living on the handouts of others, probably sleeping most nights under the open sky.

Clearly Jesus and Kwai Chang chose to be nomadic. But why? Why would someone choose to be a nomad in the desert, homeless for long stretches of time, often alone, risking starvation and death?

In the case of Kwai Chang, the reason was partly because it made for a better plot for the television series. Every week he was some place different, some place interesting, and he had to confront different people and different threats. He was able to have his obligatory two kung fu fight scenes with bad guys we hadn’t met before. And it fit his philosophy of life, that of following the path, the Tao. And you can’t very well follow the Tao staying at home and working in the factory week after week, year after year. So you wander.

In Jesus’s case, perhaps he chose to wander in order to reach more people with his message. I accept that he consciously had a message that he was trying to spread, though a possible atheistic position on the subject is that Jesus was just a nut, possibly even schizophrenic, not unlike a thousand other nomadic (homeless) crazies of that time period. I don’t subscribe to the view that Jesus was a nut. Or I try not to. There’s too much wisdom in words that have been attributed to him.

How common is a nomadic existence today? There are the homeless of today’s world. Many of them are nut cases, with genuine mental illness. But some have simply abandoned the conventional model for how to live life, by giving up their job, packing their bag, leaving their family, and taking a chance on the generosity of other people. You see them on the street corners. Many of them could go to shelters and be rescued, but many of them elect not to. Or so I believe.

But you don’t have to be without a house to be homeless in this world. There is something which I call “Emotional Homelessness”, a kind of nomadic existence of the heart, where you bind yourself to no one. And because you are alone in this desert of a sort, there is no one there to rescue you, or befriend you. You risk a kind of starvation and death in the absence of love and affection, without the occasional gentle touch, with no one to watch your back on a daily basis in this crazy world we live in.

Yet many people are emotionally homeless.

*I* am emotionally homeless. But I would like to find a home.

Before bible study today, a friend sat with me for a moment holding a paper bag. She said, “I brought these for you.” I took the bag and looked inside. There were three beautiful, succulent, red, inviting tomatoes in her bag. But I knew that if I took them, I would have to eat them. There was no way they’d last till the end of my fast. So I told her that I’m fasting. She asked, “How long?” I said, “Forty days.” Her smile disappeared. She had once been a nurse and was now a dental hygienist. She appeared to assume the worst about my situation. “We’ll talk. I’ve gotta go.”

A man in my Fred group came up to me then. I asked how he was. “Fine. But how are *you*?” He gave me a big hug, as if concerned for my health.

This evening I was visiting a friend to play cards. While we played cards at her dining room table, I looked into her kitchen and saw an onion. I had a momentary desire to eat the onion. When I told her of my desire to eat the onion, she laughed and said, “That’s really sad.” This was the same woman I watched eat ice cream yesterday.

I really am fine. People don’t need to worry about my health. About the only thing negative I can say about this fast is that it’s making me irritable. I sent an email to a friend that I wish I could take back, an email that revealed personal feelings that I didn’t need to reveal.

During the day I fantasized about pizza. It’s irrational, because I am not overly hungry, but I’m having thoughts about food. Now that I’m done with Day 8, I’m a fifth of the way through the fast. But I still have four fifths of the time remaining.

Fireworks are exploding over my neighborhood this July 4th as I write this.

Today was probably the hardest day of my fast so far. I went shopping for a new car with a friend. I didn’t buy today but I test drove five cars, and it was hot, very hot, reaching 103 degrees according to the car thermometer. The afternoon sun in July in central Texas and I don’t go well together, and I briefly questioned whether I should finish the fast. As a reward to my friend for putting up with my car shopping for 5 hours, I took her to Amy’s Ice Cream, the best ice cream place in the world, and bought her a cup of her favorite. We sat inside and she ate while I watched. Was I sure I didn’t want some of her ice cream, she asked. Yes, no, maybe. I declined, but it was tempting. Though I was tempted to quit the fast, I put the thought out of my mind and made it through the rest of the day.

Is the fast changing me? I did some house cleaning today that I normally wouldn’t do. I thought about doing some consulting work, something I haven’t thought about in a long time. And today I thought that it was time to completely recreate my life. So maybe the fast is having the desired effect.

There’s something called “The pain of healing” that happens when a wound begins to heal. The theory is that the pain from a wound is dampened by its severity. The more serious the wound, the less you feel it at first. I was once in an automobile accident in which two people died, and I suffered a concussion and severe cuts to the face and bruising to the legs. Yet in the minutes after the accident, I felt no pain from these injuries. It wasn’t until an hour later, particularly when needles were used to administer a local anesthetic for the stitches, that I started to feel any pain. And the real pain didn’t happen until late that night, when the effects of the concussion set in, and I wondered whether I would live through the night.

The pain of healing can happen even if the wound is not physical. I’ve experienced it myself at times when people have hurt me, or when I’ve hurt others, and the pain or guilt didn’t really set in until days or months later. It must have something to do with awareness, maybe by undoing the repression of the painful emotions.

The fast, by creating a vacuum in my life, makes it possible to feel some of the pain that I’ve been repressing, pain associated with the way I’ve lived my life recently, and even from events in my life many years ago. Maybe it isn’t the fast per se, but the fast is allowing me to process some things that I’d otherwise leave buried.

The pain of healing is good when it comes. It means that the healing has begun. If there is no pain, especially after something serious has happened, then it means that the healing hasn’t started yet.

And a knowledge of the existence of the pain of healing is a good thing, because it helps a person tolerate the pain when it does come. Because the pain is temporary, and necessary to the healing process.

I think I’m feeling some of the pain of healing of the wounds of my life.