Gods And Fools

On the Road Again

Having a great time here in Hong Kong.  I’ve never seen East Asia before, and it’s an eye-opening experience.  I read the Economist this morning, as it discussed China’s growing military power, and the threat it could pose to other powers.  And walking past me were people from England, Europe, America and every part of the Pacific Rim, all of whom have turned this far-off chunk of China into a cultural and commercial crossroads of incredible global impact.  It’s fascinating.  The Pacific Century may well be more than Pac Rim marketing.

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Thanks to my brother's frequent flyer miles, I was able to fly out here business-class on Asiana Airlines, which was a real treat.  I longed to sleep on the 13 hour trip to Seoul and the three-hour connection to HK, but I feared missing out on even a moment of pampering.  I could get used to this.

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If you're one of my Facebook friends, I'll post my first batch of HK photos this weekend.  HK is a phenomenal mix of old and new, gritty and pretty.  The Central district is as decked-out as Regent Street in London or the Champs-El in Paris, but the Mong Kok district reminds me of the funkiest parts of Rawalpindi in Pakistan. 

Flying out here, I found myself brooding over how it was a long intercontinental voyage on which my dad's heart began to fail last September (as his flight from England neared JFK).  I've made several flights since then, including three intercontinental ones, but this was the first time I felt the emotional connection, pondering what it felt like for him to begin to see the end of his life, so far from his Pakistani home and so far from his family in L.A.

Take My Advice About Advice

Bear in mind that other people's advice is primarily advice to themselves and secondarily advice to you.  When they urge you to take Road A, it generally has less to do with their sense of what's best for you and more to do with what they think is best for them.  When they're counseling you, they are really having a conversation with themselves about what is right -- and then, by extension, they would love to see their choices validated by you choosing in a similar way.

Given that, you shouldn't worry too much about certain kinds of criticism.  They will often feel a need to tell you not to live a certain way, mainly because they've chosen not to live that way, and they're annoyed to see you choosing differently. 

For instance, someone once observed that married people love telling single people how lonely singleness is, because they'll be damned if you're going to have more fun than them.  Here's another example.  A friend was asking me about my spiritual journey.  At first, he strongly suggested and even predicted that I would find happiness someday as a Catholic.  When the issue of my heritage came up, he began to press me to find ways to affirm the religion of my heritage.  I asked, "Which is it?  Do you want me to be Catholic, or do you want me to be like my non-Catholic parents?"

Later it occurred to me:  My friend did his best to be loyal to his heritage, and his heritage was Roman Catholic. He attempted to find utlimate truth in Catholicism, incentivized by his efforts to be faithful to his heritage.  He could have found comfort and communion if I were to affirm his Catholicism by choosing it for myself, but he could equally have found such comfort or communion if I were to affirm his loyalty to heritage by my expressing loyalty to my own heritage.  What I didn't get from him was any empathy about my actual situation, which was that I frankly wasn't looking for anyone's advice.

That offered a deeper insight than I'd had before into how people give other people advice.  But what I really appreciate are when friends attempt to offer any observations or advice on who I truly am rather than on their own emotional needs; and I suspect they appreciate me more when I attempt to do the same. 

Here n' There

Timmy asked me to point out where else I've been writing:  I've been reasonably active on the Daily News' blog, most recently here.  I've also done a few things recently at USC's Center on Public Diplomacy blog, where I'm a Fellow for the 2008-2009 year.  Here's a piece on Obama's inaugural address, along with several other posts. 

Humbler-Than-Thou

"Moses was a very humble man, more humble than anyone else on earth."
-- Numbers 12:3, ostensibly written by Moses

Most of us realize by now that vanity and shyness are opposite faces of the same beast.  The haughtier a person is, the more fragile his sense of self and the more easily he can be demoralized.  And the more overtly meek a person is, the greater the chance that he secretly harbors a god-sized ego.  Mother Teresa, who like me was astoundingly humble, noted that a humble person simply has the ability to see herself as she is -- no better, no worse, and certainly without any need to compare herself to others.

Live Free, or Buy

We're back.

I had come close to deleting this GAF blog, just as I’d recently deleted my longtime America Bug blog, figuring that I could save some cyber-trees and rid the world of a few more self-indulgent online journals.

But I still like to muse publicly about personal thoughts, and to have an archive of it, in ways that no one on the USC Public Diplomacy blog or the Daily News blog or the newspapers that publish me will put up with.  So I’ve renamed GAF slightly and relaunched it.

The decision to revive the blog was helped along by a peculiar realization a couple of weeks back, at 5 o'clock one still-dark morning. I couldn’t stand to stay asleep anymore, having soaked up a month’s worth of sleep during three days of a pernicious cold.  I got up, poured out some milk into a meager bowl of cranberry almond cereal and looked out at the two beige couches in my living room of my one-bedroom apartment, when the thought hit me:  This is the life I always wanted.  This. What I was doing.  How I was living.  Who I was answerable to.  Where I was headed. What I was learning.  Whom I was meeting.  How I was exercising my gifts.  How I was able to take care of myself.  This.  This – whatever the hell it is – is what I was born for.

It was an odd moment for a couple of reasons.  First, I've often been arrogant enough to suspect that I was born for something better than whatever I was getting at the moment.  Second, the moment mirrored yet countered a similar moment about a decade ago, in another one-bedroom apartment, in Burbank.  In that darkened living room late one night,  I held a warm towel over my right eye, where a mild eye infection had arisen, and I pondered my career, my prospects, a very recent breaking of my heart and various other muddles, surveyed my 600-square-foot pseudo-empire, and concluded, “My life is such a disappointment.”

I was around 33 then, and am 43 now.  If you had told me then that I would still be in a one-bedroom apartment, still single and still not renowned, I’d have felt that “disappointment” was too mild a term.  Yet I feel younger now at 43 than when I was  33.  Younger than when I was 23, frankly.  And less concerned about my age or my pace than at any point in the past. 

Youth is wasted on the young -- but ah, they wouldn’t have listened anyway.  I know I didn’t.  The revenge is that, while the youthful struggle to seize an adulthood forged in their strained imaginations, you have a chance to drop the baggage and move through the world with a child’s eyes and heart, but with an adult brain and bank account. 

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When a family relation who suffered through the crash of the mortgage industry wondered aloud about possible new directions, my mother (who had been no fan of how I’d lived during many years of my life) was wonderfully kind:  “You could be like Robbie – he leads a very respectable life.”  I was charmed, till this family relation responded: “Like Robbie?  Living in a one-bedroom apartment?  Are you kidding me?”

Yeah, I do sometimes still struggle with my underachiever role within a proud line of property holders. 

Yet housing, marriage, kids, a corner office, were all examples of aspirations that may have been overlaid on me by outside forces... with my full blessing and cooperation.  When those didn’t transpire by a certain date, they became oddly irrelevant, and I oddly became more liberated by the gap between myself and my goals than I’d have been by the achievement of those goals. 

I’ve spent my entire adult life withstanding lectures from people telling me I was a fool for not cashing in various real estate booms.  I always resisted, contending that my friends who owned homes were in fact owned by their homes.  After the Great Housing Bust of 2008, I’m relieved that I never bought a house simply because “owning is what adults are supposed to do.” Maybe that’s one reason I feel younger now.

Kids can be fun, so I used to assume I'd like to be a father someday.  But I will tell you what I love:  I love the way my three nieces and my one nephew clamor for my attention.  And after a long afternoon of being with them, I love dropping them in their parents’ laps, so I can go enjoy a drink with friends, or run off to Europe for a quick couple of days, or work on my side career.  So even with the great gift of children, I am a renter.

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This GAF blog, as you may have noticed previously stood for Great American Faith, which reflected by intention to occasionally satirize how Americans conflate their political gods and their religious ones.  Jesus wrapped in Old Glory in the manger, in one manner of speaking.  It also offered my continued mulling of the various personal and cultural and political and theological issues that first drove me toward the evangelical Christian camp and then drove me away from it. 

When that whole episode of my life began, my father insisted – quite convincingly at times – that my choices reflected my being “brainwashed” by a host of outside influences.  Both my father and my choices have expired, and it seems to take a mix of maturity and youth to figure out where I really was and where I really am – and where I really intend to be.

It is difficult to know when to leave behind old gods, and more difficult still to leave them, though I have seemed to do it more than most people.  You always leave the old ones with an unsure sense of whether you’ll be safe or you’ll be smitten, or whether you’ve just been “brainwashed” by dads telling you that they need you to keep believing in their gods, lest their gods further lose convincingness. 

When I was an evangelical, I used to chide atheists about how everyone really has a god that he tends to serve, and that the challenge of theology is to expose the identity of our gods and see if they are in accordance with how the world works.  

I don’t quite see it that way at the moment.  Now I see it more as a matter of how everyone builds his own god (think of Build a Bear, but with long, flowing beards and cool magic powers).  In that sense, idol-makers were just more honest, and more craftsmanlike, in their worship.   The issue is whether we have built gods adequate for the tasks that we have taken.

I’m not sure you can “own” much in the true sense. The only earthly possession that in theory doesn’t wear out is land.  And who truly “owns” a plot of land?  Only people who acquired it from someone who killed enough rivals to convince the survivors to give him a deed. 

Maybe the only thing you can own is that build-a-god that you fashion in the image you need.  But given my own peculiar history of trying on so many different faiths for size, or given how Neil Postman used a rule of quantum physics to justify the need for multiple, paradoxical, opposing gods, maybe again it's better to lease divine things too, rather than to be saddled with them for the long haul.   

And my own needs for divine protection are minimal at this point anyway.  As you can’t forget by now, I’m a renter, through and through.  I’m happy to explore life and to learn, and to hopefully put minimal demands on it.  I’m happy with the empiricists and the rationalists one day, happy with the new-agey, “feel the positive energy manifesting your dreams in the cosmos” crowd another day, and always happy to associate with the kinder Muslim, Jewish, Christian, Hindu and Buddhist types on any day. 

I think that allows me to be happy in my place in life.  I think that allows me to be happy in just a cardboard box, if necessary. 

And if I’m wrong, I’ll repent and join Scientology.