Month: December 2015

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Spoiled Again

By the time this appears in print, I may actually have seen the new “Star Wars.”

I know, I’m just a little late to the party here. By the time I actually walk into a theater and launch into that galaxy far, far away, the rest of my fellow fans will have purchased enough tickets to paper a small moon. (Or is it a space station?) By now, every last detail has been dissected and analyzed, whether it’s the precise dimensions of the new cross-hilt lightsaber or the dents acquired by the Millennium Falcon since its last run in “Return of the Jedi.”

I can’t wait to join the conversation. But I also can’t wait to discover the movie. And that means I’ve been filtering social media like a riverside gold panner, trying to keep from becoming The Man Who Knew Too Much.

One must be careful. The Spoilers are on the prowl.

“Spoiler culture” is a funny thing. In an older time, it was expected that one would know the crucial points of the great stories of the day. Some even spelled out the entire plot in a quick summary right at the start for those who might not otherwise keep up, such as the opening prologue of Romeo and Juliet. (A friend joked that the Shakespearean narrator should begin that speech with the words “Spoiler alert!”)

But something changed in the last century and a half or so. Partly, I think, it was the rise of plots whose dramatic power depended on hiding information until a certain point. Think of Citizen Kane and the need to identify “Rosebud.” Or the plays and novels of Agatha Christie with their hidden twists. Or even the quests of Frodo Baggins or Harry Potter, where the choice that the hero makes is all-important, but it’s not always clear at the start what choice the hero has to make or what the cost may be.

Partly, too, it’s an explosion of novelty and individuality at the same time. The 19th and 20th centuries especially set off an avalanche of stories and plot lines. And while the new mass media could make sure that many of them became community knowledge (is there anyone who doesn’t know how Gone With The Wind goes?), the exact timing would depend on individual choice and budgets and lives. Those who had undergone the shared cultural experience first had an advantage – however temporary – over those who didn’t, and could shape the experience of the “not yets” by what they chose to reveal. (“Don’t tell me the ending!”)

So – you have the spoiler. The information that would reveal a plot’s mysteries and surprises too soon. There’s been a debate over when is “too soon” to put spoiler information out in the open, especially for reviewers: should one wait a week after release? A year? Should the information stay locked away forever, despite all blandishments and temptations?

Some audiences are better at keeping secrets than others – there’s a reason that thrillers like “Deathtrap” retain their power to surprise and startle. And there’s no doubt that some storylines are damaged less than others by a premature revelation. A black-and-white action tale usually has all its cards on the table … and yet, how different is a new viewer’s experience of “The Empire Strikes Back” these days when it’s common knowledge who Darth Vader really is and what he’s after?

Ultimately, it comes down to the individual reader, viewer or listener. It has to. No spoiler law will satisfy everyone or will be perfectly adhered to. Each of us has to decide how much is too much to know, and do what we can to protect our own decision.

And really, isn’t that true with any sort of learning? All the way to the beginning, knowledge has been about choices. What do I need to know? What do I want to know? Sure, some things come in by osmosis (my wife Heather knows any number of movie ‘moments’ that she’s never actually seen), but the best learning is directed learning – making the decisions that will make someone a better student, a better citizen, a better member of society.

Choose well. Choose wisely.

And if you choose to tell me the new Star Wars plot twist before I can get in the theater, then may the Force be with you.

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Looking Forward

This year, I resolve to be irresolute.

OK, I’m being a little bit of a wise guy. But only a little bit. After all, we have the New Year coming up. And next to drinking, partying, and lying about staying up until midnight, the most popular New Year’s activity is the Oh-So-Solemn Resolution.

“This is the year I lose 30 pounds.”

“This year, I’ll finally write that novel.”

“It’s time I learned to play guitar.”

“Aliens are out there, and I’m going to catch them on camera.”

Well, maybe not that last one. But this is Boulder County, so one never knows.

About 45 percent of Americans make at least one New Year’s resolution, a recent study found. About 8 percent actually keep them. I’ve been part of both groups. If I kept every New Year’s resolution I’d ever made, I’d cook like Julia Child, play guitar like Andres Segovia, and have more New York Times bestsellers than Stephen King. (Oddly enough, one of the resolutions I did keep – to lose weight – was a springtime promise, made long after Baby New Year had been put down for a nap.)

In a way, it’s understandable. When a resolution is made because you feel the need to do something, more often than not it gets done. When a resolution gets made because you know it’s the Official Time To Make Resolutions … well, you get a lot of resolutions and not much else. It doesn’t mean they won’t get fulfilled eventually, but without a conscious need, Life Happens.

So, I want to try something a little different as we approach the boundary line of the year. Rather than look forward and make a promise, I want to look back and learn a lesson. When I do that, two things jump to the top of the curriculum:

1) I have no idea what lies ahead.

2) I can’t do it all myself.

Number one may seem too obvious to mention, but 2015 pounded it home in a big way. This was the year I got my first-ever leads at the Longmont Theatre Company, including one in a show I never tried out for. It was the year that Heather first learned she had MS and the year that I first met the power of migraines. We had to work out new rules for life, even as we kept on with what we already had: the wonders of Missy, the wrinkles of a new job, the joys and stress of a family wedding.

And thus – number two. The Ringo Starr lesson: “I get by with a little help from my friends.” Maybe the hardest one of all for me to learn, year after year after year. But no less essential for that.

I can’t do it all. I want to. Heaven knows I try to. But until science discovers full-body human cloning and does away with the need for sleep, there’s simply no way that I can be everywhere I’m needed doing everything that needs to be done. As I’ve said here before, I hate not having control – and I know that any of it I think I have is an illusion, subject to revocation without warning.

That means I have to ask. And to accept. And to be grateful. Friends and family and co-workers have all been there at different points to make things happen. I’ve still taken on more than I probably should, partly because I’m stubborn, partly because friends and family and co-workers can’t be everywhere, either. But they’ve been a lot more “everywhere” than I could ever be alone.

So I’ve learned partnership. And pacing. And even just taking care of myself; the hardest thing for any caregiver to learn, really. Vital, though. If your own foundations aren’t solid, how can you support anyone else?

Those aren’t bad lessons to jump into 2016 with. Be ready to be surprised. And don’t meet those surprises alone.

Maybe those are resolutions of a sort. And with a year of learning behind them, maybe they’ll be easier to keep.

But easy or hard, it’s time to turn the page.

Class is back in session.

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Love in a Cold Time

The first serious snowfall of winter always energizes me.

Maybe part of me never stopped being nine years old. That’s how old I was when the Christmas Blizzard of 1982 hit, transforming the world around me with sudden rapidity. A six-block drive to pick up Grandma became an epic journey in my Dad’s crawling Subaru. A bicycle left on the back porch disappeared beneath a carpet of white, except for one tip of one handle. The entire back yard became a frozen world to explore, one that my sisters and I – proper “Star Wars” fans, all – immediately declared to be Hoth from “The Empire Strikes Back.”

In the years since then, I’ve learned about the joys of freeing high-centered cars, salting frozen sidewalks at 6 a.m., and wrenching your spine while shoveling snow. (Snow shovels make a very inadequate cane, by the way.) None of it has deterred me very long from my basic thesis. If anything, it’s deepened the complexity, setting off two overlapping voices in my head:

“It’s wintertime. What a white, beautiful and lovely place the world is.”

“It’s wintertime. What a cold, chill and deadly place the world is.”

The latter cannot be denied. This is a time of year that can freeze people outside or drain them inside, as the dark nights lengthen. It’s a time when we become all too aware of the people who should still be here celebrating with us, when the empty chair takes on a presence of its own and summons more ghosts than a dozen “Christmas Carols.”

Which is why I maintain that this is still the perfect time for a celebration of universal love.

I admit, this may take some explaining.

Almost every belief and tradition turns on the lights this time of year to hold back the cold and the darkness. Whether it’s Christmas, Hanukkah, Diwali, Yule, or something else, there’s this deep-set need to push back against the encroaching night and create beauty. The light kindled stands all the more bright and lovely by contrast, even without five marching Snoopys, four Santa Nativities, three melting lights, two inflatable turtledoves, and a partridge in a floodlit pear tree – all of them on the same yard.

But anyone can plug lights in a socket and “ooh” at the result. It doesn’t necessarily follow that we also turn our thoughts to tidings of comfort and joy, especially in times when the thermometer would have to be heated to reach two digits.

But it’s all the more fitting that we do. Because this is the time of year when love takes guts.

Love comes easy when the sun is shining and the world is green. The barriers are down. It’s when we relax, when we court, when we find it easiest to visit on the spur of the moment. Why not?

But when it takes an act of will and a thick pair of boots just to make it from the front door to the mailbox … that’s when even the smallest gesture takes on new meaning. The natural instinct is to stay huddled inside in the warmth – and we have to ignore that instinct if we want to be able to help a friend, a neighbor, a stranger freezing on the street.

We expose ourselves every time we do that. But we also spread the warmth to places where it otherwise could not go.

Anyone who lives in Colorado, I think, knows that it’s during the times of extremes that you find out what your neighbors are made of. Flood or drought, wildfire or blowing snow, this is when you see the open-armed charity and almost selfless courage begin to emerge. It’s when a community is tested, to see whether you truly have a community at all or just a bunch of people living together.

This particular test is more predictable than a rising river, more enduring than a blaze in the woods. So what better time to celebrate brotherhood and goodwill? Sure, church scholars talk about how Christ was probably born in the spring or the early fall (to draw from my own faith for a moment), but the story of love coming to a hostile world would still belong in the winter, even if no other tradition had demarcated the territory and lit the darkness.

This is where risky, selfless, muscular love belongs.

And if that love comes with strong vertebrae and a snow shovel – so much the better.

See you in Hoth, everyone. May the season be with you.

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Joy of the Moment

Missy stabs with her finger as the Christmas lights come into view. “Look … Lookit!”

She cranks the volume as high as she can when the Hallelujah Chorus comes on. “Yeah!”

She carts her hand-sized Christmas Bear with her everywhere, often cramming the poor red-and-white toy with glee into spaces it was never meant for, like a CD compartment or her overstuffed purse. It somehow soldiers on, its Santa hat hanging by a thread.

In short, if there were a job opening for Christmas Spirit, our disabled ward would be ahead of the competition by about three reindeer and a jingle bell. And it’s a bit infectious. Turn her loose on A Christmas Carol and not only would Scrooge redeem and Tiny Tim walk, but the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come would be leading a chorus of “Feliz Navidad.”

That kind of joy.

That’s a word I don’t use lightly. To be honest, it’s a word you don’t hear much anymore, outside a few seasonal songs. We talk about happiness, we revel in fun. But joy is something deeper, more wonderful, less tied to circumstance. A toothache can steal happiness but joy can live even in the darkest of places.

It’s a quality we badly need now.

You’ve seen the headlines. They’re not the sort to linger over. Appeals to fear. Calls for division. Angry men with angry words about the dangers of a faraway people, too different to be trusted. Some of those angry men wear beards. Some wear three-piece suits.

They build nothing except walls. They give nothing except grief. And too often, people follow in their wake, pulled by the confidence of someone who seems to know where to go, how to get there and who to blame.

It’s a confidence born of arrogance. And it’s really the antithesis of everything that joy stands for.

Because joy, at its roots, is humble.

To truly “get” joy, you have to be able to be astonished. That’s less easy than you think. It means admitting you don’t know everything. It means abandoning cynicism. It means cutting free of past and future and allowing yourself to marvel in the wonders of now.

Maybe that’s why Missy does it especially well.

An outside observer might wonder what she has to be joyful about. Her physical disabilities means she usually takes slow, careful steps through life, balanced on an arm, a wall or a piece of furniture. Her mental disabilities mean that she’s sometimes four, sometimes 14 and sometimes 42 – in particular, able to understand a lot of what’s said to her, but with limited ability to communicate back.

But maybe those challenges have also made her blessings possible. Because she moves through life slowly, even small things can catch her eye. Because she has a “younger” perspective (I hesitate to say more innocent, knowing some of the mischief she’s capable of), those small things can be new over and over again, and acknowledged without any pretense. Patterns and traditions are often a thing of comfort for her, and few times carry more tradition than Christmas.

Put it together and you have someone constantly open to joy, giving it, receiving it and reflecting it.

I’m not suggesting all of us can or should live life exactly as she does. (For one thing, the number of intact Christmas Bears in the world might approach extinction.) But the general lessons remain viable, whatever our situation or level of ability. Take time to truly see what’s around you. Experience the moment as a moment, without the fears of the past or the dread of the future. Share the good you find without hesitation.

It doesn’t have to be a Pollyanna approach, sweeping all the bad stuff into a corner and pretending it’s not there. But over time, it can take away some of the power that bad stuff has. When even simple things can be a source of wonder, it’s harder to hold onto fear and anger. Harder to remain behind walls when you’re always running to the windows. Harder to stand apart when any new person could be a new chance to share the joy you’ve found.

In a world torn down by fear, joy builds.

So go ahead. Look around. See what you find.

The Christmas lights are waiting.

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Hands of Hope

There’s an exhaustion that threatens to border on despair. I think a lot of us are there now. I know I am.

I’m tired of this.

What else can you be when you see the same situations play themselves out over and over again? New shooters. New victims. New settings, from Colorado Springs to San Bernardino. And exactly the same results.

I’m tired of our communities becoming a roll call of blood.

I’m tied of the wait to learn a killer’s name, tired of the endless gabble and chatter and theorizing when it’s revealed.

I’m tired of the argument that’s become ritual, as we raise the points we know so well. Guns. Mental illness. Terrorism. Rights. Needs. Like a tae kwon do training pattern, we pose and shake the skies, only to end up right back where we started.

To have this happen in a sacred season seems a grim joke. And yet it’s the time we need the reminder more than ever.

Now, most of all, we have to have hope.

It sounds kind of insubstantial, doesn’t it? Of all the virtues that get celebrated coming into Christmas, hope may be the most misunderstood. It doesn’t get the full spotlight that basks over love. It’s not directly celebrated in carol after carol like peace or joy. When it comes up in the season at all, it’s a quick mention, almost glancing:

A thrill of hope, the weary world rejoicing …

Respite in the midst of exhaustion. Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it?

But how?

Let me make one thing clear. This is not optimism. A simple conviction that “Hey, everything’s going to be OK” will burn out fast in the face of everything besieging it. Hope has more than good feelings behind it. Hope is putting your sweat where your dreams are.

Hope is the soldier of World War II who can’t see the end of the conflict, but throws himself into it, convinced that his one life can still make a difference.

Hope is the civil rights worker of the 1950s, for whom the vision of freedom seems impossibly far away, who nonetheless keeps marching and speaking and battling to make it happen a little sooner.

Hope is what keeps the teacher at a classroom. The policeman on a beat. It’s what fuels the best of marriages, the kind that didn’t stop all their energy on the altar but kept pouring it into every passing minute and hour and day.

Hope means work. To paraphrase a favorite writer, once you say that problems can be solved, that better is possible, you have to get off your duff and do something.

That’s what can transform a “weary world.”

Despair is easy. You just sit back, let the world happen, and say “told you so.” Hope can wear you out to the point where it almost breaks you. But it’s also the only thing that gives any of us a fighting chance.

This last year has been a quest for hope in our house. Ever since my wife Heather was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, we’ve had a lot to do. There have been medicines to try, work schedules to balance, a life to somehow keep going in the midst of everything. And it’s tempting to just sit down and shout at the heavens “I CAN’T DO IT!”

Sometimes we do. Everyone needs to retreat sometimes. But eventually we keep going. We have to. Or it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Hope asks a lot. But it’s the only way to move forward. It’s the only way to move at all.

Are we ready to try it?

It means more than hand-wringing and pained pronouncements. It requires more than a hashtag and a Facebook post. If we’re going to break the cycle of death, we have to be ready to fix our eyes on a goal and shoulder our piece of the work. It may not be monumental. It may seem hopelessly insignificant. But drops become a flood. And a flood can change landscapes.

Will we? Are we ready at last to take up the burden of hope?

I’m tired of what we’ve got.

Let’s wake our world.