Return To Honor

Charles Dickens wrote in A Tale Of Two Cities the classic line, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” At no other time in my tumultuous life have I known that to be more true than right now. I look ahead and I look around, and I see and feel dread, fear, anger and despair, and yet in the midst of it and beyond it in truly glorious colors, shades and hues I also see and feel beauty, hope, promise and even joy.
How is that possible, and which is really true? A teacher of mine once said that everything has its balancing counterpart, and if we can step back in our minds far enough from any given event or experience, we will see the balance of all forces. Many of our great religions teach us in some form or another that “God gives us hardships in direct proportion to what we are capable of handling.” How capable we are of “handling” anything, I believe, is the degree to which we are able to “step back” and look objectively at the dilemmas of our lives. Our willingness to do that enables us to see those dilemmas for what they really are…opportunities to gain strength, insight and clarity about things we only thought we knew about before, or had learned…or perhaps resisted out of fear or discomfort or arrogance.
Whatever they are or have been for you, they are not insurmountable or as bad as they may seem, no matter how grim or awful they may look. They are only that way to the extent that you fear them, resist them or detest them. It is vital that you do not see anything or anyone as “doing something to you,” but rather that you have created the experience yourself through many different devices, beliefs and patterns of behavior and thinking for your own growth and transformation. “God” didn’t do anything to you but give you grace…which is your own spirit to draw upon for insight, inspiration and faith to accept what is before you and what you’ve left behind you in your wake, and do something positive and counterbalancing not just to make it right but to propel you out of the storms and into the bright, sunny light of day beyond them.
If you choose to see only the storms and the difficulties, you will only continue to create them as further “evidence” that life is stormy…the “worst of times,” as Dickens wrote. If you choose, however, to see the storms as merely experiences you have created to learn something or simply something to experience and gain wisdom from, then they will abate and you will see and experience what a friend of mine and I coined recently as “tangible miracles”…things that happen for no particular reason that bring new light, new friendships, unforeseen encounters and “chance” meetings with others who suddenly make life so much more meaningful, joyous and fun. Suddenly, it’s the best of times.
You and you alone have the power to change even the worst of maelstroms in your life into forces of good and decency. Call on God or Allah or the Great Spirit, if you wish, to help you through it, but know in your deepest psyche that it is you that determines by your daily choices how to view the problems in your life in such a way that you can thank them, bless them and use them so you can stop hacking and slashing your way through a jungle when there is a paved road only a few yards away.
You can keep hacking and slashing if you wish to, but at least you’ll know the road is always there. Then you can stop from time to time, raise your goblet in toast to the journey you’re on…and laugh. It’s only as bad as we think it is.
To the journey…

Don Kirchner

Sedona, AZ

In a recent broadcast by National Public Radio on the plight of men locked up before trial and held for lack of sufficient funds to make bail, the commentator said that there are now more children impacted by their fathers being incarcerated than there are from divorce. I haven’t researched that rather shocking statistic, but as one who had an opportunity to experience such a thing on a first-hand basis for two and a half years over two decades ago, I have no doubt that it’s true.

According to www.divorcerate.org, present divorce rates in America run from nearly 50% for first marriages to as high as 73% for third marriages, so if NPR’s commentator is even close to being accurate, that’s a lot of children with no father present in their lives. Add them together, and it’s clear that America is a nation of “fatherless” children. Given this nation’s justice system’s obsessiveness with locking people up for nonviolent and drug related crimes, it’s no wonder that we can’t build prisons fast enough, or that we continue to have such exorbitant crime rates. We’ve got a burgeoning population of children with no place to go and no father to help them figure things out.

Before you think to yourself, “Well, what kind of fathers would a bunch of inmates and criminals make, anyway?” consider that the majority…not the minority…of inmates in America’s prisons today are not the heinous, scarred and tattooed gladiators one sees in the movies and television programs. A full 70% of those incarcerated are for nonviolent, first and second offenses…usually drug-related crimes. Even so, I’ve watched first-hand even the “gladiators” in visiting rooms, bouncing small children on their knees, and being warm, kind and loving with them…and returning to their cell blocks fighting back the tears everyone knows are flooding their eyes.

The damage, sociologically, to this country in locking men (and women) up for interminable periods for crimes of a relatively harmless nature is far-reaching, and much more destructive in the long run than all the crimes put together that create such a rip in the fabric of our society. We’re breeding generation after generation of young criminals, at a rate that far exceeds that of radical Islamic terrorists who cultivate and train their young children to become suicide bombers…and we’re oblivious to how and why crime is so rampant in our streets.

I’m not suggesting that we do not punish law-breakers, by any means. I’m saying that we must have legislative reform in this critically important aspect of our development. We cannot continue to justify such extremes in retaliating against people who break the law, and expect that just because we remove them from our streets that we are going to be safer. There is a delusion in so thinking, because the more we do that, the more we ignore the children who are left to fend for themselves in an increasingly hostile world facing economic and political upheaval.

If we don’t take steps NOW to change the laws, and redirect those many individuals who can be trained to function more responsibly while performing community services instead of wasting away behind bars and Plexiglas cellblocks, we will soon find ourselves like I did once…facing the wrong end of a loaded gun while my car and pockets, and bank account were emptied. Thank God that at least one of those young perpetrators wasn’t quite yet so strung out on Meth that the chamber of that gun he held wasn’t emptied on me.

Don Kirchner

Sedona, Arizona

These are either the “best of times” or the “worst of times,” as Charles Dickens wrote in his Tale of Two Cities, depending upon how you choose to look at them…”choose” being the operative word. It’s all a matter of choice, really, even if you’re broke and facing a foreclosure, in how you deal with that dilemma. What will ultimately come of it depends entirely on how you choose to handle it.

If you have a bad attitude about what’s going on these days, you’re going to have some pretty bad times ahead…even if the economy should happen to turn around and real estate values go back up again. Your health and sense of well-being also will likely be affected negatively, and the worse you feel about any of that, the worse it will get.

If, on the other hand, you look for something good and decent in everything that happens…even the “bad” things…they will improve. Pollyanna was right…and now is the ideal opportunity to put her philosophy to the test. I have, and I can assure you that I’m well-qualified by now to tell you that it’s true.

A man I know fairly well runs a series of very large entrepreneurial training forums, and at one point he portrays in a very convincing way the nature of what he refers to as “fearstorms.” He uses film clips from “Jurassic Park” and a couple other very convincing movies to demonstrate how even the most seemingly menacing situations are just mental and emotional anticipation of things not always real. We make them real by fearing and resisting them. That’s not to say that what’s going on the world right now isn’t real, but rather it emphasizes the importance of taking charge of our lives and finding better, more effective ways of dealing with both real and imagined threats to our well-being.

WE get to choose how we feel about it…and our history books, movies, books and many personal stories of overcoming adversity in the world confirm over and over that we can not only get through difficult times, we can grow stronger in the process.

Find ways to feel better, love more, laugh a bit and trust yourself to make it through any challenge, and to do so with courage, honesty and integrity, and no matter what the difficulty may be that you face, you can and will get through it. Hate it, twist around it, deny it or manipulate people to help you get around it, and times will get harder for you. Accept it, deal with it, be honest about it and find ways to be kind and loving with those around you, and the best of times will surely be upon you…no matter what dark clouds may be out there.

They’re only fearstorms.

Don Kirchner
http://ReturnToHonor