Revisiting Resolutions

How are we doing on our New Year's resolutions? Maybe it seems like it's a little early to ask, but a 2015 poll by the Marist College found that one month into the new year, about a third of people who made New Year's resolutions had stopped their efforts to lose weight, decrease spending and become better people. Six months into the year, the faithful resolutioners had dropped by more than half. So that's why I'm asking how we're doing in the middle of January. It seems like it's the safest time to ask.

I made a few resolutions myself, everything from write a novel and read the classics to stretch in the mornings and wear more sunscreen. I've actually been doing OK on the sunscreen one, but I've been less successful getting to the others. I'm telling myself that I need an adjustment period before I launch into better health and personal improvement. If I start too fast, I might hurt myself. So I am going to start writing the first chapter of my novel. I'm just going to do it tomorrow.

How do we end up failing to keep resolutions? And I don't just mean New Year's resolutions. Efforts to be better might sound a little louder on the first of January, but they should also sound familiar. We tell ourselves: I should walk more. I'll save gas and get exercise. Or, I should eat less junk food. I should leave the house earlier or more often. Or I shouldn't get so frustrated with things. I should try to see things from another perspective.

I believe that there are a couple of reasons why our resolutions to be better fail. One, which I think New Year's resolutions in particular are prone to, is the idea that we are still the same old people. For example, suppose I resolved to eat less sugar in the new year. At first, I'd cut out sodas and pastries, everything added and artificial and sweet. I'd be a genuine abstainer.

But then, I might be in a hurry one morning, and I would swap my regular breakfast of black coffee and a hard-boiled egg for a powdered sugar doughnut. But I'd tell myself, it's OK. It's just once. Then later, I'm at dinner party, and someone offers me dessert. And I would tell myself it was OK, it would be rude not to accept. The next thing you know, I'm hiding bags of jelly beans in laundry hampers. But that would be OK too, because those are there for hard days, and I've got it under control.

And then, when I've had a really hard day, I'd happen to see a cake on sale at the supermarket, and that will be it. I'd buy the cake, bring it home and sit down in front of it with a knife and fork. But even then, it would still be OK. Why? Because I'd tell myself that I'm no different now than I was last year. I'm still that guy, I've always been that guy, that cake-eating guy. That's just who I am. And then, I'd eat the cake.

There is truth to that. If I was that cake eating guy, I will have always had been that cake eating guy. I could change my ways, move to a new state and grow a mustache, but all that cake I ate will still have been eaten by me. And that can be demoralizing. If we start to think of our pasts as sticky, we are bound to get stuck. That's called falling back into bad habits.

It's somewhat comical when it's about cake, but it's less so when someone decides they just are that person who drinks too much or that person who loses their temper. That's when you don't just fall into bad habits—you can fall and hurt yourself and the people around you.

What can we do to avoid doing that? I stumbled upon a biblical suggestion. I say that I stumbled upon it because it comes from a passage that we don't typically associate with self-improvement.

In the sixth chapter of the gospel of Mark, Jesus instructed his disciples on their mission. The passage reads: “He said to them, 'Wherever you enter a house, stay there until you leave the place. If any place will not welcome you and they refuse to hear you, as you leave, shake off the dust that is on your feet as a testimony against them.' So they went out and proclaimed that all should repent.”

That passage is rightly understood to be Jesus' instructions for how his disciples should to conduct themselves in public—from how to heal to the clothes they should wear—which gives us a peek inside the workings of the early Christian church. But it's also clear that Jesus was speaking somewhat symbolically.

Shaking dust from one's feet was about more than personal hygiene. Religious scholars interpret it as responding to a host's hospitality, or lack thereof, but it has always been interpreted in the abstract—less about the dust itself and more about what it meant metaphorically.

So what happens when we apply that abstraction to ourselves? Can we shake our own dust from our own feet? How do we respond to the people we were in the past who were bad hosts, bad stewards of our spiritual selves? How do we respond to the people we were who were ignorant, who lacked control, who hurt more than they helped?

We do what Jesus told all his disciples to do. We stay as long as we need to in their presence, and then we shake their dust from our feet and leave. The people we were in the past will refuse to hear us—they cannot hear us—but we can hear them. We can learn from them, we can learn to be better than we once were, and then we can release the people we were and embrace the people we are to become.

Jesus was instructing his disciples to exist within the moment they existed, to stay in that place until they left. It was a call to be present, a call to be mindful, and it was a call to not remain in that place once they were no longer needed or in need, once they were no longer there.

But maybe we're having trouble getting started—maybe we're having trouble leaving that place and leaving behind that person. That's the other big problem with New Year's resolutions, especially if we're caught up in who we were. How can we release the old and then embrace the new? How can we begin being different? How can we begin being better?

That ancient Chinese saying about how the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step actually is an ancient Chinese saying. It comes from the Tao Te Ching, the collection of Taoist wisdom attributed to Lao Tsu, and my favorite rendition of it comes from the translation by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English. It reads: “A journey of a thousand miles starts under one's feet.”

That's my favorite translation because I like that image—the journey that begins under one's feet. I like it because it indicates the journeyer is already on the journey because they are already on the road. It's under their feet.

Religion, a spiritual practice, offers us a number of tools that help us move toward our goals of personal improvement: moral guidelines to help us treat other people better; metaphysical focus to help us see what really matters; positive rituals to give us the discipline to replace old habits. But those tools cannot put us on the path to personal improvement because we're already there.

We're already on the path. We're on the path to being different. We're on the path to being better. Our journeys have already started. They started under our feet, under our sandals, while we were looking somewhere else. So we don't have to force ourselves to begin because we've already begun. All we have to do is to keep moving forward.

Toy Drive 2018

Considering where we were earlier this month, Southern Californians have a lot to be thankful for this week. The Woolsey Fire, which burned more than 150 square miles across Los Angeles and Ventura counties and took three lives, is almost completely contained. Thousands of people who were forced to evacuate are able to return to their homes and start the long process of putting things back together.

From national cable news stations to local media outlets that were in the heart of the blaze, images of the fire and its aftermath are everywhere. At the fire's peak, more than 250,000 people were displaced. Now that it's nearly contained, the number of buildings destroyed stands at 1,500. Even if we've only seen the pictures, perhaps we can imagine the heartache and sense of loss some are experiencing right now.

Christmas is a time when we're called upon to spread joy, so that's when the Christian Institute holds its annual toy drive for local children in need. This year, there is plenty of need in communities like Thousand Oaks, Malibu and more, so we'll be coordinating with local fire departments to make sure we meet that need as best we can. Not everyone who lost a home is a homeowner, and some were forced to flee in cribs and car seats.

From Monday, Nov. 26 to Wednesday, Dec. 19, we'll be accepting new, unwrapped toys and games for babies, toddlers and children. If you plan to donate, please deposit toys in either the red or silver box in our community classroom. Wrapped toys will not be accepted.

Remember, we're far from the only place taking donations. Local chapters of the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, the Humane Society and United Way, as well as the Los Angeles County Fire Department Foundation, have all pledged to help, and time or money donated to them will go toward healing the region after the fire.

The holiday season is usually coming to an end when we start passing out presents, but this year, consider beginning the season with a gift—whether its time spent volunteering or a toy dropped off for a child who's lost a home. It might not seem like much in the wake of the fire, but being remembered at Christmas always means something.

Defusing Anger Without and Within

How do you feel right now? Are you OK? I hope so, because there's a lot of anger out there today. And you don't have to take my word for it. The evidence is everywhere. You can turn on a television set or locate a newspaper or do some man in the street interviews, and you'll find that people are angry.

When people are angry, they spread it around like influenza. They spread it through fear. They spread it through violence. They spread it through subtler ways as well. Politicians, national and local and on all sides of the aisle, frustrate and alarm us with their rhetoric or policies or failures to act. The eternally talking heads of the news keep us engaged in states of hot rage and cold concern.

It doesn't even have come from large, overarching social structures like politics or media. Anger has a way of trickling down into our daily lives, putting us on edge and pushing every little problem into a big, dramatic event. Those little things can make us just as disturbed as the big things, especially if we're already living in an anger zone.

It's not good for us to live with all that anger all the time. We know it's not. It doesn't feel good. It's bad for our blood pressure. It's exhausting. It drives people away. And yet, we have seemingly become a constantly outraged society. What can we do about all the anger that's out there?

There are some suggestions in religion and spirituality. Even though it seems like anger is a particularly contemporary issue, we have to remember that it's been around for a while. Religion specializes in issues that have been around for a while because it's also been around for a while. In fact, one of the pet peeves that some critics of religion have is that it's based on ancient texts that are too old and out of touch to have anything worthwhile to say to the modern world.

What those critics don't seem to realize is that that's exactly what gives spirituality its strength. It's timeless. It deals with timeless themes: the infinite cosmos and our place in it; birth, life and death; how to live a good life. These are things that mattered the ancients and they matter to us.

The issues that religion deals with are as old as the species, but its solutions to those issues and ways of dealing with them have a unique perspective precisely because religion is so old. It's a human creation, there's no doubt about that, but it's far older than anything else we've created to deal with eternity.

The insight that religion offers has a perspective that comes with time. That's why the age of sacred texts, as well as the temporal distance of the words and actions of holy women and men, are all so valuable. They have weight of something that matters because it's lasted. So what do the world's religions say about anger, about dealing with it where we find it.

Unsurprisingly, they have a lot to say. The Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hahn said that Buddha viewed angry feelings as knots in your consciousness that blocked you up, tied you down and poisoned you with cravings and confusion. The Greek philosopher Aristotle and the Catholic scholar and saint Thomas Aquinas both cautioned that anger could strip you of reason, cloud your thinking and even rob you of your humanity.

Medieval Japanese swordsmen sought a state of mind called “mushin,” which means “no mind” or “empty mind.” For them, it was an ideal state of consciousness, free of the attachments of anger or fear or prejudice. The mythologist Joseph Campbell, on an episode of the 1988 PBS documentary series “The Power of Myth,” illustrated it with a story.

He said: “Let me tell you one story here, of a samurai warrior, a Japanese warrior, who had the duty to avenge the murder of his overlord. And he actually, after some time, found and cornered the man who had murdered his overlord. And he was about to deal with him with his samurai sword, when this man in the corner, in the passion of terror, spat in his face. And the samurai sheathed the sword and walked away. Why did he do that? Because he was made angry, and if he had killed that man, then it would have been a personal act, another kind of act; that's not what he had come to do.”

There are two things we can learn from that story. The first is how to deal with our own anger. It takes time, something that timeless religion can help us see. The book of Proverbs says in the 15th chapter: “Those who are hot-tempered stir up strife, but those who are slow to anger calm contention. The way of the lazy is overgrown with thorns, but the path of the upright is a level highway.”

Combating our anger takes time that is time taken out of being angry, the slowness that we call patience or calm or inner peace, the control which the samurai neatly exhibited. Combating anger also takes the time that is the effort we put into practicing that control, the time it took for the samurai to walk away from his own ego and rage.

It might not be easy, but we can do it. The age of religion indicates that we have been doing it for thousands of years. Religion has tools like prayer, meditation and ritual, which are meant to give us pause and put things into perspective, to make sense of the world, and to see more and lose our tempers less.

When we get angry, we can lose more than our tempers. Like the philosophers feared, we can lose everything that makes us who we are—our perspectives, our sense of judgment, our families and friends. The sharp-tongued American writer Ambrose Bierce once said: “Speak when you are angry, and you will make the best speech that you'll ever regret.” We all have seen that there are some people who are not satisfied to merely speak in anger; they are willing to do much worse.

But we know all that. Unfortunately, everyone knows that. Anger is bad and we have to hold our tempers in check or terrible things can happen. But what do we do when we encounter all the anger that's out there right now, the anger without as well as the anger within? The second thing we can learn from Campbell's story is this: We cannot control someone else's anger. The samurai couldn't control when the killer spat on him. All he could do was walk away.

When we're angry, when we're in a state where everything about us has been stripped away by rage, what makes the situation better? Is it someone else getting even angrier at us? Someone shouting right back in our faces? Does that comfort us and make us feel better? I don't think so. What we need is someone who defuses us, who removes rather builds up our fire until there's nothing left to burn.

The rules of religion guide us toward a personal spirituality, toward the tools that help us deal with the everyday as well as the eternal. What tools work for you? What calms you down and comforts you? Is it silent prayer? Mindful breathing? As a spiritual seeker, it's your responsibility to find out and to bring it to bear in your daily life.

Anger is something that will pass. Anger always passes. We can all boil over with rage, but we run out of steam eventually. That's the nature of the beast. Again, the 15th chapter of the book of Proverbs begins: “A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.” You might not be the one who started the anger, the violence and fear, but you don't have to be the one who keeps it going.