I have a regular column in my town's bi-weekly alternative newspaper, the peculiarly named Salem Weekly, whose web site is called WillametteLive for some peculiar reason.
(Hey, it's an alternative paper; my column is called Strange Up Salem; peculiar is good.)
In the issue that hit the streets today I wrote about yes, yes, yes. The column is philosophical enough to merit sharing in this here Church of the Churchless.
Plus, a bit of Googling of my own websites (you can do it yourself via the search box in the right sidebar) turned up a 2007 post on a similar theme: "Beyond religion's No to Yes, Yes, Yes."
Here's my column. If you aren't familiar with the Oregon Country Fair, I've shared photos of this one-of-a-kind event here, here, here, and here. (But most of those on Flickr are way better.)
Say yes to all of life
“Yes, Yes, Yes.” I enjoy seeing these words colorfully emblazoned on banners at the marvelous Oregon Country Fair in Veneta (a must-go July experience for lovers of alternative reality).
This is the heart of strangeness, the vitalizing power that makes life into passionate ooh’s and ah’s rather than listless oh yeah’s and so what’s.
Yes. This is. We are. It barely matters what the “is” and “are” consist of.
Opening ourselves to it, embracing it, saying yes to it, glorying in the mystery of how this particular slice of external and internal reality came to be after 14 billion years of big bang evolving — such is living life with eyes positively wide open.
I don’t mean to sound Pollyannaish, excessively optimistic. Life can suck. It can be painful, depressing, disappointing, tragic.
But saying yes to all that is a lot better than denying it. Kudos to the folks in Salem who organized the Stories from the Dark Side series at the Grand Theatre (last Thursday, May and June). Great idea, inviting people to share tales from the darker side of themselves.
Recently I came across one of those wise Twitter epigrams that say so much in 140 characters or less: “Self hate lives in the gap of what you think you should be and what you actually are.”
Yes. This is what you are. This is what I am. Yet also more, because of Yes, and Yes, and Yes… without end.
Back in the 1960’s us Vietnam War-era protesters often heard the words, “Love it or leave it.” Meaning, the United States. It was a stupid saying. But changing one word puts it in accord with my Yes philosophy of life
Love it and leave it. Love what is true right now inside and outside of us. And leave that behind as we open ourselves to the fresh reality of what is possible in the next ever-changing moments.
There always is another Yes. Until there isn’t. There’s no No, existentially speaking. So long as we live, we always are living positively, even in our deepest negativity.
Salem, like everywhere else, thrives when people are open to anything and anyone. Dogmatism, certainty, fixedness, rigidity: these confine the creativity of Yes.
Sure, not everything that is, is what we want. However, making desirable changes first requires seeing things as they are. Then the avenue to what should be opens up with the next “…and Yes.”
I meditate every morning. Today I repeated Yes, Yes, Yes as sort of a mantra. After a few minutes I felt the pleasure that often comes from hearing or saying “yes.”
(OK, not if you ask your boss if you’re being fired, but otherwise.)
Meditating did spur an uncomfortable yes-memory. When I proposed to my wife, the words came out so botched Laurel had to say, “Are you asking me to marry you?” Yes, I said.
Such is the power of yes. It transforms a bad beginning into a happy ending.
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Strange Up Salem seeks to lift our city’s Blah Curse. Give us a Facebook like. Brian Hines blogs at hinesblog.com
Brian,
Theme of saying "yes" resonates with a post by journalist/writer David McRaney: http://youarenotsosmart.com/2013/05/23/survivorship-bias/
In this post David McRaney explains why successful people are the people who say "yes" more often than the other. According to McRaney, successful people owe more of their success to luck than anything else and here is why:
.... the latest psychological research indicates that luck is a long mislabeled phenomenon. It isn’t a force, or grace from the gods, or an enchantment from fairy folk, but the measurable output of a group of predictable behaviors. Randomness, chance, and the noisy chaos of reality may be mostly impossible to predict or tame, but luck is something else. According to psychologist Richard Wiseman, luck – bad or good – is just what you call the results of a human being consciously interacting with chance, and some people are better at interacting with chance than others.
....Wiseman speculated that what we call luck is actually a pattern of behaviors that coincide with a style of understanding and interacting with the events and people you encounter throughout life. Unlucky people are narrowly focused, he observed. They crave security and tend to be more anxious, and instead of wading into the sea of random chance open to what may come, they remain fixated on controlling the situation, on seeking a specific goal. As a result, they miss out on the thousands of opportunities that may float by. Lucky people tend to constantly change routines and seek out new experiences. Wiseman saw that the people who considered themselves lucky, and who then did actually demonstrate luck was on their side over the course of a decade, tended to place themselves into situations where anything could happen more often and thus exposed themselves to more random chance than did unlucky people. The lucky try more things, and fail more often, but when they fail they shrug it off and try something else. Occasionally, things work out.
Wiseman told Skeptical Inquirer magazine that he likened it to setting loose two people inside an apple orchard, each tasked with filling up their baskets as many times as possible. The unlucky person tends to go to the same few spots over and over again, the basket holding fewer apples each visit. The lucky person never visits the same spot twice, and that person’s basket is always full. Change those apples to experiences, and imagine a small portion of those experiences lead to fame, fortune, riches, or some other form of happiness material or otherwise, and you can see that chance is not as terrifying as it first appears, you just need to learn how to approach it.
Posted by: Ania | June 19, 2014 at 03:18 PM
The unlucky person tends to go to the same few spots over and over again, the basket holding fewer apples each visit. The lucky person never visits the same spot twice, and that person’s basket is always full.
Not "always", but the strategy does yield more interesting, if not more gratifying, results. It's about taking a calculated risk instead of sticking with "the devil you know".
Posted by: cc | June 19, 2014 at 06:38 PM