Irritants

When I was a kid, we didn’t have peanut allergies and gluten allergies. I realize I’m voicing my inner grouchy old man here, but peanut butter and cyanide were not in the same category when I was in elementary school. This became the topic of conversation with a friend one morning, but this dialog took a different turn than your average “retirees solving the world’s problems over coffee” conversation. My friend has her doctorate in medical things, so I had to ask--what caused the avalanche of allergies? She suggested one theory that I found particularly striking: Several generations of antibiotic and antibacterial use has left our immune systems underexposed to allergens and irritants. Now our puny defenses can’t protect our bodies from what were once merely low-level threats. It would seem that isolation isn’t the best strategy for health. I feel a metaphor coming on.

The possibility of “something bad happening” has kept many good people sequestered to the safety of their own living rooms. They don’t risk meeting someone they might disagree with. The mere suggestion of a contrary influence must be shunned. Even a conversation about people different from them has them breaking out in boils. They might be nobly motivated to be the best of society, but instead they become the armada of the anemic .

The healthiest people I know have been “exposed” to life. There’s something to be gained by exposure. They don’t blindly endorse the opinions of everyone, but they aren’t afraid of conversations.  Healthy people know encountering others is key to growth. Leaving the safety of one’s germ-free domicile isn’t always easy, but neither is anything that makes you stronger. Interaction with others gives you perspective.

Visually, you gain perspective by seeing different things at once.  In life, you gain perspective by seeing different things at once. Everyone should experience a period of their life where they are a minority.  Everyone should personally know people who are very different from themselves. When you trade categories for first names, the world becomes a better place. What once irritated you can become a point of dialog. Your opinion might not shift far from your antiseptic-wiping comrades, but you will be much healthier.

You can hide and survive in life. Or, you can engage and thrive. If you’re still hiding behind your bible, open it up and read which approach Jesus did. He ate with religious leaders and partied with government workers. He hung out with the in-crowd and the outcasts, the purebreds and the half-breeds. Jesus turned out okay. Somehow he managed to love even the people he disagreed with. In our world that seems to be irritated by everything, maybe Jesus (aka “The Friend of Sinners”) has a better approach.

Having cake and eating cake

Having your cake and eating it too sounds like a sweet deal. You always have this nice cake sitting there, so whenever your sweet tooth beckons,  you tap your endless supply of cake. You have it. You eat it. Unfortunately, this spontaneously regenerating cake is regretfully rare in our universe. Everyone wants one, but nobody has one. Word on the street is you can’t have your cake and eat it, too.

That little saying about nonrenewable baked goods points to an immutable truth in life: You can’t do whatever you want without consequences. If you want to lay on the couch and eat fast food every day,  you won’t stay trim and buff. If you want to get wasted on Friday, Saturday is going to be rough. If you want to live like hell today, don’t expect a life like heaven tomorrow. Consequences are consequential.

All of us go through phases of living like we’ve got perpetual cake. Then at some point, we wake up smelling like bakery vomit and realize that nothing is left of our cake but crumbs. That’s when many of us realize that we aren’t exceptions to the laws of life. We scratch our cake-eating heads and wonder if someone has figured out a way to eat just enough cake. That search takes us to a chick named wisdom.

Wisdom is the collection of best cake-eating practices. Wisdom knows you can’t have it all, and she knows how much you should have. Wisdom knows how to best live life today so it doesn’t suck tomorrow. You might be surprised where this metaphorical babe hangs out--in church.

Good religion has balancing guidelines for how life is best lived to the max. A “cake rationing plan” of sorts. When you’re in the “wahoo, I’ve got cake!” phase of life, adhering to guidelines seems like obeying killjoy rules. The only thing better than a little cake is a lot of cake, right? But when you walk in the kitchen and find no cake for the week because you inhaled it all last night, following a plan starts to seem like a good option.

Tired of being cakeless? There’s a wise lady you should go see.

The Boredom Threshold

I recently sat through a couple hours of a civic meeting. When I left, more than half of the agenda items were untouched. No stranger to boring situations, I've observed that people reach a point when patient listening moves beyond their grasp. The exact point varies from person to person, but when the “boredom threshold” is achieved, some action must be taken. In said meeting, some found spam emails on their phones become strangely interesting, some brashly cleared their throats in a failed attempt to rush a speaker, some snored gently as consciousness itself became too great a chore, and others collected their papers and walked out the door.

When the boredom threshold is hit in life, action must be taken. We are compelled to break away from the usual “wake-shower-work/school-TV-sleep” routine and do something that actually gives us a bit of a buzz. Clearly everyone has a different threshold for this. “Adventure” for one person means jumping out of a perfectly good airplane, and for another it means an evening of watching NBC instead of the usual ABC. You weren’t designed to whittle your life away in abject boredom. There are too many great experiences in life for you to re-waste your time re-reading the Twilight Series.

When the boredom threshold light glows on our dashboard, it tells us we’ve been fueled with too much caution. If we don’t pop the hood and add some risk to our lives, our vehicle might just die on the side of the road from ennui. Part of our human engineering is this need to mix it up from time to time. Occasionally, you’ve just got to do something different. Picking  that “something different” is where things might get messy.

The boredom threshold dictates that your life needs to a shift from caution to risk, but here’s the tricky part: nowhere in your owner’s manual does it say that you need to do something “bad”. Clearly this is confusing, because frequent “boredom busters” include Vegas benders, imbibing too much cheap beer, and getting unprofessional with that girl in accounting. We muster up the energy to break from orbit, and then we fly to planet evil. Somehow, we get convinced that our break with the mundane requires a break with morality. It’s a lie.

When your boredom boils over, it’s time for a risk. Maybe you need to round up friends and family for the most epic croquet game ever. Maybe you need to convince a friend to jump out of a perfectly good airplane with you. Maybe you need to go cook a meal at a homeless shelter. Maybe you need to find a problem that no one else is solving and take the first step to solve it. Maybe your boredom threshold breach is your signal to kick in the gates of hell and do something good in this world.

Reached the boredom threshold yet? Go do something…good.