Changing the world
November 7, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 12 Comments
image courtesy of photobucket.com
My daughter wants to change the world.
She’s nine, only a couple months removed from ten—that age when the world reveals itself to be a bit darker and more foreboding than once imagined, but it still retains a hue of rainbows and promise.
She’s studied history and knows about things like wars and slavery. She catches snippets of the news and sees the hunger and the hate. She knows what rape means. A few weeks ago, someone in her classroom was caught selling weed.
“Marijuana is bad, Daddy,” she told me. I told her yes, it was.
Much of me says it’s too early for any of this. I didn’t know what marijuana was until I was well into my teens, and my childhood was largely spent pondering the hitch in my baseball swing than the socio-economic ills of modern society. But these are different times, I suppose. Everything seems to be happening so fast. You try to let your kids be kids, but the world gets in the way.
My daughter, she doesn’t hide from any of this. Sometime in the last few years the thin veil that hangs over the world slipped away and revealed its true face to her, and she did not look away in horror. She was not afraid. She simply saw that something was broken and knew she was the one to fix it.
I can understand this. From the time I was eighteen until almost thirty, I felt the same way. I was going to be the one to fix the world. I was going to be the one to make a difference. And I acted as such in my own warped, disillusioned way until the day I realized just how tiny and powerless I was.
My daughter will learn that one day, too. I suppose I could try and soften that blow now, gently tell her that she isn’t all she thinks herself to be, but I won’t. There are things best learned while standing and things you can only learn after a fall. That lesson is of the latter. Most of the important ones are.
But on the other side of that she will learn one of the more valuable lessons in life, and that is that none of us can change the world. It is too big. We are too small. It has always been that way, and it always will.
That’s no cause for surrender, though. That’s what I’ll tell my daughter. That’s what I discovered for myself. Because even if we can’t change the whole world, we can change tiny pieces of it. We can change the small part of the universe around us. We may not be able to save millions, but we may be able to save one.
It’s the small scale that counts—doing the little things in a big way. Maybe one day my daughter will cure cancer or end hunger and make it rain in the desert. Maybe she will fight for peace where there is war and teach people to replace hate with love. But in the meantime, she can smile at a stranger and say hello. She can plant a flower where there is only muddy soil. She can choose to believe and not doubt.
In the end, that’s all we can do.
Cleaning up the world
October 5, 2010 by Billy Coffey · 14 Comments
image courtesy of photobucket.com
To work at a college is to have the opportunity to live your life in reverse. To see yourself as the person you used to be. True for me, anyway. I listen to their stories and hear their dreams and realize both sound familiar. They’re much the same as mine were, once upon a time.
There is a sense of determination among them, an anticipation. It’s almost palpable. They’re at that golden age in life when they’re both informed of the happenings of the world and determined to do something about them. And though the thousand or so students here differ in beliefs and opinions, they are united in this one important sense:
They are all convinced the world needs a good cleaning up.
Many more than you might think are here for simply that reason. They’re learning and preparing to go forth into the dark lands outside these ivory walls and do some good. To clean up. They see The Way Things Are and believe theirs is the generation who will put a stop to it all.
But there’s much they can do while they’re here, too. There are clubs and protests and candlelight vigils for everything from tolerance to global warming to ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They write articles for the school newspaper on equality. Each of these activities are undertaken with a sense of excitement and passion you’d expect to find in young adults. They’re fighting the good fight and smiling as they go.
That was me once. I was never one for clubs and protests and candlelight vigils, but I did write articles. And I did believe the world needed a good cleaning up. Believed I was the sort of person to do it, too. I had all the excitement and passion in the world behind me to push me ahead. I promised myself that things would be better one day and that my generation would be the ones to thank for it.
It’s funny what people believe when they’re young. How that excitement and passion is the result of a blind expectation rooted not in reality, but in the idealistic dreams of youth.
You, dear reader, know this. I’m sure of it. Because like me, you likely once thought much the same. But the big dreams we sometimes have tend to shrink as time wears on. Where they once lifted us up in possibility, they soon begin to weigh us down in doubt. We may know of the world at twenty, but we cannot fathom it. Not yet. That comes later, when job and family and responsibility appear. When getting ahead is narrowed into getting by. And we see then for the first time this horrible truth—things are too big for us. We are not the stalwart captains of hope and change we once believed we were; our determination instead resides in surviving this day to face the next.
We no longer wish to change the world. All we want is to make sure the world doesn’t change us. That would be enough. We don’t like thinking we’ll lose in this life, even if winning seems unfeasible. Fighting to a draw, then, is the best we think we can do.
That’s what I think about when I see these students every day. About how their passion will be tempered against the hardness of a world they can only flirt with and not yet love. I wonder how kind the coming years will be to them, what they will lose and then gain from the loss.
And through it all they will be nagged by the very notion that still nags you and me, the notion that the world does indeed need a good cleaning up. We’re all right in believing that. Where they’re wrong now and I was wrong once is believing that cleaning should begin at the upper reaches of our society and drip down onto everyone else. I don’t believe that to be true. Not anymore.
Because now I know better. Now I know that if I ever want to help clean up the world, I have to start by cleaning up myself.
This post is part of the blog carnival on Healing, hosted by Bridget Chumbley. To read more, please visit her site.
Battling the Urps
April 30, 2009 by Billy Coffey · 36 Comments
(This post was first published as a column in the Staunton, Virginia News Leader on April 26, 2009)
I have had the hiccups for two days now. Not kidding.
It started as I was putting the kids to bed. One little hic, followed by another, followed by a double: hic-hic.
To my children, this is the funniest thing they have ever seen. Because these are not the sort of tiny urps you can keep to yourself. No, these are violent, thrashing inhalations that scramble my insides and cause the people around me to stare. And aside from a hour or so here and there of blissful calm, they will not stop.
I think I may be going insane.
Hiccups is technically known as singultus. “A quick, involuntary inhalation that follows a spasm of the diaphragm and is suddenly checked by closure of the glottis, producing a short, relatively sharp sound.” So says my dictionary.
Caused by “many central and peripheral nervous system disorders, all from injury or irritation to the phrenic and vagus nerves, as well as toxic or metabolic disorders affecting aforementioned systems.” So says Google. And if you can figure out what exactly that means, please let me know.
As far as cures go, it seems medical science is a little lacking. Drugs, of course, are an option. And also something called “digital rectal massage.”
I’m not sure what that means, either. But no…way.
The tried-and-true cures of holding my breath and getting scared haven’t worked, though my son continues to run up to me and shout “BOO DADDY BOO!!”
Undaunted, I am now studying the possible causes of my condition:
Lack of water. No, that can’t be it.
Eating too fast. A possibility, given the hectic nature of a normal day. But as this began in the peace and quiet of home, I don’t buy it.
Being hungry for a while. Another possibility. But as we had dinner just a few hours before this all started, I’d say no.
Laughing vigorously. A very good possibility.
Talking for too long. Me? No.
Overstretching of the neck. Huh?
Not much help there, either.
So here I sit, trying to type, hitting the backspace whenever my body convulses and renders “type” to “tyyype.”
Still, it isn’t all bad. Charles Osborne had the hiccups from 1922 to 1990, a record sixty-eight years. Since I’m competitive by nature, I now have something to shoot for. And I am slowly building a remarkable set of abs.
Besides, I would much rather have this sort of hiccup than the alternative definition: “To experience a temporary decline, setback, interruption, etc.”
Oh, yes. I’ve had plenty of those.
The interesting thing is that the causes of physical hiccups are the very same as the causes of spiritual ones:
Lack of water. Not the liquid kind. The other: “Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again,” Jesus told the woman at the well, “but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never thirst; but the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life.”
Eating too fast. And not just eating. We judge and condemn and speak and live too fast as well. How much beauty and joy do we miss in this life because we simply won’t slow down? Too much.
Being hungry for a while. Not a good thing for your body. Worse for your soul. Because if you’re hungry enough, even poison tastes good.
Laughing vigorously. Yes, life should be enjoyed. And yes, it should be fun. But let’s not forget that we’re here to make this world a better place. That takes work, serious work, and a lot of it.
Talking for too long. As my Grandma said, “God gave you two ears and one mouth so you can listen twice as much as you talk.” Our words are precious things of mighty power. Use too many of them, though, and both the preciousness and power wane.
Overstretching of the neck. This one hit me particularly hard. I’m always trying to crane my neck to get a better view, whether it’s to where I’m going or where I’ve been. But it’s more important to pay attention to where you are. The best way to make sure tomorrow will be fine and yesterday won’t matter is to take care of today.
How this will end is anyone’s question. But I know this: I would rather hic like this in my gut forever than hic one moment in my life.
Resolutions
January 1, 2009 by Billy Coffey · 11 Comments
My New Year’s Resolution lasted exactly twelve hours and thirty-seven minutes. A new record. All because I didn’t bother asking for any help.
Doesn’t really matter what my resolution was. Nothing major or life-altering. I’ve learned my lesson in that regard. There is a rule for making resolutions, and that is to keep them small. Manageable. I’ve tried the big resolutions, the ones that promise to change you and change you well, but the result was always still the same. “Shoot for the moon,” the expression goes. Because even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars. While that aphorism is inspiring, it isn’t very realistic. Most times you’ll miss the moon and the stars and crash somewhere in the desert.
Trust me. I know.
Still, I like the thought of bettering oneself. Of fixing the broken things in us and changing our outlook or our place in life. And that’s what resolutions are for. It is, perhaps, the only time of the year some people take an honest look at themselves: what is wrong? What will make me a better person?
And this, the big one: what should I change?
My resolution involved change. A change of behavior and habit that, while harming no one but me and even then only slightly, proved too difficult for me to do. And that’s frustrating. If I can’t even change one small thing about me, what can I change?
In a word, nothing. Me, you, the nice folks down the road, we’re all the same. We’re fallen creatures in need of a great amount of help. And without that help, we can do nothing.
Six years ago found me at a crossroads in my life. I was sick, both within and without. Ready to find the nearest tall building so I could make a slow trip up and a fast trip down. The problem? Well, the problem was that I was thirty years old and still suffering from the same problem I was at sixteen. I was tired of ignoring it, and more tired of fighting it. Every year I would vow a change, and every day after would prove that change wouldn’t be coming.
Help finally came by the counselor at church, so sat me down on one snowy day in March and told me four things.
One was that God was the only one who could change me.
Two was that God would only change me if I asked Him.
Three was that I would only ask Him if I was truly ready to change.
And four was that I would only be truly ready when the pain of staying the same was greater than the pain of changing.
I’d waited my whole life to hear those words.
I think we all want to change something about us. But it’s hard, isn’t it? Hard because change hurts. It’s work. Tough, sweaty labor that leaves us weak and exhausted. It’s easy to give up. Easy to put things off until tomorrow or next week or next year. Because let’s face it, the pain of changing is often a lot worse than the pain of staying the same.
But we aren’t called to stay the same, are we?
We are called to become more. More than we know or dream. More than we can do on our own. So don’t be afraid to ask for a little help to change, whether that help comes from a friend, a counselor, or prayer. There isn’t anyone alive who doesn’t need an ear to whisper to, a shoulder to cry on, or a pair of arms to rest in. Everyone needs help from time to time. Even God needs two mountains to make a valley.
Author of Snow Day and Paper Angels (November 2011), both by FaithWords. But don't let that fool you. I'm just as confused as anyone.
And that is fine with me, because the great thing about wandering around in the fog is that you never know what you might run into.
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