purpose

The best things in us

April 6, 2020 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

A quick look at my website tells me that it’s been almost two years since I added a single word to this blog.

Aside from the (very) occasional update to social media, I’ve largely been absent from the internet. There are reasons for this, good ones and many, which will likely come up from time to time in the weeks and months ahead.

For those who have kindly reached out privately to make sure I am still alive, thank you. I very much am. And for those who have wondered if I’m still writing — yes, I also very much am.

But again, we’ll get to that.

Suffice it to say for now that there was some question if Billy Coffey should remain Billy Coffey or perform a bit of literary magic and become someone else, and that at some point in the last two years, the internet became little more to me than just a place where people shouted at each other. Both of those things made me realize that maybe the wisest decision was to take a nice long break and head back out into the real world.

It’s ironic that heading back out into the real world is what ended up bringing me back to my own little corner of the virtual one.

Because it’s crazy out there right now, isn’t it?

One month ago we were all under the impression that our lives were as solid as the world we walked upon. Now we’re coming to understand that was just a story we told ourselves to keep the monsters away. The truth is that life is a fragile thing, much like our happiness, our peace, and our plans for the future. Any one of them can be threatened at any time by any number of things. We’re nowhere near as big and strong as we think. A lot of us are figuring that out right now, myself included.

Like most of you, I’ve spent the last few weeks at home. My wife the elementary school teacher is still teaching, though only to those students blessed with internet access and only from our sofa. Our children are here. I am fortunate enough to continue my day job here here in my upstairs office. We take the dog on long walks and play basketball in the driveway, spend our evenings on the front porch listening to the wind and the birds and our nights watching movies. We’ve fared better than most. The sickness has stayed away from our little town. Though its shadow creeps in everywhere, I’m even more glad than usual to call this sleepy valley my home.

Social distancing, that’s the key.

Keep others safe by keeping yourself safe. Don’t go out unless you have to. That’s life for all of us right now, and it looks like it’s going to stay that way for a while. One day at a time, wash your hands, sneeze into your elbow, wear a mask, call and text the ones you love.

Get by. I keep hearing that from people — we all just need to hang in there right now and get by.

I think there’s a lot of wisdom in that, and for many of us that has to be enough. Let’s face it, hanging in there and getting by is exhausting. Most days feel like we’re all having to swim against a constant current. Victory doesn’t mean progress, it just means holding in place.

That was my thinking up until about two days ago. I figured the best way through this was to keep apart and keep busy, so that’s what I’d been doing. Lots of work. Lots of walks. Lots of writing and reading. Getting by. I thought I was doing everything right.

Then I had to go to the Food Lion in town.

It can be a harrowing experience to go to the store now, and next time I’ll tell you how that trip to get some groceries made me feel a lot better about things. But right now I’ll leave you with what the little old Amish lady in line told the cashier. I couldn’t hear the beginning of their conversation (the rest of us in line were standing six feet apart and looking at each other like we were all infected), but I did catch the end, that warm smile and a gentle voice that said:

“The worst things in the world can never touch the best things in us.

We just have to try and get our eyes off the one and put them on the other.”

Not the first time an Amish lady told me exactly what I needed to hear.

The truth is that I’ve been practicing as much distraction these last few weeks as distance, keeping myself busy so I wouldn’t have to stop for a minute and really think about what all of this is and what it means. I’m not going to beat myself up over that. Sometimes the things that come into our lives feel too big to handle. Too scary to look at. For a lot of us, this time is one of those things. There’s nothing ever wrong in getting by.

But that little Amish lady at the Food Lion stirred something in me that had gone asleep.

I’m tired and stressed and worried and can’t stop washing my hands. But for as much as I just want all of this to be over, I also don’t want it leave me the same as I was a month ago. If we believe that nothing in life is random and everything means something — and I do — then there must be a purpose to all things, even the bad ones. For me, that means wondering what my purpose is in this, and what purpose this has in my own life.

Somewhere along the line, I lost myself. I bet I’m not the only one who can say that.

If that’s you, then maybe we can find ourselves together. Because in the end, that’s how we’ll all get through this.

Together.

Cosmic scum like us

February 17, 2017 by Billy Coffey 2 Comments

Of the many times I mourn those who live in some city or another, night is when I feel sorry for them most.

I do not speak of crime, or more the threat of it—how so many in those cramped-close jungles of concrete and steel must lock themselves away along with the sun lest they be set upon by evil-doers. I remember taking a trip to Baltimore years ago to visit some of my wife’s kin. The windows of their house looked out upon busy streets filled with litter and exhaust. There wasn’t much to be seen, which was fortunate given I couldn’t see much anyway for the steel bars set over the glass to keep out intruders. I remember wondering how it was that anyone would live in such a way. A comfortable cell is still a cell.

I rather mourn city folk at night for the simple reason they are not afforded the luxury of a view on par with my own. Step out into my yard on any evening when the moon is small and the clouds scattered to the other side of the mountain, you’ll see what I mean. The stars in the Virginia sky are a wonder this time of year, so clear and close you are afraid your breath will chase them away like bugs. Millions of them scattered to all directions, never-ending and straight on to the very curve of the earth, divided overhead by a great milky arm of our galaxy itself. So many stars you cannot fathom to begin counting them all.

I like it out there, looking at them all. Few things in life offer such a perspective.

We humans have been staring at the stars for quite some time and for just that sort of thing—to gain a better view of ourselves and our place. Back when the smartest people around believed Earth occupied the center of the universe, it was fairly easy to see humanity as something special, set apart. Something fashioned by the very hand of God.

Of course the whole center-of-the-universe thing didn’t pan out. Turns out we’re not so special at all, cosmically speaking. The universe is vast and growing more so every second, and just about every part of it we can see is mostly the same. Ours is merely one planet among billions at the far edge of one galaxy among trillions, which over the centuries has changed the way we see ourselves.

Special? Hardly. Needed? Don’t even go there.

Humanity is about as inconsequential as a thing can be. We’re all no more than a happy accident. As the astronomer Carl Sagan laid our situation out, “We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star.” Stephen Hawking made it sound even more pessimistic: “The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet.”

Yay us, right?

Call me crazy, but I am of the opinion this sort of thinking has seeped down to infect us all. Doesn’t seem to matter where I go or what I read or who I listen to, it’s all some version of that—nothing really matters because nobody really matters, so screw it because we’re all gonna die and be forgotten anyway. If the politicians or the media or celebrity culture doesn’t ruin us, we’re sure to ruin ourselves.

We’re not all that special.

Then again, maybe we are.

For all the talk about how our planet is so mundane, scientists are discovering the universe itself seems fine-tuned for life. Which is strange, given it seems for now that we’re the only kids on the block. So far the planets discovered beyond our solar system aren’t much Earth-like at all, much less places fit to support the sort of life we know. Intelligence seems a difficult thing to produce in the great beyond of space and time. It takes a lot more than water and oxygen and a few billion years of a stable environment to make even cosmic scum like us.

If that leaves you feeling a little lonely, you’re not alone.

Being special has its drawbacks. Given the size of the universe and the trillions of galaxies holding billions of stars, chances must be pretty good there is at least something out there, or someone. All that wasted space would be a shame otherwise.

But maybe even that doesn’t matter. The universe may be immense and growing, but the speed of light is still fixed. Life could be flourishing in the farthest corners of the cosmos, we’ll never know because we’ll never get there. Even over the span of thousands of years, we’ll be fortunate to visit even the closest stars. Maybe we’ll find someone to talk to. Maybe we’ll have only ourselves.

It seems arrogant on the face of it, believing everything I see in my small patch of Virginia sky exists for us alone.

I’ll be honest and say I have my doubts on that. But I also believe we’re much more than the insignificant inhabitants of an insignificant planet turning around an insignificant star.

We may not be so special in the grand scheme of things, but in our own tiny part of that grand scheme we certainly are.

We are each needed. Special. Wholly unique and so infused with a value far beyond our reckoning.

And maybe for the sake of us all, we should start treating each other like it.

Beauty from ashes

July 9, 2015 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

Screen Shot 2015-07-08 at 1.11.18 PM The car exploded without warning on a day this past April, at a stopping center in an area of Baghdad called Al Mansour. Dozens were killed. The market was left charred and in tatters. The air carried a sickening smell of smoke and burnt flesh and the sounds of sorrow and rage and panic, that music of our age.

This is life for a great many people in the world, a daily existence upon which is balanced a need for the basic essentials of food and water, the universal desire for safety and comfort, and the very real possibility that an act as simple as going to the local grocery store may well end in death. People call our time the Digital Age or the Information Age, but there are times it seems more the Fearful Age.

That this bombing occurred somewhere in Baghdad doesn’t really matter. It could have just as easily been London or Paris, Moscow or whatever city is closest to you. The reality is that none of us are truly safe, and it’s been that way for a long while. Unlike my children, I never had to worry about terrorism as a boy. But I do have the memory of hiding beneath my school desk during a nuclear war drill, of glancing up at wads of chewing gum and scribbled names of children long gone and knowing even then how ridiculous it all seemed. As if my tiny school could keep the Russians away. As if a one-inch piece of laminated desktop would save me from death.

But we’ve learned to carry on in spite of it all, haven’t we? We outlasted the Cold War and Saddam and Osama. Chances are we’ll outlast whatever perversion of religion leaks out of the Middle East, too. Iran. China. North Korea. Maybe we’ll even be forced to outlast ourselves. But the shadow of death will still hover over this world as it has hovered since Cain slew Abel, and even in our safest and most quiet moments, we feel that shadow there. We take our children’s hands and tell them to keep close, worry when they don’t, all because of that shadow.

Yet somehow we still prosper. Our children grow on with us, we still find reason to laugh and sing and devote a large measure of our worry to things that don’t matter at all. We adapt to the shadow of death, that rot in the world. We get used to it. Humanity’s ability to accustom itself to all manner of horrible situations to the point where even the worst things become accepted as normal could be our greatest attribute. Without it, how could we have survived this long? And yet that knack for adjusting could also be our worst curse, because it allows evil to continue on unfettered.

I don’t know if that’s what Karim Wasfi was thinking when he heard of the bombing in Al Mansour, but I’m betting it was something close. Because while the dead and grieving were being taken away and the market workers were cleaning up—telling themselves and each other, perhaps, that this day was lost but tomorrow would perhaps be better—Karim Wasfi decided to do something about it. To do something profound. He didn’t reach for a gun, didn’t vow vengeance. He instead dressed in his best suit, reached for his cello, and went to the market. He placed a chair on the burnt ground, and there in the midst of all that carnage and ruin, he played.

One Iraqi said that Karim “is playing music for the souls of the people who died just a few hours ago. I can imagine them listening too, and wondering, ‘Why?’”

You don’t have to be dead to ask that question: Why? It is just as much the call of the living, a single word that has passed through the lips of every person who has drawn breath, one syllable that has both sparked faith and doubt. Why? Why must things be this way? Why is this allowed?

And here’s the answer—I don’t know. You don’t. No one does. We can couch our guesses in religious terms and say God has a plan. We can drown in the shadow of death and call it evidence that there is no plan at all. Either way, the reality remains. Life is merely a string of ever complex questions. The answers, for the most part, only come after.

But that reality doesn’t mean we’re powerless, nor does it take from us the burden of responsibility. We have a task in this life, you and I, and while that task can at times seem pointless and even false, it remains the only task that matters. We are not only to seek out the beauty that remains plentiful and vibrant in our world, but to make that music ourselves and in whatever way best suits us. It is to do as Karim Wasfi did on that April day. To fill the air with hope and love and peace, and to call that the music of our tomorrow.

The Gospel of Hank

November 20, 2014 by Billy Coffey 1 Comment

Saturday afternoon, early November. Cold an dank. Mood? Questionable. Thirst? Very. So I pulled off the road along US Route 11 and into the parking lot of a no-name service station, the sort of which was what you’d expect for rural Virginia—dirty windows, questionable service, and people who made putting up with both well worth the effort.

People like Hank.

The man behind the cash register greeted me with a “Howdy” as I walked through the doors, each of which had been propped open by two twelve-packs of Budweiser. I nodded back and made my way toward the drink cooler in the rear of the store.

“BETTER ONES UP HERE,” shouted a voice.

I turned, and there beneath the mounted head of a deer sat an old man. His red suspenders clashed with his brown pants and blue shirt. He twisted in a vinyl chair and tapped his cane on the bin beside him.

“ICE MAKES ‘EM COLDER THAN THAT GOL’-DARNED ‘FRIDGERATOR CAN,” he shouted again.

“You got a point there,” I told him.

“HUH?”

“YOU GOT A POINT THERE.”

“AH,” he said and smiled.

I grabbed a Coke from the bin and swabbed the condensation with my shirt, nodding once more. The old man wheezed and coughed a hunk of phlegm into his handkerchief.

I took a sip and paced the store, taking stock of the sardines and canned vegetables, both of which had expired three months prior.

A mother and her brood of three came in just then, all of whom got their own howdy from the cashier. The kids made a bee line for the magazine rack while mom paced the aisles in search of an elusive Something.

“Do you sell salt?” she said to the cashier.

“LAST AISLE, YOUNG LADY,” the old man said, pointing his cane to the opposite side of the store. She smiled a thank you, and he smiled a you’re welcome.

He wasn’t done, either. In the next fifteen minutes, the old man had noticed the keys a customer had dropped, reminded another that his headlights were on, and squished a rather nasty cockroach.

“You have a pretty good helper over there,” I told the cashier as I paid.

He smiled and said, “Yeah, Hank’s been around forever. Used to own the place until he started getting sick.”

As if on cue, Hank began hacking again.

“So he still comes around?” I asked.

“Yep,” he said as he offered my change. “He’s deaf, weak, and the doc told him last month all those non-filter Camels have eaten his lungs up. But he still shows up every day wanting to help out and do somethin’.”

I shoved the change into my pocket and looked at Hank, who had made himself busy by using his cane to scrap half of the dead cockroach from the bottom of his boot.

I had to smile at the sight. Though I knew nothing of the man, it seemed so utterly Hank.

That a simple man in a no-name gas station on a fall afternoon could teach me something was a little unexpected, but then again there are lessons to be learned in most anything. Especially in the sight of an old man clinging to what little life he had left.

Strip away theology’s pretense and philosophy’s theories and we are faced with this one basic question when it comes to the conduct of our lives—what does God expect from us each day?

Over the years I had come up with many possible answers—to love Him and others, to do our best to leave the day a little better than we’ve found it, and so on. But after watching Hank, I knew the real answer to that question.

What does God expect from us each day? Simple.

To show up.

We can give God our hearts and our desires, give Him our minds and our talents, but if we don’t give Him our time, those things just don’t matter.

Poor Hank could have spent his last remaining days at home watching HGTV, but he didn’t. He still showed up in that little gas station every day willing to do whatever he could to help despite his weaknesses and infirmities. I think we should do the same.

Because no matter how wounded we are, no matter how broken and beaten, we can always do something to help. We can always make a difference.

Living stories

October 13, 2014 by Billy Coffey 1 Comment

As hard as it is for someone like me to believe, there are people who would have you believe they do not like stories. They will say they have no time for books, that they are too boring and require too much effort. They will say they have no need for the imaginary things, characters born of thought rather than flesh or places conjured rather than built. It is reality in which they are most interested. So they would have you believe. In the real world, there is little time for fairy tales. Living is serious business, stories are definitely not. Those who waste their time in tales are the ones who fall behind. They are the ones who lose the game.

I suppose that means I am losing at best. At worst, I am contributing to the delinquency of otherwise good and responsible human beings. Not only do I enjoy reading stories, I enjoy writing them. I enjoy seeking them out. And what I’ve found in my seeking is something those interested in the serious business of living would perhaps find very disconcerting—stories are everywhere. They are buried in every person we meet and every conversation we overhear. They are present in the pictures that adorn our walls and the music that fills our ears. They wait in every rock and puff of wind. In everything there is a beginning, middle, and end, and nestled in the spaces between those three legs of every journey lies all the magic and knowledge any of us care to seek. The poet Muriel Rukeyser once said, “The universe is made up of stories, not atoms.” I believe finer words have never been spoken.

There’s more to Rukeyser’s maxim than poetic truth, however. There’s a deeper meaning as well. Whether you call yourself a writer or a reader or an unbeliever in both, the truth is that you a storyteller. That fact cannot be ignored. It cannot be brushed aside. And most of all, it cannot be denied. You are the chronicler of your own tale. Your every day is but one small chapter in the larger story of your life, some part of the beginning or the middle or the end, written upon pages granted by whatever God or random chance you ascribe meaning to. Pages bound together by time itself, filled with your minutes and hours.

Perhaps that sounds a little too metaphysical for the seriously-minded. They may disagree with my notion. Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t change a thing. Good people can stand on either side of a truth, but that doesn’t alter where that truth lies or what that truth means. We can deny that our lives are a story, but that will make our story one of renunciation. We can choose not to respect our place as authors of our own accounts, but that will make our accounts ones of failure. Do you see? There is no escaping it. You have no choice but to write your story, just as you have no choice but to live your life.

So I say live it for all it’s worth. I say wring every bit of beauty and truth from it. Let is drip down your hands and arms. Let it pour into your mouth and quench your every thirst. Bore down into your every moment and mine the gold you find. Scribble and scrawl on your pages. Write furious and true. Do not waste your days. Time is not a flat circle, it is an arrow that stretches from now into eternity. There is where you should look, on to that final chapter, because God put our eyes in front of us so we can see where we’re going, not where we’ve been. Whether quiet literary or screaming thriller, lustful romance or heartbreaking tragedy, bawdy comedy or uplifting inspirational, when all is finished and the final period is put to the last sentence on the end page, your life in this world will stand for something. Your tale will be set down, and that is what you will be remembered by.

Tribes and tribulations

May 15, 2014 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

I can’t remember the name of the tribe, which is mildly ironic given the nature of their story. And it’s quite a story.It amazes me that regardless of how smart we are and how much we can do, we still know so little about the world.

Only 2 percent of the ocean floor has been explored. Species thought long extinct still turn up every once in a while. And just last year, scientists stumbled upon a valley in New Guinea that had gone untouched by man since the dawn of time. There were plants and insects never seen before. And the animals never bothered hiding or running from the explorers. They didn’t have the experience to tell them humans were a potential threat.

But of course it’s not just plants and animals and hidden valleys that are being discovered. People are, too. And that can lead to all sorts of things.

Take, for instance, the tribe I mentioned above.

They were discovered in 1943 in one of the remotest parts of the Amazon jungle. Contact was carefully arranged. Easy at first, nothing too rash. That seems to be rule number one in those situations–don’t overwhelm the tribe.

It didn’t work. Here’s why.

The difference between these particular people and the others that pop up every few years was that their uniqueness was foundational to their belief system. They’d been so cut off from civilization for so long that they were convinced they were the only humans in the world. No one outside of their small tribe existed. And they liked that idea.

Finding out that not only were there other people in the world, there were billions of them, was too much. The trauma of learning they were not unique was so debilitating that the entire tribe almost died out. Even now, sixty-nine years later, only a few remain.

Sad, isn’t it?

I’ll admit the temptation was there for me to think of that tribe as backward and primitive for thinking such a thing. But then I realized they weren’t. When you get right down to it, their beliefs and the truth they couldn’t carry made them more human than a lot of people I know.

Because we all want to be unique.

We all want to think we’re special, needed by God and man for some purpose that will outlast us. We want to be known and remembered. We all know on a certain level that we will pass this way but once, and so we want whatever time we have in this world to matter.

That’s not a primitive notion. That’s a universal one.

I think at some point we’re all like members of that tribe. We have notions of greatness, of doing at most the impossible and at least the improbable. Of blazing a new trail for others to follow. It’s a fire that burns and propels our lives forward.

I will make a difference, we say. People will know I was here.

But then we have a moment like that tribe had, when we realize there are a lot of other people out there who are more talented and just as hungry. People who seem to catch the breaks we don’t and have the success that eludes us. And that notion that we were different and special fades as we’re pulled into the crowd of humanity and told to take our rightful place among the masses.

It’s tough, hanging on to a dream. Tough having to talk yourself into holding the course rather than turning back. Tough having to summon faith amidst all the doubt.

But I know this:

That tribe was right.

We are all unique.

We are all here for a purpose, and it’s a holy purpose. One that cannot be fulfilled by anyone else and depends upon us.

We are more than flesh and blood. More than DNA and RNA and genes and neurons. And this world is more than air and water and earth. Whether we know it or not, whether we accept it or not, our hearts are a battleground between the two opposing forces of light and dark.

One side claims we are extraordinary. The other claims we’re common.

It’s up to us to decide the victor.