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“As If” I Were Blogging

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It’s often surprising to me that I’m not more artistically inclined. I had a great great uncle who was a cartoonist by trade. But apparently that gene was recessive or something because I didn’t get it. It’s strange though because I like to oversimplify my life into snapshots. You would think I would make a natural photographer. My close friends chide me for this. I do it with just about everything. It’s part of the reason why I crush so hard. (I haven’t really brought this up before, but I do, in fact, crush hard.) I latch on to a specific moment or a specific picture of a girl, and I construct a whole ideal and romantic story surrounding that moment or picture. It’s not entirely based on reality.

It’s not surprising, then, that I’ve always had a very definite picture in my head of my adult life. Now don’t laugh. It sounds idyllic and stereotypical and stuff, but it’s all that I really want.

This is what future me looks like. It's not a golden retriever, but everything else is pretty spot on.

I have an image of me age 30 or so. Back when I was still in high school this picture involved me being taller, maybe 5’10” or something, but at this point, I don’t think that’s going to happen. But I am a little more filled out. 30-year-old me is a regular attendee at his gym. He’s not body builder big but he’s got arms bigger than pencils. He has short hair and his skin is clear. He’s clean shaven. He’s wearing a flannel. It’s brisk outside, and he’s in the middle of a field. It’s fall and on all sides of the field are tees that are changing color. Some of the leaves are falling into the field. And there’s a golden retriever. And that dog loves 30-year-old me. And that’s it. That’s my picture of the future.

I like to live “as if” this future is true. It certainly seems attainable. This guy Hans Vaihinger constructed a whole philosophy around this “as if” thing in the 1930s. He said that because we can’t ever really know for sure what’s going on, we behave “as if” our constructs of the world are true. The psychologist Alfred Adler thought that we develop psychological problems when the “as if” of our constructs doesn’t match up with what’s really going on.

The thing about the snapshots is that they contain a lot more than they appear to. In my picture of the future, I know that the flannel-wearing 30-year-old is a good man. He cares about a lot of people, and they all know that he cares about him. Maybe he has kids who he wisely teaches. Maybe he has a wife who he loves selflessly. Maybe he has a career where he influences a lot of people or maybe he has a career where he gets to have close relationships with a few really awesome people. But I know he’s good. I know that he reads a lot, watches old movies, goes to concerts, and hasn’t played a video game since college. I know that he writes. I know that he loves God and wisely shows it.

It’s interesting because I know that he has all of these traits. I don’t perceive him “as if” he has all of these traits.

In philosophy 101 one of the first things you learn is the “is-ought” fallacy. It says that we cannot get morality or normative claims directly from descriptions of the world. Just because there is violence in the world, for instance, doesn’t mean there should be.  I think Vaihinger’s “as if” is more a descriptive than a normative claim. It’s no secret that most people act “as if” the world they have created is true.  But I don’t think it’s the way it has to be or even should be. What if, instead of acting as if I would one day become that person in my picture of the future, I knew that I am that person?

What are you acting “as if” is reality that you could be making a reality instead?

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A Nickel and Two Pennies for Your Thoughts

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Only 7% of what people glean when they listen to us is verbal. That’s staggering. It’s life-changing. It’s monumental. It means that someone who never talks could, hypothetically, be 93% as effective a communicator as someone who talks.

Albert Mehrabian, in the 1960s, ran a bunch of experiments and discovered that humans make emotional and value-laden judgments based almost solely on non-verbal cues. We don’t really care what a person is saying so long as they are saying it in a nice tone and confidently and while leaning in a bit and while making eye contact.

I suppose this is something rhetoricians, politicians, and pick-up artists have known for quite some time. But we don’t really like rhetoricians, politicians, and pick-up artists. We lump them in with used-car salesmen. They are slimy and tricky and deceitful. The devil probably is the  smoothest being in the world. I wrote a story once where the devil was a man in a white suit. He looked a little bit like James Stewart. He sounded like your father and patted you on the back like an old friend. That’s the only way I can understand the devil.

I think it’s easy to start thinking that people who are more concerned with the 93% non-verbal cues are just intrinsically crafty. But rhetoricians, politicians, pick-up artists, used-car salesmen, and the devil aren’t slimy and crafty because they care about that 93% but because they are using that 93% to sell lies.

What would it look like, I wonder, if we started to use that 93% to love and in truth. We tell people all the time that we love them. We tell our friends, our family, that guy who just gave up his seat in class so that you and I can sit next to each other. And most of the time people don’t believe us. And why should they? “I love you” only makes up 7% of what they are hearing. But what if, every time we told someone we loved them, we lowered our voice a little, looked them straight in the eye, leaned forward, and touched them on the shoulder? What if every confession of love was made to seem like a secret? What if every compliment, every favor, every piece of encouragement was delivered like the most private and personal and valuable of statements? It would be staggering. It would be life-changing. It would be monumental.

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Unconditional Friendship

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My parents always used to tell me that I had to be a friend to have friends. I always thought that advice was pretty lame. Popular kids had friends because people wanted to be their friends, not because they were friendly. No one wanted to be my friend, I argued. I was perfectly nice and polite and thoughtful but no one wanted to be my friend. But then I started befriending people who had a lot of friends, and I realized that they have a lot of friends precisely because they are great friends, themselves. Parents 1, Spencer 0.

Friendship is such a slippery thing. We’ve been reading this guy in my Medieval English class named Aelred of Rievaulx. The last thing Aelred ever wrote was this dialogue called Spiritual Friendship. I think that’s pretty cool because Aelred didn’t die suddenly. He kind of died of old age so he knew it was coming, and yet, he chose to compose his last piece of writing on friendship. Up to this point, ‘Red (yeah, me and ‘Red are on a nickname basis) had written histories or traditional spiritual treatises. So it was kind of a departure for him too. The really cool thing about ‘Red is that people really liked him. And who better to write a piece on friendship than someone who is well liked?

Does't 'Red look friendly?

In Book Three of Spiritual Friendship two of Father Aelred’s students are giving him a hard time about a friend who he has that does some questionable things. They ask ‘Red how it is that he continues to be his friend even though this friend has a temper every once in a while. Aelred just so lovingly says to them, “once I had received him as a friend, he could never lose my love.” I love that. I love it for two reasons. 1. It is so very contradictory to what I do and 2. It is what love is.

This is so not how I treat friendship. If someone is hard to get along with, if we fight every once in a while, if we have tough conversations, I just give up on the relationship. I find new people (or, more accurately, let new people find me), and I move on with my life. But the problem with that is that when I stop treating that person like a friend, I am assuming that I am a perfectly agreeable person to get along with. And that’s just not true. I’m a pain in the butt to get along with. I complain constantly; I behave selfishly; and about one day a week I skip showering. I am extremely difficult to get along with, but thankfully, there are some people who show me some grace. And they are all beautifully wonderful people. And so when I stop talking to a friend, I’m basically saying, “Hey, I know you showed me grace a ton in the past, but I’m not willing to do the same for you so don’t let the door hit you on the way out.” And that’s wonderfully horrible.

But grace is a really important component of what love really is. It’s a choice. It’s a verb. And people sometimes understand this with romantic relationships but almost no one ever thinks about it with friendship. We can choose to love our friends even when they are being difficult. I think that gets really hard because we don’t want to give something to someone that he or she isn’t going to return. (This is part of the reason why ‘Red thinks we should choose friends wisely.) We want to know that the time we put into a relationship is going to be returned. I don’t think we can do that though. I think we have to love first when it comes to friends.