Pax Plena

Tag: self-reflection

  • The Problem with Pictures

    Kitty (aka Mario / Kit-tums)

    It was an early Sunday morning, I was packing my suitcase. Predictably, I waited until the last minute. My flight back to Oklahoma was set for noon and it was an hour’s drive to the airport in Denver.

    I raced about the house trying to collect my scattered electronics and books. It wasn’t as if the flight was a surprise, but I tend to put off the reality of leaving until the last possible moment. Somewhere in the chaos of tangled cables and missing chargers, I gained a helper who was none too pleased with my shenanigans.

    “Kitty” (whose actual name is Mario) decided that all of this packing nonsense needed to come to a stop. Being the pacific belligerent that he is, Kitty opted to occupy my carry-on bag rather than actually allow me to fill it with my belongings. The result is that I snapped a lovely photo demonstrating how helpful cats can be and how annoyed they can get with their humans: “Just where do you think YOU’RE going???”

    It wasn’t until I was safely in the air (and a couple of hundred miles away from Kitty) that I looked back at the photos from my trip. I thumbed through the camera roll and wondered about the picture I took of him. It was just a quick, one-off snap before I shooed him out of the suitcase. But it struck me that a picture can capture a lot about life in our age of hyper mobility – yet also so little.

    My son lives in Indiana. My girlfriend lives in Colorado. I live in Oklahoma, and until this past spring, I worked out of a base in Arizona. The past ten years of my life have been spent in constant motion. While I’ve taken plenty of pictures and put myself through the paces of travel, I can’t help but think about all of the things a photo doesn’t capture.

    Sure, Kitty looks sufficiently irritated. But the picture doesn’t capture the moment before when I was frantically trying to collect my books for the carry-on. It doesn’t capture the night before, making guacamole on Saturday evening, and the movie night with my gf for which the guac was mandatory. It doesn’t capture the goodbye kiss at the airport or video chats with my son from afar.

    I guess the problem with pictures is that they don’t capture love and life on the run. They miss the gate to gate, week to week, and ultimately year to year dedications of a life that’s too vast to preserve in toto.

    Ultimately, a picture is just a moment we try to preserve in hopes that it will conjure both memories and context. A still of life that we can set aside. Even as good as a photo may be, its true meaning will eventually be lost.

  • My Neighbors

    Back in Walters, I live about a block from the old train depot. Built in 1920, the Rock Island Depot put Walters on the map in Cotton County and heavily influenced the town’s selection as the county seat. The line itself served primarily as a local passenger stop along the Rock Island and Pacific Railway line – although the tracks eventually linked up to points well beyond the confines of Cotton County, particularly once one reached Oklahoma City or Dallas.

    Today, the depot is on the National Register of Historic Places. It mostly hosts community art events and is home to a newly-minted playground for the kiddos in town.

    I guess one could say its heyday has long passed. But it’s still interesting to think about the people that boarded and disembarked all those trains back in the day. The passenger line ran until the 1950s before cost cuts closed the local lines, opening the tracks to mostly freight (viz., grain) until the depot’s ultimate closure in 1980. Sometimes when I walk by, I think about the age when train travel was a major form of transportation. Folks boarding and waving good-bye to loved ones on the red brick walkway outside. Perhaps soldiers going off to war or returning from battle. Thousands of lives lived and now long gone, even while the building remains – a testament to life in a different era.

    I sometimes wonder about the lives of those people. What their goals were. What they dreamed of accomplishing. The people they were dating. Who their friends were. What they did for work. What they did for fun. How did things turn out for them.

    That kind of wondering has a way of raising larger questions. Lately, I’ve been reading about different schools of psychology and the great debate between Freud’s etiology and Adler’s teleology, and the contrast keeps returning to me. As a former, law-trained academic, I’m out of my depth, but the difference is clear enough. The rub of Freudian etiology looks to the past as a way to explain current behavior. Meanwhile, Adlerian teleology looks to purpose and what a particular behavior is trying to achieve, and whether that purpose can be redirected toward more constructive ends. To a layman like yours truly, the differences seem like an exercise in semantics. But they’re actually quite distinct.

    In Freud’s world, people are the way they are based on their past. And the way to address the present is to work through what has happened in the past. In Adler’s world, a person’s past is irrelevant. What matters is the goal a person is trying to achieve through a behavior, and how to redirect the individual toward a more constructive goal. Freud asks, what happened. Adler asks, what’s the point.

    The link between etiology/teleology and the depot actually gets back to an ancient question that was also posed by a lawyer to Jesus: “Who is my neighbor?” While the depot itself is surely in the neighborhood, I can’t properly call it a neighbor – no matter how compelling the depot’s past may be to Freud. Adler, by contrast, would say the history of a building and its former patrons really isn’t that important. What’s more important are the interpersonal relationships I have with the people around me right now. In other words, my actual neighbors are all of the people who live in my vicinity. My neighbors are the people I worked with. My circle of friends. My family. My child. My person here in Colorado. Location doesn’t matter so much as the depth and breadth of the interpersonal relationships that make up my life.

    And I think that’s a good thing. Perhaps I am, by nature, much more Adlerian than Freudian.

    To me, dwelling on the past only accomplishes so much. The real question for each of us is, “what are we trying to accomplish in the limited time we have on this earth?” I think when we put life in stark contrast to the ticking clock that I’ve alluded to in other posts, it makes one acutely aware of the need to treat each moment as an irreplaceable gift.

    Maybe that’s the point. It’s fine to think about the people who have come and gone from the old depot. It’s okay to wonder about their lives and even about what life was like way back when. But that’s not the same thing as loving your neighbor. Loving your neighbor requires active participation. It’s contemporaneous. It requires an investment. And even as frightening as investment can be, even a failed investment of time, love, energy, and effort is better than having never left the past.

    So, I think Mr. Rogers said it best: “Won’t you be my neighbor?”

  • Letting Go…

    I feel like each new year, I set a theme, or perhaps some goals and resolutions, but by February, it’s back to the mantra – new year, same me. Or as Taylor Swift might say, “It’s me. Hi. I’m the problem, it’s me.” The lone common thread in all of these past failed attempts is yours truly.

    But I’ve been thinking about a question I saw recently whilst scrolling social media: “What do you want to let go of in the new year” and this struck me as a much more productive way to think about closing out 2025 and welcoming 2026. I suppose for some folks this might be a bit of a mind-bender. But the resounding response to the question, direct from my subconscious was stress.

    Stress and worry. The antithesis of silver and gold. Or leather and lace for that matter. But the point is the same. These evil twins have haunted me for the better part of my life to the point where I’m not entirely sure what a stress-free, worry-free existence would look like.

    The problem stems from triggers. There are so many of them. Whether its stress or worry, they can all at various times utterly debilitate me.

    So, there seems some wisdom in thinking about the opposite of those triggers. This led me to try and recall the most peaceful day I can remember.

    And I remember it well.

    I was a sophomore at Dartmouth. We were pressing toward the end of Spring term and finals had just wrapped up. Class had not yet begun, and Sophomore Summer was on deck (this is where the rest of the campus goes away except for the sophomore class who take a couple of classes and generally enjoy the New England summer from the comfort of alma mater). So, after a jaunt to church in Woodstock, VT, I made my way back to campus and stopped off near the Quechee, VT dam. I meandered away from the little shops along the town’s main drag and found a perfectly-manicured, expansive, green lawn near the river.

    And I did something I seldom do. I laid down. Right in the middle of the park. The sun warmed my face. A late spring breeze rustled my hair and I remember thinking to myself, in that moment, all was right with the world. And it was. I was a young man. No money. No debt. No expectations. Just a full belly after church and the promise of an entire summer ahead.

    I’ve often thought about this day as being one of the ‘good ole days.’ A better time than the present. In most respects that day fit the bill. But I didn’t recognize it like this at the time.

    The four, halcyon years of college were some of the best I had. And yet, even in the midst of them all, I had yearnings for a future time. For better things and better times.

    The lesson I take from this and the social media question posed is simply that the good ole days are really now. Not some distant future point that may or may not come. Not some future when all of the hard work pays off, and the debt is gone and life is where we think we want it to be. It’s really, just, today.

    I think the rub is to recognize each day for what it is. To free the mind from worry. And memento mori. No future interests are guaranteed.

    So, I’m not sure how, but my goal among others is to let go of those evil twins, stress and worry. They haven’t been terribly helpful anyway.