Life of Pi

A day after reading Life of Pi and I’m still trying to wrap my head around all its themes.

It was a book I almost gave up on, that for the first one hundred pages or so reminded me of A Passage to India in the sense that it seemed like one of those books forced upon unsuspecting children for summer reading in preparation for an AP class in the fall.  It seemed that for a book that was supposed to be about a boy trapped on a boat with a Bengal tiger, it was taking a horribly long time to actually get him out to sea.

The first part of the book, though, is important in establishing Pi’s faith which ranges from Christianity to Islam and all religions he can find and explore.  He is devout in his belief in God.   There is an innocence to his belief.  He doesn’t understand why he can’t believe in all religions.  It will be his innocence which makes the end of the book so devastating and it is faith, ultimately, that will make him a survivor.

After the ship he is on sinks, Pi finds himself on a lifeboat with an orangutan, zebra and hyena.  The hyena eventually makes short work of the already wounded zebra and the aggressive, but smaller orangutan.  For all this time, Pi thinks that his greatest worry is the hyena, and then he discovers that sleeping below him in the lifeboat is a 450 pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker.

Richard Parker dispatches the hyena and Pi is left alone on the boat with a ferocious killer.

Quickly Pi makes an important decision.  He cannot stay on the boat with Richard Parker, so, while the animal recovers from seasickness, Pi devises a makeshift raft from oars and lifejackets, ties it to the lifeboat with a forty foot length of rope and hops on board, giving himself distance from the deadly tiger.

But Pi finds life on the raft unacceptable.  He is constantly wet for starters and no matter how hard he tries to make the raft a home, he realizes that in order to survive he must go back to the lifeboat and find a way to deal with Richard Parker. 

He identifies several scenarios which would result in the tiger’s death, the easiest being to let the animal starve to death or die from dehydration, but eventually Pi comes to the conclusion that he cannot do any of these things, that the only way he will survive is on the lifeboat and the only way he will survive Richard Parker is by taming him.

Raft or boat?

Miserable and safe vs. less miserable but with the risk of being eaten while you sleep.

If Pi stays on the raft, he won’t be eaten, but he most certainly won’t survive.

Going to the lifeboat gives him a better chance of survival if he can avoid being eaten.

It seems like an easy decision until you’re staring at a 450 pound tiger.

Which would you choose?

I would argue that too often we choose the raft, that too often we are paralyzed with fear and we convince ourselves that if we stay on the raft just a little longer, something will change.  A ship will find us.  Richard Parker will die.

Staying on the raft is a passive response that hands your fate over to chance.

Moving to the lifeboat, on the other hand, is a risk, but it puts your fate in your own hands.  Tame the tiger and live.

We know this, I think.  We always know this deep inside that the riskier move can provide the most reward.

And still we sit on the raft and wait.

Every year when I was teaching, I worked on getting my students to take risks in their writing, knowing that when it came time for them to take the FCAT Writes, that a riskier essay, one that was creative and took chances had the best opportunity for scoring higher.

And every year, I would seemingly have at least half of my students ready and willing to take this risk.

And every year, most of them would take the easy way out, write the same old boring essays and take their passing 4’s when if they had just taken a risk, they might have scored the perfect 6. 

I write this, of course, realizing that I’m sitting on my own raft right now, hoping passively that the circumstances of my life will change, that my health will magically get better, that my books will become overnight bestsellers, that money will appear under my pillow each night and I will be able to afford seminary and other things like food and books (the two staples of life).

And I know too, that to move forward, I will have to leave the raft.  I will need to take risks that I’m always encouraging others to take, that when we look at the greatest inventors and leaders in history, the ones that changed the world were the ones who were single-minded and dogged in their approach, the ones that sometimes fell to rock bottom and yet still wouldn’t stop.

What reading Life of Pi has taught me is that even though we may not be stranded literally in the middle of the ocean, that our lives, the stories of our lives, the “Life of Kendra,” the life of Beth and Rebecca and Nancy and Danny and everyone is a story of survival, of how we move forward.

Life is about moving forward always.

Life is about assertiveness and not passivity. 

It is about risks and knowing, always knowing, as Quaker Thomas Kelly wrote that “Over the margins of our life comes a whisper, a faint call, a premonition of richer living which we know we are passing by … that there is a way of life vastly richer and deeper than this hurried existence, a life of unhurried serenity and peace and power.”

May you hear that whisper in 2013 and let nothing pass you by.

Building Rock Walls with Linus

Christmas is over.

All the necessary boxes have been checked: opening presents, check; lunch or dinner with family, check; Doctor Who Christmas special, check.

And now it is the day after.

In less than a week, a new year will begin.

So now what?

As stressful as the holidays can sometimes seem, they at least give us a goal.  They give us something to do, whether it be shopping or cooking or otherwise preparing for the day.  In the months leading up to Christmas there is always something to do.  Watch long marathons of Christmas movies on Lifetime or Hallmark.  Make Christmas cookies, decorate the tree, entertain the children with that creepy little Elf on a Shelf doll.

But after Christmas?  It’s time to reboot.  It’s time to reset and focus on something else.

Yesterday, one of my presents (as per a tradition my dad and I have), was the latest in the Fantagraphics line of Peanuts books.  Twice a year, Fantagraphics publishes two Peanuts books, each with two years of comic strips.  We’re up to 1985 and 1986 most currently.  The publisher’s goal is to print every Peanuts comic strip ever produced.

So yesterday morning, I took some time to read through the latest book.  In a continuing storyline, Linus begins building a rock wall.  Why?  My guess is he grew up in the same small town I did where once in third grade, my best friend and I spent an afternoon smoothing out and polishing rocks we found in the playground on a larger rock in the playground, all because we had learned about erosion that week in school.

But as Linus continues to work on his rock wall, he discovers that it’s providing him therapy, so much so that he comments he might not even need his security blanket anymore.  His sister, Lucy, says that’s a good thing, because she has cemented his blanket in the wall.

Linus freaks out.  Charlie Brown tries to offer comfort, by explaining what Linus, himself, already knows that building the wall is all the therapy he needs, that if he just adds a rock to the wall every time he feels stressed, he’ll ultimately feel much better.

Linus’s response? “There aren’t that many rocks in the world!”

I marked the page.  How often do we feel like Linus?  How many times do we feel (in a completely non-paranoid way) that the world is conspiring against us?  That even when we find something worthwhile to do, it will never be enough to ease the stress and sadness and worry in our lives.

As I was driving home from my grandmother’s yesterday afternoon, I saw a cop car up ahead on a side street with his lights flashing.  The car in front of me and I slowed to a stop to let him pull out, but he didn’t move, so we wound up driving on through.  But when I looked in my rearview mirror a moment later, I saw that the deputy had pulled out and was now behind me, at a distance, but closing fast with his lights still flashing.

So I eased the car onto the shoulder and waited for him to pass me.

Much to my shock, he pulled in right behind me.  I quickly put my own car into park.  Normally, my heart would stop at seemingly being pulled over by a sheriff’s deputy, but I was so confused, all I could do was watch in my mirror and wait.  I hadn’t been speeding.  I hadn’t run a stoplight or stop sign.

It was only seconds, but it felt like an eternity.  I watched as the deputy turned off his lights and a second later drove away.

I spent the rest of the day (and obviously this morning) trying to figure it out.  Was it some sort of Christmas prank?  My mom said he was probably running my plate.  But he wasn’t behind me long enough to do that.

It was crazy.

If I were Linus, I’d add another rock to the wall and another for the disability company that still hasn’t paid me and another for the ennui that follows Christmas and another for the cloudy skies and too much wind.

And if I kept doing this, I’d probably find, like Linus, that there aren’t enough rocks in the world.

So instead, I need to take the Peppermint Patty approach.

Perpetual D- student Peppermint Patty writes this for her homework:  “What I did on my Christmas Vacation.  I went outside and looked at the clouds.  They formed beautiful patterns and beautiful colors.  I looked at them every morning and every evening.  Which is all I did on my Christmas Vacation.  And what’s wrong with that?”

Patton Oswalt, in his introduction to this latest Peanuts book, writes, “Charles Schulz wrote a fifty year-long psychological autobiography starring a bald kid and a sentient dog.”

If we look at all the Peanuts characters, we can find aspects of Schulz’s personality, but also all aspects of our own.  There’s Lucy, the crab, Linus, the philosopher, Peppermint Patty, the optimist, Charlie Brown, the worrier and Snoopy, the dreamer.

As I look to my own future, I must recognize these traits in myself and use them in the best possible ways.  There are times for worrying and building rock walls and there are times for dreaming and staring at the clouds.

There is a season for each.

Christmas Day is over, but the season is not.  Now is not the time to add rocks to our wall.  Now is the time to remember that this is a season of hope (and I’m reminded in Pastor Debbie’s Christmas Eve sermon) and also faith and love.

So maybe I’ll take a minute to stare at the clouds today and remember that in a world where there will never be enough rocks, there is a God who loves us.

Why am I keeping a sock?

There is an episode of Friends where Chandler, after marrying Monica and moving in with her, discovers a secret locked closet in her apartment.  He and Joey speculate what she might be hiding.  Joey suggests her old boyfriend, Richard.  But when Chandler finally opens the closet, he is shocked at what he finds.

His wife, the clean freak, has a closet stuffed from floor to ceiling with junk.  She is a closet hoarder in the literal sense.

I completely relate to this, not so much in being a clean freak, but in despising clutter.  Clutter makes me anxious.  I hate things lying around, but, like Monica, I also have the hoarder gene and so while you may walk into my condo and think how everything is so neat and tidy, you wouldn’t want to start opening closet doors or old trunks or hope chests or anything with a drawer.

Saturday, I dove into an old trunk looking for the Miami sweatshirt I had worn in college.  It’s a trunk where I keep things that matter to me, but when I got it open, I found more trash than treasure.  There was a pair of faded jeans with a label that said “junior.”  That went in the trash.  There was my old jacket from college.  I checked the pockets first and found about fifty cents.  There was a vest that no one has dared to wear since 1992 and a sweater, stretched out and well worn.

Trash, trash, trash.

And there was a sock.

A random, half of a pair, white sock.

All of this in a trunk where I was keeping things like my old baby blanket and the stuffed elephant I sewed in Home Economics in seventh grade—you know, things that had sentimental value.

All of that … and a sock.

Trash.

Pastor Debbie and I were talking yesterday morning about how Lent and Advent are times of the year when it’s good to clean house in physical, emotional, and spiritual ways.  Advent especially is a time to spend preparing for the coming birth of Jesus.  And as we would for any guest, it’s a time to straighten up, to clean up, to throw away any trash we’ve been hoarding over the past year.

It’s a time to ask ourselves why we hold onto things.  What are the things that really matter in our lives and what things do we need to let go of?  What things do we need to give away?  What things need to go straight to God?

What burdens are we carrying that begin in our heart, but weigh at us physically too, stooping us over, rounding out our shoulders so that we appear so much older than we are?

Christmas is, sometimes inexplicably, the most stressful time of year.  It’s not just the preparations, the gift-finding, the decorating, the ever increasing need for a day off, it’s that all these things weaken us just enough that suddenly we can be bombarded by memories of old, things we’ve locked away in the trunks of our mind, both good and bad.  We become Scrooge, biting the heads off of overworked store clerks, and wrapping presents with bitterness instead of kindness.  We become haunted by our ghosts of Christmas past, present and future.

Think of Scrooge’s house for moment, the cold, the damp darkness, a bed walled off by curtains most likely filled with a lifetime of dust.  Think of his old partner, Marley, weighed down by the chains of his own past.

Christmas is a time to clean house, to open the windows and let the sunlight in, to throw away the clutter and the trash.  In a time in which we celebrate a birth, this should be the time of rebirth for us.  We make New Year’s resolutions, but really we should be making them sooner, in Advent, so that everything is ready and we are able to stand with arms open to welcome the Son of God.

Despite the stress, Christmas is still my most favorite time of the year.  I love my peppermint bark chocolate and Christmas carols.  I love the majesty and tenderness of the Christmas Eve service.  I get teary-eyed just writing about these things, because this is the time for miracles.  Right now—if we’re willing.

This is the time to rejoice.

This is the time to throw open the shutters and announce to the world how blessed we are.

This is the time to let go of the burdens we carry, to unlock the chains of our past and let them fall away.

This is the time—right now—to start anew.