Atlanta Unitarian

  I am 52 years old now, likely at the peak of my career. I work as a teacher, a mentor, an academic. I strive to be a dedicated father, husband, brother, and serve my Fellowship. I have done a decent enough job at these things, yet in some ways, I think I missed the boat or, to use another metaphor, served the wrong master. Much of my life, I have thought about justice, the public good, and the potential for improvements to public policy. This was something that was encouraged by my birth family, by my own inclination, and by my elite college education. I was taught, perhaps in a style adapted and updated from Aristotle, Plato, Thoreau, and Dr. King, to reason about the good society and act in a way to reform my society. Perhaps it is living in a young country, one that not too long ago had racial discrimination written into its laws, that made this task seem urgent and proximate. But I have lived and worked long enough, committed myself to justice work long enough, to reali...

For the past 16 days, I have been the parent in charge at home, every day, all day long, with my two elementary age boys.  We did not go on any vacation, having spent our vacation budget on a trip to Atlanta over November.  We were, in a word, stuck at home.  Stuck.  At.  Home. We did, however, engage in a wide range of activities, both at home and away.  Indoor play spaces, building ginger bread houses, bowling, numerous games of strategy and chance, books, lots of movies.  At the beginning of the holiday I drew up a list of activities for us to do and solicited further suggestions from the boys.  Aside from these excursions, with the cold weather, we were mostly confined inside.  We were lucky enough to score warm-enough weather for two walks. Nonetheless, we were all faced with a substantial amount of boredom and the frustration that comes with boredom.  Being stuck at home, and maybe not being so good at building a nearby social ...

I've recently joined a few new activities where I was clearly and markedly the worst by a large margin. The first is I've joined the "back-up" choir at my UU church. The second is I went out for some pick-up Ultimate Frisbee this past weekend. In both cases, there was a sense of anxiety that I might be (OK, was) dragging down the group. It can be tough to know that you are the bottom end of that bell curve, scraping against the right edge of the graph. But I think that I also experienced a broader sense of liberation. Being the worst, once it has been clearly and definitively established, frees you from any pretence of image or competition. You can immerse in an activity for whatever it is, on its face value. The subjective experience of being in the moment becomes so much more important, because you are clearly not impressing anyone. It's a great thing to sing, and greater still to sing surrounded by voices of beauty. The music stays with you as you walk -...