There’s nothing so cute as a picture of a dog that’s befriended a rabbit, or a moose that is best friends with a cow. It warms the heart to think of love flourishing in unlikely places. But sometimes it is worth celebrating the ways in which we simply manage to peacefully share space with those who are near us: the neighbors or co-workers who we may not enjoy, but who have as much right to the rock as we.
How do you make space for people you don’t care for, or with whom you disagree?
Here’s a possibility. Maybe the day, your surroundings, the light and the air are simply glorious. And maybe you, yourself, are simply the most glorious thing in the whole fabulous situation. It just could be.
What in your life is glorious?
Generally people think of religion as, by definition, something that you take on faith. And indeed most religious questions aren’t subject to scientific testing—there isn’t an experiment that will prove or disprove the existence of God or an afterlife. And yet, our religious convictions are only really meaningful if they hold up in the context of our lives and our other beliefs, to the tests of whether they make sense and whether they help us to live better lives.
What religious beliefs have changed for you as you’ve tested them against your life and values?
From the vantage of a bird in flight, everything looks very different than it does here on the ground. Each individual person and tree and building looks smaller, and you lose a lot of the details that you can see head on. But from above it is also easier to see patterns, how the pieces relate to each other, how everything connects.
What do you do to get a bird’s eye view on complex problems?
Perhaps you seen, or even been, the child who approaches the high dive, looks down, pauses, climbs back down the ladder, climbs back up the ladder, goes back down the ladder, climbs up the ladder again, pauses, looks, and finally takes the big jump. Somehow, in the climbing and the looking down and the watching others jump and survive and race to jump again, the fear doesn’t necessarily go away, but the longing for the sense of flying grows until it outweighs the fear, and the scales tip.
What leap into the unknown have you taken in spite of the fear?
