Category Archives: Religion

How I did with my 2011 new year’s resolutions: a journey of growth towards principled living

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Last year, I had an ambitious list of new year’s resolutions. Here’s a recap and a report on how I did:

1. Get fit and lose weight. Partial success – I got fit for a part of the year, but then a stressful term and many preoccupations caught up to me and I gained it back again! So I am at 172 now, exactly where I was at this time last year.

2. Organise my time to get two books written. Half-Success. Well, I got one done! Understanding Human Communication, 2nd Edition came out. I am still working on the other one: Understanding Public Relations in Canada, and thinking about yet another on the topic of social media philosophy and strategy.

3. Keep a clean driving record. Yay! Success! I kept this one!

4. Take an advanced driving course. I just didn’t have time. Life caught up to me. I do have plans to eventually acquire a sports car, so this one will eventually come true, I guess. I learned this year, that this is really a back-burner issue.

5. Take at least one real vacation. Again, life caught up to me. I have never been busier or more stressed than I was in the last six months. Well, at least since my tenure year – that was pretty stressful.

6. Enjoy nature. Yay! Success! I got out for a quite a good number of walks, particularly in the first six months of 2011.

7. Pray and meditate more. A mixed result. I have definitely prayed and meditated more. But I have also had moments of complete self-absorption and dark anxiety, which weren’t in the spirit of this resolution.

8. Make more time for art and culture. Again, a mixed result. I have been to symphony more than ever before, but haven’t really been to the opera or the ballet, both of which I love.

9. Play the piano more. This wasn’t successful. I haven’t played much at all. Feel a little sad about this one.

10. Take life a little less seriously. Well, I think that while I haven’t really succeeded in doing this, in trying to, I learned something about myself. That is that I think taking life less seriously is heavily tied to prayer and meditation.

All in all, this year of resolutions was mixed. I think it was mixed because many of the resolutions I made would have been completely life-changing had I been successful. I have discovered that it takes time and dedication to change your life. It also means a fundamental and basic change in perspective. What this requires is not a change in the rules that you impose on yourself in your life, but rather a change in the principles that guide you.

What I have discovered is that one of of the most difficult things to do is to find the first principles which are at the root of your behaviour and your perceptions. Are you motivated by love? Do you want to build a good life filled with good things? Do you want to be a constructive and supportive force for good in the lives of others?

We can quibble over definitions of the Good, but the fact is that the Good is something we understand in context, given the people we are dealing with and the situations that they are in. That is where wisdom comes in – you have to understand and empathize with others, as well as have a connection with the history of human experience, feelings and stories to really be able to establish what is Good in a given circumstance.

What is most important is to make sure that your principles are always point you away from nihilism, selfishness, insecurity, cynicism and destructive thinking. Your principles should push you – stubbornly and relentlessly – toward the Good.

If you calibrate your principles this way, you will find the Good Life. Even if it takes you a long time and some errors along the way.

I will post a new set of resolutions for 2012 on New Year’s Day.

Merry Christmas everyone.

 

A beautiful conversation followed by terribly sad news

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Today started off with a funny feeling. I felt off. When I went to do my morning push-ups regimen, I was weaker than normal. Something wasn’t right. I got into Mac very well dressed with a neatly pressed polo and fine woolen black slacks, ready for an important meeting. However, when I checked my messages, I realised that the big meeting I had prepared myself for had happened yesterday! There had been a scheduling error. How annoying. A bad start to the day.

Things brightened considerably after that. I had a wonderful lunch with McMaster communications alumna Emily Morrice and her husband Brad Morrice. What a wonderful thing to see my former student doing so well. Confident, successful and happy. It was a pleasure to speak with them. They work in Christian mission in Montréal, which is a challenging and exciting thing to do given the general apostasy yet feeling of seeking meaning that characerises the lives of many French Canadians. We had a very wide-ranging and stimulating discussion on topics are varied as “how do you talk about love and sin in contemporary life” to how can one have personally liberal and progressive views and still lead a life guided strongly in a set of non-relativistic, loving principles. It was exciting to chat with them and learn of their ministry. They are doing good in the world. They are doing it gently. And that’s beautiful.

After that I got some terrible news. Another of my former students and a good friend suffered a terrible tragedy as his wife gave birth to a stillborn child and she herself was now in critical condition. Life can seem so terribly cruel. A young couple, awaiting their first child – so full of joy and expectation, of the possibility of bringing new life and new love into the world – is brought down by accident. Life is so fragile. My prayers and my thoughts have been with them all day.

We all live steps away from death or injury or disability. We don’t know the amount of time that we have to live and love. I think that is why it is so crucial to lead a good life, a loving life, a life that makes a contribution every day to a better world. Some days that contribution could be creative – a poem, a painting, a new way of solving an engineering or financial problem, whatever. Another day that contribution can be to bring joy or peace to another. On yet another day, your contribution could be to help right a wrong, to stubbornly stick to a higher principle that you believe in, or simply to be an example of upright, reliable and decent behaviour to others.

Today, at lunch I spoke with people who have given their lives to spreading love and faith and order. In the evening I heard of others before whom life had thrown a terrible challenge.

I challenge you, my friends, to make your days count. I challenge you, as I challenge myself – to make each every day a contribution, an offering. You will step more lightly and you will sleep better. When you are not there, others will remember you and sing your name with admiration and gratitude. Each of your contributions to the good, no matter how small, is a step on your road to freedom.

Live a principled life, a good life, and you will have no regrets.

Ingmar Bergman Makes a Movie – a great documentary

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I have spent the evening writing up a grant to fund a new research project (while eating lots of chicken couscous that I made yesterday) on political communication using the technique of content analysis. I will be submitting it later on this week. More on that project in a future post.

While I was writing, I had a film about Ingmar Bergman‘s creative process playing in the background: Ingmar Bergman Makes a Movie. It is fantastic. While watching it, I realised how challenging his creative life must have been. He was identified early on as a creative prodigy and his work usually involved deeply personal insight. Often his work would involve reflections on the nature of God, prayer and the contemplative life. In the documentary, which is composed of a series of interviews with him and his crew, Bergman reflects on his desire to produce films that move people and capture a feeling of place. He describes, quite candidly, how these goals obliged him to always move among people. What is most interesting, however, is how he keeps coming back to the idea of blending in, of anonymity. He says, at one point in the documentary, that he had no greater desire than to fit in to be anonymous – but that the very fact that he was capable of pulling truths and feelings out of the people, society and scenery around him made him stand out and maintained his celebrity. What a paradox.

I think the world of political communication is similar. A good political communicator is always among the people of his or her riding, empathising with them and then finds a way to synthesise the feelings, thoughts and dreams of his or her constituents into policy, communication and action. The politician becomes the tribune for the dreams, fears and everyday concerns of the population – something that requires maintaining a critical distance at the same time. I hadn’t realised how much politicians and artists have in common. I guess it shouldn’t surprise me – both artists and politicians deal in raw human needs and desires. There is a lesson to be learned here somewhere for Canada’s politicians. A little soul-searching is in order. To return politics to its place as the ground for negotiating the order of things in the City, it is necessary for political communication to become less stunt and attack oriented, and focus more on telling the story of Canada’s citizens in the House of Commons, then translating that story into legislation that retains what is good and beautiful, but points the nation toward a better future. This better future cannot be communicated as the imposition of a party’s ideology (“After all, you voted for us!”), rather it should be the weaving together of the stories that all members bring to the House, whether they are members of the Official Opposition, or of the Government.

I highly recommend the movie – very thought-provoking. Ingmar Bergman has a lot to teach political communicators in Canada.