Coming Up For Air

From the perch of midlife's approach to objectivity, astute and genial observer of the human character Benjamin Franklin compared two friends in a letter to a third. He appraised, "Parsons, even in his prosperity, always fretting; Potts in the midst of his poverty, ever laughing. It seems, then, that happiness in this life depends rather on internals than externals; and that there is such a thing as a happy or unhappy constitution." Franklin may have been centuries ahead of neuroscience in suggesting a happy or unhappy constitution, especially if one factors in an accumulation of formative experiences very early in childhood in establishing this default perspective. If he is ahead of his time in this middle-aged realization, the 16-year-old Franklin is even more precocious when he writes as Silence Dogood, "Nothing is more common than grieving for nothing when we have nothing else to grieve for." That is, with or without a particular, inborn tendency to be pess...

Donald Honig was quoted in Willie Mays: The Life, the Legend observing, "Putting Willie Mays in a small ballpark would be like cutting a masterpiece to fit a frame." As ready as we are to find parallels between the national pastime and life in general, I wonder if we don't ill use that sort of reasoning. Our application, spelled out, would be that given our cavernous outfield to cover, we would suddenly have the capability to do so. We are confined, we tell ourselves, by our limited opportunities. We are, we think, waiting to be discovered. Then there is Stephen in the Bible's Book of Acts. We may know his earthly end as the first Christian martyr and employ similar thinking to the above. We may tell ourselves that if our most cherished beliefs were questioned, we would give a great speech and give our lives for what we believe in. Stephen, though, is shown differently. Before expounding on the ways in which the Old Testament points to Christ, forgiving his accusers...

Christian musician Laura Story was on Focus on the Family this week to relate the impact of her marriage through her husband's life-threatening and then life-altering brain tumor. As she waited through days in the hospital of wondering whether he would live, Christian friends would remind her of the Bible's promises that all events would come together for the Christian's good. Sometimes these friends, she says, would make such specific application they would begin to console her with thoughts of reunification with her healed husband in Heaven, all while he still fought for his life. On reflection, Story says at that moment she didn't need a biblical Band-Aid for the gaping wound of her all-consuming uncertainty and grief. The most helpful words she was offered in those awful moments were, she admits, "Here is your latte." Aphorisms are so much easier, though. Offering the latte in such moments requires that the would-be comforter quiet his or her own internal...

The gifts of future baseball Hall of Fame inductee Chipper Jones and current contractor and reality TV star Chip Gaines are best demonstrated in motion as either baseballs or sawdust flies. Both chafe under the enforced stillness of introspection. In a recent episode of Fixer Upper in which Chip Gaines had to sit still and review clips of the show with his wife, he seemed to twitch visibly like a schoolboy kept in detention. Chipper was used to the hitter's discipline of keeping his head still, but his discomfort in the introspection chair that came with a book tour he launched this week in Winston-Salem was clear in other ways. His laugh was uneasy. His delivery was, at times, too low and too fast for the audio catchers mitt of poor acoustics to capture. Both were there, however unnatural there was. Both Chipper and Chip built in time to purposefully reflect. For Chipper, although this week's format may have been different and more daunting, a regimen that forced him to consi...

It is the time of year when thoughts turn to baseball and writers groan to extract life lessons from the grand old game. Accomplished pitcher Mike Mussina would roll his eyes at that. He once sported a T-shirt that read, "American Sarcasm Society: like we need your support". He earned an economics degree from Stanford in three and a half years while playing baseball. He downplays both that accomplishment and overemphasis on the game as a major source of identity or education, admitting, "Graduating from college doesn't mean you're smart, but it does mean that you're smart enough to know that having a college degree can be a good thing." Since Mussina started his baseball career with this detached perspective, his state of mind near the end of that career as intimately detailed in John Feinstein's Living on the Black is counterintuitive. He told the writer that he found himself caring MORE about ball and strike calls. As a player approaching middle ...