Food for Our Minds and Spirits: What a Bummer Can Teach Us

Sometimes it is hard to tap into our spiritual selves or find time to nurture our intellectual curiosity. Here is a section that reflects on some nourishing materials from around the web and related media channels in order to get us thinking, get us feeling, and get us reflecting on the lives we are living in this big, beautiful world. **Some Adult/Mature Themes May Appear in Links and Other Attached Material**

What a Bummer can Teach Us

Profound change comes from profound times. And this last year and a half has been profound. And to me, at least, one of the most beautiful things that can come out of trying times are the ways that people come up with to conjure something out of a bad circumstance that they wouldn’t have managed if the badness hadn’t been a part of it. And that is the story of the pandemic for many of us. We have struggled, but we also made new traditions and fostered time for ourselves in ways that we wouldn’t have been able to if COVID-19 hadn’t been as virulent as it was. 

That’s why this note really hit a nerve. Ignoring the annoyances of Home Owner’s Associations (or really any petty bureaucracy), the dynamic of “playtime is over” that some people have brought with them to our emerging, post-pandemic world is, to me, a spoiling of what is great about us. It is a shameful un-learning to come out of this profound year and not change our sense of community and purpose. I’m deeply hurt on behalf of the father who had to write this note. 

Since I was so stung by reading this, it made me reflect on how often I pendulum between the two sides of this note––there are times when I’m the kid playing in the woods, having the best Summer of his life, but there are other times when I’m the grumpy adult trying to make the world more of what its convenient for me for it to be. One of those perspectives is the open, affirming, world-curious version of me that I know is the better version. The other is the selfish, narcissistic, closed off version of myself who is coping with the world rather than marveling at it. 

I guess the lesson is, maybe we should all build more tree forts??



Allan T. Georgia, M.Div., M.T.S., PhD