Running On Empty
Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
February 27, 2022
The Rev. Craig M. Nowak
Decisions; decisions.
Just about every moment of our lives is filled with decisions to make. Some are easy and often made without thought, almost instantly. Others are hard and not easily made and which we may agonize over and even delay making. And a few, we might actually take time to ponder.
Of course, sometimes decisions that seem like they should be easy, like what kind of tooth paste to buy, can become ridiculously difficult given the tyranny of choice facing the modern consumer in wealthy nations such as the US. And other times decisions we should agonize a little more over but don’t, like whether or not we really ought to send that snarky email while we’re still seething over some perceived slight, only get the time they warranted after the fact in the form of regret track playing over and over in our mind.
Then there’s decisions made by way of pondering.
I don’t know about you but whenever I hear the word ponder, an image of Rodin’s “Le Penseur” or “The Thinker” comes to mind. Maybe that’s because so many of us associate pondering with thinking, particularly deep, concentrated, prolonged, thinking. The kind it takes, we believe, to decide big things, consequential things. Things like, How shall I live? Where is happiness found? What is life? Which is really what we’re asking with what feel like smaller, more common questions. Like, What do I want to be when I “grow up”? Should I marry so and so or take that job offer across country? When should I do that thing I always wanted to try? How will I know what I decide is the right decision?
Now, it is not uncommon whenever we ask these questions, for a chorus to swell inside us. A chorus of multiple voices…people, past and present, people we may or may not know personally, people we’ve heard of, read, or maybe even admire for various reasons. All these voices rise up to offer pros and cons, their input, their advice, their opinion. And whether these voices seem helpful or not, their presence is often so taken for granted that we fail to realize something crucial…these voices are not our own, they belong to others. And yet they fill our heads! Perhaps prompting the Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne to claim, “The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.”
As his words suggest Montaigne is not just talking about discerning our own voice, but claiming it, and learning to inhabit it. And “that is why”, he says, “it is not enough to remove oneself from people, not enough to go somewhere else.” No. He says, “We have to remove ourselves from the habits of the populace that are within us. We have to isolate our own self and return it to our possession.”
Now, you may be thinking, well, okay, but it can be helpful to have other people’s opinions or thoughts when trying to make a decision. Well, that’s often true, but what are we measuring those opinions or thoughts against, your own or yet another person’s who is still not you?
Indeed, one of the challenges of human existence is that much of what we call and assume to our life, is in fact not our life at all. It is an accumulation of other people’s ideas of what life, including our life, is or should be and to which we are merely adapting or reacting to. Again, there’s nothing wrong with the fact that lots of people have ideas about life and its meaning or that these may inspire or influence us. But without our own sense of self, of who we are to ground us, we can easily and unknowingly replace our unique life, our “one wild and precious life”, as the poet Mary Oliver would say, with that of others.
And do we really want to give away our own life to live another’s?
One of our religious forbearer, Henry David Thoreau famously wrote, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately … I did not wish to live what was not life.” Many hear these famous words as Thoreau’s intention to discern a universal understanding of what matters and what doesn’t in life. But we can also hear it as Thoreau’s intention to discern and live his life. That is, to differentiate it from the multiple voices telling him what life, his included, is or ought to be. Indeed we can say Thoreau went into the woods to “isolate his own self and return it to his possession.”
Thoreau’s sojourn into the woods at Walden Pond is a classic example of the practice of solitude. As is Jesus’ time in the wilderness, we heard about in our first reading this morning from the gospel of Luke. The verses we read relate what is typically referred to as, “The Temptation of Jesus”. And indeed, in the story, after Jesus goes off into the desert, he is soon confronted by the devil. Now, I realize this is where many a modern ear tunes out. After all, we know there’s no such thing as the devil. But let’s for a moment imagine the devil not in anthropomorphic terms but instead as perhaps a stumbling block or obstacle in the way of Jesus hearing and potentially heeding his own unique voice.
So Jesus is out in the desert. He’s discerned a life that is his to live but there’s lots of other thoughts and expectations, from people past and present, about what his life is, what it means, and how he should live it. And so in the story along comes the devil who doesn’t really propose anything particularly sinister, but more or less seems to assume Jesus can be persuaded to give in to what those other people want or expect of him, that is, to live the life they’ve conceived for him rather than the one he’s beginning to discern for himself.
Perhaps underestimating Jesus, the devil starts with a sort of text book temptation playing on Jesus’ weakened state from fasting,
“Hey, son of God, why not use some of that power you say you have for your own benefit? Go, ahead, turn these stones to bread.”
When that doesn’t work the devil tries another angle, “Wouldn’t this be easier if you just employed conventional means….c’mon, think about it, imagine what you could do with all the wealth and worldly power I could give you.”
Finally, in an attempt to appeal to ego, he goads Jesus, “Okay, okay, just demonstrate how special you are…dazzle us with a spectacular feat of daring.”
To each temptation, Jesus declines to take the bait and rather than reacting defensively or giving in just to “prove” himself, he responds in ways that indicate he’s found his footing while in the desert. Indeed, repeatedly he acknowledges then differentiates himself from the temptations to live a life other than his own.
Of course, this story is not unique to Jesus. All of us are tempted with a life that is not our own. But, as the Buddhist teacher Stephan Batchelor reminds us, “We can learn to…create a solitude in which we feel at home and grounded…”, which is what Jesus did. Batchelor continues, “Crucially, it has to do with refining our capacity to see where our impulses are coming from, to what extent those impulses are just driven by conditioning and habit and fear, and to what extent we could somehow open up a nonreactive space within us. “Solitude”, then, he says, “ is the practice of creating an inward autonomy within ourselves, an inward freedom from the power of these overwhelming thoughts and emotions.”
It’s taken a while, but science is starting to catch up with and confirm some of the wisdom found in the world’s religions. “When people are experiencing crisis it’s not always just about you: It’s about how you are in society,” explains Jack Fong a sociologist at California State Polytechnic University who has studied solitude.
Fong notes, “When people take these moments to explore their solitude, not only will they be forced to confront who they are, they just might learn a little bit about how to out-maneuver some of the toxicity that surrounds them in a social setting.” “In other words”, writes Brent Crane, author of the 2017 article in The Atlantic in which Fong is quoted , “When people remove themselves from the social context of their lives, they are better able to see how they’re shaped by that context.”
The important point here is that we’re not talking about simply getting away and being alone. Stephen Batchelor calls that “outer solitude”, “When you go off to the top of the mountain, and you sit in a cave…” That kind of solitude he says is “dead easy.” A sentiment echoed by Matthew Bowker, a psychoanalytic political theorist at Medaille College who has researched solitude and notes, solitude it not only about being alone, “It’s a deeper internal process.”
Indeed, it’s running on empty.
When Thoreau goes into the words or Jesus withdraws to the desert, they are not doing it merely to be along. They’re running on empty which is, as Montaigne says, to remove oneself “from the habits of the populace that are within… to isolate our own self and return it to our possession.”So it is not simply time spent alone. But time given to emptying our minds of that chorus of voices that has filled us and grown in number with each passing year. That’s what it is about. Regularly draining the input of others from our minds to create a space, a stillness within, that invites life, our life, to emerge and be known.
This is why thinking is often so unhelpful in making decisions related to those big questions we ponder…. How shall I live? Where is happiness found? What is life? For thinking is a kind of filling…adding even more input, opinions, preferences, and data from other minds than we already have stuffed in our heads.
Pondering calls not for thinking, but emptying.
It’s funny how events that bring to the fore lots of immediate concerns can also reignite larger questions worthy of pondering. When the pandemic hit in the middle of my sabbatical, like many, I found myself unbearably anxious on many fronts and revisiting questions of varying scale and consequence. Questions where thinking often seemed to make things less clear.
And so I began taking walks several times a week on a set of heavily wooded trails near my house. Of course, it was not unusual for my mind to be abuzz with worry and accompanied by a full choir of voices variously chastising, advising, and coddling me when I started on the trails.
I was not familiar with Hermann Hesse’s reflection on trees, (our second reading this morning), at that point, but his musings perfectly capture the experience and process of solitude, including the tension I felt at the start of those walks,
“In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves.”
As I continued on along the trails I my attention shifted more and more to my surroundings, noting with my senses and without generating an internal commentary, being there…the wind in the trees, birdsong, the sounds of squirrels and chipmunks running through the ground cover, the changing sunlight and temperature, the earthy scent of the trails. And over time any thoughts I had entered the trails with were long gone by the end. In their place was a decidedly more spacious mind that held neither questions nor answers, but a steadying sense of isness.
A quality Hesse’s reflection on trees brilliantly conveys, “Trees are sanctuaries…whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.
A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.”
Paradoxically, running on empty leaves us restored, replenished, and able to return from the woods, the desert, the mountaintop, or the room down the hall, better grounded for having discerned and reclaimed our own voice. And as the tree teaches, “My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.”
And it is living out of this trust, which is continually renewed, strengthened, and refined, in solitude, that Hesse’s most compelling observation emerges, “Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.”
May it be so.
Amen and Blessed Be
Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
February 27, 2022
The Rev. Craig M. Nowak
Decisions; decisions.
Just about every moment of our lives is filled with decisions to make. Some are easy and often made without thought, almost instantly. Others are hard and not easily made and which we may agonize over and even delay making. And a few, we might actually take time to ponder.
Of course, sometimes decisions that seem like they should be easy, like what kind of tooth paste to buy, can become ridiculously difficult given the tyranny of choice facing the modern consumer in wealthy nations such as the US. And other times decisions we should agonize a little more over but don’t, like whether or not we really ought to send that snarky email while we’re still seething over some perceived slight, only get the time they warranted after the fact in the form of regret track playing over and over in our mind.
Then there’s decisions made by way of pondering.
I don’t know about you but whenever I hear the word ponder, an image of Rodin’s “Le Penseur” or “The Thinker” comes to mind. Maybe that’s because so many of us associate pondering with thinking, particularly deep, concentrated, prolonged, thinking. The kind it takes, we believe, to decide big things, consequential things. Things like, How shall I live? Where is happiness found? What is life? Which is really what we’re asking with what feel like smaller, more common questions. Like, What do I want to be when I “grow up”? Should I marry so and so or take that job offer across country? When should I do that thing I always wanted to try? How will I know what I decide is the right decision?
Now, it is not uncommon whenever we ask these questions, for a chorus to swell inside us. A chorus of multiple voices…people, past and present, people we may or may not know personally, people we’ve heard of, read, or maybe even admire for various reasons. All these voices rise up to offer pros and cons, their input, their advice, their opinion. And whether these voices seem helpful or not, their presence is often so taken for granted that we fail to realize something crucial…these voices are not our own, they belong to others. And yet they fill our heads! Perhaps prompting the Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne to claim, “The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.”
As his words suggest Montaigne is not just talking about discerning our own voice, but claiming it, and learning to inhabit it. And “that is why”, he says, “it is not enough to remove oneself from people, not enough to go somewhere else.” No. He says, “We have to remove ourselves from the habits of the populace that are within us. We have to isolate our own self and return it to our possession.”
Now, you may be thinking, well, okay, but it can be helpful to have other people’s opinions or thoughts when trying to make a decision. Well, that’s often true, but what are we measuring those opinions or thoughts against, your own or yet another person’s who is still not you?
Indeed, one of the challenges of human existence is that much of what we call and assume to our life, is in fact not our life at all. It is an accumulation of other people’s ideas of what life, including our life, is or should be and to which we are merely adapting or reacting to. Again, there’s nothing wrong with the fact that lots of people have ideas about life and its meaning or that these may inspire or influence us. But without our own sense of self, of who we are to ground us, we can easily and unknowingly replace our unique life, our “one wild and precious life”, as the poet Mary Oliver would say, with that of others.
And do we really want to give away our own life to live another’s?
One of our religious forbearer, Henry David Thoreau famously wrote, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately … I did not wish to live what was not life.” Many hear these famous words as Thoreau’s intention to discern a universal understanding of what matters and what doesn’t in life. But we can also hear it as Thoreau’s intention to discern and live his life. That is, to differentiate it from the multiple voices telling him what life, his included, is or ought to be. Indeed we can say Thoreau went into the woods to “isolate his own self and return it to his possession.”
Thoreau’s sojourn into the woods at Walden Pond is a classic example of the practice of solitude. As is Jesus’ time in the wilderness, we heard about in our first reading this morning from the gospel of Luke. The verses we read relate what is typically referred to as, “The Temptation of Jesus”. And indeed, in the story, after Jesus goes off into the desert, he is soon confronted by the devil. Now, I realize this is where many a modern ear tunes out. After all, we know there’s no such thing as the devil. But let’s for a moment imagine the devil not in anthropomorphic terms but instead as perhaps a stumbling block or obstacle in the way of Jesus hearing and potentially heeding his own unique voice.
So Jesus is out in the desert. He’s discerned a life that is his to live but there’s lots of other thoughts and expectations, from people past and present, about what his life is, what it means, and how he should live it. And so in the story along comes the devil who doesn’t really propose anything particularly sinister, but more or less seems to assume Jesus can be persuaded to give in to what those other people want or expect of him, that is, to live the life they’ve conceived for him rather than the one he’s beginning to discern for himself.
Perhaps underestimating Jesus, the devil starts with a sort of text book temptation playing on Jesus’ weakened state from fasting,
“Hey, son of God, why not use some of that power you say you have for your own benefit? Go, ahead, turn these stones to bread.”
When that doesn’t work the devil tries another angle, “Wouldn’t this be easier if you just employed conventional means….c’mon, think about it, imagine what you could do with all the wealth and worldly power I could give you.”
Finally, in an attempt to appeal to ego, he goads Jesus, “Okay, okay, just demonstrate how special you are…dazzle us with a spectacular feat of daring.”
To each temptation, Jesus declines to take the bait and rather than reacting defensively or giving in just to “prove” himself, he responds in ways that indicate he’s found his footing while in the desert. Indeed, repeatedly he acknowledges then differentiates himself from the temptations to live a life other than his own.
Of course, this story is not unique to Jesus. All of us are tempted with a life that is not our own. But, as the Buddhist teacher Stephan Batchelor reminds us, “We can learn to…create a solitude in which we feel at home and grounded…”, which is what Jesus did. Batchelor continues, “Crucially, it has to do with refining our capacity to see where our impulses are coming from, to what extent those impulses are just driven by conditioning and habit and fear, and to what extent we could somehow open up a nonreactive space within us. “Solitude”, then, he says, “ is the practice of creating an inward autonomy within ourselves, an inward freedom from the power of these overwhelming thoughts and emotions.”
It’s taken a while, but science is starting to catch up with and confirm some of the wisdom found in the world’s religions. “When people are experiencing crisis it’s not always just about you: It’s about how you are in society,” explains Jack Fong a sociologist at California State Polytechnic University who has studied solitude.
Fong notes, “When people take these moments to explore their solitude, not only will they be forced to confront who they are, they just might learn a little bit about how to out-maneuver some of the toxicity that surrounds them in a social setting.” “In other words”, writes Brent Crane, author of the 2017 article in The Atlantic in which Fong is quoted , “When people remove themselves from the social context of their lives, they are better able to see how they’re shaped by that context.”
The important point here is that we’re not talking about simply getting away and being alone. Stephen Batchelor calls that “outer solitude”, “When you go off to the top of the mountain, and you sit in a cave…” That kind of solitude he says is “dead easy.” A sentiment echoed by Matthew Bowker, a psychoanalytic political theorist at Medaille College who has researched solitude and notes, solitude it not only about being alone, “It’s a deeper internal process.”
Indeed, it’s running on empty.
When Thoreau goes into the words or Jesus withdraws to the desert, they are not doing it merely to be along. They’re running on empty which is, as Montaigne says, to remove oneself “from the habits of the populace that are within… to isolate our own self and return it to our possession.”So it is not simply time spent alone. But time given to emptying our minds of that chorus of voices that has filled us and grown in number with each passing year. That’s what it is about. Regularly draining the input of others from our minds to create a space, a stillness within, that invites life, our life, to emerge and be known.
This is why thinking is often so unhelpful in making decisions related to those big questions we ponder…. How shall I live? Where is happiness found? What is life? For thinking is a kind of filling…adding even more input, opinions, preferences, and data from other minds than we already have stuffed in our heads.
Pondering calls not for thinking, but emptying.
It’s funny how events that bring to the fore lots of immediate concerns can also reignite larger questions worthy of pondering. When the pandemic hit in the middle of my sabbatical, like many, I found myself unbearably anxious on many fronts and revisiting questions of varying scale and consequence. Questions where thinking often seemed to make things less clear.
And so I began taking walks several times a week on a set of heavily wooded trails near my house. Of course, it was not unusual for my mind to be abuzz with worry and accompanied by a full choir of voices variously chastising, advising, and coddling me when I started on the trails.
I was not familiar with Hermann Hesse’s reflection on trees, (our second reading this morning), at that point, but his musings perfectly capture the experience and process of solitude, including the tension I felt at the start of those walks,
“In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves.”
As I continued on along the trails I my attention shifted more and more to my surroundings, noting with my senses and without generating an internal commentary, being there…the wind in the trees, birdsong, the sounds of squirrels and chipmunks running through the ground cover, the changing sunlight and temperature, the earthy scent of the trails. And over time any thoughts I had entered the trails with were long gone by the end. In their place was a decidedly more spacious mind that held neither questions nor answers, but a steadying sense of isness.
A quality Hesse’s reflection on trees brilliantly conveys, “Trees are sanctuaries…whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.
A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.”
Paradoxically, running on empty leaves us restored, replenished, and able to return from the woods, the desert, the mountaintop, or the room down the hall, better grounded for having discerned and reclaimed our own voice. And as the tree teaches, “My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.”
And it is living out of this trust, which is continually renewed, strengthened, and refined, in solitude, that Hesse’s most compelling observation emerges, “Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.”
May it be so.
Amen and Blessed Be