Hugh Hollowell

Trying to build a a better world.

The daily ritual that saves our marriage

This essay published

For the last eight years, my wife Renee and I have engaged in a ritual, nearly every single day. It is very rare we miss it, and the performance of this ritual is, I am fully convinced, the reason we have stayed married. This ritual grounds us, centers our priorities and allows us to be vulnerable and open in front of each other as we live out our values.

We eat dinner together every night.

Nearly every night, with rare exception, it goes like this: One of us will cook (For years it was always me, then it was mostly her, and now it is mostly me again), we will set the table with plates and napkins and silverware, we will get the pitcher of iced tea out of the refrigerator and fill the glasses with ice, put some music on and then we will eat together. Like a family.

I didn’t have a clue this was actually pretty rare until quite recently. Then I started talking to people and learned that many people eat in front of the TV, or eat different meals at different times, or have their phones out during the meals, or any other number of schemes I have heard about.

Here is the thing: This is one of the most important things we do in our marriage. We are both introverts. I have a very extroverted job. I am an early riser who is generally in bed by 10 and she is a night owl whose idea of morning is 10AM. I am a writer. She is a photographer. It is very possible for us to spend a Saturday together and say less than 20 words all day.

But every night we hold this intentional space where we can share (or not) what we are thinking, what our days were like, what we are thinking about, what our dreams look like. Some days it is nonstop talking for 90 minutes. Some days it is quiet, as we smile at the cats’ antics and listen to the music and just enjoy being in the presence of each other.

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I am a big believer in rituals. I have written pretty extensively about the power of rituals in this essay.

They make money off your fear

This essay published

I listen to people. I guess that is a good characteristic to have, doing what I do and all. And as a writer who is fascinated with people, I love listening to the cadence and rhythm of voices and stories. Additionally, one side effect to having ADHD is that I often end up being confronted with conversations I am not involved in. When I walk into a room, I hear all the conversations happening, and they all fight for priority.

And much of what I have heard people say lately was about being afraid.

“We can’t let kids play in the neighborhood like we did when we were kids. It’s just not safe.”

“Anyplace I can carry a gun, I do. It just isn’t safe to do otherwise.”

“I get nervous in any large crowd of people. I am constantly scanning for exits, in case there is an active shooter.”

“Every time my phone rings and it’s my kid’s school, my first thought is that a shooting happened there.”

Those are all pretty much verbatim quotes I have heard this week. We are convinced the world is getting worse instead of better, and we are afraid.

But the objective reality is, the world is not getting worse instead of better. This is one of the safest times to be alive in human history, relative to violence. Compared to 30 years ago, murder and all violent crime is way down. In the US, both violent crimes and crimes against property are down by around 50% since the early 1990’s. The murder rate (murders per capita) in 2014 was almost exactly the same as it was in 1960 – you know, the good old days when we could let our children free range in the streets.

We are safer from personal violence than ever before, and are more afraid than ever before.

Not all fear is bad. Historically, it made sense to be alert for dangers to you or your offspring, and to protect yourself and the people you love. The world we evolved in was violent and “red in tooth and claw”, and whether the threat was a neighboring tribesman or a large tiger hiding in the savanna grass, it made sense to be alert, lest we perish as a species. Fear can also tell you when a situation is unsafe, when you need to run rather than fight and can still help you survive in 2017.

But fear that is ungrounded in reality can paralyze and overwhelm you. The primary source of safety for humans has always been our community – the people around us who protect us and who watch out for us.  We are small pack animals, like chimpanzees, lions and dolphins. Our safety is found in the collective.

However, the sort of fear we have nowadays serves not to protect us, but to make us suspicious of those in our community. We are being inundated with news of atrocity and disaster on a 24 hour basis, in ways that our ancestors could never dream of. Our species is some 200,000 years old, and yet the ability to know the immediate details of an act of violence that happens on the other side of the world is less than 100 years old. In fact, for most of the evolutionary history of our species, we were completely unaware there was another side of the world, let alone what happened there.

And because of our strong tribal safety programming, we hear of violence on the other side of the world, or the other side of the country or even the other side of the state, and our brain processes it as the same sort of threat as if it were happening on your block. But a school shooting in California does not make your child in Virginia less safe. It just doesn’t.

So why, if we are safer from personal violence than ever before, are we more afraid than ever before?

Because people make money when we are afraid.

Our biological programming is not equipped to handle the scale of information we now not only have access to, but have thrown at us. The media profits on our fear, and the nature of the Internet economy is that every time we click on a headline, someone makes money. Sensational headlines get more clicks, and headlines that confirm our fears get even more than that.

Every sensational news story of violence drives gun sales, despite the fact that most people killed by guns are the gun owner – usually in an act of suicide. The alarm industry, the gun industry, the security industry, the NRA – all of them profit from your being afraid.

People and corporations are using your fear for profit, and meanwhile we become less safe, not because of actual threat, but because of our increased disconnection from each other.

The only solution I know is to limit your consumption of media. Focus on, and give priority to, the local. Search for things you have in common with people you meet, instead of differences. Be aware of your surroundings, and ask yourself critical questions about fears you have, especially if the fear comes from a non-local source.

And remember that our safety is truly only found in our ability to take care of each other. That is as true now as it was when we were sleeping in trees in the African savanna.

Rewriting Forgiveness

This essay published

A rare guest post today, from my friend Alyssa Vine-Hodge. She and I were talking a few weeks ago about how hard it is to forgive people who have hurt you, and how she, as a survivor, had come to terms with forgiveness. Later she sent me this, and I asked her if I could share it with y’all.

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Does anyone else out there cringe, or feel your blood pressure raise, when you hear the word forgiveness? Do you wish that the definition could be changed, or that the word could be stricken from our vocabulary altogether? If so, I wrote this for you.

Ironically, growing up saturated in Christianity gave me a warped understanding of the word forgiveness. Being a victim of sexual abuse at a young age, though not at the hands of a church or family member, made sitting in church and listening to sermons about forgiveness complicated to say the least.

I heard many sermons about Matthew 5:38-40. “…But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other also…” This passage was very often linked with the concept of forgiveness, topping it off with many sermons about our Lord and Savior, who himself died by abuse.

Often I would hear, “Jesus was God, he could have chosen to take himself down off the cross, but he didn’t. He died, a torturous death, so that we might all receive forgiveness”. I don’t recall ever hearing a sermon about what to do if you are in an abusive relationship, how to stand up for others and come to the aid of those who may be experiencing abuse, or how to stop being an abusive person yourself. What does this say to a child or even to many adults? Well frankly, it says “Take it. That’s what God wants.”

And turning to the secular definition of forgiveness doesn’t make it any easier.

To Forgive: To stop feeling angry or resentful toward someone for an offense, flaw, or mistake.
Synonyms: pardon, excuse, exonerate, absolve

The current definition and synonyms we use can be tolerable, and even useful, for soft situations. But we all know it gets harder and harder as the intensity of an offense increases. How do we stop feeling angry after something like abuse, rape, or murder? Should we stop feeling anger? And inserting the available synonyms just makes it more complicated. To excuse and absolve things like that just seems plain wrong.

It’s been a long process, but I’ll admit that I’ve gotten to a place where I have forgiven my perpetrator. It took time. I was locked up in the crazy house. I take medication now. I do yoga. I still pray to Jesus. But what helped me arrive at forgiveness was writing my own definition:

To not allow another person’s evil to dictate who you want to be

Notice this definition still allows room for a person to experience anger or pain. And there is no way any of the replacement synonyms would work here like “absolve” or “excuse.” Writing this definition liberated me. I was able to no longer have to think of forgiveness in terms of having to tell an evil person, “Hey, rape is excusable. I’m fine now. I’ve forgiven you.” I instead am able to think, “Hey, What you did was totally evil and inexcusable. You caused the symptoms I live with. But I don’t have to be evil like you. I have the power to embrace love.” And to
me, that’s forgiveness.

Today as I was writing this, I decided to be a studious Christian and look up the Hebrew word for forgive. What I found was the same list of synonyms above. However, one translation had an additional word at the end of that list:
to renounce! How can renounce be in the same list with absolve? Well, I think it means that God is bigger than our respective languages and vocabularies. And perhaps God smiles when we write definitions and set ourselves free.

So I hope that today you feel empowered. You have the power to choose what you absolve and what you renounce. And that makes the word forgiveness a little easier to say.

And what about Jesus, then? Well, I’m still on a long road of grappling with many questions. But I’m pretty sure the message isn’t that abuse is okay. I think it means that things like truth, love, and being yourself are often things that others want to destroy. And sometimes they succeed.

 

The storm is still there

This essay published

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I made the decision to go on medication for my depression – depression that was crippling me and threatening my ability to keep it together. This past weekend I was at a wedding, and several of the people there are readers of my blog. So, a natural question they asked was, “How is the medication working out?”

That is the question, isn’t it? Generally, it’s good. I am some five weeks in, and should now be fully dosed. And I have some very good days, some OK days, and some bad days – I imagine just like you do.

Drugs don’t stop depression, as much as I wish they did. I am still the sort of person who gets depressed, and always will be. Hell, I always have been.

What the drugs do, however, is give me some space away from the depression. Instead of being immersed in it, I am able to sit back and observe it. Here is the way I described it to a friend the other day:

Imagine you are on a patio, and it has come a thunderstorm. You are getting drenched, and are unable to move to shelter. That is what depression feels like for me. Now imagine you are inside the house, looking at that same storm, and at that same patio through the sliding glass doors. The storm is still there, the patio is still there, and you are still there. That is what depression on meds feels like for me.

The storm is still there. But now I can observe it, instead of drowning in it.