Ellie and the other members of our primary presidency put on our ward’s primary presentation last Sunday. Rather than giving the children their lines, each child chose her own NT parable or miracle and wrote his own talk. It felt much more genuine. Ellie also disbursed 3×5 cards to the congregation with questions like, “What was your favorite song? When did you feel the spirit? What did you learn?” I left the meeting both inspired and instructed. One thing I learned, from a story one young man shared, is that ritual absence can be as important as ritual action. For example, we sometimes talk about the limited view of worrying only about what not to do on the Sabbath rather than what we should proactively be doing, which is a fair point; but in course correcting, we may forget that ritual abstaining can still be an important way to mark our discipleship, so long as it is personal and not a standard by which we judge others.
I finished all of my coursework for my MFA in Film Production this past summer, and only my final project—a feature film—remains. As I learn about what it takes most films to get made, I’ve decided making a film is like trying to walk on to a professional sports team—it’s virtually impossible. That it ever actually gets done is a miracle. I have heard that it takes, on average, 10 years for a film to be made, and that doesn’t account for the majority of films that suffer a miserable death in “development hell.” Filmmakers fail a thousand times before succeeding. Only the most indefatigable succeed. Pixar’s motto is apt, “Fail as fast as you can.”
On that note, I was inspired by some things Ed Catmull, former Pixar CEO, wrote in his book Creativity Inc. Below are a few lines from his chapter “Fear and Failure”:
Mistakes aren’t necessary evils. They aren’t evil at all. They are an inevitable consequence of doing something new and should be seen as valuable; without them, we’d have no originality… fail early and fail fast…be wrong as fast as you can. If you aren’t experiencing failure, then you are making a far worse mistake: You are being driven by the desire to avoid it.
Trusting others doesn’t mean that they won’t make mistakes. It means that if they do (or if you do), you trust they will act to help solve it.
Rather than trying to prevent all errors, we should assume, as is almost always the case, that people’s intentions are good and that they want to solve problems. Give them responsibility and let the mistakes happen, then let people fix them. If there is fear, there is a reason—our job is to find the reason and to remedy it—not to prevent risk but to build the ability to recover.
“Build the ability to recover.” Wow. In a gospel context, recovery is repentance. This may be why the Lord taught “say nothing but repentance unto this generation” (D&C 6:9; 11:9; Mosiah 18:10; Luke 24:47). Mistakes, sins, and the like are inevitable, even necessary, for our growth. Our challenge is to build the ability to recover! Similar to Pixar’s motto “fail as fast you can” is an admonition from my patriarchal blessing, “The miracle of forgiveness will work it’s magic in your behalf as you quickly repent, so that you may go forward with your callings here on earth.” On a more humorous note, rough-necked LDS General Authority J. Golden Kimball used to say, “I won’t go to Hell for swearing because I repent too damn fast!” 😂 Of course, and this should go without saying, our repentance must be genuine.
Lucy Easthope is Britain’s most experienced disaster adviser. She has worked on almost every major emergency since 9/11, a catalogue of destructions that include suicide bombings, air crashes, chemical attacks, and more. Even a brief summary of her work seems too heavy to recount, but as I read a New Yorker article about her, I learned two important things from her work. First, she noticed that very small interventions could make a significant difference to people who were involved in atrocious events. “They’re so tiny but they’re so fundamental,” she says. “Being given a cup of tea, or fresh clothes, before being asked what happened to you. Being told the truth even when it is unbearable. These can help take some of the pain away.” Second, out of the worst catastrophes “beauty can rise out of the ashes.” Easthope doesn’t call it “recovery” (often there is little) but instead “finding meaning or purpose.” So (1) small acts of kindness can give relief even to those who’ve suffered the most horrific tragedies, and (2) as meaning-makers, we can find purpose in those very tragedies, drawing beauty from ashes.
I was struck by this poem and how well it reflects our grasping for faith in the things we seek but cannot see nor know: The Soul As If Treasured, by Steven L Peck (BYU biology professor).
“When seeking to unearth a bird-like Cretaceous tyrannosauroid, you can’t tell whether you’ll stumble onto beautiful rock bones, silenced long ago in ancient alluvium, or find only the dry grist of weathered rock, piled high, nothing more than sand and grit whisked and piled thick into a matrix of mud. And yet you press on. Not in certainty, but in a species of hope, the kind of hope that science demands, that life requires, a recognition that even though it is often against the probabilities, you dig as if you might find this beast, one which might have even been covered with feathers—leaving the surrounding stone still bearing the impression of quill and rachis, embossed in shale, and preserved under pressure. So you unearth as if. Excavating, you take care, although nothing may be there, not with shovel and backhoe, but with small and agile trowels handled with grace, encouraged by brushes, removing the frozen bone with attention and stealth—you honor its fragility and vulnerability. Not in pretense or inauthentic performance, but in hope, striving towards recognition that what we uncover may be vital abundance. And though you may find not even the fragment of a toe, you work as if you will find treasure, as if every move you make might break apart the paleontological plum over which every dinosaur-hunter lusts, as if this is the place that will be remembered for a hundred years. It is how you honor the probability that something may be there: You dig as if it were more certain than it ever can be.”
In his essay In Praise of Nothing, Tyler Johnson, LDS Stanford oncologist and professor, recounts how he routinely visits Stanford Memorial Church but seldom sees others there, observing, “What keeps people out when other parts of campus are a hive of activity? Precisely this: there is nothing happening there. And heaven knows, nothing so offends the modern ethos as nothing.”
Johnson writes how modern life is the antithesis of nothing, most notably because of mobile phones and the onslaught of social media. “What is a smartphone, after all, if not the perfect device for preventing nothing from ever happening to anyone, anywhere, ever again?” He argues that the impetus behind online engagement is not information or education, but dopamine—the neurotransmitter that buzzes our brain when we get a like, or a retweet, or a flattering comment. “Dopamine squirts make us feel vaguely important, even desired. We love the internet because it gives the appearance of loving us back.”
His colleague, Anna Lembke, psychiatry professor and head of the Stanford Addiction Clinic, explains that the ready availability of dopaminergic forces in modern life—whether opiates or pornography, likes or retweets, or calorie dense foods—has made addiction nearly ubiquitous.
“We surf the web for the same reason we devour a bag of potato chips for the same reason we binge Netflix for the same reason we seek out pornography compulsively—because it feels good, and we never want to stop feeling good…Even the Surgeon General has now officially recognized the poison that social media is to the developing teenage brain…We become so used to ‘feeling good’ that we arrive at a point where we no longer know how not to. Any time spent not ‘feeling good’ seems somehow wrong or wasted.”
“So, what are we to do?” Johnson asks. “We must reteach ourselves that we are not meant only to feel good all the time. We are, instead, to pass through times of suffering, and we must learn to sit with sorrow without dismissing it or glossing over its depth and difficulty.” There “must needs be opposition in all things,” he writes, quoting the Book of Mormon prophet Lehi (2 Ne 2:11). Without it, “awash in pleasure, we experience little joy…adrift in comfort, we find no meaning.” We just want more and are never satisfied. Dr. Lembke even suggests that the recent near ubiquitous rise in anxiety, depression, and other forms of mental illness stems largely from our unending attempts to evade sorrow and the genuine difficulty of life.
Johnson concludes, “Perhaps the antidote to this endless drive for dopamine is, in fact, nothing—the kind of nothing I experience in Memorial Church…It’s not easy. In embracing nothingness, I sometimes pass through the travails of withdrawal—the longing, the craving, the tremulous desire. But as I push through, I find myself newly alive, senses heightened—eyes, ears, and heart open as never before. That is why I sit in Memorial Church on a Monday morning. Because the quivering silence and kaleidoscopic light highlight that nothing is happening, and nothing is what I desperately need.”
Holy Envy 