Studies such as this indicate that the younger you feel as you age, the happier and healthier you tend to be. Acting old and talking about being old and complaining about the things that make you feel old, all tend to accelerate the aging process. Focusing on things you enjoy, starting new hobbies or challenges, and acting or behaving younger seem to slow the aging process.

My wife and I will have our 34th wedding anniversary this year, I will turn 60, my youngest (out of 6) will turn 20. There’s a lot to feel old about, but I feel younger than my age and am grateful for my health and for my wife's health.
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About a week ago we were sitting in bed in the morning talking. Almost every morning we read the Bible, pray, and chat about whatever is on our minds. I wish now that I could remember the full conversation, but all I recall is one sentence. First a little history:

When we were young, in our mid 20s, from the very earliest memories of our courtship, I remember talking about growing old together. We had this joint vision of a house with a front porch looking out over some land and sitting next to each other in two rocking chairs—peacefully rocking and enjoying just being there together. On my 50th birthday Jackie gave two bentwood rocking chairs and we put them on the front porch. We’ve spent a fair amount of time since then, enjoying the peace, watching the animals and rocking together.

Back to a week ago and our morning chat. She looked over at me and said “you know? we’re growing old together.” It was the first time I ever felt that we had actually entered that amazing place—and it in no way was a sad realization—it was more like a “coming home” feeling, in the best sense of coming home.

So, the studies may encourage people to stay young by doing young things and to avoid falling into the “old person” role, but I for one am going to bask in the joy of growing old together rocking on the front porch with my beautiful wife.

How we perceive the world impacts our lives as much as anything that happens to us. This is very good news indeed, because we can put on new glasses, or we can clean off the ones we have on. A couple weeks ago I dropped my glasses. I was outside, and they landed on a rock and got scratched right in the middle of my line of sight. When I picked them up and put them back on, there was a blurry spot everywhere I looked. It affected the way my car looked and the way my wife looked. Everything I looked at with my right eye open was affected by that defect.

I ordered new glasses.

If I had continued to wear the glasses the way they were, I would have become accustomed to the scratch. At some point I would no longer notice it, because it would be normal. Some people rarely clean their glasses, and the gradual degradation of vision over time happens so slowly that they don't notice.

I talked to a person yesterday that had on glasses of suspicion and distrust. These glasses were welded to his head because he had been betrayed by important people in his life that he trusted, starting with his parents at a young age. He could not simply take off his glasses of distrust and put on new glasses of trust, he needed tools to help remove the glasses, as well as tools to help install the new ones.

Traumatic experiences tend to weld glasses of distortion on the person who has been traumatized. These are among the hardest glasses to change, but we all have glasses with various degrees of difficulty replacing. Here are some of the types of glasses we can wear:

Negativity
Judgment
Superiority
Victimhood
Blaming

And here are some of the glasses we can replace them with:

Positivity
Grace
Humility
Acceptance
Solution focus
Owning


Whether our current glasses are hard or easy to remove, the first step is acknowledging how they distort our perception, how beneficial it is to take them off, and how bright and clear our world can be, in time, with new glasses.

From The Undoing Project.

"All you had was rubber bands and masking tape, so you fixed things with rubber bands and masking tape," she said.  ...There weren't many luxuries. She and Amos had no phone and no car, but neither did most of the other people they knew. The shops were all small and particular. There was the knife sharpener, and the stonecutter, and the falafel seller. If you needed a carpenter or a painter you didn't bother to phone them, even if you owned a phone, because they never answered. You went downtown in the afternoon and hoped to bump into them. "Everything was personal, all transactions. The standard joke was: Someone runs out of their burning home to ask a friend on the street if they know someone in the Fire Department." There was no television, but there were radio's everywhere, and when the BBC came on, everyone stopped whatever they were doing to listen.

As I read through this description of a community, I was drawn to the personal connection that it portrays. It makes me think of the shift I felt when headphones became more prevalent with Walkmans. It felt to me that people who had the headphones on had put up a barrier with the world. They were unavailable. Do Not Disturb. It had not been so with transistor radios and a single ear piece. With the transistor radio, the person with the single ear piece was sneaking a listen to other things, like the ball game, while still being available and present with those around.

Today if I go out walking on a public trail, more than half the people I pass have isolated themselves from the world around them by the use of headphones. Including myself. I have my reasons, of course--and I break headphone etiquette by saying "hi" to people as they go by--but I still do it.

This is the baggage of technology. It helps in many ways, but there is always a cost. With greater awareness, the cost can be managed but it is ever present. It is the tension between  a world where connection is always face to face, and one in which I can walk and shut out the world while I  listen to teaching or worship, Car Talk or a book on Audible.

My lovely wife recently pointed out the Tytler cycle to me, which I find very intriguing.  It was conceived by the Scottish Historian Alexander Tytler, and posits that every democracy goes through the same cycle, which looks like this:

The first stage moves from bondage to spiritual faith. 
The second from spiritual faith to great courage.
The third stage moves from great courage to liberty.
The fourth stage moves from liberty to abundance. 
The fifth stage moves from abundance to selfishness. 
The sixth stage moves from selfishness to complacency.
The seventh stage moves from complacency to apathy. 
The eighth stage moves from apathy to moral decay. 
The ninth stage moves from moral decay to dependence.
And the tenth and last stage moves from dependence to bondage. 

This can be drawn in a circle as well, to depict the full cycle including from the bottom back up to the top.

Now clearly this has implications politically right now, but that is not what I have been thinking about quite as much. What I have been thinking about is the clear demarcation in stage 5, where the  positive ascent resulting in abundance, gives way to selfishness and then the death spiral. Stage 5 is the tipping point. If an individual could climb the stages and stay in abundance without moving to selfishness, grand things could be accomplished. Abundance without selfishness. Abundance without selfishness.

In Proverbs 30, Agur says "give me neither poverty nor riches, but give me only my daily bread. Otherwise I may have too much and disown you and say, 'who is the Lord?' Or I may become poor and steal, and so dishonor the name of my God." Abundance without selfishness, without self importance, without pride in what I have or what I have done is next to impossible. It reminds me of Jesus saying that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.

Now, lest you feel you are off the hook for being rich, 1% of the worlds population makes $38,000 per year or more (the stats vary, so it may be slightly lower than that). That means that all of us in the US live in abundance, because even if we are not in the top 1% we are for sure in the top 5.  I would also venture to say that we all deal with selfishness.

We watched a documentary last night called Living on One Dollar, which is about 4 college students that decide to take two months of their lives to see what it is like to live on a dollar a day in Guatemala, where that is a common income. The most impactful part of the movie for me was seeing how generous the Guatemalan people are, how willing to help and give of themselves, and in the end how generous the 4 students were as well. There is something very powerful about people who have very little being so willing to share.

Sunday morning I was standing in Church singing, when the little boy in the row ahead of me kicked over his Styrofoam water cup.

Water, tile floor. No big deal.

However, my 17 year old daughter, with a "help people in distress" streak as big as the sky, darted down the row to help the young mother by cleaning it up. On her way, she inadvertently kicked an extra extra extra large coffee latte which dumped its sticky contents all over the floor and adjacent rug.

We've all been there. Trying to help but making things so much worse than they were before we tried to help.

I told her later how proud I was of her, that just because things turned  out embarrassing did not mean that the quality that propelled her into action was any less gracious and kind. Life can get messy, and the only way to avoid that messiness is to stay uninvolved. Some use a situation such as above to say to themselves, "I always mess up when I try to help, its better not to help at all". That is an unfortunate choice because it removes that persons giftedness and contribution from the rest of the world.

Learn from your mistakes when you can, but stay engaged, stay involved and remind yourself that if you're doing it right, at times it will be messy.

This morning on my way to work I heard another report on fake news. The gist of the report was that some groups of people felt it effected public opinion to a great extent and others felt it was not that big a deal. Some groups (I am avoiding naming particular political groups) felt they could easily spot fake news, others not so much. This drew my thoughts to confirmation bias, the insidious and powerful filter in our lives that helps us organize our thoughts, but leaves us seeing less clearly than we think we are.

Confirmation bias is the hard default of our brain that causes us to see what we expect to see and to ignore information that we do not expect to see. I say hard default, because it is impossible to change this tendency no matter how much we know it is present, and how hard we try. We can push against it, but it is forever paddling upstream. Granted, some do not even try to push against it and drift blithely downstream, while others fight with some tenacity.

I noticed a non-relational example recently. Michael Lewis in his book The Undoing Project talks about this in relation to scouting and choosing NBA (or any) draft picks. He tells how Daryl Morey, a sports analytics practitioner, observed that scouts would look at a player and form an almost instant impression of them. After that, the things the player did that confirmed the impression were noted, and the things that did not support the impression went unnoticed. None of this was conscious, their assessment process felt objective to the scouts. Factors that affected this impression were things like:

--reminding the scout of a current Most Valuable Player due to size, build, racial characteristics, mannerisms.
--reminding the scouts of themselves when they were younger, and thus favoring their skills.
--physical features such as looking soft, odd, attractive or unattractive.

Consequently, he began to come up with ways to counteract this powerful but ghost-like force in order to select the best players more accurately. He came up with rules such as "you can never compare a player to someone of the same race". That means if there is a black person trying out, you can not say, "he reminds me of Michael Jordan". You can say regarding an asian player, "he reminds me of Michael Jordan". What he found in the end was that people completely stopped making comparisons because they did not fit so easily cross racially.

If people are going to this much effort to select sports players accurately, it makes sense to put effort into living well with the people around us and swim upstream if necessary to counteract our biases. At this point I do not have any rules to impart, but I do want to raise awareness and encourage you to assess your own biases

I have listed below some factors that could potentially effect the way you "hear" someone. So the question is: How do these things effect the way you view what this person says, or are these things irrelevant? Or, do you feel like some of these things have good reason to impact how you view what someone says?

Height
Attractiveness
Hair color
Race
Political views
The kind of car one drives
type of employment or unemployment
home
how organized the person is
how loud or withdrawn a person is
religion and the level of priority placed on religion including atheism
physical disability
emotional disability
mental disability
where they went to school
body piercings or art
manners
​self awareness

feel free to add to the list, this is just a start.

I am going to leave this as a "food for thought" blog, but I would love to hear any input you may have regarding this.

Speaking of streams, it's Interesting where a news story can take ones thoughts.

Today I feel stressed, small and inadequate. In the grand scheme of things, there is nothing tragic in my life--it is normal (difficult) stuff that converged today and left me wilted and wanting and in need of God's intervention--in whatever form He brings it. 

I take some encouragement from this however. In the beginning of Revelation, God gives John a series of visions and asks him to write down the words he gives him for letters to 7 churches. In 5 of those 7 letters God has some positive and some negative to say about each church. I church he has nothing critical to say, and in the last church, Laodicea, he has nothing positive to say. What is the biggest issue with Laodicea? They say, "I am rich. I have acquired wealth and don't need a thing". They had become self sufficient. Not the self sufficiency that is robust while still acknowledging that "everything I have I have received" (1 Cor 4:7), but a self sufficiency that said we don't need a thing, we frankly have no need of God, we've got this covered.

I can be the same way when things are going smoothly in certain areas of my life. In fact, I think it is important when things are going well to have a thankful heart and "remember the Lord our God for it is He who gives us the ability to produce wealth" (Duet. 9:18). It is also He who gives us everything else. 

I don't go here quickly. I internally fuss and fume and try to figure my way out of my predicaments. None of this is wrong of course, but turning to God sooner is always better than later.

So today, though I am feeling needy, I am thankful that I have a God who can give me everything that I need, and that I am so much more aware of my need because of my circumstances.

When I was 8 years old, i got my first pair of glasses. I can distinctly remember my amazement as I surveyed the new world.  Trees had individual leaves that moved about, not just blobs of green. I could see the chalkboard. I could see how cute Ingrid was from way across the room. I could see clearly.

In my counseling practice, I see people who have stressed and struggling marriages. Most come because they want things better; they want a marriage with joy, peace, and love. The excitement of a first date for some, and the comfort of a favorite pair of jeans for others. Over the years I have noticed a barrier to their goals that is simple to understand, but hard to remove. In order to remove it, they must put on new glasses.

Inattentional blindness is a phenomenon that has been observed in many contexts. Our brains take in an enormous amount of information, and it is necessary to filter out the less important things in order to attend to the more important things. Inattentional blindness is a result of this filtering, and paradoxically, the more attention is focused, the worse the blindness can become. Two experiments illustrate this: In one, a group of radiologists were asked to look at 5 scans of patients lungs looking for cancer.  The final scan had  a gorilla 48 times as large as the cancerous  nodules, yet 83% of the radiologists did not see it. In another experiment, participants were asked to watch a basketball game and count how many passes were made. During the segment, a person in a gorilla costume (not sure what the gorilla connection is) crosses the court. Subjects were able to report the number of passes, but were shocked to learn of the gorilla person. 

One last example that we can all relate to immediately is our nose.  It is very prominent in our field of vision, yet our brains edit it out and even "patch in" what is expected to be behind it.

So, what does this have to do with marriage? A phrase that is frighteningly true unless you have learned to use it to your advantage is this: You see what you expect to see.  I hear phrases like this: "he always does _______"  "when _____ happens, she always______" "this is what he does......"  I can never _______, because she __________" and so on. It is the narrative that I know how things go and they always go that way and he/she needs to change so that things can be better.  Things can never be better until he/she stops doing the things they do." Once this mindset has developed, it creates inattentional blindness to anything that does not support it.  The mind thinks it is doing us a favor (simplifying life) by excluding the data that do not support what we expect. So, how do we counteract this phenomenon?

1. Look for evidence that your preconceived ideas are wrong--look for exceptions and magnify them.  When she expresses appreciation for the yard work you did, don't miss it because "she never appreciates anything I do". Use it as an opportunity to say how good it feels when she expresses appreciation.

2. Focus on the positives and the things you like/love about your spouse. The things you pay attention to will become more important in your mind. (which is why things go downhill when the focus is on the negative). 
For example, rather than focusing on how little time your husband spends with you and how you feel unappreciated, focus on how he works consistently, he is a good father, and he is faithful.  This doesn't mean the other things are not important, it means that if you focus on what you have instead of what you don't have, things will tend to get better.  If you focus on what you don't have things will always get worse.

3. Practice Philippians 4:8 Finally, brothers and sisters, fill your minds with beauty and truth. Meditate on whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is good, whatever is virtuous and praiseworthy. 

I do recognize that all three of these overlap.  It just feels good to have 3 points instead of one.  The main idea is to purpose to look for things that are going to put the eye glasses of grace and truth on our relationships. In addition, it is encouraging us to spend more time looking at the leaves, and less time looking in the sewer.