Do you ever wonder what it would be like to slow down a second and just breathe—take into your soul for one small moment of stillness
all that you love and trust and desire and hold it in your heart for as long as this world will allow?
What about those times when you’re traveling through life at a nice, little clip and WHAM! You are sucker punched in the face from the suffering of someone you love? Or perhaps someone you don’t even know? Or you experience a faith-quake that grabs your conscience like a vice and haunts you—literally haunts you—until you finally relent and make some adjustments to your priorities to remove yourself from the grip of regret?
Maybe you never slow down long enough to notice that you’re on that hamster wheel? Maybe you do your utmost to avoid the suffering of others and preserve that false sense of safety and security you’re so attached to? You don’t want to think about it. And you certainly don’t want somebody coming along who thinks it might be a stellar idea to chuck a stick in the spokes of your hamster wheel.
Well, watch out.
Jeff Goins is walking around poking sticks in hamster wheels and people are flying out of their cages. There are paradigms shifting everywhere, folks, and Mr. Goins, in true Thoreau form (yeah, I said it) is standing at the helm. For those who have convinced themselves that the pursuit of their own life, liberty, and happiness is the end-all-be-all, the goal, the point, the obsession, and that nothing—no amount of human angst or threat of stroking out from the daily grind—is ever going to stop you… Well, you go ahead and take a pass on this guy.
He’s really not for you, pumpkin.
But if you’re tired? Or if your heart goes out to those oppressed but you just don’t know what to do to help yourself, let alone anybody else? Or if you’ve contemplated, self-reflected, and second-guessed the way this world works and your place in all of it? This is most decidedly the author for you.
Jeff’s two books, Wrecked: When a Broken World Slams Into Your Comfortable Life and The In-Between: Embracing the Tension Between Now and the Next Big Thing gives us a sense of who he is: He’s just a guy—a storyteller. Simple. Unassuming. But here’s the thing: you and I are in every one of his stories, and each account of his own interactions with the world leads us right into every point he makes about life. He’s an accomplished wordsmith and seems to love to drop these hilarious quips in the middle of incredibly poignant truths—so we won’t forget them.
In Wrecked, which made me cry because this guy so gets it, he challenges us to put ourselves purposefully and intentionally in close proximity to other people’s pain, not merely so that we can be the miracle they need, but so that we ourselves can be profoundly changed and shaped by it.
Sounds fun, right?
Except he makes it very clear that the alternative robs us of our very humanness. And in the end, who wants that? To be so self-absorbed and busy drains us of compassion—a word that when deconstructed literally means with suffering. So then, we don’t have true compassion unless we, too, are… suffering?
You tell me.
In The In-Between, Jeff ups the ante even further by addressing the busyness of our culture, challenging us to find the beauty of life in those moments where we (perish the thought) wait. We hate to wait, don’t we? We get ants in our pants just waiting for fast food. Food! That is FAST! This is what “Jimmy Johns” sandwich shops promise to alleviate. This is why the hook of many advertisements is, “Don’t wait! Get it here NOW!” We’re just not built for waiting in this country. We go from big moment to big moment in our lives and dread the time In-Between.
Early on in the book, however, Jeff warns us, “If we reserve our joy only for the experiences of a lifetime, we may miss the life in the experience.” Then he proceeds to tell us about the ants in his pants that prevent him from being good at waiting just like the rest of us. He is honest about his own impatience and how he’s missed the joy of life because he was so busy anticipating the “next big thing”. Many of his antics cracked me up, but he eventually listens to that soft, still voice inside him, and he figures it out. From his anecdotes, I can’t decide if this guy is 12 or, like the great Jedi master, Yoda, 900 years old?
Maybe he’s both. He seems to be a great voice of wisdom to the upcoming generation, and that’s why these books are treasures. I alluded to Mr. Thoreau earlier because when I read Jeff’s work, it made me think of Henry’s, specifically the text that surrounds his most famous words in regard to the mass of men who lead lives of quiet desperation:
“I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous… Talk of a divinity in man… How godlike, how immortal, is he? See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate… As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.
When we consider what, to use the words of the catechism, is the chief end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of life, it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there is no choice left. But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear. It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true today may turn out to be falsehood tomorrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields.”
Mr. Goins has masterfully reminded us in his work that life is not frivolous. Killing time, indeed, injures eternity. Don’t be content to lead a life of quiet desperation simply because you think there is no choice left. You are given a measure of time on this earth. Choose wisely.
Daisy Rain Martin is editor in chief for RAIN Magazine. She is also the author of Juxtaposed: Finding Sanctuary on the Outside and If It’s Happened to You, which can both be found on her website. Look for Hopegivers: Hope is Here in 2015.
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