The Perils and Pleasures of Being High

My life is lived mostly at ground level, in two dimensions. I look up sometimes, but I hardly ever consider the spaces much above my head as part of the immediate physical world I inhabit.

This weekend my world expanded to three dimensions for a little while as I was running up the highest point in New Haven. It is called East Rock and it is a 350-foot high basalt formation that, even if I am generous, cannot be said to “loom” over the city. It more-accurately “glances over the shoulder” of New Haven. There is a road that leads to the top and I like to run up this road most Sundays.

This past Sunday I was near the top of East Rock, running along the road that skirts the edges of a cliff in some places and offers a good view of the Mill River valley below. The drop from the road down to the valley floor is at least 300 feet. As I neared the edge, two turkey vultures blasted up into view mere feet ahead of me, riding an updraft from below and startling the poop out of me. It looked to me like someone had yanked an invisible string and pulled these birds up from the valley floor and high into the air in front of me.

I stopped and watched them for a while as they continued to rise without even a flap of their wings. Vultures are not known for their good looks, but these two birds were the epitome of grace as they made the tiniest of adjustments to their outermost wing feathers to affect changes in their drift and glide. Watching these birds reminded me of the third dimension I walk around in all the time. My wife skydives for fun, so she looks at the air above us differently than I do. She certainly sees it as another medium, like water, that humans locomote through. I just about never think of it that way, but watching those vultures made it clear to me that there is a third dimension—life is not just length and width. There is also depth.

As they soared out and away across the valley and toward West Rock I lost sight of them and continued my run.

And as I did it came to me that most of my relationships are also lived in those same two dimensions. There is a length and a width to them, but the depth is something I hardly ever recognize or explore. The times when this third dimension comes most reliably into focus are when I or someone close to me says something honest. Often the truth catches me by surprise and all in a moment reminds me of just how surface-y and full of shit most of my moments are by contrast.

Being honest and saying what is really there not only makes that third dimension in my relationships “pop” into focus, it also provides lift to reach some pretty amazing places if I am willing to stay in them. Choosing to love someone is a brave decision that loses much of its power if, over time, that love is lived out in two dimensions instead of three.

The Assassination of Barack Obama

President Barack Obama delivered his long-awaited speech to the Muslim world at Cairo University in Egypt today. As has become his pattern, Obama did not shy away from the stickier points of the relationship between Muslims and the United States. Law students who had Barack Obama as a lecturer at the University of Chicago have commented on his ability to lay out the facts of a situation or a case in a thorough, impartial way that gives a full airing of the grievances felt by all sides in a dispute. The same was true of his speech in Cairo today.




He talked about America’s “unbreakable bond” with Israel, but also spoke of the “daily humiliations” suffered by Palestinians living under occupation. He said that to deny the holocaust is “baseless, ignorant, and hateful,” but he also spoke of “Palestine” instead of the usual American Presidential equivocation of “a future Palestinian state.”

When Obama gave his “A More Perfect Union” speech in Philadelphia last spring, I knew right away that he was something special—a politician willing to treat people like they are capable of hearing hard truths about complex, nuanced issues. He knows that we can hear the truths because we all live the truths every day. He knows that to deny the truths, while easy, will never lead to real progress.

Blacks and whites in America KNOW race relations are often not good. Catholics at Notre Dame KNOW that good-hearted people of faith can disagree about abortion. Arabs, Israelis, and Americans KNOW the truth about the conflict in the Middle East
is somewhere in the middle of their many deeply held myths, legends, histories, and explanations.

President Obama seems to truly want the nation and the world to make progress on some of the problems we have been stuck with for generations. He also seems to understand that no progress can be made without recognition of the truth, no matter how complex and unflattering it can sometimes be.

So, he went to Philadelphia and spoke the truth about race relations in America. He went to Notre Dame and he spoke the truth about abortion. And now he has gone to Cairo and spoken the truth about the relationship between Muslims and the United States.

When his speech was over, my first thought was, “He is not long for this world.” If a seeming-crazy person speaks a hard truth that challenges the status quo, that is easy to ignore. But when the President of the United States starts to upset the apple cart, many people firmly entrenched on all sides of these issues can feel threatened. If a politician pisses off one group of the fringe element, it is easy enough to protect against. But when a President takes on as many sacred cows as Barack Obama seems intent on doing, I worry that too many extremists will be coming at him from too many angles and he will be killed. I hope that I am wrong, but as the Greek philosopher Bias of Priene said over 2000 years ago, “Truth breeds hatred.”