Be a Buddhist, Boulder
Published in the Boulder Daily Camera, 11/23/17
My daughter, Erin, and I share a common trait — we tend towards passion about things we believe in. From family to politics, Erin and I actively engage in public debates on issues of importance to us. She's a liberal high school teacher and I'm a conservative newspaper columnist, so we get lots of opportunities to put our passion to work.
In Boulder, we have lots of company.
However, it's easy to cross the line that separates a passionate believer from a raving lunatic if our personalities come up short on one important trait — humility. Whatever we may think, we are not the only smart person in the room and the complicated issues that lie before us do not often lend themselves to clear and indisputably right answers. The tough stuff of life is just not that simple. Whether it's how old our kid needs to be before they can have a mobile phone or if we should kick out Xcel and generate our own electricity, the right answer is rarely clear.
The primary source of conflict during these debates is that we all lack the perfect crystal ball to tell us what the future holds depending upon the choices we make. If we're humble, we understand that our crystal ball gives us, at best, fuzzy black-and-white images that often go blank at the most important parts. If we lack humility, we believe our crystal ball shows simple and clear truths that we must make the world understand.
But, passionate debate must eventually yield to the people in power, be they parents, politicians, or voters, who must make the decisions. And, if those decisions don't go our way, we don't like it one bit. Human nature.
A few years ago, Erin and I both realized that we spent too much energy fretting when the decisions didn't go our way. So, we decided to borrow the humility page from Buddhism's playbook — the one that places a high value on respecting those who think differently from us. Now, when some decision doesn't go our way, we remind each other that the best thing to do at that moment is, "be a Buddhist." In other words, accept the decision graciously and let the future unfold for us all to learn from. Enlightenment 101.
Boulder has just gone through a knock-down, drag-out brawl of an election. A town that viewed itself as politically homogenous has just learned that we're not. Turns out that there are some pretty serious fault lines around big issues like whether we accommodate change through growth and how we can best help our environment. These are not trivial issues and it's fair to assume that what Boulder becomes tomorrow will heavily depend upon what voters and politicians decide today.
Leading up to this election, many of us set aside our humility and engaged the debate with all due passion and commitment to the rightness of our beliefs. That's what civic debate is all about, and we had a good one this year.
What we seem be struggling with, not only in Boulder but across the nation, is finding peace after an election when, on almost every issue, about half of us are disappointed.
The road most traveled today seems to be one of anger and resistance to the winners. Even though the choice is made, we continue shouting the arguments that were, in the end, unconvincing to voters. We find reasons to think the other guys cheated, like free pizza. Perhaps most destructively, we attempt to taint the character of the winners by blaming the "bad" choices" of voters not on the strength of the winners' ideas but, instead, on their character flaws. We do that here in Boulder even if that means demonizing the likes of PLAN Boulder, an organization that has undeniably done more to make Boulder great than any other current civic organization.
Maybe it's easy for me to see the wrongness of this because Boulder has been teaching me humility for all of my 36 years here. As a conservative, I've been getting up every morning, reading the newspaper, and asking myself why the powers-that-be in this town keep doing things that are certain to destroy Boulder. And, for each of these 36 years, Boulder has kept getting better and better. That's humbling.
Sure, as we approach future decision points about Boulder and America's choices, the passion of our arguments should rise again to a fever pitch. But, in the interest of seeing what tomorrow really ends up looking like, let's all bury the vitriol and relax a bit while the future unfolds.
Be a Buddhist, Boulder.
My daughter, Erin, and I share a common trait — we tend towards passion about things we believe in. From family to politics, Erin and I actively engage in public debates on issues of importance to us. She's a liberal high school teacher and I'm a conservative newspaper columnist, so we get lots of opportunities to put our passion to work.
In Boulder, we have lots of company.
However, it's easy to cross the line that separates a passionate believer from a raving lunatic if our personalities come up short on one important trait — humility. Whatever we may think, we are not the only smart person in the room and the complicated issues that lie before us do not often lend themselves to clear and indisputably right answers. The tough stuff of life is just not that simple. Whether it's how old our kid needs to be before they can have a mobile phone or if we should kick out Xcel and generate our own electricity, the right answer is rarely clear.
The primary source of conflict during these debates is that we all lack the perfect crystal ball to tell us what the future holds depending upon the choices we make. If we're humble, we understand that our crystal ball gives us, at best, fuzzy black-and-white images that often go blank at the most important parts. If we lack humility, we believe our crystal ball shows simple and clear truths that we must make the world understand.
But, passionate debate must eventually yield to the people in power, be they parents, politicians, or voters, who must make the decisions. And, if those decisions don't go our way, we don't like it one bit. Human nature.
A few years ago, Erin and I both realized that we spent too much energy fretting when the decisions didn't go our way. So, we decided to borrow the humility page from Buddhism's playbook — the one that places a high value on respecting those who think differently from us. Now, when some decision doesn't go our way, we remind each other that the best thing to do at that moment is, "be a Buddhist." In other words, accept the decision graciously and let the future unfold for us all to learn from. Enlightenment 101.
Boulder has just gone through a knock-down, drag-out brawl of an election. A town that viewed itself as politically homogenous has just learned that we're not. Turns out that there are some pretty serious fault lines around big issues like whether we accommodate change through growth and how we can best help our environment. These are not trivial issues and it's fair to assume that what Boulder becomes tomorrow will heavily depend upon what voters and politicians decide today.
Leading up to this election, many of us set aside our humility and engaged the debate with all due passion and commitment to the rightness of our beliefs. That's what civic debate is all about, and we had a good one this year.
What we seem be struggling with, not only in Boulder but across the nation, is finding peace after an election when, on almost every issue, about half of us are disappointed.
The road most traveled today seems to be one of anger and resistance to the winners. Even though the choice is made, we continue shouting the arguments that were, in the end, unconvincing to voters. We find reasons to think the other guys cheated, like free pizza. Perhaps most destructively, we attempt to taint the character of the winners by blaming the "bad" choices" of voters not on the strength of the winners' ideas but, instead, on their character flaws. We do that here in Boulder even if that means demonizing the likes of PLAN Boulder, an organization that has undeniably done more to make Boulder great than any other current civic organization.
Maybe it's easy for me to see the wrongness of this because Boulder has been teaching me humility for all of my 36 years here. As a conservative, I've been getting up every morning, reading the newspaper, and asking myself why the powers-that-be in this town keep doing things that are certain to destroy Boulder. And, for each of these 36 years, Boulder has kept getting better and better. That's humbling.
Sure, as we approach future decision points about Boulder and America's choices, the passion of our arguments should rise again to a fever pitch. But, in the interest of seeing what tomorrow really ends up looking like, let's all bury the vitriol and relax a bit while the future unfolds.
Be a Buddhist, Boulder.
