@HomewithDean – Homily 06/25

So I’m at the gym on Wednesday, putting my stuff in my locker. Another guy who I see there pretty regularly walks in to do the same and offers up a greeting.“Morning. How’s it going?”To which I answered,“Can’t complain. But the day is young.”Now, I’m really not one to overanalyze pleasant small talk, including my own, but at five in the morning there are parts of my brain that are pretty much doing whatever they want without asking permission. And one of those parts got caught up in my answer.“Can’t complain. But the day is young.” A fun little upbeat answer with just a touch of fatalism for flavor. I’ll give it a seven out of ten for clever, especially at 5am. But what I started pondering was whether it was true. Is it true that I can’t complain? Or is it just that I won’t complain? Seems like splitting hairs but the difference between can’t and won’t are night and day. “Can’t” means today’s potential moods are out of my hands, but “won’t” is a choice. I said “can’t.” And if my gym friend had cared—which obviously he didn’t—but if he had, he might have thought, “Hmmm, he can’t complain. So, this guy seems in a pleasant mood right now but basically he’s admitting to me that if I hung out with him longer it would pretty much be a coin toss.” Small talk is a trivial thing. Truth is I don’t really care how my gym friend sees my world. But I do care how my own brain sees my world, and that makes the difference between, “can’t complain,” and “won’t complain,” a big deal to me.If there’s one thing that I’ve learned from hanging out on this planet for the last half century it’s that life is imperfect. Intensely, chaotically, consistently, often stunningly imperfect. But life is also miraculous, and wondrous, and indescribably beautiful. Life is, in fact, always all of these things all the time. Stunningly, intensely, beautifully, chaotically and consistently wondrously imperfect. Which simply means at any given moment in any given day, there is never a shortage of things to complain about or things to celebrate. And at