Chickin Soop

I’m about half way through the second of the Chicken Soup for the Soul books. There about now about half a million different versions, the whole thing busting out into a ridiculously overblown franchise. There is Chicken Soup for the Graduate’s Soul, Chicken Soup for the Mother’s Soul, and so on ad infinitum ad nauseam.

For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, CSFTS books contain short stories, usually no more than a few pages long. They are by design inspirational, uplifting, and intended to help you spend time thinking about how much goodness life contains. They are meant to act as an antidote to the dominant media themes of death, destruction, perversion and greed and worry. To some extent, I believe they do that. I do find myself meditating on the stories, moved by them and I do believe that spending a few minutes a day reading such stories is helpful to the heart.

I must say, however, that there is a strong tendency toward sentimentalism. Some of the stories make me feel not so much choked up as fighting down the gag reflex. And a particularly strong theme in this book is death. Episode after episode of people that said “I love you” to someone just before they died – or didn’t. Kids dying. Adults dying. Cancer. Car crashes. Heart attacks. At a certain point I just started to think that the editors seem to have a rather operatic view of the world. Pathos. Pathos. Pathos. Everything, even the smallest act carries life and death import.

At first, I rejected that. The world is not so much of a drama as that. The mundane is mundane, Most of life just toodles along, punctuated occassionally by brief moments of high drama.

As I considered this, I then realized that I was wrong and the editors actually were right – sentimentality and all (I hate it when that happens). Everything really is a life and death struggle. Life is so short and death so certain that what we make of this brief shining moment determines the value of the life. At the end, it is the sum of these moments that will leave our mark on the world. It is cliché but so what. The truth is that for so much of the world, drama is all there is. Peace is the abberation. Death and destruction is at the door, banging to come in. I cannot afford to be casual, or death will conquer me before I die.

I mock the press analysis of “presidential legacy,” for they speak as if legacy were something that can be created out of nothing in the last 18 months of a president’s tenure. Yet if I am not seeking full engagement with the life that is in me and around me right now, I am making the same mistake. I cannot wait until just before I die to create my legacy. In fact, I may right now be in my last moments. This is no reason to panic, but it is a reason to get serious and get to work. It is a life or death matter.

Why am I here? What good can I do right now? What is really the MOST important thing? To get these answers wrong, or to fail to answer them at all is to die too early. We mistake activity for life. We confuse movement for vitality and noise for breath. It is not a matter of our existence, it is a matter of our direction.

The Bard referred to cowards thusly:

Cowards die many times before their deaths.
The valiant only die but once.

I prefer to die once, and to die well. Children with cancer and orphaned babies remind me of real courage. There are many poor bastards who discover their valiant nature when someone simply cared enough to touch them. Yeah, I’ve read one too many stories of people who were about to commit suicide, but changed their minds because some modestly valiant person was unexpectedly kind to them. At the same time, I hope that I can also be one of those valiant ones. It is much better than being a coward.

It pisses me off that CSFTS helped me to see this a bit more clearly. One likes to get one’s great flashes of insight from much more important books like Moby Dick, A Critique of Pure Reason, or at least maybe King Lear. I guess you can’t pick and choose where your lessons come from.