Clear Eyes, Full Hearts

This summer, I plowed my way through four seasons of Friday Night Lights on Netflix in about a month.  (I'll give you time to wonder about whether I have any friends whatsoever and how I could sit in front of the tube for that long, and rate my loserhood on a scale from Scotty Smalls in the first part of Sandlot to Steve Urkel.  Good?  Good!)  By doing this, I introduced myself to a group of characters that immediately joined my Court of Fictional Friends alongside Howard Roark, Calvin, Hobbes, Roy Hobbs, Matthias from Redwall, Mufasa, Woody and Andy, and Moonlight Graham.  The most important was Coach Eric Taylor, who led his teams into battle (and an uncanny amount of last-second wins), with his mantra of, "Clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose."
There's nothing sneaky about this phrase.  It can be interpreted pretty easily.  The coach is just telling the boys that being strong people is more important than being a strong football team.  That they can't lose if they are upstanding individuals.

That's fine and good, but I'd like to break it down a little bit more.

Full hearts.  If you would have told me to have a full heart five years ago, I'm not sure I would have thought that was possible.  How can you have a full heart?  Aren't there always more things to love?  Can you really fill that container up?  I now believe that I was on the right track, but I was picturing the container wrong.  There's no finite amount of space to fill up - no box or bag or bucket that can eventually be 100% full.  Instead, I'd like to reference a lecture that I received in one of my first classes at Notre Dame, a theology seminar.  The professor compared the concept of "knowing God" to that of walking backwards out of a funnel.

You start in the spout, and from that point it looks like there's a pretty clear path out.  There isn't much to the sides and you can more or less narrow everything down into a fairly well-defined, uncomplicated track.  The light at the end of the tunnel is narrow.  God is limited.

However, there's a point in time when everything clicks and you realize that God can't be that limited.  That's the transition from the spout to the bowl of the funnel.  From that point on, every step you take forwards makes the area surrounding you a little wider; the closer you get to understanding God, the more there is to understand.  This paradigm means that the funnel can never end, as every time that you do take that step and you do understand, there's that much more that's uncovered and still has to be learned.

I believe that the same type of analogy is true of the heart.  The more that we love, the more ability we have to love.  The more full the heart gets, the wider the "container" gets.  The more love we give, the more ability to love we have.

The only way to be able to do that, however, is with clear eyes.

I believe that one of the worst feelings in the world is regret.  Pain goes away, sorrow clears up, anger dissipates, but regretting something can never be undone.  What-ifs and I-wishes and could've-beens keep us awake far longer than I-miss-hers and screw-hims.  Wouldn't you rather strike out with the bases loaded than let it be completely out of your control?  If you have an open jumper at the end of the game would you really want to pass it to a teammate just to avoid the pain of missing?

Clear eyes means no regrets.  Clear eyes means looking at someone and being able to tell them that there's nothing more you could do, nothing you would rather have done, and that you're proud of yourself.  Clear eyes means that you don't have to look back at the past, but that you can see the present and the future without obstruction.  And to me, clear eyes means one more thing:

Without clear eyes, it's hard to really see what's going on.  It's easy to make judgments about people, about places, about situations.  It's easy to think that you're always right.  It's easy to overlook things. 

Clear eyes means being able to see the world with an open mind.  Clear eyes means being willing to understand people for who they are without blindly trying to classify them.  Clear eyes means wanting to know and understand the world around you, the people who live in it, and the things that happen in it.

If we can look back without regrets, if we can see the past for what it was and the present for what it is, and if we can allow ourselves to see the unknown as it comes instead of assuming what it will be, if we can fill our hearts, and continue to fill them, if we can approach the world with a loving heart instead of a bitter one, I really don't think that it's possible to lose.

!

Two nights ago, I was told by someone I know that life is a question mark, that you can never be sure what's going to happen next, that it's one big mystery.

Ehhhhhhhhhhhh...

I'll give her that you can never be totally sure of anything, but at the same time, she's making it sound like Mario Kart, where you get hit by lightning or tracked down by a turtle shell at least once every 60 seconds.  Now, I don't know all that much about what's going on with her, but I can honestly say that none of those things have ever happened to me.

Milwaukee, apparently

There are unknowns.  There are lots of unknowns.  In fact, there are very few knowns, and that's even if you count high probability assumptions, such as surviving the morning drive to work.  These things are scary, some are terrifying, some make us stay awake at night, some make us doubt ourselves, and some seem insurmountable.  In no way am I saying that there aren't question marks in life, but that doesn't automatically make life a question mark.  We give out question marks when we run out of our own options, either when we don't have any ideas left or when we don't care enough to find out by ourselves.  Is that really what we want to reduce life to?

Let's pretend that

Clay Matthews

is chasing you down.

What do you do?  Well, you, you scared little ball carrier you, have options.
1. Stand still
2. Run at him
3. Try to avoid him
That's pretty much it.  Now, there's a great chance that by doing any of these three things you're going to get clobbered, but at least in the second two you are in control of your own destiny.  If you try to avoid him, you have a chance to get away.  If you run at him and initiate contact, you have some control of where the hit's happening.  If you stand there and leave it up to him, they'll have to peel you out of the Frozen Tundra.

This isn't something that a positive attitude can solve.  This is something that only effort and passion and hope can solve. 

"Remember Red, hope is a good thing, maybe even the best of things, and no good thing ever dies"

A positive attitude wasn't going to get Andy DuFresne out of Shawshank.  A positive attitude won't save your teeth if Clay Matthews is running at you.  A positive attitude only works when coupled with hope, which my dictionary defines as "a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen."  Key word there?  Expectation.



If we wait to see what the scary things are going to do to us, even if we have the best of attitudes, they will inevitably do something other than what we want, and while it may never result in us face-down in the Lambeau Field turf, it could cause other things that are just as bad emotionally, if not physically.  On the other hand, if we take that fear and channel it, and decide that we're going to do something about it and keep it in our own hands, we can do absolutely no worse, and a lot of the time we can do a lot better.  If we expect to come out ahead and we act like it, if we expect to break out of that prison and do something about it, if we expect to juke out that linebacker and start making some moves, there's a chance that we will, but if we sit around and wait to get hit by the scary unknown, the best case will never happen.  Clay Matthews doesn't miss tackles.  Shawshank doesn't let guys out because they feel bad for them.

We need to be bold, we need to expect excellence in the hopes that we will only fall as low as success, and we need to live life as an exclamation point, not a question mark.  Exclamation points accomplish their purpose!  Aren't question marks just waiting to get eliminated?