David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

David McElroy

How do we know when to quit? Persistence may be futile choice

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Inspirational quotes often give very bad advice.

In fact, if you want advice, I can find multiple pieces of folk wisdom or quotes from famous people to share with you — almost none of which would agree with the rest. I can give you folk wisdom about never giving up or I can give you folk wisdom about cutting your losses before they get worse. Which one is good advice?

Why is so much of our collective folk wisdom contradictory? And why does following some of this wisdom not seem to help us?

I’m thinking about this tonight because I ran across a quote which was attributed to Winston Churchill: “Never give up on something that you can’t go a day without thinking about.”

Is that good advice? I have no idea. I guess if you don’t give up on the thing and your persistence brings it to pass, it was great advice. But what if you spend years persisting — passing up other opportunities — in order to stick with something? If you end up with nothing, it was terrible advice and it leaves your miserable.

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Chance encounter with woman leaves me grateful for my health

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When I saw her walking toward my table, her face was familiar, but it took me a long moment to place where I’d known her.

I hadn’t seen Dana for about six months. I didn’t know her well, but I used to talk with her casually when she worked at a restaurant where I go a lot. She left quit that job earlier this year and she hadn’t crossed my mind until tonight.

At first, I couldn’t even remember her name, but I exchanged empty pleasantries with her anyway. I asked how she had been, but it was mostly just a polite question to which I expected a simple answer, but her answer wasn’t simple.

She told me that she left this job for a job at another restaurant. As she was getting ready for her second day of work at the new place, she felt something happen inside her body. She knew it was serious but she didn’t know quite what was going on.

Dana went to an emergency room and found out she had just suffered a stroke. She hasn’t been able to return to work since then.

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Psychiatrist’s insight might be link between spiritual, material worlds

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For my entire life, I’ve struggled to bridge the gap between two worlds. I’ve had one foot in the scientific, material world and another foot in the mystical, spiritual world. They both felt real and true to me, but the two worlds seemed to be at constant war with one another.

I feel those two worlds come together when I experience beauty and when I create art. When I see the trees of a forest in front of me and feel their color and light and shadow hit me like a pounding symphony, I feel as though I’m been transported to another world while I photograph it and then create the finished piece.

This place (in the photo above) exists in the material world. I saw it with my own eyes when I photographed it Friday afternoon. But my rendition of what it looked like and what it felt like to me — that’s something which didn’t come from the camera. That came from something mystical which I can’t explain.

I experience the collision of the material and spiritual worlds when I create something. There have been a few other times I’ve experienced it, too, through transcendent spiritual experiences which thrill me and frighten me. For years, I’ve needed to find a way to unify these two worlds — and an elderly Czech psychiatrist might have just pointed me in the right direction.

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