Crazy In A Better Direction

We are all a lit­tle crazy in our own unique lit­tle ways. That is the point of the early chap­ters of Gen­e­sis. “Sin” has to do with being a “lit­tle out of round.” We do odd things that we ratio­nal­ize but can­not fully explain. Those that know they are doing such things we call saints. Those that do destruc­tive things with­out full con­scious­ness, we call sin­ners. The sooner we rec­og­nize just how weird we act, the bet­ter. Fully embrac­ing this mys­te­ri­ous dynamic and focus­ing on a bet­ter way of liv­ing is called repen­tance.

One night I caught myself, late at night, wax­ing my car in the rain. I was doing some­thing pretty weird. I knew I was doing some­thing bizarre, but I could not stop myself. Later, I learned that I tended to wash my car when I felt angry. One winter’s day in West Texas, at ten below zero, I again noticed I was wash­ing my car. The water from the robo wash was turn­ing to ice instantly as it hit my vehi­cle. That was weird. At that point, I knew that wash­ing my car stood for some­thing that I had not yet solved.

To make a long story short, I dis­cov­ered that I was wash­ing my car as a way of deal­ing with buried anger. Pretty weird, but I solved the mys­tery. I came to a deep insight about myself and have gone to a “nor­mal” wash­ing cycle for my auto­mo­bile (every few weeks or months depend­ing on where I live at the time). The weird­est thing we do is when we defend our com­pul­sions. I had all sorts of ratio­nales for wash­ing my car. The truth is: I was angry and chose to vent it — though fairly con­struc­tively to hide it from myself.

We are all a lit­tle bit strange. Trac­ing the roots to our strange behav­iors is a jour­ney in and of itself. Do not be afraid to do so. You may not be able to imme­di­ately change your com­pul­sions, but you can start being crazy in a bet­ter direc­tion. You can do good things for oth­ers instead of self-defeating things. You can be con­struc­tive instead of destruc­tive.

Crazy things hap­pen to us. With­out being aware of these things, we pass the crazi­ness along. Catch­ing our­selves at it is what makes us saints. We wake up to our uncon­scious act­ing out. True to form, we usu­ally blame our act­ing out on oth­ers or on cir­cum­stances. Noble is the per­son that can own the weird things he or she does.

Hon­esty is the bot­tom line to all of this. Stand up and admit that you do some crazy stuff. At that point, you will auto­mat­i­cally begin to change for the better.