We create our suffering. When we choose to stay negative, we either (a) think it will help us get what we want; or (b) we’re getting off on playing the victim. Staying negative has no useful purpose and is therefore unintelligent. 

∞

Deltas feature prominently in my physical and spiritual lives. I often blurp into past lives spent in the Ancient Egyptian Nile Delta where I was a beggar, a sun god, and everything in between. This might explain my compulsion to get a delta symbol tatted on my forearm at the age of 43 following a spiritual awakening, even though I swore off ink after a botched job 25 years earlier.

More recently, my grandad’s grandad was a slave in the Mississippi Delta, where more millionaires lived per capita than anywhere else in the world during slave times, and generations of abuse, rape, and torture forged a tolerance for pain into his DNA that he passed on to me. Eventually, my grandad settled in Memphis, Tennessee, named after the Ancient Egyptian capital of my spiritual ancestors. In Memphis, he met my grandmother, a member of the second generation of college-educated Black women in Tennessee and a proud member of the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., who crossed over when she attended Tennessee State University. 

In this life, I learned about using deltas to evaluate performance when I was a door-to-door canvasser for a lefty political organization in Arizona, with the delta being the gap between where they say you’re at and where they want you to be. For example, my team lead often said my delta was that I’d get by off charisma alone instead of seeking to activate community members, and we’d talk about “closing the delta.” (Now that I suspect the organization was an unofficial arm of a political party financed by dark money, I understand my former self’s soul-level reluctance to activate strangers).

Deltas are also helpful in describing any difference in views between humans or groups of humans. Once you accept the delta, finding a common ground and closing it becomes way easier. I practice this most frequently with my ex-wife, who’s a baby mama (she doesn’t love that term) and co-parent. For example, I’m not about most vaccines, and she is. Once we accepted the delta, we could move past debating the merits of vaccines and instead move towards finding a middle ground. In this case, I told my ex I wasn’t going to haul her into court to get a restraining order barring her from getting my boys vaxxed, but I wasn’t taking them to get jabbed, either, and I would share with them my spiritual doubts about whether or not vaxxes are helpful. This outcome wasn’t optimal for either of us, but we closed the delta and moved on.

My favorite spiritual delta to explore is the gap between how we think things should be and how things actually are. For many of us, this delta turns into a spiritual Bermuda Triangle where we get trapped and can’t escape. We get so frustrated about how things are, we don’t have any energy left over to unlock a new experience. 

Fighting against what is dishonors the present moment, which is a gift. Acceptance doesn’t mean resignation. We can’t unlock new possibilities without radically accepting our current reality, including nonpreferred life circumstances. 

One nonpreferred life circumstance in my reality is that we live in a car-driven world, and I don’t love driving and avoid doing it. Especially in dense cities, yet I live in a big, congested one. Even if I loved driving, the absurdity of organizing society around cars, especially gas-powered ones, causes me to experience pain on a soul level. It’s dirty, divisive, dangerous, and destructive. And dopey. The other day, my wife was stunned that they allowed cars to drive and park in both directions on a city street narrower than the shoulder of a suburban bike path yet piled on both sides with parked cars. It’s a silly way to live.

I could go on and on about how ridiculous I find this whole car lyfe reality. And I did for the better part of a year until I watched I ❤️ Huckabees and recognized I was annoying people like the Mark Wahlberg character whose wife and friends bounced on him because he wouldn’t stop harping about the dangers of petroleum. Only I’m way less hunky, and I’m not violent like the character played by the former Marky Mark.

I hated on car lyfe so hard that I moved to a car-free neighborhood in Arizona just to find people to cap on cars with. How it went is that I annoyed my new neighbors too, as most of them weren’t ready for a car-free lifestyle and parked their fancy cars at the apartment complex next door.  My neighbors were decent humans, I just didn’t rock with them because I thought it was weird to move to a car-free neighborhood, pretend like you’re not about cars, and park your fancy one next door. I didn’t get why they didn’t just accept that they were about cars and move somewhere you’re allowed to park them. But it doesn’t matter. I accepted the situation for what it was, which allowed me to take action.

Once I accepted that the car-free part of the apartment complex that billed itself as a car-free neighborhood was jive—I almost got tagged by several G-Wagons pulling up to the fancy on-site Mexican restaurant when I was on dumpster runs taking out the trash—I broke my lease. I moved into a nearby apartment with a functioning pool where my kids had a cannonball contest when they visited, and you get to park your car. My wife moved in and brought hers, and we had a blast getting into adventures in and around the Sonoran Desert for a few months until we moved back to Minnesota to be with our kids.

Talking trash about what’s what isn’t useful or helpful. Change doesn’t come from the outside in, it comes from the inside out. So instead of talking trash about cars, which isn’t useful, I avoid cars when I can and do things like use the shared EV network of cars in my city, ride my bike or walk to places, or take public transportation. By doing things like that, I gradually fold into a reality that’s a vibrational match for my intentions. This is how life works: like attracts like.

The most prevalent delta I’ve observed with my loved ones lately is about the election, as loads of them are still stuck on stupid about the results. A man who is what he is won the presidency fair and square, and we should start figuring out how we’ll get along with him and the folk who rock with him instead of hatin’ and complain’.

There’s no way I’m going to take up arms against any of these silly Trumpers or otherwise try to harm them, as many of them are my friends, and I’m way too old for that sort of thing. So I’m spiritually preparing to love them extra hard and stay locked on Care Bear Stare Mode.  And if that doesn’t work, I’m fully prepared to be exiled or imprisoned. That’s not paranoia, it’s preparation. So is the 24-year-old used campervan I copped that I stocked with vegan freeze-dried meals to ride out the Trumpocalypse, but that’s another story for another day. 

However you want to look at it, I’m not complaining that I live in a country where most of my fellow humans elected someone from among our ranks whose behavior, in my view, shows a deep lack of presidential comportment. There’s no point in staying negative, so I don’t. Instead, I’ve accepted how things are, which allows me to take action: leading with my heart and putting love first.

One of my spiritual advisors calls it radical acceptance. I call it “not being a dope.” Staying stuck on stupid isn’t useful. Therefore, it’s unintelligent.

I fold into enough outrageous situations in this realm and others where I’ve got to have my wits about me that I can’t afford to stay negative, which lowers vibrations and makes us dopier. So, I choose to exercise free will, smile, accept what happens, and roll with it.

As J. Krishnamurti, the great Indian philosopher and supermellow spiritual teacher, explained, “My secret is I don’t mind what happens.” It’s that simple. But on some days, I lack the Zen to just be cool about things from the jump with some of the stuff that pops off in life. Sometimes, I need a moment to breathe and get my mind right.

Marcus, my spiritual exemplar, frames it as a challenge when he dares us to be “athlete(s) in the greatest of all contests—the struggle not to be overwhelmed by anything that happens.”

Closing the delta between what we want and what is is the first step in the grand game.