Progressions and Obsessions
By Richard Eyre

If you are wondering why the logo for "The Three Deceivers" (my old column) appears on this column along with the new logo for "Journey into Autumn," the reason is that there is a quite an extensive Three deceiver update incorporated in the "Notes" part of today's column. I am going to do that occasionally — throw in an update on the Three Deceivers and The Three Alternatives, because, until that column comes out as a book, II hope it remains an active and dynamic thought in our minds, my mind and yours.

Journey:

We are still in Australia, and still loving it. One amazing thing about a country as big as the US with less than a tenth as many people is wide open spaces and little crowding (as in traffic jams) and a sort of manageable scale to everything. We went to the Australia Zoo, for example, maybe the biggest "theme park," and the home of Steve Irwin (one or two of our kids loved that guy!) and there were no lines, no traffic, no hassle. And it was great feeding kangaroos and watching crocs.

All of the major cities in Australia are built on rivers, and all the rivers are lined with bike paths and jogging trails. My early morning routine is to run along rivers — the Swan river in Perth, the Brisbane in Brisbane, the Yarra in Melbourne. Getting up early and running is an awareness booster isn't it? You see a city waking up. You see nature waking up. You see people waking up and going about their business.

Sydney, of course, is built on a harbor rather than a river, and what a harbor it is! Deep and winding, with endless miles of shoreline lined with lovely houses. The icons are the sails of the Sydney Opera house and the massive Harbour bridge, which we walked on the top of. Bill Bryson, one of my favorite writers of late, describes Sydney's harbor like this:

Life cannot offer many places finer to stand at eight thirty on a summery morning than Circular Quay in Sydney. To begin with, it presents one of the world's great views. To the right, almost painfully brilliant in the sunshine, stands the famous Opera House with its jaunty, severely angular roof. To the left, the stupendous and noble Harbour Bridge … Before you, the spangly water is crowded with the harbour's plump and old-fashioned ferries, looking for all the world as if they have been plucked from the pages of a 1940s children's book with a title like Thomas the Tugboat, disgorging streams of tanned and lightly dressed office workers to fill the glass and concrete towers that loom behind.

An air of cheerful industriousness suffuses the scene. These are people who get to live in a safe and fair-minded society, in a climate that makes you strong and handsome, in one of the world's great cities — and they get to come to work on a boat from a children's storybook, across a sublime plane of water, and each morning glance up from their newspapers to see that famous Opera House and inspiring bridge. No wonder they look so happy!

Autumn:

One hard thing about being on the other side of the world, is missing the constant contact with family. Absence (and especially distance) does make the heart grow fonder. But what a world we live in, where cell phones can be bought for thirty dollars, and the US can be called for 29 cents per minute, and emails with pictures and movies can whiz back and forth in nanoseconds and keep you updated.

We have one child who is just starting her mission, (In London, in our old no mission no less) and another who is just about to get engaged, so we find Internet connections whenever the opportunity allows and look for new family news. (We also look for news news of course, and grieve about our friend Mitt who somehow did not fully connect with a country that needs him so badly.)

Notes:

Here is an update on The Three Deceivers (a column here for all of last year, and about to become a book): I have been thinking a lot lately about the increasing amount of addictions that plague our world. As we speak to audiences, we see, in both kids and in their parents, various kinds of addictions of the body, the brain, and the spirit, and I have been thinking about the connections to the three deceivers. Think it through with me if you have time:

Think first about the word "Progression." Progression is often a positive concept. We progress in our development of skills or in our mastery of a subject. We progress from grace to grace or from gift to gift.

But there also negative progressions, slippery slopes where our slide gets faster and faster and harder and harder to stop, downward spirals where we lose control and plummet toward darkness.

In today’s world, there are two dark progressions that scare me most — two quicksand dangers that should terrify us all.

One is the way wants can progress into obsessions, which can then quickly turn into addictions.

Wants-----------------------------Obsessions----------------------------Addictions

The other is similar, but more complicated, because it can be a good or a bad progression. It is the progression of acceptance into belief, and then of belief into worship. The danger of this progression is that it can happen with falsehoods and carefully crafted lies as well as with truth.

Acceptance-----------------------------Belief-----------------------------Worship

Both are easy to illustrate:

With the first negative progression, people want social acceptance or to be free of some kind of stress or pain so badly that they become obsessed with altering their body or their mind and they are soon addicted to anorexic or bulimic behavior or to drugs.

With the second progression, on the good side, someone accepts the idea of God and of religion and progresses to belief and faith and is thus driven to worship and service. On the bad side, someone accepts a false idea about materialism or power or exemption from responsibility and soon begins to believe in rights that he really does not have and then to worship his false gods of wealth or fame or imagined freedom.

Scary as these progressions are on things like substance abuse or pornography or materialism or narcissism, they are most terrifying when they act on our attitudes. Physical addictions are easier to cure than mental ones, and mental obsessions are easier to correct than spiritual ones.

Control, Ownership and Independence have become our mental and spiritual obsessions.

And the spiritual obsessions we have developed for the three deceivers lead inevitably and irrevocably toward spiritual addictions. Instead of letting the negative progression continue, we must find ways to reverse it — to go backward to our wants instead of forward toward addictions. We must attack this progression at the left end, at phase one.

We can question our wants, ask ourselves why we want certain things, ask ourselves if they are the right things to want. We can examine and operate on our wants before they balloon into addictions and then disappear into obsessions. We must ask ourselves if we want our own control or God’s guidance, if we want selfish ownership of selfless stewardship, and if we want the loneliness of independence or the connectedness of synergicity.

The other, parallel progression is the same; we must reverse it back to its first phase and fight it at its source. Rather than going along with media, celebrities, peer groups, and society at large in unquestioned belief in the virtues and desirability of control, of ownership, and of independence, we must back up and question our acceptance of these goals

How much do we want to (and how much should we) control? What can we really own? From whom do we want to be independent, and why? We must question our acceptance rather than blindly believing along with everyone else until CO&I become our idols, our gods, and the objects of our covetous worship.

Seeker

Thanks for seeking with me each weekend here on Meridian. Physical travel can be stimulating and perspective-enhansing, but there is nothing like travel of the mind. Keep your thoughts and feedback coming to me at richard@meridianmagazine.com. See you here next weekend.

1. Journey — where we are at the moment, and what we may be able to learn from the culture and the nature of each new place.
2. Autumn — where we are, each of us, you and I, in the phases of our lives. (I see myself at the end of summer and the beginning of autumn.
3. Notes — where I am on whatever I am writing at the moment (at least if it is anything I think Meridian readers might find interesting) where the idea part of my head is presently.
4. Seeker — where my heart is and what I am finding out about who I am and about what I want to be (particularly if it is something I think you might be looking for to)
   
   

   
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A former Mission President in London and candidate for Utah governor, Richard was the director of the White House Conference on Parents and Children for President Reagan. He served on the President's advisory panel for secondary and higher education. A graduate of the Harvard Business School, he headed a management consulting company for 20 years before giving it up to meet the growing demands of his writing and speaking schedule.

Richard and his wife Linda are parents of nine children and authors of a dozen bestselling family and parenting books. They are now focusing on the phase they are entering: Empty Nest Parenting. Through their web sites valuesparenting.com and familynightlessons.com, their frequent national media appearances and theirspeaking and lecture tours (see http://www.theeyres.com/), they continue to work at their mission statement which is, "FORTIFY FAMILIES, popularize parenting, bolster balance, and validate values."