Do the Next Right Thing

I don’t recall who my friend Judy Stone Nunneley was quoting when she told me in the summer of 2005 about something she tries to remember as she meets challenges each day. She said simply, I just try to “do the next right thing.”

As life’s connections go, sort of like the “six degrees of separation” many of us have heard about over the years, I came across the name of Anne Lamott. I think it was through the newspaper of the Episcopal Diocese of Texas. What I recall is a blurb announcing that Lamott’s lecture somewhere, sometime, in Houston had been postponed, rescheduled. The announcement included enough information about her that I thought, hmmm, I’d like to know more about her. Later on I had opportunities to ask several people, mostly women, if they were familiar with the writing of Anne Lamott, and almost without exception they were. I’m remembering especially my friends Joy Stone, and our family friend Cherry Moore, who was also our mother’s hospice chaplain and delivered a beautiful eulogy at Mother’s burial service.

Last summer my partner and I read Anne Lamott’s book, “Traveling Mercies,” a story of her complicated, dysfunctional, but somehow privileged childhood, her life with a son she was raising alone, all the men who had broken her heart (but that’s a two-way street, right?), and God’s love and mercy as revealed in her journey. For her she found a welcoming, loving place of worship.

Anne Lamott says, "I took a long, deep breath and wondered as usual, where to start. You start where you are, is the secret of life. You do the next right thing you can see. Then the next."

As it turns out others have voiced the same advice. “Do the next right thing," is a guideline for living in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. is quoted as saying "The time is always right to do what is right." Other persons of note who espouse the same notion, indeed organizations that are built around it, can be revealed from a simple search of the Internet.

What great irony that in the course of doing the next right thing we so often end up doing the wrong thing, or what seems to be the wrong thing at the time, or indeed turns out not to have been the best choice. All we can do is try to do the next right thing. That, however, requires that we can discern what is right and then follow through.

A friend told me many years ago about her own mixed results in love, marriage, and parenting—marriage and divorce, raising a batch of exceptionally bright and very self-willed children. Parents do the best they can, according to Rachel. Parents do not look at a child in the crib and say “I’m going to screw you up.” Rachel was a product of Europe in the years leading up to the second world war, a Jew from Belgium, who with her family fled to London. Alongside her husband, she participated actively in the Zionist struggles of the 1940s, eventually settling in the United States. She had been to hell and back and lived to tell about it. Along with all the turmoil, fear, physical and emotional dangers, she had known love, fulfilling love and beautiful love, even love of great historical significance. I don’t recall that she and I ever used the term, “do the next right thing,” but wouldn’t it have been appropriate.

Each day that we open our eyes and put our feet on the floor, if we are so fortunate even to have those choices, we are asked to choose. Allowing ourselves to love another human being is a choice, or so it seems sometimes. Falling in love, maybe that’s not so much a choice. Sometimes we have to choose whether we intentionally want to hurt someone else. This can be as removed as dealing with someone in customer service over the telephone or as complicated as choosing not to strike back when we are verbally stricken by someone we love.

We have just recently completed a long, four and one-half year journey with our mother, who probably set a record for the local hospice organization. Defying the cardiologist who issued her death sentence, she lived out her tough Texas German heritage, becoming bed ridden only four days before she died. Until the last several days, she continued to make the trip between the den and her bedroom, assisted by her walker, and finally seated on a fancier walker pushed by my oldest sister, who took on Mother’s care giving once Mother was diagnosed as terminal. Mother refused to use the bedside commode until even she accepted that she really had no other choice. The Monday before Mother died on Thursday, our middle sister came to keep vigil with us, accepting the gift to minister to Mother, and to share with us saying good-bye with love to our mother. Unless you’ve been there, it’s impossible to imagine what goes through your mind and heart as all of this is happening.

It is somehow amazing to consider and then understand as best we can in the midst of turmoil that we are constantly choosing. Be the challenge a dying mother, a seemingly intransigent lover, or an outright adversary, we must choose what we do about love. We are told in scripture to "Honor thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee," Exodus 20:12. "Honor thy father and thy mother, as the LORD thy God hath commanded thee; that thy days may be prolonged, and that it may go well with thee, in the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee," Deuteronomy 5:16. For those of us who adhere to the Christian faith, Matthew’s gospel makes clear our responsibility to love: “Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” Matthew 22:37-40

Some months back I was urged into reconsidering the notion of loving ourselves, indeed loving my own self. Think about it. How much time does any one of us spend feeling lonely, forgotten, incomplete, guilty, maybe even self-loathing. Perhaps the ability to do the next right thing begins with loving ourselves. The world we humans have created bombards us with enticements, distractions, and fears. Just living our lives—earning a living wage, supporting oneself or a family if you have one sometimes takes more resources than some people can muster. Keeping up appearances cannot even be imagined by some who fall into despair, giving up because they can’t meet life’s challenges. Sometimes we don’t even recognize another human being in despair because he looks just like us.

To love our neighbor as ourselves is a tough assignment, especially if we don’t love ourselves, indeed if we don’t understand how to love ourselves. Then how can we possibly love another human being? We may be shackled to another out of some sense of responsibility—parent-child, brother-sister, lover-lover, friend-friend, associate-associate—but without love in some form at work in the connection we are simply going through the motions.

We all have to face the loss of loved ones, indeed our own death. Further, we can’t escape failed relationships, the consequences of poor choices, the complications of living in a world that expects much of us. All this begs another choice. Do we despair and lose hope, hold others accountable for our own lives, compartmentalize our pain in an attempt to just keep going, dig our metaphorical hole even deeper, grab the bull by the horns, pull ourselves up by our bootstraps—any combination of the above? Anne Lamott says, you take a long, deep breath, look around yourself and start where you are. To her this is the secret of life. “You do the next right thing you can see. Then the next." If we are fortunate enough to have the wits about us to make this choice, we are indeed fortunate. Some would say blessed.

Harold Hollis (February 2007 – Normangee Texas)