Is

I don't remember who said it, but I have been thinking about it for a long time now (along with a certain 8.5-month old who has taken up literally all of my blogging time).

I had said a phrase that I have always strangely enjoyed:  "It is what it is."  I am sure you have heard it and perhaps said it as well many times yourself, but my interlocutor of the day was not in a mood to accept such meaningless fluff.  Whoever it was pointed out what you see very clearly yourself:  the sentence is redundant.  Why would you even bother to say something like this?  When you get right down to it, the sentence is the equivalent of saying that something that is red is red or that the moon is the moon.  An idea like that and 8 dollars will buy you a cup of coffee.

I don't know why this criticism stuck with me.  I certainly did not take it personally.  Heck, I don't even remember clearly who made the objection in the first place!  I guess it is just the way that my mind works these days that I have to think through a problem long enough that such things start to seem a little bit profound.  You see, I do think that such statements have a significance in our current times.  George Orwell once put it this way, "We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men." Such restatement is a call for us to check ourselves against the measuring stick of what has always been true.

We live in a time when the most basic elements of our society, such as the family and the rule of law are constantly being degraded.  Reality is fundamentally questioned, to the point that it can be very helpful to have that little reminder that what is has the significance of existence in opposition to all that is merely the dream (or the nightmare) of the imagination.   Our anxieties about a possible future overwhelm our reasonable reaction to the needs of the day.   It is impossible to come to the right conclusions when we are inaccurate in our understanding of the world around us.

Our thoughts about ourselves are perhaps the most significant example of this kind of inaccuracy.  How often do we really see ourselves and the sum of our actions for what they truly are?  Too often we are lenient to ourselves because we think that "what is" is that we are the image of the altruistic person who is only doing what anyone would do to secure our rights in some situation.  Too often we magnify our own faults to similar detriment because we see not who we are and where we fit in the world, but expect ourselves to be our own savior and salvation.  If we live in these fantasies (and they are very tempting fantasies indeed), we end up dissociated from ourselves and unable to make of ourselves a gift to the one who made us.  Humility is the very tool that lets us correct the mistaken ideas we have about ourselves so that we can know that we are what we are.