Call Me "Ma'am"

I’ve got a dirty secret I want to share with you.

I am unashamedly living my uninterrupted life. I only do what I want to do, and frankly I never do anything I don’t want to do. (That’s not the secret.)

That isn’t to brag, but it also isn’t hyperbole. And I want to suggest that maybe the reason I get to live this way is because I believe what I’m about to tell you.

It’s a pretty big secret. Something almost nobody seems to know, and I’m not even sure I should be telling you. If word got out about this massive, dirty secret, I shudder at the thought of how our society would devolve.

Here goes…

Deep breath.

It’s not that serious. 

Whew! Boy does that feel good to say out loud.

It’s not that serious.

I can already feel you tensing up, and your mind has probably come up with 5 different examples of things in life that “are that serious.”

And to that I say: relax, it’s not that serious.

Let’s start with some easy stuff. Think about some parts of your life that we often believe are “serious.”

• Deadlines

• Taxes

• Google ratings

• Art

• Sports

Deadlines are one that always makes me chuckle. Sure, deadlines can be helpful for ensuring the timely completion of a project, but some people treat them as if the world is going to collapse if they don’t have something by such and such date. I’ve seen people tremble at the thought of not meeting a deadline!

Interpretive dance is another one. I recently came across a video of a dance group in Washington D.C. perform a piece in protest of the rise in ICE attacks on American civilians. Pretty serious stuff, no doubt. The dance itself? Well, if you ask the dancers, they were doing the most serious thing in the world.

Taxes and healthcare are other great examples. When I left my job as a teacher, the first question several people asked me was, “What’re you going to do about health insurance?!”

I bet you know someone who is particularly skilled at manufacturing an emergency. A deadline that “has” to be met, a meeting that could make or break a company, of what the color of your suit says about your patriotism. It is easy to get sucked into someone’s vortex of urgency and forget that the crises we create are just that: crises we create.

Before we continue I do want to take a moment and acknowledge that this philosophy doesn’t ignore the very real parts of the world. What is happening across the Middle East is indeed a very serious issue. Americans being taken off the streets by unidentified men in masks is serious. Child trafficking is serious.

I’m not suggesting that any of these are made up, hoaxes, or should be disregarded entirely.

I’m also not diminishing the weight and toll these very real events are having on our society. Humans are biologically wired for emergency. “Fight or flight” is one of our oldest biological triggers, and we are primed to respond very deeply to what we believe to be an emergency.

Our brains don’t know the difference between a gator in the pond and a passive-aggressive email from Judy with our HOA. Some people are emergency factories, making them up as if they had a conveyor belt, and the result is that we have confused the categorically “more serious” with the personal absurd.

Take pronouns. I’ve been called “ma’am” on the phone my entire life, including very recently. I’ve had students address me as Ms. Flentge when I have a full beard. Respectful communication is a matter of sincerity, and I value it deeply.

I could have manufactured an emergency, distraught over the misgendering, and collapsing into a heap of indignity over a syllable. Many people would and regularly do.

But what would that have accomplished besides producing my own suffering?

I choose to let it be unserious and, in doing so, keep my peace.

Perspective is the key to reconciling the inherent unseriousness of everything with the “real world” we see around us.

Sports highlight the grotesque over emphasis of something’s seriousness. The American sports industry was valued at $1.06 trillion in 2023. Over a trillion dollars!

For what?

To watch some people throw a ball around or run around some plates.

Have you ever been to a little league game where one of the parents or even the coach is red-faced screaming at 6 year olds to run faster? “Very serious” sports fans go into depressive states when their teams lose, wear the same jersey every game, and get tattoos on their bodies representing their favorite teams, numbers, or players.

Sports are fundamentally unserious and a completely made up human experience.

Speaking of the human experience, art is another paradox of seriousness.

Recently I read Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert followed by The Creative Act by Rick Rubin. Both authors shared the same idea: that to make art we must simultaneously take it seriously and also recognize how not serious it all is.

Maybe you’re coming around to see what I’m trying to say, and maybe now you’re starting to see how we treat some parts of our lives as “so serious” when really, they’re simply not.

Perhaps you can see how sports, music, gardening, the fabric of your sheets, how many people read your newsletter, the color of someone else’s hair, or whether or not your garbage can is in the right place per HOA guidelines are all taken too seriously.

Let me challenge you a little farther. Your retirement is unserious. In fact, the number in any of your bank accounts isn’t serious. Your credit score isn’t serious. (How we love to laud and glorify an 800 credit score!).

From birth, we are taught that our bank account is the primary determiner of the life we live. Take this from someone who quit his “stable” job with about $2,000 in his savings and has lived for the last year on a $0 income: the bank account means nothing.

We spend decades of our life doing everything to “improve” a three digit number that is a combination of factors we have no influence over and handed down by a machine we’ll never meet. Yet we believe it determines so much of what we can enjoy in life and subsequently the value of our lived experience.

Many of us think that without a paycheck the world will collapse. When I first entered this period of not having any income, I’ll admit it was quite frightening. But when I had $3 in my account on my 30th birthday, or $1 in my account earlier this week, guess what?

The birds are still singing.

My coffee tastes better than ever.

And most importantly, my capacity to love, create, and breathe remained entirely unbankrupt.

A zero in the bank account, as I’ve learned, is not a zero in the soul.

It is not a loss of character.
It is not a loss of oxygen.
It is merely the score of a game I decided to stop playing by someone else’s rules.

The entire financial system is a game that we’ve been told we have to “win.” You can win the game and still lose at life, and you can lose the game and still be alive.

I’m going to drop one more example, and this is going to be the biggest one of them all.

Your religion is not that serious.

While you’re clutching your pearls, let me explain. Tending your soul is probably the most serious thing we do, but the manner in which we go about it is often wildly unserious.

I was the associate director of music at an Episcopalian church for about eight years. The Episcopal tradition stands at the intersection of the divine and the pedantic. Right now, we are currently in the season of Lent and I always found it funny how we got consumed with the heavy weight of solemnity. Some hymns and anthems can’t be performed during this season because of the “importance” of Lent, and you can’t say words like “Alleluia.”

We were obsessed over the geometry of the processional—the exact spacing between pairs as we walked down the aisle to the front of the church or the synchronicity of our bows. Choir members were instructed to discretely carry their water bottles so that the congregation couldn’t see them.

What a tragedy it would have been to be seen with a water bottle, or colored shoes!

How we thought we would undo the majesty of the Creator if we showed our water bottle, or wore a bright headband, or didn’t perfect our choreography. We were indeed guarding the altar but had lost the plot.

To look more broadly, the god I believe or don’t believe in versus the god my neighbor does or doesn’t believe in has been the root of countless wars, violence, torture, and gruesome death throughout history and to that I say: It’s not that serious.

All completely meaningless beyond the meaning we attach to it ourselves.

We are living in a collective fever dream where we have lost the ability to distinguish a paper cut from a heart attack. Our society is a mess because we have traded our peace for a series of catastrophic emergencies that a) we made up and b) don’t actually exist.

The secret to living an uninterrupted life is the distinction between seriousness and sincerity.

Seriousness is heavy. Rigid, brittle, and fueled by a fear of consequence. The nervous manager who loses sleep over a deadline; the red-faced parent at a T-ball game; hiding the water bottle in the processional.

Sincerity, however, is light. It is a devotion fueled by love. You can be sincere about your art without being serious about the critics. You can be sincere in your faith without being serious about the choreography.

You can be sincere about your life without being serious about the score.

Treat your relationships, your spirit, and your health with the deepest sincerity.

Everything else? It’s just a game. Try playing it like you’re just glad to be on the field.

After all, it’s not that serious.

Until next time, live uninterrupted.

~ Coleman