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Life is a Joke and God Wrote It Jerry Stanecki
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Life is a Joke and God Wrote It
Jerry Stanecki
Spirit Canyon Press, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 2000
In Life is a Joke and God Wrote It,
Jerry Stanecki has written a book that covers all the essential aspects
of living the spiritual life. It doesn't matter that he's a
famous Detroit news hound, or a recovering alcoholic. The
important thing is that he has absorbed the most important of life's
lessons, processed them, and internalized them so that they are simply
part of his nature. He impresses you as a man who lives his
spirituality in a no-nonsense manner, from day to day, and from minute
to minute. He also knows how to tell a story with a clear
spiritual point in a highly economical manner. His message
is profound, but delivered swiftly so there is no mistaking
it. He's like fastball pitcher who serves straight down the
middle. As readers, he's simply challenging us to keep our
eyes on the ball.
The first thing that
impressed me about this book was Stanecki's statement, on the first
page, that alcoholism is a "thinking" problem. As someone
who also once involved in a 12-step program, this was also the
conclusion I came to. In fact, not only addictions, but also
all neuroses, compulsions, aberrations, illnesses, complaints, and
dissatisfactions have their basis in a person's thinking
pattern. In the 12-step group I attended, there were people
who were convinced that their addictions and compulsions were emotional
in origin, and that they were addicts for life. I felt
strongly at that time, as I do now, that stopping at the emotions leave
an individual's neuroses intact. It's necessary to go
farther, and address the fundamental thinking and assumptions that are
the root cause of the individual's behavior. And that
requires a degree of honesty that not all people in these types of
programs possess.
Stanecki's honesty, his
willingness to look at himself, and most importantly, his ability to
adjust his thinking rapidly are his most outstanding qualities, and I
can think of none that are more 'spiritual'. Spirituality
does not come from uttering the word 'God' in a pious fashion, prayer,
or quoting scripture. It comes from living one's life in
harmony with the most fundamental principles of Life-that God IS, that
life is in this MOMENT, and that what we are seeking is HERE and
NOW.
Jerry describes himself as an extrovert, a type-A personality, a
risk-taker, work and success oriented, a tough guy. And his
path to spirituality was clearly determined to a great degree by his
personality. He had to be stopped in his tracks before he
could slow down. He was used to always being needed, always
being indispensable, and in a state of action. It must have
been devastating for such a person to be humiliated, to be fired, to be
unemployed, to be looking for work, and to find himself in
limbo. For someone addicted to chaos, it must have taken a
complete change in attitude to be comfortable with the mere sound of
his own heartbeat or a bird chirping in the woods.
Other people will come to the same point via a different
path. You may be an entirely different type-an introvert, a
loner, averse to risk, without any experience of success in
life. If you've lived a humdrum existence, Jerry's
experiences even in the throes of his addiction may sound more exciting
to you than insane. But it doesn't matter how he got to
where he is, or how you got to where you are. The important
thing is the commonality of viewpoint when we get to the point of no
return. Some people are addicted to chaos, others to order.
Some people feel safe in the eye of the storm, others by staying
entirely out of its path. Some discover their fear in a
burst of revelation, while others live quietly in full consciousness of
their fear for years before they can find the impetus to do something
about it. But whatever the tendency of our personality, the
root of our dissatisfaction is the same. If the fear is
familiar to us, that doesn't mean it's any less frightening, but only
that it has been consciously endured for a longer period of time.
What I really like about
Jerry Stanecki's book is that he doesn't provide any pat endings to his
stories. The stories I like best, in fact, are the darkest
ones. He tells the story of Fenkell Street Harry, for
instance, who lost his sobriety, and eventually his life, because he
was late for the bus one day. And the one about Larry, who
poured out his resentment toward his father on the latter's deathbed,
only to see him stubbornly cling to life much longer than
anticipated. These stories work because they illustrate the
problem of resentment, the habit of blaming our problems on everyone or
everything else, instead of examining ourselves. And by illustrating
the problem, they suggest the solution more effectively than any amount
of preaching could do.
 Of
Stanecki's personal stories, one of the best is entitled "Great
Revelations-Not All At Once." In it, he tells of the fearful
job of making phone calls for prospective jobs. On this
particular day he had five numbers on his list. After four
calls, he had four rejections. The fifth call left him
thinking, "Well, here's a possible maybe for
sure." The story doesn't attempt to supply some kind of
'uplifting' ending. Jerry's point is not that due to his
faith, his prayers were answered, and he got the job of his
dreams. His point is that the real success lies in the
process, in our day-to-day, minute-to-minute attitude toward
life. If we hang all our hopes on a particular job,
connection, relationship, or situation, we will only be disappointed in
the end. Life is always changing. The real
security is being able to adapt to whatever comes along.
Life is a Joke
is filled with aphorisms that are more than witty or
true. They represent ideas that a serious reader can't push
aside. For instance, he notes that "Perfection, or the
illusion of it, made my life painful. In fact, perfection
almost killed me. That's when I decided to work real hard at
being UNPERFECT!" This is not a realization that is relevant
only to people who are perfectionists, obsessive-compulsives, or
addicts. It's applicable to anyone who is interested in
developing spiritually. We tend to equate spirituality with
perfection, when in fact it is about anything BUT
perfection. To devote our lives to being imperfect-now
there's a worthy goal. Having a goal like that can help us
develop such traits as humility, forgiveness, tolerance, patience,
detachment, candor, and sincerity-all the spiritual virtues, in
fact.
The ability to live with
imperfection hinges on three main techniques. The first is
to be proactive. That is, any time you find yourself stuck,
trapped, bogged down, depressed, facing insurmountable odds, or in an
untenable situation, the answer is always to DO
SOMETHING. Action is the antidote to worry, or in Stanecki's
words, "action breaks the fear that
feeds…procrastination." Another aspect of this technique is
to simply do one thing at a time, put one step in front of the
other.
The second technique is living in the NOW, which Jerry illustrates by
depicting his worn-out thought processes: "What about the money you
owe? What about [having to make] the house
payment? What about no guaranteed money coming
in? Freelance work is iffy at times… What
about…
"HEY! THINK DIFFERENTLY! I jolted myself out of
the negative hole I was digging and did a reality check. The
house payment isn't due for two weeks. Do I want to waste
today and fourteen more days worried about something that is not a
demand of today?"
This is an important
point. As long as we are alive and kicking, there is always
something we can do that is more productive than worrying about what is
around the corner. And when we're dead, we'll be somewhere
else, anyway.
In other one of Jerry's personal anecdotes, he relates how he was
talking to himself one day. "'Today, on the money issue
you're OK, you're not broke today. Stay in the now, focus on
what to write.' I was trying, but it wasn't
happening. I got up feeling frustrated." True to
his form as a writer, he doesn't provide an account of how he solved
his financial affairs. Instead, he relates how he chose to
be proactive that day. He changed his morning
routine. He went out on his deck, saw some geese flying
overhead, took a deep breath, and realized how good life
is. That's an example of living in the NOW. He
wasn't dead broke that day. Maybe the next day he would be,
but not that day. So why not appreciate the
moment? Why not take a deep breath and watch the geese fly
overhead?
The third
technique is to believe that everything is happening for your own good,
and that your needs-if not your wants-will always be met. I
suppose this is related to faith, but it's a different kind of faith
than most of us are taught. It's not faith that all our
prayers will be answered or that all our desires will be
fulfilled. Nor is it merely some kind of ultimate faith that
in the end we will go to heaven if we just endure this hell on
earth. It is not even necessarily faith in a personal God
that watches over us every moment, although it could be. But
it could just as easily consist of faith in the simple principle
everything in life receives that which it requires.
For me, one of Stanecki's most powerful statements is his comment that
"In 1983 I decided that I would try to do whatever I wanted to do,
whenever I wanted, and see if I could surive… What's truly amazing is
that without having the security of a 'job,' not only have I survived,
but [also] the quality of my life just kept getting better and
better. I never had a lot of money, but my needs have been
met beyond my expectations."
I think about this concept of doing whatever you want to do, whenever
you want to do it, and it seems so contrary to what most of us are
taught. We do so many things out things out of duty,
obligation, service, a desire for security, or just because we feel we
have to conform or fit in with the rest of society. And we
think that in being of service to others, we can't possibly do what WE
want to do, as well. Jerry Stanecki's Life is a Joke
is an antidote to this kind of thinking. If everyone
followed its principles, we would be living in a different world, a
world brimming with happiness instead of discontent. The
irony is not only that life is a joke and God wrote it, but that He
wrote it for everyone. But there are millions of people who
don't get the joke.
For information, go to www.jerrystanecki.com, or e-mail: stanecki@wwnet.net. |
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Date Submitted:
2001-07-17 00:00:00
Review by The Spiritual Traveler |
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