About a year ago I was visiting a bookstore while on vacation in Delaware, when a little gray cat caught my attention. He was one of many others on the stuffed animal display, but there was something particular about him that stood out to me. Maybe it was his cute blue eyes. I don’t know … I moved on and tried to forget about him. But before we left, I came back and gave him another look.
“I shouldn’t spend the money,” I thought. “I’m an adult! I don’t need this.” I continued to make excuses until I realized that the real reason for my hesitation was that I felt guilty for being kind to myself. Maybe I subconsciously believed I didn’t deserve a toy.
So at the last moment I carried him up to the cashier. She politely inquired who the cat was for. I hesitated to give my “selfish” answer. “It’s … for me!”
She laughed. “Grownups can have stuffed animals, too!”
I always felt a little strange around many of my peers when I was a kid. I wasn’t into sports. I wasn’t the stereotypical rough-and-tumble boy. My favorite thing to do was play stuffed animals with my brother and work on craft projects and write stories. My brother and I invented a world called Animal Friend Land (accessed through a magical treasure chest) where the two of us and all of our stuffed animal friends lived in peace and harmony on Fellow Street.
Somewhere along the line, I stopped playing with my stuffed animals. Which is totally okay. But what really stank was that somehow I got the idea that this former part of my life was kind of embarrassing and maybe even off-limits.
Why? I’m not sure. All I know is, these past few years, I’ve grown so tired of living in self-denial. I also am tired of selfishness and the way it chews people up and spits them out.
What if both of these things … both the self-denial and the selfishness … were redeemed by Love? Love heals all things. It doesn’t throw stuff out. It transforms even bad, painful stuff into something new.
It seems to me—I realize this is an over-generalization—it seems to me that there are two kinds of people in the world. Three-ish, actually. There are some people who are ruled by selfishness. They pretty much manipulate whoever and whatever they need to get things exactly their way and experience no shame for, or even awareness of, the pain they cause other people around them. In reality, they experience nothing BUT shame, and to numb their pain they have to make sure every surface whim they have is met at every moment of the day. If they succeed at the quest for control, then they can continue to live life on the surface, ignorant of the shame and pain beneath that has nearly usurped their entire existence and replaced their true self with a self-serving robot. If they fail at the quest for control, well, then maybe they might actually heal. These people are in need of our compassion more than anyone but they’re also quick to push anyone away that they can’t pretend to control.
Then there’s the other group of people, who I suspect make up the majority, who are ruled by self-denial. They’re people like me, who are basically afraid to be kind to themselves. They spend an inordinate amount of time wondering if they’re one of the selfish people in the first group, probably because they were wounded by some of those people in the past. So in an effort to avoid such a terrible fate as being that shameful and debased, they give so much of themselves to others and never give anything to themselves. It’s pretty exhausting, but it’s safe, and in a world where safety isn’t really that much of a thing, the appeal of appeasing a guilty conscience is quite appallingly appetizing.
And then there’s the third kind of person. Third-ish. This is the person who is finding healing in some small or large corner of their heart. (I say third-ish because we’re all still part way between healed and broken, not fully one or the other.) And suddenly selfishness and selflessness take on their redeemed, healed, beautiful forms of self-care and others-care!
I really hope this is true! I don’t see much care in the world around me, but I’m starting to see more. I think there’s way more kindness in the world than we realize, we just are blind to it until we begin to heal from the terrible notion that the world and our fellow humans are terrible beyond measure and need to be avoided, distrusted … maybe even exterminated! How many wars, or even simple arguments, wouldn’t exist if we asked Love to heal the spaces and perspectives of our world?
I do believe Love is a person. I don’t really care if you call him God, or Jesus, or even Steve. What I care about is that you find somebody who loves you more than you’ll ever know. The rest of us humans are too stuck dealing with our perceived junk to really display with any consistency the kind of love we need for healing. We need Love, and we need him as a personal being in the world who can talk with us and show us a better way, and I think he does. He’s been revealing himself to me in ways I never expected these past few years, and it’s changed my life for both better and for “worse.” Usually the worst moments have been when lies I believed in, that I thought I needed, or unhealthy coping mechanisms, that I also thought I needed, have been completely blown out of the water by Love. It ends up being a very good thing, but it doesn’t look that way when it appears to threaten safety and status quo. But since when was safety and status quo anything more than an illusion?
I think the real safety is found in Love. He has called me out onto the open and stormy waters of mystery and trust. My outside world—what I see with my eyes—doesn’t feel very safe, but my inside world is secured by being loved into a peace I didn’t know before. I’m not saying I’m in serendipitous bliss over here, I’m just becoming more comfortable in my own skin each day in a terribly slow and sometimes majorly terrifying process that hasn’t come anywhere near to being finished yet. But it’s still sometimes overwhelmingly wonderful, and sometimes there is a patch or two of that serendipity that some might be quick to poke fun at.
So, where was I? Oh yes. The cat.
On this particular vacation, my mind was moving at 100 miles per hour as I started finding inspiration for one of my book projects. It’s an unfinished story that I hope to publish in a few years, about a boy (me) who meets a bunch of talking animals and travels the universe with them in search of a lost world (a metaphor for heaven). At some point, my character asks the animals to explain their excessive use of the word “winder” (pronounced like the the wind, not like a wind-up toy):
“So do you guys just stick the word ‘winder’ in front of everything?” I asked.
The animals all looked at me with confusion. After a moment, the horse collected herself. “No. Why would you do that?”
“Well what does the word even mean?”
“It’s not a word,” snapped the rabbit, “it’s a prefix.”
“There are no words that could be used to describe winder,” explained the horse. “Winder will always be winder, regardless of what other people try to say it’s supposed to mean.”
“So—if there’s no way you can tell me what winder means—how will I ever know?”
“Well that’s just the magic of it,” the horse answered. “You have to experience it for yourself. Nobody else can experience it for you. Winder is not something they can teach you in school. The early humans were so obsessed with figuring things out. That’s why they lost the winder in everything.” She sighed. “They couldn’t figure it out, so they threw it out.”
— Caleb Quinn, unfinished manuscript
Indeed. I decided to name my cat Winder. Then later I named my publishing company after him! I want Winder Place to be a place where mystery is welcome. Where not knowing is welcome. Where people will be encouraged to explore Love for themselves and experience the truly winderous!
Winder Place is not a website. It’s not really a publishing company either. It’s just a place in my heart that I want to welcome others into! The website and the publication business is more of a conduit to draw people into that place, however and whenever they might want to come and enjoy with me discovering the winder in everything again. I don’t think we can precisely define winder. That’s why I made up the word. I think it’s just something to be enjoyed. But I think there’s a lot of love, a lot of healing, a lot of self-care and a lot of others-care in there, and I’m excited to see what that will look like!
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