Are you serious?

Hello, Tiny Dancer.

Every once-in-a-while I wake up or find myself during the course of the day, repeating a phrase. Don’t worry. Sometimes it’s like talking (out loud) to myself or perhaps I’m just thinking about what that particular common phrase really means.

This morning the phrase was: “Are you serious?”

By the time you are a teenager perhaps the phrase “Are you serious?” won’t be used by others teens to express incredulity. As in: “Really? Are you serious? Are you JOKING me?”

For me though, I was thinking of it as a direct question about everything in my life. (One thing I’m sure you’ll learn about me pretty quickly is that I tend to think about these things. A lot.) That is, I was asking myself:

Are you serious about being in better health/shape for your daughter’s sake? (Your grandfather, my dad, died in January of this year and I wish he had been a bit more serious about HIS health.)

Are you serious about your own writing? Are you going to spend more time with your scripts and fiction writing?

Are you serious about reconnecting to and deepening your spiritual life? I’ve gone to mass sporadically and my daily meditation practice is not what it was a year ago.

Are you serious about taking care of this home we share?

Are you serious about the house you own in Detroit?

Are you serious about the film you spent some much time working on?

Are you serious about your business?

Are you serious about doing everything you can for your wife, your marriage?

A-and if you ARE serious, what are you doing about these things?

Now questions like this often come from a little Inner Child we all have that alternates between being puffed up with self-worth and ego and then terrible insecurity. (Of course, when you’re a child – you and your inner child will be bosom buddies. Maybe when YOU grow up, you’ll wave goodbye to that inner one.)

Buddhist talk about a “Middle Way” and Christians have a wonderfully symbol of balance (and a roadsign for life ahead): the Cross. So, I know in my heart that “being serious” is not about frowning and nodding very seriously or putting myself down.  It’s something in-between, just as we live our lives in-between.

“Being serious” is as much about having serious fun or believing that life itself is deadly serious too.

As I often do when these questions really start bugging me, I went to find out what “Serious” really MEANS? I mean what are the roots of the word?

Turns out that it is related to the French “sérieux” or “grave, earnest”, and the Latin “seriousus” for “weighty, important, grave”. But YIKES, that’s not really what I meant!

I also don’t want to use the word that is related to the German “schwer” or “heavy”. (Etymologists (not the people who study bugs (entomologists) by those who study words like these: say around 1800, “serious” was also “attended with danger”. Hmmmmm. No, not right either.)

As I think of this (and perhaps it is my own reasonable adult talking to that Inner Child, I dunno), while I think I was reprimanding myself for not being more “serious”, I think the real question is: Are you awake? Are you aware? Are you engaged?

Because it is so easy to fall asleep, to miss the beauty right in front of us. Sometimes it just makes sense to make FUN of the frowny face and say that if criticizing OTHERS and giving them grief isn’t kind or helpful, then it certainly won’t be for oneself.

And after all, people who look TOO serious can look awfully funny: