The Notes with Andrew Nemr

I thought I’d take this week to make some space to breathe. To take in, again, all that has been explored around the beatitudes so far. To sit in contemplation of the journey – what mine has been like, what I’m currently working through, and what I may look forward to – all with God. I would encourage you to do the same. Related Links * Poverty ( read or listen ) * Mourning ( read or listen ) * Th...

I’m telling my fourth joke of the night. They have all been puns. I’ve been on a roll, but this one is a swing and a miss. I chuckled to myself and said to the audience, “I guess I am my father’s son.” My dad loves to play with words. So much so that it’s a sport to keep up with him. He’s got three solid languages under his belt, too. Imagine conversations sprinkled with multilingual puns and dad...

I’m listening to the radio when this song comes on . The lyric in the chorus catches my attention. If I traded it all // If I gave it all away // For one thing // Wouldn’t that be something My heart resonates with the singleminded intention. It reminds me of the focus of pursuit that great artists and athletes endure to reach the heights of their craft. It reflects the discipline I’ve seen in peop...

Years ago (some may say many years ago) there was a common stereotype of the self-righteous individual. It was the cigarette smoker who had just quit. This person, for whom the habit had been a mainstay, upon quitting becomes the most outspoken, imposing, and sometimes outright oppressive proponent of the evils of cigarette smoking and the virtues of quitting. Their policy is not in question. Thei...

Welcome to the hard road. We’ve faced poverty, mourning, and the challenge of gentleness together so far, and it doesn’t get any easier. Transformation is difficult, for all the reasons we’ve mentioned before. The cross as presented by Jesus, as a vision for the necessary (even willing) death of our person, in order to be born again, formed again, into a new kind of person is realistic – it’s not...

“I’ve been meeked!” I read this line a few weeks ago in a lovely book by Charlie Shedd. He was describing a friend’s reaction to moments in his life when he had essentially been put in his place. Meekness is a funny word. It isn’t common in the current English language. We don’t see it in print, or hear many people use it in public with any frequency. Yet, here it is, just three lines into the pro...

I’m a crier. I do it a lot. I’ve given up trying to stop. I just let it come, whenever and however the emotions arise. Instead of fighting it, I get curious. I ask myself why? What might be fueling these emotions? Maybe I can learn something from what my body is telling me. I have discovered that a lot of it for me is a simple, deep sadness, about the hardness of life. Loss, separation, death, bet...

Debilitating burnout, a pandemic raging across the world, me moving internationally twice in two years, gaining and losing full time employment, have all been part of the last three years of my life. In the midst of all of that, I experienced feeling closer to God than ever before in my life. While I can say that I have known God for a significant amount of my life, this closeness was qualitativel...

This last note of the year is a little different. At the end of the year have learned to turn my thinking towards reflection. As an artist, the work I do is never far from my experience of life, the things I’m actually thinking about, and what I’m working out in myself. As a freelancer, however, I often jump from project to project without much time to reflect in the middle of the season. So it ha...

There are a few key elements that need to be present for us to hold on to a process of transformation. There are some that come from within, like our own desire to transform, continual intentional choices towards transformation, and a seeking for the means (especially if we don’t already have them) that will facilitate the transformation. There are some that come from without, like the means thems...

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to teach a workshop entitled Tap Dance and Empathy Building at the National Museum of Asian Art, a part of the Smithsonian Institution. The participants were an eclectic gathering of museum directors, curators, and programmers who had convened for the Designing for Empathy Summit. In the workshop I used tap dance as a kinesthetic learning tool through which we...

This is the way we always have done it. That must make it good and right, right? This is the way things always have been. That means we must simply accept them as they are, right? As someone who was grafted into the oral tradition of tap dance, I have spent a great portion of my life navigating the obvious tension that arises between tradition and innovation. That is, what has always been done, an...

My mother cooks for a football team on every special occasion. Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, Birthdays – you name it, if there is an opportunity to cook, she’ll take it. If she had the time, she would probably cook a meal that way every day – it doesn’t even have to be dinner! The love and care she puts into the meal is directly connected to her giving nature. But there is a problem. As good as...

For much of my life, I have lived at a pace that didn’t allow me to stop to smell the roses. Even worse, when I was forced to slow down and smell some roses, I began developing a defense for the practice in relationship to my work. Smelling the roses had to be something that served the larger purpose of work. I smelled the roses so that I could rest, or be inspired, so that I could get back to wor...

I had written almost two thousand words this week, working out this idea, and decided to scrap them all. This is a rewrite. The question this week is simple: what do we have to gain? Two years ago I came upon Dallas Willard’s four great questions of life. They became so formative for me that I gave a TED talk about them. This week’s thinking zeros in on the answers we carry for two of the four que...

One of the first responsibilities that you encounter within an oral tradition is the idea that you have to remember stuff. I mean, really remember. There's no guarantee that you can come back to what you are learning. The sources are people, and one person might move, your access to another person might change, and you don't know when those changes might occur. You also don’t know if that person h...

Over the past two weeks I’ve explored the idea of giving, even generosity beyond the measure of oneself. In reality, the act of giving is always an act of loss. Whenever we say, “Yes,” to one thing, a multitude of things are receiving from us an automatic, “no.” Their possibility has been sacrificed. On account of our inherently limited nature, and contrary to much of what seems to be a more commo...

I wasn’t expecting this, but this week it looks like I’m doubling down on the generosity idea, or more specifically giving. The next few weeks I’ll be working through a series of questions that start with the word, “what.” I don’t normally like “What?” questions, or series for that matter, but we go where the good spirit leads. Related Links: * Thinking about generosity * The how of giving * Iron...

Spoiler alert! This week’s note centers around a seen in the 1990 film Awakenings. In the 1990 film Awakenings, Robert de Niro plays Leonard Lowe, a character we meet in a catatonic state. As the movie progresses, a drug is discovered that has the power to awaken Leonard, and some of his fellow patients, from their state of stillness. It is a miracle – an awakening of not only one, but many people...

I saw a statement a few days ago that got me thinking about language. We live in a time in which the underlying trust which allows language to function as a productive form of communication has been taken for granted (at the least) or outright dismantled (at the worst). The statement was on twitter – a platform of statements. Here, I purposely follow people from many different traditions of belief...

I’m in Tacoma, Washington, at the inaugural Zion International Film Festival . Identity: The Andrew Nemr Story is an official selection, and I’ve made the trip to support the film, meet some people, and make myself available to whatever else might happen (one never knows). In a scene from the film, I’m driving in my car pontificating on the nature of my relationship to my dancing. I say, “The way...

Breathe in peace. Breathe out rest. At different points in my life, I have taken on specific pursuits for the sake of understanding. I spent three years trying to define the word love (LINK), after failing to define it in a very important moment. In the past three years I've been trying to cultivate an understanding of my own life that leads to the kind of rest (LINK) that cannot be separated from...

In March 2020 everything around me stopped. The pandemic, with all of its challenges, pain, and ongoing fallout (to this very day), served as an interruption to all the habits of thought and action I had developed. I couldn’t work as fast or hard or travel as much. I couldn’t count on what had been regular. My entire environment changed. I had the opportunity to change, too. Peace would be central...

I’m 17 years old, fresh out of high school and in my freshman year of college, when I receive my first formal teaching gig. The offer is to teach the most advanced tap dancers of a local private dance school in New Jersey. These dancers are teenagers who are used to competing and presenting their dances at an annual recital. In addition to teaching technique, I am required to create two pieces – o...

I’ll go first. I sent an email out to three new friends with a proposition. I wanted to bring them closer to the center of my life. These new friends were the first friends I had had that didn’t come from or had the opportunity to lead to work since I was in high school. We met in a larger group that had committed to meeting regularly to study the Bible. Within a few months we realized that we act...