wholepeace

Posts Tagged ‘being human’

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MOURNING IN AMERICA

In PeaceAble on December 11, 2025 at 7:31 am

It’s been more than 50 years since Elisabeth Kübler-Ross described the five stages of grief.  I have been wondering how to apply those stages to what is happening in America under Donald Trump, because make no mistake about it, America under this administration is grieving. And I have come to the conclusion that it’s impossible.  The normal processes do not apply.

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America is grieving.

We are grieving those we have lost to extreme weather events, fires, and other climate-related disasters.  We are grieving those we continue to lose to gun violence.  We are grieving those we are losing to preventable diseases because they weren’t vaccinated.  We are grieving the loss of those who have been snatched off the streets and sent to foreign prisons and domestic concentration camps.  We are grieving the banning of books, the suppression of dissenting voices, the attacks on the arts.  We are grieving the loss of rights we thought we had protected forever.  We are grieving the wanton destruction of our democracy by those who should be responsible for its preservation. We are grieving the loss of some certainty, some control, some confidence that our lives will provide us with at least the minimum we need for not just happiness, but survival.

We are grieving so many things.  Too many to list.

And the list keeps growing.  The grief keeps compounding day-by-day, hour-by-hour.

The grief is simply too profound, too overwhelming, and too unrelenting.

How do we grieve, how do we process our grief, how do we heal?  Grief takes time.  Grief takes effort.  We cannot simply move on, and we cannot deal with either our grief or the causes.

And it seems that this overwhelming onslaught of grief is deliberate.  It’s intentional.

A political class that rose to power by feeding the grief, and the grievances of millions, have now institutionalized, legislated, and militarized grief as their primary strategy to keep the power other people’s grief has given them.

And the mourning will continue, and the traumas compound.  We hear the threats to take over cities, to turn the military loose on US citizens, to defund universities, to slam on the brakes on alternative fuels, to destroy decades of progress on human rights, minority rights, on access to vital resources for people other than white, nominally-Christian men, to flout both law and morality at home and abroad.  And the threats are made manifest by men with hidden faces and flaunted weaponry, by politicians who steal from the most vulnerable to give to the most powerful, by politicians and bureaucrats who lead by lies and conspiracies.

Suddenly, those three brass monkeys with their hands on their eyes, ears and mouths seem as though they have the right idea.  Shut it all out.  Stop the noise, stop the pictures, don’t say anything that might cause argument or worse.  But we can’t shut it all out.  Even those monkeys can only do one thing at a time.  Cover your eyes, and you can still hear the cacophony.  Cover your ears, and you can still see the chaos.  Cover your mouth, and you are left with no way to say what everything you can see and hear is eating you up with grief.

And so, our grief is manifested in fear and anger.  We hide away or we strike out.  We cling too tightly to the people and things we love, or we push them away because our grief makes love too painful.  We shout rather than talk.  How can we empathize with others’ pain when we are paralyzed by our own? 

This is the real, comprehensive, most dangerous consequence of Donald Trump and those who surround him, prop him up, hide behind him as they destroy our democracy to build a white nationalist fascist state around a theocratic rhetoric they don’t even really believe or practice.

We need to accept that the process of grief – that long, delicate, exhausting path toward acceptance and healing – is, for now, a luxury we can’t afford.  We cannot allow our grief to keep us from acting. 

The window of opportunity for turning things around is both too short and too long.

There is speculation that Donald Trump may be about to succumb to failing health or failing politics, or he may be around for a long while yet.  But the damage is already done.  When he is gone, the grief will remain, and we cannot let it keep us from doing the necessary work.  Recovery will be long and difficult, and we cannot wait until the next election or the one after that, the next administration, the next generation of leaders. 

The work has to start now.  It has to start with all of us, individually and in our families and in our communities.  The public work, the protests and the resistance are important, but we also have to make it close and make it personal.  We must not let our mourning isolate and weaken us.  We need each other, our collective and shared empathy and support, our common will and our common strength.  Talk together, grieve together, cry together, shout together. 

There is every reason to hope that the country will survive this and have a chance to rise anew from whatever is left of us.  Until then, let us try to turn our grief into positive action, into empathy, into helping each other.

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Maybe Don’t Love Thy Neighbor As Thyself – Do Better Than That

In A God of Infinite Possibility, PeaceAble on February 2, 2024 at 9:56 am

“When you are told both to love your neighbor as yourself, and to love your enemy, it is important not to conflate the two, lest you and your neighbor become your enemy and you treat each other accordingly.”

I just saw a meme that repeated the adage “Love they neighbor as thyself.”  So simple.  So profound.

Except.

The saying assumes (even requires) that you first love thyself.  And there-in lies the problem.  Far too many people don’t love themselves; or love themselves too little to make that love manifest in their treatment of others.  Or love themselves in toxic ways, which they think are love.  Neither humility nor narcissism is necessarily love.

We might even say that many of the problems of the world are caused by the fact that few of us genuinely love ourselves sufficiently to be able to consistently treat others as we wish we could treat ourselves.

See what I did there?  Slipped the old golden rule in.  Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

That’s because the two ideas – loving others as yourself, and treating others as you would like to be treated – are related.  And they are linked by the concept of “deserving.”  If I do not love myself, I cannot see that I deserve to be treated better, and if I project this on others, then I cannot love them enough to believe that they deserve better treatment from me.  To put it another way, we may do unto others as we believe we deserve to be treated, which is not necessarily how we wish we could be treated – if only we had earned it.

Our culture assaults us daily with messages of inadequacy, scarcity, and fear.  There is a new product being advertised, which tells us that underarm deodorant is no longer enough.  We’re told that we really need to deodorize our entire body. Pleasant, clean-looking young people sniff their elbows and legs, and react with disgust.  It’s not just our underarms that stink, we’re told.  Everything does.  How do we, the stinking mass of humanity, dare to go out into the world like this?  How could we not have noticed that everyone is offended, repulsed even, by our stink?  No wonder we aren’t more successful, more fulfilled, more popular, more loved.  We don’t deserve it.

(As an aside of sorts, the ad shows two young women.  Women in our culture are already bombarded with negative messages about their bodies.  Our culture tends to treat women’s bodies as fundamentally disgusting unless they are properly shaved, perfumed, deodorized, especially in intimate areas, covered in cosmetics to hide all the “flaws,” and covered in clothing except for the purpose of titillating men with their shaved, perfumed, cosmeticized bodies.)

Loving oneself – truly loving – means beginning with a baseline understanding of our fundamental humanness.  But human beings decided a long time ago that our fundamental natures need to be altered.  We decided that we are not enough just as we are.

Basic hygiene, of course, is not really about inadequacy or disgust at the fact that we are, first and foremost, animals.  Hygiene is also about humans having come to better understand disease.  Whether cleanliness is next to godliness may be debated, it is certainly next to healthiness.

A full-body deodorant is only one small example.  The basic message of oppression is that the oppressed are undeserving even of the little that their superior oppressors magnanimously allow them to have. 

And the mass of humanity is made into both the oppressed and the oppressors.  We are pitted against each other and ourselves.  We are told to ask why others should have more, rather than why we all have so little.  We are told, by explanation, that we are competing not only for resources, but also for our level of deserving.  We are competing for love: the love of our oppressors, the love of those we oppress.  We are even asked to compete for the love of whatever god we believe in.  How special can Heaven be, if everyone gets in by default?  If everyone deserves god’s love, then why do we have to try so hard to be deserving of it?

Consider the concept of human rights.  Our important social documents lay out our “inalienable, god-given” rights.  We know, of course, that none of those rights actually come from god, but are enumerated by governments of flawed humans.  None of them are, in fact, inalienable or absolute.  All our rights will regularly come into conflict with someone else’s rights.  But if we truly loved ourselves, and loved others equally, there would be no problem with that.  We could love each other enough to find a way to meet our needs, rather than assert the supremacy of one right over another.  But that would require us to love each other enough to see what is needed rather than what we think is deserved.

The world is changing rapidly around us.  If we are to survive – as individuals, as a community, as a nation, as a planet – we will need to relearn how to love each other, and ourselves.

Life takes us down paths of our own making, but the paths available to us are not all the same.  Regardless of how we are traveling our own path, or where it might lead us, we can learn to love it; and we can learn to love the paths of others, to see where we going in the same direction, or to honor the different direction each of us is taking.  We can look for where our paths might intersect or run parallel or diverge in interesting ways.

We can and must learn to love ourselves, then love others as ourselves; and learn how to do unto others as we all ought to be done, because that is the least we all deserve.

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Keeping Things Moving

In Gallivan's Travels, No Particular Path on January 30, 2024 at 4:14 pm

          No matter where I go, I’m always here.

One of my favorite poems is Mark Strand’s “Keeping Things Whole,” which begins:

  ”In a field/I am the absence/of field”

And concludes:

  ”We all have reasons/ for moving./I move/to keep things whole.”

I am sitting here, thinking about a trip that will have to be delayed a bit.  Life requires that sometimes.  We had planned on taking Gallivan, our 2019 class B camper van, on a five to six week trek from Rhode Island to New Mexico and Arizona.  Instead, we will be making a number of shorter trips in the East.  This is not a terrible thing, and the circumstances that require it are merely inconvenient, but it does provide me with the opportunity to write something I have been contemplating for a while.

There are, it seems to me, three reasons for traveling, which might also be called ways of traveling.

The first, of course, is to get to some other particular place than where you are now.  This I will call “destination travel.”  When we destination travel, there are almost always constraints of time, distance, and purpose that influence the traveling.  We know (if there is a deadline to meet) fairly precisely when we have to be there, and how long the trip is likely to take.  We know how far away the destination is, and we can plan specifically for travel expenses such as meals, lodging, transportation, and destination costs.  And we know why we are going, what we intend to do there, and when we’ll be done and ready to come home.

The second way of traveling is to enjoy the trip itself, to stop and smell the roses along the way, to find experiences as we go.  It’s the journey, not the destination, so I call this “journey travel.”  When we journey travel, the constraints may be less specific than those for destination travel: how prepared are we to see and do whatever experiences present themselves?  Can we be spontaneous, serendipitous, adventurous?  Do we have the resources of time, money, physical attributes, curiosity, and observation?  Sometimes, we may have constraints of time; we have limited vacation time; or appointments, responsibilities, or obligations for which we must return.  Aside from that, however, we are free to travel as far and as long as we wish, and go wherever the journey takes us. 

The third way of traveling is simply built on the desire to be on the move.  We have no specific destination, and we aren’t especially interested in what we can discover along the way.  We just want to be on our way.  This is what I call “motion travel,” and sometimes it is my main reason for travel and my favorite way to go.  When we motion travel the principal constraint is time.  How long can we be away; when can we get started and when must we return?  As we go, we can choose at any moment to stop for a moment or a while, visit someplace new or familiar, to discover or explore, or just keep moving.  There is the maximum amount of freedom in such traveling, and the least obligation.

It is, of course, possible to combine all the types of travel in a single trip.  Two summers ago, Sue (my spouse) and I set off on a trip that took us from Rhode Island, where we live, to New Orleans for the Jazz Festival, up along the Mississippi to Nebraska, then west to California, north along the Pacific to Washington, then back along the Canadian Border (and briefly across it), straight through the middle of New York and Massachusetts, and on back home.  We had only two specific destinations: the festival, and relatives in Washington state.  We were on the road from late April until mid July, and most of that time was unplanned in advance.  We stayed some places for a week or two, because we found something interesting, or beautiful, or new, and had the time and resources to do what the experiences offered.  We visited a friend in Florida, we explored the California Redwoods, we discovered a town in Arkansas that was steeped in the Americana and music we enjoy, found the Nobrara River in Nebraska, and made side trips along the Salish Sea and Puget Sound, and the northern edge of the Olympic Range.  But we also simply stayed off the interstates for long distances, not looking for anything in particular, but taking whatever came our way, small towns with pretty parks, funky restaurants, unusual and fascinating museums in places like Elko, Nevada, or Minot, North Dakota.  And sometimes, we just drove, with a CD playing music we could sing to, until we had gone far enough for that day.

We aren’t nomads.  We like the comfort and security of a home base, of a starting and ending point.  We have friends who have made their RV their home for years, now, and there is something appealing about going where you want, when you want, without having to be anywhere in particular in order to be home.  By combining destination, journey and motion travel in a single, extended trip, however, I like to think we have found enough of the freedom and adventure of nomad life to satisfy our needs.

And this is key, I think.  Let your travel, whether a few miles or across the country or around the world, meet your needs.  Your travel owes nothing to places, people, or time, except what you choose to give.  Travel as you will, and let that travel inform your spirit.  Let every trip be, first and foremost, your trip.

So, I would say to all who long to go, don’t overthink it.  There will be plenty of times when we just have to get somewhere; plenty of times when we just want to see what’s out there; and plenty of times when we just have to move.  But whatever the way you travel, travel consciously, travel joyfully, and travel on your own terms. 

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WHAT SIDE ARE YOU ON? – AND WHY IS IT ALWAYS THE WRONG ONE?

In PeaceAble on January 16, 2024 at 1:53 pm

“A door is something my cat is aways on the wrong side of; and these days I think I know exactly how she feels.”

You have to choose.  You have no choice.  And you have to choose *this* way.  Or else.

This is where we are now.

On virtually every issue facing us, this is where we are now.

We’re told that we must choose a side.  And must do it right away.  Taking time to think about the issues or events, to consider how to choose, or even whether to choose is considered weakness, at least; or even worse, cowardice; or at the worst, complicity.  And then, having chosen, we are condemned by one side or the other.  Every choice now carries significant risk.  We may find ourselves threatened, attacked, vilified.  We find our lives, our professions, our families, everything we love, value, and need, being threatened, being destroyed.

Do you support Israel or Palestine?  Quickly!  Choose!  What’s that?  You support Israel?  So, you have no compassion for the suffering of the Palestinians, then!  You support the Palestinians?  So, you’re antisemitic, then!  What’s that?  You’re not taking sides?  Then the Zionists win!  Then Hamas wins!

Do you support Donald Trump, or Joe Biden?  Quick!  Choose!  Right now!  Today!  We’re taking a poll and we want to know who’s ahead, who’s winning.  Right now!  At this very moment!  Are you for Democracy or for fascism?  These are your only choices.  Ten months away from the election, these are your only choices.  What do you mean you’re studying the issues, trying to decide if there are any other possibilities?  What do you mean you don’t know yet how you’ll vote in the election?  Why do you hate democracy?

You say you don’t have enough information?  Why can’t you see that the answer is obvious; that there’s only one right answer, one right choice?  The situation is still developing?  Don’t you see that’s why you have to choose now?  If you wait for developments, you might choose differently, choose wrongly.  If you wait for things to change, then you’ll be to blame if they don’t change the way we want them to.  If they do change the way we want, then you’ll be left out, left behind.

We no longer have any patience for patience; we deliberately eschew deliberation; consideration has become inconsiderate; careful thought is recklessly unthinkable.

The world has become too complex for simple answers.  And simultaneously expectant of exactly those answers. 

There does come a point in most issues where a decision needs to be made, of course.  Life is always about choices.  Most of them are simple, mundane, spontaneous.  And the consequences of the choices are fairly immediate, not life-threatening, and clearly connected to the immediate choice.  Do you want chicken or fish for dinner?  Choose now or take what you get.  Should I wear the blue shirt, or the plaid?  Choose and discover whether you feel awkward or attractive. 

All our choices then lead inevitably to more choices.  Buy the new sofa and you realize the chair no longer matches.  You’ll have to get a cover for that.  Love that new pattern, but the rug doesn’t really fit any more.  Maybe you should paint the walls, get new curtains.  The living room looks great, but now the kitchen is looking like it needs some TLC.

But there are choices we need to make that can have literal life-and-death consequences for us, our community, our nation, our world.  Some are directly in our control, of course.  If I drive carelessly or dangerously, I may risk anything from a ticket and a fine to an accident that results in injury or death.  Such consequences are foreseeable and require us to take personal responsibility. 

The choices we make about larger issues and events, however, often have consequences that are just as serious, but which may seem somewhat distant from us, don’t affect us directly or immediately, don’t create any sense of individual responsibility.  Such choices, like who we support in an election, require us to understand our actions as part of the group, rather than just ourselves.  These decisions should be made with deliberation and thoughtfulness, based on the best information and evidence available to us.  Quick, emotion-driven choices can create the kinds of consequences that can take decades to unravel.

Choices of great import and vast consequence also have a moral component.  We need to consider the choices in light of what we believe, what our priorities are, what compromises we’re willing to make, how we wish to be seen in all our humanness by those whose opinions and esteem we most value.  These are the choices that are often presented to us with the loudest, most insistent, most passionate voices, by people with agendas we may or may not share.  These decisions should be approached, even if they need to be made quickly, with clarity of mind and conscience, lest we find ourselves in serious conflict with our deepest, most personal selves.

How much of the divisiveness and polarization of our society could be lessened if we allowed ourselves and others to make our own choices in our own way, without judgment, without blame, without categorization and without the simplistic reductiveness of either/or?  If we really want to find effective, comprehensive solutions to the problems we face, we need to learn to engage the fullness of our choices and choose as effectively as possible.  We need to find, each of us and the collective whole, the best answers we can, not just the quickest or most immediate or the most convenient.  And certainly not the ones promoted by the loudest voices or the most passionate.

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A Birthday Revery — October 5, 2022

In No Particular Path on October 5, 2022 at 11:16 am

Today it has been three quarters of a century since my birth.

Why does that sound like a lot longer than seventy-five years?

I suppose it might be, first, because our measurement of anything contains an attitude, an orientation, that helps us to think about it.  We measure our age in years because it keeps the numbers accessible, manageable.  We know that a century is a very long time, so three quarters of one seems enormous, also.  Seventy-five years since 1947 would also be 27,393 days, an impossible number to remain aware of and celebrate. 

Besides, anniversaries are always a day late.  Today, my seventy-fifth birthday, is actually the first day of my seventy-sixth year of life.  I finished seventy-five full years yesterday.  So, technically, today I celebrate a younger self.  Younger only by one day, but I’ll take that.

I don’t mind being seventy-five years of age.  I actually enjoy it.  I like it.  I don’t believe that I am seventy-five years old, though.  All my life, I think, I have felt either younger or older than my actual age.  At first, that always felt not-old-enough.  I wanted to be older, grown up, an adult.  Then, as I approached the years of life that have been called middle age, I briefly felt as though I were aging too fast.  I wanted to slow it down.  I wanted to give myself more time to learn, to do, to be whatever came into my mind I might be.

I was reminded this morning, that at eighteen I had just completed one year of college, but was not going back to the university, for reasons that are another story.  What I wanted to do was pack up a backpack and hit the road from Massachusetts to California.  I had some vague idea about being a movie actor; but mostly I just wanted to be grown up, to get free of a life that I found small, cramped, too-safe and too-slow.  But I lacked the knowledge of the world and of myself that would have given me the confidence and courage to risk it.

By the time I was twenty-five – the first quarter of my century – I had stumbled along far enough to have a degree plus some graduate studies, a steady job, and a family (one wife, three kids).  By my half-century, I had acquired a second wife, another kid, a career, and still no idea what I was doing most of the time.  But I had begun to realize that time was going too fast, not too slow.  I could see that the chances were rapidly fading of my ever being what my first-quarter-self had dreamed of being.  But I could also see more clearly how I had come to that place.  I could see the choices I could have made, for ill or good, and I could honor the ones I had made for how they had created who I had become.  And, over all, I liked who I had become.

Over the course of my third-quarter, I have encountered personal tragedy and triumph both.  Within the context of the life I have chosen, they carry equal weight.  They have spurred me to greater self-awareness, to clearer social consciousness, to a manageable balance of youth and age.  I have traveled across the country and back twice, I have been off the continent once.  I have retired from my career and have pursued other interests, such as writing, that I never took the time for before.  I have fallen in love and married for the last and best time.  And I am content that I am, at last, both grown up and not old.

I cannot, of course, predict what my next quarter of a century will bring, but I am ready for whatever it gives me time for.  When I was still in my pre-teens, I dreamed (literally, at night, while asleep) that I would live to be ninety-seven years old.  I now feel that I under-estimated.  I look forward to finishing this last quarter of my current century, and perhaps begin another.  But I have stopped growing old in favor of continuing to grow up.

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Teaching Real Life Skills

In No Particular Path on April 16, 2021 at 4:16 pm

I’m seventy-three years old.  I was educated K-12 in a public school in a small town.  During my lifetime, I have learned how to do, and have done the following:

Change a tire, change the oil, replace the spark plugs (and not mix up the wires), replace the distributer, and Gerry-rig, then replace, an accelerator cable, and repair and replace a muffler.

Replace the transmission and later the whole engine in a Volkswagen.

Repair and replace electrical fixtures, and electrical appliances.

Build a wall in my house, install different types of doors, paint inside and outside walls, and wallpaper a room.

Grow my own vegetables, gather my own food, and cook entire meals, from salad to desert.

Cut and chop my own firewood.

Balance a checkbook and do my own taxes.

Do my own laundry, make my bed, and clean my house.

Raise children, including changing diapers, and dealing with sickness.

Understand important issues, develop an informed opinion, and participate as a citizen in a democracy.                                                                                                                                                 

I was never taught specifically how to do any of these things in public school.  Aside from one course (usually “Home-ec” for girls and shop for boys – yikes!”), what I was taught were the basic skills of language and reason.  The language not just of reading and writing English (and in my case, some German and Latin), but also the languages of mathematics, and science, and history, and social studies, and the arts.  I was taught how to use those things to understand and analyze and solve problems.  And I was taught to find appropriate and useful information when I needed it to solve new problems and accomplish new tasks.

I have, of course, not done all of these things with equal skill, and have made mistakes along the way, but that’s how life is.

As an adult I have done a variety of jobs, from farm worker to short order cook to soda jerk to dishwasher.  I have participated in the arts in a variety of ways. 

And I eventually became a teacher, teaching both high school and college.

So, when I see someone talking about how they think our schools should be teaching what they call “life skills” such as the things I have listed above, instead of things like algebra II, or art and music, or foreign languages, because the students “will never use them,” then I want to tell them that they do not understand what education is, or what essential “life skills” actually are.

The specific tasks of life will be different for each student.  Not all will need to grow food, not all will need to be DIY mechanics or carpenters, not all will need to cook for themselves or care for and raise children, not all will need to manage their own money or do their own taxes.  But every one of them will need to know what to do when life presents them with a challenge or an opportunity that their public-school education could not have anticipated with specific instruction.  Every one of them will need to know how to reason, and solve problems, and make good personal decisions, and live with other people as a citizen.  Every one of them will need to be able to communicate with others who will help them with the things they cannot, themselves, do.  Every one of them will need to know how to create a life that is greater than just eating and working and sleeping, but is fulfilling and creative in whatever ways they might desire.

The old saying “give someone a fish, they will eat for a day; teach them to fish and they will eat for a lifetime” leaves off the third option.  Teach someone how to learn, how to reason, how solve problems, handle challenges, create the life they need; and they will not be limited to eating fish just to survive.

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Thanksgiving in the Year When Nothing Good Happened

In PeaceAble on November 26, 2020 at 4:22 pm

(In response to a friend who asked on FB, “what are you thankful for in the year when nothing good happened?”)

Andrew was . . .

Annoyed.

It was Thanksgiving and he had been reading all day about how he should be thankful.  All day.  On social media.

But this was the Year When Nothing Good Happened.  And Andrew didn’t feel thankful.

Be thankful, the internet was insisting.  We know that this is the Year When Nothing Good Happened, but you . . . Andrew . . . should find something to be thankful about.

Find something.

To be thankful about.

So, Andrew tried.  He really did.  He opened up a fresh page in his word processor.  He made himself a cup of coffee.  He would have made himself a glass of bourbon, but it was still morning and Andrew never drank in the morning.  That was a good thing, but Andrew considered it and thought that perhaps it was not enough to be actually thankful for on the occasion of Thanksgiving in the Year When Nothing Good Happened.

First, he tried all the usual things people say they are thankful for on Thanksgiving.  He had his health (though there was that suspicious cough earlier in the week, which might have been merely allergies, or the dryness of the seasonal air, but which could also have been the start of some dread disease or chronic condition – he’d have to pay attention to that).  He was financially secure (as long as they didn’t start screwing around with his pension or his social security).  He had the love of his family (at least he was pretty sure they still loved him – he hadn’t actually talked to any of them since August, and they all lived so far away these days, and with families one never really knows – people drift apart – he’d have to call them later, when he was finished being thankful).  He was going to contemplate the beauty of the world, but it was raining and a little chilly.

Then, grasping at straws, he thought, “This has been the Year When Nothing Good Happened, and I have survived it – I can be thankful for that!”  (But the year wasn’t quite over yet, so who knew what might still happen and whether he would survive that.)

That clearly wasn’t working.

Andrew realized that he needed something more.  It didn’t seem right to waste perfectly good Thanksgiving thankfulness on the ordinary day-to-day things for which one might be occasionally consciously thankful.  This was a holiday, after all.  A special occasion.  One should try to find something worthy of the moment for thankfulness.  One should find something for which he could be literally full of thanks, not just kind of lightly thank-y.

But what?

So, Andrew tried being thankful for big things.  But he couldn’t seem to think of any big things without sounding to himself like he was answering a question in a beauty pageant about how he wanted to bring about world peace.

It seemed that the more he tried to be thankful, the more he despaired that there might actually be nothing to be thankful for.  Especially in the Year When Nothing Good Happened.

He was getting desperate now.  Surely there was SOMETHING for him to be thankful for.  SOMETHING worthy of this solemn occasion must be able to fill him with appropriate gratitude!

So closed his word processor, shut off his computer and his phone, pulled his shades down and sat in silence and darkness in his most comfortable chair.

And, as he sat there, he found himself awash in all the bad things that had been happening in this Year When Nothing Good Happened.  And he began to cry.  At first, softly – just a bit of wetness around the rim of one eye.  Then, a tear escaped, a small gasp of breath came from deep within him, the gasp became a sob, more tears began to flow, his chest heaved, his nose ran, and he was full on crying.

And he realized that he wasn’t crying because this had been the Year When Nothing Good Happened, but because he could feel something shifting, not just within himself, but in the universe.  This, too, he thought, will pass.  And he felt a great release.  His tears were a reminder that he could choose to breathe again, to feel what he had been afraid to feel, to let the Year When Nothing Good Happened fade into the past.  And, he thought, this is how I know that my humanity is intact.  I have not, his mind raced on, simply survived, I am beginning to fight back.  The Year When Nothing Good Happened hasn’t defeated me.

Or us.  Because he could feel that he had a kinship with the rest of the human race who were also emerging from the recent troubles with new hope and new purpose.  There would be work to be done, the struggle wouldn’t simply go away, the wounds wouldn’t simply heal, but that’s what life is supposed to be about – doing the work.  There was hope, he saw; there was possibility.

His mind tried, then, to fall back on the gloomier thoughts, tried to tell him that this was all Pollyanna thinking, that he – and the rest of humanity – wasn’t up to the task.  But it was too late for that.  The thankfulness had taken hold.

Andrew had found that the human spirit, hope, empathy, purpose – love – when bundled together, even in the Year When Nothing Good Happened, were big enough to fill him to the brim with thankfulness.

And the Year When Nothing Good Happened was no longer.  The Year When Good Things Began Again had arrived.

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All Grown Up

In No Particular Path, Uncategorized on December 31, 2018 at 9:11 am

The old man asked the child.
What do you dream of doing in your life, what would you like to be?

The child responded.
Do you mean when I grow up?

And the old man shook his head gently, but smiled, remembering.
Grow up? Why on Earth would you want to do that?
Listen to me. I have become old learning this.
Some day; at eighteen or twenty-five or forty or eighty years of age, perhaps; you may get up out of your bed, or linger wistfully over your breakfast, or stop halfway through chewing a bite of your sandwich, or see yourself mirrored in a darkened window, or sit alone in your chair, and suddenly see that you are grown up. And you will wonder, oh my god, when did that happen? You may even feel a bit of panic, wondering if you’re ready yet, or if it is already too late.
But the truth is that there is no time or place in life where you will be grown up. For growing up is the work of your life, not the end of it.
Choose well who and what you want to be today.  Do as well as you can what you want or need to do today.  Grow a little more like yourself today than you were yesterday; and you won’t have to think or worry about what you will be when you are as old as I am now. You will simply be what you have always been and what you have wanted to be.
Whatever you choose to do; whatever goals you set; whatever your accomplishments, large or small; whatever titles or labels you accumulate, and whether you wear them with pride or humility or uncomfortably or with regret; don’t let them trap you into being all grown up. Don’t let them define you, for definitions can become limits.

And the child looked sad then, and the old man wished, for just a moment, that he had not asked the question.

Why, the child asked, have you never told me this before now?

And, alone in his room, sitting in his chair, looking out the window at the new day, the old man sighed deeply. And a tear ran down his cheek.
Finally, he stood up. He put on his jacket, opened his door, and stepped outside. He turned around and looked for a moment at the walls within which he had been living for so long.
Today, the child said, I will be brave. Today I will do something new. Today I will stop being grown up.
And tomorrow I will, if I can, be whatever tomorrow offers me to be, and I will do whatever tomorrow brings me to do.
So, the old man, with the child guiding him, faced away from the walls and stepped into the world.

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God, Biology and Choice: Perhaps I Simply Had to Write This

In No Particular Path on November 13, 2018 at 12:04 pm

It is possible that every choice we make is freely made at the moment we make it. This isn’t to say that our choices aren’t influenced by our biological make-up and our present physical conditions, our past experiences and knowledge, our perceptions, our psychological and emotional states, our beliefs and our relationships with others who are involved in the choice; but all those things are simply data we use in making a determination about our choices, not the choices themselves. And the degree of influence any one factor may exert at any moment will certainly vary. In the end, though, we choose, and the choice is ours to make.
Another possibility is that our choices aren’t choices at all, but are predetermined by the path set for us by a deity or deities. In that case, we are simply puppets of the divine, who is working out some plan beyond our influence or understanding. All the influences that may affect a free will choice would be part of the overall experience, but wouldn’t change the choice itself. We may ask ourselves why we chose as we did and what plan the divine is using us for, or why the divine has directed others to behave as they do; but the responsibility for the choice itself isn’t ours or anyone else’s. We also have to consider whether everything is predetermined: every triumph, every tragedy, every disaster and every celebration.
The third possibility is that our choices are biologically predetermined; we are genetically pre-programmed to behave in certain ways. In this case, there may be a certain randomness in the universe itself; the movements of the cosmos, for example, are events which may affect us, as are all the influences under free will, but our specific response to those influences at any one moment is predetermined by our biology and the biology of all our evolutionary and ancestral history. As with divine predestination, we have no personal responsibility for our choices, nor does anyone else; we are simply leaves tossed on the wind, vulnerable to the forces of nature, but unable to make a deliberate choice about what is happening to us. We can, if our biological make-up predisposes us to it, question how those forces led us to this place, but the questions and any answers we arrive at would simply be an extension of our biological predetermination.
It is also possible that we have some free choice, but it is limited. Either the divine or our biological nature gives us the ability to make choices, but only with regard to the details of the trajectory, not the trajectory itself. We have freedom to choose, but only within predetermined limits set for us according to our biological make-up or our assigned place in god’s plan.
In any event, the larger question, for me anyway, is “so what?” Does it really matter whether all this is “real” or not? If I walk out the door and decide to turn left rather than right, does it really matter in any practical way whether that choice was an event in the moment or a predestined action. I will, in any case, experience the action according to what I believe to be the reality. If I believe I am making the choice I will experience the process of consideration, weighing the relevant influences, thinking about the possible consequences, deciding on my course of action and acting. And while the discussion of the possibilities makes for a wonderful philosophical exercise, and is certainly useful as a way to try to understand what it means to be human, unless I am able to separate myself from my perceptions, it makes no difference.
In other words, there is really no practical sense in which the reality of free will or predestination changes my responsibility in this life for my actions.
Suppose I believe that everything I choose is predetermined. Then that belief would also be predetermined. If I then use that belief as a reason to leave my life to whatever happens, without trying to deliberately choose a course of action, telling myself that nothing I do is in my control, then I have a dilemma. The rest of the world may still assign credit or blame to me for my actions, and generate consequences based on that. I may not like the consequences, but really have no complaint, because all of this would have to be part of the same predetermined reality that I claim to believe in. If I believe that I have a choice, on the other hand, then I can certainly examine my choices to see if they fit some standard of ethics, morals, or logic; and use that to argue for their rightness.
In the same way, debate about god’s existence can make for an interesting exercise in trying to understand the nature of the universe and the place of humans in that universe, but my beliefs will be part of what creates my experience, and they will help to shape my choices, the consequences of those choices, and the direction of my path. I cannot, of course, no matter how devoutly I might wish it, impose my belief wholly onto anyone else and make them see the world as I see it, or expect them to act in the world according to my perceptions.
In other words, either god exists or does not. There are no other possibilities. The differences between beliefs are only in how we define god. Our beliefs are in our definitions and vice-versa. There are a great many ideas of god in which I do not believe; and I suspect that a great many people would not believe in my ideas of god. So what? We are all human beings, limited by our humanness to flawed perceptions of any god that might exist. And since our definitions and perceptions are limited and flawed, so are the choices we might make based on those perceptions. We can use our idea of god to explain our actions, but we cannot expect others to see things our way just because our beliefs are sincere.
If my actions lead to consequences that are harmful to others, it is unreasonable to assume that my religious beliefs and convictions are exculpatory. I am still responsible for my own actions in any practical interpretation of what that responsibility is. To come to any other conclusion would be to treat my religious beliefs as a form of mental illness (a conclusion to which far too many evangelical atheists are willing to leap), in which I would claim that I am not responsible for my actions because my god made it impossible for me to understand them, to make rational choices about them, to understand their consequences, and to choose to act any differently.
A belief in free will, the ability of humans to make choices as independent individuals, is necessary for any sense of morality, personal responsibility, ethics, and judgment. It is also, of course, the foundation of guilt, blame, shame, and regret. But it can be used, as well, for conscious change, for correction, for discipline, for redemption. Absent free will apology is just a mindless exercise, an illusion. Without free will, punishment is simply cruel and pointless. Without free will, we do not affect our existence, it affects us.
It doesn’t matter at all whether all of this is an illusion. It is within the illusion that we must live, by the very nature of the illusion itself and our limited ability as humans to perceive it (as opposed to theorize about it) or to act outside of it.

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The Learned Hypocrisy of Being Human

In No Particular Path, PeaceAble, Uncategorized on July 30, 2018 at 10:44 am

To be human is to live in contradiction.
Perfect consistency is impossible for us. We think too much; we feel too much; we believe too much. We invented philosophy and science, and art, and morality. And every time we think that these have given us an answer that is final, that is absolute, that we can rely on, that is true, the world changes and we change and the answers have to change as well.
But change is hard, so we cling as long as possible to the old truths, accepting only what in our pain and our grief and our fear we can no longer deny; and contorting ourselves to make everything fit. We shake our heads in disbelief at our own contradictions, and label others’ inconsistencies as hypocrisy.
But it’s really just all of us being human.
I just read something that asked the question, “How could we go so abruptly from Barack Obama to Donald Trump?” How could the same country elect an erudite, scholarly, compassionate and thoughtful leader, then replace him with a crude, anti-intellectual, self-aggrandizing, impulsive one? Which of these very opposite men really represents who we are?
The answer is, of course, that they both do.
We have evolved into creatures who deal with the natural conflicts and dangers of the world by contriving to make them more contentious and more dangerous. There are real solutions to the real problems of the world. There are more than sufficient resources. But we allow our worst traits, our basest instincts, our superstitions and prejudices and fear to rule us; we hoard our resources instead of using them, we reject comprehensive solutions to complex problems in favor of simplistic analyses and short-sighted solutions. We proclaim our desire for peace and understanding, we pray for the relief of suffering and ask why we can’t all just get along; but we refuse to do what is necessary to achieve those things. If we can’t see a way to fix something right now, for all time, without any sacrifice or compromise on our part, we tell ourselves that no solution exists at all.
We are simultaneously all that is good in the world and all that is evil. And every choice we make is a choice to turn in the direction of one or the other. Our moral compass is broken and we have lost our ability to find our way in the wilderness.
We are polarized because we have made a choice to declare ourselves only half of who we are, and to further assert that our chosen half of this bifurcated self is the only acceptable truth, the only reality.
The contradictions remain, of course, but rather than acknowledge them and try to understand how they make us whole, we either deny them or tie ourselves in knots trying to fit them into the incomplete self we cling to.
We do not live linear lives. Our stories are told first in stream of consciousness, and we try to understand who we are by rewriting the stories until they make sense; but each story needs to make sense on its own as well as finding a place in the whole anthology of our lives, and we need to forget so much to make that happen.
I am a man and a male. How can I change the normative misogyny and chauvinism of the culture unless I can acknowledge that it lives within me? I can’t remove it from my experience, from the teachings that shaped me. It’s there. It always will be. But when I allow myself to see it I am better able to see my way forward; so that there may come a time when we will have raised a generation that never learned it in the first place. I’m not a feminist because I have never seen the feminine as less, but because I have, and I am working to change that in me as well as in the society.
I come most directly from pink-skinned European ancestors. How can I change the normative xenophobia and racism of the culture unless I acknowledge that I carry within me the same learned fear of the other, of the different, that I wish to change? I don’t seek racial justice and equality because I have never felt afraid, but because I have, and I’m working to change that in me as well as in the society.
I am cisgender and heterosexual. How can I change the normative homophobia of the culture unless I acknowledge that I have feared and felt shamed by the feminine in myself, that I have questioned my own capacity for intimacy, both emotional and physical, with both women and men? I don’t fight for the humanity of those who are homosexual, or bisexual, or transgendered, or gender non-conforming, or to allow everyone to love whomever they love because I was never told that my feminine was weakness and abomination, but because I was; and I’m trying to change that in myself as well in the society.
If we are going to tell our stories authentically and honestly and make it possible for others to do the same, then we cannot forget, cannot leave out, the parts that make us contradictory, inconsistent, and even sometimes hypocritical.
There is no high road or low road; there is only the path we have walked thus far, with its hills and valleys, its twists and turns and detours, its dark passages and glorious vistas; for there is no way forward except from where we are right now.