Missing Martha

"I couldn't save you."

http://music.aol.com/video/behind-the-house/neko-case/1808667

First we didn't know each other. We were miles apart in every way. When we met, we didn't think we liked each other much. We thought we knew each others' "type" and thought we didn't like people like that. We got to know each other and found common ground in kids and a certain irreverent joy in life. We grew closer when we joined forces against a shared adversity. We learned to depend on each other for certain kinds of support, the kind you turn to when things seem out of control and all crisis-ey, when you need someone to feel sorry for you while at the same time spinning the thing into proper perspective so that you know what you knew all along and that is that you will survive this too. She needed so much after the accident and I had only so much to give without damaging myself. But I wanted to save her. I wanted to make her whole again. Once, I asked about her at the nurses station and I thought from the look she gave me from behind her computer screen, the nurse knew what I didn't what to admit yet: She would never be whole after this. I did what I could. But in the end, I lost her to the damage. I miss her. Sometimes not for days or weeks and then, sometimes, really hard. You do what you can but sometimes, even your best isn't enough.

Are Humans Warlike?

It has been suggested that humans are inherently warlike and that our future as a species will always include war. Some agree with me by saying "Yes, there will always be evil in the world that we will need to fight." But is war ever an answer to any evil? Or is it just a counter-evil? Are there other options? Are there always other options? Do we seek hard enough for options?

I listen to popular music and look around at society and what we do with our time and what we value and how we motivate ourselves and what we care about, and I am left agreeing that yes, humans have an insatiable desire for conflict that will always lead to war somewhere and at some time. I don't like that answer, but I can find nothing to justify any other opinion.

We love to rally ourselves together into a larger force and that rallying usually, in order to be FOR something, needs to be AGAINST something else. We are not just FOR a cleaner environment, we are AGAINST big oil and cancer causing chemicals and litter and suburban sprawl. We are not just FOR better health, we are AGAINST cancer and influenza and mental illness. We cheer on sports teams even more energetically if they are battling a long time rival that we can be clearly against. The more succinctly we can put a label and a cause on the thing we are against, the happier we are and the more 'good' we think we have done against it ant its 'evil'.

We love to have heroes and heroes have to have a foe and that foe has to come from within an enemy camp. Sure we can have a teacher as a hero, but often even that hero is most known for fighting AGAINST something like gangs in the school or a certain learning disability as opposed to just teaching more and better.

We tried team building in corporations but if the team was FOR a better product, the concept did little to motivate. If the team was placed in opposition to come competitor outside company, or if internal teams could be challenged to excel in come metric against internal teams, the concept lead to harder work and better quality. The 'enemy' had to be in place for the team to rally!

We love to insist that there is a 'force' of 'evil', but often the things we describe as evil are just the same things we do or reward in others. The Muslim terror bomber is giving their life for their God that wants them to act out against what they perceive is an evil of a world gone too materialistic, i.e. US, and yet, we see THEM as evil. At the same time, we revere the 'good' saints who give their lives literally as martyrs for their god or give their lives over to the service to their god. Maybe there is not evil at all, but just an exaggeration and perversion of normal human desires to accumulate goods, to accumulate territory, to protect turf, to protect family. The desire for power in the business world or in a service organization is called ambition and drive and is regarded as a good thing, but the desire for power in some sort of anti-government group is given other labels. But when the same mechanism is at work for something we do not agree with, how can it be called evil when it is admired in another context?

It is easy to think of a world divided by good and evil, but it is more difficult to accept that maybe the person we label evil is doing the same things we are but due to different motivations. It is easy to bomb and shoot, but it is more difficult to find ways that we can peacefully coexist over mutually desired outcomes. Can we find ways to convince the 'enemy' to disengage in behaviors we don't like by finding motivations for other behaviors?

When you get right down to it, most forces we call 'evil' are doing what they are doing for reasons that look and sound a lot like ours, to improve a situation for their people, their families, to glorify or defend their god. In fact, sometimes, they see us as the force of 'evil'. It hardly seems like violence is the answer in that case and it hardly seems like there will or even should be a clear 'winner'. Perhaps tolerance and conversation and more tolerance and more conversation would lead to a discovery of more in common with each other and less judging and labelling?


We somehow think our bombing and shooting is 'good' but can it ever really be?


Peace is hard work and I am frankly not sure we as humans really want it. We love a cause, we love our heroes, we love to have an enemy, we love to have things we can label 'evil' in contrast to the 'good' that we believe we possess and which possesses us.

Maybe if we ADMIT we love our war, then we can work harder to not use it? If we keep insisting we hate war, will we just keep allowing ourselves to justify using it in yet another 'exceptional' case, this one last time.

Do we indeed love war, and at what cost? Young lives lost, young bodies mutilated, young minds scarred. What will it take to make our love of the cause, the hero, the glory of victory, be outweighed by the love of our own individual people? What will make us give up our warring human ways?

Quiting Somthing Is The Hardest Thing

There are resolutions to change of all sorts, but the ones to DO something are far the easiest. If you are going to read more books or eat better, you get a thousand chances a day to put that into motion. Stop for a few minutes before heading off to work to read a chapter, read a little more before dinner and a little more before bedtime. Add some carrots to your lunchtime meal of a sandwich. Park father away and walk more. Clean a closet or a corner of a room and you are on the way to success. Take the steps. Do, do, do, take action, and so it is easy to score on the "do something" resolutions.
But giving something up is an entirely different matter. If you are going to stop eating salty things or stop drinking caffeinated beverages or quit smoking or give up a drug or cease a gambling habit or stop watching television or end your nail biting, you have a thousand thousand times a day to get it wrong. Even if you forego the morning coffee for a nice orange juice, the pot is still brewing when you get to work and even if you refuse to give in then, there are the multiple offers by the waiter at lunch and the drive past a half dozen Starbucks and Caribou's on the way to everywhere and the coffeemaker on the counter top when you get home. If you manage to get into the shower without that first cigarette, there is the drive to work and those poor souls smoking by the back door that would be glad to share one with you for the sake of your company and each time one of your friends takes a break and invites you along and the after lunch smoke you have to resist and at some point, you are sitting at your desk and every minute is one more minute you have to say no to getting up and going out for a smoke.
If you do that one in a thousand chances at the good thing, you have succeeded in your positive "do something" resolution, but you have to say no a thousand times each day to succeed in your "stop something" resolution and one of one thousand where you give in counts as failure for that day.
Making a "do something" change is a walk in the park compared to making a "quit something" change. And after a few days, the new "doing" starts to kick in as habit, but if you crave the thing you are quitting 10 fewer times each day, it is a hundred days before you have a single crave free day and even then, there are countless triggers in the world to pull you back.
The force of habit is an easy thing to make and a terrible hard long long road to break.

Fear Itself

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." I don't know where that came from and I suppose I could look it up, but the provenance is irrelevant, really. When I was in that reading frenzy that all pregnant women enter to try to figure out exactly what was going to happen to me and how something the size of a small fire extinguisher was going to get from in there to out here, I would find reference to hormones that would make sure you never remembered the pain afterwards. Oh, yeah, that was comforting: It's gonna hurt like hell but you won't remember. It was a lie anyway: For a while, the memory was quite vivid and easy to call back up, so I am not so sure about the hormones that were supposed to take care of that. But now, 17 and 21 years later, I can say that I don't have a clue what the physical experience felt like. But I still retain vivid memories of the fear. The sense of not being in control and not knowing what was going to happen next were overwhelmingly terrifying for me. I wanted to DO something, wanted SOMEONE TO DO something to retain control of the situation. And when I think now of the things I most dread, it is the fear of the unknown, of what will happen and of not being able to control it.

The phone calls about the illnesses of parents, the waiting in the Emergency Room with a child, the news that a friend is going in for some sort of scan, what I remember most is the fear, the loss of control, the being a victim of whatever had happened and not having a way out or a choice.

My fear of water was like that. Since I cannot swim, I cannot afford for the boat to over turn, and with someone steering or paddling or another person or two even riding in the canoe, there is the risk that they will do something to overturn the boat. When I got my own one person boat, there was fear of waves, of wind pushing me, of current pulling me, and those fears of not being able to control the course of my boat brought me to the edge of panic. But learning to balance and paddle my boat, to steer it to where I wanted it to go, to paddle it back to a place I wanted to be, to stay on course in wind and waves, to learn to control my destiny in my boat on that water on that day keep the fear at bay.

And conquering one fear, standing up to the forces that caused that fear, gives you confidence about facing other fears. I will always fear giving a talk or teaching a class, but I will do fine. I will fear the reactions of people to whom I am presenting a project, but if they don't like things, I will fix them, or explain why they must remain that way and I will do fine. I will fear the airplane ride, but statistics tell me we will land safely, and I will be fine.

Back when I was delivering those babies, I should have focused less on trying to control the external factors, and more on controlling the fear within. The baby will come because the body knows how to make that happen. Let that process take its course, and manage the fear itself. In a canoe, see the waves, face them, and keep paddling, that part is simple, but the fear is a separate thing to be given focus and managed. Each time it is pushed back into its box, it comes out later and weaker and is more easily pushed down.

There is nothing to fear but fear itself, and when we tear fear down to physical symptoms, a lump in the back of the throat, a feeling of the insides rising, sweating, shaking, feeling lightheaded, none of that is terribly unpleasant in itself. If we stay in the moment during fear and stay still and swallow and breath and wait out the panic and calm the symptom for what it is, a physical process in our body and our brain, we can conquer the fear feelings, the fear itself. And what freedom that brings, what confidence that brings. But it is not something you do once. You learn to back down the fear and you do it again and again, every day. But knowing you have before and that you can and will makes it doable!

Damage Beyond Repair

She sold houses. She was good at it. I had worked for her sister and her sister lied like a flounder so when the sister told me she won the top sales award nearly every month, so much that she hardly ever went to the awards banquets anymore, so much that the other sales people in the office were jealous of her, I was skeptical. But one day, long after the accident, I was looking for a kitchen utensil of some sort in her kitchen and opened one of the deep bottom drawers and it was filled with plaques. There were easily dozens of them in there. All the monthly awards and a bunch of annuals ones on bigger plaques.
She was working into the evening on a Friday, between Christmas and New Year's, a slow time for house sales, but you never knew when some young couple would get the hankering to take a look at the models, so she was there. She ran out for something, left a note on the door and took just her wallet, not even her whole purse or her coat. Cigarettes? A snack? Advil or eye drops? A magazine because it was that slow? Who know why she left the office, she certainly didn't remember. She was just going to zip across the street into the strip mall, apparently, and she didn't have her seat belt on, though reports varied as to whether that helped or harmed her. She probably looked both ways and then darted out in her little black car and SLAM! From out of nowhere, a big landscaper's pickup with snow plowing hydraulics on the front bumper broadsided her little car, crushing, bending, twisting it and plowing it along the street up onto the curb. It was dusk and witnesses said he did not have his headlights on, so it was probably in that period between light and dark where the shadows and lights play tricks and maybe she just didn't see him. Some witnesses said he was speeding, but they might have just been piling on because they were angry with him. They said she was thrown into the other side of the car and people helped her out of the passenger side and helped find her wallet for the police and ambulance attendants. They said she was out and walking around and talking. By the time the ambulance got her to the emergency room, her brain was swelling from the sudden impact and they put her into a coma to minimize the effects of the concussion. They found oh so many injuries, a broken pelvis and a broken ankle and bruises and scrapes and long later, after weeks in the hospital and more in in-patient rehab and many more in outpatient rehab, she was still having wrist pain, so they x-rayed and found a break that had never healed because it was never immobilized. The physical wounds eventually mostly healed but her brain never did. She could still sell houses like nobody's business, but she got the paperwork wrong. Or told them the wrong numbers. Or just didn't get the paperwork done at all. They gave her a secretary, but she gave the secretary wrong information or forgot to tell the secretary to do things. Or forgot to show up for meetings or appointments. In the end, they let her go. Too many angry customers who thought they had a deal in the works and didn't, or some detail was wrong at closing and so it fell through. She bounced from job to job, worked a while even for the dry cleaner who cleaned her fancy suits and blouses for years. And oh, yeah, she didn't have health insurance because she was supposed to be on her husband's as part of the divorce agreement many years before but about 2 months before the accident, he got tired of paying it and dropped her. So the medical bills bankrupted her. Oh, yeah, and while she was in the hospital and rehab, her sister went to pharmacies and picked up her pain meds 'for her' and kept them, so when she'd go to get them, they'd be gone. And she'd worry that she'd lost them or was losing her mind.
There is a prairie at the rehab center. I have always wanted to see it, and today, on my way to pick up drafting supplies for a project I didn't want to work on indoors, I stopped there. Wandered the prairie, listened to the dried grasses rustling in the wind, watched the birds dart about the seed heads of the dried prairie flowers. And remembered it all.
There is no lesson. It just happened. It was terrible. I did what I could for her, but in the end, no amount if visiting and running errands and supportive phone calls can fix a broken brain. I don't know where she is. She moved so many times because she could not make the rent and each time, she was embarrassed to tell me. We exercised at the gym together and kept having lunch and then she stopped calling or answering calls or emails. I miss her. I heard she is living with her mother. I don't know her mother's name. I have searched for her on-line. I have lost her. I miss her.

Real Reasons

Surveys can ask people why they do a thing or feel a certain way, but how accurate is that really? If a person is asked why they think a certain thing, their true answer would be something that, if proven wrong, would change their mind. If they give a reason and you prove that reason to be invalid, yet they still believe, their answer was not their real reason.
If I tell you that I am not going to the store today, even tho we very much need milk for the cereal, you can ask me why. I can say because it is cold out. However, if there is a huge thaw this afternoon, and you ask me if I will go to the store now, and I refuse, then cold was not the reason. If you tell me that they fixed the bridge between here and the store, and I suddenly change my mind about going for milk, then you could conclude that the real reason I would not go was not the cold but my fear of failure of the damaged bridge. Or if you told me it was now warm out and I say I cannot because there is no gas in the car, the lack of gasoline is not really the answer. The real answer is either that I lack the ambition to get gas AND milk or possibly that I lack money for gas and milk. But the lack of gas in the gas tank of the car is not the reason, no matter if I say it is.
Somewhere one time I read that to find the true answer you should ask why seven times. That would lead to more accurate truths in come cases, such as the gasoline situation, where the conversation would go like this:
You: Why won't you go for milk?
Me: There is no gas in the car.
You: Why can't you get gas?
Me: I don't feel like it.
You: Why don't you feel like it?
Me: I am just not interested in going.
You: Why aren't you interested in going?
Me: I just feel . . . like I have no energy.
You: Why?
Me: I don't know. I feel that way a lot this time of year.
You: Why?
Me: I don't know. Maybe it is that seasonal thing you get from not enough sunlight.
You: So you don't feel this lack of ambition as much in other seasons?
Me: No, I guess I don't.

Because the answer first given went in a direction toward the true reason, the successive questioning can lead to a better answer that might be nearer the truth. Getting nearer the truth could lead to solutions, such as getting outdoors more to get more sunshine or taking Vitamin D!
But in the case of using cold as an answer when fear of the bridge was the real answer, the conversation might go like this:
You: Why don't you want to get milk?
Me: It's too cold.
You: It's not nearly as cold as it was.
Me: Now it's wet out.
You: Why don't you like to be out when it is wet out?
Me: Feels icky and uncomfortable.

You can see that no matter how many times we ask why here, we are never going to get to the real reason that is fear of the safety of the damaged bridge. No amount of detailed questioning will lead to the right answer, since the first answer lacked the insight of being even close to the truth.
So unless the person giving the reasons is self-aware enough to know at least a little bit of why they feel a certain way or think a certain thing or do a certain thing, no amount of asking is ever going to get to the real reasons. How can a survey ever get to real truths when we think like we do?

Worrying with AD/HD: Waiting for the School Bus

The hyperactivity of AD/HD really shines when it comes to generating ideas. You tell me a problem and I can 'brainstorm' ideas for it as fast as anyone. They may not all be good or useful, but each can lead to a handful of others and on until a whole web of possibilities exist. That is a good and wonderful thing when one is in a creative field, provided one can catch hold of one and shift from ideation into production, which doesn't always happen. Sometimes too many ideas can become a handicap to progress, but fortunately the hyperactivity comes and goes in cycles and periods of brain calm allow me to evaluate the ideas and choose and move on to actually accomplishing something.
But at no time does the flurry of ideas kick into high gear more than when I perceive that a loved one might be in harm's way. When my mother does not answer her phone, when a friend is late for an appointment, when my kid is late getting home from the school bus, then I can fast as lightening think of thousands of horrible scenarios, each one more terrible and gory and awful than the last. My kids never understood why I was so frantic when they were a mere 20 minutes late after school. To them, it had been a lark, the school bus late arriving so they messed around in line outside the school waiting, or the school bus stuck in construction or taking a wrong turn, giving them a novel but thoroughly safe ride home. But try as I might to generate innocuous possibilities for why they were late, the flood of nasty ones was unstoppable and richly varied. Accidents, crimes by the bus driver or dastardly others with various nefarious motives, attacks by wild dogs or gangs of roving drug-crazed teens or pedophilic predators working in concert to nab my children on the walk from the bus stop to home, visits by the police, reports of sightings by eye-witnesses that were only false leads, years of them being missing. Oh, no mystery novel ever written or horror movie ever filmed could begin to equal the plots and disasters and horrors that I could imagine in a few short minutes.
Such is the stuff of AD/HD worry. The creative twists and turns and the sheer quantity and speed of thinking can generate a thousand seemingly plausible logical reasonable terrible possibilities for everything from the results of a medical test to the diagnoses resulting from a routine doctor or dentist visit to a letter with an official return address to someone not answering a phone call or not showing up for a appointment to the noise you can hear from the basement to simple things like driving a car or even just leaving the house. Sometimes, these fears turn into actual phobias, and sometimes, those rampant possibilities lead me to fail to make the medical appointment or to snack on some ancient box of crackers instead of going out to the store. I make myself aware of all the phobias and their names and try to recognize when I am beginning to give in to one and take steps to counter it immediately. Fears and worries are just one layer of brain buzz that someone with AD/HD must manage on a daily and nightly basis. It is not undoable, but it does take energy and sometimes it works better than other times.

Of Vices and Virtues: Procrastination

Talking to an artist friend the other day, we explored a concept familiar to the creative person: Procrastination. Self-help books and articles covering procrastination lean to attempts to aid one in 'overcoming' procrastination or 'eliminating' it from your life. Organization and time management are seen as the weapons against procrastination, as though it is an evil that needs management. And yet, as my son studies practical economics, he is finding that delivering too much too early are not good business models. In the arts, procrastination is a tool that allows maximum creative time and minimal production time. Doing the job too early often results in the desire to redo. Obviously, if one were to just ignore the creative project until the last possible moment, there could be problems, such as under-estimating the time needed for the project and failing to finish it. But in my experience, most creatives look at the problem early and then let it sit in the back of their minds where they think it through and muddle it over and try various options and possibilities while they work on other things. So at the 'last minute', quite a bit of mental work has already gone into it and a number of versions and alternatives have been explored. So for most creative people, procrastination is not a vice, but the virtue of optimization of time and effort and the realisation of the best quality work we are capable of. Is it time to move it from the list of vices to the list of virtues and explore and understand how useful procrastination really is?

A Common "Disorder"?

They tell us in school that we are not normal, that we don't conform. They tell us that we can't pay attention like the other kids, that we are distracted, distractible, that our minds wander. They tell us that we have too much energy and need to learn to sit still. They disapprove when we sit and stare out the window, lost in thought, thinking through questions or traveling in our mind to a far off place or living in a story of our own making. They are frustrated that we cannot finish a worksheet or long set of problems past the point where we get it and any more of the same is just tedious. And when we get absorbed into a project that we DO like, and lose track of time, and do not want to be interrupted or distracted on to something else, they get angry and call us stubborn and blockheaded. Sometimes, if locked into thoughts or concentrating on a treasured activity, we don't even notice their request and they wonder at our ability to hear or they doubt our intelligence. They called us melodramatic for our overly sensitive feelings, the ease with which we are hurt, and for our eager enthusiasm for beautiful and interesting and new things, our overexcitement in a rewarding social event.
Some of them insisted that we be medicated to make us normal, that we spend our school days in a conforming trance of boredom and vague disinterest, void of enthusiasm for much of any of it, waiting it out until we can go home and the drugs wear off and we can engage in some building or making or exploring activity on our own time. For some of us, the meds are a constant numbing dumbing thing and we never know we are failing to escape them.
But some of us got good teachers who left us alone to learn by doing projects exploring ideas and left us to read book after book about the subjects we loved and let us leave the worksheet unfinished if we could satisfy them that we understood the material and they let us fill our time with art projects and making things and trying things and leading others in study sessions.
If we are not so lucky, we have jobs that we hate that make us conform and do repetitive tasks that are torture to us. If we are lucky, we have jobs that are varied and challenging and interesting and we can thrive under bosses who value our quirkiness and creativity. And we have coworkers that forgive that we miss a meeting now and then because we lose track of time absorbed in the project.
If we are not so lucky, we have families who force us into routine pattern and make us conform to normal, but is we are lucky, we have spouses and children who tolerate our nighttime prowlings, our late nights some times and our early mornings others, who tolerate our project spread over the dining room table for weeks on end.
In the old days, we were the watchers, the keepers, the seekers.
We stayed up and watched for predators or invaders or bad weather and sounded the warnings. Only at the first faint light of dawn were we able to sleep peacefully, sure that the tribe or village had survived safely through another night. We lead the celebrations of the seasons and of the bounty of the world around us. We told the stories and made the art and brought pretty things into the village or camp. We were perceptive of the signs that said it was time to move on to some other area, that it was time to go out in search of game or to gather the food or other materials that nature provided for us. We remembered the signs of where to find these things and lead the expeditions to them and worked with fervor until the last nut was gathered and the last berry picked and the last rice grain harvested.
There are not a lot of us so statistically, we ARE not 'normal' but certainly to fall outside the norm must provide the village, the tribe, the family, society, some benefit. It must make society more adaptable, more flexible, more able to recognize signs and trends and to adapt and change to meet them. Surely we have some value today in the modern world. Can we stop calling it a 'disorder' and start valuing the watchers and keepers and seekers of today? Can we stop drugging our children and find ways to educate them that conform to their quirkiness and to their needs for hands-on and involvement instead of worksheets and memorization? Can we find jobs that are not driven by the clock and routine and that utilize our creativity and flexibility and dogged dedication to that which interests and challenges us? Can we find ways to appreciate that which we now label Attention Deficit Disorder or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and begin to view this way of being as different but completely normal? Can we maybe even begin to accept that people like us might have some evolutionary benefit to society and some irreplaceable future value to the survival of humanity?

Perfect Children

They let me teach Sunday School one year. It began innocently enough. The first weeks were spent mainly getting the kids used to letting mom or dad leave them there. I read them books of fun Bible stories from picture books and let them play with each other to develop social skills. Advent was nearing and I was determined that 'my' kids would know the story of Jesus's birth inside and out. I made construction paper puppets of Mary and Joseph and the infant Jesus and shepherds and angels and innkeepers and kings and donkeys and sheep and a construction paper city street scape of inns and the barn and a construction paper manger and a construction paper star. Each week, we acted out the story with our puppets. Someone got to be Mary and someone got to be Joseph and we would go walking around outside until we were a little tired then we would go back in and knock on the innkeepers' doors until one let us use his barn. The baby Jesus was 'born' into the manger. The angels came to the shepherds over on a nearby table and they brought their sheep to the barn. The kings studied the star and followed it to the barn. We reenacted the story at least 3 times each Sunday, with kids playing many roles and changing roles each time and coaching each other thru the roles. It was rewarding to watch them pull their parents by the hand to see the puppets and to hear them tell new parts of the story that they had internalized that day. I am confident that 'my' kids did indeed know the Christmas story by the time the holiday rolled around!
After Christmas, I read them the happy stories about Jesus healing people and making more wine for the party and stopping the storm by walking on the water and teaching people and making that one fish and one loaf be enough for huge crowds of people. What fun we were having learning about Jesus!
But soon, Lent arrived and it was time to tell the kids that Jesus was going to be tortured and killed and then rise from the dead to redeem them from their sinfulness. I couldn't do it. I could not look those little kids in they eyes and tell them that this guy they had learned to love had to be cruelly killed because they were sinners that needed saving. I "lied" and told them bad people didn't like what Jesus was teaching so they killed him, but because he was God's son, he came back to life and that was what we celebrated on Easter.
I could not bear to tell them the 'for your sins' part. I just didn't believe it, so I could not teach it to them. Kids need confidence and competence, not shame and guilt!
I have read a great deal on brain science and evolution and psychology and sociology since then and this I have come to believe: Three year olds have no sins. People are not born sinful. People are born perfect. Jillions (scientifically speaking) of years of evolution made people able to adapt to conflicting needs by giving them conflicting desires and conflicting skills. We want to acquire goods and amass wealth because in times of scarcity, those that did that were the survivors. We want to help others and share with them because in times of plenty, that allowed more of us to survive and ensured the continuation of the species, keeping our gene pool richly diverse. So kids might give too much of their lunch away one day and steal the cookie from a friend the next, but that is not sin. That is just the skills and abilities that evolution gave us to keep us adaptable and survivable. And we should not be taught to feel guilty for those things, but rather taught to manage them for the best of our own health, the health and happiness of our family and our friends and our community. We have those conflicting wants and needs and abilities because we have evolved to be wonderful and perfect and we have the brains to learn to manage those wants and needs and abilities to be good and productive and kind and generous and all the things we value. Sin is a stupid concept and I won't teach any child ever that they are born sinful.

The Door Between You and Me

I wait. I pace the hall, up and down, outside the door. The door is steel, very wide, grey, a cool grey, closer the color of blue than tan. I sit down against the wall, beside the door, slumping my bag next to me. I wait. The wall has a slight texture if I push my back against it, rounded bumps, not rough, but with a smooth surface that slides against my jacket. The baseboard is thin against the wall, rubber. Where it meets the deeper metal door frame, a curved triangle of grunge remains, where careless mops never quite reach. I close my eyes to shut out that sight and press my head against the wall. I listen for some sign from behind the door. Nothing. The door is thick, heavy, soundproof. Is it one of those fireproof doors? I wait. I wake with a start: I must have drifted off. For how long? Nothing is changed. There is still no sound, no one here, no change in the light. I get up, pushing off the wall. I go to the end of the hallway. There is a window, a drive below, curbed on either side between sidewalk and grass. There is a bench of metal slats, a trashcan. A few scattered trees with a few scattered leaves remaining. I can see the parking lot and my car. I look back to the door. Are you still there? You did not speak to me or even meet my eyes, but I am sure you know I am out here. I am sure I saw you go in. I saw you pull the door tight shut and I heard you click the latch tight closed. What is happening? How long will it be? I go back and sit again, with my back against the door this time. It seems colder than the plaster wall. Smoother, but there are chips in the grey paint of the frame and the door. The linoleum tiled floor changes to a darker color at the doorframe. I take the book from my bag and try to read. I can understand the words but they do not hold meaning to me beyond the moment I read them. I put the book back in the bag. I wait. How much longer? There! I hear a clicking at the knob, as though a hand turns it from within, from the other side. I lean forward, waiting for the door to open. But no more sounds follow. Did I shift my weight against the door, thus causing the mechanism in the latch to shift? Or was there a hand there, on the other side? I get up and pace some more. I stand leaning against the wall opposite the door. There is a window high on the door. I go closer, up on my toes. But it is reinforced with wire mesh, translucent. I can see nothing through it except a uniform glow of the diffused light beyond. Or is it merely reflected light from the hallway. I lean back against the opposite wall, slide down to sit there again. Are you still in there? What am I waiting for? How long have I been waiting? How long should I wait? Am I waiting for you to come out? Or for you to let me in? Should I pound on the door, jiggle the handle, yell, demand your attention? Would you even hear? Should I wait longer? Or should I just stand up and walk away.

Living Fossils

The human brain cannot really comprehend geological time, the expanse of years since the earth has been first formed and is contiuing to be formed. The amount of time that life has been on the planet is tiny compared to the time the planet has been, and the time that life has been in forms we recognize had been a sliver of that. And of the time plants and animals have been evolving together to form ecosystems, humans have been in existance for only a tiny sliver of that. And yet that sliver of time is still a number too large for us to really comprehed. These are some of the forms of plants that are considered 'living fossils' because they are some of the earliest forms to evolve, yet they are still with us today. The growth pattern is from a central point much like the ferns, but lacks the fiddlehead shape of the uunfurliing fern. These plants are huge, many feet across, and beautiful in their radial structure. They can remind us of the vast amount of time that has passed that allowed wonders like these to evolve.

Imperfection

The Judeo-Christian-Islam creation myth has at its core the idea that people were created perfect and then somehow through their own fault, strayed into making choices and thus became imperfect, bad. This puts people in the position of being in need of the saving by God or the following of rules or Jesus or some such form of redemption. What a bunch of hogwash this sort of negative self-denigrating trashtalk is! People are not flawed. To the contrary, we have been fine tuned to be perfectly functional and perfectly adaptable and perfectly creative. To survive in so many varied ecosystems and climates and to have spread around the world, adapting and thriving in each, we MUST be perfect in these ways.
The apparent "imperfection" that seems to exist is merely a product of the fact that we are formed by conflicting needs, conflicting pressures.
One such conflict lies in our daily work, how we spend our time and how much we accumulate resources for later use. We must gather, earn, make and trade for resources in abundance beyond our current needs in order to have some to see us through the lean times. That is ambition and achievement and success.
We must also use sparingly and conserve so that we do not waste time or energy or things or wear ourselves out. That is thrift and conservation and efficiency.
However, the real best answer lies somewhere in the middle. It is called moderation. One should accumulate enough to meet the needs of self and family and some extra to buffer hard times and lean times. But one should not work so much that one is over-stressed or worn out or spending too many hours away from the family or accumulating more than can be used or accumulating in such abundance of limited resources that others are left short.
But this set of conflicting pressures and corresponding seemingly conflicting behaviors means that those that achieve less can call the accumulation of others negative things like greed, hoarding, excess. And those that are jealous of free time one carves out can label that conservation of energy and failure to secure more resources with negatives like lazy or slothful.
Survival of the species depends on the flexibility to adapt to current conditions and on there being enough who get it not just right but within a range that allows survival, and when conditions change in one way or another, on there being some on the edges of the range to fit the extreme conditions.
You can call those who stray from the middle 'imperfect' but in the right situation they might be suddenly the 'perfect' answer to save your very ass.
So leave me be when I choose to lie about all day reading a novel or lounge in the back yard in the warm sun next summer. I am just conserving energy, recharging myself to work later, relaxing to keep from overworking. I am not lazy then; I am efficient.
And leave me be again when I add to my collection of 300-plus silver-tone leaf-shaped pieces of costume jewelry or accumulate yet another piece of art pottery or another basket. I am just practicing the skills to gather resources that I can exercise later for the acquisition of food and shelter. I am not being greedy or materialistic; I am gather resources to keep my skills honed.

Creative Thinking on Speed, Saved by Knitting

The human brain at its very most creative is that of the mother whose child is missing or in danger. At moments like that, the mother can think up the worst possible scenarios and even worse variations at an incredible rate of speed and with more gore than the nastiest horror movie or violent action drama. When you are powerless to do anything to help them, all you are left with is a racing and inventive and terrified mind. Thus, the four long hours that my son was in surgery yesterday were . . . long. Very long. With my brain unable to concentrate on reading yet too willing to invent reasons to worry to allow just sitting, knitting may have saved lives or sanity. Knitting my skinny purple scarf out of textured hand-dyed purple merino wool yarn kept me from imagining worse worst case scenarios and it was something I could concentrate on enough to feel like I was accomplishing something. Surgery was declared a success and the boy is recovering quickly and the mother is . . . napping the day away!

Rights We Should Have and Should Give Each Other

1) Everyone has a right to things they are good at.

2) Everyone has a right to things they are bad at.

That means that every person has a right to try things until they find things they are good at, that they have a right to spend time on those things they are good at, that they have a right to be recognized for being good at the things they are good at, to be appreciated for the things they are good at.

That means that every person has the right to try things even at the risk of being bad at them, that they have a right to not be great at everything, that they don't have to work until they get good at everything, meaning they can stay bad at some things, that they have a right to not be picked on for the things they are bad at, to be forgiven for things they are bad at and left to be bad at them.

Everybody is good at some things.

Nobody is great at everything.

Some people are luckier than others in the number of things they are good at, but people who are unlucky in the number of things they are good in should be allowed just as much pride and satisfaction in the things they are good in as anyone else. Everyone has worth.

Everyone has to take up some slack for the things others aren't good at if they are good at those things. Without resenting it. That is how we are there for each other and make it okay for each of us to be what each of us is.

And we should appreciate the things other people are good at and do to help us out. That is how we celebrate each other.

Brains

Milton Glaser, designer of that amazing Bob Dylan poster with the big colorful hair (and perhaps less to his credit the over-copied I Love New York logo with the heart) says in his “Ten Thing I Have Learned” speech: “How you live changes your brain.” He talks about how doing certain things and thinking certain things actually causes your brain to be built up and organized in certain physical ways that determine how you are able to perceive things in the future. So what does it do to our brains to spend hours in front of these computer terminal screens interacting with other computers elsewhere and only occasionally, via our keyboards, with other people? What does it do to our brains to sit hours passively in front of a television screen? What does it do to our brains, I have for years as a parent wondered, to sit playing at pretend killing over and over and over again in electronic video games? And what does it do to our brains to spend time outdoors in natural areas hearing and smelling and touching and tasting and seeing natural things? Are we making the best choices about how to spend our time? Are our brains as ‘good’ as they could be?