Through an Open Door

A good teacher knows that he or she at some point has to stand back. An instructor who stays with you overlong steals a crucial part of a necessary education from you. With someone always overseeing you actions there are important things you never learn: independence, mental courage, an inner vigor that can only come from taking your own risks. Every individual who has come to a point of appropriate self confidence has had to learn from their own experience. It is a hallmark of an exceptional educator to know when to let go. Likewise a parent must eventually let go to allow growth.

Whenever you see a powerful leader, look at what his leadership is doing to those who are followers, are they firebrands or are they weak and passive sycophants? The demagogue may think he is “strengthening” his followers, the faithful if you would have it so, but this is exactly the blind spot of an extrovert. Our inspiration can be drawn from faith, literature and other sources of lessons but ultimately the core of our inspiration must come from within us, not from our blind submission to external control.

Clement Okon, Brother in Law to the Former Minister of Internal Development Says Tick-Tock Time is Money and the Hot Babes are Waiting.

Based on my spam filter’s content (about 150 items per day in one account alone) somewhere I must have taken a survey. I don’t know what the questions were but apparently I answered that I:

-Have self confidence issues as to my manhood,
-I believe drugs can relieve those issues,
-With the above two items resolved am looking for a young hot date,
-Believe Nigerian ex-government officials are trustworthy, and
-Am desperately in need of watch that is exquisitely precise and conveys a great deal of social status.

Just for the record none of these items is fully accurate.

Hockey-How I Pick Who to Root For

Okay so in viewing how the playoffs go for me there is a ranking of who I root for. It goes like this

The Habs,
The Red Wings,
Toronto,
Any team from Canada over any American team,
Original Six over expansion
Eastern over Western teams
Northern over Southern teams,
If any of the above don’t apply the team with the most MSU connections, or
Against any team with U of M ties.

That is it in a nutshell.

TERMS OF DEBATE

Once again I have not been as focused as I should be relative to my blogging. Currently as I most likely have noted before I am reading a book on ethics, Being Good. In one section the author has offered what I view as a particularly insightful analysis of one of things that is wrong with our current political debate. This comes to the forefront today as the Democratic Party is conducting its Pennsylvania primary election.

The author Mr. Blackburn talks about how the way we phrase our ideas ultimately prevents us from addressing troubling issues head on in an open and meaningful manner. For example, if we talk about religious freedom we end up with the question of whether we are talking about freedom of religion, freedom from religion or freedom to engage in religion (or not).

When you talk about the freedom from something it implies paternalism. Using the term from appended to the word freedom albeit from want, from unlawful search or from slavery implies that government or some other elite should be making a determination wherein the larger community benefits from the constraint of some level of individual action. Freedom from hunger means that somebody will not be allowed to accumulate foodstuffs in excess of what they need when others are hungry.

Freedom from religion is tricky. Our constitution prohibits the government from either promoting or constraining religion. The First Amendment prohibits the federal government from making a law "respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof". The first part is the element most people don’t understand and which causes the major kerfuffle in our conversation on this, it is the from clause. No one is required to be religious and they have every right to be without a doctrine or theism. Without expressly using the word from, this is a from freedom. The second part of the establishment clause is the to clause.

A freedom to carries with it the connotation of a submission of the general society’s interest to the will of the individual. In the religious milieu our case law has defined this to mean that for so long as some higher more ultimate societal rule is not broken we cannot bar a person from a unique act that may be found to cause unease in others in their pursuit of God or universal connection. Snake handling and urine drinking are examples of this. Virgin sacrifice resulting in death or ceremonial and ritualistic rapes are examples of religious practices that would violate higher values.

The area where this all breaks down in our discourse is when we talk about the freedom of something. A freedom of something conveys a more generalized, more philosophical sense of what we are talking about as to religion. Thus people talking about freedom to practice religion, freedom of religion and freedom from religion are talking past each other when they say they believe in religious freedom. It is easy to be in favor of religious freedom or a free press until you get to the details of what that means.

Our politicians don’t address the hard questions head on because it is anathema to electability. We let them get away with it by allowing sound bite addicted press pundits present faux debate. Don’t you really want to know what they feel about the growth of Islam in America and the granting of tax exempt status to schools sects that view women as not entitled to suffrage? It is a freedom of religion issue. What about a ultra orthodox Jewish Sect if it had a similar doctrine vis a vis women and suffrage?

I guess what I am saying here is that it is easy to find common ground by using expansive terms, but we need to debate our stands on the harder issues, the from and to freedoms. In an age of global warming and diminishing economic power for the United States these debates are crucial and need to be honestly addressed.

To the Point-America in Decline

I know I said that my blog would not be political. However I heard this piece this morning and it so totally sums up what I have been thinking for over a decade I had to post it. If you think things are going to get better soon a rethink might be in order. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89642189

Old Bloor Street is Coming Down

It is hard to write a blog, especially one that is not focused on the contemporary issues of the day. It is easy to rant and rail at the foibles of politicos and government policy. It is hard to talk about the mundane and keep it interesting. Real stretch to come up with that that last though, eh?

What I try and write about are internal things like my thoughts and fears in living day to day. Sometimes the details required the setting out of experiences and hopes; but this is not intended to be a diary. True North is a blog about observations and perhaps it is a starting point for a conversation. Sometimes this requires a journey back in time. Sometimes it simply requires me making notes about what I see.

Over the past two decades I have tended to journey to Toronto, Ontario twice a year. My stays have run the gamut from hockey hotels (the places where the out of town minor league teams stay) to five star places (the kind of joint where they would masticate your food for you at a price)

Normally these sojourns would be in mid-April and late November. Sometimes it would include a Labour Day trip. Labour Day trips usually ended up involving a trip to the Ex. The Ex is an experience. It is an agricultural fair and trade show located in the middle of a sprawling urban center. It is a county fair on steroids. You can watch people milk cows and the kids can ride carney rides. (Me, I don’t do ride anymore. It involves a story about a bucket or two of beer and a tilt a whirl a few years back). As you walk through the pavilions in addition to absorbing the smell of bovine urine into your clothes you can pick up free rulers (metric of course) and post it pads that say Neighbourhood Watch.

The coolest thing at the Ex is the human cannonball. I have seen these guys on television hundreds of times and blah, blah, blah so what. However when your are standing under the maniac’s flight path and you see him hurtling about 20 feet 4.5 meters above your head you realize just how nuts those people are. I am sorry I don’t see how this guy doesn’t soil himself each time the cannon goes off. To see what I am talking about check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Az566JcRjI

But I digress. Normally I love going to T.O. The food is so wonderful. Indian food, Thai food, Jamaican food and other cuisines abound. As you wonder about on foot here are so many different things to do. This time I found some old college buildings that looked like Hogwarts. Some fancy ball was going on and there were police everywhere and limos. Ah to live that life. Just down the street a movie was being shot. Tres cool.

The city is just so livable. However this time it just didn’t work completely. It probably has to do with the fact that this is the longest time I have spent away from T.O. in years. Last April I didn’t go because of my cancer surgery. Last November it was the flu and the weak U.S. dollar. In the interim my little piece of the world a microcosm contained within the confines of Bedford Avenue, Avenue Road, Bloor Street West and Prince Arthur had changed. The fortune teller, the little Mac’s store, the Swiss Chalet, Harvey’s Burger and the Bedford Ballroom all disappeared.

The Bedford Ballroom was the place where I could go hoist a pint of Smithwicks and not be afraid to be seen by my clientele. Located at 232 Bloor St West it was an old late 1800s building populated by University of Toronto students and staff quaffing pints, shooting darts and engaging in stick. It had great tortes and carrot cake. It was pool hall for people who drank and a haven for people who wanted to be crowded into a smoky bar on a cold winter’s night. The Leafs were always on. Where it was is now a four storey deep hole that will be the base of an 18 storey tall condo.

All over Yorkville the scene is being repeated. The Pizza Hut and the little Mac’s convenience store where I bought my scratch off lottery tickets from the old Arab guy are gone too. Condos being dropped into places where neighborhoods once were sucks. The foolish thing is that the moneyed want to move to where the cool factor is. When money pores in and changes the physical attributes of the place the essence of cool is gone. I guess the lesson is don’t let a friend go too long without seeing their face.

I don’t want to linger on the comparison between my lack of ease with this change and my lack of happiness with growing old, they are different things. Like that old song goes, “Life is change, how it differs from the rocks.”

The building at the top of this is the Royal Conservatory of Music. It gives you an idea of the kind of building that once populated the area. These structures are quickly going. C'est la vie.

TOPICS OF LATE

This is from a letter I wrote to a friend who was struggling with a relationship that was facing difficulty. Given the recent spate of responses to my last post, I think it makes sense to put this out there now.

No one else can give me the meaning of my life; it is something I alone can make. The meaning is not something predetermined which simply unfolds, I help both to create it and to discover it, and this is a continuing process, not a once and for all.

Milton Mayeroff, On Caring, P 62.

Late

I have a couple of rules that I have lived by. As I have grown older I have been steadfast in the no more than two beers per month rule. Tonight I had two beers; they were 20 ounce beers however. Thus I actually had 3 1/3 beers this evening. Oh have I failed my guidelines. As a result I am slightly tipsy, drunk perhaps. (Yes a lightweight, cheap date). The hour is late near midnight. Drunk and late, what a perfect segue, http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15377

In the last post I referenced Herman Hesse. This writer whom I have only read in translation has often been for me a starting point in search of spark to motivate my spiritual growth. I never read his biography, save for the end piece in one of the novels, (it may have been in Knulp). Still it is clear from his choice of words and the structure of his various stories that he was a seeker. Hesse’s writing seems to be his personal pursuit of truths fictionalized.

Sometimes Hesse's vision led him to dark places as in Beneath the Wheel, but sometimes you could sense the joy he felt at allowing his characters the opportunity to learn how to live. I think Narcicus and Goldmund was my favorite of his tomes. That volume is one perhaps that I should go back and reread. (At the very minimum it would stop me from blogging for a time and people would probably appreciate that.) As I remember it, the gist of the story was that two youths, friends after a fashion, traveled very different paths in life seeking their salvation. One of the two was very earthy and worldly (whoring, drinking, life of the artist stuff-all occurring in the midst of the plague) and the other was very focused on God and the church. As the years drew on their paths touched on several occasions.

I think there was an important internal conflict in the soul of the worldlier one as he attempted to carve a beautiful piece of woodwork for the church. What I drew from the story was something implied in the ending, that each person's path to salvation must be worked out by them alone and no two paths are identical. I also think there was a real feeling that passing judgment on others in this realm of toil and tears is not to be undertaken lightly. It may not be a task that those of us who have to live in this corporeal world have the talent for.

In addition to Hesse as I contemplate the spiritual search I have often found my way to Mayeroff and Merton. Here are a couple of quotes that I have gone back to again and again in correspondence. Merton comes first.

What is wrong with my life is not so much a matter of sin, but a matter of unawareness, lostness, slackness, relaxation, dissipation of desire, lack of courage and decision, so that I let myself be carried along and dictated to by an alien movement. The current is of a world that I know is not mine. I am always being diverted into a way that is not my way, and is not going where I am called to go. And only if I go where I am supposed to go can I be of any use to anyone.

There is only one thing to live for: love. What pains me so on these days of recollection is to see my own soul so full of movement and the shadows and vanities, cross-currents of dry wind stirring up the dust and rubbish of desire. I don't expect to avoid this humiliation in my life, but when will I become cleaner, more simple, more loving? Have mercy on me O God.

An odd piece but it is writing with great resonance. At the time I originally toyed with this bit of prose that is now becoming a blog entry I was turning fifty. At that moment I had been five years in my job, and I was pondering the choices I had made or had deferred in life. The lapse of two years has introduced two surgeries into my realm of experience, one for cancer and the other for an appendectomy. Both hurt physically but the former is always at the edge of my consciousness My one year follow up comes this month.

As I was then, I remain now deep in thought about how to live the appropriate (maybe ethical would be the better term) life. To my mind this is how it should be, I am not big on accepting the status quo as okay. Sleepwalking through life is not a good thing for anyone.

Another quote this one from Mayeroff follows. Sometimes it seems the people who have the most to say about life’s meaning are those with a central focus on love (and caring).

Hope is not an expression of the insufficiency of the present in comparison with the sufficiency of a hoped for future; it is rather an expression of the plenitude (or fullness) of the present, a present alive with the sense of the possible.

Mayeroff, On Caring, pp. 25-26

The questions I have been asking myself of and about life don't have any easy answers. Maybe they don't have any answers. Maybe they have multiple answers all correct or maybe even all wrong. The key is the questioning, questioning everything even things assumed to be beyond question.

CONFLICTED IN MY NATURE

Culturally I am somewhat aberrant. I live in Michigan but I don’t feel like I am at home here. My basic nature is too mean, too jaded. Like many Michiganders I grew up in a farm town, just not a Michigan farm town with its elevator and grain reports from the Andersons of Maumee. Every piece of media I got, television, newspaper, radio, etc., was from a big city, more particularly Philadelphia. Having now lived in the Midwest for 30 years I can see there is a harder edge to East Coast life. Resultant of my upbringing sarcasm is just another of the many services I provide.

However like every person that has grown up anywhere my path of growth differed from those around me, and from those being raised elsewhere. As a young man I worked in the fields, and I was not happy about it mind you. I also worked in produce houses, was not happy about that either. Despite character building-soul strengthening hard work, I did not gain some mystical connection with the earth and its cycles of sowing and reaping. Nope I didn’t wipe the sweat off my brow look up into the sky and say this is my place. No epiphany told me I was one of God’s own creatures working at the plan, pulling a thread in the tapestry. All I got was the cynicism that exposure to big city media can offer.

As I grow older I realize that the mindsets both rural and urban experiences evoke are valid. Letting one take some level of dominance at different times is not a bad thing. The changing from cynical to earthy, from mystical to empirical and making the shift sometimes quite quickly is not problematic.

One theory of communication psychology hypothesizes that we are not unified whole beings, but rather that we present as distinctly different persons in dissimilar social contexts. While it sounds like an acknowledgment that we are all schizophrenic, it isn't. It just means that different personality aspects that we possess have dominance in different contexts. The theory posits that such differences are appropriate both for the sake of suitable social interaction and for survival. I am okay with our personalities being comprised of different facets used in changed situations.

If you are a person how must dwell on the true nature of who and what we are, I urge a reread of Hesse. It is that moment in Siddhartha where Govinda kisses the ferryman's forehead and sees the total unity of disparate being and non-being. For your reading pleasure here is that section again,

"He no longer saw the face of his friend Siddhartha, instead

he saw other faces, many, a long sequence, a flowing

river of faces, of hundreds, of thousands, which all

came and disappeared, and yet all seemed to be there

simultaneously, which all constantly changed and renewed

themselves, and which were still all Siddhartha.

He saw the face of a fish, a carp, with an infinitely

painfully opened mouth, the face of a dying fish, with

fading eyes—he saw the face of a new-born child, red

and full of wrinkles, distorted from crying—he saw the

face of a murderer, he saw him plunging a knife into

the body of another person—he saw, in the same second,

this criminal in bondage, kneeling and his head

being chopped off by the executioner with one blow

of his sword—he saw the bodies of men and women,

naked in positions and cramps of frenzied love—he saw

corpses stretched out, motionless, cold, void—he saw

the heads of animals, of boars, of crocodiles, of elephants,

of bulls, of birds—he saw gods, saw Krishna,

saw Agni—he saw all of these figures and faces in a

thousand relationships with one another, each one helping

the other, loving it, hating it, destroying it, giving

re-birth to it, each one was a will to die, a passionately

painful confession of transitoriness, and yet none

of them died, each one only transformed, was always

re-born, received evermore a new face, without any time

having passed between the one and the other face—

and all of these figures and faces rested, flowed, generated

themselves, floated along and merged with each

other, and they were all constantly covered by something

thin, without individuality of its own, but yet existing,

like a thin glass or ice, like a transparent skin,

a shell or mold or mask of water, and this mask was

smiling, and this mask was Siddhartha's smiling face,

which he, Govinda, in this very same moment touched

with his lips. And, Govinda saw it like this, this smile

of the mask, this smile of oneness above the flowing

forms, this smile of simultaneousness above the thousand

births and deaths, this smile of Siddhartha was precisely

the same, was precisely of the same kind as the

quiet, delicate, impenetrable, perhaps benevolent, perhaps

mocking, wise, thousand-fold smile of Gotama,

the Buddha, as he had seen it himself with great respect

a hundred times. Like this, Govinda knew, the perfected

ones are smiling.

Not knowing any more whether time existed, whether

the vision had lasted a second or a hundred years, not

knowing any more whether there existed a Siddhartha,

a Gotama, a me and a you, feeling in his innermost self

as if he had been wounded by a divine arrow, the injury

of which tasted sweet, being enchanted and dissolved

in his innermost self, Govinda still stood for a

little while bent over Siddhartha's quiet face, which he

had just kissed, which had just been the scene of all

manifestations, all transformations, all existence. The

face was unchanged, after under its surface the depth

of the thousandfoldness had closed up again, he smiled

silently, smiled quietly and softly, perhaps very benevolently,

perhaps very mockingly, precisely as he used to

smile, the exalted one."

So don't sweat the currently dominant part of your being. It’s all one.

Tuesday, April 01, 2008

Well it was a noble ideal, the hope to post daily. I really don’t think that is going to happen now that I have had a chance to assess the situation. To write daily a number of prerequisites that must fall into place. For me it requires peace among my children and their interactions with each other and the education system. Can I say as likely as a camel through the eye of needle? The second thing is new fodder for my thoughts. This requires that I have time to read something new and cogitate on it. Or it could require conversation, challenging and unfettered. Again this requires a space free of the constraints of day to day living. An hour of talk, that does not touch on bills, or the government or popular entertainment, is another substance rare and elusive.

I did however get a chance to read a little bit of Being Good, a short introduction to ethics on my bus ride in. Simon Blackburn (http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/~swb24/) is a great write and I admire really solid writing. His life’s work is philosophy but his approach to life is balanced. In a passage addressing some of the core ethical issues, in this case desire and the meaning of life he offers this slightly abridged conclusion.

Perhaps we put ourselves in the position of the judge: each of us can ask whether life has meaning to me, here and now. The answer then depends. Life is a stream of lived events within which there is often plenty of meaning-for ourselves and for those around us. The architect Miles Van der Rohe said that God is in the details, and the same is true for the meaning of life to us, here and now….Meaning comes with absorption and enjoyment, the flow of details that matter to us. In other moods everything goes leaden. Like Hamlet we are determined to skulk around the edge of the carnival, seeing nothing but the skull beneath the skin. It is sad when we become like that, and once more we need a tonic more than an argument. The only good argument is, in a famous phrase of David Hume’s, that it is no way to make yourself useful agreeable to yourself or others. Id. P80

I like Blackburn’s attitude. It is so easy to get lost on the way to living with meaning. I will try to get another post up this week.