It is weird how tied On Caring is to my memory of that one specific place and time, 1970s Ocean City. Each time I pick up the book I can almost feel the sand on the pages and hear the ocean and the seagulls in the background. Even some of the smells of the suntan oils and perfumes of the day come back. Please forgive my little digressions into memory as I talk about the book.
To any person who has ever met me it is not secret that I am not a clothes horse. Hell, if my shirt and tie match it is a good day. I just don’t care about that stuff. I mean clean is important to me but not style. Well I may have one red tie that I just love that has a little style to it.
When I was at the beach my focus on style was different. During those 5 or so summers I was the consummate teen beach dweller. My clothes always aimed for boardwalk chic. When I could I wore white linen trousers and Mexican wedding blouses. On my feet I had leather sandals. My hair was long but not too long. By August it had turned auburn from the sun’s beating down on it all season. (I did not use lemon juice to lighten my hair although I knew those who did.) White linen looks good on a really tanned body if I do say so myself. Those soft clothes felt good too.
The separation from my home in Pedricktown let me focus on some weird funky sense of cool. The beach was a new world filled with new people. I wasn’t cast into the mold or rules that had governed my younger years in the rural farm town. I was free to be a cosmic hippie wannabe with a weird intellectual bent. I reinvented myself and I grew as a person. I cared about who I was and I cared about the world around me.
The time spent staring at the endless sea changed me and imbued me with a sense of what is possible in life and what is not. The sea is immutable and I had to accept that, in any battle with the Atlantic I would lose. However in the world of me, change became possible and remains always possible.
Now as to section 3 of On Caring (there is a bit of overlap of my beach memoir and the gist of the section). I think the following three paraphrased sections are the key. These as I have phrased them deal with human caring and not caring about an idea. I think if you read the section you will see the distinctions Mayeroff wants you to get on that specific point (caring for a person vs. caring for an idea) but my focus is on human beings primarily. What seems to me to be the most important lines of the text are:
• The minimum component of helping another grow is to help them care for something/someone apart from themselves. This means encouraging and helping someone find something to care about.
• I grow by becoming more self determining, by choosing my own values and ideals grounded in my own experience, instead of simply conforming to the prevailing values or compulsively rejecting them.
• A person grows by becoming more honest with him or herself and becoming more aware of the natural and social order of which she or he is a part with a minimum of illusion…
Being objective and living without illusion takes focus and I think it is a daily struggle.
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