Why Worry

Sunday, February 22, 2015

Murrow.  Murrowww.  A calico cat stares at me. I am her God of food.  Murrow Murrowww is a cat prayer; she is offering up her plea, her desire is that I trek to the basement and put some food in her bowl. The persistence of the petitioner may also mean that she wants me to refill the water dish.  

McCoy Tyner is playing “Summertime” on the radio.  Summertime?  It is anything but.  While it is 40 degrees warmer than it was two days ago at this hour the temperature outside is just 26 degrees F.  Nothing is moving very much as I look out the bay window.  The relative stillness means there are no wind chill worries.  26 F doesn’t mean much if the wind is at a sustained 20-30 m.p.h.

I have been up for an hour.  It was dark when I came down to get the car warmed up for my wife and son. On this early Sunday morning they are off to an all-day robotics event at the university. Time has passed, they are gone and light has returned to the sky but it is a grey, grey day.  Snow flakes, large ones that take their time as they find their way to the ground making leisurely circles shifting ever so lightly this way and that.

Coffee is brewed and awaits the pouring of the first cup.  Bacon is in the oven at 400 F heading for perfection.  When those slices of dead cured porker are done that will be combined with a poached egg on an Asiago cheese bagel.  The oven is adding its notes to this morning’s symphony.  Beep, beep, beep.  Time to turn the bacon and give it another ten minutes.  Once I have turned those strips that I will respond to the murrows and go check out the feline food situation. 

The music has segued into a quiet reflective piece with a strong bass line.  It sounds like the kind of bass Eddie Gomez played back when he was working with Bill Evans.  Who knows this might be Bill Evans.

(Break)

The cats are fed.  My coffee cup is filled with dirty brown water and another piano based jazz tune is playing in the background.  With my youngest not yet awake I have time to write before he commandeers my computer. Fingers align properly on the qwerty keyboard and I continue.

Yesterday I went to my office even though it was a Saturday.  Tomorrow, Monday we will be migrating to a new computer system.  My why for going in is that I had a couple pieces of work that I did not want to get lost in the process.  Invariably when the IT guys come in and promise to “move everything over to the new machine” tons of stuff ends up just simply gone. When I had gotten what I needed done on my computer I pulled a volume off my desk and commenced to read.  

The first piece I came upon was from the Greek philosopher Epicurus.  Epicurus was an interesting figure.  He was one of the earliest proponents of the scientific method. His philosophy was influential. 

To quote the Wiki on him “For Epicurus, the purpose of philosophy was to attain the happy, tranquil life, characterized by ataraxia—peace and freedom from fear—and aponia—the absence of pain—and by living a self-sufficient life surrounded by friends. He taught that pleasure and pain are the measures of what is good and evil; death is the end of both body and soul and thus should not be feared; the gods neither reward nor punish humans; the universe is infinite and eternal; and events in the world are ultimately based on the motions and interactions of atoms moving in empty space.” Kind of nice approach to the world, truth is beauty and the like.  

Epicurus was also a proponent of the ethics of reciprocity.  What is that you say?  Well the ethics of reciprocity posits, “One should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself and one should not treat others in ways that one would not like to be treated.” It is the golden rule with an imperative to not act as an ass to someone else.  I kind of like it.

I had read some Epicurus in college and with a couple of minutes of down time I figured what the heck let me refresh my mind on his thoughts.  (As a side note it seems kind of bizarre to me is that a modern drug maker would take Epicurius’s talking point and brand a sedative with it.  Atarax is one of those bliss drugs you get when things need to be made peaceful and when you need your fears allayed.)

I digress.  There was a quote in the text which struck me as interesting:  

“So death, the most terrifying of all ills, is nothing to us, since so long as we exist, death is not with us; but when death comes, then we do not exist.  It does not then concern either the living or the dead, since for the former it is not, and the latter are no more.” 

Even if you don’t buy it completely it is an interesting starting point for thought.  Why worry about your end?  If you have breath then death is not here yet.  If you are dead well the game is over and you are no more. I mean I was not in some Thanatos focused moment when I opened the volume but a quote like that gets you thinking.

Cold

Accordions well they’re wailing. Some deep Texas roots rock is blaring out of the speaker in the kitchen. The refrigerator is running well the ice maker is grinder and grunting. Outside the temperature is a cold -5 F and starting to drop fast.

In a few minutes I will have to go move the wash into the dryer. Bang, bang, bang tells me that my permanently unbalanced washing machine is nearing the end of the last spin cycle. I will also have to go outside and grab some more firewood for tonight. Do I put on a jacket or not?

Cold from Canada has overwhelmed us in these few days since Fat Tuesday.  Every door and window seems like it has a failing seal.  The icy breeze is everywhere.  You can’t escape it in the kitchen.  You can’t avoid it in the bedroom.  You just cannot ignore its chilly fingers.

Last night the phone rang while I was changing out of my work clothes.  My best friend from when I was a teen was calling me to tell me how cold he was.  The temperature there was a full 15 degrees warmer than it was here in my little bit of the world.  He questioned my sanity and applauded my tenaciousness for living oh these forty years up here in the frozen north.  

What is there to do?  Well absolutely nothing.  Well I guess I do have to move the wet clothes into the dryer.  However as to the cold there is nothing to be said or done. I have been here too long to head off to warmer climates.  You just let the cold work into your bones and you accept it.  Such is life.

There Are Conflicted Dwarves Living in South America

At home today due to the holiday – President’s Day. Doing laundry and general cleaning to end the long weekend. Loren is having some friends over to engage in role-playing games.

As I am sitting here there are four teens engaged a role playing game in my living room.  The game as I catch bits and pieces of it is set in a post-apocalyptic world.  The campaign leader is laying out the scenario of the world.  Europe is trashed.  Canada is back to a frontier state and the northern part of Africa is the place to live.  Trolls are Christian and dwarves are Jewish. Dwarves apparently had some issues that have yet to be worked out.

Okay the only difference in this from what I played as a kid is that it is occurring indoors and there are no plastic toy guns involved.  Neither is there the endless running and screaming of my youth. When we were playing war back at Patsy’s Hill there in Pedricktown sometimes we imagined the Germans would have won World War II and we would be freedom fighters allied with sordid interests.  This probably came from the comics of the day.  In addition to plastic lugers and Tommy guns we would be pulling up dead corn stalks and using the clump of dirt at the bottom as a potato masher hand grenade. 

As the campaign wages in the next room I am doing house work. We, the family, just returned from a trip to Valparaiso University. Part exploration part business the jaunt to the campus was slotted in on a weekend that was open. Back now in the pale blue house on Oxford Streeter laundry needs to be done.  Suitcases needs to be place back in the basement.

The drive to northern Indiana was uneventful. While snow was everywhere around us the roads were dry and the contents of a heavy laden grey cotton sky stayed aloft.  The drive back was also okay.  However this was only because we opted to stay for an extra day. Choosing to stay put was a very wise move.

After my youngest son’s music audition we kept getting odd reports about the east bound trek. Based on these vague reports of tough travel and a weather report that kept changing we opted for another night at the Holiday Inn Express Valpo.

At the day’s end while I was lying in bed I pulled up news stories about what was going on. Turns out the Indiana Toll Road had been brought to a stop on Saturday afternoon from the white outs and tractor trailer wrecks.  The roads in the three north most Indiana counties were closed by midevening to everything but emergency vehicles.

On the road back Sunday late morning we saw six different semis twisted in the median.  Huge tow trucks were straining to get the twisted remnants out of the center wash that lies between the eastbound and westbound lanes of the Toll Road. As I understand it cars sat on the highway for hour after hour in the near zero weather.

The whole reason for this jaunt was that Loren did an audition for baritone voice on Saturday. We ended up in the VUCA (Valparaiso University Center for the Arts) for a 10 a.m. performance.  Having driven in Friday we got up Saturday to head over and there were little blasts of white out. Clear moments would happen but the snow squalls were coming in off the lake and increasing in frequency.

We met up with the woman who had been the music departments point person to me.  She was very kind and seems attuned to drawing the best out of the applicants.  We met some from folks from Texas.  The daughter did not seem too overwhelmed by the weather.  Well it is one thing to see it for a weekend and another to live with it for months on end.

Because we were staying in town they gave us tickets for a mezzo-soprano’s and a cellist’s evening concert at the chapel. The temperature was zero when we walked to the chapel. The chapel was about a quarter mile from the car.  As we walked to the chapel it was a white out and the wind was about 50 miles an hour. About died.

Will find out about the audition in three weeks.

A Need for a Fertile Space

You cultivate rich, fertile, living ground for insight and compassion, for deep human feeling, to continually sprout and take seed. It’s a natural process. You can’t force it. You simply set the right conditions in motion and then get out of the way.

 

-          Steve Krieger, "Growing Ground"

 

I really like this quote.  It ties so closely with what I believe about caring and also about meditation.  As to each of these conditions there is no easy out of the box way to carry out either, I mean not in a meaningful way.  Caring requires a hope perhaps a belief in the unseen good that will come.  And then it requires measured action to foster the relationship between the care giver and the care recipient.  Meditation requires a movement toward silence to allow all things to fall away permitting awareness to expand.  In the silence comes acceptance and forgiveness. In essence both caring and meditating require that you create an empty space that is a fertile field. Both allow for the next better moment.