Anderson, South Carolina
One of the most celebrated books of the science fiction genre has to be Jules Verne’s 19th century classic The Time Machine. In this fanciful tale an eccentric professor working in a Victorian lab constructs a machine that allows one to traverse the boundaries of time. A wishful traveler can pierce the mystery that is the future or return to the solidified history of the past and remake decisions. One can simply pull or push a polished brass lever on Verne’s temporal chariot and change the world.
How many of us would give anything to go back but a single time and redo a decision based on the knowledge we acquired with the passing of time? We could all become multi-millionaires simply by having the knowledge needed to plow all of our money into a single stock trade, knowing what the future held. We would find ourselves suddenly free of the boundaries of financial limitation.
Perhaps more significantly, we could take back bitter words of regret. How many of us would give anything to return a single time and take back searing angry words that set fire to precious relationships, leaving them forever a smoldering residue of ash? How many wars could have been pre-empted if angry words could be taken back?
To not have gotten on a doomed flight. The stories of chance surrounding the breakup and loss of Air France’s Airbus in mid 2009 were sobering. A business man is alive because his taxi made a wrong turn. Others died because they arrived in the Brazilian airport early and hopped on Air France to get home early. Every time we board a plane it seems we are entering into a strange sort of cosmic game of chance. If Jules Verne had been writing non-fiction instead of science fiction, perhaps our lives would be much better. We could go back and tell people to change their bookings, to take another flight, to marry someone else.
One of my favorite things to do is to set up computers and projection in a black box theater in an elementary magnet school and show fourth graders cosmic wonders. As part of their science curriculum, each year I am asked to come in the winter and do an eighty minute presentation on the curiosities and wonders of the planet Mars. Yes, one hundred twenty five kids stay rapt, attentive, and well behaved for eighty minutes without a break. It is true that children are the most prodigious learning machines in the universe, if given something to study that interests them. There is nothing like feeding the elation that comes across kids’ faces when they find the universe a really cool place.
Seventy or eighty years away there is another universe, one that is often dark, cold, lonely, and devoid of wonder. Here time takes on a different texture. Children are not reaching their potential, having long faded away into their occluded memories. A second tier nursing home houses those who did not make the jack pot stock trade in real time or got on the wrong career flight. Those who are medically indigent without the funds for a better facility come to this austere place that advertises, “Take your place in life.”
In five minutes I drove my old Toyota Corolla from the celestial magic of that magnet school to the dark reality of an ancient facility stinking of urea, feces, and age. There I found many anomalies. A man, rapt, who looked as if he once was a CEO, was sitting barefoot on the floor in the hall, exploring with his gnarled fingers the boundaries of a twelve inch floor tile. His universe had shrunk down to that 144 square inch speck of space/time, devoid of any dignity. I nearly wept.
Many darkened rooms contain mounds shrouded in thin semi-white blankets. Enshrined in each is an ossuary containing a lifetime of memories, dreams, and regrets. My ‘usual’ destination is on the far side of this nebula of despair and the wreckage of time, often giving me pause to learn far more about what matters in life than I ever could hope to teach those fourth graders.
Physicists like to tell us the universe is winding down and that one day in the distant future it will become essentially extinct in an entropyless void. Everything will have the same absolute zero temperature and all will be dark and frozen. A journey in Jules’ time machine to this era would be bleak at best. After navigating around the black holes of disability in the forsaken place across town, it would be easy to take the physicists declarations as harsh non-fiction. It would seem that our lives wind down to nothing.
Perhaps there is another deeper reality. I go to the far end of the galaxy to room 24, a tiny dim little cell containing a metal locker, battered dresser, old bed, and a small sink bolted to the wall. There I speak to a shroud in the bed, energized by 140 DB of deafening sonic pressure from an old TV. Arousing, finding the remote, she brings blessed silence to her tiny darkened cell. This shroud contains nearly a century of life, now-forgotten, a life once huge and vibrant, building community all around her. Now it’s just the two of us.
I proceed to do her ‘gardening.’ Bringing new flowers, weeding out dead ones from days gone by, washing out the vases, I challenge the physicists, raising the entropy of her region of the world. Her spirits rise just a bit. She hasn’t seen anything really alive in a while. Yellow and white daisies are hardy survivors, lasting three weeks or more in the harsh environments of the forgotten.
Perhaps even more energizing than flowers or 140 db of sound pressure is a little elixir of Hope. We have forthright conversation with the One who knows our future and our past. We remind each other of the promises that are beyond the reaches of The Time Machine. We are promised that all those things cast in stone in the past will be redeemed, that all those things veiled in the future will be revealed. Suddenly, my dear friend is seeing beyond the ninety-something paralyzed shriveled body that has imprisoned her. I see Hope and Joy erupt in her eyes. Gratitude for the Promises flood over us, washing away the tincture of despair that so easily besets us.
Perhaps Verne’s work is not fiction after all. I jumped time today in my old Toyota and found Hope in the future. So did an inmate, a prisoner of time.
I know the thoughts I have for you, thought for good, not for evil; Plans that will give you hope and a future.
For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Winning the Struggle to Belong 2-25-10
Anderson, South Carolina
In the recovery world we speak of our desperate bids to belong and how these counter-productive efforts end up casting us into a prison of unremitting loneliness and isolation. We think we have to stand out in some fashion. So often we attempted to dominate people in order to get what we wanted from them and after a time these people had enough of our oppression and bolted for the exits. It really does prove to be lonely “at the top.” Other times some of us were like beaten puppy dogs crawling around the edges of groups, whimpering for attention. We used up many people with our profound neediness. These people simply could give no more to us and they left our lives, exhausted. We found ourselves alone and frightened once again. Our greatest efforts to belong had failed us completely.
We live in a culture that tells us that to belong we have to be number one. We subsist in a society where we need to be the survivor on a reality show, the fastest in the Olympics, the richest, the smartest, the most talented, the most what ever. We need to have the biggest, the newest, the oldest, the rarest. Only those who do really count. Only those who win get to belong. Silver medalists don’t get multi-million dollar endorsements, even though their times are within a hundredth or even a thousandth of a second of those winning the gold. Coming in second or even worse, being average, means almost nothing in our competitive culture. If one doe not have a trophy wife, a quiver full of kids and an even larger quiver full of grand kids, one does not count for much.
A young girl here in town is presently on one of the reality shows and every Monday night groups of people converge on a local pub and a playhouse to watch her on the big screen, trying to be the best and survive for another week. One of the contestants was so stressed by the experience that she was filmed vomiting before her performance of the week. Alas, there is always someone better, smarter, faster, richer, more talented, with better hair. All but one will be ignominious losers.
Even good things can become tyranny. I frantically build Habitat houses, serve Meals on Wheels, build sets for the theater, help people in recovery, write books, paint epic canvases, keep up correspondence, make calls, everything that might give me cause to think I merit space on the planet. I hope my performance will be judged worthy enough to allow me to stay on the reality show until next week.
As I sit here having watched my investments collapse, wondering if I will ever again have good employment, I speculate if I will ever again get to be part of what is going on, not realizing that most of what is going on is truly toxic to one’s serenity. I am facing up to the possibility that I am going to be second or even worse, just average.
Average? Perhaps there is vast freedom and belonging in being average. In one of the most beloved books of recovery, a quote states, “We have not once sought to be one in a family, to be a friend among friends, to be a worker among workers, to be a useful member of society. Always we tried to struggle to the top of the heap, or to hide underneath it. This self-centered behavior blocked a partnership relation with any one of those about us.”
Our culture tells us we need to stand on top of the heap or to try and extract from the heap by being a bottom feeder in our neediness. We live in a conflicted culture of entitlement and domination.
One of the most beloved TV shows in recent decades was “Cheers”, a happy portrayal of regular people just getting together and laughing with each other and helping each other solve the daily crises of their lives. The characters were portrayals of average people living in the middle of the pack and enjoying a sense of belonging with each other. This comedy had a profoundly serious message that seems ever more lost on the culture. I myself have been a conspirator in the toxic message of the consumer culture to a far greater degree than I ever fathomed. I am just now coming into enlightenment as to how tyrannized I have been by this.
Perhaps we can recover a sense of community and belonging, if we are willing to just be average. I sense great relief in the offing from releasing my desperate bids to be above average. I am going to look for ways to be absolutely run of the mill and love other people in their middling ways, free of the tyranny to bludgeon them towards perfection.
Serenity is after all the great prize and it goes to all finishers, not just those who come in first.
In the recovery world we speak of our desperate bids to belong and how these counter-productive efforts end up casting us into a prison of unremitting loneliness and isolation. We think we have to stand out in some fashion. So often we attempted to dominate people in order to get what we wanted from them and after a time these people had enough of our oppression and bolted for the exits. It really does prove to be lonely “at the top.” Other times some of us were like beaten puppy dogs crawling around the edges of groups, whimpering for attention. We used up many people with our profound neediness. These people simply could give no more to us and they left our lives, exhausted. We found ourselves alone and frightened once again. Our greatest efforts to belong had failed us completely.
We live in a culture that tells us that to belong we have to be number one. We subsist in a society where we need to be the survivor on a reality show, the fastest in the Olympics, the richest, the smartest, the most talented, the most what ever. We need to have the biggest, the newest, the oldest, the rarest. Only those who do really count. Only those who win get to belong. Silver medalists don’t get multi-million dollar endorsements, even though their times are within a hundredth or even a thousandth of a second of those winning the gold. Coming in second or even worse, being average, means almost nothing in our competitive culture. If one doe not have a trophy wife, a quiver full of kids and an even larger quiver full of grand kids, one does not count for much.
A young girl here in town is presently on one of the reality shows and every Monday night groups of people converge on a local pub and a playhouse to watch her on the big screen, trying to be the best and survive for another week. One of the contestants was so stressed by the experience that she was filmed vomiting before her performance of the week. Alas, there is always someone better, smarter, faster, richer, more talented, with better hair. All but one will be ignominious losers.
Even good things can become tyranny. I frantically build Habitat houses, serve Meals on Wheels, build sets for the theater, help people in recovery, write books, paint epic canvases, keep up correspondence, make calls, everything that might give me cause to think I merit space on the planet. I hope my performance will be judged worthy enough to allow me to stay on the reality show until next week.
As I sit here having watched my investments collapse, wondering if I will ever again have good employment, I speculate if I will ever again get to be part of what is going on, not realizing that most of what is going on is truly toxic to one’s serenity. I am facing up to the possibility that I am going to be second or even worse, just average.
Average? Perhaps there is vast freedom and belonging in being average. In one of the most beloved books of recovery, a quote states, “We have not once sought to be one in a family, to be a friend among friends, to be a worker among workers, to be a useful member of society. Always we tried to struggle to the top of the heap, or to hide underneath it. This self-centered behavior blocked a partnership relation with any one of those about us.”
Our culture tells us we need to stand on top of the heap or to try and extract from the heap by being a bottom feeder in our neediness. We live in a conflicted culture of entitlement and domination.
One of the most beloved TV shows in recent decades was “Cheers”, a happy portrayal of regular people just getting together and laughing with each other and helping each other solve the daily crises of their lives. The characters were portrayals of average people living in the middle of the pack and enjoying a sense of belonging with each other. This comedy had a profoundly serious message that seems ever more lost on the culture. I myself have been a conspirator in the toxic message of the consumer culture to a far greater degree than I ever fathomed. I am just now coming into enlightenment as to how tyrannized I have been by this.
Perhaps we can recover a sense of community and belonging, if we are willing to just be average. I sense great relief in the offing from releasing my desperate bids to be above average. I am going to look for ways to be absolutely run of the mill and love other people in their middling ways, free of the tyranny to bludgeon them towards perfection.
Serenity is after all the great prize and it goes to all finishers, not just those who come in first.
Convenience - At what Cost? 2-20-10
Anderson, South Carolina
In the distant past when involved in environmental activism, I was asked to make a survey of a 6,000 acre tract of land in central Alabama. Like many other southern states, a huge percentage of forest land is owned by corporate interests conducting monoculture of fast growing species of softwood, used as feedstock to make packaging for consumer goods. For example, International Paper is one of the largest land owners in North America, having title to almost seven million acres, mostly in the south east. Diverse forests have been transformed into bleak tree farms. Only four percent of the original 60 million acres of original longleaf pine forests remain. Vast tracts of once diverse forests have been eaten alive by giant chip mills, converting everything in their wake into oriented strand board (OSB), a splintery replacement for plywood that does not require high quality feedstock.
An archived 1952 document bragged on a single pulp mill in Louisiana that consumed the feedstock from the surrounding 68,000 acres. It states the company ”also seeks to make as large a profit as possible by cutting the mature trees into the most valuable products they are capable of yielding.” Today a significant portion of framing timber is imported from southwestern Canada and South America because many mature and old growth forests in the United States have long since been cut over and converted to mono-culture for paper products. If one looks closely at SKU tags, it becomes evident that much of so-called ‘white wood’ product in gray box retailers is often harvested in South America, even the Scandinavian countries. Nearly half of the trees felled in North America are converted into paper products. Forty percent of landfill waste consists of paper products.
Heavy goods industrial processes are equally demanding of resources, resulting in the liberation of toxic minerals such as arsenic and radon. Leachates from mining operations and atmospheric pollution from smelting and refining processes are vast. Occupational exposure to toxins during the production of consumer goods has produced legendary outbreaks of cancer. Entire towns have become contaminated, ultimately declared to be super-fund sites, and abandoned.
While wandering around on those 6,000 acres in Alabama on a sunny day, I noticed two young boys playing, both wearing Camp Sunshine T-shirts. Inquiry revealed these two boys to have been recent participants in this magnificent camp for children with cancer. As I watched, incredulous, they romped through a field littered with hundreds of containers filled with assorted industrial chemicals. Further questioning revealed these drums, barrels, bottles, and cans to contain poisons use to kill hardwood trees ‘contaminating’ the 6,000 acres. In a mono-culture ecology with low ambient timber prices, a magnificent two hundred year old oak tree is viewed as a contaminant. The contaminants used to remove old growth contaminants had contaminated the blood of these children, rendering them victims of rare forms of leukemia, but their abundant toys came in pretty packaging. The father of these children, who had a leasehold on this timber wasteland, could not see the connection between the dire health of his children and the clear cut chemical wilderness in which they romped. When I tried to connect the dots for him, I was quickly invited to leave his land. He did not want to be implicated.
While packing hot meals at Meals on Wheels recently, I was spooning up green beans next to a mother of four serving up helpings of Brunswick stew. Conversation wandered onto recent job creation incentives that will incite consumers to discard perfectly good ‘durable goods’ such as refrigerators, stoves, washer and dryers, and air conditioning systems and buy new ones. Like the cash for clunkers program that destroyed 700,000 serviceable cars, one can expect hundreds of thousands, even millions, of perfectly useable products to be destroyed and land-filled. This mother of four was fantasizing about getting a new washer and dryer under this incentive program.
Believing that all cancer will eventually be proven to be an environmental disease, either from industrial toxins or even viral mutations that damage genetic material, I wondered out loud if it was such a good idea for us to continue to use up our natural world and to keep replacing everything because some financial gimmick was making it enticing. Did this mother really need to replace two large appliances she admitted were still working. Did she have any concern that our consuming ways might just cause cancer in her children and grand children?
“I don’t care. At least they will have clean clothes.” I asked again. Same answer. How I wish I had a tape recorder to capture the vehemence of this mother’s declaration. Have we become so devoted to the religion of secular materialism and consumption that we are willing to practice human sacrifice to the neoplastic monsters of cancer and other occult neurologic nightmares? Are we that different than the ancient Aztecs and Mayans who regular conducted ritual sacrifice?
The United States has the highest annual incidence rates of breast cancer in the world; 128.6 per 100,000 in whites and 112.6 per 100,000 among African Americans. Rates in the US are as much as 700% higher than other regions of the world. If you have had six surgical mitigations for cancer and have had virtually everything cut off or cut out that makes you woman and each day wonder when you are going to get hammered again, statistics become insipid, meaningless. For the astounding number of my female friends who have been through this neoplastic nightmare, I just don’t remember any of them talking about their new appliances. I have heard them talk about their new prosthetics, but those are not being covered under these jobs creation incentives. I do hear employment in the medical field continues rather robust. Perhaps additional incentives are not really needed there.
Do cancer surgery patients sitting in chemo drip rooms really think “Life is really good, after all I have clean clothes from my new washer to wear here while I get infused with these poisons that will make me bald, exhausted, ancient, and miserable?.” Do you really want to send your kids to Camp Sunshine? Perhaps not? Are pretty packages, the newest conveniences worth it? Just ask my girlfriend? She’s been there, done that.
In the distant past when involved in environmental activism, I was asked to make a survey of a 6,000 acre tract of land in central Alabama. Like many other southern states, a huge percentage of forest land is owned by corporate interests conducting monoculture of fast growing species of softwood, used as feedstock to make packaging for consumer goods. For example, International Paper is one of the largest land owners in North America, having title to almost seven million acres, mostly in the south east. Diverse forests have been transformed into bleak tree farms. Only four percent of the original 60 million acres of original longleaf pine forests remain. Vast tracts of once diverse forests have been eaten alive by giant chip mills, converting everything in their wake into oriented strand board (OSB), a splintery replacement for plywood that does not require high quality feedstock.
An archived 1952 document bragged on a single pulp mill in Louisiana that consumed the feedstock from the surrounding 68,000 acres. It states the company ”also seeks to make as large a profit as possible by cutting the mature trees into the most valuable products they are capable of yielding.” Today a significant portion of framing timber is imported from southwestern Canada and South America because many mature and old growth forests in the United States have long since been cut over and converted to mono-culture for paper products. If one looks closely at SKU tags, it becomes evident that much of so-called ‘white wood’ product in gray box retailers is often harvested in South America, even the Scandinavian countries. Nearly half of the trees felled in North America are converted into paper products. Forty percent of landfill waste consists of paper products.
Heavy goods industrial processes are equally demanding of resources, resulting in the liberation of toxic minerals such as arsenic and radon. Leachates from mining operations and atmospheric pollution from smelting and refining processes are vast. Occupational exposure to toxins during the production of consumer goods has produced legendary outbreaks of cancer. Entire towns have become contaminated, ultimately declared to be super-fund sites, and abandoned.
While wandering around on those 6,000 acres in Alabama on a sunny day, I noticed two young boys playing, both wearing Camp Sunshine T-shirts. Inquiry revealed these two boys to have been recent participants in this magnificent camp for children with cancer. As I watched, incredulous, they romped through a field littered with hundreds of containers filled with assorted industrial chemicals. Further questioning revealed these drums, barrels, bottles, and cans to contain poisons use to kill hardwood trees ‘contaminating’ the 6,000 acres. In a mono-culture ecology with low ambient timber prices, a magnificent two hundred year old oak tree is viewed as a contaminant. The contaminants used to remove old growth contaminants had contaminated the blood of these children, rendering them victims of rare forms of leukemia, but their abundant toys came in pretty packaging. The father of these children, who had a leasehold on this timber wasteland, could not see the connection between the dire health of his children and the clear cut chemical wilderness in which they romped. When I tried to connect the dots for him, I was quickly invited to leave his land. He did not want to be implicated.
While packing hot meals at Meals on Wheels recently, I was spooning up green beans next to a mother of four serving up helpings of Brunswick stew. Conversation wandered onto recent job creation incentives that will incite consumers to discard perfectly good ‘durable goods’ such as refrigerators, stoves, washer and dryers, and air conditioning systems and buy new ones. Like the cash for clunkers program that destroyed 700,000 serviceable cars, one can expect hundreds of thousands, even millions, of perfectly useable products to be destroyed and land-filled. This mother of four was fantasizing about getting a new washer and dryer under this incentive program.
Believing that all cancer will eventually be proven to be an environmental disease, either from industrial toxins or even viral mutations that damage genetic material, I wondered out loud if it was such a good idea for us to continue to use up our natural world and to keep replacing everything because some financial gimmick was making it enticing. Did this mother really need to replace two large appliances she admitted were still working. Did she have any concern that our consuming ways might just cause cancer in her children and grand children?
“I don’t care. At least they will have clean clothes.” I asked again. Same answer. How I wish I had a tape recorder to capture the vehemence of this mother’s declaration. Have we become so devoted to the religion of secular materialism and consumption that we are willing to practice human sacrifice to the neoplastic monsters of cancer and other occult neurologic nightmares? Are we that different than the ancient Aztecs and Mayans who regular conducted ritual sacrifice?
The United States has the highest annual incidence rates of breast cancer in the world; 128.6 per 100,000 in whites and 112.6 per 100,000 among African Americans. Rates in the US are as much as 700% higher than other regions of the world. If you have had six surgical mitigations for cancer and have had virtually everything cut off or cut out that makes you woman and each day wonder when you are going to get hammered again, statistics become insipid, meaningless. For the astounding number of my female friends who have been through this neoplastic nightmare, I just don’t remember any of them talking about their new appliances. I have heard them talk about their new prosthetics, but those are not being covered under these jobs creation incentives. I do hear employment in the medical field continues rather robust. Perhaps additional incentives are not really needed there.
Do cancer surgery patients sitting in chemo drip rooms really think “Life is really good, after all I have clean clothes from my new washer to wear here while I get infused with these poisons that will make me bald, exhausted, ancient, and miserable?.” Do you really want to send your kids to Camp Sunshine? Perhaps not? Are pretty packages, the newest conveniences worth it? Just ask my girlfriend? She’s been there, done that.
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Touch Someone - Turn the Phone Off 2-18-10
Anderson, South Carolina
During my childhood years I was entranced with the high-tech gadgets in the Dick Tracy comic strip. It was inconceivable to me that one could ever wear a device that would allow two-way communication. Even the invention of the transistor had yet to have any impact on the vacuum tube era I grew up in. If one had shown me an I-phone it would have been an absolutely stunning experience. Even here in our fiber-optic wired landscape with an atmosphere permeated by a billion Wi-Fi signals, so-called smart phones are pretty impressive. As I write this, I wonder how many Wi-Fi networks are beaming data packets through my cranium. Technology has evolved, allowing us to do things undreamed of five years ago and not even in the minds of the best sci-fi writers of my childhood.
As someone pointed out, “Technology has advanced so quickly that society has yet to attribute any manners or etiquette to the use of cell phones, pc, and I-pods.” As these devices become ever more powerful and offer greater functional capacity, they also offer greater opportunity to be profoundly disruptive. A number of countries have outlawed the use of these devices in vehicles. A number of spectacular commuter train accidents have been attributed to the use of cell phones by drivers.
The capability of these phones to be used as a modern portable version of the old telegraph has been problematic at best. It has been well-proven that texting while operating machinery or vehicles is twice as dangerous as doing so with twice the legal limit of blood alcohol.
One can find thousands of anecdotal stories of the amazingly rude behavior that is detonated by a cell phone ringer. Kent German writes about cell phone use for a living. He says “Though I write about cell phones every day, even I think it makes perfect sense that cell phones are continually cited in studies that say good manners have gone out of the window. You don't need a sociology degree to see just how handsets have changed how we relate to each other; and I'm not talking about their positive effects (though indeed there are some). Rather, I'm talking about how you can put a cell phone in an otherwise courteous person's hand and then watch how that person loses all awareness of the people around him.”
What is stunning to me is the degree to which this rudeness has pervaded many of our relational dynamics. Not infrequently I have answered my front door to find someone on a cell phone. It has happened numerous times that people will actually come into my house and continue a cell phone call for as long as fifteen minutes. It has become so problematic as for me to actually request some people to not bring their phones into the house. From hearing their conversations, there was no emergency medical advice being given, no mission-critical legal counsel being offered, no frantic calls from brokers asking clients to cover open positions in options trading, nothing whatever that would merit the grossest of rudeness. What is now most impressive about this behavior is the ubiquitous nature of it and its presence in otherwise well-mannered people. German’s columns on cell phone use chronicle these abrupt departures from civilized behavior. Perhaps saddest about the whole degradation of behavior that stems from mobile phones, is the sudden disruption of mindfulness from present activities and people.
It is one thing to exhibit rude behavior in front of strangers, in restaurants, movies, or gymnasiums. It is quite another to do it in front of dear friends in their own houses or after inviting them into yours.
One of my favorite things to do is to load up a box of a dozen vases of cut flowers and several boxes of chocolates and make one of my “spectral runs.” One of my callings in life seems to be to visit shut-ins and individuals going through various intense life crises and cheer them up with a bit of color and a bit of ‘forbidden fruit.’ I make visits, not selling anything, only wanting to give them a bit of good cheer.
Yesterday I made one of my journeys, for the first time taking a dear friend along with me as my assistant. Stopping at a number of places, some of her choosing and some of mine, we had an amazing set of experiences. It is almost passé to say that in every house the large flat screen TV was left on for the entirety of our visit. At every single one of the homes we visited, our visits were disrupted by multiple phone calls. My friend even commented out loud about the number of phone calls. In every case I terminated our visit early, rather than compete with phone calls, none of which were urgent. In every case we awkwardly left with someone engaged in a phone call. The cell phones took priority every time, even though I had flowers and a box of chocolates in hand, and a new friend to introduce.
Countless books have been written over the centuries about hearing the still small voice of God, gaining insight and direction for how to live our lives. In societies with no electronics, no mechanization whatever, hearing the voice of God was a major challenge. I wonder how it is possible to hear the still small voice of God in a Wi-Fi world when we cannot even hear the voice of one standing in front of us, even though with flowers and a box of chocolates in hand, and a new friend to introduce.
The isolation and loneliness in American culture has been the subject of thousand of academic studies and the grist for a number of best seller books. In our fiber-connected Wi-Fi world we seem to have come to some sort of major disconnect of civility. Is that phone call really so important? I might just not ever come back, even though standing in front of you with flowers and a box of chocolates in hand, and a new friend to introduce.
Then Jesus said unto them, Yet a little while is the light with you. Walk while ye have the light, lest darkness come upon you: for he that walketh in darkness knoweth not whither he goeth.
During my childhood years I was entranced with the high-tech gadgets in the Dick Tracy comic strip. It was inconceivable to me that one could ever wear a device that would allow two-way communication. Even the invention of the transistor had yet to have any impact on the vacuum tube era I grew up in. If one had shown me an I-phone it would have been an absolutely stunning experience. Even here in our fiber-optic wired landscape with an atmosphere permeated by a billion Wi-Fi signals, so-called smart phones are pretty impressive. As I write this, I wonder how many Wi-Fi networks are beaming data packets through my cranium. Technology has evolved, allowing us to do things undreamed of five years ago and not even in the minds of the best sci-fi writers of my childhood.
As someone pointed out, “Technology has advanced so quickly that society has yet to attribute any manners or etiquette to the use of cell phones, pc, and I-pods.” As these devices become ever more powerful and offer greater functional capacity, they also offer greater opportunity to be profoundly disruptive. A number of countries have outlawed the use of these devices in vehicles. A number of spectacular commuter train accidents have been attributed to the use of cell phones by drivers.
The capability of these phones to be used as a modern portable version of the old telegraph has been problematic at best. It has been well-proven that texting while operating machinery or vehicles is twice as dangerous as doing so with twice the legal limit of blood alcohol.
One can find thousands of anecdotal stories of the amazingly rude behavior that is detonated by a cell phone ringer. Kent German writes about cell phone use for a living. He says “Though I write about cell phones every day, even I think it makes perfect sense that cell phones are continually cited in studies that say good manners have gone out of the window. You don't need a sociology degree to see just how handsets have changed how we relate to each other; and I'm not talking about their positive effects (though indeed there are some). Rather, I'm talking about how you can put a cell phone in an otherwise courteous person's hand and then watch how that person loses all awareness of the people around him.”
What is stunning to me is the degree to which this rudeness has pervaded many of our relational dynamics. Not infrequently I have answered my front door to find someone on a cell phone. It has happened numerous times that people will actually come into my house and continue a cell phone call for as long as fifteen minutes. It has become so problematic as for me to actually request some people to not bring their phones into the house. From hearing their conversations, there was no emergency medical advice being given, no mission-critical legal counsel being offered, no frantic calls from brokers asking clients to cover open positions in options trading, nothing whatever that would merit the grossest of rudeness. What is now most impressive about this behavior is the ubiquitous nature of it and its presence in otherwise well-mannered people. German’s columns on cell phone use chronicle these abrupt departures from civilized behavior. Perhaps saddest about the whole degradation of behavior that stems from mobile phones, is the sudden disruption of mindfulness from present activities and people.
It is one thing to exhibit rude behavior in front of strangers, in restaurants, movies, or gymnasiums. It is quite another to do it in front of dear friends in their own houses or after inviting them into yours.
One of my favorite things to do is to load up a box of a dozen vases of cut flowers and several boxes of chocolates and make one of my “spectral runs.” One of my callings in life seems to be to visit shut-ins and individuals going through various intense life crises and cheer them up with a bit of color and a bit of ‘forbidden fruit.’ I make visits, not selling anything, only wanting to give them a bit of good cheer.
Yesterday I made one of my journeys, for the first time taking a dear friend along with me as my assistant. Stopping at a number of places, some of her choosing and some of mine, we had an amazing set of experiences. It is almost passé to say that in every house the large flat screen TV was left on for the entirety of our visit. At every single one of the homes we visited, our visits were disrupted by multiple phone calls. My friend even commented out loud about the number of phone calls. In every case I terminated our visit early, rather than compete with phone calls, none of which were urgent. In every case we awkwardly left with someone engaged in a phone call. The cell phones took priority every time, even though I had flowers and a box of chocolates in hand, and a new friend to introduce.
Countless books have been written over the centuries about hearing the still small voice of God, gaining insight and direction for how to live our lives. In societies with no electronics, no mechanization whatever, hearing the voice of God was a major challenge. I wonder how it is possible to hear the still small voice of God in a Wi-Fi world when we cannot even hear the voice of one standing in front of us, even though with flowers and a box of chocolates in hand, and a new friend to introduce.
The isolation and loneliness in American culture has been the subject of thousand of academic studies and the grist for a number of best seller books. In our fiber-connected Wi-Fi world we seem to have come to some sort of major disconnect of civility. Is that phone call really so important? I might just not ever come back, even though standing in front of you with flowers and a box of chocolates in hand, and a new friend to introduce.
Then Jesus said unto them, Yet a little while is the light with you. Walk while ye have the light, lest darkness come upon you: for he that walketh in darkness knoweth not whither he goeth.
Gratitude - The Grand Unifying Force 2-15-10
Anderson, South Carolina
In physics the Holy Gail has been the discovery of a single unifying force that would give context and understanding to the four known forces in the universe. For decades physicists have searched for a Grand Unified Theory, surmising that some underlying foundational force must exist, explaining how strong nuclear interaction, electromagnetism, weak nuclear interaction, and gravity relate to each other. We can describe gravity and these other forces to a degree but we really have little understanding as to why things like planets and people stick to each other, why gravity seems to be a strange property of atoms. Despite being the weakest of the four forces, gravity really does help keep things where they belong.
It is thought the so-called strong nuclear interaction is the interaction responsible for holding quarks together to form neutrons and protons, and for holding neutrons and protons together to form nuclei. The particle mediating this force is the gluon. Electromagnetic interaction is the familiar force acting on electrically charged particles. Photons mediate this force. Weak nuclear interaction is a repulsive short-range interaction responsible for some forms of radioactivity that acts on electrons, neutrinos, and quarks. It is governed by the W and Z bosons. Gravitational interaction is a long-range attractive interaction that acts on all particles with mass. The postulated mediating particle has been named the graviton.
It is suggested that energy levels required to confirm any unified theory is far beyond the capacity of current accelerators. The accelerators at CERN in Switzerland are currently being ramped up to about seven trillion electron volts but even these amazing levels are far below what is theoretically needed to make certain experimental confirmations.
There are some 2,600 employees at CERN along with some 8,500 academics from around the world conducting research. The annual budget well exceeds $1 billion. I have recently been conducting some experiments of my own, using a different kind of high energy particle at immensely lower cost. In my ‘work’ I am able to accelerate several kinds of particles at a cost of mere pennies and yet obtain consistent and gratifying results. My annual budget is measured in mere hundreds of dollars.
Using two plastic boxes containing particles of chocolate in assorted sizes and a third box containing red and white banded particles laced with peppermint oil, I am able conduct repeatable experimental series several times each week. A nearby institution allows me free access to its long corridors in which to conduct my experiments.
Valentine’s Day is a magical time of year and for those who are beneficiaries of good health, flowers, chocolates, fine dining, greeting cards, and the affections of others, it is a grand day of celebration and joy. For hundreds of individuals living out their last days in the nearby nursing home, with no options, Valentine’s Day is a difficult one, much like Christmas, New Years, and any of the other days we celebrate with those we love. Often having run out of high energy to embrace life, denizens of those long corridors often sublimate into despair from the unremitting loneliness and confinement.
In my experimental ‘work’ I have consistently found that injection of large numbers of chocolate particles, and more recently red and white banded ones, produces an amazing result. When one makes a journey into those corridors and brings tangible reminders to those living there that they still have great value, the result is sometimes astounding. Only last night, I think I achieved my greatest experimental results to date.
It seemed appropriate to spend Valentine’s Day conducting experiments, so it was that I found myself last night firing particles of chocolate and peppermint at all who entered those corridors. An ancient hunched over agitated woman struggling with her wheelchair showed little promise of making it to her destination. She desperately needed an energy boost. Several particles of Swiss Colony chocolate instantaneously increased her energy level, to an astounding degree. Immediately she was transformed from a morose angry hunch-back inmate into a radiant being full of life. She offered sincere effusive thanks for making her visible.
Based on this strong interaction I decided to modify our experiments. My assistant had a vase of daisies in her hand. We injected it into Elaine’s life. The result was instantaneous and simply wondrous. Standing up, Elaine suddenly overflowed with what has to be the most sublime phenomenon in the human experience, unbounded gratitude. This dear soul suddenly entered into a cascade of thankfulness and gratitude that transformed that cold institutional corridor into a warm cathedral of worship. We laughed, we prayed, we reminisced, we caught others up in the wonder of it. Strangers became dear friends faster than CERN can tear apart atoms. I was close to experiencing the endorphin high that normally only comes from very hard exercise. I think I probably had enough spare energy to get CERN ramped up to levels that would find the unifying force of the universe.
In the recovery world we learn that resentment is perhaps the greatest killer of all and that virtually all of the angst we experience in life derives from its infection in our souls. We are desperately afraid of losing something or not getting something we desperately want. Those with great wisdom tell us that the antidote to it, the anti-matter that will annihilate this most odious and consuming force is none other than gratitude - the very force that transformed this old haggard woman into a dear friend in seconds.
One of the most articulate speakers in the recovery world, Fr, Frank Martin, describes gratitude as the Queen of Emotions. I would suggest it just might be the elusive Grand Unifying Force we have been looking for, perhaps in the wrong places. Perhaps much earlier other authors long ago figured out the unified field theory and we just have been reading the wrong books.
Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God.
For now we see in a mirror, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know fully even as also I was fully known. But now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; and the greatest of these is love.
When you are out accelerating through life, are you diverting particles of transformation to those who need them, setting up your own experiments; transforming anger, resentment, loneliness, and depression into the wonder of gratitude, thanksgiving, and community? You don’t have to go to Switzerland to collect high energy particles. They are as close as your nearest candy store and florist.
In physics the Holy Gail has been the discovery of a single unifying force that would give context and understanding to the four known forces in the universe. For decades physicists have searched for a Grand Unified Theory, surmising that some underlying foundational force must exist, explaining how strong nuclear interaction, electromagnetism, weak nuclear interaction, and gravity relate to each other. We can describe gravity and these other forces to a degree but we really have little understanding as to why things like planets and people stick to each other, why gravity seems to be a strange property of atoms. Despite being the weakest of the four forces, gravity really does help keep things where they belong.
It is thought the so-called strong nuclear interaction is the interaction responsible for holding quarks together to form neutrons and protons, and for holding neutrons and protons together to form nuclei. The particle mediating this force is the gluon. Electromagnetic interaction is the familiar force acting on electrically charged particles. Photons mediate this force. Weak nuclear interaction is a repulsive short-range interaction responsible for some forms of radioactivity that acts on electrons, neutrinos, and quarks. It is governed by the W and Z bosons. Gravitational interaction is a long-range attractive interaction that acts on all particles with mass. The postulated mediating particle has been named the graviton.
It is suggested that energy levels required to confirm any unified theory is far beyond the capacity of current accelerators. The accelerators at CERN in Switzerland are currently being ramped up to about seven trillion electron volts but even these amazing levels are far below what is theoretically needed to make certain experimental confirmations.
There are some 2,600 employees at CERN along with some 8,500 academics from around the world conducting research. The annual budget well exceeds $1 billion. I have recently been conducting some experiments of my own, using a different kind of high energy particle at immensely lower cost. In my ‘work’ I am able to accelerate several kinds of particles at a cost of mere pennies and yet obtain consistent and gratifying results. My annual budget is measured in mere hundreds of dollars.
Using two plastic boxes containing particles of chocolate in assorted sizes and a third box containing red and white banded particles laced with peppermint oil, I am able conduct repeatable experimental series several times each week. A nearby institution allows me free access to its long corridors in which to conduct my experiments.
Valentine’s Day is a magical time of year and for those who are beneficiaries of good health, flowers, chocolates, fine dining, greeting cards, and the affections of others, it is a grand day of celebration and joy. For hundreds of individuals living out their last days in the nearby nursing home, with no options, Valentine’s Day is a difficult one, much like Christmas, New Years, and any of the other days we celebrate with those we love. Often having run out of high energy to embrace life, denizens of those long corridors often sublimate into despair from the unremitting loneliness and confinement.
In my experimental ‘work’ I have consistently found that injection of large numbers of chocolate particles, and more recently red and white banded ones, produces an amazing result. When one makes a journey into those corridors and brings tangible reminders to those living there that they still have great value, the result is sometimes astounding. Only last night, I think I achieved my greatest experimental results to date.
It seemed appropriate to spend Valentine’s Day conducting experiments, so it was that I found myself last night firing particles of chocolate and peppermint at all who entered those corridors. An ancient hunched over agitated woman struggling with her wheelchair showed little promise of making it to her destination. She desperately needed an energy boost. Several particles of Swiss Colony chocolate instantaneously increased her energy level, to an astounding degree. Immediately she was transformed from a morose angry hunch-back inmate into a radiant being full of life. She offered sincere effusive thanks for making her visible.
Based on this strong interaction I decided to modify our experiments. My assistant had a vase of daisies in her hand. We injected it into Elaine’s life. The result was instantaneous and simply wondrous. Standing up, Elaine suddenly overflowed with what has to be the most sublime phenomenon in the human experience, unbounded gratitude. This dear soul suddenly entered into a cascade of thankfulness and gratitude that transformed that cold institutional corridor into a warm cathedral of worship. We laughed, we prayed, we reminisced, we caught others up in the wonder of it. Strangers became dear friends faster than CERN can tear apart atoms. I was close to experiencing the endorphin high that normally only comes from very hard exercise. I think I probably had enough spare energy to get CERN ramped up to levels that would find the unifying force of the universe.
In the recovery world we learn that resentment is perhaps the greatest killer of all and that virtually all of the angst we experience in life derives from its infection in our souls. We are desperately afraid of losing something or not getting something we desperately want. Those with great wisdom tell us that the antidote to it, the anti-matter that will annihilate this most odious and consuming force is none other than gratitude - the very force that transformed this old haggard woman into a dear friend in seconds.
One of the most articulate speakers in the recovery world, Fr, Frank Martin, describes gratitude as the Queen of Emotions. I would suggest it just might be the elusive Grand Unifying Force we have been looking for, perhaps in the wrong places. Perhaps much earlier other authors long ago figured out the unified field theory and we just have been reading the wrong books.
Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God.
For now we see in a mirror, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know fully even as also I was fully known. But now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; and the greatest of these is love.
When you are out accelerating through life, are you diverting particles of transformation to those who need them, setting up your own experiments; transforming anger, resentment, loneliness, and depression into the wonder of gratitude, thanksgiving, and community? You don’t have to go to Switzerland to collect high energy particles. They are as close as your nearest candy store and florist.
Life - A Blur at the Speed of Light 2-12-10
Anderson, South Carolina
The nearest spiral galaxy to earth is the Andromeda Galaxy, located some 2.5 million light years from us. The distance is so vast that light travelling at 186,000 miles per second takes two and a half million years to traverse the span between Earth and Andromeda. The image of Andromeda we see in the night sky is how the galaxy appeared millions of years ago. It is most likely that some of the stars we ‘see’ have since exploded into stellar novae and no longer exist. No one turned off the light headed our way.
About 6,500 BC a star in the constellation of Taurus exploded in a fiery nuclear death. More than seven thousand years later this fact made itself evident in the skies above earth. In the year 1054 AD, sometime in late April or early May, Chinese and Arab astronomers reported the sudden appearance of a strange object in the sky, increasing in brightness until July, when it was brighter than anything in the sky except the moon. It was so bright as to be visible at mid day. Today the inconceivably beautiful filaments of this star are known as the Crab Nebula.
A rather curious property of the universe is the compression of time that occurs when the observer travels at near light speed. The mathematics describing general relativity and specific aspects of quantum mechanics suggest that someone travelling at the speed of light to the Andromeda galaxy would only age 54 years. If one is willing to make a speed of light journey to Andromeda and back, one would have aged ‘only’ 108 years. For the rest of us, 50,000 centuries would have come and gone during your interstellar voyages. Don’t plan on anyone leaving the light on for you.
A good friend of mine once made the acerbic observation that he saw his son as a two-year old infant and then suddenly he had graduated from university. Everything in between was lost in a blur. He wondered out loud what happened. He went on to berate himself for having worked impossible hours for thirty six years in a little windowless cell of an office in a textile plant and having missed the biggest chunk of his son’s life. My friend was in essence moving at the speed of light, chasing the mirage of material satisfaction; collecting houses, cars, commercial buildings, and too few images of what really mattered. Moving so fast towards material success, time nearly stood still for my friend, while time moved forward for the rest of the universe in normal fashion. Years later those possessions are sources of great stress and challenge.
His son went on to launch a spectacularly successful career in management, only to be sucked into the black hole of alcoholism, fueled by an unrequited anger. At age 36, his pancreas did the same thing as the exploding progenitor star in the Crab Nebula. A father watched his son die in the garden at his lake house. Suddenly, all the resources in the universe meant nothing. The filaments of that explosion have rippled through nearby lives for nearly a decade.
Science fiction writers for decades have fantasized over the possibilities of travelling at or beyond the speed of light. What they don’t usually do is focus on the liabilities of doing so. The smart people doing physics for a living have pretty good evidence to suggest that travelling at the speed of light is going to result in missing out on a lot of what really matters in life.
The American culture is a bit like an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction without any control rods to slow it down. In a certain sense American life and economics are dependent on an ever increasing rate of expansion and consumption. The reality is these increasing rates of expansion are simply not sustainable. Like the progenitor star that created the Crab Nebula, we are imploding in ever increasing numbers. Millions of families are shattering from divorce. Ever greater numbers are caught up in using the fissile materials of alcohol and drugs. Millions work frantic hours in high stress jobs to earn more so they can spend more. Millions more are being rendered homeless in their breakneck efforts to outspend and outlive those around them. One third of home owners are ‘under water’, they owe more than they are worth. Millions are fleeing the explosion of debt that has welled up around them, causing filaments of foreclosure and homelessness to spread across the land. Unlike the inconceivably beautiful filaments of the Crab Nebula, there is nothing beautiful about the carnage taking place around us, here on earth.
It is reported that every nation in Europe has collective bargaining agreements guaranteeing minimum paid vacations ranging from four to five and one-half weeks. In most cases, mandated vacation periods range up to six weeks. In Sweden, it goes as high as eight weeks. In the United States, vacation time for most workers remains limited to two weeks. I once worked with a nurse who bragged on not having taken a vacation in fourteen years. Millions of workers are on part-time contracts in which case they get no paid vacation at all.
Most people from the United States can honestly say that they often feel rushed. This may be partly due to the fact that many Americans strive for the “American Dream,”- the epitome of success, luxury and happiness. The concept is often regarded as an illusion; yet pressuring its citizens to constantly do more, earn more, and consume more - in order to achieve more - the ideals of American society drive people to constantly be in a hurried state of mind. Time decides when Americans make their appointments, when they do their work, and even how they spend their leisure time. “For many Americans the ‘free moments’ that once glued a busy life together have almost disappeared”. In the United States, time is undoubtedly in control of the everyday lives of most people.
The Pirahã Tribe living in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest has an extremely limited language of humming and whistling. There are only three pronouns and it is the only language in existence that does not use subordinate clauses. It is an astoundingly spare language. Using no numbers, letters, or art; they have no concept of time. Specialists such as linguist Daniel Everett at Manchester University have traveled to isolated Pirahã villages to teach the tribe how to read, write, to count; such attempts have generally failed. To even consider introducing the concept of time to this tribe would be foolish, as their concept of numbers is non existent. Extensive attempts to teach them to count to ten failed, not a single person was able to do so after eight months of intensive coaching. They have no specific religious beliefs—no reference to ancestors or heroes of the past. There is no past tense because everything exists for them in the present. When it can no longer be perceived, it ceases, to all intents, to exist. The linguistic limitations of this "carpe diem" culture explain why the Pirahã have no desire to remember where they come from and why they tell no stories. This tribe has presented an ultimate challenge to linguists.
Eventually Everett came up with a surprising explanation for the peculiarities of the Pirahã idiom. "The language is created by the culture," says the linguist. He explains the core of Pirahã culture with a simple formula: "Live here and now." The only thing of importance that is worth communicating to others is what is being experienced at that very moment. "All experience is anchored in the present," says Everett, who believes this carpe-diem culture doesn't allow for abstract thought or complicated connections to the past -- limiting the language accordingly.
For those of us living fast complex lives in Western Europe, North America, or Japan, it is inconceivable that anyone could live this way, outside the tyranny of time. Our entire way of thought and life is not even conceptualized by the Pirahã. Even though it may be difficult for people in time-dependent cultures to understand Pirahã ways, there is an important lesson in their relaxed lifestyle -encouraging people to live every moment for what it’s worth.
Let the batteries die in your clocks; you might just be in time for life.
The nearest spiral galaxy to earth is the Andromeda Galaxy, located some 2.5 million light years from us. The distance is so vast that light travelling at 186,000 miles per second takes two and a half million years to traverse the span between Earth and Andromeda. The image of Andromeda we see in the night sky is how the galaxy appeared millions of years ago. It is most likely that some of the stars we ‘see’ have since exploded into stellar novae and no longer exist. No one turned off the light headed our way.
About 6,500 BC a star in the constellation of Taurus exploded in a fiery nuclear death. More than seven thousand years later this fact made itself evident in the skies above earth. In the year 1054 AD, sometime in late April or early May, Chinese and Arab astronomers reported the sudden appearance of a strange object in the sky, increasing in brightness until July, when it was brighter than anything in the sky except the moon. It was so bright as to be visible at mid day. Today the inconceivably beautiful filaments of this star are known as the Crab Nebula.
A rather curious property of the universe is the compression of time that occurs when the observer travels at near light speed. The mathematics describing general relativity and specific aspects of quantum mechanics suggest that someone travelling at the speed of light to the Andromeda galaxy would only age 54 years. If one is willing to make a speed of light journey to Andromeda and back, one would have aged ‘only’ 108 years. For the rest of us, 50,000 centuries would have come and gone during your interstellar voyages. Don’t plan on anyone leaving the light on for you.
A good friend of mine once made the acerbic observation that he saw his son as a two-year old infant and then suddenly he had graduated from university. Everything in between was lost in a blur. He wondered out loud what happened. He went on to berate himself for having worked impossible hours for thirty six years in a little windowless cell of an office in a textile plant and having missed the biggest chunk of his son’s life. My friend was in essence moving at the speed of light, chasing the mirage of material satisfaction; collecting houses, cars, commercial buildings, and too few images of what really mattered. Moving so fast towards material success, time nearly stood still for my friend, while time moved forward for the rest of the universe in normal fashion. Years later those possessions are sources of great stress and challenge.
His son went on to launch a spectacularly successful career in management, only to be sucked into the black hole of alcoholism, fueled by an unrequited anger. At age 36, his pancreas did the same thing as the exploding progenitor star in the Crab Nebula. A father watched his son die in the garden at his lake house. Suddenly, all the resources in the universe meant nothing. The filaments of that explosion have rippled through nearby lives for nearly a decade.
Science fiction writers for decades have fantasized over the possibilities of travelling at or beyond the speed of light. What they don’t usually do is focus on the liabilities of doing so. The smart people doing physics for a living have pretty good evidence to suggest that travelling at the speed of light is going to result in missing out on a lot of what really matters in life.
The American culture is a bit like an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction without any control rods to slow it down. In a certain sense American life and economics are dependent on an ever increasing rate of expansion and consumption. The reality is these increasing rates of expansion are simply not sustainable. Like the progenitor star that created the Crab Nebula, we are imploding in ever increasing numbers. Millions of families are shattering from divorce. Ever greater numbers are caught up in using the fissile materials of alcohol and drugs. Millions work frantic hours in high stress jobs to earn more so they can spend more. Millions more are being rendered homeless in their breakneck efforts to outspend and outlive those around them. One third of home owners are ‘under water’, they owe more than they are worth. Millions are fleeing the explosion of debt that has welled up around them, causing filaments of foreclosure and homelessness to spread across the land. Unlike the inconceivably beautiful filaments of the Crab Nebula, there is nothing beautiful about the carnage taking place around us, here on earth.
It is reported that every nation in Europe has collective bargaining agreements guaranteeing minimum paid vacations ranging from four to five and one-half weeks. In most cases, mandated vacation periods range up to six weeks. In Sweden, it goes as high as eight weeks. In the United States, vacation time for most workers remains limited to two weeks. I once worked with a nurse who bragged on not having taken a vacation in fourteen years. Millions of workers are on part-time contracts in which case they get no paid vacation at all.
Most people from the United States can honestly say that they often feel rushed. This may be partly due to the fact that many Americans strive for the “American Dream,”- the epitome of success, luxury and happiness. The concept is often regarded as an illusion; yet pressuring its citizens to constantly do more, earn more, and consume more - in order to achieve more - the ideals of American society drive people to constantly be in a hurried state of mind. Time decides when Americans make their appointments, when they do their work, and even how they spend their leisure time. “For many Americans the ‘free moments’ that once glued a busy life together have almost disappeared”. In the United States, time is undoubtedly in control of the everyday lives of most people.
The Pirahã Tribe living in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest has an extremely limited language of humming and whistling. There are only three pronouns and it is the only language in existence that does not use subordinate clauses. It is an astoundingly spare language. Using no numbers, letters, or art; they have no concept of time. Specialists such as linguist Daniel Everett at Manchester University have traveled to isolated Pirahã villages to teach the tribe how to read, write, to count; such attempts have generally failed. To even consider introducing the concept of time to this tribe would be foolish, as their concept of numbers is non existent. Extensive attempts to teach them to count to ten failed, not a single person was able to do so after eight months of intensive coaching. They have no specific religious beliefs—no reference to ancestors or heroes of the past. There is no past tense because everything exists for them in the present. When it can no longer be perceived, it ceases, to all intents, to exist. The linguistic limitations of this "carpe diem" culture explain why the Pirahã have no desire to remember where they come from and why they tell no stories. This tribe has presented an ultimate challenge to linguists.
Eventually Everett came up with a surprising explanation for the peculiarities of the Pirahã idiom. "The language is created by the culture," says the linguist. He explains the core of Pirahã culture with a simple formula: "Live here and now." The only thing of importance that is worth communicating to others is what is being experienced at that very moment. "All experience is anchored in the present," says Everett, who believes this carpe-diem culture doesn't allow for abstract thought or complicated connections to the past -- limiting the language accordingly.
For those of us living fast complex lives in Western Europe, North America, or Japan, it is inconceivable that anyone could live this way, outside the tyranny of time. Our entire way of thought and life is not even conceptualized by the Pirahã. Even though it may be difficult for people in time-dependent cultures to understand Pirahã ways, there is an important lesson in their relaxed lifestyle -encouraging people to live every moment for what it’s worth.
Let the batteries die in your clocks; you might just be in time for life.
Community - Life at Slow Speed 2-11-10
Anderson, South Carolina
In the early 1980s I was referred to as ‘our second dad’ by four little kids living in Birmingham. For one that never married or fathered children, this was a rather august title for me to hold. I have vivid memories of spending time with this amazingly happy and ‘successful’ family, a family that could measure its success by things such as the number of times a large red dinner plate was put out on the south end of the kitchen table, proclaiming to its user “You are Special Today.” I left that table well satisfied many times. When I went through the nightmare of a catastrophic neurological diagnosis, this family was with me through the Valley of the Shadow. The distance of twenty years has given me a sense of safety from what was a wrong diagnosis.
Alas, that same twenty years has reduced this once vibrant chapter of my life to little more that a rare group forward in one of my e-mail accounts. My personal e-mails are unanswered for the most part. I just received another one of those group e-mails on behalf of one of their now-grown sons, one recounting a recent move to a little paradise in the southwest of France to take up a new life there. From reading the assorted links in this e-mail I have a sense that this new life includes a fine wife, originally from the Lyon region of France. The dimming effects of time, speed, and distance make my present image of this family murky at best.
Embedded within a linked blog was a message of absolute clarity; one about the secret to building true community, about finding a way of life that will scratch the deepest itches in one’s soul. Sometimes e-mail can be really redemptive and clarifying. Jeff comments. “As an inhabitant of Auch put it himself, if life in Toulouse is lived at 200 km/hour, life in the Gers is lived at 50 km/hour. To that I would add: put life in the US in general at 500 km/hour, to get a real picture. What a change! We came from the States with the old adage clearly printed in our minds: “time is money,” only to find that it did not hold true here... or so it seems, at least. People are clearly not so much time-oriented in the Gers, but more so people-oriented and “quality of life - oriented”, if you will. They work very hard and have a good work ethic (a lot of farmers, small-business owners, and artisans) , but I would suggest that their productivity does not so much depend on time as it does on good relationships and quality of life.”
My memories of southern France are not unlike Jeff’s. It amazed me that the entire country shuts down everyday from noon until 2 PM, that it still does. Dining is an epic event, a destination, not an intermediate stop. Most vivid in my memory is the sense of public space where everyone congregated, just sitting and chatting, men playing their form of giant adult marbles, no thought being given to the next place to be or the next task to be torn into. Mindfulness to one’s present moment was fully evident.
Some twenty years ago Bernt Amadeaus Capra produced an amazing film called “Mind Walk”, filmed entirely on a glorious tiny island off the coast of France, a speck of medieval wonder called Mont Saint Michel. Based on the bestselling physics book, The Turning Point, by his brother Fritjof Capra, the viewer was taken into an amazing world where changing one’s perspective could produce an entirely different life experience. Liv Ullmann portrayed an intense Norwegian quantum physicist who mused out loud about the transformative effects of systems theory and systems thinking. The film was well seasoned with entrancing concepts from quantum mechanics and particle physics.
The whole concept of systems theory is nearly anathema to a culture based on individualism and ever increasing competitiveness. In her role, Ullmann nearly begs an American presidential candidate to consider a world view, one grounded in the hard science of physics, in which all things and all beings are part of a greater fabric, one in which none of us live as islands. As a frustrated communitarian and idealist, this film was therapy to my soul the many times I viewed it. Alas, in the blur of life, my copy of it has long since disappeared.
A great source of angst for me has long been this sense that we in America live on a journey consisting of a chain of uncounted intermediate stops, never arriving at a meaningful destination. I am reminded of travellers caught in red tape, trapped for years, living in airport terminals in France. In a celebrated case, a stateless man lived in Charles De Gaulle Airport for seventeen years.
This sense of people living in terminals is no more obvious than in American churches. The largest church in my county (13,000 members) cancelled its Sunday evening service so that people could watch their plasma screens and joint 107.5 million others in watching the Super Bowl. Some Catholic parishes made the unprecedented move of cancelling masses. A church in my neighborhood has each year been shortening its mid-week programming because of pressure from members to do so, citing a million things needing to be done elsewhere. My own church did away with its midweek service due to lack of interest. The midweek dinner is a hurried affair with serving beginning at 6 PM and the room usually cleaned and empty by 7 PM. Our annual breakfast was allotted little more than twenty five minutes. There is an articulated sense that there are simply too many other urgent things to be taken care of ‘out there’.
I think of those warm evenings in France where the best conversations are just getting started at 7 PM, where meals might last four hours, relationships last for decades. Here in the 500 km/hr American culture meals are fifteen minute refueling stops, friendships have degraded to group-forwards.
In recovery there is a sound byte, “A drunk will get you drunk a lot sooner than you will get him sober.” I can only hope that the people living in that grand little town in southwest France will have a lot more influence on Jeff than he will on them. Perhaps he can come back one day and teach us that time is not money, rather instead life itself. Perhaps, even how to live.
In the early 1980s I was referred to as ‘our second dad’ by four little kids living in Birmingham. For one that never married or fathered children, this was a rather august title for me to hold. I have vivid memories of spending time with this amazingly happy and ‘successful’ family, a family that could measure its success by things such as the number of times a large red dinner plate was put out on the south end of the kitchen table, proclaiming to its user “You are Special Today.” I left that table well satisfied many times. When I went through the nightmare of a catastrophic neurological diagnosis, this family was with me through the Valley of the Shadow. The distance of twenty years has given me a sense of safety from what was a wrong diagnosis.
Alas, that same twenty years has reduced this once vibrant chapter of my life to little more that a rare group forward in one of my e-mail accounts. My personal e-mails are unanswered for the most part. I just received another one of those group e-mails on behalf of one of their now-grown sons, one recounting a recent move to a little paradise in the southwest of France to take up a new life there. From reading the assorted links in this e-mail I have a sense that this new life includes a fine wife, originally from the Lyon region of France. The dimming effects of time, speed, and distance make my present image of this family murky at best.
Embedded within a linked blog was a message of absolute clarity; one about the secret to building true community, about finding a way of life that will scratch the deepest itches in one’s soul. Sometimes e-mail can be really redemptive and clarifying. Jeff comments. “As an inhabitant of Auch put it himself, if life in Toulouse is lived at 200 km/hour, life in the Gers is lived at 50 km/hour. To that I would add: put life in the US in general at 500 km/hour, to get a real picture. What a change! We came from the States with the old adage clearly printed in our minds: “time is money,” only to find that it did not hold true here... or so it seems, at least. People are clearly not so much time-oriented in the Gers, but more so people-oriented and “quality of life - oriented”, if you will. They work very hard and have a good work ethic (a lot of farmers, small-business owners, and artisans) , but I would suggest that their productivity does not so much depend on time as it does on good relationships and quality of life.”
My memories of southern France are not unlike Jeff’s. It amazed me that the entire country shuts down everyday from noon until 2 PM, that it still does. Dining is an epic event, a destination, not an intermediate stop. Most vivid in my memory is the sense of public space where everyone congregated, just sitting and chatting, men playing their form of giant adult marbles, no thought being given to the next place to be or the next task to be torn into. Mindfulness to one’s present moment was fully evident.
Some twenty years ago Bernt Amadeaus Capra produced an amazing film called “Mind Walk”, filmed entirely on a glorious tiny island off the coast of France, a speck of medieval wonder called Mont Saint Michel. Based on the bestselling physics book, The Turning Point, by his brother Fritjof Capra, the viewer was taken into an amazing world where changing one’s perspective could produce an entirely different life experience. Liv Ullmann portrayed an intense Norwegian quantum physicist who mused out loud about the transformative effects of systems theory and systems thinking. The film was well seasoned with entrancing concepts from quantum mechanics and particle physics.
The whole concept of systems theory is nearly anathema to a culture based on individualism and ever increasing competitiveness. In her role, Ullmann nearly begs an American presidential candidate to consider a world view, one grounded in the hard science of physics, in which all things and all beings are part of a greater fabric, one in which none of us live as islands. As a frustrated communitarian and idealist, this film was therapy to my soul the many times I viewed it. Alas, in the blur of life, my copy of it has long since disappeared.
A great source of angst for me has long been this sense that we in America live on a journey consisting of a chain of uncounted intermediate stops, never arriving at a meaningful destination. I am reminded of travellers caught in red tape, trapped for years, living in airport terminals in France. In a celebrated case, a stateless man lived in Charles De Gaulle Airport for seventeen years.
This sense of people living in terminals is no more obvious than in American churches. The largest church in my county (13,000 members) cancelled its Sunday evening service so that people could watch their plasma screens and joint 107.5 million others in watching the Super Bowl. Some Catholic parishes made the unprecedented move of cancelling masses. A church in my neighborhood has each year been shortening its mid-week programming because of pressure from members to do so, citing a million things needing to be done elsewhere. My own church did away with its midweek service due to lack of interest. The midweek dinner is a hurried affair with serving beginning at 6 PM and the room usually cleaned and empty by 7 PM. Our annual breakfast was allotted little more than twenty five minutes. There is an articulated sense that there are simply too many other urgent things to be taken care of ‘out there’.
I think of those warm evenings in France where the best conversations are just getting started at 7 PM, where meals might last four hours, relationships last for decades. Here in the 500 km/hr American culture meals are fifteen minute refueling stops, friendships have degraded to group-forwards.
In recovery there is a sound byte, “A drunk will get you drunk a lot sooner than you will get him sober.” I can only hope that the people living in that grand little town in southwest France will have a lot more influence on Jeff than he will on them. Perhaps he can come back one day and teach us that time is not money, rather instead life itself. Perhaps, even how to live.
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