Yet another posting from the imperiled blog…

This was something I wrote whilst on holiday in Sweden – I started just by taking a pad out and scribbling. In the beginning of the holiday I slept an awful lot [qeue sign of depressive behaviour] and my routine went along the lines of the prayers of the day (using the Northumbria community’s prayers) time in the cathedral – by the tree of life, the odd coffee where I started my ramblings and then sleep…

Once I got over the shell shock of not having a break in any real way for quite some time – I even started to actually visit the local, and I may say very good, museum and spend more time around the place – as I write this brief intro I will pause to say that here I sit by my computer smoking the meerschaum pipe I bought whilst out there – still a good smoke…

Thursday, January 19, 2006

Some time ago in a land far away, I thought about the choices we make…

It is the perennial quest of the traveller to find that where they go is close enough to be home that they feel comfortable, if only for a little time. All travellers are seeking this, even if they would not consider what they seek reminds them of anywhere – there will be people, or there won’t be…

Yet traveller or not the truth is that we are all here for only a little time, even if we feel the time that we have had as a crushing weight. The traveller may only realize how limited our time here is, even if they only feel that way regarding the place they are in.

It is the modern phenomena, in the west at least, that everybody now feels this restlessness. We may build for tomorrow, but now that activity has lost its meaning, gone is the vision of the Victorians with their view for tomorrow and so there is this drive ‘To Do!’ or ‘To Be!’ all the time. This drive is culturally or societally driven. It does not help the individual to truly live – to understand who they are and why they do what they do. It benefits cos – ‘Starbucks et al’ which profit from this drive, as the majority of their workers lose from this drive.

We are being worn thin from this and more and more disenfranchised from ourselves. It is a potent reminder that to make this point, I borrow the language. The simple advice that the likes of Ford Prefect give, “Well just stop doing it…” does not help, it is the smug comment of one who has sold out to this hectic-ness to those who strive to be themselves against the flow.

So, what then? The smug advice is, troublingly, true and yet tells us nothing about how, or why we should do so.

There is a truth that is hard to hold onto, that every moment of our lives is like a fork in the road – to do this, or that, or nothing at all, or to keep doing whatever it is that we have been doing. These are choices we make, including not to think about these things, all the time, and that is true, all the time…

We cannot, and should not, live with the idea that we are at a fork in our lives all the time, all the time. That way madness lies – to think that the thought of our choices is a choice that we make can lead to a spiral inward, and we can become like the giant serpent that eats its own tail. But not to do so at all is equally wrong. A balance should be struck. There is value in balance, and in life a balance can be had a moment you step back from the brink; it does not require years of being a hermit for all the time we’ve spent rushing around. Luckily enough.

It is about choices. It is about the choices we make and the ones we ignore.

The peril of always living our lives for the sake of others, doing what we think those around us want us to do, never a moment to think whether or not they want us to be that way, never mind what we think we want is to never consider what choices we have made, as we continue to make them. The great falsehood is that we are right in second guessing others’ desires for how they want us to be. When we do question what we do for others, we find that they have often wondered (sometimes for years) why we continue to do such things.

‘Starbucks et al’ do not wish us to question either as part of a group, or as individuals (especially as individuals, for then the whole ‘group dynamic’ could collapse and where would that leave them!) It is possible as even large groups to take into account the feelings of everyone. Everyone. Tribes in Africa have practised, until recently, and may still in places, tribal choice by consensus. They so valued each individual that each individual had a veto over what everyone else had in mind for the tribe. And in the superior west, with our great democracy – if you have a majority, however determined, then it is the solemn duty of the minority to stand aside, become complicit or to be prepared to be trampled over by the righteous majority. Being righteous by dint of being in the majority.

The nobility of the masses, and the model is transferred downwards to groups – “We live in a Democracy…” “Most of us want…” are common sayings that are reinforced top down, by the beautiful people in the group because They want to do something when others do not share their enthusiasm. It is a cultural view inculcated from our childhood by the state – especially in school trips when someone doesn’t want to play, and in youth groups by leaders who have thought of a brilliant activity that Everyone Will Enjoy, if we all give it a fair try.

The ultimate veto, the willingness to just get up and go, is seen as not wanting to be part of the group, thereby questioning the group’s right to dominate those that remain is the most censored act. So the popular ones are taught to indulge themselves and the less popular to get with the programme, go with the flow.

Unfortunately, this is how we’ve got to where we are now. The Land of Do As You Please has become, if it was not really this all the time – The Land of Do It Anyway. The question is not how do we go back, or perhaps, really arrive at, The Land of Do As You Please, for it is only a dream. To go there means travelling further into The Land of Do It Anyway, which is part of the current problem, because in this land the dogma goes – You might as well try it, what have you got to lose? Simply put – money, time and innocence.

Of the three, money is valued the most (Well, if you can’t afford it… ) and innocence the least. And it is this mass cultural and individual loss of innocence that is the problem. We have had our own innocence raped from us, for what we will enjoy, and then we turn on those yet more innocent than ourselves with the superior smugness of those who know better. The West has reached the critical mass that those who hope to hold onto their innocence feel that they have to hold out in ghettoes, and take their veto with them, only later to realize their complicity with the masses as they either realize their guilt in not getting involved and using their influence, or to bury their heads further into the ground whilst shouting about how innocent they are, and how culpable everyone else is.

Perhaps a better name for where we now live is Do It Or Be Damned, for that is how it works. Do and lose your innocence or be damned by us for not being part of the programme. The culture we have accepted and are part of is like the mythical serpent that eats its own tail. So, is there a cure or do we wait for the end where all our relationships are in some way destructive…

Perhaps we should realize that if someone does not wish to join in our idea of fun, then it does not mean that they are wrong. And think us damnable, even if we feel damned by our own hand, or by society (and thereby taking a grievous burden off our shoulders and onto everyone else’s.) What, after all, is this growth in the New Age but an attempt by a growing number of us to find redemption without having to change. The more cynical of us see that a price must be paid and not willing to accept the cost by dint of being unwilling to really accept that the state we are in is bad for us, and so we rush headlong further in whilst scoffing at those who are merely trying to put the brakes on.

It comes back to that fork in the road – the choices we make, to go further in, whether dawdling along at our own pace or rushing headlong further, faster, or to try to catch our breath and decide what we really want to be, complicit with the way things are, or to decide that whilst you may like, even love and adore the folk you are with, you want to figure out how to live with yourself, if no-one else. It may mean stopping doing some of the things that you enjoy, even if it does not mean leaving some folk behind, but it may well.

On the other hand, if someone’s been living in a righteous ghetto, what they do may not change at all, just that they might actually mean and understand what they have been doing… It could also mean that they find no-one else they know can bear to have their ideas challenged, and find themselves on a rather lonely road, with the rest of us pilgrims.

For what are we really if we choose to search for meaning, or some Greater Being, if not pilgrims searching in our own ways to find a place we can call our home.

10/2004, Karlstad