felt so much, always too much, none remember, none recall -- losing the capacity to feel now at all -- telling the stories of how it was then to fewer and fewer who care or who can -- this is the pattern, repeated again: the way of the aging, both women and men who once believed strongly though life was then hard, in promises kept, and a welcoming yard -- to find themselves faltering, staggering, sleeping with fewer and fewer of things left for keeping like autumns with family, friends, and a sky that shone on us all without once asking why
I wonder alone about all that I want -- How it seems to recede from me daily and far -- As I walk through the loneliest places I know And I mildly curse the more fortunate ones
Sometimes, within heaven, we make us a hell: A dark habitat where we choose then to dwell, Where we take what we have, and would give it all back, Just to focus instead on whatever
We lack
Envy is a weird emotion.
If you are around small children, or children of any age, you will rapidly realize both how natural and how pervasive envy is. Children tend to want whatever other children have, and to resent said children for the having.
This is often exacerbated by another common behavior among children, which is: they realize when they themselves are the ones being envied, and — they revel in it. This is a result of the interplay of natural emotions and our human tendency to want to see what (and who) we can impact, or even control.
In stories, we see this played out by the virtuous poor person who is made fun and lorded over by more affluent bullies. This is a trope so popular as to be almost universal, but one which has the unfortunate side-effect of skipping past the envy and going straight to “well, they deserve to be hated anyway”. And, to be fair, it the dividing line between wanting a better life and envying others for having what we may not can be almost impossible for us to spot from within the forest of our own feelings.
One of the other bewildering things about envy is that it can work to undo virtually everything in our lives by turning our self-image inside out. Let me explain what I mean by way of an example.
Let’s say, hypothetically, that a young person decides they want to learn how to play a musical instrument. They begin to work, outside of school hours and beyond the sight of anyone they know, on the long and arduous process of how to physically and mentally operate their instrument. It is typically months or years before anyone would want to hear the music they are able to produce, but with time and application, they are gradually met with greater facility; that, in turn, starts to turn into public notice.
Being “good at something” is a thing we are all encouraged to do; so is “work hard” and “stick to it”. So they have successfully modeled the virtues that we are all taught. And what are they met with?
“Ugh. It’s not fair. You are so talented!”
The term “talent” is supposed to be a compliment, but it is far more frequently used as a subtle way of dismissing the amount of work people have put in to get good at their craft. We aren’t allowed to envy people who work hard, so we instead claim that people have some sort of genetic “talent” advantage that we can fairly resent.
Here is the paradox: by successfully modeling the virtues we are taught, we gain a skill, which is supposed to be a good thing: but people hate us for it, which is generally considered a bad thing. This is what I meant by calling envy “bewildering” and how it can “turn our self-image inside out”. Envious people don’t want others around them to stand out in ways that trigger their envy.
I spent much of my teen and young adult life just trying to blend in. Being hated for your faults can be very difficult, but being hated for your virtues is in many ways worse. When I got to the point where I was reasonably good at playing the piano, I lost a lot of non-musical friends; when I then left music to pursue other interests in college, I found out there was another group of musical friends I thought I had who envied me for having choices.
In the mean time, I participated in all the common envies of my age: of better-looking guys, of guys with more money, and the ones who were more popular with girls for whatever reasons. So please don’t get the idea that envy was something I only saw as a target, I experienced it almost every type of way possible.
It is of very little benefit to tell people that envy is illogical. In that way, envy is like every other emotion. Of course envy is illogical, because we feel it before we have all the facts; we are even likely to continue to feel it when the facts tell us we should not.
Gratitude, of course, is the counterbalance to envy. When we focus on what we have, the emotional power of whatever we feel we don’t have lessens.
If only there was a holiday set aside for gratitude…
… which I find seldom happens in real life. In real life, people wallow in and relish their mistakes, their intentional cruelties, and virtually all of their other actions.
I know this, because I have been a people for some number of years. My moral failings are stubbornly persistent.
The frequency of use of certain phrases in clickbait titles, of course, reflects how effective they are. It appears many of us wish people would instantly regret hurting us. We would settle for regret at any point in time, but the instantly part means we get to be around to see it.
I have seldom seen anyone in my life immediately be sorry for hurting me, apart from the people closest to me — and perhaps that’s why they are the people closest to me. My life is awash in regret; I seem to have as many things I wish I hadn’t done as things I’m glad I did.
But I am a “slow to realize” person. Which is another regret.
I am thinking of starting to use more Clickbait devices in my titles. You won’t believe what happens next…
Throughout the sixty-some-odd years that I have been alive, there has been and explosion in what might be called “substitutes”. First, it was things like margarine (substitute butter) and saccharine (substitute sugar), but it rapidly picked up the pace until we find ourselves in a world with substitute society (social media), substitute advisors (artificial intelligence) and even substitute friends and other intimate relationships.
However, there is as yet no substitute for sitting outside on a chilly hillside watching the November sun come up, which I did this morning.
There are, of course, no real substitutes for any of things I mentioned before. There are only things people want us to buy from them to use as substitutes. None of these things is better than the originals, although some of them arguably aren’t worse either; they are just new things, with new sets of tradeoffs involved. If, for instance, “social media” sites like Facebook or Instagram were still called “message boards”, their actual use would be clearer. This isn’t a new society, it’s a way of passing messages around; “society” is a much more complex thing.
I use an iPhone to take pictures of the hills. The phones of today are often people’s go-to in complaining about people’s over-reliance on technology and addiction to constant interaction (particularly among the young), and there is something in that, of course. However, constant interaction has its predecessors, like the teen of my youth who would spend hours a day on the house phone with friends, or the teen of an even earlier generation who had to constantly be at the skating rink or mall or soda shop or drive-in or wherever the teen action of that time was. The fact that young people are extremely social creatures is not new. We older people who’ve seemingly forgotten what it felt like just think it is.
None of the pictures I take are quite good enough; the one attached to this post is from a Ukrainian photographer, and is of an entirely different part of the world than I am in. This is part of the fakery of the modern age, where even when trying to tell you about something that actually happened (like watching the sunrise), there is some element of deception involved.
Being phony comes naturally to me, sadly. I didn’t need the modern age to do it, I had been doing it for some time before that. The actual me is pretty dull, and my habit of making everything I ever did sound more interesting than it actually was has been a long time in the making. It comes in handy when you have a blog, I guess; anyway, a dry recitation of what actually happened in personal situations seems beyond my ability. I embellish, therefore I am — or something.
One of the things that makes my life dull is that it is a fairly happy one. The primary source of fuel for what is interesting in modern life seems to be discontent, and I used up a good portion of mine years ago. I now have a wonderful wife, a good job, great kids, great grandkids, and a great extended family, and all of us at present are more-or-less healthy.
Poor health and death await us all of course. But this doesn’t rob life of its value, it makes the time we get that much more valuable.
One part of life that adds to overall happiness for me is sports. Or at least, it can. When my teams lose, it detracts from happiness. But that’s part of the way sports works. Learning to deal with failure has to be one of the top 3 things anyone in life can possibly learn, and probably the top thing no one ever learns to do perfectly. So there are always lessons there.
The stream pictured above is in honor of what has turned out to be a “stream-of-consciousness” essay.
Yesterday and today were the first two cold days we’ve had here in Georgia this Autumn. I enjoy cold in ways only someone from a warm climate can. People I know from cold climates get so much of the cold that they can scarcely even remember what it felt like to experience its novelty. This is kind of how I’ve become when it comes to getting excited about politics: it is very difficult for me to do, given that it seems like I’ve seen it all before about a 140,000 times.
But each of us must experience life in our own way from our own perspectives, and I understand the high feelings attendant with politics.
Another thing that has soured me on politics over the years was the dawning realization that I could barely manage my own life, and that perhaps I wasn’t the person best suited to tell everyone else how they should live. Now, people who follow politics are no more likely than average to power/control freaks, but the majority of people who actually go into politics as a profession are somewhere out there on the power/control freak spectrum. You have to believe you know better than everyone else how they other people should live — which seems messed up to me.
It is 9:45 am now, and my “timed write” is over. Happy November to all of you.
The light now slanting in is old and gray: It chides the night in gentle mockery, And bids the youngish man awhile to stay.
The boy who roamed these halls those years ago: He lengthened, broadened, moved out of his shell; He didn’t need direction from a man Who treated family grim, and no one well.
But once this place was busy with success – And with eyes closed he hears the sounds again: How pride was once a fortress of excess, And blackened hearts admired among men.
His father’s life: a pyrrhic victory: That day has come and gone, now so has he
i wrestled in my bed with sweat and demons as madness tore into my febrile mind the burning from inside that brooks no pretense the loneliness that’s always there to find
across a rope-bridge chasm you were staring amid a blaze of red and wild face but no amount of shouting broke the silence and no amount of running closed the space
but how your look seared into me with loathing the river down below was all afire i longed to bring you back and home to safety but felt the platitude in my desire
in vision-tangled sheets i woke to humming the sound of air-conditioned ambience i rose to splash my face and drink some water with little hope and little left of sense
i stare now at a screen that sits impassive i’m not sure who i am or how i feel it’s strange that after all the things i’ve been through it’s only in my dreams that life seems real
there's little shelter to be found
once ship has left the port;
the elements will have their say
and nature make its sport --
for trouble, and adventure, both
can lead, or, devastate:
and sailors no more dodge the wind
than lovers hide
from fate
