Tag: Poetic Essays

A Trip to the Garbage Dump

On By Beleaguered ServantIn Poetic Essays1 Comment

A church Sunday School trip comprised of 4th graders on a Sunday afternoon, with 20 or so of us in a couple of our teachers’ vans. It was near the end of the school year, in late April. I know it was roughly half boys and half girls, but the boys were in one van and the girls in the other, as we were near the peak age of boys and girls avoiding each other without thinking about it much.

The dump had a barbed wire fence around it and a guarded gate. To my almost ten year-old brain, that meant something valuable had to be stored inside. The guards let us in after some discussion with two of my teachers. In just a few seconds, we were on a dirt path between what seemed like gigantic hills of garbage. The teacher in the passenger seat had us roll down the windows. “You need to get used to the smell before we go out there,” he said.

what do we learn
when we're learning?
what do we gain
when we see?

why should we seek out
the ugliness,
when keeping our distance
is free?

The year was 1972, and while we were told not to touch anything, we hadn’t exactly made the trip wearing sanitary gloves or anything. We had split up into smaller groups around various teachers, and we were walking around, just looking. And smelling. A garbage dump smell is not one you ever forget.

Still, there were treasures in there. Televisions and radios that had been thrown away, whole. Couches, chairs, beds, dressers. Articles of clothing, some still in the dressers that presumably had held them. All of those were relatively rare, of course, it was mostly food packages, boxes, diapers (a lot of those), and unrecognizable sludge.

We climbed up and down the hills a little bit (supervised, and one at a time with a teacher) and circled around the place, which seemed enormous to my eyes. The teachers were talking to us about what we were seeing, but I don’t remember what they were saying, other than them repeatedly telling us not to touch anything or pick anything up.

teachers swim against 
ocean tides
of haphazard minds

Children tire easily of almost anything that is good for them; I remember being ready to go for a long time before we went. It was growing dark by the time we got back to the church parking lot where my parents were waiting in our old green station wagon. As I approached the car, they had a change of clothes (and shoes) waiting for me. It struck me that they had must have each visited a garbage dump before.

Later that night, after a bath, a sandwich, and some milk, I remember thinking about how cool it would have been to have one of those old radios like I saw at the dump, and that maybe, if I had one, and plugged it in there in my bedroom, I would hear old broadcasts of the Lone Ranger, or the Glenn Miller Band, or reports from the Pacific Theater.

romance lives
where our minds find it:
bad places,
anywhere --
the adventure is in us,
externals just are.

Full admission: I do not remember why we went on this trip, or why it was thought relevant to Sunday School. I don’t remember what the teachers were trying to tell us, except (a) touching garbage can make you sick; and (b) it’s illegal to steal garbage, even though, arguably, nobody wants it. I don’t think the latter of those two things was really what they were trying to get across.

Nevertheless, looking back, I learned a lot that day, and a lot of things in my perception of the world changed. Here are few of them:

  • People waste a lot of things that still have value. I understood that day why parents never threw away what they might give away, even when the former was more convenient.
  • Ugliness has to be experienced; reading about it is no substitute. It has to be smelled, for lack of a better word.
  • When we throw things away, they go somewhere. Out of sight doesn’t change their reality.
  • Teaching is always worth it, even when they aren’t listening.
  • Reality is full of possibilities, and when we divorce ourselves from reality, we miss out on possibilities.
  • Maybe if I’d noticed what was going on with girls at age 10, I wouldn’t have been so bewildered by them at age 15.
  • Somewhere, across town, there may just be a place I’ve never been, and it’s a whole different world than I’ve ever experienced.

Greetings from Home

On By Beleaguered ServantIn Poetic Essays2 Comments

A Sunday in January, 2021, and I am on a walking trail at a local park. The sun is setting. There are maybe six people here; in pre-plague days, I would see closer to a hundred. This park consists of a lake, a trail, and around 15 different picnic areas. We walked here often when my son was young; now I come here maybe once a year.

it is a new year, and I know I need to get up and move around more. Working from home, even though it has been for public health reasons, has seemed like the next logical step in web connectedness: to somehow be with everyone, without ever being with anyone.

I’m deliberately unplugged while I am walking, though. No earbuds, phone left in the car, even took off the Apple Watch. I thought I’d give my own thoughts a listen for awhile, just to see if I am still in there. It turns out that guy is enjoying the ambient outdoors: frogs, crickets, cars in the distance. I genuinely like being alone: it limits the number of people I’m disappointing.

I am always disappointing somebody, it seems. Both the people I love and the people I work with have very high expectations on my account. I am thinking about this now, in the car, driving back home. People have a clear, strong idea about what I’m supposed to be, and I’m rarely exactly that: hence, the disappointment.

Why people have such firm conceptions about my role and expected performance levels I am less sure of; however, that has been true for as long as I can remember. As a child and teen, that phenomenon manifested itself most often in discussions of my ‘wasted potential’. Others knew what I was supposed to be, and I was not that, so I was a guilty of a moral failing, having (in their eyes) squandered some precious natural resource. That has never really changed: I was supposed to be better than I am.

As my headlights swing into the driveway, I see my wife’s car is gone. Checking my phone, after parking, I see she has left me a text indicating she has gone over to her mother’s to do some things around the house. My mother-in-law turned ninety-two this last year, and she also had clear expectations for my wife that were never met. My wife was supposed to be Miss America; as it was, she Miss About-Twenty-Different-Pageants, and close to being Miss Georgia. But she wasn’t, disappointing her mother and brother, who had her life planned for her.

In turn, my mother-in-law had disappointed her family, having married a non-Jewish boy and stayed in the South. Her family had emigrated from Poland about fifteen years before the Nazi horror; marrying outsiders carried an emotional weight I am sure few of us could understand, now. But the cycle of disappointing our families stretches out in every direction I can see. So it is in no way unique to me.

This is a very common pattern for me: I start out talking about myself, only to end up realizing that the problems I have are shared by many. “Children Will Break Your Heart” is the name of one my favorite Garrison Keillor stories. And they will. Children are part of us, but they are not us. This is a situation that only the very lucky end up on the happy side of.

I have five children I have been a part of raising (one child and four stepchildren from two marriages). In my experience, with parents and children, it is always a contest as to who will disappoint whom more; who “wins” that contest, in any individual case, depends on your perspective, I suppose.

My wife texts me to say she is on her way home and would I like her to pick us up something to eat. I am not really hungry, and tell her so, saying I’d be happy to sit with her while she eats so we get a chance to talk. My wife is a minister, and Sundays are very busy days for her. She comes home with a salad, and we sit down at our chronically cluttered kitchen table.

I honestly don’t know how my wife gets everything done that she does. She carries the concerns of a large number of people on her heart and shoulders at any one time. I try to be the person in her life who doesn’t ask for things and who listens to her concerns, as she might not have any such person otherwise. The concerns she carries she often cannot share: illnesses, betrayals, and other things shared with her in confidence. She also presides over 50 or so funeral services a year, and the sheer amount of grief she deals with staggers me.

In addition, she spends six to ten hours a day, most days, with a three year old and a five year old, occasionally supplemented by a seven year old. That seven year old also spends the night once a week. Her emotional capacity to deal with all of this is amazing.

We talk about her mother, various congregants and relatives; what the upcoming week looks like for both of us; how much each of worries about how little the other one sleeps; how many doctor visits she will be accompanying people on this week, and so on. In a fictional story, any night with a couple that ends with them having a conversation and not going to bed together would be a let-down; in the real world, it is a thing that commonly happens, and it’s perfectly okay.

At the end of the day, it isn’t about the disappointments we’ve suffered, or inflicted: it’s about the good we do, or have done.

 Greetings from home, please do ignore the mess.
 We all have our joys, our secrets to confess:
 The great disappointments burdening our hearts --
 But we understand each other in these parts.

 The way that life goes, the way things have to be;
 The tendency to a general entropy,
 Where we let the days go thoughtless into blight
 Instead of us savoring each day

 And night

A Lesson

On By Beleaguered ServantIn Poetic Essays15 Comments

If you would change the world,
First seek to understand,
For things don’t always go
Exactly as we planned

And it gets hard to clearly think
With passions running strong,
Or even to consider that
It might be us

Who’s wrong

= = = = =

First day of class. Taking notes.

Subject: Polemics. “The Art of Persuasion”

E.P.L. … Ethos, Pathos, Logos. These are the keys to persuasive speaking.

1. Ethos, meaning, establish your right to speak, why people should listen to you. Your expertise, credentials, experience, moral authority.

2. Pathos, meaning, establish why people should care about what you are saying. Appeal to the heart. Only do this after doing the first one.

3. Logos, meaning, establish the logic or reason of your case. Only do this after the other two.

Listening, scribbling, concentrating.

When attacking opponents, always start by undermining Ethos. Explain why the person shouldn’t even be listened to. They are morally reprehensible, their credentials are suspect, etc. That way, you don’t have to get into tricky arguments about their actual logical point.

If those aren’t working use Pathos. Explain why it is that you care and they are cold and unfeeling. Use people’s love of feeling morally superior to bolster your own case.

Try to avoid Logos, i.e., actual logical or policy arguments that differentiate you and your opponent as most people are unmoved by them. Or, better yet, dress up Ethos or Pathos based arguments as Logos.

= = = = =

Several hours later, in my dorm room, thinking about how wrong other people are in their beliefs about the world, and congratulating myself for not being one of them. My dorm room door was deliberately propped open, as was common at that time, and an unfamiliar boy and girl knocked on the doorframe.

“Hello.”

“Hi.”

“I’m Jay, and this is Ashley. We are from the Animal Salvation League. We do work in the community encouraging people to take responsible action concerning their pets and reproduction. We offer education, affordable access to spaying and neutering services, and care, including adoption services, for unwanted pets.”

Ethos, I thought.

It was Ashley’s turn. “Almost 5 million pets are currently in shelters and over a million every year are needlessly killed, because people can’t be bothered. They can’t be bothered to spay or neuter their pets, then they can’t bothered to actually take care of them. Pets that are counting on them.”

Pathos. Right by the book.

“We know that no one person can solve this problem, but, by doing things in our local community, we can lower the amount of needless suffering in the world. Can we count on you for support, either financially, or by volunteering?”

“Or both,” Ashley added.

Logos. Their actual point.

“What would volunteering entail?”

= = = = =

Two weeks later, I’m paired up with a girl named “Georgiana”, who went by “George”, and I am the one now knocking on doors, although we are covering the apartments near campus.

Only about one out of four people are home (or answering their doors), so we’ve made very little headway. The apartment complex is huge, so we take a break and walk over to a little store across the street to sit down awhile and have some coffee.

“Where does the money we collect actually go?” I ask George.

“We send it to regional.”

“What do they do with it?”

“Deposit it, is the only thing I know for sure.”

“Do we get money back here? Like if someone wants to spay their pet but can’t afford it, so we can help out?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Then what does the ‘affordable access to spaying and neutering services’ part of our spiel mean?”

“We have a list of local providers.”

“Couldn’t they get those out of the yellow pages? I mean, I don’t want to be a downer, but, what are we actually doing here?”

“Raising awareness.”

“And money,” I added.

= = = = =

I volunteered four more times in the next 5 months; not long after that, an article appeared in a newspaper across the state about a Federal Sting that had taken down a number of fraudulent charities, including the ASL. My roommate read it and brought it back to the dorm.

“Isn’t this the group you’ve been volunteering for?” he asked, handing the paper over.

“Yep. I’m an idiot,” I said, scanning the article.

“Didn’t you ever wonder where the money was going?”

“Yeah, I remember talking to one of the other volunteers about it months ago. But we just kind of let it hang there.”

“I wonder if any of you volunteers will have to testify? Or get in trouble?”

I hadn’t thought about either of those possibilities.

= = = = =

Neither of those possibilities came up in my case, or anyone else’s case I knew; the leaders of the group all did indeed go to jail, for both “fraud” and “wire fraud”. But that was almost a year-and-a-half later, and I was out of college by then.

Thinking back, I had learned, literally just that day, how people can persuade us to do things without being truthful, was conscious of it at the time, and still fell for it. So I stepped back and thought about my part in the whole.

First of all, Jay and Ashley had themselves been fooled. So it wasn’t them, although the fact that they were students, like me, who loved animals made me want to trust them. I assumed they had Ethos, credibility, even though none of us did, because none of us had done the work to really understand the group we were volunteering for.

Secondly, if I was honest, I liked the feeling that I was a morally superior person, enlightening others by knocking on doors and explaining things that I, in my wisdom, understood better than they. So the pitch used both my love of animals AND my vanity against me. That was the Pathos part.

Finally, I realized that the Logos, or reason part, had never been there at all. They had no facilities and nothing tangible to show about their efforts, only brochures. I didn’t ask what they did that differentiated them from other animal protection groups, or for references from people they’d helped. I had asked nothing.

= = = = =

As human beings, it is the intensity of our emotions that determines how strongly we feel about the validity of our arguments, not the other way around. But it should be the other way around, because passionately defended lies are still lies. As a rule, we are better at spotting the lies other people believe than the ones we do. But the last alternative we ever consider in any argument is whether or not it is possible that both parties are wrong.

Studying the subject of “polemics” in college (the actual class covered a bunch of subjects, and polemics was part of “rhetoric”) was the beginning of better understanding the means people use to persuade, whether fairly or unfairly. Understanding it didn’t immediately make me less subject to falling victim to it. But it gave me, with time, a way of approaching arguments where I’m more aware of my own weaknesses.

It also has made me hyper-aware of how often all the polemical tricks are still employed to this day. Attacks on morality and credibility. Appeals to passion. Weak factual or logical arguments covered up by effective use of ethos and pathos. And just how many people are passionately committed to things whose flaws they cannot see, for passions are inherently blind.

A key part of tolerance is realizing that we ourselves could be wrong; which, given how often it has happened in the past, should be our default setting.

From My Age 17 Diary

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“There’s someone out there for everybody” is what girls tell you when they’re pretty sure no one they know, or could imagine knowing, would have you.

Why do people stay in horror movies? Couldn’t they just walk off set?

“If your friends drove off a cliff, would you—“

“Have been the one to suggest it? Probably.”

She figured out today I’ve been getting in trouble for walking her to class every day. I think being late for fourth period 51 times before she found out is a decent accomplishment.

They said we wouldn’t last
That we were both too flighty
But look at us now
Breaking up
Ending this great love
We thought would last
But didn’t
I’m so sad
Oh look, we’re back together

Had to give an impromptu speech at school today on the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever done, and tripped and fell flat on my face walking up to give it. “Show, not tell,” was my entire speech.

Girls tell me they like guys who are confident, but not arrogant, which my mind translates as, “You’re allowed to like you if I do.”

The makeup didn’t cover
All those bruises,
Thick mascara couldn’t
Hide the tears,
Now she’s gone away,
And we don’t know where,
But hopefully she is safe
From all her fears

The 6 Ages of Sorrow

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There’s that year you realize, you aren’t as good at things as the other kids are.

There’s that age when you find out what it is to love someone with all that you are, only to find that all that you are means nothing whatsoever to the other person.

There’s the day when you realize that all the righteous anger in the world doesn’t make you a super-hero.

Oh, and here’s betrayal: something you’d only read about, or seen in movies, slapping you repeatedly in the face, and reminding you that bad faith in friendship is many ways worse than bad faith in love.

And now, what it is to lose those closest to you: the irreplaceable nature of relationships brought home and straight into every cell of your being.

Then comes the moment you wish you had again those feeble powers you once thought of as inadequate.

Limitation. Lovelessness. Disillusionment. Betrayal. Grief. Deterioration. No amount of learning about these things changes what it is to face them, to go through them.

We go through them, because there is no getting around them, or over them. We are in them.

And they are in us.

“A Tendency to Idealize…”

On By Beleaguered ServantIn Poetic Essays3 Comments

Having a tendency to idealize girls is not a bad place for an adolescent boy to start in terms of his relationships with girls, since it’s based on a kind of respect for them. However, continuing to idealize women isn’t where you should end up if you are a grown man.

The foundation of any mutual relationship is respect, and that, in turn, is based on a type of equality of importance. The needs and desires of both parties are equally important. Idealizing undermines this equality, because, in doing so, you treat neither yourself nor the other party fairly. This may seem paradoxical, on the surface, but let’s look at how this can work, in real life.

Let us imagine a teenage boy who sees girls (or the ones he is interested in) as unapproachable models of perfection. He will fantasize about them, but also see himself as unworthy of their attention. If he is not a particularly popular boy, he will find ample support for his hypothesis of unworthiness in the awkwardness of his encounters with girls, lack of dates, and so on.

A common occurrence as adolescence continues is to grow bitter: he sees guys he considers to be ‘jerks’ having more success (or what he deems to be success) with girls, and concludes that girls don’t like nice guys, whereupon he decides either (a) to moan about it, or (b) to become a jerk himself.

If he then becomes an adult, carrying forward this same attitude, he becomes one of an army of men whose discontent with women is based on a faulty premise: namely, that “being a jerk” is the key to getting all women to like you. Note the underlined words, and you begin to see the problem.

The problem with idealizing is that it doesn’t see people for who they are, as individuals. Any woman is different from all other women, and may differ in any number of ways. There is no “technique” to getting girls, there are just people forming relationships with other people.

In the end, idealizing any group of people or being contemptuous of that same group are forms of the same mistake: the refusal to see people as individuals whose lives, perspectives, and desires are as valid as our own. It also makes conversation about real world things next to impossible, as having cramps or intestinal problems aren’t things idealized humans have, while real ones may at any time.

This is, to me, one of the reasons so many women react with vehemence to men who say that “women don’t like nice guys”. Or, for that matter, the women who say “men only like mean girls”. There is no monolithic thing called “men” or “women” that acts as a single organism with one purpose. We are all different. And any relationship based on a stereotype rather than experience of the actual individual is doomed to failure before it even starts.

The key to getting out of this mindset (for me at least) was already contained within me, namely: I liked being friends with women when I wasn’t particularly attracted to them, and fell naturally into the sorts of “friendships of equality” that lead to real conversations and intimacy. The more I talked to people of all kinds, young and old, male and female, the more I realized that people, at heart, are kind of all the same, in the sense that we want to live fulfilled lives, experience closeness, and have the freedom to express themselves.

And now, my love, tonight we’ll be
The way we are when we’re alone:
No pretense need be tendered here,
Whatever’s real can now be shown

However that may be or feel.
However long it takes to know
What we can mention, we can manage,
And that I’ll go wherever you

May go

Summertime, 15 Years Old.

On By Beleaguered ServantIn Poetic Essays4 Comments

Summertime, 15 years old. I would practice the piano a few hours in the mornings, then head out on my bicycle. I would ride out, some days, to a little town called Seminole, on the far north part of the bay about 8 or so miles away. Other days, I would go in the opposite direction, all the way out to the beach, which was 14 miles away.

At that age, I was largely fueled by my unpopularity, so I could ride quite a ways.

Just riding was my main purpose in riding, but occasionally I would ride by the house of a girl I liked, imagining various scenarios that never happened. I don’t believe I ever actually approached these houses, except once, and that went, not as I imagined it, but as you no doubt can imagine it now:

Me: Hi. Is Pam home?

Mom: Yes. [Over her shoulder] Pam!? Somebody at the door!

Pam: [Running up breathlessly looking excited, then crestfallen] Oh. Um, hi.

Me: I was, uh… just riding by, and I thought I would, um… say hi.

Pam: Hi.

[Silence]

Me: Okay, well, enjoy your summer.

Pam: [Rolling her eyes] Yeah. You, too. [Door closes]

If I live to be a hundred, that will still be the prototype for a lifetime of interactions with women. Girls like boys, just… not me.

When I would ride out the Seminole route, I would get to where there were farms: my best friend’s grandfather had one out that way. I didn’t actually visit the place until a year or so later, when he was old enough to drive us out there.

For those of you who’ve never lived where there are dirt roads, they are interesting to navigate on a bicycle. I had the sort of standard issue 1970’s bicycle: it wasn’t a dirt bike or a ten-speed or anything fancy, just a bicycle large enough to hold someone my age, although I was skinny as a rail… I think I weighed less than 115 pounds, and that was possibly from so much bicycle riding.

We did not wear helmets or elbow or knee pads when we rode, back in those days, and I had a few memorable falls, most commonly, from getting a pant leg caught in the gears. However, in the summer, wearing shorts, that was not a thing, so falls then were rare. I remember having turned down a dirt road that summer, passed a group of mailboxes, and starting to skid on a little hill on the road. Rather than fall, I just sort of put my feet down and slowed enough to walk the bike upright. As I slowed to a stop to look back and see if I had hit anything, I heard a voice from the yard nearby:

Girl: You okay?

Me: Yeah, just, not used to this type of road I guess.

Girl: It’s Owen, right?

Me: Yeah, oh, hi! You’re James’ sister, right? Ann?

Girl: That’s right. What are doing out this way? No one comes out here!

Me: I’m just riding. And not very well.

We looked at each other in silence for a bit.

Ann: Well, I’d ask you inside, but my parents would kill me.

Me: Yeah, and I need to get back home. Besides, I’ve quite a bit of mud on me.

I rode back home, took a shower, and sat down to do my afternoon piano practicing. My dad made pizza that night, which was my favorite meal we had at home. I remember reading some book or other for a while, then going bed. And as I lay in bed, something in my head suddenly clunked into place:

Well, I’d ask you inside, but my parents would kill me.

Wait a minute, what? She would… what? What had just happened? What was she saying?

My imagination went into overdrive.

It rained the next day. The day after that, I rode my happy self back out to Seminole. Turned down that dirt road. Marched up to that door. Knocked.

James answered, with the sound of two dogs barking right behind him.

James: Hey, Owen. Ann mentioned you came by.

Owen: Yeah. Now that I know where you live, I thought I’d say hi. Are your parents here?

James: No, they took Ann up to my Aunt and Uncle’s for the summer. That’s why the dogs are in the house with me. They are normally in the back, but, I’m supposed to keep them here with me until they get back.

Owen: How long will Ann be there?

James: Until school starts.

I told him I didn’t want to make him have to hold the attack dogs back, and turned to leave.

James: Do you play D&D? A bunch of us are playing at Ken’s this Friday. He lives near you, if you want to come, be there at 6:00.

Me: Thanks. That sounds like fun, so long as you don’t mind having a rookie. I’ve never played.

About halfway back home, it started to rain, and when it rains in Florida, in RAINS. I came in the house dripping wet, using one of the towels we kept near the front door to kind of towel off and/or stand on before heading to the shower.

Me: Dad, do you mind if I go over to Ken’s Friday? Some friends are meeting to play games.

Dad: That’s fine with me if it’s okay with your Mother.

Mother [from the other room]: And it’s fine with me. What time will you be home?

Me: I don’t know. Midnight? 1:00?

Both: Okay.

To move, to ride, to wander free —
To be just where you want to be –
No work, no stress, no crowd, no school:
The one good part of being so

Uncool

Hit The Door

On By Beleaguered ServantIn Poetic Essays2 Comments

To hit the door and keep on going,
That is his desire;
To turn his back and just walk out,
To leave it all behind –

So many people, everywhere
Become a slave to something,
And turn to powder underneath
A voluntary

Grind

If you had it to do all over again, would you?

Your work choices? Where you live? Your relationships?

Or would you choose… a different life?

We can’t go backwards, of course. As Kierkegaard said, “It is perfectly true, as the philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.”

So, what can you learn today from how you answered the questions above? What is your pathway to better?

I often wonder about this, not so much where I’m concerned, but where the people closest to me are concerned.

My wife sometimes tells me stories about the days before I met her: owning businesses, traveling, exploring. The days before she had a husband, kids, her current responsibilities. Days she obviously misses. And I wonder, Does she rue her choices? Would she do it differently if she could?

Did she used to be happier?

Did she… settle?

I realize that husbands aren’t supposed to have the kind of thoughts and insecurities that I have, but, there it is.

I’m a poet, so I prefer to work with individuals rather than generalities. If someone decides to leave a job, or a career, or a relationship, I’m interested in the specific circumstances of the story.

Everyone one of us has left something or somebody behind in our lifetimes, and has had it done to us. It might be friendships that drift away, lost or left jobs, or any other type of thing. And every story is different.

When we can see other people’s problems and pains, and start to feel them rather than minimize them or explain why ours are worse, we begin to really feel empathy.

And we could almost all stand to feel a little more of that.

The Envious Type

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As an awkward, lonely, and somewhat homely adolescent boy, I viewed the couples I started to see around at that age with a mixture of fascination and envy. I genuinely felt that being part of a couple was a thing that could and would never happen for me.

It eventually did, but, not with any marked degree of success.

I was kind of a mess.

By the time I got into my twenties, I was entering into a series of relationships of varying lengths, none lasting more than half a year, and most, more like half a minute. I would go through long fallow periods of dating no one, and the envy I felt when seeing other couples returned.

I got to thinking about this after watching a recent episode of This Is Us. There, they show Kate, as an adult, going on a retreat meant for couples with her mother, because her husband backed out at the last minute. The show did a good job of portraying her seeing seemingly happy couples everywhere, although it was never said. But they got the point across.

Envy is an emotion I come back to thinking about again and again, because I think it is a far bigger part of human motivation than it is usually given credit (blame?) for. Boredom and envy are both like that: huge contributors to why we are how we are, but typically downplayed for more glamorous motivations like greed, lust, or the desire for power.

It is through the mechanism of envy that a lot of people end up resenting other people for being either happy, fortunate, or both. It isn’t enough to wish we were more happy or fortunate, we want other people to be less so – which is crazy, by the way.

Just walking across campus,
You see them reading there:
The happy couple on the lawn
As if without a care –

And anger comes, but it’s not right:
That twistedness we get to —
For envy’s anger borne from sorrow
We will not

Admit to

Competitiveness, by the way, is arguably a type of preemptive envy. We hate other people having things we don’t to such a degree that we organize our whole existence around it. This is the largest single motivating force that athletics has: it’s not the “pursuit of excellence” — although that may be a by-product — it’s the pursuit of making sure you are object of envy rather than a participant in it.

Competition is a very real part of life: we compete for attention, for dates, for jobs, and so on. However, one can’t help but notice that we tend to turn things into competitions that aren’t. Below is an actual conversation I had with someone online about two years ago.

Owen: I’ve been listening to some Orchestral music by Norman Dello Joio. I really like it.

Friend: Why do people always talk about Aaron Copland when they talk about American composers? There are a lot of good ones, like Dello Joio, who never get a hearing.

Owen: But he did get a hearing, I’m listening to his music now. And why can’t I like both?

Friend: Copland is SO overrated. I can’t believe he’s your favorite.

Owen: I didn’t say… oh, never mind.

Competitiveness in the arts is understandable, of course, even if its often coarse and catty expression can be discouraging. After all, attention is a type of popularity contest, and we all know how those go.

“Poorly for most of us”, is the answer, for you popular people out there.

Oh, how I envy you.