Blog Post Titles Considered, But Not Used.

The consequences of success in social work.
A taste of suicidal ideation.
The vulnerabilities of isolation.
The inevitable social consequences of asymmetrical power in relationships.
Useless cry for help.
Wasting away in.......
Plan B, a possibility?
You never miss your water 'til your well runs dry.
Short fiction on dying in the mud.
Chapter whatever number after the last one.
The Baroque Cycle: recommended.
Getting better at reggae, sloooowwwwlllyyy.
Conversations in bars about being an atheist.
I, Invalid?
Crazy, fight or embrace?

Wellness

Do you remember the feeling that you get after a sickness when you first realize that you are well?  Perhaps your experience differs from mine, but for me it is a really wonderful experience.  I notice things to a very large extent based on how they differ from the things around them. When contrasted with sickness simply not being sick is great.

I feel a pervasive good feeling, a pleasure in my own body's ability to walk, or see.  This pervasive good feeling extends to my senses, so that the world around me appears more beautiful.  The pervasive good feeling extends into my attitude because it is based on my experience right now, and a good feeling about right now removes anxiety.

Buddhists talk about the natural state of people being ego-less bliss, achievable through years of dedicated practice.  It seems to me that the second part of the previous sentence defeats the claim of the first, but it may well be that the natural state of humanity is something akin to bliss, and that the Buddhists are right that the goal is recognition of our situation rather than a change in it.

What would be a natural state?  I'll assume that we can get passed the absolutely true objection that everything is natural and so the question is foolish.  However, we can derive some meaning from the question and answer.  A natural state is one that has not been affected by humankind, which makes the question doubly problematic, but let us assume that the natural state of humankind is one unaffected by other people.  Another definition of "natural" is being in keeping with the environment around us.

The natural state of humanity would therefore be one of a person fitting with the environment they are in without thinking one way or another about other people, stresses,plans, hopes etc.. I would say part of fitting in with the environment is an absence of extra descriptors of the experience, e.g. hunger, cold/hot, and sick.  The natural state is wellness, in accord with the environment in which we are, unconcerned about the cares of the world. This is as Taoist as it gets, which is why I'm a big fan of Taoism.

This may seem to be a stupendous feat, achieving a natural state of unconcerned mindfulness, but  is only difficult because we habituate ourselves to non-natural states.  The achievement of the natural state requires, as the name would suggest, the doing of nothing.  The hardest part of doing not-doing (a favorite term of Taoism, which seems mysterious until you get how simple and direct it is) is doing not-thinking.  A method that works for some people is to notice what their brain is thinking (I hope my children are happy in school), label that thought (a worry), and then let that thought drift away.

On this blog I spend much of my time, too much of my time, concerning myself with problems and worries.  That's alright with me because only saints shouldn't worry less and I am a long way away from being a saint.  Still, I think I give somewhat of the wrong impression as a result.  Today I felt well and it was, is, wonderful.  Today I looked at sunshine glinting on the water without a thought for being anywhere else.  I felt a very quiet, calm sense of bliss.  I realized, without words, that it is a wonderful thing to be alive.

Such moments are difficult to describe in any way other than very prosaically, such as above, and tend to be repetitive.  I was somewhere when I noticed something and realized that life is good.  As a result I talk much more about external problems and worries than is actually representative of my life.  Most days I have at least one moment similar to the one I have described and I do try to have more.  All it takes is noticing, which becomes easier if you practice, but much easier if your natural state is made constantly apparent by experiencing non-natural states.  It is easier to notice how great it is to be well when you have just been sick.

I would say that the great secret of life is finding our wellness, getting to the place where we notice what we are, where we are.  It is no coincidence that so many spiritual teachers implore us to, "wake up!"

We evolved to be essentially hunter-gatherers in a relatively simple environment.  Such a life was greatly subject to the sudden calamity of death and disease, but it also led to long nights of restful sleep, little work, a focus on a time scale of days rather than years, and much less stimulus than at present.  Why do people on vacation go to a beautiful, quiet place, where you can get food and drink without effort, sleep whenever you want for as long as you want, and try to get away from their worries?  Because we want to get back to the best parts of our natural selves and we don't know how to do that at home.

I have some hope that as a global society we will move back towards greater recognition of our natural selves as various forces align themselves in this direction.  The medical profession is slowly managing to shift from the goal of "health" to "wellbeing" where the experience of the patient is more important than whether all the bits work perfectly.  Psychology has rather recently become quite excited about studying happiness.  There are the first sprouts of moral and political systems being designed around maximizing happiness.  The future of employment is that fewer and fewer people will work, and yet we will still get richer.  As we learn that hard work, stress, lack of sleep, etc. cause both ill health and unhappiness, and we learn that meditation, relaxation, sleep, etc. promote both health and happiness, and societal systems move towards a happiness-based system from economic-based systems, and most people will not be able to productively work much, I see a movement towards the natural state of humanity without the lions and tigers and bears, oh my.

The Latest

I haven't been posting much recently, a possible reason may become apparent a little further down, but big deals maybe happening and someone may be interested.  I'll start with what I think is the biggest deal although it may well not be what most would consider the most important.

It seems that my "magic blue pills" are no longer magic.  For the last two months I have been ill on over half the days.  The last couple of days I have been truly exhausted. Saturday night my hands were writhing trying to keep myself under control from the energy.  The cycling between different states has been the fastest in my life, although I have had far more severe experiences in the past. It used to be that I didn't really know who I would be the next week or day, now I don't know who I will be between the morning and evening.

There are several possibly reasons:

The first possibility is that the pills have changed.  This is a generic drug and while it has worked for me in the past some generics don't work for me, and industry quality assurance is very poor.  Fortunately we have different insurance and are fortunate to have enough money to pay the co-pay (down from $150 to $35) for the brand name version.  So my psychiatrist and I have agreed to try this approach first.

The second possibility is that my disease has simply progressed to the point where the pills cannot entirely cope. Since my disease was worsening (after all that's why I got help) this seems quite reasonable. The psychiatrist's suggestion would then be to try another mood stabilizer in addition to what I am taking now.  I am extremely wary of this having seen people slowly but surely poisoned by the side effects of their medications, some of which would be considered. I absolutely despise the idea of a choice between unpredictable misery and poisoning myself.  Someone with rapid cycling bipolar disorder who hates all of the possible choices they can make is an extremely, extremely bad situation.

The third possibility is that this is simply a particularly bad time for me, something that might happen every few years for the rest of my life.  I have coped with much, much worse than this in the past and can cope with such periods happening once in a while.

In summary;  I am going insane again and I find this quite alarming.

The other part is quite different.  My darling wife has been offered, and has accepted, a new job in a different company, doing quite different things. It amounts to an enormous promotion, from an extremely advanced level of keyboard monkey to the director of an entire department of seventeen people.  I am very proud of her for her courage to take this great leap, very proud of her for knowing she can do it, and most proud of her for negotiating a better compensation package.  This is the sort of feminism I really like, a woman taking risks, being confident in herself, and believing that she is worth as much as any man. In the business world meekness is punished.  My love has come a long way, what a woman!

Now for my selfish bit.  This means we will be staying in Houston, I expect for at least three years, bringing our time here to a minimum of eight years.  Or using a different scale, about 1/10th of my life.  We will be moving closer to the city, closer to this new job.  The area looks much more promising than where we are now, but it is still Houston and I hate it here. I hate the pounding heat in the summer (although October through March is lovely).  I hate the willful ignorance, the lack of caring, the machismo, the certainty, the superficiality, the lack of creativity. I am probably, on average, happier than I was in Portland but that has nothing whatsoever to do with where I live.

Decisions

We all make decisions all the time.  They vary from the insignificant to the vital, and from the easy to the difficult.

On the scale of significance the only thing I really wish to say is that I believe that human beings essentially have a (largely) fixed scale of significance.  That is that the most important things you ever deal with feel as significant as the most important thing that a subsistence farmer in Africa encounters.  Suddenly put yourself in the shoes of a subsistence farmer and then all of your previous worries will suddenly seem insignificant, but until that happens the hot water tank leak seems horrendous.  Mostly things don't matter as much as we think they do.

On the scale of difficulty I think there is an interesting effect whereby decisions become easier at each end of a perceived scale of difficulty.  I'll try and explain. 

The simplest decisions have very few components (a rock, a head and an arm for bashing one with the other) and very few outcomes (head bashing or no head bashing) and a substantial difference between the outcomes (ouch! or not.)  It is a very simple decision as to whether to hit yourself in the head with a rock.

The most complicated decisions have very many components (career advancement, personal satisfaction, a good view, how friends and family feel about it, will I ever see Paris?) and usually these components are conglomerates of other, simpler components.  More complicated decisions will also have smaller differences in outcomes so that each individual component may be enough to swing the balance from one side to the other.

Generally we conflate the complication of a decision with the difficulty of making the decision, but I think that is a mistake at the highest levels of complexity.  What I think is that at a certain point a decision becomes complicated enough that the outcome of our decisions is so unpredictable that it passes beyond an" event horizon" in that we simply cannot make a rational judgment on a decision.  There is a reason why in science there if the concept of "statistically significant" and that is that below a certain threshold you cannot make any reasonable judgments.

You are going to have a party in late May in a week's time.  You could have a barbecue outside in the lovely spring air, or a cosy event inside.  If the weather is nice then an outside event would be much nicer, if the weather is awful then inside would be much nicer.  Do you plan for the event to be inside or outside?  The thing is that you simply don't have the information necessary to make the right decision, you cannot predict the weather reliably a week in advance.  Sometimes you just have to guess, and guessing is easy.

So, let us take a very complicated decision that I think is actually easy to make.  Let us say you are an 18 year old about to go off to college.  You can go to an expensive school with a good reputation and study economics, which you have never studied before, or go to an easier, more relaxed school and study psychology for the first time.  As an 18 year old, who has never lived away from home or studied any of these subjects, the choice is extremely complex and the consequences seem to be large.  This seems like a difficult decision.  However, the amount of information available to predict the outcomes of either choice is so low compared to the difference between the decisions that tossing a coin and going with the result is a completely rational way to proceed.

When I decided to leave Michigan for Oregon there is not one chance that I could have predicted meeting someone who asked me to play music in a band, or that a girlfriend would dump me at a convenient time for me to fall in love with my wife.  I left Michigan because I had few ties there (and I had fewer in Oregon) and I was sick of the weather.  I hadn't even thought of what turned out to be extremely important consequences of a decision made for entirely different purposes.

People don't like this.  People don't like unpredictability, or the idea that a vast amount of our experiences just happen to us.  Humans like to understand, plan, and control their lives.  When the situation is complicated and unpredictable we want to simplify and predict.  The cognitive dissonance between the reality of a situation beyond our understanding or prediction, and our view as the controllers of our own fate is what I think makes big decisions so painful.

When a decision seems really hard to make the truth is that at the point where you can make a decision which choice you make doesn't matter, that is that you cannot make a bad decision.  This may seem weird, after all the wrong decision can have all sorts of terrible consequences, but that's not my point.  Someone asks you to guess which way up a tossed coin will land.  Guess right and you get $10;000,000.  Guess wrong and you get fifty lashes with the cat o' nine tails.  The consequences are enormous, but you cannot make a bad decision guessing heads or tails.  The decision is not hard, just pick heads or tails.  Worrying about what decision you should make is a waste of effort.

One of the things about Americans is that they/we really like doing something.  Americans don't believe in the idea that sometimes the best thing to do is nothing at all.  Take Syria right now.  What a horrible situation, a chaotic maelstrom of hatred and violence.  Any sane person wants the situation to be improved but not one person can legitimately say that they now what the outcome of almost any action would be.  It may well be, and I believe it is, that anything the USA does will simply make things worse.  That doing anything makes things worse s a more common condition that people think.

If you realize that all things change,
there is nothing you will try to hold on to.
If you aren't afraid of dying,
there is nothing you can't achieve.
Trying to control the future
is like trying to take the master carpenter's place.
When you handle the master carpenter's tools,
chances are that you'll cut your hand.

Tao Te Ching   Chapter 74

The Wounded Animal, Crawling Forward

The title of this post refers to a metaphor I have used with regard to the state of things in the USA.  While there are systemic problems (the wounds) in the USA (the animal) the beast is still moving forward.  People tend to focus on the wounds and forget that the animal is still moving.  There is outcry that the animal isn't "over there" but forget that it is moving at all.

It is important that people concentrate on the wounds so that they can be healed and the animal can move forward further and faster knowing that the animal is moving brings the increased happiness that optimism brings, and also the encouragement that wounds CAN be healed.

In that light I bring to your attention a momentous movement barely noticed in the media, the highest prosecutor in the land essentially saying the War on Drugs is at least somewhat of a failure and that there is a serious problem with how much we put people in jail.  This might actually make a difference because this is perhaps the only area in Congress where the right and left edges of US politics agree.

From the article - "The war on drugs is now 30, 40 years old," Holder said. "There have been a lot of unintended consequences. There's been a decimation of certain communities, in particular communities of color."
 Some of the items are changes Holder can make on his own, such as directing U.S. attorneys not to prosecute certain kinds of low-level drug crimes, or spending money to send more defendants into treatment instead of prison. Almost half of the 219,000 people currently in federal prison are serving time on drug charges.
.. the Justice Department explicitly pointed to state reform efforts in a letter to the U.S. Sentencing Commission in July. The old system, wrote official Jonathan Wroblewski, is being replaced with the idea that budgets are "finite," prison is a power that should be "exercised sparingly and only as necessary," and that "reducing reoffending and promoting effective reentry are core goals."

Such changes would be positively transformative in the  lives of tens of thousands of people a year.  It is also something that many would have considered politically inconceivable a decade ago.

Chapter 14

The sky had been an infinite circle of blue just a brief time ago.  Then titanic clouds had billowed into the blue, a brilliant white, then darkening as they approached.  As Alyami ducked his head below the door lintel a cataclysmic boom shook the heavens and the earth.  As he closed the heavy, wooden door behind him fat droplets began to furiously pummel the dust outside.

With the eye of a wearied professional Alyami surveyed the tavern, taking in the quality of the furnishings, the quality of the clientele (as determined by the quality of their clothing), and the atmosphere of the room.  The furnishings were solid and unremarkable, the clientele remarkably diverse, and the atmosphere started with hushed murmurings, quieted momentarily as people looked up from their refreshment and friends to see the newcomer, and then rose somewhat at the sight of a man with a musical instrument.  There are few inns that do not welcome a minstrel.

The landlord sidled up to Alyami and spoke in a voice attempting discretion but trained to roar over loud crowds, "Welcome to The Addled Prophet sir, I wonder if you would be playing tonight?"
"My thanks.  I will play but I beg for a short time to wash the dirt from my throat and to fill my belly."
"Of course, of course.  If sir would take the table by yonder window," with a short nod of the head to indicate that the present occupier of that table should shift it, "I shall be along with beer and victuals, terms as per usual."
With great relief Alyami ambled over to the table indicated, smiling and nodding to the patrons he passed, for goodwill is half the battle for a musician, laid his pack gently down, and collapsed into his chair.

The pounding rain mesmerized Alyami so that he was startled by the thump of a plate and mug by his elbow.  Alyami thanked the boy and leaned over his plate, inhaling the rich aromas of this foreign land, the powerful yeastness of course ground bread, the mouth watering richness of farm raised beef, the wet clothes smell of boiled root vegetable.  Alyami had a sudden sharp pang, an almost lustful need for the tart sweetness of fruit picked from a jungle tree.

Within an island of peace Alyami ate, stolidly, professionally.  Life on the road gave an appreciation for the value of a large meal, the next one was an unpredictable distance away.  The raging storm outside meant the inside was particularly cosy, when a sunny spring day might have meant the tavern was musty and close.  A gentle peace came upon him.  He was safe, fed, warm and about to do what he loved most, play.  He thanked the serving boy who came to take away his plate, agreed to another pint on the house (as per the usual terms), reached for his instrument bag and withdrew his beloved rabab.

As Alyami tuned the rabab the patrons reorganized themselves, moving closer and turning chairs around to face him.  A palpable feeling of anticipation ran through the crowd, eliciting smiles and grins.  Once satisfied with the rabab Alyami shook out his hands, straightened his back and struck a bright, cheerful chord.  At that precise instant the door opened, thunder boomed and a small man in outlandish dress was outlined in the doorway, a small smile on his face as if he had picked up on a subtle joke.

Chapter 13

The next day we tried to remove that unpleasant experience from our heads, brushed ourselves off and continued on our tour.  In the summer the river plain can become quite hot and steamy, a morning mist over the river burning off early in the morning.  At this point the river puts our own Lianka to shame in terms of its sheer breadth, if not in charming beauty.  Bridges are simply not practicable and so a ferry is needed to cross.

Following our itinerary we realized after a brief perusal of our precious map that at some point it would be necessary to cross the river in order to see the great sights of Peirout.  Without knowing the possibilities of ferries further up the river we decided to see about crossing the river from the rather ramshackle wooden pier at the riverside.  Miriam expressed some trepidation about trusting ourselves to the locals but she is a tough old bird, determined to experience life.  Still, we made sure to go out of our way to avoid the part of town that we had unfortunately visited the night before.

At the pier we discovered that there was no official ferry but also that the local fisherman would be willing to ferry us cross the river for a fee.  We had unfortunately arrived too late for most of the fishermen, but a handsome lad was willing to row us across for a fee of six Dakra, a number reached after some haggling.

 Dear reader, if you plan to travel I must recommend that you force yourself to learn to haggle.  While our custom is that it is a slight to the honesty of a craftsman to think that he might not be setting out the lowest price he is willing to take for the item, this is decidedly not the custom everywhere else I have visited.  After a while this activity can be quite enjoyable, rather like playing a game of cards, or telling a good story and will usually save the astonishing figure of half what you would pay by simply accepting the first price offered. To be brief, I believe that the back and forth between the quality of the boat, the prospects of other fishermen returning and the omnipresent starving grandmother, had an excellent result in that I found the cost quite cheap and yet the sparkle in the eyes of the youth upon payment led me to belief he was similarly satisfied.

My pleasure in the cost was deepened by the extraordinary effort it required to cross.  While the youth's gaze was somewhat uncomfortably fixed upon Miriam, he amiably explained that the width of the river and its strong flow meant that to cross required one to point the prow a full mile upstream from the intended destination.

Upon arrival the youth wished us much luck, climbed out of the boat and immediately entered a very disheveled establishment that I believed to be a tavern.  There we were standing alone upon a dock in a strange town.  This is the essence of travel, the slight frisson of fear, and the excitement of curiosity. We took a deep breath and walked forward into the town.

Blessings, in the main, lives up to its charming name.  Apparently Blessings had been a confluence of trading routes for centuries and therefore developed a greater wealth than he surrounding towns.  The effects of this were obvious, with the buildings built of stout wood, or river stone.  Some of the architecture was quite striking, with stone carved beasts staring out from the eaves of roofs.  As I have mentioned before, a traveler's first priority upon arriving in a new place must be accommodation. We quickly found a clean inn that suited our needs very well.  While more expensive than our recent experiences, it was also cleaner and more comfortable.  Sometimes one needs to rest in comfort to restore one's energy and curiosity.

While Blessings is a pretty place, arranged in little squares and shaded by a type of fruit tree known as a "mango", what you must see is the shrine to He Who From Whom Our Blessings Come.  Shortly after He descended from the mountains he walked through this town, named Asheba at the time, and transformed it.  The story goes that Asheba was a town twisted in hatred, divided by powerful clans whose symbols are the creatures that still remain on the eaves.  He Who From Whom Our Blessings Come simply came to this spot, sat down and put out his begging bowl.  The Presence of His Peace spread throughout the town and foes quickly became friends and hatred became kindness.  The town was renamed Blessings in memory, and as a symbol of the new harmony all the clans donated money towards the shrine so that they could all remember the peace and their responsibility to maintain it.

It is indeed a charming story to which I do little justice here, and the truth of it seems incontrovertible when strolling along under the gentle shade of the mango trees.  Almost by accident we came out into Shrine Square.  One's first reaction is to the majesty of the enormous mango tree that towers over the buildings.  Then one notices that beneath this magnificent tree are statues carved from white marble.  They depict He Who From Whom Our Blessings Come smiling and talking to local people while charmingly a small child is carefully placing a flower in His begging bowl.  The whole scene is distinct in its informality, the genius of the piece being the everyday realism of the figures, lifelike in size and manner, yet carved out of beautiful, gleaming marble.  I will never forget the joy of actually walking among those listening to He Who From Whom Our Blessings Come as He set out on his mission.

Oh to see His Blessing in such a beautiful way means that to me, seeing Blessings was indeed a blessing.