on Japan, weddings, and politics

It was a weird, horrible, wonderful, encouraging, terrifying, heartbreaking, heart-mending week.

On Thursday, a friend finished (I mean finished) her first novel. It made me smile big smiles, and it also lit a fire under my ass. I might get to read it, but not before I finish my own damned manuscript. On the same day (Friday for them) the earth shook in close proximity to Japan though, so my joy was tempered.

I drove to Vancouver on Friday morning after a pit stop at Mom’s for coffee. I was driving to my Bio-Mom’s place in Surrey. So it took me around five hours and 500 kilometers to get from my Mom’s place to my Mom’s place. I’m guessing that puts me in a relatively small club. Not too small, but small enough.

I spent a good part of the trip thinking about Japan. That’s a large club – those thinking about Japan – from the minority-hateful club highlighted on Facebook who were equating an earthquake and tsunami with Pearl Harbor; to the larger demographic who are directly affected, hoping to hear a word that will never come, hoping to survive long enough for help to arrive, hoping that the scars won’t be too deep; to the majority club around the world that were/are just trying to think positive things, and empathize, and hope for the best. The “best”, at this point, would seem to be “anything that is not the worst”.

The radio says that we still don’t know the magnitude of this tragedy; that the estimates of destruction and depth keep jumping every hour. The truth is that we’ll never know the magnitude of this tragedy, no matter how exact the numbers, how specific the radiation counts, how large the dollar amounts. Some tragedies can’t be measured. All we can do is be dumbfounded and then try to lean into the light again.

That’s what I tried to do as I drove into Surrey; grab the light I was driving towards and lean into it. I was visiting to attend my brother Travis’s wedding after all.

Saturday morning Travis picked me up on the way to the Abbotsford Airport so we could pick up our other brother, Troy. (Aside: My birth name, before the adoption, was Thomas – Mom had a theme all planned out.) Then the three of us drove back to Mom’s to let her bask in our perpetual three-way ribbing. And then we spent the day together, the three of us, until it was time for the wedding. This happens only once every couple years these days, so it was precious.

There were moments, whole, long sequences of seconds and minutes when I actually forgot about Japan.

The ceremony itself was simple. Trav and his fiancé Kate were insistent that it meant nothing. They have no plans on celebrating March 12. It’s a formality in anticipation of a wedding in Mexico next month, and having a signed, authorized license back here in Canada makes the legal part of things much easier. So we gathered at Kate’s parent’s home, just family, eight of us, and ate too much. Some of us drank too much, but we forgive them and had made plans for safe drives home. And in the middle a Justice of the Peace arrived and we had a little ceremony.

Kate and Trav had championed the “this means nothing” theme, and yet everyone shed at least one tear. Kate was gorgeous in her laughing tears, Trav handsome in his stoic ones, and the room was full of love the way incense can fill a room; in the way that it makes you pull back and say “wow” involuntarily.

I had several profound moments of gratitude. This was a family I had never known eighteen years ago. Trav and Kate’s love has already overcome things that would make lesser mortals coil back in fear. Gratitude actually seems like a really small word. After all, words are just symbols we use to shorthand an idea. Ideas like gratitude or love deserves volumes, encyclopedias, libraries.

It’s cool that we can condense an idea like that into five or nine letters, depending, but there’s a disservice in the accomplishment too. Both gratitude and love deserve words with more gravitas. It’s typically Western: Our accomplishments sometimes go too far. We do because we can, and do not, often enough, ask whether we should.

I drove back Sunday morning and Japan still dominated the news. There was more information on the Fukushima reactor. The numbers were ugly and getting uglier with no end in sight. There was no way to measure it on a heart level, but the astronomers said that our days are now 1.6 milliseconds shorter because the rotation of the Earth sped up, and another expert is saying that, according to GPS measurements, Honshu appears to have moved almost 2.4 meters. The whole thing. Eight feet.

And then, in the mountains, I lost radio and enjoyed silence for a couple hours. When I came out Tapestry was on CBC. Karen Armstrong was on, talking about compassion. She won the TED prize in 2009 and wished for the Charter for Compassion, a wish she got and is getting. The Charter is an amazing idea.

They also talked about the attack ads that the Conservative party is running right now in Canada

I read a very funny op-ed in McLean’s by Scott Feschuk in which he said:

“Are there really people out there so ideologically fragile that a 30 seconds of dubious accusations are enough to alter their worldview? …Intrigued by this phenomenon, I have conducted painstaking research to develop a theory that offers insight into the precise mechanism by which attack ads are able to affect popular opinion. My theory is as follows: People are dumb. …I am not saying you’re an idiot if you switch parties because of an ad you saw on television. But I am thinking it.”

I know, not very compassionate, is it? The world is complex, what can I say? We can grieve for Japan on the same weekend as a joyous wedding, even while simultaneously hoping that our species can learn to embrace compassion as a benchmark, and yet laugh at a one-sided article insulting the voting population of my country.

Nobody said any of this would be simple.

Oh, somewhere along the line I lost an extra hour. Let me know if you see it. Every hour is important. If I can’t have it, I’d like to at least know that it went to a good cause.

whispering really loud

Sunday afternoons are quickly becoming one of my favorite times of the week. First, it marks the end of my weekly sojourn into hell, er, I mean, my three shifts at the casino. Getting off work is always an enormous relief.

Then I have the satisfaction of knowing that I’m driving home to Aikido practice. It’s a strange contradiction, squishing the place that I hate the most right now with the practice that I love the most. If I were #amwriting instead of #amrevising, I might not feel that way, but the two hours on the mat every Sunday night is like a bit of heaven, even better than the climbing at the moment.

Yeah, I said it.

Finally, my commute home Sunday afternoons blissfully coincides with Tapestry on CBC Radio 1, and the hour or so of driving feels a bit like a cocoon in which amazing people talk about amazing things with a degree of enlightenment that is always moving.

Last week, for instance, they were talking to ministers and pastors who had lost their faith, some of whom were still struggling to perform their duties in that absence of that faith, still working as ministers and pastors. I think that would tear me to pieces.

This week, host Mary Hynes was speaking with Pakistani musician Salman Ahmad, of the band Junoon (which translates as ‘obsessive passion’). Ahmad spoke eloquently of his love for Led Zeppelin and Suffi mystical traditions, and he quoted Iqbal: 

“The whisper in the heart has strength; it may not have wings but it has the power to fly.” 

He talked about the creative spark within us, all of us, being our connection to the source, the base layer, or the divine. And also that it unites us; that it is the spark that, if we acknowledge it, connects us through art.

And then he said: 

“We all have that whisper of the heart, but the world is so loud that we can’t hear unless we really try.” 

It seems to me, at times, that it’s the other way around though; that our culture works so hard to not hear even when the natural arc of the universe, to steal one more quote, curves towards justice.

If we’d just get out of the fucking way and let it. Or maybe the artist’s truth is to be an amplifier; to scream that spark so loudly that nobody can ignore it. Maybe that’s part of breaking the ceiling too.


P.S. (Because I forgot) - http://www.cbc.ca/tapestry/ 

trust your friends

A brilliant friend of mine, Judy Clemet Wall, posted a beautiful blog earlier today chronicling the Ten Things She’d Do if she could. She’s a wonderful writer and just reading her list was (and is) inspiring. When you’re done here and have left a comment, I’d highly recommend popping over to Zebra Sounds ,checking it out and giving her a follow.

One of her ten things, a truly remarkable and beautiful thing, was this:

“I’d loan my eyes to some people I love so they could see how beautiful they are.”

I know. Fucking awesome, isn’t it?

That item informed a brief online conversation about wishing that we could actually do that; share in some fundamental, elemental way how much we appreciated certain people so that they could, in essence, see themselves as we see them, as we love them, as we appreciate them. It would be an inestimable gift to be able to express our respect and love that clearly, on demand, and shoot it out when it was most needed like a love missile.

No… dirty, dirty… not that kind of love missile. A deeply honest, positive regard smartbomb kind of missile.

And then I had this thought:

What if we tried seeing ourselves as others saw us once and a while, not assuming the worst (as is usually my inclination), but instead seeing the best? You know, actually believing the things that people say to encourage us instead of just brushing them off in some sort of ode to humility.

How many people do you know that have heard and ignored the same, consistent advice and encouragement from their friends and then, like a bolt out of a clear blue sky, finally get it when they hear the same advice from a therapist, or a counselor, or a book, or even on Oprah, ferchrissakes.

Yeah, you’re nodding your head now. I know. Me too. We’re way to willing to accept negative opinions from anywhere, and way to slow to accept positive ones from the people we trust most. Tell me how that makes sense.

This isn’t a self-affirmation thing. I’m not suggesting that you are a precious and unique snowflake. I’m not talking about flowery expressions of positive self-regard here. I’m not telling you to say nice things to yourself or apply the law of attraction. This isn’t about giving your self a hug or creating a self-realization mantra and saying it three times before your next job interview.

I just wonder what it would look like if we stopped once and a while, really stopped dead still, and then saw ourselves through the eyes of the people that care most for us. There’d be some honest, realistic critical observation in that view, sure, but I think we’d also be struck dumb. I think we’d have to just sit down and weep for the overwhelming joy of the love we’d feel. I think it would break us in the most complete and wonderful ways.

So here’s a thought exercise: Try to remember the last few compliments you’ve received from people you respect, admire, love and/or trust. Make them into a sentence about yourself. Like this:

“I am pretty, sensitive and I write like a motherfucker.” *

Or:

“I am strong, punctual and I work harder than anyone my friends know.” *

Or:

“I am creative, have great hands and am profoundly empathic.” *

Whatever…Do it. I dare ya.

And when you have your sentence of compliments, think about it. You don’t have to repeat it to yourself. Just think about it. Just stop… and think about it. Let it settle on you. Accept that your friends or family or boss actually think that about you, think you're pretty fucking wonderful in your own inimitable way. They sit alone sometimes and think, like Judy does, like you do about those you love, “I wish I could give them my eyes so they could see how beautiful they are.”

Thanks Judy. You’re amazing.

* These are not necessarily autobiographical in any way.

World Alzheimer's Day - Sept. 21 - Bloggers Unite

(This is a Bloggers Unite cross-post)

When I was nine my parents split up. My dad, the aforementioned English teacher, left and, with him, so did our family’s sole source of income.

My mom has suffered from chronic depression and anxiety her entire life, has a grade 8 education, was emancipated by fifteen, spent a brief time as a street kid (imagine that in the 50’s), and worked as a data punch processor until she met and married my dad. By the late 70’s when they split up those data punch skills were archaic and useless.

We spent about a year living on welfare.

After Dad left she never spent another night in the hospital due to her depression, perhaps in part as a result of him not being there, but I think mostly because she just told herself that she couldn't. For me.

She managed to pay the bills and the mortgage until she got a job as a graveyard supervisor at a group home for the mentally challenged. She built that job into a career by turning our house into a miniature group home. By the time I was 12, she was caring full time for two developmental challenged paranoid/schizophrenic women. That was her career, seemingly forged out of thin air, and the means by which she kept us in hot dogs and hamburgers.

We never lost the house, I was always fed, always clothed, always loved, and mostly aware of how amazing all of that was. It was, at times, challenging being a teenage boy in that house, but it was also a priceless and unique experience.

To this day, I have a hard time calculating the scale of the sacrifices she made; how much focus and effort a life of service to those two women must have taken; how hard it must have been to not give up or give in to the depression that was and still is a giant cloud over her head; how much she overcame to keep our modified family together.

Thinking about it always leaves me dumbfounded and a little fucked up for a while, but in a good way.

So when I say that she is the most courageous person I know, please understand how serious I am. She is my hero.

Mom turned seventy early this year and has, over the last year or so, been slipping (mostly) gently into the early stages of Alzheimer’s. We’ve had some bad stretches already, but adjustments to her medications have helped her come back twice now, and we’re currently holding.

I know that, realistically, it won’t last forever, but I’m thankful for the time we have, and for her continued courage.

There’s no bullshit around the house. She’s aware of what’s happening and it scares the shit out of her some days, but we talk about it when it does.

We laugh whenever possible. We remember together, and the repeated stories never seem old. She tells me that she’s proud of me and I tell her I’m more proud of her. We say ‘I love you’ all the time, more than we used to, and that’s never a bad thing.

So far it’s a pretty gentle experience and we’re thankful for that too. We know that it won’t last forever, but while it does… well, while it does we’ll be in the moment and appreciate it.

Every moment. Every story. Every hug. Every ‘I love you’. Every. Fucking. One.

Hell, she’s my hero and this is just life. You deal, right?

It’s what heroes do. My Mom taught me that…

September 21 is World Alzheimer’s Day.

Maybe your folks are fine, maybe not. Either way, be thankful for the time you have. It’s precious and too short.

For Gaza

Let me state this plainly:

I am not anti-Israel. I believe that Israel has a right to exist as valid as any other nation state. I don't know if I would have made the same choices that were made in the late 1940's, but that's water under the bridge. Israel exists and has a right to continue to exist.

I am not pro-Palestine. I believe that the nation state is one of the poorer inventions of the human species. Show me a nation-state and I will show you an institution that will want something that someone else possesses, and will fight and kill for it if they get the opportunity.

I am not anti-Israeli. The Israeli people are a vibrant and dynamic culture with much to offer the world.

I am not pro-Hamas. Hamas, as much as the nation-state of Israel, has many crimes to answer for. I do not condone or approve of terrorism or violence no matter how much I might understand the frustration and anger that spawns it.

What I am is anti-Israeli government and policy in so much as that government and policy considers it justifiable to marginalize 1.5 million people and dictate their quality of life so that it is, at best, an existence of bare subsistence.

I am pro-Palestinian. Palestinians are a people. Like the Israelis, they have a vibrant and dynamic culture to share with the world. Like the Israelis, they deserve the opportunity to exist and flourish.

I am pro-Gaza. It is for the 1.5 million citizens of Gaza that my heart aches, that my teeth grind, that my fists clench.

They are impoverished for no reason other than an arrogant belief that one people are more worthy than another; denied the rights that we consider most basic because one culture has decreed they are less worthy; refused the basic goods required to build their homes and feed their children because a group of developed nations have decided that it is justifiable to punish an entire people for what they consider to be the sin of  poor democratic choice.

The international community of nations tout themselves as wise statesmen acting in the best interest of humanity, but they are not. Rather, they are bullies, the largest and most immature children in the playground vying for control of a global sandbox. They do not speak for me. They do not speak for you. They speak for themselves and those economic concerns that promise them fame, power and fortune.

I am anti-bully. Bullies steal from others so that they can grow fatter and bigger. They beat up those that they can to feel powerful in a vain attempt to prove their arrogance justifiable. They say that they are protecting us, but really it's more like a protection racket, an organized crime. All this can be yours,, they say, if you will just shut up and follow the program.

We cannot shut up. In the name of all of those values that our rulers give lip service to but never honor, in the name of true morals like empathy and justice and equality, in the name of simple dignity, we cannot shut up.

Instead we must remember the weak, embrace those who have been cast out and called unclean, stand up for those who cannot, dissent from the lie of the status quo. If we will not stand now for those who are beaten down, who will stand for us when we are the slaves, the marginalized, the disenfranchised?

There must be a better way, and if our 'leaders' will not seek it, then we are the ones that must demand it with more conviction, more peace, more resolve. Our leaders must be made to remember. And for that to happen, we cannot forget.

Gaza, we remember you. And we will not forget. Or rest.

‘Every quality, taken to extremes, becomes a weakness.’ Paulo Coelho

I’ve spent a good portion of the last week reading blogs, news and alternative news sources. It’s triggered a bit of introspection along the lines of Mr. Coelho’s quote above, and from that introspection I felt the need to try to clarify a couple thoughts.

The Easter post, part satire and part anti-religion rant, raised more ire than I usually manage to provoke (or at least that I’m aware of). Most of it arrived via my FB link or by private message/email than here in the comments, but I was ready for it. There’s no way I wrote that without an intention to provoke.

But I’m also not one that relishes contention most of the time. I have to feel pretty strongly about something to not look for a win/win solution that’s inclusive. I do recognize, however, that I, like everyone else, have the ability and propensity to become too enamored of an idea, an ideology, a quality in ourselves that we consider one of our strengths, a political position, a religious doctrine, a scientific or academic school of thought, etcetera, etcetera. It is not an affliction that is unique to any one demographic or another. Even those who cherish science, objectivity and reason above all (while pointing at emotion, empathy and metaphysics as foolish self-delusions) things can become entrenched in those concepts to a degree that excludes other valid possibilities. We are all susceptible to the dynamic.

I think we find it attractive because sometimes the journey gets tiring and we just want desperately to believe that we can find that one internal or external position that will allow us to stop exploring. That place where we can say, “I’m finally here”, and that, in that place, we’ll find some rest. But that concept is, I think, mostly an illusion - a mirage.

For sure, there will be, and should be, times when we rest for awhile, but the journey never really ends. We may find refuges and oases at times, and we probably need them when we get there, but the real challenge is knowing to move on after we’ve had that rest instead of trying to settle in as if we’d ‘arrived’.

That was one of my thoughts. The other involves the concept of synthesis as opposed to extremism.

In my first year of under-grad studies, while I was taking all of those ubiquitous survey courses, I was struck by the trend in each discipline for schools of thought to develop around specific approaches, discoveries or styles. Each new paradigm would be based on the ground gained by the one before it, and yet the new paradigm ended up being branded as contrary to the one prior, and a mutually-exclusive dynamic would rear its ugly head resulting in temporary stagnation. This process would continue, spawning school of though after school of thought, until some bright person would come along and try to form a synthesis of all the best aspects of these “disparate” schools of thought.

I always gravitated towards the synthesis concept more than any other one school because, well, it just made more sense. Concepts of amalgamation tend to be more open and dynamic. Constructed on the assumption that ideas that have come before have something to contribute, and that a combination of ideas can be more complete than any separate component can be, the synthesis perspective tends to be (in theory) perpetually inclusive in design, always looking for the next bit of discovery or revelation that will help fill in a bit more of the picture.

I hold pretty strong ideas regarding the nature of institutions whether they are religious, social, bureaucratic, educational or political. I doubt that this disclosure comes as a surprise if you’ve read anything here or know me. I liken any institution to trying to make one specific wave permanent…

That said I also realize that my position on institutions is hardly ultimate or inviolate. We need institutions like laws and courts and representational democracy in a pluralistic society with high population density. I recognize that multiple perspectives are required in a system so that debate can occur; that the progress of ideas occurs through the process of exploration, disagreement and discourse; that diversity is a good thing. I like those ideas. I just don’t like the manifestations of those ideas that we are currently working with and under. If we’re open enough, I think that we’ll be able to evolve past them, but we have to be open to the evolution and not fight it so much.

I wish, sometimes, that it was easier for us as a species to remember and practice that cooperative approach of synthesis. I wish we’d save “you’re wrong” for really special occasions and look for what’s right more often, even if we can only see a little piece in the larger whole. I wish we’d look for a middle path of symbiosis instead of investing so much energy in trying to steer left or right. I wish we’d include instead of exclude. I wish we didn’t need a “them” in order to simply be “us”.

And I hope that I’ll never forget that in front of my own mirror is the best place to renew this wish.


As a side note, I like the idea of this:

“How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within oneself?... There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light." Barry Lopez, ‘Arctic Dreams’

Until the early 1990’s I had never heard of the Residential School system in Canada. It had, after all, been dismantled in the 60’s, and the Canadian government had done a pretty good job of trying to bury the horrific truth of what had happened.

The Residential School System was an official national policy, enacted by the Federal Government and solely designed to destroy first nations culture and ‘integrate’ first nations peoples into our European culture. Starting in the 1840’s and continuing for over 120 years, First Nations children were forcibly removed from the homes of their parents for ten months per year, subjected to punishment if they spoke their own language, subjected to unsanitary conditions that resulted in tuberculosis epidemics and, in some cases, a 69% mortality rate. And, of course, most infamously, there was the rampant incidence of sexual and physical abuse perpetuated by the Catholic and Protestant ‘teachers’ that the Federal Government farmed the actual task of assimilation out to.

It is, in my opinion, the darkest episode of Canadian history. The schools, funded by Federal grants, mandated with the systematic ethnocide of a people by the Federal Government, and knowingly staffed with sadists, pederasts and pedophiles by the willing churches tasked with that ethnocide, are a dark stain on Canada's history.

Awareness has grown over the last fifty years as courageous First Nations people brought the issue to the forefront of public discussions. It was a fight. The evidence was overwhelming that the abuse, that the ethnocidal policies had existed, but the ability of a government and a nation to live in denial should never be underestimated. It took until 2008 for a reluctant Prime Minister Harper to offer a long-overdue official apology from the nation to the peoples they tried to destroy.

A decade before that apology though, way back in 1998, perhaps as a way to try to silence the protests, or maybe as a form of bribe to shut them up, or perhaps, just possibly because somebody had a sane moment and thought it was the right thing to do, the Canadian Government provided funding for an organization named the Aboriginal Healing Foundation. The original funding mandate was for eleven years. It was extended last year to make it twelve. But this year the Federal Conservative administration of Stephen Harper has cut all funding to the AHF effective March 31. Not all of the programs that the AHF funds and supports will be closed because of the AHF’s funding being cut, but many will, and all of them will suffer. Many of the programs that the AHF funds are the most progressive and successful residential treatment programs in existence, and the AHF has received praise and commendations for being one of the most fiscally responsible organizations of its kind in Canada.

To be fair, the Federal Tories say that other systems and programs will be mandated to fill the void left by the AHF, but those programs are not run by First Nations peoples and have a far broader mandate than to focus on the victims of residential schooling. They may care, but they won’t care enough, aren’t mandated to care enough, to do the job right. The organization that does care enough to do it right, that has been doing it right for twelve years, is being gutted by a government that, in spite of that fake apology a couple years ago, apparently still doesn’t give a damn.

And in case you’re tempted to walk away from this thinking, “that damned Harper government again”, remember that we still all own a piece of this. If we get to be proud of the soldiers in WWI and II, if we get to be proud of our Peace Keepers, if we get to be proud of the Penticton Vees and the National Junior Team and the Olympic Gold, then we also have to – HAVE TO – own this disgrace as well.

And it lives on, every time we turn our head instead of look at a person living on the street, every time we ignore articles about things like the end of funding for the AHF or think that it’s not very important, every time we grumble over the entitlements provided to First Nations people in terms of education or taxation. And even every time a First Nations person assumes what a person of European descent thinks about them. The old prejudices still exist in all of us.

It’s part of our heritage. It’s part of what makes us Canadian. It’s part of what makes this our home and native land.

I don’t believe much in the value of guilt, but I do believe in remorse. Guilt holds us frozen, trapped in our own self-flagellations, but remorse shows that we see, that we can learn and change. I have a hard time not feeling guilty about what my ancestors did though. I try to focus on the remorse, to focus on learning and supporting change, to focus on leaning into the light as Mr. Lopez so eloquently puts it, but damn… some days it’s hard.

****

You can find out more
here,
here,
here,
here,
here, among others places. Try a Google search if you want more.

You can also find a petition through this Facebook page.

I don’t think that our government’s responsibility, our responsibility, is fulfilled yet on this subject. Perhaps we can apply enough pressure to make them do the right thing for a change.

‘Whenever we need to make a very important decision it is best to trust our instincts, because reason usually tries to remove us from our dream, saying that the time is not yet right. Reason is afraid of defeat, but intuition enjoys life and its challenges.’ Paulo Coelho

Ah, it’s been a while. Let’s see if I remember how to do this.

I came across this quote last night and fell in love with it, especially in light of some recent decision making I’ve had to do. I’ll try to provide some brief background to put some of this in context.

I’ve mentioned before that, about a year ago now, I quit my ‘good, solid career’ at a casino in Alberta, sold or gave away almost everything I owned (except the laptop, climbing gear and the library, of course), and took a job care-taking a remote ski lodge for the summer and fall. I did this so that I could finally, finally, finally write the novel I’ve been putting off for, oh, the last dozen years or so (145,000 words and counting, so it’s at least really long).

It’s been a liberating experience in far too many ways to start listing here, one of which is that I’ve had the time and freedom to start listening to my intuition again; to start paying attention to the intrinsic me that I’d effectively buried under the excuses of being too busy, too successful, too focused, too material and too completely unhappy with all of the above. I chose to pursue being a ‘me’ that I preferred to the one I’d been living as for the previous decade, even though that ‘me’ was only hypothetical then, a distant memory of me that I kept polished on a shelf like an old trophy.

I should say first that I’m a fan of using a reasonable logic tree to make decisions and always have been. My brain works fairly well most of the time, and I enjoy the process of turning the Rubik’s cube of a problem around in my hands for a while so I can really know all of the sides before I start. What I’ve started to notice and appreciate this year, more than ever before, is that I usually come back to my instinctual preference in the end anyway. And while it could be argued that I’m engaging in self-fulfilling prophecy, the logical part of me double checks for that too, so I think I’m being relatively accurate.

Rarely in life do we come across a hard decision that is clear cut or black and white. They usually involve permutations and dynamics that leave us with a choice to make, and usually a hard one commensurate to the nature of the problem we are facing. The pros and cons sometimes just don’t reveal a strong enough advantage for either option to make the decision easy. But I’d relied too much on the ability to reason to make decisions for the first ten years of the 21st century. My reason and the accepted measures of North American consumerist culture had conspired to lead me into a string of decisions that looked good on my CV and revenue stream, but were making me unhappy, unfulfilled, a bad friend and a bad son.

And then I dropped out. That decision, back in February of ’09 was an intuitive one. The care-taking position was in the tube, a possibility but not a guaranteed bridge yet, and then a few circumstances conspired to allow me the moment of clarity I needed to make the jump. According to reason and societal matrices it was the wrong decision at the wrong time, but it was instinctually correct and it proved very, very right for me.

It was a challenging experience, breaking out of that rut. I found that the writing process I’d longed for was hard to establish, that I had a deeply rooted fear of failure to try to dig my way around (I’d known it was there, but foolishly thought it would just run away crying when I finally made the ‘big move’). Focusing more on family and friends came easily, fortunately, and that was an anchor while I floated around trying to find my groove. So I spent large pieces of the summer hiking and being quiet, alone in a beautiful lodge on top of a mountain with the trees, pine martins, eagles and Harriett, the lodge cat to divert my attention when I needed it. It was the best thing that could have happened, and that time and solitude was invaluable in my personal journey from the self-inflicted constraint and restraint of my professional career to a new freedom that could be, and is, liberating and productive at the same time.

I wanted to value creativity. I wanted to prioritize writing. I wanted to focus on the close and valuable friendships I’d been fortunate to cultivate and maintain. I wanted to be there for family. I wanted to live a life with as few compromises as possible. I wanted to make a difference somehow and not use a foolish responsibility to a corporation or lifestyle that didn’t care for me or anyone else at all as an excuse for not chasing my dreams. I wanted to achieve escape velocity and pursue a better version of myself; one that I knew was in here, somewhere.

Just last week my father, who lives in the UK, was rushed to the hospital with a cardiac arrhythmia. I found out about it four days later, by which time he was hours away from heading home with a new regimen of medication to control it, so it wasn’t an emergency by then. I had been planning a visit to him this spring already. Much of the timing of that trip was dependent on when or if I would be needed back up on the mountain and I’d been wrestling with the itinerary for several weeks, waiting for word from the lodge about whether they needed a care-taker this year, trying to figure out how to make the trip and avoid as much sideways rain as possible, wanting to fit my visit around my dad’s busy schedule so I could spend time with him. All of this was swirling around in my head for a few days after I heard about his condition and I was getting nowhere.

Then I stopped and asked myself, “What was your first inclination?” It was, of course, to rush to him and help. And I knew what I had to do.

Racing across the pond isn’t required, but there will be a period this spring during which my presence in Jolly Old will be helpful. It isn’t at all the most convenient time for the lodge or for me, and might just make the lodge impossibility this year, but it is the best time for him. That’s the priority and that was my instinct in the beginning. Reason led me to worry too much about my summer job and become distracted from that priority, if only for a few days. I was distracted by that cultural conscience that tells us, especially those of us in North America, that we have a duty to our society to work hard and be busy beavers. There’s nothing wrong with working hard, but it’s not a priority that can compare to family or friends. My decision became very easy.

So I’ll be posting blogs from the UK for a few weeks this spring, later than I’d first intended, when I might have been on the mountain already, and I’ll be as happy about it then as I was the moment I stopped reasoning and trusted myself. Instead of hesitating in a sub-conscious nod to reason, I’m enjoying a life of making the right decisions without compromises. My bank account might suffer, but my heart is singing.

“Compassion is the basis of all morality.” Arthur Schopenhauer

I mentioned the other day that one of my favorite things about this time of year is that people tend to think more charitably, more compassionately about each other. We apply this especially to friends and family; those that love us back. But this is also a time of year during which we expand our compassion to include some that we rarely think about. This is a good thing, so I appreciate it in spite of disliking much of the commercial co-opting of the seasonal celebration or the religious manipulation that is embedded in the modern mythology.

I also suggested in the last entry that the best thing we might take out of this season is a commitment to carry this greater awareness of the world around us, and our heightened sense of compassion, of empathy, towards everything around us that compromises our world. And so this quote from Arthur Schopenhauer jumped out at me today.

I make a semantic distinction in my own life between ethics and morality, mostly because our culture seems to make a distinction as well. Not that there is anything wrong intrinsically with the concept of ethics; it’s a fine concept when you take the word back to its etymologcal and philosophical roots. But our popular culture has co-opted the word to become something linked to the law, to a subjective approach to ‘right’ or just behavior, and that definition allows those who enjoy manipulating the law or codified ethical standards to their own ends in order to circumvent what is ‘right’. If it’s not illegal, they argue, then it must be okay.

This isn’t the fault of the word ‘ethic’ of course, and discussion of systems of ethics in the world of academic philosophy are still often very pure, but I don’t live in that world. Because I don’t, I prefer the term morality in that it has a different connotation. It refers to an over-arching sense of what is right and wrong in the absence of loopholes and with a more limited subjectivity. And that appeals to me.

Not that morality doesn’t have connotative quandaries of its own… When we think of morality, we often immediately make a connection to religion and, if you know me, you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I believe in religion not at all. But I’m more willing to tackle that semantic paradox than I am to try to explain the etymology of the word ethics. And I like the way it ‘feels’ more too. It feels more organic to me, more easily internalized.

So, all of that babble behind us, we come to the quote itself; that the foundational cornerstone of morality is compassion. In other words, if we are capable of understanding the difference between right and wrong, if we are motivated to act according to what is ‘right’, it is because on some level we are compassionate. That is to say, we are willing to think of other humans, of other creatures, of our environment and biosphere, as beings or systems at least as worthy of our consideration as ourselves. Perhaps even more worthy in some instances. That is the essence of compassion: To understand that the ‘other’ is worthy of consideration in any calculation in addition to our own considerations.

That’s the power of compassion. It doesn’t over-rule self-consideration or even suppose that doing that would be appropriate – it just suggests that all of the agents in a given system are worthy of consideration when we are interacting with them. Compassion suggests that we think of others whenever we make choices that might affect them.

What we are generally not taught to think about in today’s competitive society is that compassion can be very profitable for all of the agents in a given system. Compassion tends to promote an atmosphere of cooperation, a desire to seek a win-win solution to any problem. American Nobel Laureate, mathematician and economist John Nash (see the movie A Beautiful Mind)  won his Nobel for a mathematical theory and proofs that showed that a cooperative approach involving mutual compromise and cooperation was ultimately more profitable for all involved, including the agent that might have ‘won’ in a more competitive scenario. It just plain makes sense.

And if all of the logical reasons don’t do it for ya, just try it for a while and see how much better you feel about yourself. Use the ‘feel good’ excuse unashamedly. Acting out of a place of simple compassion feels damned good in spite of the minor sacrifices it might entail from time to time, and those sacrifices diminish quickly as you get into it. One of the things that most people enjoy about the Christmas process is giving gifts to others as opposed to getting them. Imagine being able to give consistently, in small and large ways, every day. This doesn’t mean making yourself broke doing it (although I highly recommend that if you want to be really daring), but it can be as easy as the concept of giving dignity to people by treating them with respect.

So please, consider making compassion the cornerstone of your moral, or ethical, system of behavior. Think of others when you have to make a decision; just be aware of how your actions might affect the world around you. Embrace compassion as a way to see the world and watch the world change within your eyes.