Thursday, 22 January 2009
2009
"Scott took LITERATURE so solemnly. He never understood that it was just writing as well as you can and finishing what you start." - E.H.
Tuesday, 13 January 2009
thoughts...
ca fait longtemps.
there's a lot that i need from me in 2009 ("resolutions", if one must bandy the word about), but that's not what i wanted to write about today. well, maybe one of them: believing the best in people. giving them the benefit of the doubt. acknowledging their imperceptible trials. just... being about faith. faith in people. my big '09 project. and it will not come naturally to me, but i really want to try this year -- and moving forward. i do. i've realised how important it is; what a difference it can make. and how much courage it takes -- and how much it engenders in return.
i don't remember who said "the world is a fine place, and worth fighting for". i guess it's been repeated so often that it sounds trite now. which is unfortunate. but it is just the frame of mind that i'm trying to get myself into.
with everything that has been happening lately -- with all the beggars and homeless people i see, and with gaza and the congo and somalia and sudan and burma and pakistan/india, and christians and christianity, and religion as a general concept, and the economic crisis, and the fact that mom's miserable, and just... the world, the news... it's so easy to be OVER IT, you know? to think, "well, what's the point?". maybe this is life -- like, definitively, this is life. that there HAS to be shit mixed in -- always has been, and always will be. that maybe the "conservation of energy" principle extends to global, human misery: "suffering cannot be created or destroyed, only transferred from one form to another". so you put out a fire here, and then one starts there and we pass our lives chasing our tails. MAYBE. i can't rule that out.
what's more important though, i think, is intent. the aggregational intent of all living people at any given point in time. and the big thing is to believe that it is good. and that when it isn't, that there's a justifiable reason for any mal-intent.
i've been thinking a lot about the news. how it's almost always miserable. MISERABLE. (no news is good news, right?) and it's easy to get down on that when, in fact, this speaks pretty powerfully to the goodness of people. news are worth reporting largely because they're aberrant. that's what makes them NEWS. that's what makes people pay attention. so the fact that news is largely negative... i don't know. it makes me think that people might have it right; that all this madness still stirs up something in our collective conscience. so maybe the fact that bad news is reported consistently, repeatedly, day after day, year in/year out is not the worst thing. the fact that it exists -- the mess that has happened to warrant it -- is undoubtedly regrettable. but that's not my point. i guess the trick comes in identifying the critical point at which bad news crosses over from being an unfortunate part of our existence that nevertheless speaks to our ability to feel outrage, and instead becomes white noise -- something we've heard so many times spun in so many different ways for as long as we can remember that it becomes what life is to us. it becomes the background of to our lives' tapestry and we get to a point where, if we're honest, we admit that we would, perhaps, want to care. but we've forgotten how. and that is the downside to all the negative headlines i'm reading now: they're irking me less and less as time goes by. and it's great that people still care enough to report them but, oh... i don't know.
but i digressed. EVERYBODY IS DOING THE BEST THEY CAN. that was the point of this post. that is the awareness i need to carry with me this year. constantly.
everybody is doing the best they can.
(am i?)
there's a lot that i need from me in 2009 ("resolutions", if one must bandy the word about), but that's not what i wanted to write about today. well, maybe one of them: believing the best in people. giving them the benefit of the doubt. acknowledging their imperceptible trials. just... being about faith. faith in people. my big '09 project. and it will not come naturally to me, but i really want to try this year -- and moving forward. i do. i've realised how important it is; what a difference it can make. and how much courage it takes -- and how much it engenders in return.
i don't remember who said "the world is a fine place, and worth fighting for". i guess it's been repeated so often that it sounds trite now. which is unfortunate. but it is just the frame of mind that i'm trying to get myself into.
with everything that has been happening lately -- with all the beggars and homeless people i see, and with gaza and the congo and somalia and sudan and burma and pakistan/india, and christians and christianity, and religion as a general concept, and the economic crisis, and the fact that mom's miserable, and just... the world, the news... it's so easy to be OVER IT, you know? to think, "well, what's the point?". maybe this is life -- like, definitively, this is life. that there HAS to be shit mixed in -- always has been, and always will be. that maybe the "conservation of energy" principle extends to global, human misery: "suffering cannot be created or destroyed, only transferred from one form to another". so you put out a fire here, and then one starts there and we pass our lives chasing our tails. MAYBE. i can't rule that out.
what's more important though, i think, is intent. the aggregational intent of all living people at any given point in time. and the big thing is to believe that it is good. and that when it isn't, that there's a justifiable reason for any mal-intent.
i've been thinking a lot about the news. how it's almost always miserable. MISERABLE. (no news is good news, right?) and it's easy to get down on that when, in fact, this speaks pretty powerfully to the goodness of people. news are worth reporting largely because they're aberrant. that's what makes them NEWS. that's what makes people pay attention. so the fact that news is largely negative... i don't know. it makes me think that people might have it right; that all this madness still stirs up something in our collective conscience. so maybe the fact that bad news is reported consistently, repeatedly, day after day, year in/year out is not the worst thing. the fact that it exists -- the mess that has happened to warrant it -- is undoubtedly regrettable. but that's not my point. i guess the trick comes in identifying the critical point at which bad news crosses over from being an unfortunate part of our existence that nevertheless speaks to our ability to feel outrage, and instead becomes white noise -- something we've heard so many times spun in so many different ways for as long as we can remember that it becomes what life is to us. it becomes the background of to our lives' tapestry and we get to a point where, if we're honest, we admit that we would, perhaps, want to care. but we've forgotten how. and that is the downside to all the negative headlines i'm reading now: they're irking me less and less as time goes by. and it's great that people still care enough to report them but, oh... i don't know.
but i digressed. EVERYBODY IS DOING THE BEST THEY CAN. that was the point of this post. that is the awareness i need to carry with me this year. constantly.
everybody is doing the best they can.
(am i?)
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