Weighing the Cost

 

Today in The Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan asks this very cogent question: 

"What does good nature cost you?

We should be able to conduct our lives without a constant air of menace."

For the record, menace is not limited to meaning a threat of some kind, but also, according to Dictionary.com, can connote an "an extremely annoying person." 

And "good nature," in case we've forgotten, is defined by Dictionary.com as 

"pleasant disposition; kindly nature; amiability." 

So to Noonan's question, "What does good nature cost you?," I'd like to add, "What does a demeanor, disposition and temperament of menace cost you?"

copyright Barb Harwood

Malcontentedness

 

Peggy Noonan has a good grip on the modus operandi of how self-righteous, intended-to-be divisive personal attitudes, and the oft-believed-as-truth personal opinions self-satisfyingly verbalized from them, are fed and enabled:

     "Americans have always loved conspiracies, it's in our DNA. When I was a kid it was the CIA killed JFK, Dwight Eisenhower is a communist, fluoride in the water is a plot. In our time this tendency has been magnified and weaponized by the internet, where there's always a portal to provide you proof."

     "Part of it is American orneriness--people enjoy picking a fight, holding a grudge, being the only person who really gets what's going on. Part of it is the sheer cussed fun of being obstinate. Some of it is committed and sincere--an ineradicable belief that established powers like to pull the wool over our eyes, a belief made more stubborn because sometimes they do."

Noonan also adds,

"...mainstream media has changed its nature" and become "openly activist...This too contributed to polarization."

The solution she proposes, when asked what could be done, sounds almost quaint:

"The only thing I could think of to help was keeping lines of communication up and the conversation going."

A tall order when, as she mentioned, people actually seem to enjoy complaining to the level that they tend, as I see it, to perceive their profuse and constant commentary as an art--an art they pride themselves on being quite good at.  

I posit an alternative solution, one I can't help understanding as being necessary for Noonan's "keeping the lines of communication up and the conversation going" in a more constructive manner. 

And that is for attitudes and motivations toward one another to change from a tribalist "us vs. them" to one of respectful civility, surrendering the needy groveling for affirmation through contrariness and "being right."

The solution also must surely entail the end to thinking the worst of people who hold a differing viewpoint, or who simply refuse to join in and agree. 

A rather tall order indeed. 

copyright Barb Harwood

Certain Kinds of Thoughts, Over Time, Can Harden the Heart

 

"To brood on evil makes the heart brazen..."

St. Mark the Ascetic (early fifth century), writing in                   On the Spiritual Law

The Meaninglessness of Life

 

The potential meaninglessness of life is exasperated by, if not entirely founded upon, the inane, shallow and inconsequential thoughts and biases we legitimize through an inordinate devotion of time and energy, and verbally expose in thoughtless arrogance. 

copyright Barb Harwood

To Live in Today

 

What if we reached a tipping point and finally saw, in astonishing conviction, that we must—even better, we can, live in today, meaning this very day, moment by moment until it closes and our eyes find sleep. 

This isn’t a living for today, as if the day were our taskmaster, but living in today, in the wisdom of God our leader and guide.

Every thought, then; every word spoken; every question; thinks, speaks and asks only in the reality and now of today. 

And what if we took memories, and allowed only the good and productive ones to accompany us into this day—not so that we can lament their being past, but instead to treasure as a buoy in our present. 

This buoy is not to tie our boat to, but to take hold of in the day in which we live in sorrow and fear of drowning. Its' beacon of lovely remembrance will save us from the undertow of woeful self-sabotage, and encourage us that this too—whatever “this” is—shall pass.  

And whatever has not been good, lovely, true, wise, kind, honorable, commendable and pure—in our past selves and others, and in past experiences—we leave behind because we have the freedom to. Not only that, but wisdom begs and advises it. 

This is a new and curious sensation, to go forward without the antiquated baggage and negative realities of the past. 

It would be wonderful, wouldn’t it, to see what this could be like? 

So then, let’s give it a try. 

Let’s find out and live only in today.

Copyright Barb Harwood

In Our Own Little Head

 

This morning, I typed the phrase, “in our own little head” into Google search.

This is the definition that came up:

“To be in your head usually means overthinking or overanalyzing a situation or behavior, constantly dwelling on the same thing over and over until your mind feels super cluttered. Sometimes, we all get stuck in our heads, but some of us do so more than others.”

I have been considering how being in “our own little head” relates to patience, and based on the above definition, while some might see great patience in spending oodles of time going over the same thought or situation, I see it as being an act of impatience if open-minded resolution or closure is not the motivation. 

That’s because impatience fails to do the patient act of objectively measuring our own role in the interactions with other people and organizations, and instead places everyone involved, including ourselves, within our own one-sided, self-centered and self-important perspective.

This results in quickly jumping to, and emotionally enlarging upon, if not unfair and warped conclusions, then certainly self-defeating and unproductive ones. 

Patience, on the other hand, takes the deep breath of setting aside one’s sensitive and insecure emotional state so as to thoughtfully and bravely consider true context, which can take time, requiring skills and maturity that develop in the course of months and years.

If that groundwork has not been laid, then of course we will be inept with, and perhaps entirely ignorant of, calm, measured responses and perceptions. 

After all, positive behaviors become habits the same way that bad behaviors do, and can become our default mode in the same way; the difference being productive outcomes.

When getting outside of our head is the norm, we can build healthy inner personal and outer interpersonal dialogues founded upon the reality of what actually took place and do so unthreatened by multiple viewpoints. 

Instant reaction is thus replaced by a slower right intake and careful recollection of all of the facts. 

David Baily Harned, in his book, Patience: How We Wait Upon the World, writes that patience is a “profoundly important defense against the distractions of dejection and sorrow and the frustrations that seem to have no end in sight.”

I love that concept of impatience leading to distractions: the stealing of our minds and hearts from what is good, right, lovely, pure and going well in our lives via the tunnel-vision of self.

“Through a forbearance that has no thought of punishment or revenge, those who are patient neither permit an injury to become an obsession even more painful than the original hurt, nor do they retaliate, which would cancel out the difference between themselves and those who harm them," Harned writes.”

Ultimately, I find the phrase “in our own little head” to be quite telling in the use of the word “little,” as little heads only have room for one person, and thus will be frequently impatient with everyone, and everything, else.

Copyright Barb Harwood

Our Perception of the Act of Waiting

 

David Baily Harned continues his dialogue on patience by exploring assumptions related to it, the first being how we perceive, and thus value or devalue, the act of waiting:

In the past, Baily posits, waiting was a virtue of strength, not weakness:

"How else can we allow the future to emerge? The patience that waiting entailed was a great human act because it summoned the most distinctive powers of the self to their finest expression--vision and imagination, faith and hope, courage and prudence, humility and love.

"Today waiting remains no less a part of our lives than it ever was for our ancestors. But our assumptions about human nature and fulfillment have changed, and therefore our attitude toward waiting has changed as well. We see it less often as an opportunity, more often as a diminishing of the quality of our lives, a deprivation enforced upon us by an unfriendly environment. If reality can be more or less equated with everything we can manipulate and control, then does not the need to wait suggest a failure in ourselves? We have not yet found our place in the sun, nor achieved the mastery of our surroundings. Far from being one of the great human acts, waiting simply testifies that we have not won our struggle with the world. It tells us less about our strength than our weakness and lack of invention."

Harned says the result of this negative view of waiting is that we arrive at the conclusion that

"...waiting means there are voids in our universe, holes and tatters in what is intended to be the seamless fabric of our activity, and so we must do something with these empty spaces. They must be filled. If they are not, we shall become anxious or bored, which is the matrix for all sorts of destructive behavior toward others and toward oneself. If waiting is pointless, where can it end except in boredom unless it is relieved? The name of such relief is busyness...

"Busyness is important for two reasons. First, it is a distraction, diverting our attention from the need to wait, and so it contributes mightily to our self-esteem in a world where human significance is equated with doing things...

"The second reason is the role of busyness in expressing an impulse deeply written into our culture: the desire to believe that, no matter what, everything is all right. Busyness allows us to forget that the ordinary course of human affairs involves the sapping of our energy, our growing dependence upon the kindness of others, the inevitability of waiting, and yielding to forces far stronger than our own. In the end, what keeping busy means is quite simply the refusal...to look reality in the face. But this is also to turn from God, who is the ultimate reality..."      David Baily Harned, in Patience: How We Wait Upon the World

The Unpopularity of Patience in Our Time

David Baily Harned, in his book, Patience: How We Wait Upon the World, notes that

"patience seems to have lost its power to reconcile and heal and comfort. In its truncated and withered form the virtue has been isolated from both theology and common experience--not to mention common sense."

Patience, Succinctly Defined

The following definition of the word "patience" comes from the book, Patience: How We Wait Upon the World by David Baily Harned:

"A person's triumph over all the diversions and afflictions that can test our powers of endurance, forbearance, and discipline."