Mistaken Sacrifices

     I thoroughly enjoy reading W. Somerset Maugham. In the preface to his “Collected Short Stories Vol 4.” (Penguin Books, 1973) he says that these “were written long before the Second World War and I should tell the reader that the sort of life with which they deal no longer exists.” Later he describes a hotel that “should have been a depressing place, but somehow it wasn’t; its quaintness saved it. It had a faint aroma of something strange and half-forgotten.”
     From detailed loving attention alone, Maugham is able to rebuild the irretrievable past, even for readers not yet born, nor ever having visited the places he describes. This brings to mind two of my favorite quotes: 
     "Anything will give up its secrets if you love it enough."     George Washington Carver

      "You learn about a thing ... by opening yourself wholeheartedly to it. You learn about a thing by loving it." Barbara McClintock - Nobel prize-winning geneticist

     How radically different than the life of today's health-care providers and first responders: police, firefighters, paramedics & prison guards. It's shocking how much these fine people knowingly, but especially unknowingly, sacrifice. By maximizing their external actions ('doing'), they almost totally neglect their inner life ('being'), all because of a collective, unexamined ethos of 'traditional masculinity.' Anything 'soft', like self-reflection, self-compassion & appropriate self-care, is rigidly excluded to avoid any suggestion of weakness or lack of competence. This bravado continues despite a high incidence of primary & secondary traumatization, burnout, PTSD & suicide. 
     Socrates knew 2,500 years ago that the unexamined life is not worth living. Why do so many of us have to crash & burn to find this out for ourselves? How long will it take these professional cultures to intentionally evolve toward a wiser worldview?

     Traditional masculinity: http://healthyhealers.blogspot.ca/2017/05/traditional-masculinity-in-health.html 
     Sanity: http://www.johnlovas.com/2013/02/sanity-diligent-introspection-in.html

Tree, Forest - Which Do We See?

     Traditional aboriginal cultures live Thich Nhat Hanh's "interbeing" - in profound relationship with everyone and everything ("all our relations"). Whereas industrialized people tend to be lost in a sea of seemingly unrelated, meaningless, arbitrary, random factoids.
     Anthropologist Edward T. Hall's 1976 book "Beyond Culture", contrasts the communication differences between such "high-context" and "low-context" cultures. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-_and_low-context_cultures
     Our education system, up to & including university, is embedded in our culture's communication style. We low-context, "nuclear giants" hotly pursue highly specialized narrow goals, and as "ethical infants," continue to be oblivious of our impact on our shared quality of life.

          "Learn how to see.
          Realize that everything connects to everything else." 
                                                                                              Leonardo de Vinci

     "To Western medicine, understanding an illness means uncovering a distinct entity that is separate from the patient's being; to Chinese medicine, understanding means perceiving the relationships among all the patient's signs and symptoms in the context of his or her life.
     From a biomedical viewpoint, the Chinese physician is assessing the patient's specific and general physiological and psychological response to a disease entity."
       Ted J. Kaptchuk OMD. "The Web That Has No Weaver. Understanding Chinese Medicine." Contemporary Books, Chicago, 2000.

     "In Indian mythology, Indra was a God who attached all phenomena with visible and invisible strands weaving together a universal net. Earth, trees, clouds, mountains, sky, passion, aggression, creativity, women, men, and children, all were connected in Indra's expansive net. At the intersections of these strands, Indra tied dulcimer bells. In that way, as one part of the net was pulled or moved, the bells would ring; when the sound of a bell was heard, awareness of interconnectedness arose becoming another strand of consideration in one's weave. When the bells were ignored, an illusion of separation and independence reigned; the outcome could be destructive, reverberating throughout the net.”
        W. Anne Bruce: "Abiding in Liminal Space(s): Inscribing Mindful Living/Dying With(In) End-of-Life Caring." PhD Thesis, University of British Columbia, 2002, p12

Public Gardens, Halifax, NS

Oceans of Choices

     We live in strange times: all manner of ideas & images, from all manner of people, are instantly available to even our youngest children. We are awash in choices, ethical dilemmas, global moral ambiguity, with eruptions of irrational violence - the swagger of the simple-minded.
     The web provides endless possibilities for causing ourselves and others suffering: violent porn, slick enticements to join violent extremist groups, instructions to make bombs, enticements to 'invest' life savings in crazy schemes, 'TV evangelists', online gambling, zealous testimonials for bizarre 'therapies', hair-raising testimonials against standard therapies, and every other form of psychopathology one can imagine. Opportunities to wallow in self-inflicted misery and to inflict horrific suffering on others seem endless.
     Mercifully, the web also provides access to decent, intelligent, evolved, well-meaning human beings, as well as the literature of the world's wisdom traditions. Should we choose to do so, we can find inspiration to grow in wisdom, instead of wallowing in self-inflicted misery.

               CHOICE ! http://mindfulnessforeveryone.blogspot.ca/2013/08/381-each-moment-new-beginning.html

Wisdom - our Only Remaining Taboo

     Situation comedies have for decades featured ridiculously immature adults - males and females. Reality shows are the same, but these supposedly "real" people in addition tend to have nasty attitudes. "Nuke them back into the stone age" movies make the most money. CNN drools over every violent incident. In a recent stand-up routine on TV, Chris Rock observed how women are just as happy as men to dance to outrageously misogynistic rap music - women and men in the audience laughed heartily. At the recent 72nd annual Golden Globe Awards, hosts Tina Fey and Amy Poehler asked a series of actors "Who would you rather?", giving them two choices of actors of the opposite sex. Every actor, without a moment's hesitation, picked one on live television.
     Media saturate our consciousness with good-looking, sexy, obscenely rich "role-models", most of whom act like 2-year-old sociopaths. People start watching violent, sexually-explicit music videos and other pornography from early childhood.
     Clearly, "anything goes" today. But no, not quite! Mention the word "wisdom", and people run away as fast as they can.

     Wisdom: http://mindfulnessforeveryone.blogspot.ca/2015/01/620-what-is-wisdom.html
     and: http://www.johnlovas.com/2012/04/psychospiritual-technologies.html

Stephen Alvarez, National Geographic   http://photography.nationalgeographic.com

Sadness & Lostness as a Mood; Lacking Meaningful Moral Values

     “this sadness and lostness as a mood … results from the inability of our culture, or certain segments of our culture, to confront the deepest questions about who we are: ‘I get the feeling that a lot of us, privileged Americans, as we enter our early 30s, have to find a way to put away childish things and confront stuff about spirituality and values.’”

     “This is a generation that has an inheritance of absolutely nothing as far as meaningful moral values.” David Foster Wallace 1993

       Dreyfus H, Kelly SD. All things shining. Reading Western classics to find meaning in a secular age. Free Press, NY, 2011.

Photo: kzaz2   dpreview.com