Sustainability: Suffering

This has become quite a buzzword of late, in discussion of environmentalism, economics, you name it.

In my ongoing endeavor to quantify my emotions and perceived "needs" I was mulling over the idea of sustainability as it relates to suffering.

We've all heard stories of people lifting a car off of a trapped person, or other miraculous and normally impossible feats when emergency need arose. They were able to endure, survive and accomplish something normally impossible - but not for a prolonged period of time. They had to lift it and get the job done in a serious hurry, cause they certainly weren't carrying it around like that while they shop for groceries or try on several pairs of shoes.

But of course we all endure any number of stresses on a daily basis, for years and years. Some of those may make themselves mainstays for the majority of your life.

So different stresses have varying levels of sustainability.

Some are, some simply aren't.

And different people have different levels of strength.

So how do we determine what is sustainable for us?

Some things, like carrying cars, we are physically unable to do for a long time, so clearly it is unsustainable. Other things we may be able do for a long time and still survive, but it would be unhealthy to do them: smoking, doing drugs and eating junk food for physical examples. Many people do one or all of these for years without dying. But that doesn't mean that they are good to do and cultivate in your life.

What about emotional stresses like abusive relationships, energy draining jobs, unhealthy social boundaries, loneliness, etc?

Most of these have a fairly subjective assessment of stress level and are not conveniently quantifiable so as to render the answers clear. Most of the time we decide what we consider sustainable for ourselves and build our own arbitrary boundaries to enforce those decisions. The apparently random times that one person says "I can't ____" and the next person presses through the unthinkable can be befuddling.

Myself and another mom friend of mine (who has also been dealing with health issues) have regularly come to a place of Redefining Can't. It's become a buzz-phrase for us.

9.75 times out of 10, oh yes you can, like it or not!

When you say, "I need a break," from a task, stress, situation, person, you are deciding that boundary. Maybe you could take a lot more. Maybe you think you can't. Usually you can, but should you? I have no idea. Often it seems that break can be life saving. Sometimes pressing through is invaluable for building character. Sometimes pressing through only hurts yourself and others involved. Oh for a clear outline to know when to say when!

I have seen this in other's lives, where a situation in their life that was unsustainable (in the "I can't bear this" sense, not the I-will-die-without-water sense), eventually exploded quite messily, after they had toughed it out for longer than most would expect. In the end, they acted very uncharacteristically to satisfy these felt needs that they had denied for too long, apparently.

I want to avoid this, but I also don't want to be indulgent while using this 'fear' for an excuse.

I want to have healthy sustainable boundaries, that are willing and happily ready to be sacrificial when it is appropriate and right, and doesn't make a martyr of one's self unnecessarily.

God, give light to my path, and give me a good strong fence within to play and live!

Slave or Free Man

We all serve somebody. Larry Norman says so. I think he's right.

Just today Chris and I were talking about parenting in this light.

When you have kids, you sign up for slavery, as a radio commentator put it. Now, I would never trade this or go back. But as he heard in a radio show this morning, men are slaves to work to fund the lives and provision of their families; women are slaves to the family and home. They are on a pager 24/7, never off-duty, never on vacation - your time is no longer your own. You are always on the clock.

I heard a preacher say that a fundamental essence of our nature is our hatred of being told what to do. Five year-olds do not have the monopoly on this reaction; it is common to mankind. We have our own will, our own ideas and plans, and we want to do what we want to do, how we want to do it. When another will crosses that, we bristle. We don't like it. When our schedules and to-do lists are made for us, when the content of our life and time expenditure is decided for us, we don't like it.

This is one type of slavery, if you will.

Here is another:
It seems the vast vast majority of humanity are slaves to vanity, myself included, as my head hangs low with shame. Vanity in many forms, but all vanity in the end. By Vanity I simultaneously include and infer love of self and futility. I find the one leads to the other rather naturally.
The felt need to impress another human with our own coolness, superiority, or acquisitions and the lack of desire to please God, and more so the lack of fear of God, result in such a wealth of evils and waste. Years and years of millions of lives that amount to a landfill of time.

Maybe I should hold my tongue and not write when I'm this tired? Am I too bold? Meh.

We make ourselves slaves to money, to pride, to people-pleasing.
There is a slavery of service one could submit themselves to that holds monumental virtue, but it doesn't see the droves queuing up at the Lifestyle Line that the others do.
Why? My oh my, we are wickedly evil.

Parenting is a service of this virtuous variety, but it shouldn't end there. May this merely be for me a springboard and training ground to become a true self-pouring servant of God and his kingdom, embracing the least and being a blessing to true need and true lack.

Imagine now, if truly, you didn't care what was thought of you:
if someone thought you were attractive
if someone thought you were smart
if someone thought you had a nice house
if someone thought you were talented
if someone thought you were strong

It would be very freeing.

I heard once, and loved it ever since:


A man is free not when he lacks nothing,
but when he needs nothing.

Perfect Paradox

Deep Thoughts, with Jen Dandy.
Installment #2
a mere 10 months after the first episode.

I played a ceilidh last night. Mar is dual dom, I managed to omit supper from my getting-ready regimen. So I stopped at a grocery store that was on the way, and thought, I'll grab something quick. I found a little serving bottle of chocolate milk (they didn't even have the plain milk I was hoping to get), and a little insta-lunch of Stackers.

I don't usually get this kind of stuff. As much as possible, I try to not eat processed food, except for flour and dairy products. I had never had one of these Stackers things. Somehow I managed to turn it into a philosophical experience and an opportunity to pontificate.

It was so perfect. I'm not at all saying that I enjoyed it that much, rather I mean that I was amazed by this hermetically sealed, formed plastic, formed cheese, pre-prepared insta-meal. Everything was perfectly counted out; there was a perfect number of crackers to pressed meat rounds and cheeses, sitting neatly in their perfect little divided plastic sections. Not a cracker was broken, nor crumb astray. They were all formed to stack on each other in perfect little piles. There was no evidence of the stink and squawk of the turkey who gave his life for my lunch (this isn't a post about animal rights, if you were getting worried).

We also like things like this lovely shelf. I evidence this fact by the booming business of organizer products and proliferation of Neat shows on HGTV, TLC or whatever.

We have manicured lawns, impeccably mastered music recordings, tidy rows of matching boxes/baskets in our basements/closets/shelves. We all have antibacterial hand wash that so any bacteria that manages to float over and touch us will get the KO. Lets have perfection on the molecular level! Lets even program our sperm-egg combos while we're at it.

We want perfect teeth (bleach 'em, paint 'em, align 'em), perfect skin (treat it, cover it, shave it), perfect moods (we'll drug you if you're not), perfect partners (we'll divorce you if you're not).

Everything! From the font and finish of a book cover to a woman's Perfecting Concealer, everything has been thought of and somehow "improved" from its natural or former state.

And yet...

We are a bottomless pit of desperate filth on the inside and more or less content to deny our state of tarry blackness.

It reminded me of this verse, Matthew 23:27 "Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men's bones and everything unclean.

I heard this quote, and will sum it up like this:

Isn't it ironic that at the end of the bloodiest century in the history of world, namely the 20th century, where we've seen the Holocaust of 6 million Jews, 20 million in Ukraine under Stalin, 50 million in China under Mao Zedong, 20% of Cambodian population under Pol Pot, 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda, just to start, that you find in the universities now a denial that there is anything called evil? And still people will maintain that one doesn't need salvation, just education.

I'm gonna go out on my uneducated limb and say that I bet most of these perpetrators were educated people.

We need Jesus. Plain and simple. We are hopeless left to ourselves. We are whitewashed tombs of rot and stench with no good of our own. Our pretty facade deceives only ourselves.

God is not fooled.

If there is a moral to my story it is that.

My primary observation in writing this was the pure irony of how perfect we hope to make our immediate world, or own personal environment and situation, and yet how deathly horrid we are under our bleached teeth and ironed shirts, to the end that we have a murderous and suicidal love affair with sin, and the denial we live in about this hypocrisy.

Deep thoughts, #1

this foot


is the same foot as was felt and described in this, and in this prenatal post ? That was little Niamh stretching her yet-to-be-exposed-to-the-world legs.

How totally amazing. Just hit me. Life is so amazing.

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I'm starting a new segment that will recur in this blog. Here is the first installment.

Deep Thoughts, with Jen Dandy*

"According to research from Columbia University, children who eat dinner with their family on a regular basis are 60% less likely to smoke cigarettes, 50% less likely to use drugs, and 66% less likely to drink alcohol."
Interesting. I don't think this is the whole picture by any means, or full reason behind these children leading healthier, less substance-abusive lives. I wonder what else was different and common among these homes, in the lifestyles and beliefs of the parents, who all ate together. What else did they do differently than the other half-ish of the population? What fundamental belief systems, of which eating together was just one expression, were in place, and what other habits were factors? Hmmm...
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*I've noticed two major components to humour. Timing, and understatement. Don't overexplain something. Leave some tidbit to be assumed by the reader. I'm about to drain any potential humour out of this by ignoring that. Jen Dandy is a double reference. It rhymes with Jack Handy, from SNL, and sounds a lot like jim dandy, an expression we always used back home, which means something that is notable and exceptional. Aren't I witty? It's awe-inspiring. Where do I come up with them, I really don't know.

slow down and smell the dream

I have a few reflections, but they are all in their intellectual infancy. Thoughts for which I haven't taken the mental time to explore their applications and implications or let the m germinate to follow through to any conclusion. So I'll just see where the clicking typing keys take me.

Both came from things recently heard on CBC. I'm afraid this is gonna turn into a really long post. Oh well!

So there was a study done for the purpose of marketing research that explored how people think differently whether in groups or alone.
(Of course) They found there to be quite a difference. One of the things they did was to ask them to come up with a list of, say for example, cartoons, as many as they could think of in a given period of time. In groups, people came up with WAY fewer than the people who were left on their own to think. Now of course there was more to the study, but some of the conclusions they discussed were how when alone, people think more creatively than they do in groups. Ideas tend to be debated/argued/discussed in groups. Now mind you, this certainly has its place, but that alone time is where people's minds really go somewhere new (in that new-to-them kind of way, since there is nothing truly NEW under the sun... everything is something else rehashed or totally regurgitated somehow.) That the degree of focus was so increased when alone, that the creative areas of the brain were ignited in solitude.

And it reminded me of a story about the Mendelssohn siblings, Felix and Fanny. Around 1827, the plays of Shakespeare were just being translated into German. Well, with similar reception to the release of new Harry Potter books today, the Mendelssohns jumped at the release of each new Shakespeare play. They loved them to pieces, and devoured them voraciously. They were around like 14/15 (Fanny) and 17 (Felix) yrs old at the time, if I am remembering correctly. So one summer afternoon, Felix and Fanny had just finished reading A Midsummer Night's Dream, and they said to each other, Hey! I've got the coolest idea! (Jenni paraphrase) Let's stage this play for our parents in our back yard! Oh ya! That sounds great!
Party on, Fanny!
Party on Felix!!
(and maybe they jumped in the air and butted chests....
or maybe not...)

So they set to work. Fanny started, I dunno, making costumes or something, and Felix went inside to his room, and for the next however long, spent his free time composing "A Midsummer Night's Dream", the symphonic piece as a soundtrack to their performance, which would be executed by neighbourhood kids and/or Felix's buddies. Now, maybe you haven't heard this piece, or it has been a while. I recommend taking a refresher listen to it if you are able to. If you listen to it again with the contextual knowledge, that he was like 17 years old, was doing all this for FUN for a backyard play he was putting on with his little SISTER... I'm sorry, but it blows one's mind. The endless streams of creativity, of TIME and planning, simply giving your mind time to wander and explore polyphony, WORK that went into creating all the intricacies, both melodic and harmonic, the arranging, orchestration... unreal.

Who among us knows a 17 year old on the PLANET right now that would bother his bum to spend that much mental energy and time for something like this? Nobody. Our societies have changed to the point that this just wouldn't happen anymore. If I am not too bold in saying so, I would say that people are so accustomed to overstimulation, that we can no longer sit in solitude and quiet, and be alone with our thoughts and creative potential in the way that other eras and peoples have done. I would also argue that this has had and is currently having TREMENDOUS impact on the quality and nature of the entire society, individually and corporately. And like I've said before, if I am pointing fingers, you needn't worry, there are plenty pointing at me too. I am fully aware of (and annoyed by) my near-constant dependance on stimuli, be it cds or radio playing, internet, phone, you name it. Something is almost always going.


Secondly:
A Grecian writer, who was being interviewed, talked about the nature of vision. He explained that one of the primary ways the eye identifies the identity of something is by travelling to its edges and finding out, where does change occur? Where is the distinction between and how is it distinguished from and by whatever is around it? And this is part of how our brain/eye team discern what it is we are looking at. Find the boundaries, and you will better know the nature of what you are observing.

And my mind immediately applied this to a spiritual identity. There is so much blending in to the ways of the world these days, where is the Church's (and Believer's) line of distinction, and how does that identify us, how does it distinguish us from what surrounds us, and what does it say about us?

It reminds me of a sermon I heard that stuck in my head from my childhood as it was included in one of my favourite songs at the time. I am pretty sure it was Paul Cain speaking. Excerpts from it included: that there be a wall of separation built, a line of demarcation to come into existance... for there to be "some kind of a definition that this is sin, and this is righteousness, or this is precious and this is vile. But the Church has LOST this kind of distinction, She has no wall of protection. "
One of our biggest markers is supposed to be this:
John 13:35
"By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.”
But that's not the whole stew. There are more ingredients, as we don't take one verse and make it the whole picture.
So I'm left to ponder, where are my edges? Where do I shmear seamlessly into the world, and where is the godly demarcation? (I'm hoping there is, SOMEwhere... I don't want to be a compeltely impressionist watercolour person... or pastel drawing that a kid got a hold of... sorry.. arty mind wandering there... show of hands for all who followed my imagery - - - Good job!)

The middle of something is not as definitive as its edges. The middle might be generic. But the edges are so telling. I don't know how to articulate all that is rolling around in my thoughts, so with that, I'll give up and leave it with you. What do you think? Interesting, though, to me.