Note: (Musing follows)
Author Notes about this Blog
This blog was set up originally simply as a file deposit for musings which I sent out to friends. Somehow a lot of people managed to find the URL, and that is ok. Since the blogs were not originally meant for general distribution most have not been carefully edited. I may go back now and do the proper editing. I have recently published a book titled: The Meaning of Life. Anyone interested can find it listed in Amazon.com under the author name Reid S. James. There is a description of the content along with the listing. It was published in late October 2013. Any income from the book will be donated to various 501 category charities. Given the nature of the book, to do otherwise would be hypocritical. Given the original intent of this URL I have never provided an opportunity for any response to these musings. I think I will leave it that way as I don't have the time for a lot of responding to comments by others. These musings are written as food for thought, and do not purport to be anything other than what the blog implies: personal musings. Were I to personally know many of you who visit this URL I sense we would have a lot of engaging conversations. There are too many now for that to be practical.
Acquired Insights
New Year's Day is always special to me. That is the day I sit down and type out my thoughts about where I am at in life, where I want to get, and how to get there. Maybe the first insight I gained early on in life was that we need start with long term aspects of life and work back to short term plans of action. Early on thoughts tend to be mostly of materialistic and social goals. That's ok. Most kids have little and want more, not just things, but power over their lives, recognition, and achievements of varied sorts. The outside world seems so huge when young. Later in life, when we return to our place of youth, everything seems so small. Our world got bigger, we learned to see the bigger picture. My parents, especially my father, were not the type of parents who attempted to dictate every aspect of my life. They parented by example, and pretty much let me be myself. Still, youth is a period in which much of what we think and do is dictated by others. That is all good too, since at that age we need some sort of structure to such bewildering inexperienced aspects of life.
All of us are unique individuals with unique personalities and talents. For us to achieve contentment we need, once reaching mid teenage years, to begin to understand that personal satisfaction in life comes from being our unique selves. Everything we had been taught in our formative years needs to be reexamined, and we need reach our own conclusions about all aspects of life. Almost all progress in human life over the years has come from those who dared to be different. It seems a mistake for us to allow ourselves, from young age on, to become too much of a social butterfly. When this happens, instead of being ourselves we become copycats of societal norms. So I learned early on that for me to feel comfortable and contented with myself, I had to be myself, do things my way, go at my own pace, and head down pathways of my own choice---with one important caveat: whatever we do, it ought to meet the demands of the Golden Rule. When all is said and done, that principle is the universal human ethical guideline. No parent can give a more valuable lesson to a child then to live their lives as a parent by the Golden Rule. Countless times I saw my parents in a position to use others to gain something for themselves and they never would. As a child this embarrassed me. We see, as a child, many others bulldoze their way to power, money, titles, social positions, etc. by trampling over others in their way and being cruelly intolerant to those different from the norm. I remember so many occasions when I would say to my father, "Why can't (I or we) do it?" And he would always say, "Because that is not the way we live our lives". And whenever I would behave in ways which were outside the Golden Rule, my mother would plead with my father to punish me, but my father would invariably say: "He knows right from wrong and he has to figure out to what extent he is going to do right rather than wrong." At least with me this worked. I would then spend time thinking about what is right and what is wrong, and why, rather than be angry I was being punished for how I wanted to behave.
So early on I learned to formulate some ethical standards and found the strength to dare to be different. These two are inherently bound together. And if we do not keep them bound together we can never be truly contented. I have gone through life in various capacities, and varied settings, with all kinds of people---from every race and culture---and I have yet to find people who reached much contentment in life by trampling over others, or failing those for whom they are employed to protect. Every day I had to spend around such people in social or job situations was an annoying day. They see everything in terms of their own advancement, in terms of their own gain, and manipulate others to achieve some further advancement goal---usually related to money, power, popularity, or titles.
If we can early on dare to be different, and reassess everything we have ever been taught in our formative years, we begin to have a chance at contentment in life. To reassess we have to be a thoughtful observer of life around us. Any honest assessment of life reveals just how much we need to "learn to look on nature, not as in the hour of thoughtless youth; but hearing often-times the still sad music of humanity" (Wordsworth).
Unfairness in life was a relatively early realization in my young adult life. I remember back in my youth, when certain groups were rioting, and creating havoc, about rights they did not have, I felt annoyed, and like so many others, I felt if they did not like it here why don't they leave? It is hard now to realize what kind of logic drove me to feel that way. Certainly, for example, if I had to sit in the back of the bus because of my skin color I would be furious. I grew up a Baptist and went to church every Sunday, prayed for all sorts of things---some selfish and some for others---went to Billy Graham revivals, and felt moved to the message. A bit later when my country attacked Vietnam I was a true blind patriot, and no matter how many we had to kill to win, I was all for it---my country, right or wrong. God always blesses this country. Every President assured us of that at the end of every major speech.
But as the war dragged on I finally thought through a lot of things I had been programmed to believe. Things were not adding up. Via athletics and the places where I taught, I was thrust into daily contact with all sorts of others. It is hard to relate to 'others' rationally until we are faced by circumstance to help them become successful. The old saying that we cannot see the forest for the sake of the trees gets reversed. Suddenly, our indoctrinated beliefs about the nature of the forest are inconsistent with the individual trees. And the trees make up the forest. Suddenly we realize we can't help the people we are paid to help if we cannot remove the injustices being heaped upon them. Suddenly, for example, we can't find any real justification for why we attacked Vietnam. We lost that war and absolutely nothing bad happened to us by losing except 35,000 of our young men and 2 million of 'them' were dead. Suddenly we begin to realize that we, individually and collectively, are praying for God to correct things that we, if not individually, then collectively, can correct. God is not letting people starve to death, we are. God is not telling anyone to sit in the back of the bus, we are. God is not deciding to let children from poor families go to poor schools or get poor health care, we are. And so it goes, until our support of injustices becomes an ingrained habit, and like a pretzel twisted to fit inside our inherited or by marriage religion.
Clearly we have every right to battle for our own basic needs---good health care, good education, individual freedoms, good housing, good food, etc. No matter how unimportant we might be to a lot of others, we certainly are important to ourselves. Once arriving at a point where we understand the injustices imposed on certain others, we then have to think through our own sense of ethics. The Golden Rule makes it simple in almost all cases to understand right and wrong. We understand right from wrong, but many times we simply do otherwise for varied reasons. And most of the time when we go with the wrong it is because we get personal advantages by doing so. These personal advantages most often involve money, power, titles, recognition, social success, family values, and cultural or religious beliefs.
At some point in life I started to stop viewing life as evil vs good, with some sort of Heaven and Hell awaiting us at the end of life. We all need to believe in a lot of things, but the beliefs need to be reasonable, based on evidence and logic. Most everyone believes in God, and for me I decided to make such a belief simple: Wherever there is a gift given, there must be gift giver. All of nature is a gift and the giver I call God. There is no logical reason why we should decide that we know all that much about God. Whatever the nature of God, He/SHe is not some sort of half assed entity Who endlessly toys with us like a cat might do with a mouse before the mouse finally dies. IF God wants us to behave in a particular ethical way why would such directions be written by humans decades after some prophet had died? Why would all scriptures of major religions contain some things which eventually would be absurdities based on the ignorance of the times? Certainly, if God was going to write down instructions of behavior, seeped in rituals, and often performed in glittering cathedral-like structures, such instructions would not be delivered via genetic inheritance of religious beliefs. Where is the slightest evidence that God ever adopted any particular group of any sort as his favorite flock? There is no evidence for this in History. There is no real evidence that God selects or protects any human individuals from any of the pitfalls of life. After all, we all know some pretty bad things happen to the best of us, and some good things happen to the worst of us. Whatever we understand about ethics is an inherent attribute of human nature. Ethics is a genetic characteristic of the human species, albeit like many of our characteristics it must be developed, and the extent to which it is developed varies like every other human characteristic.
It is not that we know nothing about life on our planet because, as time passes, we begin to know more and more about the history of life on our planet, including human life. Clearly there is a process, known to us as an evolutionary process, which has been going on for millions of years. We certainly did not create or develop this process, so God must be the creator of this process. Viewing this process as a whole, why would we assume God would provide the human species with some sort of life after death? Or create diversity so that the results of such diversity would lead to some sort of Heaven and Hell. This lacks any logic. What we do know is that diversity is what drives the evolutionary process, along with chance, genetics, and environment. Thus, diversity has a purpose, and it is not to create candidates for some Heaven or Hell.
At some point in life I accepted, after much effort, to understand when enough is enough. We are raised in a culture which portrays more is better with no limits. But this, when observed more objectively, is often an illusion. Any kind of addictive behavior is self destructive. It makes little difference whether the addictive behavior is regarding recreational drugs, food, gambling, sex, money, titles, power, social life, work, exercise, sports, and so on. If it becomes addictive, by the very nature of addiction, it makes contentment impossible. Those who are satisfied with less are more content than those who have more and want more. All we can hope to achieve in life is some contentment. That is the goal, everything else is deception. Enough is enough is one of the best insights achieved, at least for me.
Duty done is satisfaction achieved. This is another insightful relationship we can gleam from this venture called life. In most cases, at least major cases, what is right according to the Golden Rule is easy enough to figure out, but doing the right is often a problem. We too often do the wrong and than rationalize our actions. We rarely fool even ourselves, however, and since it goes against human ethical nature, we can never really be content about doing the wrong thing.
While doing the wrong thing can often achieve short term selfish objectives with short term peaks of happiness, doing the right thing will pay off in the long run, while astute preventive actions can limit the damage any others can impose on us for doing the right thing. For a start here, if doing the right thing involves getting justice for others in some way, and does not involve personal gain for ourselves in any way, then we cannot lose the respect of anyone (maybe receive anger from them) and often one can, through publicizing the situation, force those who would do wrong, to back down. Once those involved in our daily lives understand our commitment to justice for others, especially those who cannot defend themselves, we will have built a support base for protection. There is a caveat here though. Be sure the support base is large enough to be effective. We may be able to win a battle with a few backers, but then there is the possibility we could win and others who sided with us, who we cannot protect, become victims of retribution.
While every person's situation in life is different, in many cases a game plan to protect doing the right thing can be utilized to form a protective wall around right over wrong. I spent much of my life in University settings as a Professor. There are ample enough activities going on in such a setting that are simply unfair to students. These injustices can be corrected by an individual Professor when two things are in place: there need to be strategically located points of protection from key administrators, and there has to be a willingness to utilize publicity and firm support from students on the issue in question. If this seems easy enough and obvious enough it really isn't. Unless one is tenured nothing can be done. But most get tenured at some point so then there is job protection for those willing to force justice to triumph. However, personal gain complicates the situation. Individual teachers can't get promoted, or gain bonuses, or gain additional duties and titles without administrative support right up the line. Most of the time any of these things can be blocked anywhere along the line. The truth here is that we cannot fight for justice, in most settings, without personal sacrifice. For example, in my case I was told one time; "You may have won this battle, but sooner or later, papers are going to come across my desk for my signature to give you advancement, a bonus, a new title, etc. and you certainly know I am not going to sign." This is where enough is enough comes in. It wasn't like I would not survive without a bit more money in the till. Willingness to sacrifice for justice depends on accepting when enough is enough in terms of our own needs.
The truth is that most of the time these sort of threats are bluffs. First of all, top administrators come and go like bad weather. And, in the case above, every few years the whole pay system gets reworked so that everyone gets equity pay adjustments up or down. Thus, in reality my pay would get adjusted upward every time because the adjusters are not figuring in who likes who. Those who fight for justice, especially for those who cannot themselves achieve the justice they deserve, are rarely destroyed career wise or pay-wise. As long as any such battles do not achieve personal gain for the battle we take on, the integrity of our actions cannot be attacked.
To restrict the length of this musing, I will now skip to the present time and my thoughts this past New Year's day and put this in another musing titled "New Year's reflective insights from a well-lived aged chap."
