I Am Not My Friend

So that I have no reason not to write, I am going to answer a few of these questions this year.Here goes:

If you had a friend who spoke to you in the same way that you sometimes speak to yourself, how long would you allow this person to be your friend?

The answer to this question is simple. And yet it is not. 

The simple answer is this: I would not be a friend to this person for very long. I would be hurt. And hurt is not something I look for in friendship. I tend to withdraw from hurt.

The not so simple answer is this: I do not consider me a friend to myself. You see, I speak to myself poorly--and by poorly I mean down right mean, at times--because I know that, unlike a friend, I can never leave me. I have an expectation of at least a modicum of politeness from my friends. I think friendship deserves that. I want my friends to be honest--even brutally so at times--but I think it can be done in a respectful and kind manner. When I talk to me I dispense with the formalities of friendship. (Even as I wrote that last sentence I realized that honesty, respect and kindness are not the formalities of friendship, but rather the foundation blocks of friendship) Somewhere in the back of my mind I must think that I need or even deserve the negativity I spew at myself. As if I know myself better than my friends do. The truth is I only believe one perspective of myself if I can so denigrate me. It's a false perspective that I perpetuate by my own words.

It's time to look in the mirror and ask for forgiveness...kindly.

A VOW

I will keep your heart.
..because I want you..
I will seize your moments of doubt and fill them with praise.
..because you are important..
I will soften the blows and calm the skies.
..because your peace is my peace..
I will forget our mistakes and relish kindness.
..because swimming is better than sinking..
I will mend your clothes, bad dreams, and wounds.
I will love you and yours.
I will nourish our bodies and souls with the remedies I know.
..because pumpkin pancakes make everyone smile..
I will feed our minds and spirits with Word from above.
..because I know the plans He has for us..
I will cover you in prayer and angels until protection is yours.
..because, like hope, I believe in you..
I will help you find boldness in shadow and strength in dark days.
I will love you and yours.
I will squeeze you tight and whisper funny things.
I will fluff your pillow and iron out all the details.
I will remember your birthday and big days and bad days.
..I will mend you..
I will keep your heart so close to mine that one will not be distinguishable from the other.
..because I need you..

Where morality fails

Life tends to be an evolutionary tautology: that which survives and sustains itself (through fitness) is life, because life is, by definition, that which survives and sustains itself. Unfit ("maladaptive") life-forms eventually cease to bear offspring and slip through the cracks, leaving mere echoes in nature's graveyard. dead men tell no tales they'd say, though tales may be told of dead men. the same theme applies to ideas and character traits, doubly so if these are of genetic origin. Take morality and kindness, for instance.

Imagine a utopia where everyone in the population is kind to one another: when one falls, another steps in to help him up; trust is not even a word in their vocabulary because distrust doesn't exist so they've never had to define it! now introduce one schemer, someone who acts intelligently towards (solely) his own interest. The schemer will eventually game the entire population and if they don't learn to game the schemer (by becoming schemers themselves), they will be overrun. at the same time, if everyone becomes a schemer the population system starts to fail because a lack of victims means that schemes no longer pay off. neither of these extremes are sustainable. The former requires an absolute blissful ignorance (not likely), the latter becomes chaos (likely to fail)

One would think then that life may go on if civilization were to find a stable equilibrium, somewhere in between these extremes. one strategy might be to take the middle ground between morality and intelligence: you start off giving others the benefit of the doubt and treat them kindly, and reciprocate their reaction from then on. If they don't game you in response to your kindness, you trust them; if they game you, you game them back from then on. According the linked article, this middle ground between morality and intelligence, which lies very close to the heart of"fairness", is a golden rule for behavior, in a game-theoretic way. But in life there are no golden rules. Life's uncaring whims require a jeet kune do approach, a form of no forms and all forms whose roots lie in the golden paradox that "there are no golden rules." or as an older, wiser, less impulsive person might say: "even gold may erode with the ravages of time and circumstance."

It's not unwise to think that what should matter in determining the philosophy you apply to a situation is the totality of the situation at hand: all its specifics and all its context weighed together to devise the most efficient response. but efficiency is a dangerous word: it is always intelligent, but it may or may not be "moral". what happens when morality meets efficiency? can they be reconciled? what would be the essence of an efficient morality? We don't have to speculate, we can see it all around us: individuals banding together, exercising great kindness at local levels (family, friends, tribe, team, country) to advance their own cause but at the same time acting against the cause of others on a global level.

The truth is direct and simple: our own intelligence conspires with our circumstances to circumvent morality when it no longer yields a beneficial return. morality, it would seem, is situation-dependent. at some point it becomes un-scalable: the more people in a population, the harder it becomes to calculate an optimum solution for everyone and the easier it becomes to revert to self-interest.

Our chosen philosophical oxymoron of the day, efficient morality, would exist perhaps on the verge just before morality fails (as an adaptive strategy to life). Past that point lies a slippery slope to a cynic's Pyrrhic wet dream: an ocean of schemers.

The point of failure cannot be maneuvered solely by attempting to inculcate kindness in humans; a hungry man is an angry man. Biological impulse wins that race by a mile. We can, however, attempt to control the conditions that destabilize the verge IE to balance our behaviors we must attack the circumstances that generate them. in boring physical terms this means we must balance the supply and demand for resources by 1) controlling population growth and 2) working on new technologies to better provide (food, energy) for the population. this sounds neither noble nor glamorous, but it is necessary. If it's true what the cynics say -that moral actions barely exist outside the forms of a facade, a conspicuous commodity exchanged for kudos in the modern world- then as populations continue to grow, putting pressure on resources and making it impossible to provide for everyone, it is not improbable that we as a civilization are nearing a point where morality fails.

Some Thoughts

Feels so good to be back on blogger almost after 6 months. When i was in London, i use to work full time still had time to blog but after marriage, life has changed a lot. I have to take care of one more person- my better half. I am so lucky to have her in my life. This one year passed very quickly.

Back to the topic "Some Thoughts"

1. Things I'm not entirely sure how to pack include: a bowler hat.

2. Percentage of my floor I can currently see: 2%

3. My paper goods weigh disproportionately more than everything else I own combined. (But only as long as we're not counting the tree trunk I like to call a 'djembe.' Because it is a tree trunk.)

4. Why isn't my room packing itself? And paper work, why hasn't that been completed while I sleep? WHY,

5. If a pair of shoes are *perfect* for a number of outfits, but are also falling apart- do I bring them to Seattle because I want to look right or throw them out and figure I can buy a new pair when I get to the US? This is actually a serious question. Help. (Note, this applies to three pairs of shoes, all slightly different.)

6. I have sustained several mysterious injuries in the last week. The cut on my finger I remember, it was from paper cut, but the cut on my thigh? Seriously, how did that happen without my noticing?


7. Too many people to say goodbye to. So instead I'm hanging out on the internet. Productive!