The Angel of Perspective

Many of these entries are posted from a coffee shop called The Blackbird, which lies right in the heart of downtown Valparaiso, less than a block from the courthouse square. It's a bustling little place, domestic, unpretentious and homey. The tables are always full. It sells baked goods--muffins and scones and cookies and bagels--and of course coffee. Everything from the chicken soup to the cinnamon scones is made on-site. The dishes are washed by hand. All in all, it's quite 9-volt nomadic, a vision of the more local and down-to-earth future that we as a world are slowly drifting toward, as toward a forgotten continent. Ordering coffee? Here it's brewed into pump-thermoses. The customer gets a mug or a carry-cup, and heads over to the thermoses, as if to a town water-pump. Oh, and if one of the thermoses is getting low on coffee, could you maybe let one of the staff know? More Italian. More Hazelnut. More Kona blend. More Blackbird blend. More decaf. Otherwise, well, the staff is too busy to always be checking, so if no one warns them it's getting low, it's likely that, before they brew any fresh, that particular thermos will run completely out.

Well so there I was on Thursday morning last week, when a customer a little ways ahead of me in line ordered coffee. Mug in hand, he pressed at the button on the thermos containing the coffee of his choice--only to find that the thermos was empty. As it happened, he was perfectly cheerful about it. He simply let the cashier know, chose a different flavor, and as he pumped the button on his second choice, said to the customer behind him: "Well, if that's the worst thing that happens to me today, I'll be doing pretty darn good."

So that's the first part of the story. Then this Sunday morning at Sunnyside, when I got up out of bed, it felt unusually cold. Pretty much right away I knew what had to be wrong. I made my way downstairs into the basement in my slippers, cordless in hand. After locating the handy-dandy sticker on the side of the furnace "Emergency service? Call 464-HEAT." I punched up the number on my phone and left a message.

Twenty minutes later I got a call back. The voice was cheerful, phlegmatic, and in retrospect I guess it sounded a little familiar, but it wasn't till the repairman showed up at my door, tool box in hand, that I realized...

It was my fellow Blackbirder, the philosopher of coffee. He recognized me too.

"Hey you go to the Blackbird?" he asked.

"Yeah, and this is like not getting my Kona blend."

"Aw, it's a little worse than that, isn't it"?

I appreciated his sympathy, as well as his sense for ranking the severity of troubles, as well his familiarity as a spirit of cheer, all three of which helped reconcile me to the occasion; which is to say, the minor outrage of a cold Sunday waking and even (eventually) the two hundred dollar repair bill. 

Let's call him the angel of perspective.

The point for the aspiring 9-volt Nomad here is this: say you're presented with a difficulty in your circumstances or with a challenge in your pursuit of plain living: Let's say the garden-mud is all caked to your shoes and you forget and track it into the house. Or say you're at home on a cold day and feeling bulky in your wool sweater and you're eyeing the thermostat and just really wishing you could go against your energy-saving conscience and crank it way the heck up. Or say it's October and you're in the Northern hemisphere and the leaves are falling and your neighbor has a new leaf blower and you want one too, because raking with a rake stinks and who cares about the carbon or the consumption or the noise? In such moments, it helps to picture your own angel of perspective (whoever that may be) and remember what such messengers like to say:

"Heck if that's the worst thing that happens to me today, I'll be doing pretty darned good."

So my furnace went out today and had to be repaired. So what? I could have fallen down the stairs instead and broken my arm. Or I could have argued bitterly with a friend. Or I could have said something stupid to someone I admire, and lost his respect. Or heck my favorite coffee house could have caught fire and burned down. Furthermore, as far as material comfort and convenience goes, the 9-volt angel of perspective encourages me not to forget that I lead a life full of privilege; that the vast majority of the other seven billion human beings on the planet have way less than I do, and the vast majority of human beings in history have lived on far, far less. Even if I don't buy the leaf blower.

Then what happens to these complaints--about furnaces, a little garden-mud on the living room floor, a personal lack of leaf-blowers, etc.? Well, in the bright light of a wider perspective, they tend pretty quickly to melt away. Really they do. 

A coda: this week I intend to keep the Philippines in my prayers, and keep at least a few of the images I've seen of the typhoon and its aftermath in mind, as a sobering force. What's this or that annoyance that I will suffer today, compared to that immense sum of loss? Why not hold my tongue and choose to be content?

HB

Until November 16th!

Love What You Have, Be Where You Are

In a recent post--the one from last Saturday--I wrote this:

there is just no way that several billion people can live the lifestyle that I, for the last thirty-five years or so, have led.

Now those of you who know me personally, probably know that I'm in my forties. Actually I'm 44. So you might wonder where the extra nine years went, and why I didn't count them. I will tell you.

In the first place I cheated, giving myself an extra year or two of grace and youth. In the second place, I did not count the years I lived as a boy in India. Those years were different. Back then my family lived a lifestyle fairly close to the nine-volt nomadic ideal: low-energy, down to earth, elemental, local, big on imagination, big on community. For now I'll stick to the practical aspects of our lives, and what we had and didn't have in terms of conveniences. In short we didn't have much, at least in comparison to what we would have had back home in the States. No, even back then (this was the 1970's, and this was rural India) most Americans would have considered our lifestyle absolutely crazy for rustic. 

We had:

• no television
• no radio
• no car of our own
• no telephone
• no refrigerator
• no freezer
• no electric range or gas stove
• no toaster
• no blender
• no dishwasher
• no central heat
• no air conditioning
• And did I mention no TV? 

We didn't really travel much either, except in South India itself, and by train. Air travel was too expensive. We returned home to North America on furlough only once during the first eight years of my life. I knew my grandparents mostly by letters.

Then what did we have in terms of modern conveniences? Well, we did have electric lighting (although we also kept plenty of spare candles). We also owned a wringer washer, with a motorized agitator and wringer. This machine at one point required a spare part that my grandfather Brooten had to mail to us from the US. (We still have my mother's letters home to her parents, and one of my favorites is the one in which she attempts to diagram the necessary part. She is no artist, but she gives it the old college try.) My father also had a fine reel-to-reel tape recorder. I'm probably leaving out a few other things. But the point is, that my first eight years were spent in (wink wink) the DIREST TECHNOLOGICAL POVERTY.

But here's the thing. The actually-not-so-mind-blowing truth:

• I was happy there. 
• As a family, we were happy there.

Which in turn suggests to me that: 

• happiness and technological convenience are unrelated.
• happiness and having lots of stuff are also unrelated.

I like thinking about all this nowadays, because it comforts me. It comforts me because, well, when I write here about giving up things; when I blog about how so many of us (including me) are eventually going to having to make do with less, if the planet is going to be able to make a decent go of it; when I say hey folks we really can't go on like this; when I say all this, I sometimes wonder how it is that I know that I'm not being a stereotypical Puritan--all thrift and no fun, all preachiness and no joy, all thou-shalt-not and no go-get-'em, Tiger. But I know I don't have to worry about this. I know the nine-volt nomadic life is doable, and even adventurous and fun. I know that yes, it's a different life I'm recommending, but not a joyless one at all. And I know all this, not just from what might be wishful readings of present experience (i.e. the forays I've made in recent years into a more elemental hands-on life) but from a significant chunk of my personal past.

I'm going to say it straight out: Very few of the hallmarks of the modern lifestyle--from Internet shopping to "intelligent" dishwashers--really contribute to human happiness. Oh we may enjoy using this device or that service. It may be convenient to shop for lithium batteries from Amazon or pop a package into the microwave for something to eat. It may be fun to sit down in front of the TV and watch a favorite show, and easier to throw your wet clothes into the dryer than hang them up on a rack. But it doesn't make us one iota happier than we might be under a different regimen. No, other folks in the past found ways of being happy without these things, and others in the present day under different circumstances and conditions continue to find ways of being happy without them. Some openly despise the things we have. Some indigenous peoples literally flee from our stuff. 

Now, we could debate and consider about how far in the direction of downshift any one of us is obligated to go, or is ever likely to go simply by force of persuasion; but the general direction and necessity for change, at least to me, is pretty clear. And of course I hope that as time goes on, the same will become clearer to others as well. In the meantime, there is no need to fear. Really, none at all. Change toward the nine-volt is possible. A long slow drift toward it is already occurring. It can be embraced. It ought to be.


One final thing to note: As a boy I of course never had to make the transition to a more rudimentary lifestyle. I was just born into it. But my parents moved into it! In fact, they chose that way of life quite consciously; they knew a least some of what they were getting into, running off together to teach at a school for missionaries' kids in the South of India. Yet they made the shift, and made it handily. In fact, I think I am correct in my assessment when I say that those years they spent way out in the comparative boonies were some of the most satisfying years of their lives--personally, professionally, socially, spiritually, you name it. Oh, I know my mother missed really good Swiss chocolates and my father missed hearing the Minneapolis symphony, and I know that once I had sampled some of my grandmother's strawberry jam, I yearned for more. But really, we were happy without these things. We knew one of the great secrets of life:

Love what you have. Be where you are. Then you will be living the great adventure of enough.

HB


Until Tuesday the 12th! 

A Parable about Living Imaginatively

The whole thing started out as a funny miscommunication: the kind where, when you say "Yo Jennifer," the other guy hears something like “pro janitor” or, if you say “mezzanine” he hears “Pez machine.”

So one day, when Jordan Reynolds was talking to his boy, he used the words "somewhat strange."

Back then, Jordan was produce manager of the Bellevue Piggly Wiggly. His son, who was five, loved to come to work with him. He watched his father stacking the fruit. He watched the customers pushing their carts past the produce and sometimes (oh joy!) stopping and picking items out and bagging them up for purchase. The boy had learned to identify almost all the produce in the store. Even the seasonal and specialty stuff. The artichokes for instance. Scallions. Shallots. Pomelo.

“Kumquat strange?” asked the boy. Which Jordan found very funny, especially since the boy's facial expression in that moment communicated a kind of extravagant puzzlement. 

"He had this hilarious frown," Jordan says.

At first “kumquat strange” served as a consistent in-joke, a family phrase:

"We'd used it for comic relief," says Jordan. "Say after an argument. Or maybe during a traffic jam, to cheer up the situation." But then, after his boy fell from a tree and was killed, and after the subsequent break-up of Jordan’s marriage (it came only a year after the boy's loss)--after all this, Jordan Reynolds began to regard "kumquat strange" as a phrase to live by.

• He moved to an orange trailer and drove a small orange car. 
• He bought a dog and he named him Quat.
• He had Quat dyed orange and trained him to respond appropriately to the command: “Come, Quat!”
• He (Jordan) meditates an hour a day, visualizing himself as a fruit on a kumquat tree and visualizing every blood cell in his body as one of the cells of that kumquat. 
• He eats kumquats. Every possible day. Kumquat after kumquat.

To be sure, Jordan has experienced many obstructions and disappointments in the pursuit of his unique passion. Not once, but twice for instance, the greenhouse glass (of his backyard kumquat orangerie) has been broken by vandals. Also, just last year, his KUMQUAT vanity plate was stolen off of his car; it has not been recovered. And yes, five years ago, “Quat” the dog went lame in one leg, and eventually had to be put down.

In general though, what does he feel about his less-than-average life? Are the kumquats obtrusive? Will he ever get over them? Should he change fruits? Our conversations on these subjects have been deep and long, so I summarize his response:

First:  No one should dismiss his enthusiasm for kumquats as a “stage.” Kumquats represent a continuing era in Jordan's life, an era with its own wisdom, challenges, defeats and triumphs. If he were a painter, Jordan says, kumquats would be both the subject of his work as well as the paint. In other words the means of expression and the thing expressed. 

Second, to anyone who might consider his passion trivial or trite: who's to say that the kumquat (both as object and ideal) isn’t a fruit worth living for? Even dying for? Isn't every kumquat God’s handiwork too? Doesn't it amount to something like a beautiful bright letter in the greater text of life? Never never discount the importance of a single exuberant letter in that Text, Jordan Reynolds says. No matter how small it is. No matter what others say. No matter even whether it reminds you (somewhat mercilessly) of a brighter time.


HB

Until Saturday the 9th!

Less Is More Than We Think

We get used to everything; nothing stays entirely fresh. Not even natural beauty. Not even surplus. I've lived in places that could make your jaw drop, they were so beautiful. But then, after living there awhile, I found there was really no way to recover that initial awe, that first sharp print on the paper of the brain. I might have wanted to recover it, but I couldn't.

Or consider the written word. In information-soaked cultures like ours, a book (the actual item) is nothing special; it's a bagatelle to get your hands on one, a big so-what to own one. But in many parts of Africa, where access to the Internet is still a luxury, and where even books are rare enough, Anna Karenina might be something you'd literally hunger and thirst for, a story you'd walk miles through the dust and the heat to hold and to read. There's a marvelous address by Doris Lessing on this precise subject: a speech she gave on the occasion of receiving the Nobel prize. It is available here. 

It's probably an important adaptation--this ability to take things for granted, to allow certain overwhelming aspects of reality to depreciate in value in the economy of consciousness. We may like to picture ourselves living in a bliss of total consciousness, glowing diligently as angels with appreciation and gratitude, but I'm not so sure that in such a state, we'd get the laundry done. And the laundry does need doing!

Of course, as Lessing's address reminds us (with such beautiful cognitive intensity) the contrary premise is also true: that in the face of dearth or of a withering of supply, we tend to appreciate more whatever it is that's running short on us! We feel deeper gratitude for what we have less of.

• If you want to appreciate the beauty of your home, go camping for a week.
• If you want to increase your appreciation of travel, stay at home for a year.
• If you want to appreciate just what a privilege it is to have a car, ride on public transport for a month. 

There are a thousand variations on this theme. Consider living one of them out, and not just for the sake of your philosophical health, but for the sake of the planet too; for the sake of the re-balancing of the cosmic economy. 

Over and over again over the past several months on this blog, I've said that, if we want really to help the situation we're in (as a voracious species on a limited blue-green sphere), then many of us are just going to have to make do with less. I return to this theme so often because, after a great deal of reading and consideration of these questions, I've come to believe that it's the only strategy that offers any hope of success. To say it bluntly to myself: there is just no way that several billion people can live the lifestyle that I, for the last thirty-five years or so, have led; the ecology, as we know it, could not survive. So, for the sake of the planet, and for the sake of justice, I must change. I must change my life.

I suppose it goes without saying that most of us (including me) would like to avoid drawing such conclusions. Substantial lifestyle-change demands so much of us that, right away, by instinct, we're full of defensive questions: can't we just take the conventional cars and replace them with hybrids or electrics? Can't we just replace the coal-fired power plants with thousands of windmills? What about high speed rail, powered by solar? Such questions imply the hope that a greener world might be engineered without involving any pain for us, or any substantial loss at all in terms of living standard.

Unfortunately change without personal sacrifice is unlikely to improve the situation much. Consider the hybrid car. Yes once it's on the road, it consumes less carbon. Unfortunately, so much carbon is sunk into manufacturing a hybrid (the lithium batteries being the budget buster) that, before one of them can claim any credit against its conventional cousins (for saving any carbon at all) it has to be driven nearly 75,000 miles. There are similar limitations to almost every advance that the sustainability-tech movement has claimed or championed. Usually what we call green, is in reality only a little less brown, with a little camouflage of wishfulness included.

An even more serious problem, though, with the strategy of change-around-the-edges is this: what we save by means of efficiency in one area usually simply frees up more money for consumption elsewhere in our lives. So, say I've saved money on gas this year because I own a hybrid; well, I take that money I've saved and apply it to a new television set that I don't really need, or I replace the roof and the siding sooner than we would have otherwise. Since this alternate-vector consumption comes with its own environmental costs, it turns out that owning the hybrid serves no green purpose at all. There's a book on this subject. It's called The Conundrum, by David Owen, and it packs a lot of proof into a very small space.

I wish none of this were true, I really do. Life for us earth lovers would be a good deal less frustrating if we could just trust all this trouble to work itself out: trust the oceans to stay full of fish and the atmosphere to clear itself of carbon: trust the planet to supply us with fresh water and petroleum right on into the indefinite, ever-progressing future. But folks, it ain't gonna happen. Things are the way they are, and the system we live in is limited, not by the lack of human imagination or by a sudden down-sizing of good-old-fashioned Yankee optimism, but by the laws of thermodynamics and of mathematics, of geology and of resource distribution. We can't go on like this. We can't. What we need is a reconditioning of the human mind. And that, to say it again, begins with the acceptance that we just have to make do with less.

This can be depressing. But there's a hero to this story as well, a sort of knight that rides to our rescue: the realization that "less is more than we think." 

• What really matters to us, is what value our consciousness puts on a thing.
• Human consciousness tends to value precisely what is rare, what is limited in supply.
• Therefore, when faced with limitations and diminishings, we can deal with the change, because....
• Even as the supply decreases, the value of what remains to us goes up.
• We're proportionally happy with the remainder that we keep.

As a final thought, consider the ultimate resource contraction: consider what happens when we run short of time: I mean time with a capital T. The sensation of mortality. There are, after all, people who  know their time on earth is short: Older people, sicker people, and just plain wise people who have thought about mortality a lot. Now, many, many such people report that, in the face of the knowledge of the ultimate limitation, they savor every day all the more. Mind you, it's not that they wouldn't like to live in better health, or wouldn't like to be given a little more time, or even a lot more time to live! It's just that, now that they know and have accepted the truth (that their days really are numbered) they nevertheless deal with it, and find that somehow, remarkably, their flame of life burns brightly enough in spite of that knowledge, and yes sometimes even more brightly because of that knowledge. That flame seems to burn on a fuel of paradox and deliberate gratitude!

HB

Until Tuesday the 5th!