Money and Haiti
Posted on | January 19, 2010 | No Comments
The BBC news this evening told me that $200 million had been pledged to Haiti by various foreign governments as aid and relief. The news anchor seemed impressed.
This effort is commendable. Yet it still adds up to about the same amount as three F21 fighter jets.
People, it may, once again, be up to us ordinary citizens to make all the difference. Please give.
Nothing is but thinking makes it so.
Posted on | January 13, 2010 | No Comments
Hamlet may have been reaching for some certainty when he said this line, but it still can guide us. Everything we think in response to an event is a construction that we are placing on that event or feeling. And it might be wrong.
If I feel I will die if I don’t buy a new car, then my thinking has made that so - not reality. If I feel my life is an empty failure then I’m presuming I can know the totality of effects that result from my life, which is arrogant, to say the least.
Yet, I can also choose to think happy, peaceful, or optimistic thoughts, even when faced with real disasters. Haiti is a disaster zone today; yet in that disaster we can see human caring, bravery, compassion and love. It’s up to us where we focus.
Love
Posted on | January 12, 2010 | No Comments
There are many things worth remembering, and one of these is that love can only come into a place of stillness within us. It cannot make itself felt in turmoil, because confusion is all we can feel at such times.
If you want love in your life you may have to practice stillness.
Anyone for cricket? A Metaphor.
Posted on | January 10, 2010 | No Comments
Every so often I read the British cricket reports, since it is the national game of my erstwhile homeland. This season’s matches against South Africa have shown an England side that has had some success, but is at the moment chiefly praised for its tendency to hang on, white knuckled, and force a draw in matches that looked as if they were going to collapse in defeat.
The British have been moved, relieved, and divided on this.
One camp snorts derisively at these failures to win, and calls a draw a feeble effort.
The other camp looks on these drawn matches as substantial efforts in their own right, where a team refuses to capitulate even when all hope seems lost, clinging on being seen as an achievement in its own right.
I am in this latter camp. Winning and losing are so black and white; while holding on and saving the day if one possibly can is much closer to one’s actual life struggle, and therefore has the greater power to move me.
Living is emphatically not a series of victories. It is a slow wearing down of the body as we move ever closer to extinction. When this happens we have some choices - we can give up and become helpless, perhaps. We can also choose not to give in, to say (in the words of the Guardian’s sports writer)
“No. No thanks. Not today. Not ever.”
Some so-called defeats turn out to be far more important statements about the resilience of the human soul than a mere ‘win’.
A Lost Joseph Conrad story…. wrestling with the past.
Posted on | January 9, 2010 | No Comments
Today I thought I’d post a few comments on a rather abstruse subject - Joseph Conrad’s story ‘The Sisters’. I choose it because it’s fairly clear that Conrad was using his story to explore some rather murky personal territory.
So murky was it that, in the end, he abandoned the tale. It was published as a fragment two years after his death.
It’s not much more than a fragment, really, but the edition that is prefaced by F. M. Ford is valuable because Ford was present when Conrad was first writing it, and has many important things to say about this posthumous Conrad volume.
The theme that might most interest Conrad fans is one that echoes through ‘Nostromo’ and ‘The Arrow of Gold’ - two sisters, and one man’s attraction to the second sister when feeling something very different towards the first. Ford refers to this as ‘incest’ although it stretches further than this. This is what we see in Nostromo’s struggle when he is engaged to the virtuous Linda but lusts after the less soulful Giselle. It is the same tension we see when Kurtz has his pure ‘Intended’ back in Brussels, and his native mistress in the Congo. To some extent Razumov feels an attraction for Natalie Haldin that is very similar, since it depends upon a betrayal of her brother - and he winds up with another woman anyway.
The theme of being attracted to one woman and finding oneself actually attached to another, very different, woman is one that echoes through Conrad’s work. ‘Victory’ sees Heyst attracted to Lena but unable to believe in her, in a tragic echo of this prevailing idea.
When seen in this way ‘The Sisters’, for all its incomplete nature, works as an attempt by Conrad to explore his conflicted feelings about lust and idealism. For this reason one could say that it is central to our understanding of who Conrad was.
From my point of view it tells us several things about writing. The first is that it can be used to work out our complicated feelings. The second is this: if we abandon the attempt to work those feelings through they don’t go away. They stick around and haunt us. The artist’s challenge is to turn those ghosts into something that can bring understanding and peace. Even if that’s not entirely possible the attempt is a worthy one.
Writing about one’s life is always an attempt to wrestle with ghosts.
America the Insular
Posted on | January 5, 2010 | No Comments
The USA is remarkably large. And because of that it is sometimes remarkably deaf to what the rest of the world is up to.
Reading the Guardian.co.uk today I noticed that the British government has just implemented a scheme to replace inefficient gas boilers in many homes, and has done so complete with subsidies. Further down the page is an article about how local agencies are making more land available for the uk’s gardeners to grow more of their own vegetables, thus lessening a dependence on foreign crops and reducing the carbon footprint of the transportation services.
This is all in the spirit of lessening CO2 output and dependence on foreign oil/gas.
If all politics is local, then this is the way to go. Global warming is not an abstract to the residents of the British Isles. It’s here, now, and needing attention.
Has the USA done anything even remotely close to this sort of grass-roots campaign? Doesn’t look like it - although believe me I’d be only too delighted to be proved wrong.
The New Year
Posted on | January 1, 2010 | 1 Comment
It’s the traditional greeting - Happy New Year! And very lovely it is too.
Yet it does demand we take it seriously. We tend to say ‘I hope you have a Happy New Year’ which seems to suggest that happiness comes from elsewhere and may, or may not, alight upon you this year if only your luck is good.
I’m the last person to disparage luck, believe me, and yet I’m also aware that the greeting could more usefully be heard as a directive: Make Sure You Allow Happiness into Your Year. It asks us to put happiness first. Not money, or success or acquisitions, but Happiness.
So - are you going to welcome more happiness into your life? Are you going to let go of old grievances and worries and obsessions? Only you can do that part. Luck, no matter how good, can’t do it for you.
You Don’t Have to be Einstein….
Posted on | December 29, 2009 | 1 Comment
I was watching the TV the other night and happened upon a program about Einstein. I can’t say I understood all of the physics, but I did take away a few things.
The first is that he never doubted he was doing important work. Even when he was working as a patent office clerk, grade 3, he knew he was going to do something worthwhile. He kept the faith.
The second was that his working day would include long spells of looking out of the window, puffing on his pipe. We now know that he was turning over ideas, trying them out from different angles, while he seemed to be completely spacing out, vacant.
And I wondered how many of us allow ourselves the opportunity to gaze out upon the world and mull over ideas – preferably ideas that ask questions about how we live and who we are, rather than deciding whether or not we want another luxury in our lives. Do we give ourselves the space to think, or do we react so that ‘thinking’ falls into line with what everyone else thinks?
I know I’m guilty of being reactive. And I also know I’m guilty of feeling bad when I stare out of the window and am not ‘productive’.
But we must, all of us, make the effort to do the other kind of thinking as well. Otherwise we are prisoners of conventionalities we do not even want, most of the time.
Yoga and more
Posted on | December 22, 2009 | 1 Comment
I’ve just got word of my good friend Laura’s new site, and now I have website envy all over again. Anyway, it’s a delicious site, one that explores the intersection of Yoga and Higher Education
http://yogainhighereducation.blogspot.com/
And I can think of several people I know in Higher Education could could really use a little yoga…..
Blessings on you, Laura, for all you do and all you will do.
Gloves, an Memoir
Posted on | December 20, 2009 | No Comments
In our household some articles are common property, as I suspect is the case in many homes. Warm hats, scarves, gloves - all are there on a first-come first-grab basis, and no one seems to mind as long as one doesn’t look too ridiculous in the aftermath.
This was not the case when I was a boy, where each of us was expected to know exactly where his or her articles or warm clothing were, and be responsible for them, and if yours went missing you were doomed to do without.
So, I was out shoveling snow this afternoon and realized that I was wearing a very old pair of my father’s gloves. He’d insisted I take them not long before he died, even though they were too small for me and I knew that he was finally going against the family dictum concerning gloves. I accepted them, of course, even though they were, well, too small. Then, today, those too-small gloves that were hard to squeeze into came into their own. Looser gloves would have caused my hands to rub against the leather, and my teacher’s soft palms would have quickly blistered as I labored away. These gloves, however, didn’t do that.
When I came back inside, proud of the tottering snow banks I’d constructed, and peeled off the gloves I noticed this tiny detail. No blisters. In the final round-up the old dad had been right to insist I should take his fine, too-small pigskin gloves. I wouldn’t mind betting he knew exactly how useful they’d be in this circumstance. I could almost feel him looking over at me with a wink that said, ‘Told you’.
It makes me wonder how much else of his good advice, that I didn’t think was good advice at the time, I’d ignored over the years….
Write Your Memoir:
The Soul Work of Telling Your Story
The Six Archetypes of Love: From Innocent to Magician
Stories We Need to Know: Reading Your Life Path in Literature
Life Passages: Writing Exercises for Your Life Journey
Hi—I’m Allan Hunter, author of The Six Archetypes of Love and Stories We Need to Know as well as two books on writing for self-exploration, Life Passages and The Sanity Manual. If you’re looking to live your best life I hope you’ll find lots of inspiration here.
Recent Comments
- Allan Hunter on Kitchen Kvetch
- Marnie on Kitchen Kvetch
- Mary Lou Shields on Personal Writing and Memoir
