It occurred to me today that there are two kinds of people in the world.
I just got off of the phone with a friend of mine; he just reached out to catch up and to see how my family and I have been doing. We shared some pleasantries, and then the conversation turned toward some of the things on which we’ve been spending our quarantine time. He was talking about being happy to have had the extra time to connect with his family more. I talked about being able to write more and read more.
In that respect, I have actually enjoyed being quarantined. I have had the opportunity to reorganize my priorities and to investigate other options for spending my time. I know that many have been clawing and scratching to get out of the quarantine, but as for me, I’ve chosen to make the most of the time that I’ve been given. I’ve chosen to look at the bright side. I know of others who’ve been using this time to be productive, as well –> I have one friend who keeps posting pics on social media of all of the home improvement projects he’s completing.
I have always believed that there are two kinds of people in the world: consumers and producers. In fact, this is one of the entry-level lessons in a social studies classroom unit on economics. Everyone knows (or should know) that the producers are the ones that create the goods and services that the consumers, well, consume.
I have tried teaching this lesson to my children, especially when I feel like they’ve been spending too much time starting at computer screens or television screens or cell phone screens.
And, of course, each of us is each of these, to a certain extent. We all consume and we all produce. The question is this, “What’s the ratio of one’s production to one’s consumption?” The question is also this, “Is the ratio of one’s production to one’s consumption pretty even, or is it askew?” The question is additionally this, “If the ratio of one’s production to one’s consumption is askew, is that a bad thing?”
A life of productivity (notice the root of the word ‘production’ and the root of the word ‘productivity’ –> produce) is a good life. A life of consumption ends up being mostly pointless.
Of course, the trick in this balancing act, as is the trick with so many things, is to avoid the extremes. If you’ve been reading my blog for very long, you know how I hate extremism (and if you don’t know how much I hate extremism, try THIS POST on the subject).
Now, it should be obvious how consumption, to the extreme, is a bad thing. Ever seen a plague of locusts on a field of crops? That’s some extreme consumption! It might be less obvious how one could manage to be an extreme producer. Nevertheless, extremes are very rarely a good thing, and the same rule applies here. You should try to strike a balance in your life. Take an inventory of your ways –> if you died today, would there be a hole because of the things that you’ve been doing that people would miss?
I can tell you this: if you died today, no one would miss you because of the lack of your consumption.
Another way to look at this –> give and take. Do you give to the world, to those around you, to our society, as much as you take, or do you take more than you give?
Now, at the start of this post, I tried to draw some comparisons between people and how they’ve been dealing with the quarantine and whether or not they give more than they take. I don’t mean to say in all of this that people who have not enjoyed the quarantine time are useless and unproductive. I know people who I respect, people who I know to be producers, who have been put upon by the quarantine and its limiting effects.
However, I have also noticed, in the rush that people have had to get back into the pandemic world that is waiting out there, that there is a sub-current of consumerism at work. I just watched a video of a restaurant in Colorado that opened for Mother’s Day, in violation of that state’s quarantine orders, and the place was packed and the people that I saw there weren’t looking for ways to be productive –> they were looking for ways to consume.
Before I go off, let me just say that I think that all Americans would be wise to look at what they’re doing with themselves and try to err toward the productive end of the spectrum.
It occurred to me today that the world of gaming has changed, and that gaming has changed our world.
I don’t know when I’ll end up dropping this post, but regardless of when it happens, I should say that I literally just left my bedroom five minutes ago because my wife and my daughter were gaming in there and I came down to my kitchen to get some coffee.
Now, rewind thirty years, and my brother and I were involved in a strategic campaign to get our father to break down and buy us a Nintendo Entertainment System. We wanted one for the same silly reasons that any kids want anything: all of our friends were getting them, all of the commercials said we should have one, etc., etc.. You get the idea. We eventually wore him down and then, let the games begin!
We set it up in a communal room in the house, to keep the sibling rivalry to a minimum, and my gaming interests began to take hold. To be honest, even before that, I felt I was a gamer. Dig Dug and Pitfall on the Atari were great, but they left a little to be desired. I couldn’t possibly tell you how many hours I sat in front of that NES, beating games we’d bought, beating games we’d rented from the video store, working on beating games that were so difficult as to be ultimately frustrating. I even spent hours working on the time it took me to beat Super Mario. To this day, I am still able to beat Super Mario in under fifteen minutes. Stop by some time, I’ll show you on my Wii.
Since those days, I’ve owned many different video games, video game systems, accessories, etc. In college, I was a PC gamer, when network gaming was just getting started. A college roommate and I punched a small hole through the drywall that separated the bedrooms in our apartment so we could play Command & Conquer: Red Alert against each other on a P2P connection (part of the reason that we never got our security deposit back). PC gaming in those days often involved four or five or eight CD sets that you would play through, because video-quality graphics take up a lot of space and those CDs only hold so much data.
Then, as an adult, I’ve conned my wife into letting me buy video game consoles (for the kids, of course), and the gaming interests have continued to have a hold in my life. I remember playing Guitar Hero on the PlayStation 2 while my son, six or seven years old at the time, watching at my side. His favorite song on Guitar Hero, and therefore the most requested hit in my repertoire, was a Joan Jett classic, “I Love Rock and Roll”.
Santa bought an X-Box One for the kids a couple of Christmases ago and now I have been loving Fall-Out 4 and Forza and others, as well. My son, soon to be sixteen, has followed in his father’s footsteps, and he and I have often booted each other off of the X-Box.
Speaking of my wife (the first full paragraph of this post was about my wife), when we first met, she was not a gamer. Not in any sense of the modern term. She thought video games were a waste of time and that I was wasting my time playing them. I did it when she wasn’t around, back when we were dating, and tended not to bring it up in conversation when we were together –> avoid the touchy subjects.
So, the experience of leaving my bedroom several minutes ago because she was gaming and I wanted to get some coffee occurred to me as somewhat odd.
How times have changed.
And speaking of times a-changin’, I haven’t been gaming much, just recently. I’ve been finding other things to do. Other things that I am actually enjoying more, and that seem to be a bit more fruitful. Like, for example, working on my writing.
Now, don’t get me wrong –> my wife has not become the gaming zombie that I used to be, sitting in front of that NES decades ago for hours on end. Additionally, this is also probably the time for me to mention that I still waste way too much time on Sudoku puzzles (if you haven’t heard of my Sudoku addiction, check out PART ONE & PART TWO of that particular story). And, I get pulled into Twitter too often. And I love me some Notre Dame football.
You get the idea –> we all seem to have our distractions. In fact, this is a topic that I think I have blogged on before (I was going to try to link in some of those other posts, but then I got distracted).
But gaming has been a particularly powerful distraction in my life for a very long time, and judging by what’s going on in my bedroom right now, it’s influence is still alive and well in our society. Thinking about the way that gaming has evolved throughout its history, from being a “nerd” activity to being something that many more people are involved in, the distraction has become real for a lot of people. And, while I don’t want to condemn anyone (because I’d be one of the greatest of the sinners, trust me), I do wonder what I could have accomplished over the years, over the decades, if I had all of that time back.
Research shows that the average gamer spends about seven hours a week on gaming. That’s 10,920 hours that I’ve lost since I begged my dad for an NES.
Especially mobile device gaming. My wife is still not a big fan of console gaming (although she’s had plenty of opportunities in our house, trust me), but mobile device gaming is what has her consumed at the moment. She likes to play canasta and euchre and various word games and matching tile games. Add to that list Candy Crush and Fruit Ninja and Flappy Bird and Pokemon Go! and you start to get the idea. The number of gamers grows higher and higher.
And this is only one of the multiple distractions that we face as a society.
So, what’s my point?
Well, I guess it’s the hypocrisy of the thing. Because, eventually, when these gamers run out of time to do what they need to do because they were playing games instead, that’s hypocrisy. Or, when they look around at the world, dissatisfied with the way things are, wanting change, that’s hypocrisy. Or, when they’re broke and can’t afford the utility bills but they’ve spent a chunk of money on in-app purchases to get them to the next level of their game, that’s hypocrisy.
Additionally, if you’ll allow me to get a little “conspiracy theory crazy” for a minute: couldn’t it be that gaming (or the entertainment industry or the fast food industry or the advertising industry or the social media machine) is being used by powers who seek our docile dormancy? You know what we’re not doing when we’re playing games? Rocking the boat. Improving ourselves and our world. Organizing ourselves to initiate the changes that are long overdue.
At the very least, we can question what it is that we do with our time. Perhaps the greatest hypocrisy is saying that we want something (more time, better fitness, a healthier bank account) but our actions suggest otherwise.
It occurred to me today that sometimes we’re going uphill and sometimes we’re going downhill.
Have you ever noticed that those two phrases both mean trouble? The uphill battle? The downhill that comes after you are over-the-hill? Or, when things are headed downhill?
From a running perspective, I can tell you that downhill is better than uphill.
I’ve been running now, on and off, for a few years (let’s say five). During that time, there have been ups and downs, highs and lows. Times when I’ve been proud of where I’m at, in my journey as a runner, and other times when I’ve been ashamed of having dropped the ball.
In the summer and fall of 2016, I got to the place where I was running a lot every week, consistently over a few months. I was proud to be getting back in good health, for the first time probably in my adult life.
In the Spring of 2018, I was on a run and my ankles got tangled up in some metal wire lying at the side of the street where I was running, and I went down like a sack of potatoes. That injury knocked me off of the running wagon for months. Dropped the ball.
This year, I swore I was going to average a mile a day for the whole year (366 miles by the end of 2020). So far, knock on wood, I’m on track to do so (actually, I’m on track for many more miles than that, but we’ll see).
***
This morning, as I was just setting out on my favorite route, I passed someone I know (which isn’t hard in a town of five thousand people). She said, “Doing good!”, or something like that, as I was passing by. I ended up thinking about her a lot as I continued my run.
You see, the first quarter-mile of my route heads down a hill, and this morning, as I passed this person that I know, I was mere yards away from my house, mere yards into my run. And, during this first quarter-mile of my run, heading down hill, there’s really very little work to do. Gravity does a lot of the work for me as I head down that hill.
My friend, on the other hand, was headed in the opposite direction, headed up the hill near my house. The argument could easily be made that she was doing more work climbing up the hill than I was doing headed down the hill.
This friend of mine, a very positive person, was just being congratulatory, and here I am, reading far too much into it. I don’t think I would have very many blog posts to write if I didn’t reading too much into a lot of things.
So, here’s what I came up with.
My run this morning, during which this friend of mine saw me for maybe fifteen seconds (if that), was a sixty-two minute run. That means that this friend of mine was a witness to .4% of my run. To put it another way: if you divided my entire run up into one thousand pieces of time, this friend of mine only saw four of those and missed the other 996. So, while I am sure I looked really strong and capable at the point where my friend saw me, there were plenty of other times when I didn’t look strong during the run.
So, what does that mean?
Those snapshots that we get of each other when we have an opportunity to get a look into each other’s lives, that’s exactly what they are –> snapshots. If someone had seen me this morning at the end of mile two, when I was winded and stiff and walking, rather than running, they probably would not have been as impressed with me as that friend of mine this morning, who saw me before I even got the chance to start sweating.
When you see someone who’s been knocked down, understand that they haven’t always been down –> this person has had higher points in their life and are just in a rough patch. Conversely, that person that you know that seems to be on a winning streak hasn’t always been on top of the world –> that person has had their own low points.
The only person who knows your whole story is you (and maybe one or two of the closest people in your life). Therefore, they are the only people who have grounds to say anything about your story as a whole. When the people who would judge you want to say how low you are, they don’t know about how solid everything was just a little earlier, and they probably won’t stick around long enough to see you rise up again. When people who would judge you want to say how wonderful things are for you, they don’t know how bad it just was, a little earlier, and they probably won’t stick around long enough to be by your side when the bad times come again.
Discard all negative commentary from the outside world –> they don’t know your story.
Covet any encouragement that you might get, from anyone who is willing to add their sunshine to your world; that particular gem is becoming rarer by the day, it seems.
It occurred to me today that I have only recently become acquainted with fear, while others have always known it.
On Friday, I got back from my run memorializing the birthday of Maud Arbery with a 2.23 mile run. I don’t usually run on Fridays, but I didn’t figure a 2.23 mile run was going to be that big of a deal on an off-day.
I wonder if Maud thought his run on February 23rd was going to be a big deal.
I was so proud of myself, posting the hashtag on Twitter and then commenting on my own post with the screenshot of my mileage, thinking of myself as a social activist, as if I’d actually done anything that substantial.
During the run, thinking about Maud pretty much the entire time, I remembered LeBron James and his post on social media from last week, mentioning that black men are hunted whenever they leave their homes.
I can’t even imagine what that would be like. No one noticed me during my run on Friday, no one looked at me suspiciously or decided to follow me while keeping a watchful eye. No one grabbed their guns to come after me to ask me some questions about what I was doing.
I came across a police officer, during my run on Friday. He was turning a corner in his squad car, a corner that I was approaching. I thought to myself of the stories that I’ve heard where people have been unduly harassed by police officers, for whatever reason. I thought to myself that I’ve never had any reason to not trust the police in my neighborhood.
One of Maud’s killers was a retired police officer.
I was also thinking about my daughters and their questions about why I was running on an off-day, trying to explain to them how someone could be murdered in February, but no one gets arrested until May. Trying to explain why racism still exists in the world.
Trying to explain, and mostly failing.
The word ‘asymptomatic’ has been bothering me a lot lately. In fact, it’s got me down-right scared. I don’t know who out there in the world has COVID-19 because of the word ‘asymptomatic’. I don’t know if it’s safe to give my neighbor a ride to the grocery store while his car is in the shop. I don’t know if it’s safe for my son to hang-out with his girlfriend that he hasn’t seen in person in a couple of months. I’m afraid that some ‘asymptomatic’ human is going to infect me and then I’m going to infect one of my kids, or my wife, and then what?!?!
I think about my fear, and then I think about Maud’s fear and LeBron’s fear, and it makes me wish for a world where there is less to be afraid. It also makes me a little bit ashamed to be so little acquainted with fear. My white privilege has me pretty spoiled, it seems.
And, as the story continues to unfold, and people politicize Maud’s death, and people yell at each other about race, no one at all seems interested in listening –> they only seem to be interested in being heard.
It occurred to me today that I’m an imperfect father.
To be honest, it’s occurred to me a thousand times, or maybe a hundred thousand times, before this.
The other day, I finally got fed up with my children being mean to each other. They are siblings, the three of them, and they treat each other with a malice that they seem to reserve for each other. This isn’t to say that they are overtly evil to each other, for I’d have stepped in a long time ago if this had been true. Rather, they are snide and derogatory in a way that has worn on my nerves for a long time, but I’ve done nothing about it.
So, I got fed up the other day and I sat them all down in the same room together and I WENT OFF. Not in a rage-driven sort of way, but rather, I laid down the law in no uncertain terms and set parameters for future behavior and consequences for violations.
And then, within the hour, I realized something else.
They learned it from watching me. I know that this is true because, after I told them to stop doing it, I tried to stop doing it (to be a good example), and it was so hard. I caught myself doing it within forty-five minutes of telling them to stop doing it.
Do you remember that drug ad, from decades ago, where the father comes in to his son’s bedroom, to confront the teen about doing drugs, and the teen says, “I learned it by watching you”? That was me the other day. I was ashamed of myself, as I have been so often before when I’ve realized that my children are bad because they’ve seen me being bad, and I hate that part of the parenting process.
Saying mean stuff is just something that I do, and it’s wrong.
It’s no wonder that they do this automatically. They’ve seen me do it automatically so often that they, like little copy machines, are now running around the house doing it and I’ve had enough of it.
What a hypocrite I am, for being tired of listening to my kids as they do the things I’ve taught them to do.
So, while I could steer this post into a discussion on hypocrisy, or the perils of parenting, I think I would rather talk about the world that we live in where everyone, myself included, seems way too quick with the negative commentary.
I notice this a lot on Twitter, and other social meda outlets, as well. In fact, it’s so prevalent, people speaking poorly of each other, that it surprises me when I see someone with something positive to say. You know that things are bad when the norm becomes the negativity and the exception to the rule becomes something uplifting and positive.
I think it comes from a need that we all feel, made worse by social media in my opinion, to have something to say. The title of the blog post, “If you can’t say something nice…” is a reference to an old piece of advice from many years ago –> If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.
Imagine all of the silence if all of the negativity was just stopped, somehow.
As a teacher, I should know better than this; I have, on numerous occasions, been educated on the importance for teachers to be sure to use more positivity than negativity in my classrooms. I have been present for multiple trainings discussing the ratio of praise to criticism.
I’m left to wonder how I got to be such a negative person. The influence of a society that has become increasingly negative? The pressure that I’ve always felt to have something to add? The lack of value that I put on silence?
And it’s not that I am negative with my own children, at least I don’t think it is. I would hope that my wife would have said something to me if I was being too negative with them. Rather, I think I just say a bit too many negative things, in general.
When I had my three children sat down in the living room, to let them know that I wasn’t going to allow things to continue as they had been, I told them that silence is always a better choice than negativity. Of course, as I was saying that to them, I was yet to realize that they’re getting me as a role model of negativity. What a fool I must have appeared to be to them when I was telling them to be silent rather than mean.
Maybe, my children would have been better off, all these years, with a role model of silence. Maybe I would have been better off, all these years, having kept my mouth shut rather than being so negative.
Maybe our world would be a better place if we would all just keep silent in the absence of something positive to say.
It occurred to me today that the truth is getting harder and harder to find in our world.
On Friday, Jimmy Kimmel tweeted a video of Vice President Mike Pence dropping off supplies to a nursing home. In the video, Pence seemed to suggest that he wanted to carry empty boxes up to the door of the nursing home, for the sake of the cameras that were watching at the time.
Of course, this post by Kimmel set off a storm of people with not-nice things to say about the vice president. Until, Friday afternoon, when it was discovered by fact-checkers that Kimmel doctored the video, originally available from other sources, to make the vice president look bad. This set off a storm of people with not-nice things to say about Jimmy Kimmel. Which then set off a storm of people with not-nice things to say about the people who were saying not-nice things about Jimmy Kimmel. Which set off a storm of people with not-nice things to say about the people who were saying not-nice things about the vice president.
In this midst of it all, it occurred to me that people lie.
Now, this shouldn’t have come to me as a surprise. I lie. You lie. People in the news lie and my neighbor lies and my children lie.
Lying has been going on for as long as people have been talking to each other.
But, as the Jimmy Kimmel episode illustrated to me yesterday, we now have to fact-check things. When did this start? You could make the point that fact-checking has been around for as long as late night television hosts have been making the news by saying not-nice things about others, but I suspect fact-checking has been around for longer than that.
Have you ever fact-checked before? I’m sure you have. Probably not long after you realized how to lie, which psychologists suggest is right around three years of age. You see, it’s at three years of age that children begin to understand that other people are different from them –> they feel differently, think differently, act differently. It’s at that point that children also discover that others don’t know what is going on in the head of the child. This makes lying possible.
Of course, the “bridge too far” when it comes to lying is the lie that is preposterous enough for us to wonder about its authenticity. This is how parents know when their kids are lying. Since children lack practice at lying, they tell some whoppers. And, in the process of doing so, they set off those internal flags in the minds of their parents.
What does fact-checking look like at that early age? When Bobby tells Tina that Suzy called her a poop-face, Tina goes to ask Suzy if she called her a poop-face, and Tina says no, and so the two of them go over to Bobby and kick him in the shins.
Sound familiar? You’ve fact-checked before.
So, considering the fact that fact-checking is something that we’ve been doing pretty much our entire lives, how are people in the media able to “pull the wool over our eyes”?
When Tina goes to Suzy to ask her if what Bobby said was true, there is something in Tina that says, “That doesn’t sound like Suzy.” So, Tina has a reason to do the extra work of fact-checking, and the reason is that she doesn’t believe what she’s heard from Bobby.
Notice that word: ‘believe’.
Jimmy Kimmel convinced enough people that Mike Pence was delivering empty boxes to the front door of a nursing home because those people believed that was a possibility. They wanted to believe it, so it was a lie that was easier to sell.
I used to watch The X-Files back in the late 90s and early 2000s. The main character in the show spent a lot of his time being led around by his beliefs in paranormal phenomenon. Of course, a major theme of the show was Mulder’s desire to believe, and it was this desire to believe that caused Mulder to be manipulated by people who found it easier to sell him certain lies because of his beliefs, and his desire to believe.
Of course, the problem with this is: each of us has a different set of beliefs that determines whether or not we’re willing to believe the lies that people are trying to sell us. Not everyone believed Jimmy Kimmel early in the day on Friday; if everyone had, there would have been no fact-checking leading to the big reveal, later that day.
And, just like anything else, the kinds of lies that people are willing to believe fall on a linear scale. People are unwilling, most of the time, to believe lies that are extreme, and much more willing to believe when the lies are not-too-outrageous. The number of people willing to believe in a government conspiracy to kill JFK is smaller than the number of people that are willing to believe that all politicians are corrupt.
The other thing that occurred to me with this whole Jimmy Kimmel thing was that the fact-checking wasn’t then fact-checked, at least as far as I’ve heard. Why not? Who’s to say that the sources used in the fact-checking shouldn’t themselves be fact-checked?
Where does the insanity stop?
Let’s say someone tells me, and a friend of mine, a lie. I fact-check the lie, because it seemed in my head that it was a lie when I heard it, and I find a source that says that it’s a lie. My friend, who believed the lie in the first place, doesn’t fact-check the lie. Later, with the information that I have on the original lie, I go to my friend and I say, “We were lied to.” Then, my friend fact-checks the source that I used to fact-check the original lie and finds a source that says that my source was a lie. How do we ever reasonably establish whether or not we are hearing lies?
It occurred to me today that, maybe we’ve been doing this whole voting thing the wrong way.
I guess you could call me a Never Trumper; in current terms, it comes closest to describing my political position. I’ve been a conservative all of my life, and until 2016, I would have described myself as a Republican. I have never supported the decisions of the conservatives in this country who voted for him, which has made me a persona non grata with some. That’s okay.
I remember back to 2016, when friends and loved ones in my circles back then, time and time again, said things to me like, “I’m voting for him because I can’t bring myself to vote for her.” or “I’m picking the lesser of two evils.” or “I’d vote for a third-party candidate, but that’s just going to help her win.” or “Why do you throw your vote away on those third-party candidates?”
I voted for Darrell Castle in 2016, and I don’t lose any sleep at night about it.
I thought it was wrong at the time, this “lesser of two evils” approach to voting. I still think it’s wrong. When my friends looked at Hillary Clinton back then and decided that Donald Trump was the better choice, not because of any great character traits of his (does he have any of those?), but because they thought she was worse, were they feeling the way that I’m feeling now as I look at Biden and think of my disgust for Donald Trump?
Yes, it was no doubt this way for them back then. The height of hypocrisy, for me, would be to condemn those people who voted for Trump in 2016 while I consider voting for Biden, to get rid of Trump, in 2020.
The “principaled” version of me in 2016 was pretty sure that it wasn’t going to make much of a difference one way or the other, whether I voted third-party or not. The same me, who wants to stick to the same principals, is MUCH more concerned about our country getting out from under its current president.
It’s not that hard, it would seem, to stick to your convictions when there’s nothing on the line. It is, however, much more difficult when there’s something to lose.
Here we sit, in the midst of a global pandemic. A pandemic that, for one reason or another, seems to be hitting the United States particularly hard. I don’t blame anyone for these circumstances, but I can’t help but wonder about other countries who have faired better than ours. And, maybe I’ve been listening to certain media outlets (not all of them leftist, even) a little bit too much lately, but I’m starting to wonder whether we’d have done better with better leadership.
And, those friends of mine, who voted for Trump in 2016, they’re wondering, too –> I know they are because I’ve noticed from those people (if they’re still a part of my life, four years later) that they’ve morphed into two different groups of people.
One of those groups, I’ll call the Remorseful.
The other of those groups, I’ll call the Rabid.
And, here I sit, a Never Trumper, thinking to myself…
“This is unreal.”
I don’t blame the Remorseful because of what they did back in 2016. But, the Rabid are starting to look more and more scary to me. I can’t have any civil discourse with them and I can’t follow them on social media anymore and I most certainly can’t try to change their minds.
But, I also can’t help but think to myself that voting for the lesser of two evils didn’t work out too well this last time. I thought it was a bad idea back in 2016, and I told some of my closest friends as much, back then, and they called me an idealist, and they called me naive.
Now, granted, a certain percentage of the time, voting for the lesser of two evils is going to work because, a certain pecentage of the time, you don’t end up with one candidate being that much different than another. THE BIG SECRET IS THIS: as much as it might pain people to hear it, having one president in the office, assuming that they have the “right stuff”, is often not that different than having a different president in office. Their choices might be different and their opinions might be different, but they’ll tend to behave similarly.
That didn’t happen this time.
This time people voted for, what they thought of at the time, as the lesser of two evils. Instead, we got an ego-maniacal whackjob.
Can I just take an opportunity right here to wonder whether or not Hillary would have been so bad?!?!
And, in defense of those friends of mine, who have maybe used the “choose the lesser of two evils approach”, who knows how many times in their lives, I can’t say I blame them for rolling the dice one more time. But this time, the “choose the lesser of two evils approach” was a bust. And it came home to roost. And I think that many of my conservative friends are starting to see that.
The thing to do with remorse is to make sure that it eventually leads to change.
As for me, and my silly principles, I’m not sure what I’ll do. Will I place my egg in some third-party basket yet again and hope for the best? Will I do in 2020 what I swore I wouldn’t do in 2016?
This is the second part of a two-part post that won’t make any sense if you haven’t read THE FIRST PART.
Continuing on…
–>What doesn’t make sense now, might later.
I can look at a little, nine-square grid and see many missing blocks and I’ll think to myself, “None of that makes any sense.” But, I’ll go about solving other parts of the puzzle and some of those empty spots in that mostly-empty grid will get filled in via the process, up until the point where there are only a couple of empty spots left. Then, I’ll look at those few remaining spaces and I’ll think, “Well, it’s obvious what goes in that spot and what goes there, and look, it’s done.”
Not every puzzle you face in life is ready to be solved when you first encounter it. Sometimes, the puzzle needs to be worn down by the passage of time and the changing circumstances; only then might you be able to solve it.
Additionally, I sometimes cheat. I cheat because, the way I do things, I face each daily puzzle from my calendar and I won’t move on until I finish the puzzle that I have in front of me (that’s how I do it). If I get stuck on a puzzle for too long (two days or three days or four), then I feel a pressure to just cheat to get the answer. So, I’ll turn the puzzle over and look at the answers on the back, just to get one of the blocks that I need –> I don’t usually need more than that. I hate doing it, and I won’t do it unless I really am in need. But, even this has its own little lesson.
You might not be prepared to solve every puzzle when you come against it. Sometimes, you need to be a better you to be able to solve the hardest puzzles.
–>The biggest win comes from the longest odds and it tastes the sweetest.
There really isn’t much joy for me, anymore, in completing easy-level puzzles. I do it to stay up on my practice, but it’s not a challenge to my skill set. I can’t imagine Michael Jordan would be that impressed with himself, were he to win a game of horse against some sixth-grader. Antonio Esfandiari, one of the greatest poker players in recent years, would not be that enthused in a win against me and my poker buddies.
But, when I have been struggling with a puzzle that is particularly rough, one that started with only a quarter of the blocks as given (there are 81 blocks to be solved in a Sudoku puzzle), and I have battled and persevered and succeeded, those puzzles are worth a little cheer of success.
–>Sometimes, luck is all there is.
There are certain puzzles, of the most difficult level, when you get to the place where you have deployed all of your tactical approaches and wisdom and learned maneuvers and the puzzle won’t budge. It might be down to a single block that only can only be one of a couple of possibilities and the only choice for you to make is the choice to guess. Those are the puzzles that you complete in pencil. When it comes time to make that guess, and you play out the rest of the puzzle and you make it to the end having had your guess justified, then you can fill in those blocks with a pen. Otherwise, when you make your choice and it turns out, ten or twelve or twenty blocks ahead, that your guess was the wrong one, you’ll be glad to you did the puzzle in pencil.
For me, having my back up against the wall with no other option but to take a chance and see how it turns out, I hate having to guess. And, when faced with a guess, I will try to look as far ahead into the puzzle, based on that one guess, as I can look to see whether or not the whole things pans out. Maybe there are times when all you can do is your best and the rest is up to luck.
And so, Sudoku has taught me much about life. I’d encourage you to find a hobby that will challenge you to be its master. Perhaps you can rise to the challenge and learn your own lessons along the way.
It occurred to me today that I have learned more from Sudoku than some of the college classes I’ve taken!
So much, in fact, that this will be a two-part post, with the second part coming tomorrow.
Anyway…
I have been a Sudoku player for many years, but I’ve become pretty fanatic about it over the last few years especially. And, as silly as it might sound to hear me talk about the game that I love to play, there are quite a few things that I’ve learned from Sudoku.
–>What might seem hard isn’t always that hard, and what might seem easy might not be that easy.
Most Sudoku puzzles have a difficulty level assigned to them. If you download them from the internet or find them in a book or –my favorite– pull them off of the daily calendar, it will say somewhere on the puzzle what difficulty level it is. I have, on numerous occasions been more challenged by what I was told was easy and not challenged enough by what I was told was hard. Just over the weekend, I spent forty-five minutes on an easy puzzle that should have taken seven minutes, just to turn around and complete a hard puzzle that should have taken me a couple of hours in seventeen minutes.
Just so you know, when other people say that something is hard, what they mean is, it was hard for them. That doesn’t mean it will be hard for you. Similarly, when someone tells you that something is easy, be warned; it might be hard for you.
–>Practice really does make you better.
I don’t know if it should have taken me this long (I’m forty-four) to learn that this is true. In my own defense, I probably learned this was true earlier, but I don’t think I’ve understood it as deeply then as I do now. I have been practicing my skills at Sudoku for a long time, and I am better at it than I’ve ever been. I have learned from the process of doing these puzzles what tricks to use. I know how to change my approach when I am stumped so that I continue to progress. And –this is huge– I’ve learned that you don’t have to be away from something for very long before you start to lose your edge.
If I ever get pulled away from my daily Sudoku practice, even if it’s only for a few days, I notice that I don’t have the skills that I did have because I let myself slip. If you think getting to the top of something is a challenge, try staying on top.
–>Sometimes, it’s just best to walk away.
I will literally sit in front of a Sudoku puzzle, just staring at it, going over the possibilities in my head until I am so frustrated that I am not aware of anything else; just my task and my approach and my frustration and my failure. And I can sit there in front of that puzzle and stare at it for as long as I want to, but I’m not going to get any further for my effort. When it gets like this, I need to walk away. I will get up and leave and go do something else. Then, I can come back and sit down and, in seconds, I will have the next step to take, because all I needed was a change to clear my head so I could come back and see things differently.
And, this was one of the greatest lessons on my life. How many times have I just walked away because I needed a chance to think, a chance to breathe, a chance to reset my mind? And then, to re-engage when you’ve had a break, everything becomes so much clearer.
–>Recognizing patterns is a must.
There is an inner geometry to a Sudoku puzzle, beyond that which is understood by basic players of the game. That geometry helps you, if you know it well enough, to recognize the patterns in the puzzle as they develop. When a block in a certain spot get solved, and you know the geometry of the puzzle and recognize the patterns, it gives you other block solutions that you might not have had otherwise. It took me many hundreds of puzzles to start to see the patterns, but now, I see them in so many of the puzzles that I do.
I think pattern recognition is a part of what makes for the most observant citizens in our society. The things that are going on in the world around us, the problems that need to be solved, the issues of contention that we’ve had with each other, the difficulties that weigh down the human condition; these issues are not old issues. They are part of a bigger pattern that we should be recognizing when we see it, so we can do something intelligent about solving these issues. It’s the twenty-first century, folks, and we should be beyond some of this garbage.
It occurred to me today that our world has been shaken.
The pandemic has shaken our world, as a whole, and each of the individual worlds that we all live in. I have come to understand this through a number of changes that have been wrought in my life. While some of them have been difficult to grapple with (I’m a teacher who has transitioned to e-learning, for better or for worse), others of those changes have been welcome and –I dare say– enjoyable.
I kind of like not having to do some of the things that I am no longer able to do.
In time when things are shaking, we look for what’s solid. In an earthquake, you are told to get to an area of your house that is less likely to fall (more solid). We build our houses on foundations (more solid), rather than just on the dirt that is prone to movement.
You get the idea.
So, the question is, what have you been looking to –what solid thing– as the world has been shaking.
Weeks ago, I guess it has been now, I first saw a video that took my breath away:
Now, the reason that the video took my breath away was probably different than the reason that this video might take someone else’s breath away. It is, on its surface, an inspiriational attempt at rallying the troops and sounding the battle cry and garnering hope. But, to me, the most stunning part of the video came in its very first sentence.
“At a time when things are most uncertain, we turn to the most certain thing there is: science.”
Now, I don’t usually use this blog as an evangelical tool because I believe that the best way to evangelize people is to live alongside them and to show them the difference that God makes in my life, and, since most of the people out in the world who read this blog are never going to live alongside me, there isn’t any point in trying to evangelize them through this tool.
However, please excuse me while I wax religious for a few paragraphs (or maybe more).
When I first saw that video from Pfizer (don’t get me started on big pharma), when I first heard those first seventeen words, I thought to myself, “This commercial is exactly right. We should all be turning to God right now.” And then, the eighteenth word dropped –science– and I laughed out loud. What I thought was going to be an ad, reminding the world that the only sure foundation is a faith in God, turned out to be something else entirely. Since that first time, I’ve seen the video many more times, and I am still taken aback by what the video is very subtly saying.
I know that, in my own personal world, while science is wonderful (a God-given gift, I would say), it is not the most certain thing there is.
God is.
I wrote my Master’s Degree thesis in 2012 on the effects of post-modern society on the educational environment; in doing so, I learned some about the subject of the philosophical changes that are associated with the post-modern world in which we live. Whether or not you’ve even heard the term “post-modern” before, you have been living in a post-modern world your whole lives. And, one of the most important tenets of post-modernism is the rejection of “grand narratives”; we should strive to establish our understanding of the world around us without relying on the stories that we’ve been told (this is a thinly-veiled attack at organized religions).
So, resulting from post-modernism, one of the philosophical developments that has been sweeping the globe, especially in industrialized nations, since the middle of the twentieth century, has been a move toward atheism. Remember, since we have to reject the grand narratives that we’ve been told, we must, instead, just look around to establish an understanding of reality and, rejecting the truths of organized religion and faith, try to make sense of it all. Our attempts at doing this, without an understanding of what we are seeing around us, might send us to the false conclusion that there isn’t a God.
But, one of the problems with atheism is that people require, on a subconscious level, an understanding of someone or something above them, to help them to be comfortable with what can otherwise be a very harsh and terrifying world. It used to be, for most people, we took our solace in God. These days, in what are we to take solace?
Now, atheists, in a defensive reaction, will tell you that this isn’t true; they don’t require –or even desire– that there be someone or something above them, in charge and in control and protecting them, but talk is cheap, and if you watch them, you will find them putting “faith” in other things.
“What other things?” you might ask.
These days, for many in the post-modern world, that “power above” has become government. In case you haven’t noticed, our society is uber-political, in ways that it has never been before; I would posit that this is a result of post-modern atheism and the importance of the government as our “power above”. To the degree that people used to get very passionate and excited and emotional about their faith in God, their decendants are left to get very passionate and excited and emotional about their government. When people come to believe that the government is the “power above”, they become extremely interested in how it works, in who has power, and in whether or not that government is efficent and effective.
Or, let’s say that you’re not comforted by the idea of government as your “power above”. Where else can people turn when seeking something to help them make sense of the cruel, cruel world?
Well, Pfizer would have you believe, the “power above” is science. Science makes a great replacement for God, if you’re into that kind of thing, because science is the tool that people will try to use to prove that there is no God. So, why not replace God with his assassin?
In fact, I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed before, but the war between science and religion gets a lot of play these days. This “war” leads to things like 1) religious people being thought of as ignorant by atheists, 2) religious people rejecting science because they’ve been told that they are at war with science, 3) scientists with faith having to walk around on eggshells in their professional communities, etc..
Let’s not forget, however, that science and religion have, over the long haul of history, been best friends for most of that time. In fact, a) education and b) scientific study and c) human intellectual endeavors, until only relatively recently, have taken place in accordance with each other. In fact, the only schools of the distant past were monastic schools where people of religion were the teachers and the students and the scientific researchers.
Nevertheless, should science be our “power above”? Don’t get me wrong; I have always loved science and I believe in the ability of science to interpret the inner workings of the world, as built by God, but it still feels like a second-place god to me.
In fact, government and science, and any other idol you might erect for that matter, they are equally ill-suited to the task of being our “power above”, and all for the very same reason.
We made them. And we suck.
Well, let’s be generous. Humans may not suck (consistently), but we are inconsistent (see what I did there), and that inconsistency leads to the things that we make having flaws. Science is flawed inasmuch as scientists hypothesize things that other scientists then prove to be false and insasmuch as scientists still don’t have explanations for everything. Government, another human creation, is flawed because we can’t even come together long enough to agree what government should do.
So, let’s bring this around full circle.
That Pfizer commercial, the one that I linked above, the next time you see it, think of that opening sentences this way:
“At a time when things are most uncertain, we turn to the most certain thing there is…”
It Occurred To Me Today 