Letting Go

Perhaps it is the particular task of getting old to learn to let go.  We learn to let go of our childhood, our plans for the future,  our careers, our children, perhaps our partners and many friends.

Finally, we learn to let go of ourselves.  To face that eventuality that the individual self that I am will no longer be.

I began to accept this when I realized that I don’t miss any of my former selves – that me that was a baby or a child or a teenager.  Or even the me that existed five years ago.  And so the loss of my current self no longer seems so unbearable.

I do hope that somehow I will become part of the great cosmic mystery we live in.  I certainly hope I don’t find myself in some kind of static, non-changing,  ”perfect” place with nothing to do but sit around.

When my sister was visiting here last month, we were walking in the fields and found a feather.   Her thoughts, too, are about learning to let go.

Way Of The Single Feather

Last night’s mockery of Orwellian shamanism

Still twitched at the corners of my mouth

When I happened upon (never mind that there were several)

Sun stroked remains bearing witness to a pheasant’s sky circles

Brought to a

Dead

Stop.

What meaning might be brought to this synchronous memento of living flight?

There is at first the courage born of facing loss,

and then the dusty futility of objectifying breath

as if, by drying a flower, or mounting the hunted, or refusing to exhale

we might hold sway over the letting go.

Still, a legacy will not be denied this lone feather.

An afterlife, beyond its evolutionary process has begun.

Let it be the pen through which these words flow

An on-going eulogy to a life of sky circles

Marking the pages of my mind’s meanderings.

It will never fly again.  No.

Yet its unconscious beauty allows a sense of awe in my life.

Perhaps I too am a mere part

That the very term realization is a feint.

Is the bird itself a feather?

I will take the way of this single feather as my way for a time.

Perhaps I will learn something.

Perhaps I will remember that I too once flew in great sky circles

And that I can no longer is not my failure

But simply my new normal.

And when the mere shadow of my former self

Loses sight in the darkness of its own passing

I will most certainly contemplate

the way this lone feather came into its incredible shamanic power

and laugh my way to the light again.

Feeding the sated

My mother often used to insist that we finish the food on our plates saying “there are children starving in India.”

Being a little slow on the uptake, I was already out of the house before it occurred to me that my eating my spinach or beans or calves’ liver was not going to provide additional nourishment for a single child in India or anywhere else.

Well-meant as this approach was, it also had another flaw.  It failed to teach me to adjust my eating to my needs.  It was irrelevant whether I wasn’t eating because I didn’t like spinach or felt that I’d already eaten enough.  Learning not to eat when you’re not hungry is particularly valuable in an environment which provides food non-stop 24/7.

To this day I find it difficult to leave food on my plate or leave left-overs in the fridge whether I’m hungry or not.

The Queen and the President(s)

The refrain of the British anthem says “Long Live our Queen.”

It seems to work.  In the last 450 years:

Elizabeth I reigned for 45 years beginning in 1558;

Victoria reigned for 64 years from 1837-1901;

today’s reigning monarch, Elizabeth II, assumed the throne in 1952.

Presidents Eisenhower and Truman, 1957 and 1951

1957 with former President Hoover

President and Mrs. Kennedy in 1961

1970, President Nixon

President Ford in 1976

President Carter, 1977

President Reagan, 1982

1991 with President H. Bush

2003, with President George W. Bush

President Obama and family in 2009

She doesn’t look 83, does she?

Obama’s cleft stick

I have just read three serious, well-thought out analyses about the war in Afghanistan, one for staying the course, one for continuing to engage in surgical counter-terrorist strikes and one for pulling back as quickly as we can without committing political suicide.  The stakes are so high, the consequences so broad, and the situation so fraught with contradiction and confusion that I can understand why President Obama is taking his time deciding whether to send in more troops or find some strategy for withdrawal.

In favour of a surge and staying the course:

• The West’s security could be seriously threatened if the region, including Pakistan, falls into full-scale civil war, especially if the Taliban should gain access to Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.
• Withdrawing from Afghanistan now would be an admission not only of defeat but of an unwillingness to fight, reflecting perhaps even a lack of confidence in our ability to make a difference.  Even an appearance of weakness would make us more vulnerable to attack.
• Withdrawing at this point would be a betrayal of the Afghan people, many of whose troubles are the result of Western intervention.

The principle argument in favour of withdrawal sooner rather than later is that the war in unwinnable:

• More than two thousand years ago, Alexander the Great invaded Afghanistan.  He was defeated.  So has every other invading army since.  Britain fought three wars there in the last 130 years.  In the 20th century, Russia tried for ten years to conquer Afghanistan.  After losing 15,000 Russian and more than a million Afghan lives, Russia withdrew in 1989, saying it was impossible to win a war there.
• Last month, Matthew Hoh, a senior Foreign Service officer and former Marine captain resigned his Afghanistan job saying the war was not only unwinnable but that the presence of U.S. troops was exacerbating the situation.  Even if the US increases its troops, it will take generations and billions of dollars to create the conditions that might lead to success.

So the question I’m asking myself – as presumably Obama is asking – is whether the war in winnable,  and if it is, at what price and is America both able and willing to pay that price.

As I understand it, General McChrystal says that to win we must minimally:

• Increase the number of troops there by 40-60,000.  These will be mainly American troops, because Europeans are not enthusiastic about the war, and after eight years of Bush’s high-handedness are not in the mood to cooperate on this venture.
• The strategy must change so that civilians are not mere regrettable casualties of strikes against the Taleban.  If their security is not given a much higher priority, they are going to continue to cooperate with the Taleban to get the foreign troops out.
• The Afghan government must be more credible.  The recent election, which was supposed to be a big step forward in this direction, instead turned out to be a showcase of corruption and ballot-fixing.  Karzai who is now the de facto winner is leading the government which NATO troops are dying to support.
• Afghans must be trained more quickly to take over much more of their own security operations.  This was the goal of the surge in Iraq, which was initially declared a success.  But it is not yet clear that it was.
• The current constitution of Afghanistan must be revised, creating a decentralized government reflecting the real distribution of power wielded by provincial and local leaders.  At present, provincial governors are appointed by untrusted President Karzai.
• Americans must help re-build the country’s road, water and electrical systems, and schools.  It will cost American lives and billions of dollars and take a very long time.

Are we prepared to do these things?  And if we are prepared, should we do them?  And if we should do them, can we do them?

If we stay, we should at least, as Colin Powell argued years ago, have a clear set of realistically achievable goals.  We should not be there to create a democracy, we should not be there to create equal opportunity for all, we should not be there to destroy all the poppy fields.  We shouldn’t be there to capture Osama Bin Laden.

I am not 100% sure I’m right.  Not the way I felt right about the war in Vietnam.

But personally and regrettably, I think we should develop a strategy for getting out of Afghanistan as quickly as we can, and live with the consequences.

Fact and belief and the preposterous

Facts are based on the empirical evidence I have access to at any given point in time.  If the empirical evidence changes, the facts change.  That’s why even the most hallowed facts of science have changed over the centuries.

Belief, on the other hand, is a little more resilient in the face of opposition.  When faced with contradictory evidence, beliefs might not change.  I may, instead, distrust the evidence.

The arena of conflict between facts and beliefs isn’t confined to conflicts between science and religion.  Most of us in our personal lives have been faced with similar dilemmas.  For example, money is missing from my purse.  There is only one other person who had access to it since the money disappeared.   He must have stolen it.  And it must be how he could afford that expensive shirt he just bought, after telling me he was flat broke.  That he stole my money is the only explanation, and all the evidence corroborates it.  But I know this person.  I know he is not a thief.  I don’t believe the evidence.

And perhaps I find the money under the seat of the car where it fell out?  Then the facts change.

I was thinking about this difference today when I read a short list of the beliefs of Scientology, a religious group which says it has more than 3,000 congregations in 133 countries.  They believe that 75 million years ago (just before the dinosaurs disappeared according to my chronology), an intergalactic tyrant, Xenu, brought millions of aliens to Earth who now cling to human bodies.  Scientologists apparently have a series of processes by which they claim to free themselves from these unwanted guests.

Now I accept a lot of things as facts.  And I have a set of beliefs which seem to me to go beyond the absolute empirical evidence but which are central to my life.  And I have a huge array of possibilities which I neither accept as fact or discard as impossible, but which I certainly do not take as likely enough to guide my daily decisions.  I think it’s possible, for instance, that some kind of  process of telepathy operates in the Universe.  I think it’s possible that the dead can sometimes communicate with the living world.  Perhaps there is life that is more advanced than life on Earth, or that extraterrestrials have visited Earth.

But I have to say, from my point of view, Scientology takes the cake for actually believing the preposterous.

Halloween History

I read somewhere that Halloween was brought to America from Ireland.  As a child, I was taught that the beggars represented souls in Purgatory who were going from door to door to ask for prayers so that they could be released in time to get to heaven for All Saints Day on November 1st.  Halloween didn’t make it to England until about a decade ago – brought, I strongly suspect, from America by stores looking for something to fill the retail gap between summer and Christmas.

106th Street, NYC

 

 

My favourite personal Halloween experience was when I was living on 106th Street in New York City.  It was a neighbourhood influenced by Columbia a few blocks north, and by the ethnic groups which gave the area its quite outstanding neighbourhood restaurants.  There was an edge in the neighbourhood which delighted me.  There was the old lady who sat at her ground floor window and asked passers-by to pick something up for her at the grocery sore.  And our bag lady who accosted you if you put your trash into the bin after 10 a.m., when she’d already gone through the garbage on our street.

But for Halloween, the best was our local street panhandler.  He always waited until the morning after the night before, and stood on the corner calling out “Trick or Treat:  Last Chance for Trick or Treat.”

I remember him with such fondness that I wish I’d given him more than my standard quarter.

 

The Church of England vs the Church of Rome

The pope’s invitation to Anglican Catholics – including priests and bishops – to join the Roman Catholic Church is continuing to have repercussions.  By and large, I’m afraid it is not a display of Christian love.

Just in case you missed it in the 4th-grade history class, the Anglican Church broke off from the RC church 500 years ago over the issue of papal authority.  The trigger was King Henry VIII’s desire to annul his first marriage to Catherine, an annulment to which papal authority would not agree.  This was not wholly a matter of principle, since Catherine had powerful connections whom Rome did not wish to overly displease.   Henry ultimately decided that he was the head of the Church of England, and divorced himself.  Years of civil war ensued, but Anglicanism ultimately replaced Roman Catholicism because great swathes of England wanted it that way.

Personally, I strongly suspect that what at the moment looks like a clever papal coup and a humiliation for the Church of England is going to be a rather small wave in the tide of history.   The Anglicans who are contemplating a move to Rome are doing so over the ordination of women and gay priests and bishops.  But the English psyche is not going to bend easily to papal authority.

That has been the issue for 500 years, and it is not going to go away.  Roman and Anglican Catholics may have a great deal of doctrine in common.  But those who are leaving the Anglican Church are doing so because they do not agree with the Archbishop of Canterbury.  There is even less room for disagreement when they disagree with the pope.

Addendum:  When Pope Benedict XVI met with Queen Elizabeth II for the first time, the pope was expecting her to kneel and kiss his ring, which is the protocol he has come to expect.  The Queen, however, as the Head of the Church of England, simply stood and held out her hand.  The Pope, apparently, was quite taken back.

How dare she!  and a woman besides.

Television or the computer?

“Television is more interesting than people.  If it were not, we would have people standing in the corner of our rooms.”  Alan Corenk

Well, I have a friend whose television is in the corner of her room behind a screen where it stays most of the time.  It’s brought out only when something really really really important is happening.  Like when Obama was elected.  Or for the news on 9/11.

I’ve never been a great TV addict.  Besides the evening news, an hour once a day is the maximum I’m comfortable with, and often we watch nothing at all.

Ah, but my computer is an entirely different thing altogether.  It is a discipline I must impose on myself to make sure I do not sit in front of the screen for eight hours running.  It’s not always the internet or even email.  Often it’s writing or working on my accounts.  And stupid games like Freecell.

Sitting in front of a computer isn’t as passive as sitting in front of a television, but in truth, I’m not sure why I find it so potentially addictive.  Though I think I’m probably not unusual in today’s world.

Enough for tonight.  We’re watching a TV series called “In Treatment,” which I find – well, addictive.

Another simple solution isn’t simple

Several posts ago I said that several renown economists were seriously floating the idea that CO2 emissions are not the cause of global warming, but that the warming could be slowed down by spraying sulphur dioxide into the air.

Well, I’ve started to read the book – it’s only one chapter in Super Freakeconomics – but The Economist has convinced me it’s worse than a bad idea.  That’s too bad because if it had been a viable solution, it was almost laughably simple and cheap.

Two big objections to this whizz idea are:

- sulphur dioxide sprayed into the upper atmosphere might disrupt patterns of rainfall with results no less drastic than global warming

- the problem with CO2 emissions isn’t just that it’s one of the greenhouse gases causing global warming.  It is leading to an acidification of our oceans which will kill millions of species living in ocean.  It’s already threatening our fish-and-chips, and coral reefs are dying by the mile, and is threatening bio-diversity on a huge scale.

Even if cutting CO2 emissions won’t stop climate change, we badly need to reduce our use of fossil fuels.

So I’m putting a thermal inter-lining on all our curtains.  All our windows already have thermal light-filtering blinds I imported from the States.  (They’re terrific, by the way.)

Close to cannibalism

When I was studying for my Ph.D, psychologists were just beginning to suggest that perhaps the species-centric view that only humans were capable of higher mental activities like problem-solving, loving, and social interaction was wrong.

With time, research has made it increasingly difficult to maintain that these activities are uniquely human.  Evidence that animals not only solve problems, but often have a sense of humor, and grieve when they lose a child or friend is not extensive.

The practice of killing chimpanzees for bushmeat is not uncommon in the few places where this threatened relative of ours still survives.  But I think seeing a whole community of chimpanzees mourning for the loss of one of their friends would make it feel like cannibalism.