kindness

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Work, pain, fear, compassion…let’s call the whole week off

Well, it’s Friday, and this will be the last blog post of this week, exclusis improvisis.  By which I mean, I am not scheduled to work tomorrow, and I will not work tomorrow.  I suspect even if I were threatened with rather severe consequences‒which is extraordinarily unlikely to happen‒I would not work.

After all, I have lost most of what mattered to me already, and though some things (people), important things, have indeed come back, and are cherished, I know that I can either survive whatever might be used to threaten me, or that I am not too frightened of death in such circumstances.

As the line from the famous movie (and book) Damage goes, “Damaged people are dangerous; they know they can survive.”

Of course, that does depend on the type of damage and the nature of the person in question, but still, it is a valid point.  Indeed, as all of you who read this regularly may know, my biggest question is not “How can I survive?” or “Can I survive?” but rather, “Should I survive, and why?”  I’ll avoid getting into the whole Myth of Sisyphus discussion, since I think I’ve done it nearly to death, but I suspect you get the point.

I don’t mean to imply by the above that I think I am immune to threat and pain and torture and so on.  That would be quite unrealistic.  If nothing else, my experience with a kidney stone made clear the fact that, despite chronic pain for roughly a quarter of a century, it is entirely possible to visit upon me further pain so severe that I literally can think of nothing else but trying to get help and to stop it.

Actually, despite those 25ish years, it’s not as though my chronic pain isn’t gripping and debilitating in and of itself.  There are many days in which a lot of my time in the office is spent trying to do my work while writhing and contorting, trying to stretch, banging on my thighs with my fists to try to loosen their tension, sometimes even deliberately hurting myself (sometimes in ways that would frighten other people, I suspect, and that can involve very sharp things and/or very hot things) to distract from the other pain.

I’ve said it before, and I’ve encountered no convincing counterargument so far, but pain is not evolved for one to be able simply to ignore it.  And while I am admittedly rather weird and atypical, and often have felt that I was not the same species as the people around me, I am by no means a different enough organism not to share such a fundamental characteristic.  Pain‒at least, the capacity for it‒is a necessity for long-term survival.  And fear, as the 12th Doctor pointed out, is a superpower.

Of course, we must be careful to distinguish true and useful fear from pathological fear states.  As Gavin deBecker points out in The Gift of Fear, if your fear is of something real, you will be able to discern its cause eventually, and it will be fairly focused and reasonably specific:  a particular person makes you feel uncomfortable, something about a particular car or driver seems erratic or reckless, that sort of thing.  Whereas just general anxiety is often vague and nonspecific.

I know of people who felt afraid to take a bath after they saw Jaws!  Now that doesn’t make much sense.  If your bathtub is big enough and deep enough to have a great white shark in it, then you’re probably ultra-wealthy and the shark is your pet.  Probably you keep it well-fed on captured British Secret Service agents, so it is unlikely to bother you.

Anyway, what was I talking about?  Oh, yeah, not working and being unsusceptible to most ordinary threats.

Certainly, it would be rather ridiculous for someone to say they would ruin my future prospects, that they would put a black mark on my resume or some such.  How hilarious.  A major point on my current CV would be “Three years, Florida State Prison, West Unit, working as an inmate in the Education Department”.  I’m already not competitive for many positions I would have the skill to fill, just as I would no longer be allowed into many nations I would like to visit.

I am, actually, far more susceptible to cajolery and appeals to kindness, or rather “niceness”, than to threats.  I guess it’s because I want to try to be a good person, a kind person, a compassionate person*, despite my tendency toward darkness of various kinds.

It’s an area of insecurity and conflict on my part, because there’s always part of me saying, “You don’t know the power of the Dark Side.”  And I am not always sure, especially when my pain and my depression and my sense of otherness are at their peaks, that it would not be preferable.

But when I am clearest and calmest, I recognize that compassion and at least attempted kindness are better.  They not only may help other people, but they tend to be better for one’s own sense of well-being.  It’s an almost archetypal win-win scenario.

I guess that’s probably a good and somewhat positive place to end this post and this blog week.  I hope you all have a nice day and a good weekend and a good beginning of next week.  I will probably be back on Monday‒again, exclusis improvisis**.

*These are not three different people.  I’m not trying to be like Eddie Murphy in The Nutty Professor.

**Yes, I am trying to apply that expression frequently to see if I can get it into (relatively) common use.  So, please, do feel free to use it when it’s appropriate, and tell people what it means.  And, what they heck, tell ‘em where you first encountered it.

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How far that little candle throws its blogs! So shines a good deed in a naughty world.

Hello there, good morning, and welcome to yet another Thursday.  It’s the first Thursday of April, and yesterday was “April Fool’s Day,*” but I doubt that many people felt like playing pranks on each other…I know that the ones with whom I interacted showed no signs of such “foolishness”.  To be honest, I’ve personally never seen the fun in pulling pranks on other people, April Fool’s Day or otherwise.

It would have been nice—in a horrible way—to have learned that the global coronavirus pandemic thing had all been a big prank, to be revealed on April 1st, but it’s hard to imagine anyone doing something in such poor taste…even those people involved in government, who are notorious for their tastelessness.

We’ve finally gotten things set up so that, at least part of the time, I’m going to be working from home for the coming days to weeks (hopefully not months!), but since I do records and payroll for my workplace, I’m going to be needing to go in at least part of the week.  That’s not so bad.  If I’m basically the only on in the office, it’s hard to see from whom I could catch the virus, and to whom I could give it.  Also, my training, combined with my already socially withdrawn character, make me somewhat less vulnerable to contagion than many others.

Speaking of the latter, I apologize for the gloomy character of last week’s blog post.  I suppose it can be forgiven—at least I hope so—given the state of things, but still, it’s nicer to try to keep at least a little lighthearted, even in dark times.  And, let’s face it, taking the universe as a whole, at least since the universe was more than three hundred thousand years old, it’s always been “dark times”.

Get it?  If not, don’t feel bad.  It’s not really funny, and not very clever.

Anyway, I did a little “audio blog” yesterday that I’ll be posting on Iterations of Zero, soon, about patriotism, the pledge, the national anthem, the flag, and an aside on seeing a virus as an alien invasion.  It’s more fun than it may sound, and it’s less than ten minutes long—I even do a tiny bit of singing—so when I post it, I invite you to take a listen.

Of course, despite everything, Unanimity continues to draw closer to release—a story about a contagion of an entirely different, and more terrifying, kind than any we’ve seen before.  I feel bad that it’s not already available, because I think it would be quite a nice book to read while stuck inside over the course of a social distancing protocol.  It’s long, at the very least.  Well, what can you do?

If you wish, you can certainly feel free to get copies of Mark Red, Son of Man, or especially The Chasm and the Collision, to help you pass your time.  They, and all my many short stories, are available for Kindle, so you don’t have to leave the house to get and read them!  I’ve even got audio of me reading several short stories and part of CatC on my YouTube channel, and you don’t even need to pay for that (except with advertising or with your YouTube premium subscription…none of that money goes to me, though).  Obviously, of course, there are a squillion other books out there to enjoy when stuck at home.  Number one on my list of recommendations would almost certainly be The Lord of the Rings, for those of you who haven’t already read it, or haven’t reread it recently.  I’m probably going to be picking it up again, myself.  But really, the number of possible books is functionally unlimited**.  Indulge yourselves in what you enjoy when it comes to books, including nonfiction.  Why not?  Written language is the lifeblood of civilization.  Let’s keep it flowing in abundance!

With that, I’ll bid you farewell for the moment.  Do take sensible precautions, look after your elderly and infirm friends and relatives, and look out for each other.  The great strength of humanity is our ability to work together in complex and coordinated ways to do more and better than any collection of people could do each on their own (a process which relies powerfully on symbolic language).  And one of the great motivators of that strength is our ability to care about our fellow humans.  Remember, every other person out there is so much more like you than they are like any other kind of creature in the universe (and vice versa) as to be nearly indistinguishable for any other type of creature.  So be sympathetic and be caring and be careful.  The world is full of sharp corners.

TTFN

*April Fools’ Day?

**Further recommendations are available upon request