Do you claim all of your home?

One of the central problems with associating the idea of home too much with a place is that you're making a claim to be a part of something that you probably do not even begin to understand.

Our ignorance is unlimited.

When you say that you are proud to be from a place, you should do so knowing what that place really is and what it has been.  Pride in nationality or group often stumbles when it is presented with all of the requisite negativity that comes from the way that groups and nations work.  There is very little that is moral or compassionate in the way that a state functions, and the ways in which groups define themselves and confine themselves leave little room for the questioning and personal growth that is a standard part of the good life.

Be a human being, not a Brazilian.  There is an overwhelming history of compassion and love that comes with that humanity, and it sits right alongside an overwhelming history of brutality and hate.  That is not to say that there aren't things about your community or your people that you shouldn't stake a valid claim to, that you shouldn't be proud of.  There's little of you in that claim though, besides that which you choose to take for yourself.  And if it is a taking on of your own choice, why limit it to one place or one people?  Search far and afield for the positive.

Take all that is good, strive to be all that is good, and always keep in the back of your head the fact that goodness and decency are something to be fought for.  All too many throughout history, around the world, in your town,of your people, under your flag forgot that. That is part of being human, but it is also something that you claim when you put yourself under their banner.

Where do you live?

Understanding home is pretty difficult.  We normally assign a pretty generic place name to the idea of home.  The further away we get from the place the more and more generic it gets.

Right now I live in the city of Mississauga.  If someone from around here asks me where my home is I would tell them "Mississauga".  I own a little bit of land here, have a house, just built a raised garden bed in the backyard this morning before it started raining.

If Mississauga is my home, and Mississauga is in Canada, wouldn't that mean that Canada would have to be my home as well?  Yet it's a whole different story to refer to a country as your home.  I grew up on the east side of Indianapolis, Indiana.  It was hard for me to ever even say that Indianapolis was my home.  I definitely didn't feel at home downtown, or out west, and definitely not up north.

The United States, even as it grows seemingly more and more dysfunctional by the day, still registers as home for me in the big picture.  My brain puts out alarms whenever the conversation of home and country even come up, it's a topic riven with competing psychological interests.

But when you break away from the psychological attachments and look at what I've just said, it makes no sense.  A city that is Canada is where I would call home in any normal ol' conversation, but the same doesn't stand true for Canada itself.  That word, home, like most words, has so much meaning bound up in such a small space that it's hard to treat it with any sense of greater understanding.

If the US is home, then wouldn't the deep heart of Mississippi be home?  It's the US?  If Mississauga is home then wouldn't the mansions up and down Mississauga Road be home?  They're in Mississauga.

When any of us are asked about the idea of home, we have answers at the ready.  When we start to break those answers down though, we're left without a good understanding of whether the thing that we call home is specific enough to have any real meaning.

Understanding that contradiction is one of the important parts of understanding the idea of cosmopolitanism.

The Stoic is cosmopolitan

Nope, wrong one.

Interesting, but nope again.


Cosmopolitan in it's old, little understood, sadly too often reserved for just those who travel around staying in luxury hotels kind of.


Two weeks ago I'd planned on doing a short series about fatherhood, but hey, the baby is here, and being thrust into fatherhood kind of removes the immediate will to write about it.


I'm working on the idea of home this week with my students, and it got me to thinking about the way that Epictetus develops the idea of a cosmopolitan person, the person who regards the world as their home.


More on that as time and baby allows this week.

More like this

Making it up as you go along

I begin this writing project by talking about names.  I was anticipating the birth of my first child at that time, and here I am now, still anticipating that same event.  Now, of course, that anticipation is building and building as it gets closer and closer to her arrival.  Soon I'll add another title to the list that I've been building up over the years.

This week I plan on writing a bit about being a father.  It's something that I don't really know anything about.  I met my own father three or four times in my life, and I never spent a good deal of time around other people's fathers either.  I think that everyone that becomes a parent ends up making it up as they go along, but I'd like to take the week to try to get my head around some ideas.

Hopefully it'll help me to sort out some of my ideas, and maybe you can give me a little help along the way.

My cup overfloweth, buddhism as daily practice

Imagine your mind as a cup.

This cup fills itself.

Thoughts and reactions and ideas slowly bubble up from the bottom.

Whether you are optimistic or pessimistic; you are full.

There's no need for anyone to come by with a pitcher and top you up.

You are overflowing.

What drops out of you dirties up your table, splashes onto others, requires towel after towel after towel to clean up.

You try to stop the cup from filling itself, but that's impossible.

It's nature is to fill itself, whether you want it to be full or not.

What you have to learn to do is to safely pour a bit from your cup out into other vessels when they are a little empty themselves.

Finally, the Fourth!

There's a spare minute in my day, and so I can finally put up the final part of the Basics of Buddhism.  There are Four Noble Truths.  #1, #2, and #3 are done.

#4

There's a way to set things right.

Suffering isn't a broken leg

Some people like things simple, some people like explanations.  The problem with simple things is that they don't always represent the underlying complexity of what's going on.  The problem with complex things is that they can hide the real simplicity that underlies much of our life.

Here's the simple stream of consciousness reply:

My problem with the third truth of Buddhism

Just in case you forgot the first two, they are, in my words:

1.  Life is Awry
2. Grasping and craving create suffering

Number 3 seems almost anti-climactic:  You can get rid of suffering.

Sounds great huh?  Everyone would love to have a life with no problems, no suffering.

But....

Hairless Monkeys Grasping at the Air

Those crazy monkeys keep trying to grab the moon, never realizing that all they're seeing is a reflection of it in the water.

A couple hundreds of thousands of years have left us far less hairy than them, but it hasn't made us any less confused about what is around us.

Rule #1 Life is Awry

There was a week of studying nonstop getting ready for class, then half a week of being sick and slowly getting better, and now I can get back to what I had planned on putting up here a couple of weeks ago- a basic explanation of some of the central ideas of Buddhism.  Here we go:




#1  Life is Awry

We're strangers in our own brains

There's surprisingly little going on in our heads, even when they seem full of every thought, worry, and stray wisp of consciousness that we can muster.  Our stream of consciousness never really dries up, and even when we want it to be still so that we can stop and focus and think, it largely just does what it will.  

That stream of consciousness is a lot like a summer blockbuster, a lot of explosions and interactions and ramblings, but little substance.  

One of my siblings asked me about this when I was visiting for the holidays, and it inspired me to go back and see if I could conjure something up. I'm going to start a list of posts this week on some of the basics of mindfulness.  The Stoics have a great deal to say about mindfulness, and, really, all great religious and spiritual traditions focus on mindfulness, but the basic practices of Buddhism probably tell us the most.   

Seeing what's around us is a lot more difficult than it seems, with our egos and expectations and prejudices constantly jumping in the way of what's in front of our eyes.  Reading posts on the internet don't really do anything to help us with this, as Socrates observed long long long ago, reading something often just convinces us that we know something, when we have really just read it.  To get started on knowing, rather than just having read, we need to do.

Here's a nice video to get to just that, it takes about an hour, and you'll want to watch it somewhere quiet and where you're not being pestered.  Enjoy:

Decide what to be and go be it

That's a really fun smile.  That's Sharon Lebell.

I've never met her, but sometimes there are people out there who you can just imagine really getting along with.









She is apparently a master player of the hammered dulcimer.  I couldn't really say what a hammered dulcimer is, but Google of course can, so here it is:  





Not that I've ever heard her play the dulcimer.  If I'd never looked at her website I'd never have known that she played it.  I "know" her from her translations of Epictetus.  I feel a sort of kindredness to her.  Here is someone who took the time to become a master of the hammered dulcimer, who first wrote a book about naming children, and then who wandered into the realm of Epictetus, Stoic philosophy, and contemplating the good life.

Some of us take roundabout ways to reach what eventually feels natural to us.  Others find a way to get there young, and, sadly, most of us never really move out onto that path.  I don't know whether Sharon was the first or the second, but I find myself definitely moving through the first.  Sometimes I feel like David Byrne, waking up, looking around, and asking myself, "How did I get here?"

Somewhere along the way I asked myself the question, paralleled in the title with a song by the Avett Brothers, and here translated from Epictetus by Sharon Lebell:

"Who exactly do you want to be? What kind of person do you want to be?  What are your personal ideals?  Whom do you admire?  What are their special traits that you would make your own?"

And once you ask yourself, you have to face up to it.  You are not, no matter what your momma told you, perfect, and you will never have the chance to be perfect, but you do have the chance to be better, to be more at peace, to be more happy and open and forgiving and honest.

 "It's time to stop being vague.  If you wish to be an extraordinary person, if you wish to be wise, then you should explicitly identify the kind of person you aspire to become.  If you have a daybook, write down who you're trying to be, so that you can refer to this self-definition.  Precisely describe the demeanor you want to adopt so that you may preserve it..."

Always looking backwards, vol3

Two very interesting thinkers passed away this week.  One was very interesting, got a ton of press, and will likely be forgotten within a generation.  The other was very interesting, went through long periods of being largely ignored, and will likely be read and reread for the next several centuries.  The first was Christopher Hitchens, the second was Vaclav Havel.

The good life is interconnected, but individualistic

Being yourself is a pretty scary prospect.  The reality of sitting alone with oneself in a room is more than most people can handle.  The idea itself is even a little frightening for some.  If just being temporarily alone with our own thoughts is more than we can handle, how could we even imagine being alone in the world?  And so we build relationships and connections and interconnections, as we should.  Understanding how to separate those connections from our own true selves is one of the primary difficulties involved in figuring out what it means to have a good life.

The banquet of life

Some chapters are boring, some are interesting.  Some people seem to be a little bland, but when they stand up to speak they passionately set forth on their topic.  Grand ideas are floated by some students in the attempt to solve all problems, while others are happy to deal with the details.  You open your mouth and say something interesting, and the next day you open your mouth and sound like an idiot.  You take it as it comes I suppose.  Being in Kingston for classes and discussing interesting ideas with other students always takes me to a little piece from Epictetus that never fails to put a smile on my face:

Remember that you ought to conduct yourself
as if you were at a banquet.
When something is passed around to you
stretch out your hand and take it politely.
If it passes by you, don't ask for it to come back,
it's not its time.
Perhaps there'll be some left when it comes back around.
 (Encheiridion, 15)

The good life isn't ruled by money, false dichotomies

False dichotomies are one of my favorite (I just cursed at my computer because it told me favorite should be spelled favourite) things.  They're one of those things that are so amazingly useful that no one seems to care that they're absolutely nonsensical. Your false dichotomy for the day is:

I would rather be poor and happy than rich and miserable.

The good life isn't ruled by money, part 1

The problem isn't with money, the problem is with you.

The good life isn't ruled by money, intro

For the most part my first year university courses are a blur.  Besides the obvious problem of drinking, there was the fact that I was reading like a madman, though most of it wasn't really for the courses that I was taking.  I had read The Social Contract when I was in high school, but I remembered next to nothing from it.  After my second reading in my freshman year I came away with at least that first line, "Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains."  Rosseau thought that those chains could be broken, and they have been for the most part.  Unfortunately, most of us have willingly replaced them with another set of chains of our own forging.

If you're reading this blog, you are probably in a place that is freer than any other place has ever been in the history of the world. About 45% of my readers are American, 45% Canadian, and the rest scattered around various other free places in the world.  The unparalleled freedom present in these locations is only matched by the willingness that people have to be dominated by money. We face the problem not of being held in bondage, but in deciding whether we will allow ourselves to simply be the means through which another person can make money.

More to come later this week...

The good life is generous

I'm a big friend of lending books.  In some ways, a lot of our social networking ties into that same simple notion, to point our friends towards information that we might think is useful to them.  The idea of giving is vitally important to my understanding of the good life, and there's no better way for me to explain it than to point you towards the words of Kahlil Gibran.  I had planned on using this blog as a way to sort through my own ideas on a subject, but sometimes my own ideas are tied so tightly to my influences that there's no way of separating them.  In those kind of cases I think that the most useful thing to do is to simply reproduce the original rather than run it through my admittedly thin filter.

The following text is from his book The Prophet:

Simple things are hard to do

"While thou livest, while it is in thy power, be good."


This is perhaps the simplest of commands.That doesn't mean that it's easy though.  While you are alive, and while it is in your power, be good.