The moment I arrived at my first rainbow gathering, I knew this was the place I´d been looking for my whole life. I felt at home in a way I hadn´t since my departure from Oneness into this Avatar called Meagan.
Just kidding (or am I?).
Seriously though, my time at my first national rainbow gathering, in the northern part of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, was a time of finding my place in the world, a sense of relaxation and fullness, maybe like how it feels when you find your true love or life purpose. The paths all intertwined in completely off-the-grid type ways, winding back into one another and leading you straight to your camp just when you though you were lost, or possibly guiding you to stumble upon pizza made in a stone and mud oven, or hippies singing naked on top of a wooden pirate ship. Here you could sit in the middle of the path asking for donations of small crystals, chocolate, or other valuable goods, and no one would arrest you or tell you to move it along. People would smile and make friends, and walk around you on the path.
I spent two and a half weeks at my first national rainbow gathering. When I left, my first shower lasted at least an hour before a fellow traveler knocked on the door saying it was their turn, and I didn´t know what to do because I´d never got out of a shower before with dirt still coming off me. I longed for a place like this to be always, a tribe and village following the philosophy of live and let live, where the paths aren´t based on cars or even bikes, but our very own feet and their relationship with the forest.
Little did I know at that time that permanent settlements of this nature really do exist in the world, and that one day I would follow a message from the Mystery to a small and sacred collection of them. This place is Lake Atitlan, or more specifically the towns nestled on the edge of it, with varying proportions of locals and foreigners looking to escape the western grind.
No, there aren´t many naked hippies (the influence of Catholicism here might hinder that), but there are people sitting in the streets bartering their wares (like a giant trade circle!). There are paths where no car tired can tread, where even tuk-tuks or bicycles find it difficult to pass. A few days after my arrival I discovered that this town is not nearly as big as I thought it was, because it winds back on itself, and I thought I was on drugs until I realized that this place knows no grid, it has grown organically, as all Earth-creations are wont to do.
Yesterday I cried as I walked through San Marcos, where the first path you walk on upon arrival by lancha is so obviously made for humans, not for cars or other machines. The cobblestones wind through the scattered restaurants and spiritual retreat centers like a peaceful stream, flowing through the path of least resistance.
Aaah surrender. This place isn´t perfect. The pollution here is devastating, but surely no worse than in the States. Its just hidden better in the States. There are lessons to learn from this place though, and I don´t know how I will return home now to the grid. What can I do? Surely the only logical thing to do is stand before city council and cry, sobbing that we must learn to organize our lives in ways that nourish our souls.
Who knows if this passion will still be that alive when I return, but here is one small record of the innate human response to living even a little closer to the land we are made of, set forth because the energy needed somewhere to go.
I post this as a prayer that all our souls may be nourished by the place we live, more and more each day, and that we remember our ability and response-ability to co-create that nourishing environment.
Amen, Blessed Be, Auuuummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
Thursday, January 13, 2011
Saturday, January 8, 2011
Health & Healing
It seems like years ago that I was laying in a hammock talking to a young woman from Canada on Guatemala´s Pacific coast about health care.
The conversation brought to mind an idea I once came up with, that if a group of people wants to organize themselves into a cohesive body, inherent in that organization is that all members look out for one another´s well being. Few hunter-gathererers would stay with a band of people who didn´t share their food or look out for each others safety and health. There would be no point.
Somehow this quality of looking out for one another, intrinsic to human existence, has come to be called `socialism`, or sometimes `communism`, and is treated like the plague in the more ignorant parts of the world (coughcoughunitedstates).
Leaving aside the idea that we are one human family for a moment, its completely understandable that someone living in Texas or Miami wouldn`t give a rat`s ass about the health and well-being of poor liberal children in California.
However, if you don`t see yourself as responsible for someone`s else well-being, neither are they obligated to make or follow social agreements with you.
You can`t have it both ways, simultaneously telling people that you are all one nation, under God, and must abide by the same codes of living (called laws), and that everyone is accountable to the so-called justice system, and then treat people like they aren`t part of your tribe by denying them food, health care, or other assistance while you have more than enough. Its hypocritical.
However I got really jaded about this whole concept as I started thinking about the toxicity of so-called healthcare in the States. People drugged up on pharmaceuticals they don`t even need, women being told they can`t have their babies at home, kids misdiagnosed with learning disabilities because they`re being driven crazy from being stuck in a dreary classroom all day when they should be out climbing trees. Who wants this kind of universal healthcare? Not I.
So, the solution is to totally re-vamp all aspects of our healthcare system, making it holistic and truly accessible. Simple, right?
The conversation brought to mind an idea I once came up with, that if a group of people wants to organize themselves into a cohesive body, inherent in that organization is that all members look out for one another´s well being. Few hunter-gathererers would stay with a band of people who didn´t share their food or look out for each others safety and health. There would be no point.
Somehow this quality of looking out for one another, intrinsic to human existence, has come to be called `socialism`, or sometimes `communism`, and is treated like the plague in the more ignorant parts of the world (coughcoughunitedstates).
Leaving aside the idea that we are one human family for a moment, its completely understandable that someone living in Texas or Miami wouldn`t give a rat`s ass about the health and well-being of poor liberal children in California.
However, if you don`t see yourself as responsible for someone`s else well-being, neither are they obligated to make or follow social agreements with you.
You can`t have it both ways, simultaneously telling people that you are all one nation, under God, and must abide by the same codes of living (called laws), and that everyone is accountable to the so-called justice system, and then treat people like they aren`t part of your tribe by denying them food, health care, or other assistance while you have more than enough. Its hypocritical.
However I got really jaded about this whole concept as I started thinking about the toxicity of so-called healthcare in the States. People drugged up on pharmaceuticals they don`t even need, women being told they can`t have their babies at home, kids misdiagnosed with learning disabilities because they`re being driven crazy from being stuck in a dreary classroom all day when they should be out climbing trees. Who wants this kind of universal healthcare? Not I.
So, the solution is to totally re-vamp all aspects of our healthcare system, making it holistic and truly accessible. Simple, right?
Monday, January 3, 2011
Infestations
For some reason I had decided on fries at the bus stop forty five minutes out of Los Amates, and as the Chapin woman in charge of this food station began to hurriedly scoop them into a small cardboard box, a large roach (well, large for my hometown. Small for around here) crawled out from under the metal pans holding sandwich fillings.
Despite my nausea, this six-legged appearance couldn´t have been timed more appropriately. On the way up to Finca El Paraíso, from which I was now returning, I had shared with my fellow traveler Michelle my thoughts on the conflict between anthropocentrism and the pest-like behavior of my species.
¨What is the meeting place between these two conflicting ideas?¨I asked. I felt like I was on the edge of something big. I had two opposing perspectives mapped out in my head. On the one side is my basic opinion that civilized humans are a scourge on the Earth; we act in many ways just as cockroaches, bed bugs, termites, cancerous cells, or any other infestation of small and noxious creatures does-- over-breeding, over-crowding, and generally polluting our environment with toxic waste, concrete, and plastic.
On the other hand, I love my species, and watching the innocent glowing smiles of Chapin children reaching up through the window of a shuttle (a mini-van designed for maybe ten but filled with twenty or more people, if you include those on the roof) to squeeze their departing relatives´ hands is enough to make my heart ache. This love and appreciation of our species had led many people to believe we are somehow superior to other life on the planet, and, in some minds, not even regular animals but creations of God, made in his image, meant to have dominion over the Earth. This dogma of superiority justifies our endless use of other life and the basic elements of this planet for our own pleasure and luxury.
I knew that somewhere in the friction between these seemingly opposite perspectives was some greater Truth, and Michelle´s response deepened my understanding of this situation, although it turned out to be much simpler than I expected. She said that the halfway point between anthropocentrism and human-as-pest is that we are just animals--not superior, and not inferior, but just animals like all those other animals around us.
Contemplating this I thought it was problematic, because our status as animals, who are therefore natural, has been and is used to justify our destructive behavior as also natural.
What this did help me understand though is why many humans have so much resistance to seeing themselves as animals. In our superior state, there is no point in comparing ourselves to animals, because we are governed by a different set of rules. But if we see ourselves as animals, then we might start to compare ourselves to other animals, and see a lot of room for growth.
We might see how we act as ants, running around in cities barely acknowleding each other, all interactions having to do with the distribution and exchange of resources (commerce), mostly for the queen (the elite few who hold most of the global economy´s wealth). We would see how little of the things we say we value so much about ourselves--compassion, mercy, ability for connection and intimacy-- are actually played out in every day encounters, at least in places that have been industrialized -- ¨developed¨, as the capitalist adherents would say.
We would see how, as Edward Abbey so aptly put it, we have adopted the philosophy of the cancer cell in aiming for infinite growth, and that hoping to colonize other planets when we destroy this one is sickeningly selfish.
I´ve been reading a book involving doing shadow work for the past month or so, although I didn´t bring it with me to Guatemala. The basic premise of this book is that we reject the parts of ourselves that we don´t accept, but this exacerbates them and is one of the main sources of the problems in our lives.
Civilized humans wage war on pests. We bring in toxic chemicals to rid our homes of insects that have found a niche to live in, exposing children and pets to carcinogenic compounds. Then of course we also wage a war on cancer, fetishizing the victims of this civilized disease to distract attention from the cause of it - the poisonous artificial environment we have created for ourselves. I now believe that at least part of why we do this with such fervor is that we are scared of the mirror these beings hold up for us, revealing our infestious behavior.
I also want to add that cities are a special breeding place for many of the creatures that have been labeled as most disgusting. Wherever humans have congregated in close proximity, we have been followed by pests and plagues who thrive in such conditions.
My proposal? First of all, to do the shadow work of acknowledging and accepting the infesting, defiling, verminous aspects of our nature. Once we cease to fear these aspects of ourselves and can look them square in the eye, they will no longer rule us.
Then we can ask ourselves what qualities of we want to cultivate, from the animals we admire. The wisdom of the owl? The profundity of the whale? The grace and joy of dolphins as they leap through the air? Whatever it may be, we have much to learn from the living community of which we are a part, and it is time for us to do so.
Despite my nausea, this six-legged appearance couldn´t have been timed more appropriately. On the way up to Finca El Paraíso, from which I was now returning, I had shared with my fellow traveler Michelle my thoughts on the conflict between anthropocentrism and the pest-like behavior of my species.
¨What is the meeting place between these two conflicting ideas?¨I asked. I felt like I was on the edge of something big. I had two opposing perspectives mapped out in my head. On the one side is my basic opinion that civilized humans are a scourge on the Earth; we act in many ways just as cockroaches, bed bugs, termites, cancerous cells, or any other infestation of small and noxious creatures does-- over-breeding, over-crowding, and generally polluting our environment with toxic waste, concrete, and plastic.
On the other hand, I love my species, and watching the innocent glowing smiles of Chapin children reaching up through the window of a shuttle (a mini-van designed for maybe ten but filled with twenty or more people, if you include those on the roof) to squeeze their departing relatives´ hands is enough to make my heart ache. This love and appreciation of our species had led many people to believe we are somehow superior to other life on the planet, and, in some minds, not even regular animals but creations of God, made in his image, meant to have dominion over the Earth. This dogma of superiority justifies our endless use of other life and the basic elements of this planet for our own pleasure and luxury.
I knew that somewhere in the friction between these seemingly opposite perspectives was some greater Truth, and Michelle´s response deepened my understanding of this situation, although it turned out to be much simpler than I expected. She said that the halfway point between anthropocentrism and human-as-pest is that we are just animals--not superior, and not inferior, but just animals like all those other animals around us.
Contemplating this I thought it was problematic, because our status as animals, who are therefore natural, has been and is used to justify our destructive behavior as also natural.
What this did help me understand though is why many humans have so much resistance to seeing themselves as animals. In our superior state, there is no point in comparing ourselves to animals, because we are governed by a different set of rules. But if we see ourselves as animals, then we might start to compare ourselves to other animals, and see a lot of room for growth.
We might see how we act as ants, running around in cities barely acknowleding each other, all interactions having to do with the distribution and exchange of resources (commerce), mostly for the queen (the elite few who hold most of the global economy´s wealth). We would see how little of the things we say we value so much about ourselves--compassion, mercy, ability for connection and intimacy-- are actually played out in every day encounters, at least in places that have been industrialized -- ¨developed¨, as the capitalist adherents would say.
We would see how, as Edward Abbey so aptly put it, we have adopted the philosophy of the cancer cell in aiming for infinite growth, and that hoping to colonize other planets when we destroy this one is sickeningly selfish.
I´ve been reading a book involving doing shadow work for the past month or so, although I didn´t bring it with me to Guatemala. The basic premise of this book is that we reject the parts of ourselves that we don´t accept, but this exacerbates them and is one of the main sources of the problems in our lives.
Civilized humans wage war on pests. We bring in toxic chemicals to rid our homes of insects that have found a niche to live in, exposing children and pets to carcinogenic compounds. Then of course we also wage a war on cancer, fetishizing the victims of this civilized disease to distract attention from the cause of it - the poisonous artificial environment we have created for ourselves. I now believe that at least part of why we do this with such fervor is that we are scared of the mirror these beings hold up for us, revealing our infestious behavior.
I also want to add that cities are a special breeding place for many of the creatures that have been labeled as most disgusting. Wherever humans have congregated in close proximity, we have been followed by pests and plagues who thrive in such conditions.
My proposal? First of all, to do the shadow work of acknowledging and accepting the infesting, defiling, verminous aspects of our nature. Once we cease to fear these aspects of ourselves and can look them square in the eye, they will no longer rule us.
Then we can ask ourselves what qualities of we want to cultivate, from the animals we admire. The wisdom of the owl? The profundity of the whale? The grace and joy of dolphins as they leap through the air? Whatever it may be, we have much to learn from the living community of which we are a part, and it is time for us to do so.
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Do Who You Are, Love What You Do
Lately, I've been thinking about whether or not we are what we do.
It seems that some would rather believe we are not what we do, because they want to see themselves as separate from the actions they have taken which they are ashamed of or otherwise regret.
I've been thinking though, there's two problems I have with this line of reasoning. The first is that I promote unconditional love and acceptance of ourselves no matter what we do. The other is that I think we are what we do, not what we have done. We are what we are doing in this moment. Write now (freudian slip), I am writing.
Get it? I'm writing. I am writing.
I am Meagan.
I am Writing.
Earlier, I was dancing.
Thus, I think that the fact that we are ashamed of some of the things we do is not cause to separate from these actions and disown them, but to love them compassionately, and all the feelings that go with them. Because no matter what we are doing or have done, we are alive, and that is reason enough to celebrate.
It seems that some would rather believe we are not what we do, because they want to see themselves as separate from the actions they have taken which they are ashamed of or otherwise regret.
I've been thinking though, there's two problems I have with this line of reasoning. The first is that I promote unconditional love and acceptance of ourselves no matter what we do. The other is that I think we are what we do, not what we have done. We are what we are doing in this moment. Write now (freudian slip), I am writing.
Get it? I'm writing. I am writing.
I am Meagan.
I am Writing.
Earlier, I was dancing.
Thus, I think that the fact that we are ashamed of some of the things we do is not cause to separate from these actions and disown them, but to love them compassionately, and all the feelings that go with them. Because no matter what we are doing or have done, we are alive, and that is reason enough to celebrate.
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Age
I was going to write about art.
I was going to write about my process of doing art in college. I declared myself as an art major this semester, something neither I nor anyone I knew saw coming. As one of my best friends said when I told her when I said she did something random, "Its not as random as you changing your major to art after showing no artistic interest whatsoever." Or something like that.
But shortly after I changed my major, I remembered something I said a few years ago to a fellow student: 'If the world didn't need saving, I'd be an art major.' I always thought that art was a luxury. I thought I could go to school for something that would help make the world a better place.
As it turns out though, school doesn't teach you much of anything useful for saving the planet. Thus my degree change. And now I have to face what I have rarely dealt with before: being challenged in school. Because school has always been a breeze for me. I picked up math, language, even science and history, easily and naturally. I skated through school, a straight A student the whole way. But art? Art is completely different territory. This is right brain stuff. This is why I changed my major.
Since changing my major, I have discovered a place in school where I question my own sense of self worth. Although I enjoy being challenged and trying new things, I'm not used to not being able to do things. Such as draw Kendall Hall. (I was nearly in tears that day, as I worked my way around my paper, only to discover that I was going to have to erase everything and start over to make it come close to looking right.)
The hardest part about making art is feeling excited about my work, and wanting to show it off to my friends, and then feeling embarrassed when I imagine how I look. Like a little kid coming home from school showing their parents their scribbled monster drawing, to which the parents can only respond, "That's wonderful darling!"
I panic when I think I am acting like a little kid. I fear being seen. I feel immature. Part of me hasn't grown up. I noticed the other night that while watching a movie about high schoolers that I felt younger than the kids in the movie. They seemed older than me. Why is that? Didn't I ever grow up? Shouldn't the high school kids seem younger than me? What's wrong with me?
When I see high schoolers in person they seem younger though. So maybe it was just the movie.
Part of the problem is that our society's idea of maturing entails becoming part of the capitalist economy, something I rebel against. Does this condemn me to being a kid forever? Can I psychologically mature in this context? What does that even mean?
This idea that I am more immature than people around me, more clumsy and irresponsible, is part of a general problem with devaluing myself. But I ask myself, do I really want to grow up? The answer is yes and no.
Yes I want to take responsibility for my part in the scheme of life. Yes I want to create, to influence and help shape this world in harmony with my values. Yes I want to feel that I am growing, emotionally and spiritually.
No I don't want to get a boring, soul-killing job. No I don't want to let go of my idealism. No I don't want to settle for being a cog in the machine.
All this leaves one question unanswered though. Am I a little kid if I want to show off my art? Can I let go of this shame of being proud of something I made? Pride and shame...they're dating these days. But for how long?
I was going to write about my process of doing art in college. I declared myself as an art major this semester, something neither I nor anyone I knew saw coming. As one of my best friends said when I told her when I said she did something random, "Its not as random as you changing your major to art after showing no artistic interest whatsoever." Or something like that.
But shortly after I changed my major, I remembered something I said a few years ago to a fellow student: 'If the world didn't need saving, I'd be an art major.' I always thought that art was a luxury. I thought I could go to school for something that would help make the world a better place.
As it turns out though, school doesn't teach you much of anything useful for saving the planet. Thus my degree change. And now I have to face what I have rarely dealt with before: being challenged in school. Because school has always been a breeze for me. I picked up math, language, even science and history, easily and naturally. I skated through school, a straight A student the whole way. But art? Art is completely different territory. This is right brain stuff. This is why I changed my major.
Since changing my major, I have discovered a place in school where I question my own sense of self worth. Although I enjoy being challenged and trying new things, I'm not used to not being able to do things. Such as draw Kendall Hall. (I was nearly in tears that day, as I worked my way around my paper, only to discover that I was going to have to erase everything and start over to make it come close to looking right.)
The hardest part about making art is feeling excited about my work, and wanting to show it off to my friends, and then feeling embarrassed when I imagine how I look. Like a little kid coming home from school showing their parents their scribbled monster drawing, to which the parents can only respond, "That's wonderful darling!"
I panic when I think I am acting like a little kid. I fear being seen. I feel immature. Part of me hasn't grown up. I noticed the other night that while watching a movie about high schoolers that I felt younger than the kids in the movie. They seemed older than me. Why is that? Didn't I ever grow up? Shouldn't the high school kids seem younger than me? What's wrong with me?
When I see high schoolers in person they seem younger though. So maybe it was just the movie.
Part of the problem is that our society's idea of maturing entails becoming part of the capitalist economy, something I rebel against. Does this condemn me to being a kid forever? Can I psychologically mature in this context? What does that even mean?
This idea that I am more immature than people around me, more clumsy and irresponsible, is part of a general problem with devaluing myself. But I ask myself, do I really want to grow up? The answer is yes and no.
Yes I want to take responsibility for my part in the scheme of life. Yes I want to create, to influence and help shape this world in harmony with my values. Yes I want to feel that I am growing, emotionally and spiritually.
No I don't want to get a boring, soul-killing job. No I don't want to let go of my idealism. No I don't want to settle for being a cog in the machine.
All this leaves one question unanswered though. Am I a little kid if I want to show off my art? Can I let go of this shame of being proud of something I made? Pride and shame...they're dating these days. But for how long?
Monday, December 6, 2010
By Now, Intuition is Old Hat
When I ride my bike around town, which I do every day, I constantly get urges to go a certain way, take a certain route, turn here, cut through there, go down this sidewalk or that path. I might look spastic, by how erratically I bike. I follow my impulses and take the path that my gut is telling me to follow. I live on a grid so there are a lot of ways to get from one place to another.
Often there isn't an obvious reason why I am being guided in a particular direction. Sometimes I run into someone I know, and stop to say hello for a moment. Maybe its not about what I find, but what I miss. Maybe if I had gone a different way I would have passed a cop, or a car accident. The other day, though, I saw an incredible example of why its worth it to follow our intuition.
Ever since it got cold I've had cold ears. I've often had this problem in the winter. If I pull my hat down over my ears it just slips back up. If I pull it down far enough to really cover my ears, its in my eyes-- very uncomfortable. Finally, I found the solution: this year, I'll get a hat with ear flaps! However, I'm an ex-Gandhi wannabe, so buying new things is still kinda hard for me. Especially because I knew I needed a fair trade organic cotton or wool hat. So I put off looking for one.
Then, as I was biking down my street a few days ago, I got this urge to turn a block earlier than I usually do to leave my neighborhood. I ignored it at first and kept going-- lately these urges have been bothering me, seeming more like OCD than intuition. The feeling was so strong though, that I actually turned around and went the way I had felt pushed towards. Within ten seconds I probably forgot about it, and about a minute or less later, I saw a dirty hat laying in the street. Although it was covered in leaves, it had ear flaps and smelled like nothing but wet fabric and dirt (it had just rained). I threw it in my bag to wash, super stoked at finding something I'd been wanting. As I went to get back on my bike, I realized that if I hadn't turned around and came this way, I never would have seen this hat.
Maybe I'm not OCD after all.
Often there isn't an obvious reason why I am being guided in a particular direction. Sometimes I run into someone I know, and stop to say hello for a moment. Maybe its not about what I find, but what I miss. Maybe if I had gone a different way I would have passed a cop, or a car accident. The other day, though, I saw an incredible example of why its worth it to follow our intuition.
Ever since it got cold I've had cold ears. I've often had this problem in the winter. If I pull my hat down over my ears it just slips back up. If I pull it down far enough to really cover my ears, its in my eyes-- very uncomfortable. Finally, I found the solution: this year, I'll get a hat with ear flaps! However, I'm an ex-Gandhi wannabe, so buying new things is still kinda hard for me. Especially because I knew I needed a fair trade organic cotton or wool hat. So I put off looking for one.
Then, as I was biking down my street a few days ago, I got this urge to turn a block earlier than I usually do to leave my neighborhood. I ignored it at first and kept going-- lately these urges have been bothering me, seeming more like OCD than intuition. The feeling was so strong though, that I actually turned around and went the way I had felt pushed towards. Within ten seconds I probably forgot about it, and about a minute or less later, I saw a dirty hat laying in the street. Although it was covered in leaves, it had ear flaps and smelled like nothing but wet fabric and dirt (it had just rained). I threw it in my bag to wash, super stoked at finding something I'd been wanting. As I went to get back on my bike, I realized that if I hadn't turned around and came this way, I never would have seen this hat.
Maybe I'm not OCD after all.
Monday, November 29, 2010
Conclusions
So far my favorite blog on here is Looking Both Ways. Or more accurately its the one I think is most acceptable, the one that follows the format of a typical good essay or blog post. Its essentially a rant, but besides going off topic for a moment, I stick to the basic structure of a linear, logical argument, embellished with a few personal insults.
The problem with linear, logical arguments, though, is that they don't allow for growth and learning to come about through the process of writing. I knew the answer before I began writing that post. I knew what I wanted to do: to complain about a behavior and explain why it bothers me, blowing off steam and hopefully persuading people to agree with me in the process.
Most of my thought processes aren't as linear as all that though-- they don't stick to this typical blogging format of telling a story with a point, a lesson, or moral. I appreciate learning something new about myself or the universe though the act of writing.
All throughout school I found writing conclusions to be the most difficult part of essays. Conclusions always seem so cliche. Everyone ends chapters in nonfiction books the same way-- with a short sentence that's meant to sound profound and make the reader feel warm and cozy or inspired, but above all else to agree with the author (Barrack Obama's The Audacity of Hope is one of the most obvious examples I've ever seen of this).
In school they taught me that an essay goes like this: tell the reader what you're about to tell them (introduction), tell them it(body), and then tell them what you just told them (conclusion). This always seemed redundant to me. I had a hard time being redundant on purpose, and I am bothered by it when authors do this too obviously in books. Also known as a 'recap', I hear it in my head as a lecturing voice, automated, not authentic.
Life has taught me that any time I think I reach a conclusion, there is always something new to be learned. For example, after I wrote about the old man and the red light, I started wondering about his perspective. That got left out. I don't think I will come back to it here, but the process has continued for me. Conclusions are an illusion. They are inherently temporary. Although that ironically sounds like yet another conclusion. Ah, the eternal paradox strikes again!
So this is fair warning. I am not a linear, logical person, at least not most of the time. And I can't guarantee that I will ever come to much of a conclusion.
The problem with linear, logical arguments, though, is that they don't allow for growth and learning to come about through the process of writing. I knew the answer before I began writing that post. I knew what I wanted to do: to complain about a behavior and explain why it bothers me, blowing off steam and hopefully persuading people to agree with me in the process.
Most of my thought processes aren't as linear as all that though-- they don't stick to this typical blogging format of telling a story with a point, a lesson, or moral. I appreciate learning something new about myself or the universe though the act of writing.
All throughout school I found writing conclusions to be the most difficult part of essays. Conclusions always seem so cliche. Everyone ends chapters in nonfiction books the same way-- with a short sentence that's meant to sound profound and make the reader feel warm and cozy or inspired, but above all else to agree with the author (Barrack Obama's The Audacity of Hope is one of the most obvious examples I've ever seen of this).
In school they taught me that an essay goes like this: tell the reader what you're about to tell them (introduction), tell them it(body), and then tell them what you just told them (conclusion). This always seemed redundant to me. I had a hard time being redundant on purpose, and I am bothered by it when authors do this too obviously in books. Also known as a 'recap', I hear it in my head as a lecturing voice, automated, not authentic.
Life has taught me that any time I think I reach a conclusion, there is always something new to be learned. For example, after I wrote about the old man and the red light, I started wondering about his perspective. That got left out. I don't think I will come back to it here, but the process has continued for me. Conclusions are an illusion. They are inherently temporary. Although that ironically sounds like yet another conclusion. Ah, the eternal paradox strikes again!
So this is fair warning. I am not a linear, logical person, at least not most of the time. And I can't guarantee that I will ever come to much of a conclusion.
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