A good friend of mine, living in the Nordic countries for some years, recently emailed me to ask a favor. Her co-worker, founder of an innovative digital project for artists and teachers and the general public, found himself hitting a brick wall with his venture in its start-up phase. He and I haven\u2019t met yet, but she asked if I\u2019d write him a letter and see if I could cheer him up. So I did. Here it is. A few sections have been cut, and the names changed, to protect the innocent.<\/p>\n
Dear Sven:<\/p>\n
We don\u2019t know each other, but our mutual friend Kathleen has asked me to email you with some words of support. She\u2019s worried about you, says \u201cHe got married just last Saturday and hasn’t smiled at all.\u201d I take Kathleen very seriously, and I\u2019m the kind of guy that does what he\u2019s told. So here goes.<\/p>\n
I assume you\u2019re not sad because you got married, but rather because you and your mate and your colleagues inhabit a world that obstructs you, seemingly at every turn. From what Kathleen tells me, you and she are both struggling against the pervasive dumbness of the people around you and the idiocy of the systems in which you\u2019re entwined. (A distinction worth bearing in mind always: Ignorance is a condition, dumbness is a commitment.)<\/p>\n
Apparently you find yourself surrounded with incompetence, greed, pettiness, stubbornness, backbiting, and unreliability, all of which interfere greatly with your ability to do your job and further a perfectly sound, intelligent, exciting, socially useful and even visionary set of projects that will benefit humankind.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s the good news: You\u2019re not alone in that situation. As a bigger country, we in the States have even more dumbheads and obstructionists unfit to pour piss out of a boot with the instructions written on the heel than you do. (I speak here numerically, not statistically; I suspect the proportions are about equal.) I meet them everywhere else I go, too; the problem is most likely global.<\/p>\n
It gets even better: They\u2019re breeding faster than we are. There\u2019s a great science-fiction story from the \u201850s by Frederick Pohl called \u201cThe Marching Morons,\u201d a classic, which you should look up if you really want to get depressed.<\/p>\n
So anywhere you might flee for refuge in the world this same situation pertains, I guarantee it. All across the planet, points of light, small pockets of sanity, intelligence, foresight, responsibility, ethicality, integrity, surrounded by pandemic infantilism. The terrible truth is that we inhabit a world full of children of all ages, and the occasional adult — I mean a truly mature person — you meet is as an oasis in a desert, and you must learn to fall on such a one like a thirsty man on a watering hole. \u201cThere are many people, but very few human beings,\u201d Chief Dan George tells Dustin Hoffman in the film Little Big Man.<\/p>\n
The more you realize this — and the blunt ugly fact of it sinks in deeper as you grow older, I can tell you — the more justification you have for despairing and tearing your hair and screaming at the walls, as we all do periodically. I am not sure that will ever improve; as the song says, \u201cthis old world\/ain\u2019t about to change.\u201d Maybe Marilyn French has it more precisely in her novel The Women\u2019s Room<\/em>: \u201cThings change, but more slowly than we do.\u201d Terribly frustrating, the waste and stupidity we confront every day, and if you let it then it can drive you mad, or cynical, which may not be too much different.<\/p>\n But I\u2019ve become convinced that surendering to those negative energies is not an option. A poet of my acquaintance, Carolyn Forch\u00e9, speaks the deepest of truths when she says, to people like ourselves, \u201cIt is\/not your right to feel powerless. Better\/people than you were powerless.\u201d<\/p>\n Remember the saxophonist and playwright Vaclav Havel, who had it much tougher than you or I ever will, and who wrote, in his book Disturbing the Peace, Now the plain fact, sir, is that you may be doomed to live in this mess of a world, but you are also blessed. You have intelligence, and creative energies, and an attunement to the future. These are gifts. (I take this on faith because Kathleen believes in you, and she has proven an infallible guide to the rare human beings. If she takes you seriously, I do too. And she has never asked me to write a letter like this to anyone.) You have occasions when you get to use those gifts, even if you must fight battles to get those chances.<\/p>\n You also have a wife who loves you, I gather, which means you have a life partner with whom to stand side by side, back to back, face to face. And you have the friendship and respect and collaboration of Kathleen, one of the most extraordinary people it\u2019s ever been my privilege to know. Which means you have ready access to two sources of the miracle of supportive female energy and intelligence and protection, one in your private life and one in your workplace, a benevolence without compare. Cherish all this. Relish it. Feel grateful for it. Those things, all by themselves, signal that you live a charmed life, better than most people will experience. Recognize its enchantment and give thanks to the great spirit for this bounty.<\/p>\n Here is my suggestion:<\/p>\n Go find as a wedding present for yourselves Lewis Hyde\u2019s astonishing meditation, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property<\/em> (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). The luminous comments of this poet and essayist on the differences between a gift economy and a market economy must surely resonate for creative people everywhere who nowadays find their fields of activity entirely and unapologetically market-driven, increasingly populated and dominated by bean-counters, number-crunchers, desk jockeys, career bureaucrats and MBAs.<\/p>\n Yet his is not a despairing book, if only because Hyde knows that the world\u2019s need for the gifts of its teachers and artists endures, inexhaustible. \u201cIf the commodity moves to turn a profit,\u201d Hyde asks, \u201cwhere does the gift move?\u201d His answer: \u201cThe gift moves toward the empty place. As it turns in its circle it turns toward him who has been empty-handed the longest, and if someone appears elsewhere whose need is greater it leaves its old channel and moves toward him. . . . The gift finds that man attractive who stands with an empty bowl he does not own.\u201d<\/p>\n The challenge for you, Sven, for you and I and Kathleen and the rest of us, is to learn to see the world and all its people as \u201chim who has been empty-handed the longest, . . . that man . . . who stands with an empty bowl he does not own,\u201d and to see our job as depositing our gifts in that bowl even when the one who holds it out puts obstacles in the way of our getting to it.<\/p>\n Get up tomorrow morning and enjoy your new marriage. Enjoy your wife, your home, your city. Go walk among your fellow citizens, sit with your beloved holding hands in a caf\u00e9 to watch them and marvel anew at the fact that every single one of them thinks, like you, that they\u2019re the very center of the universe, and that they\u2019re each and every one of them exactly right. Take a deep breath, replenish yourself. You have serious work to do next week. It\u2019ll keep till Monday morning. Meanwhile, make coffee. Make love. Make dinner. Make love. Get a good night\u2019s rest. Make love. Make breakfast. Remember this: \u201cGot to do what you can to keep your love alive; try not to confuse it with what you do to survive,\u201d Jackson Browne sings. And, in another song, he adds, \u201cAnd when the morning comes, get up and do it again. Amen.\u201d<\/p>\n No need to answer this. I hope it helped, though if so I\u2019m not sure how. It was Kathleen\u2019s idea, and she\u2019s usually right about these things. I trust her implicitly. If it didn\u2019t do any good, that\u2019s probably my fault.<\/p>\n Things could be worse.<\/p>\n Fuzzy logic, A good friend of mine, living in the Nordic countries for some years, recently emailed me to ask a favor. Her co-worker, founder of an innovative digital project for artists and teachers and the general public, found himself hitting a brick wall with his venture in its start-up phase. He and I haven\u2019t met yet, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/foodandtravel\/islandliving\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/foodandtravel\/islandliving\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/foodandtravel\/islandliving\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/foodandtravel\/islandliving\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/foodandtravel\/islandliving\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=248"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/foodandtravel\/islandliving\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/foodandtravel\/islandliving\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/foodandtravel\/islandliving\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/foodandtravel\/islandliving\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n\u201cEither we have hope within us or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul, and it’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart. . . .
\n\u201cHope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. . . .
\n\u201cHope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. . . . It is also this hope, above all, which gives us the strength to live and continually try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nAllan<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"