A Rain of Frogs

I wonder, sometimes, what it is that makes it so hard for people to talk to me.

As I always have, I look inward first. I’ve (apparently) always had a problem with this, looking for the problem inside myself before I look elsewhere. Certainly, many people who know me might roll eyes at that, have some anecdotal evidence of me blaming someone else or citing a situation or problem other than myself, but rest assured, that didn’t come first. I’ve always looked inside first, blamed myself for the problem. Logic and a defined thought process lead to me looking outwards. Eliminate the impossible, and whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth? Someone famous said that once, even though I think he might have been fictional.

I suspect the problem with people not talking to me must be me, that this is a problem where the truth is that I am at fault. Somehow I give people the impression (at least, I get the impression this is the impression I’ve made) that I will break like a dropped egg, or explode like some crudely crafted homemade bomb when something difficult is said to me. It’s sad, really, how few people will tell me real things. It’s touching that they worry, but I cannot help but feel I’m being deprived of information I really need.

Or maybe I just expect too much of people. I expect less of others than I expect of myself, and I certainly never ask someone for something I wouldn’t be willing to do myself. Maybe I ask too much of people sometimes. Maybe I should not expect unconditional love from anyone who for whatever reason cannot love me unconditionally. Maybe its unfair to ask it of them.

In case it hasn’t been evident, I’ve been in a pretty dark place mentally for the last week and a bit. Longer, in fact, but it’s become fairly acute in the last little bit. It has been a time of great upheaval for me in general, and some very specific points of upheaval are causing extra discomfort.

Yes, I call it discomfort, because for the most part, I have a pretty comfortable life. I am not hungry, I am not deprived. I have a generally good life, despite what feels like a very strong karmic imbalance right now. I persevere, I maintain faith, that good things are coming. Isn’t that a sign of insanity, doing the same thing over and over and hoping for a different result? Not so much difference between insanity and hope, if you ask me.

However, I am not where I want to be in life. My mind is often a thousand miles away. It upsets me a great deal, my mind being so far away sometimes – more than most would believe possible, let alone proper. Right now I cannot do what I feel is right for those I love in the way I would like. Situation and circumstance have made that a short-term impossibility. Not impossible forever, just for a while.

Sometimes I wake up in the morning and wonder how it could get worse, and with enviable timing, the world shows me how.

And then I have to fight the urge to bemoan the fact that it seems my world is collapsing around me. Fight the urge to succumb to despair. I am, after all, the architect of this world, and therefore responsible for all its glorious bits and equally responsible for all the squalid bits underneath. See how its internal first?

Of course that’s only half the story of accountability. Too often I find myself trying to take responsibility for other people’s happiness, and I can’t and shouldn’t do that. I need to separate myself from those who would gladly hand responsibility of their happiness to me. When it’s offered, I feel obliged to carry that weight.

But that weight, it burns me out, wears me down. Leaves me threadbare. Feeling empty. It’s bad for me. I can’t do it any more, and shouldn’t have to.

Maybe that’s why I’m so hard to talk to, because I’m threadbare. People see me, see that maybe I need to be responsible for my own happiness for a while. But I can’t help myself, and offer to carry theirs, if even for a little while. Make their life easier for a bit.

And really, who could resist that?

It’s getting dark,
Too dark to see.

I was reading this article about cost-per-mile and ownership of hybrid cars over at 37 Signals and feel slightly vindicated.

I’ve been maintaining for a few years now that hybrid cars are not more energy efficient than other cars simply because they have lower fuel usage costs.

It’s great that we’re using less fuel in cars – I think mileage is a fantastic thing to continually improve. It means we use fewer gallons or litres of gas (or diesel) and can stretch our already stretched dollars more.

But to say that a low-mileage car is intrinsically better for the environment than any other car is fallacy. The cost in energy to product a far must be taken into consideration, as must the cost of maintaining and disposing of the vehicle.

I’ve used the same argument about wind power. By some reports, it takes more energy to create the carbon-fibre blades of a large three-blade wind generation tower than the tower will generate in the lifetime of those blades (no, I cannot find any corroborating link to this, but I read it somewhere, National Geographic, or Scientific American or something, I can’t remember). This is not energy efficiency. This is NOT good for the environment.

Cars are bad for the environment no matter how you slice it. In terms of energy cost per mile (or kilometer, for us metric types) bicycles have cars beat by several orders of magnitude. We can do better with cars. Can and should. There must be better solutions out there.

But to claim hybrids are better for the environment is wrong. As the article states, by all means buy a hybrid. Hybrids are shrewd business decisions. Lower your cost of ownership. Just stop waving your environmentalism flag in our faces while you drive by the rest of us at the petrol station.

I remember when I was little, and I would hold my father’s hand,
I always marveled at how large his hands were, how powerful his grip.
He would sometimes lift me up by the one hand he held in his,
Grip tight but not hurt me. Strength and gentleness.

And I remember looking at my smooth white hand in his,
It seemed amazing to me that my hand could ever grow as large,
As covered with hair, crisscrossed with tiny lines and wrinkles.
Covered with the scars of hard work and worry.

I remember being a bit older, and helping my father renovate the house,
Or change the brakes on his car, or build a fence in the back yard.
My hands were almost as large as his, but his were still more powerful,
more wrinkled and scarred than ever, but more clever, smarter too.

We would work together, and I’d watch his clever smart wrinkled hands,
Watch as this grace and power combined to get things done.
I’d see him impose his will on a bit of wire he was cutting, or watch
As he gripped a hammer and willed nails through wood.

And then one day I had a child of my own and I held that boys hand in mine,
Compared his perfect tapered tiny little fingers to my own.
I wondered if he would look at my hands and see what I had seen,
If he’d wonder at my powerful clever hands as they willed music out of strings.

And some day I know I will hold my father’s hand again,
Except I won’t be so little, and his hand won’t be so large or powerful.
And I’ll look at his shaking white hand in mine, see the scars,
Scars of work and worry, and our roles will be reversed.

And I’ll lift him up, as gently as he lifted me as a little boy, as I lifted my little boy,
I’ll lift him up and we’ll walk again, this time all three of us.
And I’ll hold each of their small white hands in my powerful, scarred grip,
But there’ll be no worry or work, just the hands of two fathers and two sons.

“Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature,
nor do the children of men as a whole experience it.
Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure.
Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.
To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits
in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.”
– Helen Keller

We live in fear. Fear of losing our televisions. Fear of losing our jobs, fear of losing our liberty. So we build these boxes around ourselves, limits beyond which we won’t venture. We mark these boxes “Fragile”, and “This side up”.

We think these limits we’ve created are safe. We trade our potential for safety. And then we deserve neither.

When did we become so timid?

Take up space. Scream “No more!” and stand up. Security is an illusion. Safety is a myth. Cast aside the boxes, and live like the free men and women we were meant to be.

No more!

“A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent in doing nothing.”
– George Bernard Shaw

“Any man who selects a goal in life which can be fully achieved has already defined his own limitations.”
– Cavett Rober

“Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.”
– Erich Fromm

“A man dies still if he has done nothing, as one who has done much.”
– Homer

“There is no security on this earth. Only opportunity.”
– Douglas MacArthur

“Bite off more than you can chew, then chew it.”
– Ella Williams

“There are risks and costs to a program of action. But they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.”
– John F. Kennedy

“It seems to me that people have vast potential. Most people can do extraordinary things if they have the confidence or take the risks. Yet most people don’t. They sit in front of the telly and treat life as if it goes on forever.”
– Phillip Adams

“An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.”
– Friedrich Engels