Dave Pollard's environmental philosophy, creative works, business papers and essays.
In search of a better way to live and make a living, and a better understanding of how the world really works.


January 6, 2011

Not Present

Filed under: Preparing for Civilization's End — Dave Pollard @ 01:57

Boathouse at Dawn, Fiji, photo by Ron Romanosky, at webshots

So it’s another year, and one year since I first read Ran Prieur’s warning that when you have, at last, the time and opportunity and freedom to do nothing, nothing is all you will want to do, and you may then remain depressed for a long time before you finally discover and realize what you, alone, unpressed by others, really want to do with your life.

For one year I have had that freedom, and Ran’s warning was right on. After the initial exhilaration, I spent most of 2010 doing nothing (of substantial use to anyone else, anyway). I put a bit of energy into four projects I think are important, but that’s all. I was pretty self-indulgent, and on balance not significantly happier, and actually somewhat less productive in non-work-related areas, than I was in previous years when I was working full time.

One paradox I have been facing is that in moments when I feel most “present” (those amazing times when I am feeling at once very relaxed and very aware) I can see and imagine much more clearly what I want to do with the rest of my fortune-blessed life; but that intentionality, that sense of purpose and direction and knowing what I care about and what I have passion for and what I feel good about doing, seems to be a prerequisite for feeling present. For me at least, presence and intentionality are a self-reinforcing ‘positive feedback loop’, but so is their lack. When I don’t have both, I have neither, and am stuck, aimless, motionless, inside my head.

I have been focusing much of my time of late on self-acceptance and on being aware of and letting go of my ‘stories’ — the fictions about myself and others, and about the past and the future that I mistake for reality, and which constrain and depress me and hold me back. These stories I tell myself include:

  • the story of Gaia’s ghastly and ever-increasing suffering, loss of beauty, and collapse
  • the story of most people’s insensitivity, cruelty, excessive neediness, rapaciousness, stupidity, dishonesty and unreasonable expectations of me and what the world “owes” them (and I of course include myself, much of the time, in the category of “most people”, and acknowledge that much of this human folly is unintentional)
  • the story of what will happen if my worst fears (usually of loss, suffering, or acute social anxiety) are realized
  • the story that I am lazy, hypocritical, selfish, useless to others, “part of the problem”, promise what I can’t or don’t really want to deliver, and am too easily angered, upset and fearful

This “letting go of stories”, and total non-judgemental, non-expectant self-acceptance, are the key practices I am using to become more present. It is as if when I let go of stories, judgements and expectations (and hence am freed from the fear, anger, anxiety and other negative emotions they provoke) what is left is true presence.

Sort of. The truth is that when I am alone, what I generally feel when I let go of all these things is a kind of ‘space-y’ numbness. It is when I am with others (in love, in sex, in intelligent conversation or in learning) that this ‘letting go’ brings about an amazing sense of presence. I suspect that this ‘thinking out loud’ blog that I’ve been writing now for eight years, is to some extent my reaching out for an intelligent conversation with others who are sympathetic, at those times when I am physically alone. Last month, after an animated hour-long conversation on a bus with a woman I had only just met, I suddenly realized I am feeling happy. It was only at that point I recognized that I had not been feeling happy before this chance encounter. How can I be so un-present that I am not aware of a fundamental, creeping sense of unhappiness, especially when I am living in a situation in which, by all rights, I should be constantly and ecstatically happy?

Photo: Mindful Wandering, by Maren Yumi

Yet after I’ve spent some time with people — even in intelligent conversation — I have a growing longing to be alone. So then I escape the crowd and retreat to comfortable space-y aloneness again. Except sometimes now it isn’t space-y: Perhaps I am slowly learning how to be alone, since there are moments, listening to well-crafted music, or bathed in certain light and shadow, or steeped in warm water, or surrounded by exceptional and peaceful beauty, or somehow moving effortlessly (e.g. on night trains), when I can be present alone. These are for me rare moments of great creativity, imagination and insight. In such moments I really feel like “the place through which stuff passes”, a part of all-life-on-Earth, instead of a disconnected “self”, an “individual”. It’s an amazing feeling of readiness, of momentum, of well-being, and of really be-ing.

In those moments my intentions are usually to write (music, poetry, short fiction) and to find people near where I live who are at once exceptionally intelligent, empathetic and gentle. If they also have many of the 65 abilities that will become all-important in the next decade, or if they’re potential sexual partners as well (young, slim, fit, attractive, poly, and with high sexual appetites) that would be an unexpected but unessential bonus.

So what’s emerging for me this year is a set of modest intentions and a possible process for helping me realize them:

  • Continue to try to live by my six principles: be generous, value my time, live naturally, self-accept, practice be(com)ing present, let go of stories;
  • During my time alone, create an environment (peace, beauty, light, music, warmth, movement) conducive to that state of presence that produces my best writing, and devote at least three hours a day to that writing — and trust that the outcome of that process will be positive; and
  • Find, as close as possible to where I live, some more exceptionally bright, empathetic and gentle people, and spend as much time with them as possible; at this stage I have no idea if that time will be spent just in conversation and recreation, or on projects with shared purpose (I trust that if I find them, we’ll figure that out together).

Thinking about my one-word theme for the year, I keep coming back to the same word that I chose for 2010: mo(ve)ment. I think it is interesting that the words movement, motion, motivation, moment (in time), momentum, momentous and emotion all stem from the same root meue- meaning both instant and important. The power of presence, and of living in the now, to “move” us.

That’s all I’ve figured out so far. How about you, dear readers? What is your intention for 2011, and your process for realizing it?

January 3, 2011

What’s the Title of This Story? (guest post by Tree Bressen)

Filed under: Our Culture / Ourselves — Dave Pollard @ 15:56

A guest post by Tree Bressen:

matter of scale andy

(image by Andy from Lighthawk Photo)

A few recent stories to share.

________

#1. The other day, the copy machine i’ve used in my home office for nearly 5 years with almost no troubles suddenly started generating a peculiar odor, a smell with a chemical tint to it.  I did what most people would do, which was to turn off the machine and hope the problem would go away.  Unfortunately, the next time i revved it up the odor immediately returned.  I generally have a poor sense of smell, so something has to be pretty bad for me to even notice; i figured it was time to call the company.

The company representative attempted to be helpful.  She asked what my model number was (though i’d already told the computer that answered first), and how long i’d had the machine.  “Do you see any burnt or melted parts?” she asked.  “No,” i replied.  “Now please open the front cover, and pull out the toner cartridge.  Do you see any burnt or melted parts?”  No, again.  “Please open the back cover of the machine.  Do you see any burnt or melted parts?”  Nope.  “Sometimes the machine emits an odor as part of normal usage.”

“I’ve had this machine for over four years, and it’s never made this smell until yesterday.”

“Do you see any burnt paper?”

“As i told you, it doesn’t smell like paper, it smells chemical.”

“Normal use can result in a smell.”

With rising frustration clearly evident in my voice:  “I’m telling you, i’ve had the machine for years, this is not normal. Can you please respond to the logic of what i am saying to you, instead of repeating your script?”

“May i please put you on hold?”

A standard bureaucratic interaction, right?  So we are accustomed to telling ourselves, and i’m sure you could share your own stories along similar lines.  I recently had a positively Kafka-esque moment attempting to transfer a bank account, where each banker was requesting certain verification from the other, simultaneously insisting that their institution’s rules prohibited them from first generating what the other was requesting.  Seems crazy, huh?  Like something out of the movie Brazil. Here are a few more stories, and you’ll see where i’m heading.
________

#2. I’m currently blessed to be buying a house.  When i called about this particular property, it turned out to be owned by someone i already knew.  Not a close friend, an acquaintance.  Instead of conducting the whole business through realtors, we sat down at a coffeeshop and worked out the deal with kindness, flexibility, and good sense, then presented it to be written up by the appropriate officials.  I took the initiative to schedule a signing appointment at the title company.  I told them we wanted to come in together, and she said, “We normally schedule the buyers and sellers separately.”  “I know,” i replied, “but we’re already friends, and we’d prefer to come in at the same time.”

The people i’m buying from never even met the owners before them… and this too is considered normal.

_________

#3. For years i’ve spent an occasional Sunday evening visiting my elderly neighbors Annie & Bill.  Both retired teachers, they’re lovely folks, their house reliably filled with music, food, and good books.  They loan me extra linens for Passover every year (and some semblance of a shankbone, since i’m vegetarian), and proudly share the latest accomplishments of their children and grandchildren.  I met one of the latter once, when he was here attending university.  For a long time i lived right across the street from them, but since i moved a few blocks farther away i don’t get over to see them quite as often.  Recently i called to see about dropping by, for the first time in several months.  They did not pick up as usual, the outgoing message sounded odd, and a week later i still hadn’t heard back.

I searched online and discovered that Bill, 81 years old, had died shortly after my last visit.  Informing me naturally wasn’t at the top of Annie’s list to attend to:  they’d been together for over 50 years, and her own health was not the best.  Probably she’d gone down to California to be with her daughters.  Because we had no other friends in common, i hadn’t known.  I had to look on the internet to find out­ (fortunately their surname is not overly common) ­and to track down one of their kids to contact.

* * *

Separate stories, a few bureaucratic in nature, the last one personal.  What do these true tales have in common?

On a day-to-day level, you can complain all you want about administrative excess, or about the poor quality of craft and manufacturing “these days.”  Read the latest article bemoaning the state of our “sound bite” culture.  In the bigger picture, you may lie awake at night worrying about the latest financial crash, or coming climate disasters.  But on some level, all of these, along with the anecdotes i have offered above, have a common driver.

That driver is scale.

It is the scale of modern life, more than any other quality, that is a common cause behind all these phenomena.

Imagine how strange it would be, in most places in the world, in any village of a few thousand people, to not even know the people who lived in your place before you did.  In most such villages you would have built your shelter yourself, but if not you would at least know who did, and probably the whole history of who lived there several generations back.  Yet in America today we take it for granted that most people are strangers to each other, and the whole structure of modern life is built around that proposition, replacing community with rules to protect us from each other.

Mark Hayes writes that “We Are All Tuvaluans,”1 and in some sense it’s true:  In the effort to slow climate disaster, the tiny island nation of Tuvalu is but the canary in the coal mine — ­however, the reality of that is too far from obvious for us to act.  Or we would act, the 89% of us worldwide2 who consider climate change to be “very” or “somewhat” serious, only we are caught in polities so large as to be nearly impossible to turn around.  If it had been a rowboat instead of the Titanic encountering an iceberg, it wouldn’t have sunk.

To my mind, the one great thing about things that are unsustainable, is that by their very nature they don’t last. Operating in social units at the tens of thousands, let alone 310,521,330 (the census estimate of U.S. population on the day i am writing this), is unsustainable, and sooner or later it will change.  The coming crises, eventual results of the very, very large feedback loops we’ve created, are going to push us back into communities where we actually deal with each other face-to-face, for better and for worse.

At age forty, i’m sure not relying on the government to take care of me in my future “golden years.”  Social security is just that, social, and it’s going to be my relationships with friends and neighbors, not money in the bank, that are going to provide whatever care i may be fortunate enough to receive in that time.  For months in advance of my impending move i’ve been attending potlucks, book groups, and block parties with my future neighbors, about a mile from where i live now.  If one of them is in need, i’m trusting i’ll hear about it sooner than a few months after the fact.  Right now, those connections are still a luxury; later, they will be the stuff of survival.
________
1 http://www.tuvaluislands.com/features/GriffithReview2007/GriffithReview2007-01-05.html
2 http://ecopolitology.org/2009/12/07/poll-shows-unprecedented-global-concern-about-climate-change/

Tree Bressen has been putting down roots in Eugene, Oregon since 1999.  Working as a group facilitator on a gift economy basis, she is a co-creator of GroupPatternLanguage.org.  She lives car-free, travelling mainly by bicycle and train.  Tree uses a lower-case “i” to refer to herself as a conscious expression of values, asserting that English is the sole language out of 6,809 worldwide that capitalizes the self and no other pronouns, and that language is one influence on culture.

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