My too often nonsensical and forever unenlightened reflections on people and life and everything else I understand as well as I understand everything else. Not well at all, in other words. Love thy neighbor, is my motto. Unless something better comes along. Make sure to say so when you find it.
I had a clarifying moment, today, when my principal created as social scientists might call a forced choice.
Either go with the pressure and force as the governing philosophy of interactions between people or don't.
And like the vast majority of my kids and the teachers I work with I'm choosing not.
Love,
Ben
Posted by
Ben Sutherland
at
2/16/2007 12:40:00 AM
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2 comments:
Force like that sucks. No doubt about it. what sucks even more is its inevitability.
I don't mean that in a long-term, societal sense. I mean it in a more acute "this is life right now" kind of way.
No matter how yokes you toss off, there's someone else waiting to slip another one on you.
The trick, I'm beginning to believe, is to dump as many as you can and to duck others.
Case in point. I love working for myself. By removing a large "force source" from my everyday life, it's easier to deal with other limitations on individual freedom, etc.
When you have to combine your professional/work life's limitations with the other ones society thrusts upon you, it can become rather oppressive.
That's my "be your own boss" speech, I guess. There are potential financial benefits, but the real perk is autonomy.
Good luck with all of this. I know it's a tough series of calls to make.
CDB
Yeah, I agree, Carson. I'm sure that's why my dad was so desperate to be his own boss as well.
And at a bigger level, I've just decided to stop trying to please people who pressure me. People who do this, in my experience, are like terrorists. They never back off because they're too convinced that they have found something that works. That is the rationale for terrorism, actually, which is seen by terrorists as the force/pressure necessary to achieve their political aims. And that's they they don't see their fights as illegitimate. Because they see what Westerners do and they think that they just can't do it with enough muscle.
There's only one way to deal with that, I've found not out of some strategy but out of resignation: to ignore them and to stop trying to please them. Because they'll never be pleased.
I've just decided to stop trying to please people anymore who won't ever be appeased and to focus, instead on doing the work that counts.
That's a decision I made a long time ago, but it's only now that I realize that people who play this way really can't be trusted. So I've given up trying to trust them.
Ben
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