In the book Illusions by Richard Bach, he talks about meeting an advanced soul, and about learning the truth of this lifetime. One of the techniques for discovering truth that he talks about is posing a question in your mind and then opening at random a book or newspaper and reading the first thing that you see aloud. If you are properly focused the text will contain an answer to your question.
At present our life is in an uproar as Michele and I are hoping and praying for a change in our circumstance. We have put into motion several events and are waiting to see if one of the results is the outcome we truly want. We have tried very hard not to plan on any one outcome; (a) so that we can be flexible enough to accept what ever happens, and (2) so that we don’t emotionally invest so much that the loss of the outcome doesn’t destroy us.
With all of this in mind, when I recently stumbled across this Hebrew proverb, Man plans, God laughs, I realized that it was an answer to a question I had been holding in my mind for some time now. The question hasn’t been put into words as much has it has been a context for all that I have been thinking and feeling in the past few weeks. If I were to put it into words I would pose it this way: What actions or inactions should I be taken to get the outcome I truly desire? The answer is: Man plans, God laughs. To me this means that you have to give up the illusion of control and accept what your inner essence leads you toward.
I have to trust that part of me that is the Tao or God. I have to believe that inside of me is a compass that unerringly points in the direction I need to go, and that all I need do is relax enough to see this internal compass and I’ll be okay. I’m not suggesting that I be fatalistic or passive, on the contrary, I am saying I need to be active and participate in my life, but in a way that listens to my inner voice. In a way that honors that part of me that is in touch with the Divine.
In spite of my best efforts to do otherwise, I find myself investing in a potential future. By this I mean I am emotionally and spiritually investing myself in a future that is currently dependent upon the actions of others. Most of us have some control over our immediate future, we can plan out the day or a week. And major events likes weddings or vacations are sometimes planned for months or years before coming to pass. These are all situations where most of the control lies in the individual and very little is delegated to others.
Employment by and large is not an area where individuals have much control any more. In the twenty-one plus years I’ve been a professional the employment landscape has undergone several major changes, the end result of which has been to create an unsettled and chaotic environment where people are no longer really in control of their destiny. The illusion of control still exists, people can still make what appear to be choices about what work they wish to perform and where. The change has been more subtle and more insidious. Gone is the promise that hard work and dedication can help you build an investment in your current engagement. Gone is the idea that your support of the company will net you support from the company in return.
Don’t believe me? Just look at the change in language used to describe people in the work place. Personnel departments are a thing of the past, now we have Human Resources. Positions require a “full time equivalent” or FTE. The bottom line is protected at all costs through resource actions rather than firings. We’ve de-humanized the language used to describe human contributions and costs in the workplace, which in turn allows us to treat live people as objects. It is far easier to throw away an unwanted object than it is to impact the live of an employee and their family.
This past week on “NOW” there was a piece on New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer who is making a career out of investigating and prosecuting large deregulated industries. His raison-d’etre seems to be that deregulation doesn’t place the corporation above or outside of the law. This is the first sign I’ve seen that the pendulum may finally be reaching the end of the swing started in the 1980s by the Drucker lead “downsizing” movement. Maybe the final twenty or so years of my career will see a return to a time when corporations and employers view their employees as valued members of a community, as human beings with life’s of importance, and not just as pawns in some meaningless profit driven chess game.
In the computer hardware world there is a term, “Mean Time to Failure” that measures the average time a device is expected to last under normal wear and tear before failing. Of course you don’t always get the mean time, sometimes you get more and sometimes you get less.
Take our toilets for example. The apartment we are renting as two bathrooms, one that gets used all the time, and a second that gets used primarily as a backup when the first is occupied. This past week the flap inside the tank on both toilets stopped working properly. Both are now sticking in the up or open position causing the toilet to run on and on and on. Now I suspect that both flaps were installed at the same time, and while our usage has been lopsided in favor of one, you could probably make a case for each flap having roughly the same wear thus far in its lifetime. But what are the odds that both flaps would stop working in the same manner within days of each other?
That’s a pretty tight mean time to failure.
All of this gets me to thinking the people have a mean time to failure too, physically, emotionally, and mentally. The general reduction of difficulty getting food and shelter has lengthened our lifetimes considerably in the past century or so. More people are living longer, more people are active and working longer than ever before. The ultimate mean time to failure is our lifespan. Men generally get to the mid-seventies and women a few years more. Of course the lifetime you lead will cause your mileage to vary. The past year with all of its stress must have shortened my time. We’ve been way beyond normal wear and tear for some time now.
My only question then is this: will I be aware of my own flap getting stuck or will that failure be it?
The weight of daily existence is starting to wear me down. I’ve never done well in those times of my life where my focus was on the future or the past. I’m a present tense kind of person, and lately I just can’t seem to find a connection to the present.
There are periods of time where the immediate task at hand helps to blot out my stress about the future, and my anguish over the recent past. Work has become a drug in a sense. I can numb myself to the harsh reality of my situation by immersing myself in the details and crap that makes up my current employment engagement. And the stress of the past few months has taken a toll on my energy level so that I collapse into bed at the end of the day and immediately fall asleep. The sleep isn’t restorative or restful however, I’m not getting enough relaxation while I’m awake to get some beneficial sleep.
I felt very forced into my current situation, and I allowed certain aspects of it to happen without even attempting to participate. I’ve always believed that you have to let go and move with the flow of events around you, but that’s different than giving up. In a sense I gave up when we moved to Kansas. I had worked so long and so hard to find work again, and then worked even harder to get us here that I created a false sense of momentum and direction. At first being in Kansas felt like it had a future, that we were going to be okay here. In truth I gave up when the last day in Springfield came and we had to leave all in a rush, all in a hurry. My engines flamed out then, it was only the forward speed I had built up that kept me going until now.
There have been brief moments of connection with my true self recently, connection that was the result of actively participating in my life again. I think that the impact of losing my job in March disassociated me from myself in a deeper and more profound way than I realized. It has taken me until now to start to feel connected to myself again. Only now am I able to really connect with my truth again, and only now am I feeling like I can direct my life again. I’ve started to focus on today and on the present more in the last few weeks. Gone are the long periods of hurt and bitterness over the events of last spring. And gone too, are the fears over the future. Or rather, gone is the intense focus on the future.
I need to care for myself here, now, in this moment. I have to discover my needs and fears and hopes and desires in this time and space. Once I do that, I can start to connect once again with that part of me that is capable and strong, wise and learned. Ignoring my immediate emotional or spiritual state blocks me from accessing my true power and ultimately only contributes to my feeling of helplessness. Recently I started to take a more directive role in my situation (the results of which I hope to expose here very soon now) and as a result I started to feel better.
I’ve got a lot of work to do to fully come back to myself, but I know how to accomplish this and I’ve successfully done it before. We are approaching a new year, and in a nice bit of synchronicity, the start of the tenth year I’ve had Michele in my life. It is time for a new beginning, it is time to reaffirm who I am. I stopped my world and got off for a while, now I’m ready and able to get back on.
Michele and I had a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday. Starting on Wednesday with a matinee showing of National Treasure and culminating with 4 glorious days of doing nothing.
The food was plentiful and fantastic tasting. We made perhaps the best roast turkey we’ve ever had, complete with dressing, cranberry sauce, mandarin oranges, and greens. The weekend also included portions of hamburgers, Dublin Coddle, homemade beef vegetable soup, fresh strawberries over vanilla ice cream, and chocolate lava cake.
We watched movies too. Everything from “The Matrix” to “The Majestic”, and from “Fried Green Tomatoes” to “Finding Nemo” by way of “The In-Laws”. There were naps, and reading, and general relaxing.
The best part of the weekend however, wasn’t the food or the movies. It was the time spent with my wife. We needed some serious downtime, some time to re-connect with each other, some time to re-connect with ourselves. The past months have taken their toll on our spirits, our energy, and our general well-being. This weekend went a long way towards restoring us to at least a shadow of our former selves.
Dear Spammer(s),
Okay. You win this round. I’ve been forced to remove comments from my sites because I am sick and tired of spending an increasing amount of time everyday removing your vile spew from my site. So now no one can comment here at all.
Fuck you very much.
However, all is not lost. I’m in the process of switching the back end of this site, and my wife’s site to Expression Engine. Which has a membership feature that will require proof of humanness before comments can be left.
Sometimes technology is a a good thing.
You never fully appreciate just how interconnected we all are until some event on the world stage impacts your life. Take the Abu Ghraib prison scandal for example. As a program manager in the information technology field, working in Kansas, you wouldn’t expect my life to be directly impacted by heinous human rights violations half way around the planet. But, as it turns out, my life was impacted by that scandal.
I work on a contract, held through a series of intermediaries, for a large government agency. This agency worked with GSA (the General Service Agency) to manage contracts and make payments against them. GSA also oversaw funds being transfered between various branches of the military and independent service providers in Iraq. Some of these funds were used to hire interrogators who abused prisoners in Abu Ghraib. When the prison scandal broke this summer the Inspector General was brought into GSA to address the problem there. The executive management layer at GSA was fired and all contracts were examined with a fine tooth comb.
The new managers were loathe to have anything to due with existing contracts, as those contracts were all suspected of carrying leprosy now. One of the problems that came to light was overspending on contacts. The existing rule of requiring a contract to be re-scoped and re-bid if any year’s expense went over the budget by 25%, had been ignored. The new management is now enforcing this rule. The contract that ultimately pays for my job was projected to be more than 25% over for the base year ending in January. So “resource activities” were undertaken to bring the contract’s actual expenses inline with the budgeted amounts. Friends of mine lost their jobs. My future here was put into question.
So, a bunch of over-stressed, under-trained, poorly managed soldiers; fighting an immoral war thousands of miles from home, over-reacted to their stress and abused other human beings. And the ripple effect of their actions impacted my life. We are all living on one planet, and no one country or group of people is immune to the actions of others; nor are they immune to the reactions of others to their movements. The sooner we all learn to live together rather than at odds with each other the better.
I have worked for over twenty-one years as a professional in the information technology field. Two times, earlier in my career I was faced with being in a union or labor bargaining unit as a programmer. Both times I resisted because I had bought into the media myth about unions. Today I am ruing the lack of representation I have with my employer.
My present engagement has me working as an employee for a small consulting services company. The company provides 7 paid holidays and 10 paid vacation days per year. Far from generous and unfortunately typical in today’s marketplace. The client where I am assigned observes 11 holidays annually. I am not allowed to work on their holidays, and I can’t work at the home office those days either. In some cases we have been allowed to work some overtime the week of the holiday to compensate, but recent budget shortfalls have ended that practice. I am have to take a “vacation” day to cover the 4 holidays my company doesn’t give me.
So I really get 6 vacation days that I can use at my discretion. Well actually 2. You see the client shuts down for the week between Christmas and New Year’s so there’s another 4 days of “vacation” spent.
Labor unions fought for, and died for, worker rights in this country. We all benefited from better working conditions, health care, retirement pensions, and yes, paid vacations. The media and the corporate interests in the United States have convinced everyone that unions are somehow bad, that they are somehow hurting our economy. Slowly the protections and gains won by the unions in the last century are being eroded.
After twenty-one years of work I have no pension, no retirement, minimal health care that doesn’t even cover a root canal, and only 2 discretionary vacation days each year. The land of opportunity has become the land of opportunists who willingly sell the rest of us down the river to make a few more cents dividend on the next quarterly report.
Why do I think there are some in Redmond who are facing some sleepless nights these days?
Here is the default start page for the 1.0 release of Firefox on Google.
The death of Michele’s father last weekend has given me a sharper focus on what is really important and what isn’t. In spite of my efforts to be otherwise, I am still driven at times by the need for material possessions or wealth. I can easily produce a list of objects I would like to own, from a home of my own design down to new books and movie DVDs. Hardly egregious stuff to be sure, but the crux of the problem isn’t the object desired, but in the desire itself. Unrequited desire is an indication of a need not being met. Repeatedly feeding the need for new objects, only to find acquisition hasn’t satiated the desire, is just a form of insanity. Stopping the cycle of blindly feeding an obsessive need is the path to truly feeding the desire underneath.
In the harsh light of Dan’s death I have been thinking long and hard about my own life, wondering what will happen upon the occasion of my death. When I sit back and I look at the physical accumulation of objects that clutters my life I find that they are meaningless. Precious trinkets that have huge sentimental value from my perspective will be just so much junk for my survivors to throw away. For years whenever I moved I had piles of boxes, some of which hadn’t been opened since the previous move, to cart along with me. This past spring I managed to throw away and estimated 3000 pounds of accumulated crap. And even after that effort we still have two 5 x 10 x 10 storage lockers stuffed with belongings; books, tapes, CD music, DVD movies, clothes, and furniture. The physical presence of these things is an indication of a deep unmet need for fulfillment, for safety, for comfort.
Not that I don’t have fulfillment in some areas of my life, or that I don’t have safety and comfort available to me. It’s just that I am not really listening to my self and addressing the deepest needs I have. It is easy to meet the surface needs of affiliation and fellowship. Anyone can put on a good show and maintain a surface relationship with family, friends, and work acquaintances. The real trick is stripping away all the surface obfuscation and exposing your true self to yourself. Most of us are so good at fitting into the surface deep world that we stop there and lie to ourselves that any unmet desires are our fault for not fitting in to the world well enough. Don’t believe me? Look at all the diet books on the shelves, or all the makeover shows on television. From early childhood we are taught to fit in, to “go along to get along”, and most egregious of all, “to do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” What a miserable way to exist.
I am human and therefore frail and given to failure. Life is nothing if not a huge experiment in trial-and-error learning. I would like to promise to myself that the experience of Dan’s death has given me not only new clarity about the truly important, but also renewed impetus towards meeting the goal of living for myself and meeting my true needs. I would like to do that, but I suspect that the constant weight of the world will wear me down again. Before long I’ll be trying to meet my desires through objects and attachments to possessions. I’ve put all this down into words so that when I start to feel helpless and tossed about in the choppy surface water of life, I can once again trust myself to deeper, smoother currents of truth that lie beneath the surface.