Sunday, November 11, 2007

unexplained love

i have a friend who has a sister married to a guy known as “the pig”, he is vile, but she still loves him. i know another couple where the wife is beautiful and the husband is a sweet guy, but he is clearly much less of a catch than she is. we all know these relationships, one of the people we like, the other we despise, loath or simply feel sorry for. there is a lack of balance, but for some reason the person we like is in love with this other person. we don’t see it and have no idea why they love the person but they do.

as we go through life there are situations where we just can not understand people’s decisions. the talented kid who takes drugs and destroys their future by getting arrested or by allowing the drugs to take their life over or the adult that makes a stupid choice and allows their career, family or future slip away. we can not understand how this occurs, but we have seen it enough times to know that it does.

the hardest is to watch someone love a person who others see is clearly broken, but to understand that they either can not see it, or that they simply choose to ignore how broken and dangerous the person is for them. this may be one more form of self-destructive behavior, or it may be a sense of clarity that those around them can not appreciate. at times it feels like a car accident in slow motion. the viewer simply stands on the side watching the metal preparing to be twisted and flesh to be torn, but is completely powerless to stop it.

the real taboo subject in life is not politics, sex or religion; it is a friend’s dysfunctional relationship. you go to dinner with them, you talk to them, you listen to their spin on life and you want to shake them and tell them they are clueless with their life. you want to do an intervention and stop them from continuing to make the mistake that everyone around them knows they are making, but you don’t. you can’t, it’s not right for you to have an opinion, and if you do it’s relationship suicide to share it with them. no one likes to accept that they are wrong, and in this case maybe they are not.

we can not see or understand the love someone feels for another. we don’t know why they continue to love a person long after they have proven they do not deserve the love. we can not see the situation, or the other person, with their eyes and heart. we simply need to accept that the world is not ours to control. the relationship has to be allowed to move on its own, the players need to make their own decisions.

people can not look inside our hearts; we may not really be able to look inside our own. we love the people we love, we trust the people we trust. we do not completely understand or control these things. why that person makes us feel this way, and another person, one who may deserve the love more, who may be a better fit for us, who may be in the one who would make us happy for ever, does not get that love is a mystery. we do not completely control it, and we could not explain it.

if life were simple we would not have unexplained love, life would be clear and obvious, but it is not, it is weird and complex. life is not simple, love is less simple. we love the people we love. we need to accept and understand that. the people around us need to do the same, and we need to it for them as well.

house-ism

while in the US i finally took the time to buy an antenna for my condo tv. this means, for the first time since cancelling the cable, i can watch tv in the us again. it was getting too uncomfortable to use the excuse of no cable to try to hang around the ex-wifes house, so i can now watch tv in the comfort of my own home. my son and my ex-wife’s significant other are both almost as happy with this as i am, although for different reasons.

while there i was able to watch an episode of house. i saw other shows too, but this is the one i really wait for, one of the shows i will most excitedly buy on dvd here in malaysia. there is a certain mix of humor and self-inflicted pain that i love about house. its not really just him though, most of the people on the show have a dark side which just seems to be less prominent when contrasted with the over the top behavior of dr. house.

if you know me, you know i quote house’s most famous house-ism on a regular basis, “everybody lies”. i have written on this in past, it is no less true today than 3 years ago when he first said it. it is the most clear example of his world view which most people both think is sad, and which they tend to agree with.

as i watched an episode of series 4, one which i will watch again in 3 months when the dvds finally come to asia, there was a new quote, which i have been mulling. “the goal of life is not to eliminate misery, but to bring misery to a minimum”. this is such an irish-catholic sentiment that i immediately smiled when i heard it.

somehow it is not a deeply compelling as “everybody lies”, but that may be that is simply not ground breaking enough. as we were brought up, most of us are told that there are good people and bad people. good people tell the truth and help others; bad people lie and hurt others. the fact that house has put this on its head and pointed out that everyone lies means that either even good people lie, or that everyone is bad.

clearly, we all have a spectrum of good and bad within us. few people are clearly evil, and the sense that everyone has bad within us is not new to many of us, well at least to the more liberal and hopeful of us. the conservatives among us have always seen the world as full of bad people who needed to be controlled, if they did not believe this they would trust people to make their own decisions and act as they felt was best. clearly this is a recipe for disaster in the mind of conservatives. maybe this is a digression, but given the quote, maybe not.

you can not eliminate misery, just limit it. as we look at the world, as we teach our children, do we tell them this? do we tell them that life is as hobbs said, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”, or do we attempt to tell them that life is full of hope and fairness. i guess it depends on the family and the dynamic, but as a rule i think most people choose to give their children hope and comfort and allow life to teach them any lessons counter to this philosophy.

the christian tradition since saint augustine is based on a life long struggle with sin, a life begun with original sin which comes to us through no act of our own and is outside of our control. the idea that children if they were to die outside of baptism would go to hell, is just one more example of how classical thought has carried its ideas into our times at the expense of good people and their good works. no child born into the world and then taken from its parents would go to hell if a good god were involved in the process. augustine is either wrong and the catholic church is teaching bad doctrine, or god is not good.

house is also reflecting a quote from buddha which said, “life is misery”. in the buddhist tradition, you overcome misery through meditation. you need to know and understand life and its pain to find enlightenment. only by accepting that life is both good and bad do you find the understanding that life can be happy and productive even with the existence of pain.

house is expressing a world view which one can understand and sympathize with, but it is also one which we work very hard to protect our children from. we put them in sports to allow them to believe that the world is based on “rules of the game” and that playing by the rules is the only course which is valid if you want to continue to play. “everybody lies” and “life is misery” are both quotes which show house through his pain and suffering, but which also somehow give me hope.

life is filled with pain, and it is also filled with joy. the trick is to enjoy the moments of joy and move though the moments of misery as quickly as possible. if we focus on one of these and ignore the other we eliminate our ability to learn from that which we are ignoring. even the people who only focus on the good are at risk, they may not be as dour as those that focus on the negative, but they will never learn from the pain. misery brings learning, unless we embrace it we will never learn. “those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it” is a true-ism which we can imagine house using.

as i said, i smiled when i heard this house-ism. i do not find house to be angry, sad or jaded. i find him to be intelligent, aware and full of hubris developed through years of success. i also do not find him to be self destructive. house learns from his mistakes and attempts to teach those around him. this is a hopeful exercise of life, one that we should not forget.

swim lanes

i was on my way to my daughters swim meet the other day. it was early morning and i was out of the house early, as i drove i checked email and found the meet was an hour later than i thought, so i decided to go to starbucks and have a coffee to kill time. i found a comfy chair and sat down with a book (internet is not free in starbucks in the us, one more reason i like to be in asia). a woman walked up and asked to sit in the chair next to me, we started to talk and when i told her i was on my way to a swim meet she smiled and told me she i was swim coach.

there is something about swimmers, once you are one you can sense others as you move though life. most of the girls i dated in high school and college also swam. swimming is a passion, it’s not a surprise that i passed this onto my kids, the oldest two are swimmers and lifeguards, the youngest wants to be a coast guard rescue swimmer. as we sat and talked about life, travel and other random things it was swimming that was the core connection that we seemed to have. does it seem funny to you that a sport where you are unable to talk to anyone one else while you are doing it helps people to find the ability to talk easily when out of the water?

i got to the meet and sat next to a woman i love. we spent the next 4 hours sitting, talking and watching kids swim in the first meet of the year. we watched our daughter stress out until the heat she was swimming butterfly was over, and then we watched her relax and simply swim for the fun of it.

as the time passed, as i watched kids swim up and down the pool, i realized swimming really is a good sport for kids. we place them into a environment which they learn to glide effortlessly though, one that terrifies others who have not learned the techniques they have to control their bodies, their breathing and their level of effort to allow them finish the race and come up with a smile. swimming more than any other sport is one of technique, it’s what separates those who can swim and those that don’t.

but there is more to swimming, during practice and warm ups, swimmers share a lane, they pace themselves to move in unison, to not bump into the swimmer in front of them and to stop from having the girl doing a flip turn from smashing into them at full speed as they prepare to do their down flip turn and avoid the guy behind them. they also learn to find the right lane, to swim with those who move at about the same pace and to move themselves up or down a lane as the other swimmers become to fast or slow for them.

swim lanes are subject of pride. our daughter was just telling me that she was embarrassed that on the new team she was still in lane 4, she felt she should be in lane 5, with the faster kids, but that on her new team she was not good enough for that. as we talked, i could tell she both accepted the situation and was ready to change it. there is no avoiding the fact that you are getting lapped, and that people are literally tapping you on the foot to tell you that you need to move faster or allow them to pass you. it’s not something you can hide from yourself or anyone else and you only have yourself to motivate to improve.

swim lanes during a meet are singular. each lane only has one swimmer in it at a time. as each swimmer touches the wall a new swimmer may go in relay, only one is swimming at any given moment. this singularity is balanced by the team work of the relay, four people working to finish one distance. the hardest part of this for new swimmers is to wait for the tone telling them to go, or the swimmer in front of them to touch. if anyone goes too quickly, they are dqed (disqualified) and the entire team loses.

swim lanes also allow the fastest swimmer to finish their times, and to allow the other swimmers to finish their own. one of the best elements of swimming is that no one leaves the pool until all the swimmers have finished. the slowest swimmer is congratulated by the swimmers around them for finishing the race, they are never left in the pool alone. that would be a major breach of swimmer etiquette. everyone is cheered, even when they are the slowest person in the pool.

we watched our daughter and her team compete that day. i realized we are now swimming in different lanes. we are no longer a relay team, trying to finish the same race together, but have moved to swim solo, or on other teams. our lanes separate us and keep us safe from bumping into each other. the waves are suppressed by the lanes and the distance between them. these are all positive things; they allow us to be safe and to stop people from bumping into each other. but it also comes at a price, you get used to swimming with people over time, you get used to the rhythms and movements, you miss it when you are swimming alone.

swimming does help you as you go through life. you know you are cold, but that a shower is waiting for you when you get out of the pool. you know you are thirsty, and the water around you is not the solution to that thirst. you know you are in pain, but that recovery will be fast because you are practiced dealing with this pain. you know the workout is long, but that you can finish it.

you also know that sometimes you are alone in the pool, but that means the water is clean and placid. it’s a way to not have to tap the foot in front of you, or to feel the tap on your foot. you get used to having your own lane and to building your own work outs. you get used to needing to breathe on both sides and to learning to flip turn so you don’t lose too much time as you change direction.

swimming in your own lane is great, but swimming with others really is the best part. even when its crowded, you can just watch the bubbles in front of you and know that the end of the lap is coming when the water stops churning in front of you.

man of god

i describe the US to people all the time and take pains to say how open and enlightened it is. it doesn’t seem like the US of my youth, where it was considered wrong to have friends from another religion. my grandmother told me of her youth when it was forbidden to go to a protestant friends house, thankfully those times were gone.

i was in the US and was taking my son to ccd, this is what i have termed “catholic school”. living in a secular country with separation of church as state the children are only exposed to their religious heritage if you get up early on saturday morning and take them to the small school building attached to the parish. when we discussed sending him to this, i had a minor reservation remembering back to the time our daughter came home from catholic school in tears.

our daughter was upset because of the message of that morning’s teaching. they had been told that rich people were going to hell, because they became rich by focusing more on themselves and work, rather than giving themselves completely to god and living a life focused on enriching their souls rather than their pocket book. she was in tears because she felt singled out, among her friends she was clearly one of those with the most, with a big house, vacations and parents who ran a company and worked for the things they had.

our daughter was sent home feeling as though her parents were bad people who would be punished for their sins. i held her shaking in my arms while i calmed her down and explained that this message was not one that our church should be sending. i told her about our acts of charity that were only possible because of our work. i also told her that our work was focused to give her a rounded education which would let her see the world openly and fairly, give her the tools to help the world and make friends no matter where life took her.

as i drove our son to “catholic school” i asked him if he liked going. he said he did. i reminded him that although we were teaching him to see himself as a catholic, he had to remember that this did not mean that catholics were right and people with other religious beliefs were wrong. this sense of correctness and exclusion are the issues which i feel keep the world from finding peace, and i did not want him to slip into this in any way. i reminded him that we had friends who were christian, jewish, muslim, hindu, buddhist, agnostic and atheist. he simply looked at me and said, “i know dad”.

happy believing that he did know, that he understood how important it is to respect others and allow himself to see them as people and friends first, and not see anyone as a caricature built by the media or society, we got out of the car and walked to the school building that for the next 90 minutes he would be taught to be a good catholic. as we walked in the rain to the door, i noticed the parish priest, father stephen. stephen is a nice man, is good with children and is the priest whose close minded sermon from the pulpit drove me to stop attending mass. he asserted that the church had no homosexual priests, had never allowed a pedophile to stay within the priesthood and was being targeted by the media in an unfair attempt to hurt the church. i found it objectionable that he would use his position to say such things, which were known by almost all catholics to be completely false. i discussed this with my wife and we agreed that i should not go back until this blew over, because if he did it again i was going to stand up and tell him how wrong he was.

as we walked in he said, “hello father”, he had never learned my name, and called most parents mother or father. he asked me if i had an umbrella, i told him that i did but that it was in malaysia. i would think he might have noticed that i had been absent for years and that another male parishioner (one whose name he did know) was now sitting next to my wife at mass. he asked why i was in malaysia, i told him i lived there. he looked shocked and asked how it was. i used my practiced answer, i like it the weather, food and people are wonderful. it’s a nice life and a good change of pace from the US.

the next words out of his mouth stopped me in my tracks. “you must be careful. the muslims are a vicious people.” i took a beat, looked at him, and said, “father, that is not true, i have very good friends who are muslim, their faith is one of peace and they are wonderful people who i love to be near.” he replied with, “no, their book tells them to use violence.” i was simply shocked. i had almost no idea what to say. i explained that was not true. the wahhabist teachings do teach jihad as a seemingly sixth pillar of islam, but that i view as an alteration of the pure teachings. he said, he was not sure, clearly not educated on this subject at all, he reminded me that “other priests have told me so.” at that moment the bell rang and i thankfully moved away from him to send my son to be educated in our religion based on love.

as my day went on, and as days have passed, i continue to think about this exchange. these are the first openly hostile comments anyone has made to me about the muslim world in the two years i have lived here. it is also a shock to me that a “man of god”, the man we entrust both our children’s religious education and our souls to, could be so ignorant and closed minded. years before coming to malaysia, i had spent a week long vacation reading on the history of judism, christianity and islam in an effort to understand the world better. clearly my priest had never taken the time to do the same.

our son is still going to “catholic school” each week. i am not going to pull him away from his education and his heritage as i allowed myself to be driven away. but i am also going to continue to remind him that we have close friends around the world who come from many religious traditions. i think the core element of these friends is ability to accept us for who we are, and to understand that we are not our church. i am very glad that i am not my church. as far as i can tell my church is one of closed minded ignorance that is more focused on self protection and narrow-minded self congratulation than on deepening its understanding of the world.

we will continue to educate our children to be citizens of the world. we will continue to travel and to enjoy getting to know people from all around the world. we will help them to be more open minded and loving than anyone around them that is focused on separating the world by color, religion, sexual preference or any other belief that some people my use as a wedge to separate one group from another. i just hope in the next generation hard work and loving people who are different than ourselves will be ideas embraced not only by our children, but buy their church and the society they live within. whatever that church and society are.