I hate how we compare ourselves

"There is also the seeping of self-doubt into everyday consciousness, a subtle feeling of inadequacy that smothers one's activities with an uneasy sense of impending emptiness...For as we incorporate others into ourselves, so does the range of what we feel a 'good,' 'proper,' or 'exemplary' person should be....Each moment is enveloped in the guilt born of all that was possible but now foreclosed." Kenneth J. Gergen in The Saturated Self.

I feel this so much. The constant comparison with people around me. The constant feeling I"m behind in life, that I"m not where I should be or who I should be. The result of the new possibilities for interaction modernity has brought about....?

Everyone loves an inspiring story....

My friend wrote me about this story that happened to her the other day.

"When I drove back to school today there was a hill of compact snow in the middle of my parking lot so my car got stuck on it. No matter what I did I couldn't get it to move. These two young asian girls that work in the Chinese restaurant that my parking lot is behind came out with shovels. We couldn't get it though! Eventually three guys joined us: a friend of the girls, a delivery boy, and a random guy that I think works at another restaurant. So there were 6 of us working to get my car to move. They stood out there with me for an hour trying to help me. It just made me feel so good about the world. A dozen people walked by without even offering help and yet there were these 6 people that didn't give up on my little car! :) I wish I could repay them for all their help. I thanked them profusely and just ordered some flowers to be delivered to their restaurant tomorrow. Anyway, I thought it was a sweet story even though it was an exhausting hour."

Like I told her, I like this story because I think it shows such vulnerability on the part of all the people who helped her.....u know inspiring for me to want to do the same and all that...... :)

Latest straggle with The Struggle

Day after Christmas---SICK OF STUFF! Everywhere I go, look, turn: STUFF, stores, money, materials. Really overwhelmed with it all. Again, I struggle with people giving me things. I struggle with other people, people I love, wanting things. I struggle when it seems all people talk to me about are the latest sales, the latest fashions, their latest plans to go shopping. I struggle when people ask me to go shopping.

I'm Not the Only One

Recently whenever I learn something new it's like I think I have this big secret of the world that I think no one else knows. Like after I took a class about human diversity and learned about institutional racism and the concept of empathy as a response...this was big life changing news to me that I thought just my little class of 20, my professor, and the authors of the books we were reading knew about. I thought everything from my middle class background was bad, probably most of what my parents thought too. Then after talking to my dad a few months later I realized he actually teaches a class about this kind of empathy (!!).

Besides racism, I've begun to feel more deeply about other injustices in the world. I've begun to be attracted to the "social justice" issues and groups. This too, I thought, was some recent thing that only a certain group of people at my school knew about. I would get so resentful when my mom made it sound like it was just a phase I was going through and refer back to how "it was the grape pickers" when she was in college. I would get so excited to hear about groups at other schools with the same theme and more recently a whole school-UC Santa Cruz-with the emphases on social conciousness. At first I thought there were just a few fair trade, sweatshop free options---now I see there are whole magazines devoted to such enterprises.

Related to this topic of injustice, I've been learning about this divide in the church between those who focus on activism/social justice and those who may have a more individualistic focus. Again, I thought this was a huge revelation as well. I would think: Doesn't the church see this and don't the see the need to "figure out" a balance or compromise or something??
But again, I'm learning that this is a concept that is DECADES OLD (if not longer--what do I know?) and has been many-a-times commented and thought upon.

It's kind of a cool discovery--that all the big questions in my mind are the big questions for others too and there is lots of literature and wise thoughts out there for me to consider. Also it makes me feel not so alone in these huge issues where I kind of thought I was alone. It makes me feel silly for my ignorance though. It makes me rethink the comments my mom made--I am going through something that many others go through.

But if everyone goes through this "phase"--I just think things would be a little different--a better world maybe. This is something I'm discovering too though---maybe the world is better than recently I've come to see it. Maybe there are a lot of people who believe in the causes and stuff I've come to learn about and feel so passionately about and are just living it out in the best ways they can---I'm beginning to see there are indeed many ways to "live it out." Maybe I need to think better of people.

I realize this world, especially in the way of time how it has stretched so far back, is so much bigger than I know or can fathom.

Love and relationships

I read in Barth's Evangelical Theolgy that the word love in terms of "Eros" is the "powerful desire urge, impulse, and endeavor by which a created being seeks his own self-assertion, satisfaction, realization, and fulfillment in his relation to something else." It's a movement toward an object, trying to bring it "into its possession and power."

Am I like this in relationships and interactions in general?? Do I seek to achieve something so that I can feel good about myself? Is my motivation wanting to acheive a certain state that I'm not currently in? A certian level of familiarity, of benefits of being associated with certain people or certain types of friendships?

In comparison:

Agape love is different in that the "origin of its search" for the other is out of a freedom for the other one. "All it desires is to exist for him, to offer himself to him, and finally to give himself to him." It is a love that gives "sovreignty" to the one whom you seek to love.

What would relationships look like with this kind of Agape Love. Perhaps I wouldn't focus so much on getting to a place where I wasn't before. On gaining something. Achieving a certain state of being. Perhaps interactions and relations would come from a place of sacrifice, of offering.

Perhaps I would be more patient and kind, less jealous and boastful, less arrogant and rude, not insisting on my own way. Perhaps I would rejoice in truth, bear, believe, hope, and endure all things.....(Corinthians)

LA times Article

Homeless in life, nameless in death

A trip to the mass graves of Evergreen Cemetery.

Daniel Costello
June 25, 2006

THE OLDEST cemetery in Los Angeles, opened in 1877, is Evergreen Cemetery in Boyle Heights. Some of the most well known families in Los Angeles — including the Boyles, for whom the neighborhood is named — are buried there. So are thousands of Angelenos whose names we will never know.

As L.A.'s homeless population has grown, so has the number of homeless deaths. The coroner can usually identify the bodies, but most of the time their families don't collect the remains. So once a year, in autumn, the county cremates and buries them in a single grave at Evergreen. Thousands of dead men and women are marked only by small plaques displaying the year they died.

After some cajoling, he agreed to let me see the storage room where they're kept. We went around back and he opened the door to a dark, musty closet whose shelves were lined with what looked like books. But they weren't books, they were boxes — small maroon boxes, nine to a shelf, row upon row of them, each with a name neatly written on the front. There were hundreds of boxes, perhaps more than 1,000. The closet can hold remains for only the last two years, so he showed me the overflow, a less tidy room where thousands more boxes were stacked high.

This fall, workers will take almost 1,600 of the containers from the shelves, discard the nametags and pour their contents into a newly dug grave in the same out-of-sight corner of Evergreen Cemetery. (They reuse the boxes.) A plaque reading "2002" will be placed in the ground on top of the grave. A handful of people will be there, including a chaplain, some workers from the morgue — and, if they allow it, me.

I don't know how I feel about this modest ceremony. Yes, it's something. No, it's not nearly enough. Writing about homelessness for The Times' editorial page for the last several months, I've developed a theory as to why this city has more homeless people than anywhere else in the country: because we ignore them. Whether we're walking through downtown or making policy in City Hall, the easiest thing to do is to pretend they don't exist.

Somehow, these anonymous graves show me that as much as anything else. We know who these people were, but we bury them nameless. How much would it take to add their names to their gravestones? Maybe that one small gesture would give them some dignity in death that we never gave them in life.

*

Daniel Costello

Religion and Politics

A recent speech by Barak Obama (click me)

The last paragraph:

"And that night, before I went to bed I said a prayer of my own. It's a prayer I think I share with a lot of Americans. A hope that we can live with one another in a way that reconciles the beliefs of each with the good of all. It's a prayer worth praying, and a conversation worth having in this country in the months and years to come. Thank you."

Landis and Mirza

Floyd Landis is an American cycler in the Tour de France. Going off of info from the July 2006 ESPN magazine, Landis was one of Lance Armstrong's lieutenants for three years (and three tour wins) before leaving to ride for Tyler Hamilton in 2004. After Hamilton was suspended for "doping," Landis became team leader in 2005 and finished ninth. So this year, he is a major canditate for the big win.

I appreciate his humble mennonite upbringing and his rebellion from it as he dove deeper into the cycling world. It may sound twisted, but I appreciate how his desire to stay far away from his home culture has motivated him throughout the years. How the pain of isolation brings victory and triumph--love it when that happens! And cycling as an escape has given him an inspiration that the article likens to religion. Tim Keown writes:

"But what if you don't belong? What if your life revolves around a religion you don't understand and an ethic you can't embrace? The literature of adolescence insists there's a place for everyone--geeks, stoners, jocks, brains, zealots. But what if nowhere feels right? What if, in a miracle that just might confirm the existence of God, you found an escape? What if it was something as simple as a bicycle, and what if it took you to places that were all yours, places no one else in your world even knew existed? Chances are, you'd ride that bike with the kind of passion you couldn't summon for religion. You would ride it until oxygen deprivation vaporized everything but the bike and the road."


Floydlandis.com


Sania Mirza is a tennis player who in 2005 went from a rank of 326th to 31st. She was the first Indian woman to reach the fouth round of a Grand Slam (US Open) and the first to win a WTA Tour event (Hyderbad Open). I was caught by her story because of how she seems to be caught in a mess of societal and cultural pressures. All eyes are on her, but not just those of fans watching her tennis skills; she also must deal with the eyes of Muslim officials quick to critique her choice of clothes and stance on certain issues. The writer of this article, Carmen Renee Thompson, describes her outfits as "heavily negotiated" and she has had protesters burn her effigy for something she was misquoted on. But I'm inspired with how she is not afraid to keep doing what she's doing and use her celebrity for the positive with her support of a campaign afainst the illegal practice of aborting female fetuses. One of her billboards reads "Your daughter may be the next champion."

Saniamirza.net

So I'm not a big sports person. But I love stories about individuals, athletes or not.

groWTH

From "Falling into the Arms of God: Meditations with Teresa of Avila" by Megan Don

Virtue is not a word that rolls easily off the contemporary tongue. For many it is associated with morality or uprightness; however, it has also been defined as "inherent power" (Collins English Dictionary). For Teresa the greatest virtue was the growth of our soul; by attending to this growth, she believed, we can discover the power that we are all born with. Be vigilant, she warned. Watch closely as you grow into yourself spiritually, and allow for change and growth to occur both in your friends and in you. Too often we want people to stay the same to ensure our own comfort. Likewise, our growth may not always be welcomed even by those closest to us.

I like the idea of growth being a virtue. We want virtues, right? So I like the idea of growth being something that we want, that we value, want to uphold, and strive to implement in our own lives. Lately I've been realizing the value of growth, the importance of it, the blessing of it. I find growth in seeking new experiences, in setting goals and reaching them, in reading, in learning, in figuring out how to better yourself, in furthering and/or using your strengths, in nurturing yourself physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually.

Teresa of Avila talks about the "growth of our soul." I'm not sure if the growth I've experienced is the growth of my soul, in particular, but its the growth of something for sure. What is a soul anyway? I suppose that's a question many have debated, perhaps it's related to the dualism of mind and body stuff I learned about in philosophy. But, hmmm, soul. My deepest inner parts? The spirit of life that keeps my hands typing and lungs breathing? The invisible mechanism that brings joy? My heart? My head? I think it's a combination of all these things wrapped up in one big mystery.

I guess Teresa also believed that this virtue/ inherent power of growth is the greatest power individuals have. I would agree from experience. I think that when your are learning and expanding and growing you are alive in an indescribable way. You are more alert, more interested, more confident.

Let me run with some implications of this idea.

So if one's greatest power is this virtue of growth of your soul, then one's greatest power, (and I might add) sense of control and contentment, does not come from money, looks, or any materials in themselves. It means we have a power that no one can take away from us in order to deplete our power or to increase their own supply. I suppose it would require a little bit of "love of self" as you would need to put a little focus on bettering yourself--but this would be so you could be at your best in order to, perhaps, eventually go on to help others and make a bigger and better contribution to the world.

Anyways I want to tackle another dimension of this growth thing. One friend in particular showed me the beauty of bettering yourself and I think it is the best gift you can give someone. I believe I am greatly indebted to her. But this leads to something else that Teresa touches on: the problems in relationships that go along with the growing process. She seems to see that we are all in relationships and everything that happens to us will affect others because it affects us, one half of the relationship. It seems we must leave room for each other to grow, to not grow, or to grow in a different direction or pace than us. And to love them through it all. This relationship aspect is complicated, but something I really want to explore more.

In the spirit of growth I will close with future questions to be thought about/ answered

• Perhaps I feel so close to someone because we are so similar, but as we grow/change, we may not be so similar. Would it/ Should it affect our closeness?
• Can growing as an individual in a relationship somehow be a joint project? Like pushing one another in their individual growth? What would that look like?
• The power of virtue may be the strongest power an individual can have, is it the strongest power a group of individuals could have?
• How can we keep from being judgemental of others' growth or seeming lack of it? How can we keep from being pushy even though we so very much want the best for another (or what we think the best for them is)?
• How can we harness this best part of ourselves, the power that comes from growth, and apply it to everyday life?