My life’s ambitions?

Tags

Candide, Gardening in Bend Oregon, My pleasantly ordinary life, Voltaire

“I know also,” said Candide, “that we must cultivate our garden.”  “You are right,” said Pangloss, “for when man was first placed in the garden of Eden, he was put there ut operaretur eum, that he might cultivate it; which shows that man was not born to be idle.”  “Let us work,” said Martin, “without disputing; it is the only way to render life tolerable.”  The whole little society entered into this laudable design, according to their different abilities. Their little plot of land produced plentiful crops. Cunegonde was, indeed, very ugly, but she became an excellent pastry cook; Paquette worked at embroidery; the old woman looked after the linen. They were all, not excepting Friar Giroflée, of some service or other; for he made a good joiner, and became a very honest man.  Pangloss sometimes said to Candide:  “There is a concatenation of events in this best of all possible worlds: for if you had not been kicked out of a magnificent castle for love of Miss Cunegonde: if you had not been put into the Inquisition: if you had not walked over America: if you had not stabbed the Baron: if you had not lost all your sheep from the fine country of El Dorado: you would not be here eating preserved citrons and pistachio-nuts.”

“All that is very well,” answered Candide, “but let us cultivate our garden.”

That is the concluding paragraph of Voltaire’s book Candide: or, The Optimist and Candide.

That is my feeling at the moment, with one small caveat. I would replace the meal they had “eating preserved citrons and pistachio-nuts.” with eating my recently most favorite food, rhubarb chutney made by Debbie from our homegrown rhubarb brewed up somehow with vinegar and spices, and my personally created Chuckie-butter chopped (not stirred) blend of 45% butter, 45% sunflower butter, and olive oil. These things spread over a thick well-toasted multi-nut bread are fantastic.

I do cultivate my garden and here in Bend, Oregon at 3,600-foot altitude, that means starting my garden in my south-facing window by mid-March.

I coped with the snow problem seen under the fence by planting 70 quarts of dirt in yogurt containers in my south window.

My pleasantly ordinary life is punctuated with gardening, conversations, and trying to outsmart Covid.

Simplify Your Life by Elaine St. James

Tags

Charles Galton Darwin, Charles Murray, Elaine St. James - Review, Good advice, Simplify Your Life - review

I picked up this book Simplify Your Life by Elaine St. James in the book exchange box a couple of days ago and enjoyed several half-hour readings of common sense suggestions for living a good life. It’s a parallel book to The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Getting Ahead by Charles Murray, and The Next Million Years by Charles Galton Darwin, and is easy reading and loaded with easy-to-follow advice.

These three books have ideas you don’t encounter much these days in popular media, and therefore not so much in current popular thinking either. Each of these authors has had fabulously successful careers, even in popular media. Darwin’s book is openly dissed by many readers because of his hyper-long view of human history which makes our current values seem trivial. A modern reader doesn’t want to feel unimportant and thus they dislike, even hate, an author who classifies them as of fleeting importance.

Charles Murray doesn’t come off much better in the popular view because he presents clear descriptions of how their general intelligence is modest, to put it politely, and that their current lifestyles are destroying healthy family life and thus destroying the foundations of a healthy society. No one wants to hear or read, that, and so Murray is widely vilified. However, his book is loaded with sound ideas on how to improve your life, and I have been applying some of those ideas to my personal life. This Curmudgeon’s Guide‘s proclaimed audience is twenty-five-year-old college graduates and I would highly recommend it to that cohort. I am now eighty-four years old and would recommend it to my cohort too. We are already proclaimed to be curmudgeons by young adults, and we should consider playing our role in society properly.

St. James’ book isn’t as grating to most people’s world view as are Darwin’s and Murray’s because of their abstract and abrasive overview of humanity. Her book is given in the clear and present tone of mildly motherly advice. No, not quite. It is more like the advice of a thoughtful grandmother who loves you dearly. Or, perhaps like an aunt who just wants the very best for you. The book does have the slightly condescending tone of someone whose been there, done that and got a fine collection of T-shirts to prove it. 

I recommend reading all three of these short books as a trilogy. They will help straighten a few paths ahead that currently look very crooked.

 

“Do it right!!!” Filling your brain with the right stuff.

Tags

Happy, Healthy, Lack of money, Money, Stupidity, Wealthy Foolishness, Wise

Ben Franklin’s suggestion was “Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise”. Long ago, for my personal use, I modified it slightly to, “happy, healthy, wealthy, and wise”, because at that time that order felt more realistic. From some approaches that is still valid because people can still be happy on their deathbed. I’ve seen that happen to dying relatives. But, at that time when health is giving out for the final time, wealth and wisdom don’t carry much value, while  personal relationships to their loved ones do.

From another point of view, wealth seems like the ultimate virtue to be sought because with money one can purchase many of the things that make life easier, and sometimes money makes health last a little longer. However, in daily living, happiness beyond covering one’s basic monetary needs isn’t linear, and having a hundred million dollars isn’t a hundred times better than having a million dollars, and having a hundred thousand dollars in the bank isn’t a hundred times better than having a thousand dollars. But having some money reserves for contingencies gives a great deal of relief over being broke. It has been said that most modern Americans can’t come up with $400 in an emergency, and must turn to expensive loans to survive. If that’s true most people are living in a condition of self-induced anxiety.

Wisdom was the last of Franklin’s suggested values, but wisdom is the basis for everything that a human can have and hold. “A fool and his money are soon parted.” There ought to be a counter proverb, “A wise man and his happiness, health, and wealth glide through long lives together.” Even better than learning to be smarter than everyone else is to be less stupid than they behave.

Getting wisdom early brings wonderful things to your life.

Sage tip # 105, Protect your friend’s life as your own life.

Tags

Categorical imperative, Do lots of tiny good deeds, God is Love, Immanuel Kant, Protect your friends

The Seven Sages of Ancient Greece distributed suggestions for personal behavior on stone about the year 570 BC. These were not laws of the land with punishments like Hammurabi’s laws written in stone, nor Commandments with eternal rewards and punishments like Moses’ statements in stone. They were more like suggestions and while trying to make these ideas more readable and palatable to the modern English reader I have softened them into tips. These tips are stated as generalized actions that the reader may ponder, and if found reasonable for their life situation, practiced with mental exercises. There may be no Universal good actions because it seems to be possible to conjure up situations where a seemingly very good act has bad effects. Morality is based on situations and those may be viewed in many different ways. Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative,  “Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law,” is famous and sounds great, but when you try to apply the idea it becomes too nebulous to be useful. In the Old Stone Church here in Bend, Oregon, the statement “God is Love” has hung over my head in stained glass for the last six years. It sounds nice and the sentiment is spiritual, but ask anyone what the terms God or Love mean and both of those terms drift off into a confusion of nebulous, fuzzy vapors. I can appreciate the intent of the statement but those terms and their pleasantly warm feelings, without a positive application to other people’s lives, go into the grave with those people’s bodies.

The Sage tips are action-oriented, and even the ones which are totally mental are intended to put the person thinking them into a positive-action frame of mind. This idea carried to the maximum yields Sage tip #105, Protect your friend’s life as your own life. I have also been stating that idea in a more mundane way for daily use because hopefully the situations that are dangerous to your friends’ lives are rare. The statement for daily life is “Treat others better than you treat yourself.” That action is more compatible with tip #75, Do lots of tiny good deeds and a few big ones.

 

Sage tip # 74, Only obey your own guilt and shame impulses.

Tags

Coping with guilt, Coping with shame., Generating habits., Guilt, habits, Shame

This morning as I was about to depart from my Saturday morning breakfast group one of my friends asked me to leave a bit of wisdom from my book, Love Your Life. I carry a working copy in the breast pocket of my jacket with the title exposed and occasionally people will ask about it.

I pulled the booklet out and randomly opened it and said, “Point at a line and I will read it to you.” Without looking he randomly chose Sage tip #74, Only obey your own guilt and shame impulses. It was strangely apropos to our previous conversation because I had committed a social sin and had criticized something he had said, which was a bit unpleasant for everyone at the table.

My thought, when I amplified the original statement from the Seven Sages of Ancient Greece suggestions for a good life, was that a normally developing individual should hear what other people have to say about various subjects, including moral ones, but they should have enough self-possession and self-control to think for themselves as to what they should be doing and not be doing. They should be the sole arbiter of what their actions should be and how they should feel about those actions because only they would have a complete understanding of what precipitated those actions.

The guilt for an action lies solely with the perpetrator of an action, and therefore that person is the only one to make the judgment or feel the emotion of guilt. Similarly, it is this person who carries the habits within themselves that generated the action, and they are the sole person responsible for creating those habits and therefore they are the one to feel the shame if that action is inappropriate.

If the guilt is judged to be legitimate, it is their responsibility to respond in some compensatory way and to do what is necessary to modify the offending habit in such a way that it doesn’t happen again. If they fail to do that, they are setting themselves up to feel guilty again and to feel shame again and thus it behooves them to attend to doing what is necessary to generate an appropriate response and form it into a functioning habit.

Our self-generated habits are the way we control our future actions.

Sage tip #105, Protect your friend’s life as your own life.

Tags

Defend your friends, Defend your self

The 147 suggestions attributed to the Seven Sages of Greece were published about the year 570 BC. That means about 550 years before Jesus gave his sermons. I have been rendering those sage suggestions into a slightly expanded modern English wording and calling them tips because that term doesn’t generate the negative reactions that God-given commandments tend to do. Even the term suggestions has a pejorative feel, so I have been using the term tips. Thus in the book Love Your Life, Sage tip #105 is currently rendered Protect your friend’s life as your own life.

When it is stated in that way the idea feels like Jesus’s Great Commandment spoken in King James Version of Matthew 22:37-40.

Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

The Sages’ statement “Protect your friend’s life as your own life” (570 BC) is very similar to Jesus’ 27 AD saying, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” In both statements, the idea is to value and protect your friend’s wellbeing as carefully as you do your own wellbeing. 

That is a minimum concern we must have for our friends, and when we have the consciousness and the opportunity we should treat others better than we treat ourselves. This is a greater opportunity for personal growth than treating others the way you would wish to be treated. That weak form of the Universal Golden Rule doesn’t advance your spiritual growth; it only locks you into the level you have already reached. When you intend to treat others better than you treat yourself you must pay attention to their needs, and be aware of your needs too, and then intentionally sacrifice some part of your time, attention and other possessions to help that other person.

The reason for doing so personally expensive a thing is because that is the surest way to cultivate the habits of becoming a happier, healthier, wiser and wealthier person.

To protect your friend’s life as your own life teaches you how to protect your own life better.

What does Love Our Life need to succeed?

Tags

Evolution of a book cover, Loving Our Life

What does Love Our Life need to succeed? The name of this potential new book is still bouncing around. Today we discussed the tone of the title “Love Your Life” as implying telling someone what to do. It has an undertone of commanding the reader of the book and the follower of the system to do certain things. That is not the intent of the whole program. Quite the opposite. The book is intended as offering suggestions that the reader can browse and little games that they can choose to play to help them achieve their personal goals. The grocery store checkout line game can be played while waiting. It doesn’t have to be played. It is totally voluntary, but if there isn’t anything to do while waiting, then hovering your hand over the candy will help you to learn how to resist temptations. That simple game will help you to resist other temptations too, because it gives you a frequently encountered moment in time when you can practice resisting obvious temptations.

The title Love Our Life doesn’t have the overtone of authoritative command like Love Your Life does. Perhaps a title like Loving Our Life would be even softer and more to the point of the whole book. These seemingly simple considerations are important because they set the whole tone of a personal response to what people are reading in the book every time they pick it up. It also sets the tone whenever a person is discussing the material with a friend.

A hypothetical conversation might go like this, “Did you ever play the game of hovering your hand over the candy at the checkout line?” “No, what’s that?” “It’s one of the games in the Love Your Life book. It’s in the chapter on dieting.” “No. I didn’t pick up the book because it sounded like it was telling me what to do and I’ve had too much of diet books laying guilt trips on me and telling me what I should do!”

Putting in the title Loving Our Life sounds more active but not directive. I will now make cover #40 and show it to my pals tomorrow morning for an aesthetic critique. I made a little lapel pin this morning which was okay, but I’ve tweaked it a bit for tomorrow also.

The struggle for a cover goes on. It will click as being just right, one of these days.

Love Our Life is designed to be fun to read.

Tags

Designing LOL to be fun., How to make LOL fun

The existing diet books tend to be laden with hidden guilt. They also keep referring to science and scientific studies in an attempt to appear well-founded and important. Perhaps this is because people who have body image problems feel guilty and want to change for the better but don’t know how. The diet mavens, in an effort to respond to the seriousness of the current obesity epidemic, become pretentious and overload their writing with useless facts. They also promise fantastic improvements that magically happen overnight if only you suffer enough.

Love Our Life is going to be fun to read and every bit of it is going to be repeatedly proofread to filter out negative thoughts. If we expect someone to do the games as routine behavior for the rest of their lives, they must be pleasurable. This is the opposite of standard diets that expect their followers to be willfully overruling their bodies’ natural eagerness to eat. They try to force their gut to act as if there is a famine currently in progress. That generates internal pain, and no one wants to live in pain every moment of their future life. We may suffer pain for a little while to achieve a grander goal of being comfortable in the long run. But even then we must expect that if we follow the plan of suffering we will eventually reach a state of harmony and contentment. Just endure this pain for a little longer. Unfortunately, a little longer is forever.

Love Our Life is designed to be pleasurable from the very first moment you begin reading the little book of LOL games. Writing about something that has as much negativity associated with it as dieting does is a challenge. To do comedy about obesity is easy if it is based on making fun of the problem. But that is not only ugly, it is counterproductive. It doesn’t help anyone take control of their personal situation and instead drives them toward resentment and despair.

Having a positive attitude toward solving a problem is what works. It is necessary to get into a positive relationship with problems to deal with them effectively. It works best to be a friend to all of your emotions. Strong emotions wouldn’t be coming up if there wasn’t some problem that provoked the response. That moment of response is telling you in clear terms something needs to be attended to.

I have already written forty-three essays dealing with various aspects of the dieting problem, and much more about habits. This LOL book has a fertile ground upon which to grow the new ideas. The LOL diet is based on games that bring happiness and health. The easy games can reach people who can’t endure a future based on deprivation and pain.

This new strategy isn’t easy or obvious and I have already rewritten what was thought to be the final cover and introduction fifteen times. Fortunately, I have some older professional friends who are willing to discuss these problems with me and keep me on track to what will work.

The goal of Love Our Life isn’t to have fun myself, it’s to help all humanity to cope with their problems.

 

Maturity gives you more opportunities to help your community.

Tags

Personal maturity, Wisdom of maturity

Infancy creates your basic self upon which the rest of your existence builds. — Being a child is fun because you are in control of things and people. — Being an adolescent is satisfying because you know you are recognized by your friends as being grown up and important. — Being an adult is wonderful because you now have life and liberty and you may pursue your happiness as you choose to do. — Becoming mature is even more fulfilling than being an adult because it gives you the opportunities to do things that interest you on a community-wide scale.  —

As a mature person, you have the opportunity to do more things you choose to do and to avoid doing more things you don’t want to do. You have the choice to help your community in a way that would never occur to you as an adult because as an adult your primary focus of attention is on growing your security through total economic worth and helping your family to flourish. Doing mature things would distract you from promoting your own personal growth and the growth of your loved ones. Even your legal opportunities probably expanded because you have the economic and social standing to do more things, that is, to do more things you realize will be helpful for everyone in your community.

As with becoming an adult, becoming mature has its disadvantages and in this case it’s because more people look to you for the things that make their lives more successful. Many times you might have the power to help them, but as your power increases the number of people making requests and demands upon you keeps growing. There may come a time when it is beyond your capacity to help a given individual without hurting another and you will be forced to choose who you help and whom you won’t. That will be burdensome because those you don’t help will resent your actions.

Being a mature person gives you the power to help many people, even people of your community that you may never know personally.

 

 

This Is Your Brain on Music by Daniel J. Levitin – book review

Tags

Daniel J. Levitin, Evolutionary theory, Steven Pinker, THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON MUSIC, Why music evolved

This is essential reading for people who listen to music, and that means almost everyone. It gives considerable scholarly detail on what music consists of, as understood by a professor of music presently at McGill University. It is authoritative and meaningful. Get the book at Amazon – THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON MUSIC by Daniel J. Levitin. Here is a 16-minute video of Levitin that gives a quick introduction with some suggestions of how music can help your life.

The last chapter of the book brings up a scholarly argument based on some comments made in a lecture on the evolutionary origins of music given at MIT in 1997 by the Harvard linguist Steven Pinker. Those twenty-year-old comments asserted, “The cognitive mechanisms that we, as cognitive psychologists and cognitive scientists, study, mechanisms such as memory, attention, categorization, and decision-making, all have a clear evolutionary purpose.” He said that “Music is auditory cheesecake,” “It just happens to tickle several important parts of the brain in a highly pleasurable way, as cheesecake tickles the palate.” Those were fighting words for scientists, and sure enough they rose to the challenge. The last twenty pages of this book prove that music does have an evolutionarily valid reason for existing. The concluding sentences cap Levitin’s contention that music has an evolutionary foundation. “As a tool for activation of specific thoughts, music is not as good as language. As a tool for arousing feelings and emotions, music is better than language. The combination of the two—as best exemplified in a love song—is the best courtship display of all.”