The Twisting of Perspective

[Image: “Defy the Gordian Knot,” by a user on Flickr who goes by the improbable handle “GollyGforce.” Using it here under a Creative Commons license; thank you!]

[Note to visitors as of Saturday, 2022-08-13: Some strange stuff going on with the appearance of my posts here — particularly, italicized and/or hyperlinked words and phrases. I’m working to resolve this, but please in the meantime accept my apology for the typographical weirdness.]

So much can change in a year, in 18 months, in a decade… heck, overnight. The changing can occur gradually, incrementally, or (dinosaurs…asteroid!) in a few seconds. This week whiskey river (italicized portion) reminds us both of things which need to change, and of things which have never changed and shouldn’t:

In a society which is predicated on competition and really, very often, the ruthless exploitation of one human being by another the profiteering off of other people’s problems and very often the creation of problems for the purpose of profiteering the ruling ideology will very often justify that behavior by appeals to some fundamental and unalterable human nature. So the myth in our society is that people are competitive by nature and that they are individualistic and that they’re selfish. The real reality is quite the opposite. We have certain human needs. The only way that you can talk about human nature concretely is by recognizing that there are certain human needs. We have a human need for companionship and for close contact, to be loved, to be attached to, to be accepted, to be seen, to be received for who we are. If those needs are met, we develop into people who are compassionate and cooperative and who have empathy for other people. So… the opposite, that we often see in our society, is in fact, a distortion of human nature precisely because so few people have their needs met.

(Gabor Maté [source])

All of this is very true — I know and feel this to the marrow of my bones. Unfortunately, at the moment, I’m kinda self-preoccupied: keeping the big issues of the world in perspective is almost completely off the radar for me…

The Missus and I “downsized” from a house to an apartment in spring, 2019. It took us months, even with the help of friends, to get everything ready for that move: selling or otherwise dumping what we didn’t want, packing up what we wanted to keep — holding “keep for the apartment” lot separate from the “keep for the next house” one — prepping the house and yard for selling it, and so on. I’d never seen such turmoil, never been so exhausted. But it’d be worth it, because we were going to spend six months post-retirement, in mid-2020, traveling around Europe!

Ha. *cough*pandemic*cough*

Well, we managed to compensate to some extent, by going out on our year-long road trip around the USA. And one thing about the trip has especially interested me, aside from the destinations of course: my own, well, preference for inertia: unchangeability in everyday life.

I have probably expressed this here before, but I’m so very tired of “living out of a suitcase” as the expression goes. I want to again have a single roof over my head for days at a time — not constantly and 24×7, no, but a single roof to return to every night…

We’re at a temporary stopping point for the next couple weeks, give or take, and then we head north to [somewhere] to seek a home. So we’re not anything like “at rest” yet — but headed in the right direction!

Note: I’ll be endeavoring a possibly complicated change to the “look” of RAMH soon — like in the next 24 hours. The change itself is simple, just upgrading to a new version of some software which controls the site’s appearance. But I don’t know what the fallout of that upgrade might be; it could be invisible, or it could cause the utter collapse of the whole pile of jackstraws. Life really needs to be more exciting, eh???