Life is a Prime Number.

A father’s will was read.  Divide my 17 camels among my 3 sons accordingly: ½ to the oldest, 1/3 to the middle son, and 1/9 to the youngest.  But how were these divisions possible? The 3 sons quarreled.  Finally, they decided to go to a wise woman.  The wise woman listened patiently about the will. She thought hard.  She went away. And when she returned, she added her 1 camel to make 18. Then, she gave the oldest son 9, the middle son 6, and the youngest son 2 camels—according to the will.  This left 1 camel.  The sons quickly agreed to give the extra camel back to the wise woman. They returned home happy.  

ORIGINAL LESSON: Negotiation and problem solving is the struggle to find the 18th camel, i.e. the common ground, in order to resolve any issue.  Read Ury's The Third Side. 

BUDDHIST LESSON: If we applied wisdom and compassion, how could this problem have been resolved more simply or even avoided all together?

the unexamined life imposed

A young couple moves into a new neighborhood. The next morning while they are eating breakfast, the young woman sees her neighbor hanging the wash outside. "That laundry is not very clean; she doesn't know how to wash correctly. Perhaps she needs better laundry soap."

Her husband looks on, remaining silent. Every time her neighbor hangs her wash to dry, the young woman makes the same comments. A month later, the woman is surprised to see a nice clean wash on the line and says to her husband: "Look, she's finally learned how to wash correctly. I wonder who taught her this? "

The husband replies, "I got up early this morning and cleaned our windows." And so it is with life... What we see when watching others depends on the clarity of the window through which we look.

www.Rubyschallenge.com/watch

Life Without Labels

Someone sent me this article...

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/27/us/scotus-same-sex-marriage-gay-culture.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=b-lede-package-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=1

When I was working on my dissertation, I read a lot about "race" and came to the conclusion that it's a cultural construct with no biological basis. (It's like Darwin's announcement that the category of species, for example, is basically arbitrary and merely convenient.) Hence the quotation marks. 

 My takeaway from this article is that like being gay, belonging to a "race" or any other group that claims oppression or another level of discrimination affords a cherished victim mentality.  I often wonder, what would these group lose without the labels?  Obviously, oppression often garners not just solidarity but reverse exclusion.  I'm, _______, but you're not ____________.  Look at the recent news stories of gender and "race" crossing. 

I learned in my Cognitively-Based Compassion Training course, that we all share certain needs.  We all want to feel safe, loved, healthy, peaceful, joyful, and appreciated.  We  all  want to feel special. And in the West, it seems that feeling special computes to feeling entitled. Not  so much because of what we've worked for or accomplished--but more for what we can grab as quickly as the 99 cent value item.

So I grant, like Darwin does, that we need categories.  They organize, simplify, and unify life.  But what if we restrict our human labels to what we earn?  The Greeks had this figured out.  They categorized 2 kinds of honor: ascribed honor as a result of power, position or birth and acquired honor gained by excelling in the honor/shame game.  What if we adopted only earned

labels?  For me, that would be mother, professor, wife, meditator...  If I didn't work hard to achieve it, I don't earn the designation. I realize that I'm reducing life to a performative level.  Think Judith Butler's Gender Trouble.  But just think about how much flexibility and freedom that would give us.  Noone would be called a girl or a boy until each child chose and lived that designation.  And what would that living even mean?  Is it meaningless?

What do we have to lose if we dispensed  them on the basis of clearer criterion?  Would we become more or less rigid?

Just a thought...

Self-examing beyond a race problem

On the heels of the Charleston murders, I watched Jon Stewart struggle to deal with the "race problem" in the US.  I thought immediately of Du Bois: "How does it feel to be a problem?" I grant that the US has a race problem. But I worry that when we identify one area of our aggression, we ignore a bigger picture. 

Let me turn to Faulkner.  He ends Absalom, Absalom!  with an exchange about hatred. Shreve: "Now I want you to tell me just one thing more.  Why do you hate the South?" We don't hear Quentin's reply.  We may think we read his reply, but we really read the narrator's rendition of Quentin's thoughts: "I don't hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!”  The End. It's up to Shreve to figure out if that's true.  Good luck.  It's up to us to make sense of the ending and the entire series of layered stories.  I've thought of this ending so much in the wake of the South Carolina killings, and here's what I've come up with. End the book with Shreve asking, "Why do you hate?" No South. No specific problem. 

The US still has a race problem. A human trafficking problem. A child abuse problem. A wife beating problem. A glass ceiling problem. A sexual orientation problem.  An aged people problem. The US has a love affair with violence.  I can't understand how, amidst anti-bullying, anti-racism, anti-sexism, etc. campaigns, sports figures in the US earn millions of dollars to hurt each other.  I thought of this when I listened to Stewart point out that the US spends millions of dollars and thousands of lives protecting its citizens'freedom.  And part of that freedom is to box, wrestle, tackle, trash talk, and bully each other--in public, for lots of money, and with great acclaim.  Of course, this is not just the US.

Humans have a hate problem.  Ironically, it doesn't serve us well.  It makes us less productive.  It endangers our safety.  It ruins our health. And it enervates our happiness.

So why do we hate?  Thomas Hobbes would answer that it's because we fear. We fear, especially, death.  For Hobbes, that's the root of our competitiveness, aggression, greed, and hatred.  Buddhism might agree that it's our inability to accept our impermanence that causes so much of our suffering.

I don't have the answer.  That's not the point of this blog.  My point is that isolating a crime to one problem allows me to overlook any hatred I have toward anyone outside that problem. Instead, I'd be a better person to ask myself, "Why do I hate?"

letting go of leftovers

If I record here the background of this post, you might conclude that this whole issue is "a tad petty," as one responder has already judged.  So I'll skip to the broader ethical issues.

This post's etiquette quandaries involve leftovers.

1. The big one: Who owns the leftovers--the person who ate the original meal; the owner of the refrigerator storing the leftovers; the person who paid for the meal; or someone else?
2. How long does that ownership remain or does that depend on the food, e.g., 2 days for liver but 10 mins. for fried chicken?
3. Can you gift your leftovers to a specified recipient, which precludes anyone else enjoying it?
4. If no one wants the leftovers, must the person who made them dispose of them?  Out, demon!
5. Just to seem like you're going to eventually eat someone's cherished food gift, how long must you wait until you can pitch Grandma Bessie's lasagna with impunity?

Sadly, I could continue recording etiquette questions revolving around leftover food.  But I'm already impressed that this is more than "a tad petty."  After all...one of the synonyms for "leftover" is "scrap."  Says it all.

So go ahead and eat my leftovers.  I'm letting it all go.  Total Zen of me.

Except, of course, fried chicken.  Hands off.