Murphy’s Bye-Laws

For too long a common strategy for dealing with turmoil in my life had been retreat, avoidance, and running away. Things that bothered me stayed lodged in my psyche and scabbed over with neglect to fester into an infectious sore never to be addressed or healed. Addressing some of these sores, I think, has resulting in me setting an unexpected and quite random goal of running a 5K race. But what am I running for (or from)?

At first I thought that maybe I was driven by nostalgia. Aside from good grades in school, which was pretty much doing the minimum (if you want me to wear 25 pieces of flair, make 25 pieces the minimum), running was the only thing that I ever really felt like I was better than average at. My ascendance to this feeling was fast but also quite fleeting. After only a half of a season in cross-country where I was improving exponentially, it seemed, I changed schools to a school without a team. Whatever progress was made in the one season of track and the half-season of cross-country was halted and I lingered in mediocrity while still clinging to the feeling of actually being good at something. It took a long time to let that feeling go, all the while blaming my parents for the move. At first, I thought this was a ploy to try and regain some of that nostalgic feeling; to reclaim the personal achievement I just missed out on and the feelings surrounding those running events.

It later crossed my mind that the whole Multiple Sclerosis (MS) angle of the race and the fact that my father had just suffered major setbacks due in large part to his MS may have had something to do with it. With a minimal amount of reflection this reason turned out to be false as well. While I had concerns for my father’s condition, I was also less than sympathetic (see Regretful Reactions). See, whatever laziness I exhibit surely stems from my dad’s genes. Always a rather sedentary person, his debilitation from MS seemed like a convenient excuse for sympathy and lack of activity. Even when he was advised over and over again to exercise (even a little) to maintain as much strength as possible, the ass groove in the recliner and the muscles in his television remote finger were the only things developing. This contrast between a man who could, at one time, do things and chose not to and a man who was no longer able to do things even if he wanted to colored my sympathies and feelings about his physical condition. These mixed feelings and the added disappointment from other non-health related things (not to mention the blame I laid on him for my shortfalls and disappointments in high school) really tarnished any semblance of a relationship.

So while attempting to gaze to the outside for reasons and blame for a whole host of things, I ended up only seeing my own reflection in the glass. No matter how hard I looked or how the light shone on the pane, it was still only my own reflection that I saw. Then I realized that I was running to avoid becoming the kind of person I disliked about my father. I know most folks live a big portion of their lives trying to avoid this fate to varying success. After looking at that reflection for a while, I can now say that all the reasons I’m training for this race have everything to do with myself and little, if anything, to do with anybody else.

I run now because it was a concrete goal with an end and I am not very good at following through or finishing. A little effort? A little discomfort? It was always easier to just do something else. In matters of my own fitness and health, I’ve shunned advice and mainstream medical protocol (which I can still say I don’t regret), but I also ignored advice that made sense to me because of laziness and an unwillingness to change.  I don’t know that I’ll continue to be a runner when the race ends – I don’t think dealing with pain via a constant stream of ibuprofen is a good sign of something I should continue indefinitely – but I do think that some regular fitness program is in my future. I also think that goals previously thought too hard or unattainable will look like low-hanging fruit after running this race. I am still running from something, though: fear. I am leaving fear of failure, fear of adversity, and fear of uncertainty in the dust. And the habit of looking outside for the cause of problems is still standing back at the starting line.

I’ve had the unfortunate experience, more than once in the last couple of weeks, of having fairly tragic things happen to loved ones wherein I feel guilt for not having as sympathetic a reaction as the events would dictate. The feeling isn’t schadenfreude; I’m not gaining any pleasure from the events. I regret that these things happened, feel some sympathy for the afflicted, and still hope for their recovery. If that was all I felt I would have no guilt, but there are other things felt as well. Things that move straight to the forefront of my mind before sympathy sets in. In one case, even feelings of mild anger were generated for the guilt this very reaction caused.

In recent weeks and months I’ve been increasingly turning a scrutinizing lens inward. While this isn’t a new thing for me, the focus of this lens has been. I’ve been examining negative feelings toward various people such as legislators, instruments of the state, various personal acquaintances, and the particular actions some of these people have taken. My range of emotional reaction to events, mostly internal, have ranged from anger to cynicism, annoyance to conceit, and sarcasm to schadenfreude. All of these emotions are negative in tone and serve no constructive purpose for me or those evoking the feelings. In fact, the negativity does my psyche harm more than the people and events eliciting the reactions, which is usually of no consequence to me directly or doing me any real harm.

A part of trying not to react negatively to events is withholding judgment. Judging an action (or inaction) is inviting negativism, and is, indeed, the source of the negative feelings. I’m still struggling with the non-judging as opposed to the actual analysis of what is happening. I feel analysis is necessary as we process our surroundings, but separating it from value judgements is proving difficult. One thing that does precipitate out of the non-judgmental solution is judgment of past actions and events. Without the filter of judgment from these things, it becomes much easier avoid negative emotional reactions to present circumstances.

All of this introspection does trend toward a new age-y universal love kind of doctrine, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing or unrealistic. Reverence, respect, love, and goodwill toward the people around us beats fear, control, hate, and violence and is, in my opinion as well as others’, a key component to peaceful anarchy. Letting go of personal frustrations from the actions of others, stemming from judgment of those actions, is like cutting the chains enslaving a psyche and can lead to a greater freedom than simply raging to destroy institutions. That, after all, is the point of this exercise of mine.

As the holiday season prepares to go out with a bang this evening, I’d like to reflect on thoughts I’ve had while catching up with old friends and acquaintances.  This year has found me with a full social schedule over the past two weeks meeting with prodigal friends returning home temporarily or carving out some time to catch up.  At one time, all of the people I visited with shared some aspect of their lives with me before separating to pursue individual purposes.  I’ve thought much about the divergence in our lives and geography and how much one has had an effect on the other.  Read the rest of this entry »

A friend and occasional commenter to the Bye-Laws, it was once joked, never did anything halfway; instead this person went overboard with all things from the passing hobby to general consumption.  Since everything was taken to extremes with them, I suggested practicing “extreme moderation.”  This was a joke, of course.  In actuality, if moderation were practiced – even extremely – this person would be unrecognizable to their friends, and that wasn’t the goal.  The oxymoron in the title isn’t the target of this discussion, though.  Instead, the title refers to the apparent pattern of my own personal convictions and attitudes toward them.  (Isn’t a title with layers and layers of possible meaning fun?)  Over and over again in my intellectual awakenings I see a new idea latched onto vehemently and radically only to become more temperate, nuanced, and reasoned over time.  Reflection on this process makes it seem like the initial stages are so strong in order to ingrain the new thought paradigm and expel the old paradigm; with time and deeper consideration a zen-like peace with the new outlook replaces the zealous attitude.

The first thought paradigm to be put asunder was that of Christianity.  I studied Christianity with as much vigor as my school work, probably as a supplemental challenge, through Junior High.  My approach to it was academic mostly. Read the rest of this entry »

Picture it! A still life of a belly button nestled cozily in a belly – tone but soft – perhaps with a quaint jewel or ring of gold piercing it. Oh, the feelings of warmth brought by beauty and the longing to stare or caress. Of course navel-gazing can take a turn for the worst if you end up with a cavernous crater of a belly button atop a mountainous beer –and-wing belly with damp wads of lint intermixed with the occasional hair gracing the canvas. I’ll pause here to allow the visual specter of a literal interpretation to pass before continuing on to the figurative colloquialism. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve lamented to myself in the past about being too easily swayed by anything resembling an argument.  There was a time when my beliefs and philosophies very closely reflected whatever I had read most recently.  I’ve gotten much, much better in this regard, but like bringing a car back onto the road when two tires have hit the shoulder, overcompensation is a real danger (I know this first-hand and got a nice helicopter ride to drive home any point the tree and guardrail and ditch failed to make).  Now, after reading a great post by Jeremy over at Social Memory Complex, I wonder if I haven’t jerked the wheel a little too hard in the other direction and become dogmatic and rigid in my thinking.  Sure, taking the “red pill” can make one cynical and surely put a damper on one’s general outlook, but Jeremy takes us a step further:

I think one problem libertarians tend to have is that they confuse their principles with their identity. Read the rest of this entry »