A Time of Life, a Place of Life

 A Time of Life, a Place of Life

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’ve reached a certain age.

I’m at an age where I’ve started looking after myself proactively with diet, exercise, and mental activity. I know my age; I know the age my older friends are and I know the health challenges they face; and I can subtract.

It’s coming.

I want to take care of myself, so that I can help take care of my children and my grandchildren.  

We care for ourselves so we can care for others. We care in a circle centered at ourselves but certainly not ending with ourselves. The circle goes out in distance and in time as well.

There is a purpose to it all. At the core, we want human beings to flourish.

Flourish. I like the word.

Helping humans to flourish is a hard task.

There is an old chestnut about the contribution of three scientists: Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud.  It goes like this: Copernicus proved that Man was not at the center of the universe; Darwin proved that Man was an animal; Freud proved that Man was a sick animal.

Not to diminish any of these great men’s achievements, but we’d known all of that for a long time.

I want to zone in on Freud’s part: Man is a sick animal.

If you are born a squirrel, you’re born and you know what your life is going to be like. You wake up, you eat nuts--and steal fruit while in season, pesky little so-and-sos--you climb trees, and you bury nuts. At the end of the day, you climb into your burrow, go to sleep, and do it all again tomorrow.

Animals are like that. They live, and they don’t think a whole lot. Squirrels solve a lot of puzzles; ask anyone with a bird feeder. But they don’t seem to worry.

Man--the Human Animal--does think; does worry. We are animals, but we differ from the other animals. As one ancient teacher said, “Foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head.”

We are an animal that has clawed its way out of its niche.  We are an animal but we hold ourselves separate, superior to animals.  

It is a paradox.

We’ve had modes of life where people were happy.  By all accounts, the hunter/gatherers were happy.

There are many accounts where children of European ancestry came into the care of indigenous tribes. (Please note the careful use of language in the previous sentence as an effort to keep from being distracted.) When the children were reclaimed by their relatives, they didn’t want to go back. One can talk about Stockholm Syndrome or resetting after having lost one’s parents, but I think it was just a better way of life.

They became part of a tight-knit group of people who cared for each other.

Man, as a species, has a disease.

That disease is related to consciousness.

Consciousness is just a part of who we are.  Most of what our brain does is unconscious.  We walk, breathe, our hearts beat. All unconscious.  Every once in a while, consciousness has to step in and say, cool it.

Consciousness has been involved in my decisions to eat better, to exercise, and take care of myself.  I pay attention to how hungry I am; I make sure I schedule time to walk. The word they use for this is mindfulness. You might prefer to call it taking care.

Consciousness, though, can make you miserable if you allow yourself to think too much about things you cannot control. The word used for this is neurotic.

We think too much. We cut ourselves off from other humans too much.  We become “atomic people,” people as isolated atoms rather than being part of a tribe.

There is no going back to being members of mutually supportive  nomadic bands of hunter gatherers. (I like having a dentist too much, anyway.)

We do have churches, though.  A church should (good word) be a place where we can find some balm for that human disease, a place where we can contribute to the flourishing of our fellow human beings during their whole lives, from conception to natural death. A place of Life. 

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.