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.

 Trade Anger for Pity

By Bobby Neal Winters

As Christians we are under orders to love not only our fellow Christians, but to love our neighbors (broadly defined) as well as our enemies.  This is hard, especially the first one sometimes, but there it is. You can find it in black and white right there in the Bible.

This puts us in a quandary when we move from the safety of the church sanctuary out into the real world.  There are some difficult people who live out in the real world.  They will say things that hurt your feelings; they will do things that will hurt your body.  

They may even disagree with you.

But we are not given any loopholes.  Love in the answer.

Here I would be remiss if I did not say that love means desiring good things for the person you love.  The good things that we desire for them are that they be brought closer to God.  This is not done by preaching to them, nagging them, or any other means of speech or persuasion. 

It is done by praying for them.  Pray for them, and don’t tell them about it.  

C.S. Lewis wrote: “I pray because I can't help myself. I pray because I'm helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn't change God. It changes me.”

In taking up seriously the idea that I should pray for my enemies, a remarkable thing happened. My emotions shifted.  What had been anger at someone who annoyed me and caused me trouble, shifted. I didn’t feel the heat of anger burning in my heart anymove. The sharp pain of anger shifted to the softer pain of pity.

The person who had been causing me anguish was another human being like myself. That person was made in the image of God.

That person was in pain.

I remembered something a preacher had said to me a couple of decades ago. At the time it seemed, well, idiotic, quite frankly, but something has changed in my head and heart in the meantime.  He said, “Hurt people hurt people.”

So I go from being very angry to being a bit sad.

Anger is nasty: It fouls everything.  Anger is an acid: It burns you up.

Many of those in politics are now using anger (and its sibling fear) like the ring in the nose of a bull, to turn the head of the voting public to the left or to the right.

Is exchanging anger for sadness a good thing?  We don’t like being sad, certainly.  While anger is acidic, it has a narcotic-like effect: you may have a hangover, but there is a certain exhilaration. 

While we don’t like to be sad, sadness--and maybe pity would be a better word--doesn’t steal your brain in the same way wrath does.  Sadness allows us to think; to inspect our own hearts; to see if there is anything we can do to actually help the situation.

Sadness can often be a manifestation of love. Love can’t live long within anger.

In chapter 21 of Revelation we are promised, “He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”

Through prayer, we turn our anger to tears, and God will wipe away our tears.

Loving your enemies is not easy.  Loving your friends can be a chore at times. We live in a beautiful world, but as has been said by many before me, our view is obscured by this veil of tears over our eyes.

This is radical. If you follow it to its logical conclusion, slaves should feel pity for those who enslave them. The victims of the Holocaust should feel pity for those who exterminated them.  That is a big ask, and not very many can get there. I am not saying that I can. 

But that is the way we were pointed.

Maybe I’m a fool.  No, I take that back, I AM a fool.

But not because of this.

Love your enemy. Give up anger for pity. Pray a lot.

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.

 The Process

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’ve recently read a book entitled The Master and His Emissary which was written by a scholar named Iain McGilchrist.  The writer was making a case that Western Civilization is going awry in a particular way--which is what almost every book is about this day it seems. Along the way he writes about many things that interest me regardless of the merits of his case as a whole.

McGilchrist is a brain scientist.  In simple terms he says that the right half of our brain takes in our experience of the world; the left half of the brain creates a model from the information it gets from the right by putting it into language that can be manipulated.  The model is then sent back to the right brain to be tested against reality.

I’ve read the book and a group I belong to is now discussing it.  All of us in the group are all either teachers or retired teachers, so this sort of thing is of interest to us. It parallels the best way to learn something and the best way to teach something.

Right now, as someone who is going to be 62 in a couple of months, I am learning to program in assembly language. I am doing this because I am preparing to teach a class in low-level programming.  Here “low-level” does not refer to the level of difficulty; the word “low” refers to how far you are above the hardware.

To understand this better, let me talk about high-level programming. I’ve written before about learning to program in the Python programming language. In Python, you put in your numbers and commands and run it.  You don’t worry at all about the particular machine you are using. Regardless of what machine it’s going to be running on, everything is the same. 

In low-level programming, you need to know about particulars. You need to know what CPU you are running your code on. You need to have its data sheet. I’d never even seen a data sheet before I started working on this.

I’ve been googling articles, buying books, and watching videos.  And making notes. I’ve forgotten from time to time. In my youth, I just remembered things. I paused in conversation and they were just there. Now I need to write them down, and sometimes I forget that I’ve written them down.

From time to time, I need to pause and write down in prose at length what I’ve learned. I write from the point of view of explaining to someone else.  I then come back the next day and recopy it, expanding on the points where I was just a bit too terse. Once done, I put a paperclip on it, and put it in a file. 

I then go on to the next thing I want to learn.  Lather, rinse, repeat.

My plan is to come back--after I’ve gotten the whole process done--and type it all up.  In the past, I’ve found that what I’ve done at the end will make me want to change what I’ve done at the beginning.

This is a great way to learn. This isn’t my discovery by the way.  It’s well-known.  Make your student go through an experience and force them to think about it enough to explain it to someone else.  

We do it by writing. Writing is probably the best way to do it, but talking works.  We have kindergarten kids do it in Show-and-Tell. The great story-tellers of old from the ancient oral traditions did it. Do it; think about it; explain it to someone else.

Writing allows us to remember details better.  Writing allows us to revisit, to correct, to amend. Writing allows us to share through time.

As wonderful--and to me, enjoyable--a method this is, students resist it.  Students don’t like to write.  Writing requires time; writing requires thought; writing requires time.

Writing requires rewriting.  Indeed, for you programmers out there, writing is rewriting in the same way programming is debugging.

Writing puts our grammar and spelling on display for all the world to see.  There is a lack of appreciation for creativity in either of these areas.

In any case, once you get over the bump of hating to rewrite, a whole new world of learning opens up.

[As an advertisement, the University has a writing center that helps students and teachers in stuff like this.  The staff there is brilliant. Just sayin’.]

There is a process we go through naturally. It’s the way the brain works: Take it in; think about it; explain it. This process goes in a circle. Good education, education at its best makes use of this process and perfects it.

Welcome back to school!

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.

 Drops of Rain

By Bobby Neal Winters

Mountains are boundaries.  Geographically and symbolically. They are a separation between here and there, but they are a connection between here and there.  Mountains separate Heaven from Earth, but mountains are where Heaven and Earth come together.

It rained heavily on us the first day we were in Scotland.  As we were landing in Edinburgh, we caught a flash of sunshine on the ground, but by the time we got through passport control and customs it was done.  The clouds were thick and the sky was dripping.

It was dripping when the heavens didn’t open like a faucet, that is.  We were thinking that we were going to have some wet hikes, but when we went to Blair Atholl the next day it was better, and it steadily improved from that point out.

On our full day in Blair Atholl, we took a hike from there to Pitlochry. This was in the Highlands, so there were mountains there (or hills if you want to be a snob) and those mountains dominated the geography.  There was a river that made its way through the mountains. The highway followed the river; the railroad followed the river; we, on our hiking path, followed the river.

On that first day, there was still a tiny bit of rain in the morning. It came down in mist.  As we got into the woods, the trees were wet; the grass was wet.  Looking up the hillside, I could see places where the water was seeping. The mist from the heavens gathered on the trees and grass, pooled on the hillside, and trickled into ever larger streams until it hit the river.

None of the drops of mist ever has to think about what it’s doing. It just follows God’s Law, the law of Gravity in this case.

In Scotland that rivers will come together in the valleys to form lochs.  You might want to say a lock is a lake, but while that is true in some sense of the use of language, if you have ever seen one a loch is a loch.

Some of these lochs are quite deep, filled by God’s rain one tiny drop at a time.

The surface of water is a boundary just as a mountain is a boundary.  In dreams and stories it is said to be a boundary between the conscious and the unconscious. (Just a note here: I always try to use unconscious as opposed to subconscious. “Sub” would indicate that it was under the control of your consciousness.  Consciously hold your breath for a while and see how that goes for you.)

Our unconscious mind takes care of a myriad of things of which we will never know, of which we are...unconscious. When you see a meek young mother go to the aid of her baby against a wild animal, that is all emerging from the unconscious. We have monsters that protect us living in our unconscious.

When we think of “loch,” we will think either of Loch Lomond and start humming to ourselves or of Loch Ness and the Monster therein.  Loch Ness is close to Inverness as the morphology of the words would seem to suggest. And Nessie is everywhere in Inverness. 

Everywhere. 

Does the Loch Ness monster exist?

The Scots are, perhaps, the sweetest people I’ve ever met. Yet, historically, the Romans never conquered them.  Indeed, the Romans built a wall.  While the English eventually did, it took them a while and there are a lot more English than there are Scots.  And since that time, the Scots have done some of England’s toughest fighting for them.

Every once in a while you will see a Scottsman who is built like a Navy Seal, but never did I see anything but a smile, anything but friendliness.

Beneath the surface, though, it is there, as it is in all of us.

There is a Loch Ness Monster, covered by millions of drops of mist that are collected and trickle down from the Highlands.

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.