eThoughts : Holiday Thoughts, Part II

Continuing in the spirit of being thankful for all we do wrong, let’s grin a bit and keep ‘er going.

All right, humans are directionally challenged. For all of our intent, our behaviors are like a shotgun blast on a distribution chart—all over the place with no real arrow of direction. Our attentions are so varied when we attempt to do something, it reminds me of a kind of “Whack-a-Mole” consciousness—there’s no telling where the next attention is going to come from or what it’s going to suggest. We need direction. There are lots of individual directions—and that’s a good thing. But individual directions are only one part of being in a pack. And it’s not enough to tout freedom or democracy or consideration or whatever seems politically expedient when addressing the whole of us. We have a semi-civil code for being in groups, but we don’t have a civil essence of the whole. In other words, we have laws and lip service, but we don’t much have a genuinely innate sense of civil behavior. So here’s a holiday gift born of our bumping into each other: The best way to preserve our individual likes is to think about our impact on others. Can you imagine our world if we all did that? Heck, even a critical mass of us. Like this entire exercise, it’s the principle of applying opposites and contrasts to better ourselves.

In the vein of looking at our nuttiness to tease out our gifts, let’s look at how we engage in accommodation and assimilation? Just how in the world did we set up human interactions to give weight to one people or the other or one person or the other? We may be part of a pack, but that doesn’t mean we have to adopt the one-alpha-at-a-time approach and make everyone else accommodate that alpha-whatever, while that alpha simply assimilates the underlings. The kingster is dead, long may that icon stay dead. And the queenster as well. I’m guessing we can have better without installing a human symbol of absolute power—that’s just another Golden Calf to worship. So, this Holiday season, let’s be thankful for our need to have kings and queens so we can recognize how we abdicate responsibility when we instill all we want and need on one person or one group of folks. That gauge is announcing to us just how separated we are from our own royalty. Talk about slouching towards Paradiso.

Okay, one final thought in this non-inclusive list of celebrating human foibles during the Holidays: How about intimate relations? That gauge on our console is bouncing around like we’ve entered the Bermuda Triangle. And we probably have. Why is it that marriage means “tying the knot” or our spouse is the “ol’ ball and chain”? Our restrictions in intimacy are very telling. Love is to be guarded—very, very carefully. So we become armored-car drivers instead of amour-car drivers. And we accept it because we think if we don’t, we’ll be asking too much and wind up with nada. And we might, given all the walking wounded. So the familiar devil is better than the unfamiliar god. Okay, if that’s our gauge and we want it to read “cautious,” then let’s have fun with the complaining. If we want that gauge to read “surrender ahead” then let’s take a deep breath and go for having it all. I still can’t figure out why we can’t, though the talking-heads simply consider such a notion as immature.

Sometimes the gift is not only what we have, but what we can have. We’ve got eyes for both, though we often seemed to gaze in only one arena. Gifts abound and sometimes they can be discovered and created by looking at our crazy-gauge, not just pondering our if-only gauge.

It’s the Holidays again—a time to end, a time to begin, a time to grin.

And maybe a time to be a bit corny, complete with twinkle.

Happy, wonderful, uplifting Holidays to all!