My exceptional friend

It's not often I dedicate a post to singing the praises of an individual, but after getting our local paper today and finding out that one of my wonderful friends is going to China in an attempt to break a few Guinness World records involving a frisbee, I think it's time.

His blog is here, I will be adding it to my links (which you should check out if you're into the 'best of local' around these parts).

Let me tell you a little story about this guy.  He was on the high school hockey team but hung out with the rest of us nerds and misfits.  Fittingly, his blog is called "Odd and Misunderstood."  Boy, can I ever relate to that some days.  Instead of being a standard-issue jock, he once told me he liked listening to Gregorian Chant before hockey games because it helped get him pumped up.  Now he says that throwing a frisbee is "his favourite form of mediation,"  and I believe it!

Hats off to you Rob, for listening to your inner voice on a slightly 'odd and misunderstood' journey that involves an immense amount of practice and perseverance.  World records or not, I am astounded at what you've accomplished and I know the best is yet to come.

An endlessly varied recombination of age-old components

How's that for a headline?  Yowzers.

I am reading Carl Jung's 'memoir,' which is called " Memories, Dreams, Reflections."  Rather than recalling chronologically the events in his life, Jung recalls how he came to understand the psyche, the unconscious and the formation of human personality.

Here is an excerpt which I find totally fascinating:

Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors.  The 'newness' in the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components.  Body and soul therefore have an intensely historical character and find no proper place in what is new, in things that have just come into being.  That is to say, our ancestral components are only partly at home in such things.  We are very far from having finished completely with the Middle Ages, classical antiquity, and primitivity, as our modern psyches pretend.

Nevertheless, we have been plunged down a cataract of progress which sweeps us on into the future with ever wilder violence the farther it takes us from our roots.  Once the past has been breached, it is usually annihilated, and there is no stopping the forward motion. But it is precisely the loss of connection with the past, our uprootedness, which has given rise to the 'discontents' of civilization and to such a flurry and haste that we live more in the future and its chimerical promised of a golden age than in the present, with which our whole evolutionary background has not yet caught up.  

We rush impetuously into novelty, driven by a mounting sense of insufficiency, dissatisfaction, and restlessness. We no longer live on what we have but on promises, no longer in the light of the present day, but in the darkness of the future, which, we expect, will at last bring the proper sunrise. 

We refuse to recognize that everything better is purchased at the price of something worse; that, for example, the hope of greater freedom is cancelled out by increased enslavement to the state, not to speak of the terrible perils to which the most brilliant discoveries of science expose us.  The less we understand of what our fathers and forefather sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass, ruled only by what Nietzsche called the spirit of gravity.

Reforms by advances, this is, by new methods or gadgets. are of course impressive at first, but in the long run they are dubious and in any case dearly paid for.  They by no means increase the contentment or happiness of people on the whole.  Mostly, they are deceptive sweetenings of existence, like speedier communications which unpleasantly accelerate the tempo of life and leave us with less time than ever before.  Omnis festinatio ex parte diaboli est - all haste is of the devil, as the old masters used to say.

Reforms by retrogressions, on the other hand, are as a rule less expensive and in addition more lasting, for the return to the simpler, tried and tested ways of the past and make the sparsest use of newspapers, radio, television and all supposedly timesaving innovations.

In this book I have devoted considerable space to my subjective view of the world, which, however, is not a product of rational thinking.  It is rather a vision such as will come to one who undertakes, deliberately, with half-closed eyes and somewhat closed ears to see and hear the form and voice of being.  If our impressions are too distinct, we are held to the hour and minute of the present and have no way of knowing how our ancestral psyches listen to and understand the present - in other words, how our unconscious is responding to it.  Thus we remain ignorant of whether our ancestral components find an elementary gratification in our lives, or whether they are repelled.  Inner peace and contentment depend in large measure upon whether or not the historical family which is inherent in the individual can be harmonized with the ephemeral living conditions of the present.

A lesson from someone else's 90 years

Sometimes I am tempted to think I am a pretty hip person - I've been to 'free school,' I helped start a mixed arts festival with my friends, I like the idea of open-source everything, and I am not afraid to eat sushi or spicy food or dance in public.

But then there are other days when I am pretty sure I was born in the wrong generation, and that I am secretly an old lady inside.  Case in point:  I love stationary and letters, I know how to make bread and baked beans from scratch, I don't have a cellphone, I sew on buttons and mend clothes that aren't ruined, I like to read actual books, sing hymns and play the piano. I realize this much of this is tragically unhip but I can't be bothered to hide it.  And I don't put pictures of myself doing these things on facebook.

Today after church we had a 90th birthday party for a lady in our congregation - you only turn 90 once and she is a lively lady despite the year on her birth certificate.  What a lovely time: lots of small tables set up, a nice bowl of unpretentious soup for everyone, cake and ice cream.  Conversation, smiling.  Kids, old people and everyone in between.  Another lady played the piano intermittently while we ate.  We all sang happy birthday together, whether we felt we were excellent singers or not.

Which brings me to the point:  this generation (the one that lived through the Depression and WWII) knows how it's done.  They can enjoy the simple pleasures that truly matter: a meal with friends, lighthearted music, kind words spoken and time well spent.  Nothing flashy, no pressure to participate by buying stuff (who really needs more stuff now anyway!!).  What a nice change from the emotional ambiguity of text messages, the narcissism of the online world and the lack of human contact that makes us all retreat too far into our own heads.

Thank you elders for reminding me what really makes life wonderful.