Strangers in Strange Lands

"Therefore the truly great man dwells on what is real
and not what is on the surface,
On the fruit and not the flower,
Therefore accept the one and reject the other."

["Tao Te Ching", Lao Tzu]

As I was lying in bed awake at 6am this morning, as I am about that time just about every morning, I was thinking about a lot of things:  love, Valentine's day, nine dots, the nature of happiness, binary, Anne Braden, Catholicism, my inability to properly explain the infinitely important concept of 'paradox' to an 11-year old, and my bladder.  All of these thoughts are connected in a roundabout way, I assure you, except the business about my bladder.  Though I suppose it's probably more an assurance of the peculiarities of the bizarre inner workings of my head than of any notion of brilliance.  But allow me to explain.

Every morning, about this time, I am awake, but usually only with two thoughts in my head:  1. 'Goddamnit, brain, why won't you go back to sleep?  Stop braining!' and 2. 'Stupid bladder.  If only you could hold out one more hour I wouldn't have to endure the cold bathroom floor every day and this ridiculous struggle to fall back asleep.'

This morning, instead, I struggled to choose between going back to sleep or getting up to excitedly rush to the basement and fetch the Valentine's day gift I made Liza-Ann so I could place it carefully on her dresser for her to find when she gets up.  Which will be about three hours from now.  So really there was no rush but clearly at 6am I wasn't thinking that far ahead.  And while many of you realize I produce enough origami flowers to warrant a volumetrics study, what I made her wasn't a flower.  Which also fits perfectly with this story.  Press on.

So that's how I arrived here, writing, this morning, while the rest of the house (except those noisy f%$#ing guinea pigs!) sleeps peacefully.

For perhaps twenty years now, every once in a while whenever I find myself walking past a perfectly clean white board, I draw the solution to the Nine Dots Puzzle and just leave it there.  OCD compels me to clean white boards; Taoism compels me to never leave one perfectly clean.  (I'll save that explanation for another day.)  In any case, the Nine Dots Puzzle was something I saw in my teens or early 20s, used when I was teaching back in the day, and have always considered an important philosophical lesson.  If you want to be a good problem-solver, you need to always be willing to think outside the box.  If nothing else, I am a consummate problem-solver.  It is irrepressibly in my blood, as any of my annoyed ex-girlfriends will tell you.  (You want me to just... listen?!?...)

But I was thinking this morning that the Nine Dots Puzzle is not just the solution to many problem-solving dilemmas, but an important part of the key to happiness.  I consider being happy a skill and last night when I went to bed I started re-reading The Art of Happiness, a book I started years ago with a borrowed copy from a friend, but then returned unfinished, and have been meaning to get back to for years.  That book had taught me some very important lessons that have helped me immensely, and was what really started me on my whole 'happiness is a skill' path.  The Nine Dots Puzzle is an important part of being happy because a great deal of unhappiness stems from the confines of false dilemma thinking.  Happiness is seldom to be found in the extremes of a binary system.  In fact, love, sexuality, and even gender, we are coming to learn nowadays, are seldom as binary as society would have us believe.  And while I embrace simplicity as one of the three great treasures of Taoism (Compassion and humility.  I saved you a Google search.), I accept that the world is a complicated place, and love a many-splendor thing.

We live in a complicated world, but the solutions are often simple.  Just not always binary.

At the end of a Flobots song, Anne Braden, she is quoted saying "You do have a choice.  You don't have to be a part of the world of the lynchers.  You can join the other America."  She's talking about racism at the time, which seems about as far away philosophically from Valentine's Day as one can get, but the way in which she says 'You do have a choice.' has always stuck with me since hearing the song.  Also, I was listening to The Flobots yesterday but didn't listen to Anne Braden, which almost never happens for me, because it's a fabulous song and any trip to the music library to visit Flobots seldom concludes without hearing Anne Braden at least once.

'You do have a choice.'  

Valentine's Day is a time of year when the world tends to divide in a very binary way into two camps:  the couples who woo each other with flowers and chocolates because they either genuinely believe that this single day out of 365 (+1/4) is the mathematically correct position in Earth's orbit around the sun for expressing their affection or are at least willing to cave to public pressure by those who do, and the singles who bitterly lament that it's the most oversold, overwrought, commercialized bullshit of all possible yearly celebrations.  I don't believe either of those paths truly leads to happiness, and think there's actually a lot to be learned from kids in this regard: schools tend to have it as simply "Love Day" or some similar thing, wherein it's a time of year to express your respect and affection for all of your friends, and not just your partner, if any.  We include our child in our celebration and always have; it's not simply a binary thing.  (I fetched two crafted presents from the basement, not one.)

... and with a complete lack of segue...

As kitschy as the little Serenity Prayer plaques from Ye Olde Catholic Paraphenalia shops usually are, and while it's been over a quarter of a century since I abandoned Catholicism, I do still respect that there is something worthwhile in those words.  Because of "...the fruit and not the flower...." (see above), I accept good advice, whatever the source.  While personally, my religious leanings teach me that said serenity, courage, and wisdom have to come from within and not from without, there's value in it, but it does, once again, put forth the sort of binary "do something/do nothing" reductionist thinking that produces few good results and runs contrary to decent risk management.  Perhaps a secular version might be something like:

I hope I find within myself

the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

the courage to change the things I can,

and the wisdom to know that real solutions will no doubt involve some combination of both factors, and even said combination may evolve over time as new opportunities or ideas present themselves, though one should also be careful to avoid unnecessary cognitive dissonance after a satisfactory solution has been implemented.

This is why I could never be a priest.

Bottom line:  Love is simultaneously complicated and simple.  The world is simultaneously complicated and simple.  Life has been very interesting for us of late, taking some strange twists and turns.  There loom many large and unanswered questions.  But the answers... the answers have consistently been simple.  As my sister Nancy says, "just love".

You do have a choice.  Choose simple.  Choose love.

And then figure out how to explain the vital concept of paradox of an 11-year-old or you'll never have another Taoist in your house.