Here's something from another blog (http://besubtle.blogspot.com/) that got me thinking:


It is 5:11pm on Sunday. I have just finished my midterm paper for my developmental psychology class. Officially, it is not due until 2pm tomorrow, which means I have twenty hours and forty-nine minutes left before the deadline.

This is the first time I can remember, if not the first time in my life, that I have finished an assignment like this with plenty of time to spare. Not only that, I managed to work every day this week training for my new job, getting 100% on all the food/wine tests they gave, go to the gym, do all the work for my other class, stay current on my Course in Miracles practice, find an hour a day for meditation, and hang out with my lovely wife.

In previous lives, I would have undoubtedly found myself in a state of panic very soon. I would have noticed the sun was coming up, which meant I only had a few hours left to finish the reading I had to do in order to even start my paper, and I would have to come up with some excuse why I couldn't make it into work that day. I would probably have been up for at least 30 hours, drinking redbulls and smoking cigarettes incessantly. I probably wouldn't have eaten for some time. Every room in my house would be clean (since that used to be a favorite way for me to procrastinate), and I would have probably started three or four big projects in the meantime (like building a doghouse) to distract me from actually sitting down to do some work.

It really amazes me how much energy I used to put into not getting started on what needed to be done. That's not to say this way is any easier, or takes any less energy. I always got the assignment done on time, after all, and I'm still exhausted. This way just makes for a smoother ride...

It seems, in spite of myself, that I've managed to make some progress after all...


This struck me with a dawning realisation of how much potential lies in all the hours when there seems to never be enough time even to do the simplest things properly. Reading this, I was amazed at how much one can do, and wanted to know how he possibly manages it all. But, really, I'm called upon to look at my life honestly and ask - why can't I?
There is so much energy put in to other things, like fear and anxiety and suppression and putting things off and apathy and uncertainty. It's absolutely amazing how much energy is put in to not putting energy in - to procrastination, to saying 'can't do it now, i'll do it another time' - so much poured in to keeping this as the dominant mode, because to maintain it requires constant vigilance against what doesn't want this to be the way I live my life - the inspiration, the love, the motivation - and so much is put in to pushing away and trying to cure the guilt and the gnawing feeling that comes from this.
If life is potentiality, then it is a choice constantly made to put energy in to these things, when it could be put in to the things I really want to do and be and the things that would really be best and greatest and that would really serve and actually make this life in to something worthwhile. On the most basic, fundamental level, it is simply a matter of choosing to change where I channel my energy, choosing to put it where it would serve the highest good, rather than into where it would not so much. It is shifting my way of being in the world. And that is always a choice. Although it may seem difficult, that is ok, because looking back on things I can see that what seems difficult at times is often quickly overcome. It is fleeting, rather than defeating. Difficultly does not mean stop. It means faith. Commitment, devotion, dedication to constantly choosing to realign ones life - that is how it is done. As the saying goes, it is step by step, one day at a time, one moment at a time. I would open up to life.

The Newtown Festival and Holidays!

Went to the Newtown Festival yesterday. Basically spent the day looking around at stalls, met some new people and just hanging out I suppose. Didn't actually do much, especially when I think of it in terms of how long we were there. Time flies when you're having fun. It has been so nice this weekend hanging around not doing work without the nagging feeling that I should be doing work. Watched a TV series of The Forsyte Saga - books by John Galsworthy - for many hours. I've concluded writers are sadists. All they do is come up with characters who they lovingly fashion just to make them suffer. Damn writers. Anyway, here's some pictures.

Just to imprint thier names upon my memory (left to right): me, Jack (who went ot the Bob Dylan concert when he came out here), Zoe (who I'm friends with from uni), Cai (who I don't know anything about), Boris (who's from Germany), other guy who's name I din't know, and Peter (Zoe's friend, who introduced us to these other people).

Funny hair!

Omg a brush with fame (Australian fame anyway; non Australians might remember the security breach at APEC - these guys got a fake motorcade right to the hotel where George Bush was staying, and even then had to stop their progression themselves by jumping out of the limo dressed as Osama bin Laden - very embaressing for the security people!)

Starting a new job today, where I will be working probably about 20 hours a week over the holidays. Not sure how I'll do with working that much. We shall see!

Have a good one!

Live your life with so much love in your heart that if, by mistake, you were sent to Hell, the Devil himself would deliver you up to Paradise

If anyone 'spiritually inclined' out there happens to read this...

There is this exercise I've been doing lately. It's so incredibly simple, but as many great people have been forced to learn, the things of real value often end up being hidden with things that are simple. A little cosmic giggle, when you go out on some path through the wilderness, bashing through the overgrown shrub, crossing rivers, climbing mountains, and then you realise that just two metres to the side, behind a wall of shrub, there is a meadow that will take you there too. And then you realise that you actually planted that shrub, in some distant dream long ago. This exercise seems to have brought incredible growth to my life. The things that I have been striving after and agonising over just seem to be spontaneously happening, and it is so wonderful, and I am so greatful. So I will share it here, in case it may be of some benefit to someone.

All you have to do is 'breathe' spiritual energy from the base of your spine up to your head. You can imagine it as a brilliant white light.

A little background can help here.

Please note that I am trying to talk about this stuff as accurately as I can, although I may have some details wrong, or not quite right.

This 'spiritual energy' has been identified and used in many spiritual traditions, but what would I suppose be the most common term for it would be kundalini energy. It is this energy that is said to flow through the 'spiritual body' in perspectives that suggest we have two bodies: the dense and the etheric. This is the energy that is the vitality of the spiritual reality.

A slightly more complex version of the exercise is one that deals with the chakras...Let me go get a book to make sure I'm getting this stuff right...Well I can't find it right now, but the basic idea is there. It shall be as it may.

Other things:

- Almost four months off uni is almost upon me! Oooo the anticipation. And at the same time not, because when I look truely at my life I realise that it doesn't make a difference to my happiness or anything, that having all this work to do hasn't actually really gotten in the way of the fullness of my life. No, that is an independent inner state that relates to the interpretation you choose to have of what life gives you. I have had a wonderful year, and learnt so much and experienced so much 'despite' all this uni work (although despite may not be the right word...maybe 'including from', because although I don't agree with my course in a lot of ways or like it all the time, it has helped me grow).

- Willie Nelson is an amazing man. I read this book he wrote called The Tao of Willie, and you could say that it changed my life. Or just that it certainly helped. I'll go get it...Random quote from Willie time...Ok, I'm not sure that there's anything all that quotable here, but I'll put it up anyway since that's where it opened...

Our life is our own possession,

and it's benefit to us is very great.

That's not even by Willie Nelson but by an early Taoist teacher called Yang Chu. But that's what my eye fell upon. Far be it from me to judge it unworthy.

- I got a job! After a couple of rejections and starting to worry that no one wanted me, I got part time work for the holidays

- I'm going to Melbourne in February with friends, staying in a hostel, eating good food, listening to good music, doing whatever else you do in Melbourne. Excitement!

- I'm meeting up with one of my tutors in the holidays. Weird? Maybe. But he's so amazing. In the tutorial today, almost everyone was there - amazing, considering the numbers in other tutorials were much lower. But people like to go because of him. People have said that they want to write good essays because he's going to be marking them. There's apparently a group of facebook called 'I wish John Carr was my dad'

- I'm enjoying being social at the moment. It's fun distracting myself from uni work with talking to people

- Been working on my singing voice and songwriting skills (both of which have improved) in hopes of having a go at being in a band

-I'm becoming wise - one of my wisdom teeth is peeking out. No more fun and games, have to mature up!

Hmmm that's enough for now. Sleep time!

Goodnight :)

(need to add pictures for prettiness...there we go)

Here's my first piece of writing from this new more truthful place. I don't know what I think of it. It's not in line with my professed values, but it's more truthful than pretending. It's starting from where I am.
If anyone has any comments, I would love to hear them (not that anyone ever does :p). (Jared - you constructively criticise mine and I'll constructively criticise yours *nudge nudge* [if you give me the url that is]).
Goodnight!



Jenna Carlyle


There was war even here. The tiny vessels of single men who could not stand, they made their way in undetected to the home front itself. If you don’t go to the war, it will come and meet you where you are, my grandmother used to say. She was there on the day the city way down under was filled with the sounds of that creeping battle. A shell went right by her head, she said. How surreal, when you think you’re so far from the perils of that elsewhere battle, safely tucked away in an unimportant continent, but the war comes to you. Meets you on your own turf.
My grandmother was always talking about war as though we were still in the middle of one. I remember when she lived with us. Even the house was a battle zone to her. Nothing was safe from the war, she said. She spoke as if The Enemy could come in any second and slaughter us all. When we were on the phone, she would stand there, staring, monitoring what we said, to make sure we didn’t let slip any details that might betray us – address, name, plans for what we would do tomorrow. The moment we uttered the first syllable of some vital detail she would snatch the phone from our hands and slam it down, cutting off the call, then look about wildly and tell us we were mad.
The first time I brought a friend over, Tamryn, I think her name was, she grabbed her by the shoulders and started interrogating her. Who are you? What do you want? Tamryn looked so afraid, I wondered what my grandmother saw in her. I could not see anything but a shocked little girl with tears in her wide eyes. What was it that my grandmother saw there?
She was afraid of shadows. She insisted we take her bed away and leave only a mattress – that way there could be nothing hidden, waiting to get her as she slept. Sometimes at night I thought her fantasies had come true, and I ran to her room to find…just her. Just her, shouting, crying out for help. Midday was the only time of calm. I remember standing with her on our quiet street, straight underneath the sun, feeling so relieved that the shadows had disappeared, while she held my hand and looked down at me, not as though I was about to die or about to betray her, but as though I was her granddaughter.

I don’t imagine her in heaven. Even when she died, when I was eight, someone told me she was smiling down from a better place, but I couldn’t see that. I imagine her as an angel of the world. A shadow angel over my shoulder. Her body died, so she took up sentry duty in my life. Once when I went for a job interview, I heard this inaudible voice in my ear, and I just froze up and couldn’t answer any of the questions they asked me. Then a few months later the company went bankrupt, and the CEO was caught for fraud and sexual harassment of an emplyee. And one night, this unspeaking voice came again suddenly, and I tripped and my shoe fell off, and I had to stop to put it back on. When I got to the bus stop, the bus had just pulled away from the curb, so I got a taxi. Near home, we passed by the bus – T-boned by another as it came up the hill.

Last night an angel hovered over my bed. A different angel. An angel made of light, who was before me, not behind. I looked at her through slits of sleeping eyes, and she whispered secrets into my heart. At midday the next day the voiceless tone, a very different angel, sounded in my head again – and I ignored it and kept walking, out to the middle of an empty football field. I waited. Silent, poised. Slowly, the shadows began to reappear as the sun descended through the sky. They grew longer and longer, and I just stood there, stood in a world of shadows, until I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned around, and there was my grandmother, smiling.

Poverty Level Decreases Globally
(read on and it's not just other people's writings ;)

By Steve Radelet

Steve Radelet is a development expert that has lived for many years in Africa and Asia, taught at Harvard, and worked at the US Treasury. He is currently a Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington and economic advisor for President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia.


Unicef announced this week that the world reached a remarkable milestone in 2006: for the first time since records have been kept, the number of deaths of children under five years old has fallen below 10 million a year, less than half of the 20 million that died in 1960. The percentage of young children dying has fallen even more dramatically, from about 184 per thousand in 1960 to about 72 per thousand today. That means that out of every 1,000 children around the world, an additional 112 who would have died in 1960 are now living beyond age five.

This terrific news is the latest indicator of the dramatic fall in world poverty over the past few decades. While the percentage of people in the world living with incomes less than $1/day has fallen steadily for several hundred years, world population has grown faster; so the absolute number of people in poverty continued to rise – until it reached around 1.4 billion in 1980. Then one of the most important changes in world history occurred: for the first time ever, the number of people living in absolute poverty started to fall. Actually it started to fall in the 1960s, then it spiked up again during the commodity price shocks of the 1970s, before falling permanently in the 1980s. Since then it has fallen very rapidly to less than 1 billion today.

That’s right: after rising steadily since the beginning of time, the number of people in the world living in absolute poverty has fallen by nearly one-third in less than three decades. Amazing.

Of course, much (but not all) of the reduction in poverty is centered in Asia. But one of the most remarkable things about the fall in child morality rates reported by Unicef is the fact that it occurred in every region of the world. Even in sub-Saharan Africa, under-five mortality has fallen from 277 per thousand in 1960 to 160 per thousand today...

--see the rest of the article at http://files.tikkun.org/current/article.php?story=2007091611512481


Isn't that amazing? I mean, amongst all the doom and gloom that dominates our talkings of the world in terms of cultural criticism, there is real, quantitative data that would tell us we need to consider the true complexity of the situation and think 'hey, maybs this idea is more based on the way I perceive things than how the world actually is'. Cultural studies, i'm talking to you!
The thing with cultural studies is that it ignores everything else but 'well, i reckon it's this way becuase I do' - yes, there could be things to support it, but then there's also things that don't support it, that support something entirely different. Which makes me think that of postmodernists, poststructuralists, cultural constructivists etc. By looking at the world and saying 'oh look, heaps of people see things in heaps of different ways; therefore there is no such thing as anything innate or true' and yet people disagree with this position based on their own experience, so it really contradicts itself...
Anyway, I'm just trying to explore an approach that is not common in cultural studies and against which there is a definite bias (although I am studying a field that's all about 'power relations' and how those dominant meanos are oppressing everyone else, so perhaps the answer is that I'm in the wrong field...).
I'm on a break now (well, not officially until Friday, but all I have to do before that is a 600 word story, which is not like an essay) - such a relief. (The lovely sounds of mum's crime show are coming in from the other room...don't you love hearing terrified people screaming for their lives to some psychopathic murderer? music goes on...ah, much better). This essay I handed in today was horrible. I just couldn't get words out, so that something that could have taken me a couple of hours ended up keeping me up until 2:30 this morning and then stressing to finish it in the break between my lecture and tutorial. Not to mention yesterday I forgot my wallet (thankfully did not get fined - the nice station guard man let me off with a warning [honesty pays in these situations]), left my usb lid at the library (not a biggie, but part of the picture), finished an assignment right when it had ot be handed in and ran around trying to print it, drove a few hundred metres with the handbreak on, got half way to the podiatrist and realised I forgot my orthotics so had to turn around and go home....A crazy day, was yesterday (although it is nice to realise that i was a bit stressed, but not really so stressed, and if this is the hardest part of my life, then I'm pretty freaking blessed, ay).
And after all this crazyness and many things coming together in my life, I spent a little while last night (in a break from not writing my essay) experiencing something that I never have before - truth, or the inklings of. You see, everything's culminated in the realisation that I'm trying to walk before I've even learnt to crawl. So I'm really back tracking, or so it seems, although it's really more like going 'back' in order to go forward, which isn't really back but it's so very forward. Back tracking to real basics.
It's really nice.


"Do not accept anything simply because it has been said by your teacher, or because it has been written in your sacred book, or because it has been believed by many, or because it has been handed down by your ancestors. Accept and live only according to what will enable you to see truth face to face."
- Buddha, as quoted in *Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life* by Thich Nhat Hanh


A dedication to knowing the truth
Rather than knowing about it.

It's simple really -
simply a step,
like a toddler
just learning to walk
who has to really stretch themselves
to climb that big person's stairway.

It helps when the load is lighter
The hike becomes easier
When you look through your pack
And sort out all that stuff,
When you put it down for a moment
And assess the situation -
Where you are,
Where you want to go,
What you need to get there,
And what you don't.

Apples are delicious.

The more in tune I am with love and joy and life the less I want junk food and the more I want 'natural' goodies (such as apples).

Expecting the hours to be the length that they are makes standing around at work that much more pleasant.

The gift shop up the street is a veritable repository of tear-inspiring beauty.

Regina Spektor is made of love. By that I mean that her voice is magnificant.

Hi! I haven't posted anything for a while, and didn't really think I would post any more, at least for the moment, but I just had to post this!

The Prayer of the Teacup

Never get tired of staying awake to pray for the saints. Ephesians 6:18

In this beautiful reminder to pray for one another the author of Ephesians is certainly not talking about the saints in heaven. The saints spoken of here are the saints at your elbow, the saints in your household, and the saints you shop with at the supermarket.
I used to worry about how to be faithful in praying for all these ordinary saints. While looking for a way to pray for those who are a part of my life, the way found me. I call it the prayer of the teacup.
The first 15 minutes of each day I reserve for the saints on earth. It is one of my favorite morning rituals. I begin my day with a cup of tea or coffee. As the steam from my cup ascends to the heavens I pray for friends and strangers. I see their faces in the ascending steam. I receive the persons who come into my memory and give them back to God.
So many folks are brought together in my dawn ritual: my family and friends, my community, those I have worked with in the past, political figures, and church leaders. Often the faces of people whose names I don’t know come to me: people at check-out counters, folks I’ve seen during my travels, in the airport, or on the streets. There are even the faces of those I read about in the newspaper or see in the evening news.
I like this prayer because it is so simple. When we pray for others we often get bogged down with words. I need few words—just a name or a glance is enough. I simply gaze at all these people whom God loves, and I yearn for their good.


I stand at my window and watch

one by one the stars all leave me

I am having tea with the dawn

the first ray of sun descending

into my teacup

into my heart

The steam of my tea ascending

to the heavens

into God’s heart

The yearning in my heart streaming

to the heavens

into God’s heart

And God, standing in the heavens

watching the sun rise in my heart

leans down to breathe in

the first rays of my yearning

and names it morning prayer.

-- Macrina Wiederkehr

Can anyone tell me why it is that whenever I post things divided into lines like the previous post, it always double spaces them?

You are to gather up the joys and sorrows,

the struggles,

the beauty,

love, dreams and hopes

of every hour

that they may be consecrated

at the altar of daily life.

-- Macrina Wiederkehr

A Blessing Prayer

What is a blessing

but a rain of grace

falling generously

upon those who are in need;

And who among us is without need?

May this day be a pathway strewn with blessings.

May your work this day be your love made visible.

May you breathe upon the wounds of those you live and work with.

May your breath be the breath of God.

May your own wounds feel the breath of God.

May you honor the flame of love that burns inside you.

May your voice this day be a voice of encouragement.

May your life be an answer to someone’s prayer.

May you own a grateful heart.

May you have enough joy to give you hope, enough pain to make you wise.

May there be no room in your heart for hatred.

May you be free from violent thoughts.

When you look into the window of your soul may you see the face of God.

May the lamp of your life shine kindly upon all who cross your path.

May you be a good memory in someone’s life today.

--Macrina Wiederkehr http://www.macrinawiederkehr.com/index.htm

Guess what I discovered. Hanson should be releasing an album in Australia some time very soon. Eek!

This is an article I found in Spectrum, one of the weekend magazines of the Sydney Morning Herald 12 May 2007, written by Steven Pinker, a Professor at Harvard.


We're getting nicer every day
12 May 2007
© 2007 Copyright John Fairfax Holdings Limited. www.smh.com.au


Who says life is cheap? It appears the human race values it more than ever before.

IN 16TH-CENTURY PARIS, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning, in which a cat was hoisted in a sling on a stage and slowly lowered into a fire. According to historian Norman Davies, "[T]he spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonised." Today, such sadism would be unthinkable in most of the world. This change in sensibilities is just one example of perhaps the most important and most underappreciated trend in the human saga: violence has been in decline over long stretches of history and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species' time on earth.
In the decade of Darfur and Iraq, and shortly after the century of Stalin, Hitler and Mao, the claim that violence has been diminishing may seem somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. Yet recent studies that seek to quantify the historical ebb and flow of violence point to exactly that conclusion.
Some of the evidence has been under our nose all along. Conventional history has long shown that, in many ways, we have been getting kinder and gentler. Cruelty as entertainment, human sacrifice to indulge superstition, slavery as a labour-saving device, conquest as the mission statement of government, genocide as a means of acquiring real estate, torture as routine punishment, the death penalty for misdemeanour and differences of opinion, assassination as the mechanism of political succession, rape as the spoils of war, pogroms as outlets for frustration, homicide as the major form of conflict resolution - all were unexceptionable features of life for most of human history. But, today, they are rare to nonexistent in the West, far less common elsewhere than they used to be, concealed when they occur and condemned when they are brought to light.
At one time, these facts were widely appreciated. They were the source of notions such as progress and civilisation and man's rise from savagery and barbarism. Recently, however, those ideas have come to sound corny, even dangerous. They seem to demonise people in other times and places, license colonial conquest and other foreign adventures and conceal the crimes of our own societies. The doctrine of the noble savage - the idea that humans are peaceable by nature and corrupted by modern institutions - pops up frequently in the writing of public intellectuals such as Jose Ortega y Gasset ("War is not an instinct but an invention"), the late Stephen Jay Gould ("Homo sapiens is not an evil or destructive species") and Ashley Montagu ("Biological studies lend support to the ethic of universal brotherhood").
But, now that social scientists have started to count bodies in different historical periods, they have discovered that the romantic theory gets it backward: far from causing us to become more violent, something in modernity and its cultural institutions has made us nobler.
To be sure, any attempt to document changes in violence must be soaked in uncertainty. Even for events in the historical record, statistics are spotty until recent periods. Long-term trends can be discerned only by smoothing out zigzags and spikes of horrific bloodletting. And the choice to focus on relative rather than absolute numbers brings up the moral imponderable of whether it is worse for 50 per cent of a population of 100 to be killed or 1 per cent in a population of 1 billion.
Yet, despite these caveats, a picture is taking shape. The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon, visible at the scale of millennia, centuries, decades, and years. It applies over several orders of magnitude of violence, from genocide to war to rioting to homicide to the ill-treatment of children and animals. And it appears to be a worldwide trend, though not a homogeneous one. The leading edge has been in Western societies, especially England and Holland, and there seems to have been a tipping point at the onset of the Age of Reason in the early 17th century.
At the widest-angle view, one can see a whopping difference across the millennia that separates us from our pre-state ancestors. Contra leftist anthropologists who celebrate the noble savage, quantitative body-counts - such as the proportion of men in a contemporary foraging tribe who die at the hands of other men - suggest that pre-state societies were far more violent than our own. Although raids and battles killed a tiny percentage of the numbers that die in modern warfare, in tribal violence, the clashes are more frequent, the percentage of men in the population who fight is greater and the rates of death per battle are higher. If the wars of the 20th century had killed the same proportion of the population that die in the wars of a typical tribal society, there would have been 2 billion deaths, not 100 million.
At the century scale, it is hard to find quantitative studies of deaths in warfare spanning medieval and modern times. Several historians have suggested there has been an increase in the number of recorded wars across the centuries to the present but, as political scientist James Payne has noted, this may show only that "the Associated Press is a more comprehensive source of information about battles around the world than were 16th-century monks".
Social histories of the West provide evidence of many barbaric practices that became obsolete in the past five centuries, such as slavery, amputation, blinding, branding, flaying, disembowelment, burning at the stake and so on. Meanwhile, for another kind of violence - homicide - the data are abundant and striking. The criminologist Manuel Eisner has assembled hundreds of homicide estimates from Western European localities that kept records at some point between 1200 and the mid-1990s. In every country he analysed, murder rates declined steeply - for example, from 24 homicides per 100,000 Englishmen in the 14th century to 0.6 per 100,000 by the early 1960s.
On the scale of decades, comprehensive data again paint a shockingly happy picture: global violence has fallen steadily since the middle of the 20th century. According to the Human Security Brief 2006, the number of battle deaths in interstate wars has declined from more than 65,000 a year in the 1950s to less than 2000 a year in this decade. In Western Europe and the Americas, the second half of the century saw a steep decline in the number of wars, military coups, and deadly ethnic riots.
Zooming in by a further power of 10 exposes yet another reduction. After the Cold War, every part of the world saw a steep drop-off in state-based conflicts, and those that occur are more likely to end in negotiated settlements rather than being fought to the bitter end. Meanwhile, according to political scientist Barbara Harff, between 1989 and 2005 the number of campaigns of mass killing of civilians decreased by 90 per cent.
The decline of killing and cruelty poses several challenges to our ability to make sense of the world. To begin with, how could so many people be so wrong about something so important? Partly, it's because of a cognitive illusion: we estimate the probability of an event from how easy it is to recall examples. Scenes of carnage are more likely to be relayed to our living rooms and burned into our memories than footage of people dying of old age. Partly, it's an intellectual culture that is loath to admit that there could be anything good about the institutions of civilisation and Western society. Partly, it's the incentive structure of the activism and opinion markets: no one ever attracted followers and donations by announcing that things keep getting better. And part of the explanation lies in the phenomenon itself. The decline of violent behaviour has been paralleled by a decline in attitudes that tolerate or glorify violence, and often the attitudes are in the lead. As deplorable as they are, the abuses at Abu Ghraib and the lethal injections of a few murderers in Texas are mild by the standards of atrocities in human history. But, from a contemporary vantage point, we see them as signs of how low our behaviour can sink, not of how high our standards have risen.
The other major challenge posed by the decline of violence is how to explain it. A force that pushes in the same direction across many epochs, continents and scales of social organisation mocks our standard tools of causal explanation. The usual suspects - guns, drugs, the press, American culture - aren't up to the job. Nor could it be explained by evolution. Besides, human nature has not changed so much as to have lost its taste for violence. Social psychologists find that at least 80 per cent of people have fantasised about killing someone they don't like. And modern humans still take pleasure in viewing violence, if we are to judge by the popularity of Mel Gibson movies, Shakespearean dramas and video games.
What has changed, of course, is people's willingness to act on these fantasies. The sociologist Norbert Elias suggested that European modernity accelerated a "civilising process" marked by increases in self-control, long-term planning and sensitivity to the thoughts and feelings of others. These are precisely the functions that today's cognitive neuroscientists attribute to the prefrontal cortex.
But this only raises the question of why humans have increasingly exercised that part of their brains. No one knows why our behaviour has come under the control of the better angels of our nature but there are four plausible suggestions.
The first is that Hobbes got it right. Life in a state of nature is nasty, brutish and short, not because of a primal thirst for blood but because of the inescapable logic of anarchy. Any beings with a modicum of self-interest may be tempted to invade their neighbours to steal their resources. These tragedies can be averted by a state with a monopoly on violence, because it can inflict disinterested penalties that eliminate the incentives for aggression.
Indeed, Eisner and Elias attribute the decline in European homicide to the transition from knightly warrior societies to the centralised governments of early modernity. And, today, violence continues to fester in zones of anarchy, such as frontier regions, failed states, collapsed empires and contested territories.
Payne suggests another possibility: that the critical variable in the indulgence of violence is an overarching sense that life is cheap. When pain and early death are everyday features of one's own life, one feels less compunction about inflicting them on others. As technology and economic efficiency lengthen and improve our lives, we place a higher value on life in general.
A third theory, championed by Robert Wright, invokes the logic of non-zero-sum games: scenarios in which two agents can each come out ahead if they co-operate, such as trading goods, dividing up labour or sharing the peace dividend that comes from laying down their arms.
Then there is the scenario sketched by philosopher Peter Singer. Evolution, he suggests, bequeathed people a small kernel of empathy, which by default they apply within only a narrow circle of friends and relations. Over millennia, people's moral circles have expanded to encompass larger and larger polities: the clan, the tribe, the nation, both sexes, other races and even animals. The circle may have been pushed outward by expanding networks of reciprocity, a la Wright, but it might also be inflated by the inexorable logic of the golden rule: the more one knows and thinks about other living things, the harder it is to privilege one's own interests over theirs.
Whatever its causes, the decline of violence has profound implications. It is not a licence for complacency - we enjoy the peace we find today because people in past generations were appalled by the violence in their time and worked to end it - and so we should work to end the appalling violence in our time. Nor is it necessarily grounds for optimism about the immediate future, since the world has never before had national leaders who combine pre-modern sensibilities with modern weapons.
But the phenomenon forces us to rethink our understanding of violence. Man's inhumanity to man has long been a subject for moralisation. With the knowledge that something has driven it dramatically down, we can also treat it as a matter of cause and effect. Instead of asking, "Why is there war?" we might ask, "Why is there peace?"
From the likelihood that states will commit genocide to the way that people treat cats, we must have been doing something right. It would be nice to know what, exactly, it is.


When I saw this, I thought what a wonderful thing it was! To have an article like this in a mainstream newspaper, saying all these things I have been trying to tell people, and someone at least actually putting the research into this. At uni especially, everyone's always talking about doom and gloom, saying modernity is to blame for all these terrible things happening in the world, but it just never has added up to me. It really makes no sense when you look at the actual past rather than some idealised version of it. Of course, if anyone disagrees and feels like correcting me, I'm more than happy to hear from you.

Goodnight :)

To the love that gets me through the day, even when I don't realise.

To the heart that is always true.

To my God,

To my guardian angel,

To the heart of all hearts.

Whisper low in our ears

And carry us high;

You will carry us up to the stars.

--<*>--<*>--

Change comes on the strength of the ethereal winds,

carried by its own wings.

Like a shaft of sunlight

in a dusty room.

O heart!

sweep me up in your eternal spring

take me

away from my dusty room

then bring me back again

dew-soaked

new

and true

The letter I can’t answer

from Paulo Coelho's mailing list

The letter that I can’t answer is lying right here on my desk. It reached me through the efforts of a Dutch couple who sent me an e-mail in June 2006. I lent it no importance, and did not answer. At the end of that same month they wrote again, and again I paid no attention. And then came the warning phrased in more serious words:
“This is the last time we are asking you this favor. It is up to you to write to Justin or not. Or to put it better, it is up to your conscience. I got to know your books because he recommended them. Yours truly, Jacobus” (I shall omit his surname).
I read the text of the e-mail carefully: it says that Justin Fuller, prisoner #999266 at the Polunsky Unit, Livingston, Texas, will be executed exactly on my birthday, the 24th August. His lawyer, Don Bailey, has already been to all the appeal courts, and it looks like the cause is lost. They are not asking me to denounce the fact publicly, or to take some position on the case: they just want me to send this reader some comforting words.
I type Justin’s name in a search tool. I see his photo, then I discover that there is a page with the names of all those who are (or have been) in death row in Texas. I see his criminal record at www.tdcj.state.tx.us/stat/fullerjustin.htm
I write the letter. The week following my birthday, Jacobus writes to me once more: Justin received it, and answered me before he was executed. The letter is waiting for me in a hotel I usually stay at in a certain town, and that I used as the sender’s address.
Finally, at the end of October 2006, I stop at the hotel. I know that a letter from a man condemned to death awaits me. I know that he has already been executed. I collect the letter, enter a bar, and read the words from someone whom I will never be able to answer. Whom I will never be able to ask permission to publish extracts, but since we are talking about a true aberration of justice – death as an instrument of the State – I shall copy some parts:
“Dear Mr. Coelho:
“Death row is the arena where the policies of Power, Retribution and Violence are applied to a man using materials such as concrete and steel, until this man turns into steel and his heart becomes as hard as concrete. However, though steel can be hard, it can still be flexible, and though the heart can be transformed into concrete, it still beats. Beyond the concrete and the steel stands the man, his love of life, and the great principles that rule human beings.
“Your letter surprised me. And it is very strange that my transcendence (Justin always uses this term instead of “execution”) is to take place just on your birthday. Of course, I hope it does not take place, but we both know that life is always accompanied by death. In the USA they execute prisoners in the name of what they call “justice” without taking into account whether they can be well represented in court, the circumstances of their birth and their family environment.
“While I wait out the last appeal to the Supreme Court, I feel full of life and strong, and my spirit is completely free.
“If I transcend, I will finally be able to float in the wind and enjoy freedom. I have realized that although my body is imprisoned, my life has changed and my soul can still love, because all freedom is mental. Many people in this world, although they are on the outside of prison, are far more in bondage than I am.
“Only when these people come to understand that freedom is a state of the mind will they be able to really enjoy it.”
The letter that I couldn’t answer is much longer. It describes the relationship that we built through my books, and it wishes me and my family all the best. And now it sits on my desk.
The letter that I couldn’t answer, from a man condemned to death, arrested when he was 19 years old and executed when he was 27, contains not a word of lamentation: it speaks of freedom and life.

So many of my days are spent running around, turning upside down, not knowing where I am and furrowing my brow. I get caught up in study, I get caught up in arrogance and trying to show I’m right and so losing any claim I had to being right. I walk where I’m going without really knowing. I love without savouring. I drink tea, I gaze at the trees, I gaze at my tutor, I hold my boyfriend, but these just flow over my head and I think the only real things are those weighty emotions that drag me down that I’m so tuned into I can feel so well, but don’t really know all the true ones. It’s not all doom and gloom, though. Underlying all my days has been a slowly growing awareness that God is everywhere with me. That God is in me, right now. I’m not always sure it is God. It’s this warm feeling inside that floods without really flooding, but it’s lovely and it’s in my heart and going beyond and I praise God for it except I don’t because I don’t See yet. After a fabulous break from uni, I now know that I can’t ‘force’ it to come into my existence more, or ‘work on it’ in the way that phrase sometimes feels. Rather than identifying the feeling and trying to psychicly push it throughout my body, take a bit of a shortcut, all I have to do is focus on God, pray, read, meditate, and I arrive at that blessed state I did in the holidays where I did not snap at anyone, where I treated them with the respect they deserved, where all I had to do was negotiate with my negative feelings and pray and they would be gone. Ok, it wasn’t completely ‘perfect’ as I make it sound, but it was heartening. It showed me that I can do it, and it showed me a way of doing it, and for that I am so grateful. Even though I’m having trouble with the next step of maintaining that during the semester, not falling into stressed out cruel arrogant student academic mode. See, by the end of the holidays I let these thoughts through – criticisms about things, starting off small, just the normal everyday things that people talk about, and then it spiraled out of control into this crazy place where I was just so arrogant and I’d sit in tutorials sighing about how other people didn’t know what they were taking about and I was so much better and…But I’ve strayed from my point and I’ve indulged these things again, and that only strengthens them and I am lost again as to what I do – reject them altogether, which I have vowed to do haven’t I, but then in the context of ‘the world’ that seems so difficult sometimes and though I know I should I just can things clearly, can’t act clearly…But my point in writing this really was to talk about the Wonder. Talk about the fact that underlying all of this has been that energy coming from my heart that gives my head shivers and makes me sit in tutorials looking at the tutor or whoever’s taking or the walls smiling as though I’m in love. Because that’s what I love to do, I just don’t want people to get freaked out so I keep it in check, haha. But this feeling has been my companion since the holidays and I only hope I can be worthy of its presence in me for I have been so blessed.

Note to self

Stop talking, and listen

So, here's something of love that I need to get out, rather than 'needing' to get out, I don't know, how it's so unfair that I have to work all day Saturday and Sunday as well as Monday and Tuesday nights when I have an assignment due on Monday and another on Wednesday. Because when I 'get that feeling out' it makes it a feeling. Before I say it it's not that bad, but when I choose to say it it grows and it seems like a big issue. So then maybe the same thing can apply to happy things, which, when people ask me how I am or what I've been up to or something I don't often say because they're potentially boring, not what people want ot hear, more difficult to communicate, not normal. So to hell once and for all with saying 'negative' things just for the sake of interactivity - better to have no friends or be seen as a little weird than to foster an idea that things suck.
So my love thing that's worth getting out?

This song by Sarah Humphreys (www.myspace.com/sarahhumphreys) that I've mentioned before, April, that I've listened to over and over and over again. That is my love thing. If you go to that link and listen to the song it may not seem like anything special. But the fact that the first time I heard Sarah's music she was playing it live, and it really struck a chord in me because of just the whole context, which is made up of everything ever . And so I heard something that night, so that now, when I listen to her music, and April in particular (although she didn't actually play it the first time I saw her...or maybe she did and I just didn't notice becuase it wasn't at the time as striking as others?) I hear her in the music. I can feel her play, feel her mouth forming a word in the unusual way it does sometimes, feel the slight movement of her head when she dips up to a note, feel her little smile as she closes her eyes just as I hear the smile in her voice. And of course there are the ittle idiosyncracies of her voice - the way it breaks, or dips in place, or her strange accent and not-quite-articulated words. She taught me finally to not sing along all the time, but just to listen, to really listen, a lesson I've never before followed through. And when I listen to that song, sitting here at the computer, stopping eveything else, I can feel the spark of life, of the essence, in my heart, and I smile with my whole being.
That, I think, may be me discovering love

People say they write the unsaid, or that they write to sort things out, make sense of things so they can deal with them.

The wonders of life remain far more unsaid than its dark and its dreary times.

And I don't know about you but I feel like I really need to sort out these intense feelings of love and wonderment. They're so big I have trouble comprehending them, or even doing them the smallest amount of justice.


Fixating on the dark and dreary does not make things brighter.

Dwelling on all the terrible things in the world does not heal it.

Hating the rapist and the murderer just breathes more hate into the world.

Hating yourself for what you've done to another does not rectify the situation.


You who want more love in the world, who want to see it blossom into a web of equality and understanding and tolerance:

What sense does it make to breed grief and hate?

You know what's a miracle?

That our hands make hearts

you take what's alright and turn it into a work of art

I've been lied to. Uni really is a lot of work!
Yes, I'm a fresh little first year uni student now. I should probably go out and burn my bra or something, ay
Uni's pretty good. A lot of work, but it's alright. I've met my twin. She too wants to be a writer and for the same reasons as I and wants to tranfer to international studies and go to France and other things. Making friends is easy. It's easy to chat and ask people things about themselves and tell them about yourself etc, but what happens after that stage is over? All shall be revealed in good time.
Jack Kerouac is my muse, and every time I want to get inspired I just read something by him and voila. I wrote something for my writing subject in a way that, in my limited experience of writing, I haven't done before - I just started with the opening few words and watched where it took me, and where it took me was somewhere with more heart than anything I've written before (not that I've written much...), and I handwrote it, which I used to not be able to do very well - I'd always use the computor if I really wanted to get something done - and it was the reqired 500 words without me having to regulate it - it just fell into place.
Apart from uni, I've fallen in love. Her name's Sarah Humphreys and she's taken my heart with her melodies and her alternate sweet/aussie voice and the way she bends her notes and her little smiles. She won her heat of the singer/songwriter's competition hands down. My obession with her peaked in the latter days of the latter week until it stopped me studying because all I could do was hum her song to myself and I decided it was getting a little out of hand...But there you go
:)

Credo

"Remember above all things, Kid, that to write is not difficult, not painful, that it comes out of you with ease, that you can whip up a little tale in no time, that when you are sincere about it, that when you want to impress a truth, it is not difficult, not painful, but easy, graceful, full of smooth power, as if you were a writing machine with a store of literature that is boundless, enormous, endless, and rich. For it is true; this is so. Do not forget it in your gloomier moments. Make your stuff warm, drive it home American-wise, don't mind critics, don't mind the stuffy academic theses of scholars, they don't know what they're taking about, they're way of the track, they're cld; you're warm, you're red hot, you can write all day, you know what you know, like Halper; you remember that, Kid, and when you feel as if you cannot write, as if it is no use, as if life is no good, read this over and realise that you can do a lot of good in this world by turning out truths like these, by spreading warmth, by trying to preach living for life's sake, not the intellectual way, but the warm way, the way of love, the way which says: Brothers, I greet you with open arms, I accept your frailties, I offer you my frailties, let us gather and run the gamut of rich human existence. Remember, Kid, the ease, the grace, the glory, the greatness of your art; remember it, never forget. Remember passion. Do not forget, do not forsake, do not forget. It is there, the order and the purpose; there is chaos, but not in you, not way down deep in your heart, no chaos, only ease, grace, beauty, love, greatness.....Kid, you can wip up a little tale, a little truth, you can mop up the floor with a little tale in no time; it is a cinch, you are the flow of smooth thrumming power, you are a writer, and you can turn out some mean stuff, and you will turn out tons of it, because it is you, and do not forget it, Kid, do not forget it; please, please Kid, do not forget yourself; save that, save that, preserve yourself; turn out those mean little old tales by the dozens, it is easy, it is grace, do it American-wise, drive it home, sell truth, for it needs to be sold. Remember, Kid, what I say to you tonight; never forget it, read this over in your gloomier moments and never, never forget.....never, never, never forget.....please, please, Kid please....."

--Jack Kerouac

I'm alive, and I like it

Something that just came to me

Not me, not I

Funny, every time there is a turning point sort of number in my blog posts - eg. 200 - it is revolutionalised from that point without me even meaning to do it. I just happens. Simultaneous creation? Subconcsious workings? Spirits conspiring on my behalf? Who knows...

we need a picture of sorts, don't you think?

Oh! I've just be told I must play the flute by itunes. I haven't played since I finished school! Oh the shame!

Practice=noun Practise=verb

I shall henceforth remember this, with a handy reminder: s=verb=sverb=sven!

Your Heart Is An Empty Room, by Death Cab for Cutie

Burn it down till the embers smoke on the ground
And start new when your heart is an empty room
With walls of the deepest blue

Home's face: how it ages when you're away
Spring blooms and you find the love that's true
But you don't know what now to do
Cause the chase is all you know
And she stopped running months ago

And all you see
Is where else you could be
When you're at home
Out on the street
Are so many possibilities
To not be alone

The flames and smoke climbed out of every window
And disappeared with everything that you held dear
And you shed not a single tear for the things that you didn't need
'Cause you knew you were finally free

'Cause all you see

Is where else you could be

When you're at home
Out on the street

Are so many possibilities

To not be alone

And all you see

Is where else you could be
When you're at home
There on the street

Are so many possibilities

To not be alone

When you're at home, what do you do? Well, I get strange. Spending the whole day at home gets me blocked up (and I do it a lot, don't I). Stasis. That's what it's like. An itching stasis. It shits me. How do I get things done when I can't get things done? I never take advantage of my clear and driven times, just say "awesome! i'll do something about that later." Hahaha, it's a little silly, these things people do. It's difficult growing out of the self you're so used to being. You didn't even realise it was nothing more than habit, or how it would be to change that habit, until you started to work on it. But there have been changes. Many changes. Great changes that make you very happy when you look upon them. Look at how much you've grown!! So you remember that all you need to do is keep at it and then you smile smile smile :)
I enrolled in my uni courses today. Not that I actually got a choice in what subjects I did, but I still had to go there and organise them. The handbook makes it seem like you have a choice - you must do two subjects from each of the three disciplinary strands - and then you look at the available subjects, and what do you see? There's only six subjects available, hahaha.
It's very exiting!! Going to uni, doing this course that seems like it will be awesome. It's actually on fiction writing! I thought it might focus more on media writing, but the writing part is on fiction!
I forgot, or never really knew because I didn't really pay attention, that this session was specifically for my course. So there were two guys in the line behind me - writing and cultural studies? Yeah - and I turned around and said me too! as if it was some amazing coincidence. Hahaha. But on the plus side, I made a friend already! There were real coicidences involved here, too. The first guy behind me said he lived in Cheltenham, I think. I think he said that. Which is where I live! No one lives here! The other guys went to Epping Boys High, right near by! And the first guy wants to do international studies too! Maybe I should assassinate him so he doesn't get my spot. Excuse me for a minute...*opens a cage* fly my pretties, fly!
Ahem, where was I...
Enrolled!
I have only four days at uni, and, if all goes to plan, I'll be going to lectures from 9-10 each day, and then tutorials from 10-11:30. Then home! That is, of course, when I don't have any EXTRA CURRICULAR ACTIVITIES on. That's right! I am doing extra curricular activities. That's quite a change for me. I want to do so many, but I can't do them all, for I do have to work really hard so I can transfer into International Studies. I want to join the orchestra, but they practise until 8:30 at night, and lots of people have been getting accosted/raped in my area lately...I hope I can do it, though. The train is safe, surely. Maybe I could find some music friends. That would be good.
Anyway, I'm just blabbering on boringly, aren't I? See, I'm taking some advise from a friend - blog to improve your writing skills. Which isn't really what I'm doing now, except I'm maybe freeing things up a little.
Oh no! It's raining! That's good, but I have some tomatoe seedlings out there! Little babies! I hope they don't get hurt! Is that how you spell tomatoe? It looks wrong.
Tomorrow, I have to write a 3000-5000 word story, so I can spend the following day revising it so I can send it off the day after that so it arrive in time to be judged!! I started it in third person, but it wasn't going anywaywhere so I switched to first and now it's cruising along. Wish me luck! Pfft, I don't need luck, I'm a genius, hahaha.
If you haven't noticed, I'm a bit of a chortler tonight. More humour in my life is my mission!
Goodnight, all. May you all be carried away to some wonderful place in dreamland that revitalises your non-sensory senses

Open the eyes of my heart...

"Men," said the little prince, "set out on their way in express trains, but they do not know what they are looking for. Then they rush about, and get excited, and turn round and round..."
And he added:
"It is not worth the trouble..."
The well that we had come to was not like the wells of the Sahara. The wells of the Sahara are mere holes dug in the sand. This one was like a well in a village. But there was no village here, and I thought I must be dreaming...
"It is strange," I said to the little prince. "Everything is ready for use: the oulley, the bucket, the rope..."
He laughed, touched the rope, and set the pulley to working. And the oulley moaned, like and old weathervane which the wind has long since forgotten.
"Do you hear?" said the little prince. "We have wakened the well, and it is singing..."
I did not want him to tire himself with the rope.
"Leave it to me," I said. "It is too heavy for you."
I hoisted the bucket slowly to the edge of the well and set it there - happy, tired as I was, over my achievement. The song of the pulley weas still in my ears, and I could see the sunlight shimmer in the still trembling water.
"I am thrist for this water," said the little prince. "Give me some of it to drink..."
And I understood what he had been looking for.
I raised the bucket to his lips. He drank, his eyes closed. It was as sweet as some special festival treat. This water was indeed a very different thing from ordinary nourishment. It's sweetness was born of the walk under the stars, the song of the pulley, the effort of my arms. It was good for the heart, like a present. When I was a little boy, the lights of the Christmas tree, the music of the Midnight Mass, the tenderness of smiling faces, used to make up, so, the radiance of the gifts I received.
"The men where you live," said the little rpince, "raise five thousand roses in the same garden - and they do not find in it what they are looking for."
"They do not find it," I replied.
"And yet what they are looking for culd be found in one single rose, or in a little water."
"Yes, that is true," I said.
And the little prince added:
"But the eyes are blind. One must look with the heart..."

from The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

I write this in the presence of rain. It taps on the window and reminds me that it is pattering down outside, falling to the ground in tiny droplets, blessings in pellet form. If I'd written this yesterday, it would have been in the presence of the scent of bushfires, that summer smell that ties my life together, reminding me of what it is to be Australian, to grow up somewhere where this smell is normal, even beautiful. The houses of many of my friends were engangered by the fires. But that is life here, isn't it? In order for the bush to be healthy - for seeds to germinate, for soil to be fertilised, for old growth to be cleared to make way for the new - it must burn. It must die. And then after the fires it comes to life! Seedlings come up everywhere. It all looks a little strange for a few years, with dense undergrowth and gum trees growing out oddly, but eventually it's back to normal.
Rain much needed to replenish the dry earth. I pray that the rain reaches the dams and brings them above this critical level. I pray that the rain reaches the country where they need it most, and breathes life into dying towns, dying farms, dying livelihoods. I pray that this long drought may turn.
Thy will be done.
Went walking last night in the rain. Replenished relationships, rebirthed what had been dying, now a little stronger, a little more succulent, roots a little deeper. Dirt on my feet in the shape of thongs, reminding me how we walked. Walked through many a spiderweb, ducked under, darted around, or jumped over others.
Australia Day is coming up in just a couple of days. I've becomes quite patriotic these days. Something about Australia makes my heart ache with love. Maybe it's all the propaganda, or maybe it's a little more than that, but I am so blessed to live in this country. So incredibly blessed. It's so beautiful, and there are so many opportunities and it's built on awesome values. It's nice. Australia Day is "an active celebration of Australian values: mateship, tolerance, a fair go for everyone and hey, not taking life too seriously!" and "It's about looking at our past, considering our present and recommitting to making our future even brighter." Always a good thing to do, I think. Here's something from the Australia Day website. Sure, it's art, and you could call it all lies, but I feel it in my heart. It's something that we strive towards, and there's nothing wrong with that:
The people - The life savers on the beach and the farmers in the bush; the larrikins; our sporting heroes, artists and visionaries; the volunteers who dedicate their lives to others; the spirit of pulling together in hard times and achieving beyond expectation; the eminent Australians from all walks of life, the battlers and the ordinary Australians who are anything but ordinary.
Our land - Fragile yet enduring. Harsh and extreme, lush and bountiful-a continent like no other. Our ancient land offers boundless opportunity, sustains us and makes us who we are.
Our diversity - A nation of difference and unity. People from the city, the country, different nations and backgrounds; we are one people, living together. Through our diverse beliefs and experiences we learn from each other and grow together.
The indigenous cultures - The rich and resilient spirituality; the knowledge, art and history. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are part of Australia's identity and culture.
Our freedom and democracy - A society built on fundamental rights and responsibilities. Freedom of thought and expression. Participation in government and respect for and equality under the law.
A fair go for all - An enduring spirit of mateship and fairness. A compassionate society committed to access to employment, housing, health and education. Ours is a land of opportunity where we can do anything.

Come spin on bridges with meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-e-e just to keep us warm

There is a lesson that it seems is being constantly drilled into me so that I can really learn it, never forget it.
Last night I watched a movie called 2:37. It traces the lives of a few high school students over one school day. And it really made me remember that lesson. That is, that the little judgements we make on people are so very inadequate, and, often, painful. So this is what I want to do now, something I've considered doing for a long time, something I've thought of writing a story about, to try to tell people this...this fact. How inadequate a moment, a single action, and judgement can be in seeing somebody...I remember...I was thinking about this yesterday, I wrote about this yesterday, before even watching the movie...For example, in the movie there is this guy, Steven, "Uneven" Steven, they called him, because he was born with one leg shorter than the other. He was also born with two urethras, one of which he had no control over, so that he would wet himself at school frequently. When he wetting himself, so much crap was thrown at him. Everybody just assumed he was some freak who pisssed his pants, not even considering he had a medical problem, judging him at face value, first thought that came to mind. Then later he was punched for overhearing something he shouldn't have, came out of the toilet, nose all bloodied, and people assumed he had a nosebleed, the retard that he was...All these people in the movie had some private pain, some private reason for doing as they did. It all had a context that made it understandable, but no one stopped to consider what that might be.
There's another movie, Crash. Characters do these things that would generally make you think, just looking at that action, that they were terrible people. But then the film shows more of their lives, more than just that isolated event, and you see that they're not just black and white, flat evil, but have so much more going on there. They have their own pains, sorrows, dreams, lives. There is a mother, sick, near bedridden. Berates her son for being a terrible son, saying he never comes to see her. Her other son, on the other hand, the one that they haven't seen in ages, bought her groceries. But it was the first that did that. There is another guy, a police officer. We first see him pulling over a black couple. He feels up the wife. But then later we see so much more - the father he looks after who has prostate cancer and cannot sleep for the pain. I cross into some dangerous territory here. Perhaps I seem to be excusing his rape because he has 'issues'. Debates have gone on with my friends about issues like this many times. But that's not what I mean. It's just that...well, can't you feel his pain? You don't have to hate the perpetrator out of some idea that it's justice for the victim, because it doesn't help the victim, it just creates more hate in the world. You can't rid the world of hate by hating, can you?
Well, that is a more contentious issue. Back to the simpler original point...There are times I have made judgements on situations that proved to be so wrong, wrong. Like the time I, in my self righteous pride, told a friend to break up with her boyfriend because she didn't like him anyway, was so cruel to him...but then he later would not get back together with her and she was so depressed. And what about all the times I made a judgement and never actually found out I was mistaken?
At work one time, a woman walked past the ticket boxto her firned. The manager asks if she has a ticket. She says yes, then a few seconds later goes to buy one. That manager sneers to me Funny turn of the Englsih language, when yes means no or something along those lines, loud enough for this woman to hear. I move up to the other end of the candybar to serve, and she comes up to me a says how she was just in a huge rush to get here, and drove from far away and that it didn't feel good at all to have someone say something like that. He makes this snide remark without any thought for the reasons she may have been acting that way. And she is hurt. Reminds me of that times when such things have happened to me, how much those inadequate judgements hurt. Or times when people made comments about what sort of person I was, or how i would be when I grew up or something else I knew was not true, was not me, although it seemed was me to an outside observer. It was situations like that that first made me think Is this a feeling I want to cause in others? How can I go on saying such things when I know how inadequate they are, and how they make one feel?
So that's what i want to share with you. Will you consider this? This of the times in your own life when your judgements and the judgements of others have fallen so short of the truth, have done no justice to the bigger picture. Remember the times when this lesson has been put your way, and so bring a little more compassion into the world, a little more love, to help heal the wounds of all.