Zero Waste

Ever since I lost so much weight and began experiencing life in a fundamentally new way, feeling perhaps like a once-earthbound caterpillar feels like when it emerges from its cocoon and begins to fly around, I've been obsessed and driven by the idea of making everything in my life "lose weight" -- eliminating excess, concentrating on essentials, and making lean, potent effectiveness my goal.  One idea I've been batting around, and intend to start working toward, is that of Zero Waste.

Waste has become endemic to modern living. Virtually everything sold in supermarkets comes wrapped in plastic, and even if it is sold by itself, as perhaps clothing is, cashiers will insist on throwing it in a plastic bag. Food, too, is wasted, filling the dumpsters of grocers, and the trash bins of people at home. The urban environment of America is waste made visible, in the form of suburban sprawl which forces people to make automobile trips for every need, and to drive hither and yon across the landscape because no place is near any other place worth going. Laws, too, promote waste:  traffic lights mar every intersection in cities, even in quiet neighborhoods, forcing drivers to sit burning gasoline to go nowhere, obeying the god-machine above them and defying common sense: no one is coming, so go. And if they do go, a police cruiser materializes out of thin air and promptly fines them. And the waste is not merely financial:  people work fifty and sixty hours a week enriching someone else, while their children grow up on the sidelines,  most of their childhood lost forever to their parents.

I have grown to hate waste. Life is short; time is dear. This is part of the reason I've been thinking more on simple living and minimalism. I am motivated,  too, by my abiding belief in personal responsibility. I consider frugality a virtue: I despise spending money for the same reason I loathe realizing something I own has no worth, and am disgruntled at throwing  something away. This belief in personal responsibility is interwoven with my sense of citizenship:  every bag of trash I might produce is a municipal burden,  every second a lightbulb glows is a teensy bit of local coal burned (though happily, most of my local power is generated by a hydroelectric dam).  Why use the city's resources when I can open a window and let the sun in? Why burn petroleum when I can bike?  Considering the United States' dependence on importing goods, saving energy and using less isn't just personally responsible and fiscally wise; it's positively civic.

So, how to work toward Zero Waste? Some ideas I have had..

• Using hand tools instead of electrical ones. I had never used a hand-powered can opener before my electric one died; I'd never even seen one. But since then, I've found I enjoy the experience much more than listening to the screech of the machine.
• Avoiding processed foodstuffs (always sold in boxes, bags, and individually plastic-wrapped packages)  and buying whole foods instead, like fresh greens that aren't shrinkwrapped. Not buying processed foods means cooking my own, and exercising complete control over what is used and what isn't -- and culinary uses can be found for everything. 
• Bringing canvas sacks with me to the grocery store instead of using plastic bags;  if said bags are used, take them back to the store. Both of the supermarkets I reluctantly patronize (no local grocers save seasonally-open produce shacks) have places to return plastic bags. 
• Only using kitchenware that is durable:  dishes and utensils meant for one-time uses are obscene. Plastic glasses are a conundrum   they're more likely to survive falls than actual glasses, but they can't be recycled and possibly leach toxins over time. 
• Finding simple entertainment offline, with people, instead of online. I choose to play frisbee with my nephew, for instance, instead of playing Call of Duty with him. It helps that he only has CoD on X-Box, and I am a PC purist and can't move quickly enough with one of those hand-held controllers..
• Turning off lights when not needed, especially wise considering that in the summer, incandescent bulbs not only waste 90% of the energy put into them, but that waste comes in the form of heat that fans and air-conditioning have to combat. 
• Doing errands on foot or by bike instead of by car;  I intend on  putting a rack on my bicycle so that I can transport items like groceries with it. I also plan on moving closer to my work so that biking is more practical. I currently live three miles from work, but the first part of that is on a busy highway that is somewhat perilous on weekdays. 
• Growing my own food in a garden; unfortunately, this is where some of my ideas conflict. I can live in the city and walk to work, or live outside it and have a garden, but doing both isn't possible until I can afford a small home with a backyard, or an apartment with green space that the landlord allowed gardening on.  I have an uncle who gardens, and am thinking of 'apprenticing' myself to him to learn the lore.
• Refusing to buy goods that are shabbily made, or are made of materials (plastic) that can't be repaired. This means investing in a few high-quality items that retain their value. 
• Making my own household goods, like shampoo or jam. Not only would I avoid using a plastic bottle, but I'm sure I could find a recipe that's environmentally friendly. The jam, and other food-preserving ideas, would depend on having a garden. 
• Composting organic scraps that qualify: right now I just take biodegradable scraps out into the woods and scatter them. Composting them would help in gardening instead of scattering the nutrients willy-nilly.
• Using a clothesline instead of a dryer to dry clothes. This would also be less doable were I living in a city apartment, considering that moderns see a clothesline as an unsightly indicator of poverty. I'm also concerned about the everpresent humidity in Alabama preventing clothes from actually driving in the summers: if the air is saturated with moisture,  it seems to me water would have a hard time evaporating from the clothes. 

All these pertain to resources. I've yet to start running red lights, though these days I have to stop myself from treating them like stop signs, which is how I think they ought to be treated.  I've been extraordinarily lucky in finding work in a field that is not only spiritually fulfilling (public service means helping people),  but gives me enough hours to make a living but also allows for more leisure time than most people get. I work thirty hours a week on average, which is plenty for me considering my simple tastes. I decided years ago that working for money was not the life for me: I'd rather be poor and happy than wealthy and stressed.  Money is only  valuable inasmuch as it enhances our quality of lie.

Zero waste is an exacting goal, a high standard; I doubt that I will ever achieve it. But I intend to come as close as I can, so that my life brims over with value. 

The Forge

Every morning, I run through the Forge.  The Forge is not a physical location in the neighborhood where I run;  it is a temporal location which can manifest itself anywhere.   My morning runs always start off easily enough: I am immediately awakened by the bliss of moving swiftly through the universe, my legs churning beneath  me. But soon enough they weaken,  and my resolve to effect will into action is tested. This is the Forge. This, the place wherein I am most weak, is where I find my strength.  For in those moments when the joy of running evaporates away and I know only the work of exercise,  I am not merely laying the groundwork for easier running tomorrow. True, my stressed body is being tilled for growth: the message to my brain is being communicated, invest resources here. Build muscle. Strengthen bones.  But more importantly, I am exercising the power of my mind, my will, over my emotions, over my body.  I am pushing aside any inclination to laziness, to procrastination. I'm disciplining myself, forcing positive changes. I am applying a steady hand to the rudder of my soul, turning the ship of my being in the proper direction.

Exercise, running or cycling on my part, aren't the only places where the Forge is present   although I experience it most tangibly there when I gallop down the road, focused only on the distant telephone pole I have chosen as my goal. It as though I am on a conveyor belt  of ore, passing through a smelting fire, where the impurities are burned away and on the other side, behind the telephone pole, only gold emerges. The Forge is where weak things become strong, where iron becomes steel. We can all experience it:  the Forge appears when we're raking leaves and think, "I'm tired of this;  why don't I go inside and watch TV now, and do this tomorrow?" It appears when we're working on taxes, and tired of math, or when confronting other people and we wonder if maybe we couldn't just let the matter slide "this time".  But nothing improves without effort, without energy, nor is anything maintained without the same. The best-built bridge will, in time, decay and fall.  The most meaningful relationships will fade, the most beautiful garden will wilt,  the best-toned muscles will soften without regular attention, without the chronic effort to turn will into action.  And the effort has to be regular; the Forge works best when we pass through it repeatedly.

I don't regard the Forge with anxiety, or trepidation. Adversity is my ally, not my opponent.Because of the Forge,  I can run faster, farther, longer, day by day. Because of it, I can spurn temptations. As Seneca wrote..

We see wrestlers, who concern themselves with physical strength, matching themselves with only their strongest opponents, and requiring those who prepare for a bout to use all their strength against them; they expose themselves to blows and hurt, and if they do not find one man to match them, they take on several at a time. Excellence withers without an adversary; the time for us to see how great it is, how much its force, is when it display its power through endurance. 

And similarly, from the same source:

Fortune lays into us with the whip and tears our flesh; let us endure it. It is not cruelty but a contest, and the more often we engage in it, the stronger our hearts will be: the sturdiest part of the body is the one that is kept in constant use. We must offer ourselves to Fortune so that in struggling with her we may be hardened by her; little by little she will make us a match for her; and constant exposure to risk will make us despise dangers. So the bodies of mariners are tough from the buffeting of the sea, the hands of farmers calloused, the muscles of soldiers strong to enable them to hurl the javelin, the legs of athletes agile: in each case the part of the body exercised is the strongest. It is be enduring ills that the mind can acquire contempt for enduring them.


Both of those quotations are taken from Seneca's essay, "On Providence".

City cyclist

We  in Alabama are now experiencing that most short-lived, miraculous of things: pleasant weather. It is spring. Winter's chill and darkness have fled, and the rising sun and humidity have yet to make the days oppressive and life-sucking. For now, for these few moments, it is spring -- a time of warm sunshine and cool breezes. It's the kind of weather that makes one feel perfectly at home in the world.  Lately, I have been taking advantage of such clement weather by putting my touting of self reliance into action, and cycling to work.  It's rather easy: I live 3.5 miles (or 5.6 kilometers) from the library, and the route takes me down a well-trafficked state highway, then through quiet industrial and residential streets until I hit downtown Selma. I pass a pond, two trainyards, a neighborhood firehouse, two local barbershops,  a horse, and a school, so it can be a decidedly pleasant trip.  Traffic is, on the whole, genial: I have been honked at once, and most cars move clear into  the other lane to pass me.

My first lesson in commuter cycling: tote bags do not like bouncing off a moving tire. 

I've started biking for several reasons, the most important of which I've already mentioned: self-reliance, which I regard as if not king of the virtues,  very noble indeed.  There's no feeling equal to arriving at some place under my own steam, and bicycles are simple enough that even someone unfamilar with mechanical operations can effect ordinary repairs. If my automobile was to break down, I would be at a loss as to how to fix it. I maintain fluids, check battery cables, and know enough not to drive on a flat tire, but that's about it.  The bicycle is a somewhat different affair,  because so much of it is exposed to the naked eye.  So far I have had to fix my handlebars and chain while cycling,  neither of which took me more than a minute.  The bicycle allows me to integrate more activity in my life, which I need because working has cut into the seven-mile walks I used to go on. Although I spend most of my time leisurely pedaling and admiring the scenery (in part because the scenery is admirable, and in part because I want to flaunt my giddiness in the face of drivers frowning at me for being on the road with them), I incorporate 'intervals' as well,  in which I throw myself into overdrive.  Relying on my own motive power means I pay less for gas, and I'm not contributing to the waste of a precious resource -- for the majority of my gasoline is used going nowhere at all, literally those 3.5 miles to downtown and back again. And last, and least, cycling is 'Environmentally Friendly'. I say least because I know my car-driving is so minimal as to have virtually no effect on 'carbon emissions', and so switching to cycling doesn't do a thing in that regard -- especially considering how much damage China's factories and cars are doing on their side of the globe.    Carbon is no motivation for me, but I do like knowing I'm not making the air smell like spent fuel.   An added perk is that it allows me to chat with people on the streets as I go by, like the firemen washing their engine outside this morning, or two gentlemen who stand outside their church on Sunday mornings greeting their arriving congregants. (I was also able to watch a deer stuck in a flooded drainage ditch on my first trip, an extraordinary moment for someone who had never seen a live deer so closely in broad daylight.)

I take it for granted that sometime in the 21st century, petroleum will cease to be a useful fuel for most of the world.  The facts of supply and demand will have caused its price to soar far beyond the means of most people, and cities will have to adapt --by becoming smaller, more dense, and allowing for means of transport other than personal automobiles for all, like transit and bicycles. I see a great future for bicycles as commuting instruments. Of course, I'm also enamored of mine as a way to get out into the fresh air -- when I find an affordable road bike, I'd like to start touring my home state of Alabama.  (Presently I pedal a used and problematic mountain bike, which has the advantage of letting me go off road if traffic turns aggressive, and which handles railroad tracks superbly.)   I'm hoping to find a bicycle that will double as a commuter and a touring bicycle: as much as I adore the style of Dutch city bikes, I think my interest in buying one is less an interest in that kind of bike, and more of an interest in wanting to live someplace like Amsterdam where commuter cycling is regarded as integral to everyday life, and not just the domain of lunatics maintaining a Zenlike calm as they're passed by roaring SUVs on the highway.

If any of this intrigues you, I would recommend Jeff Mapes' Pedaling Revolution and David Owen's Green Metropolis as books addressing cycling as part of urban sustainability.

Scattered Easter thoughts

As I mentioned in my last post, in the last year or so I've adopted the curious practice of going to church -- of exploring my own humanist/Stoic/universalist concept of spirituality within a Christianity community, bridged by an appreciation for what divinity can mean for people.  Most of the time, I feel perfectly at home there, but sometimes it can be uncomfortable. Lent and Easter are one of those times.

I find penitence hard to do, and positively objectionable when life is awakening from winter -- when the trees are flowering, bees are going crazy, birds are singing again, and the weather is perfect. For me, it's a time to run and sing and be ecstatic   Advent is similar: although the weather is more appropriate for somberness  (bare trees, grey skies, gloom), it's the lead up to Christmas, and by golly if there's a time of the year to be merry, December is it. I look forward to that interval between Thanksgiving and Christmas all year, because it's the only time I can wear a perfectly silly hat in public with no one blinking an eye.

Easter has never been a huge deal for me. It meant the start of spring, but I've never been particularly impressed with the story of a man-deity coming back to life. Immortality is what deities do, isn't it?  I can meditate on Jesus as a man, and share the pain of his death by envisioning him as a good man killed for defying convention, power, and so on, but the Resurrection...is just a story for me.  Christmas is great: I love the peace, love, goodwill-toward-men feeling of the season. But Easter?  As someone who does not fear death, who regards it as natural, the story of Christ defeating Death simply doesn't resonate.

I did get an idea for what it means to people a few weeks ago, though, when attending a religious retreat that involved morning and evening chapel services, the inbetween time being filled with singing, talks, and group discussions about our personal spiritual issues. One of the songs we sang went as follows:

I looked up, and I saw my Lord a-coming / I looked up, and I saw my lord a-comin down the road
(Hallelujah, he is coming; Alleluia, he is here)
I looked up, and I saw my Lord a-weeping /  I looked up, and I saw my Lord a-weeping for my sins
(refrain)

The third verse is marked by the volume and tone plummeting:

I looked up, and I saw my Lord a-dyin' / I looked up, and I saw my Lord a-dyin' on the Cross

But it's followed by an EXPLOSION --

I looked up, and I saw my Lord a-risin! / I looked up, and I saw my Lord a-risin' from the Grave! 

The song's finale is exuberant, defiant, triumphant -- and rather catchy. I grew fond of it as the weekend passed, and it's one of the few songs I put to memory.

There is one part of the Easter story I like, though, and have for as long as I can remember. It's a post-resurrection scene in which followers of Jesus are poking around on the back roads and a stranger finds them. Seeing that they're upset, he asks -- why? And they respond, haven't you heard? They killed Jesus.  The stranger joins them as they walk to their destination, and they dine together. The stranger says the blessing and breaks their bread, and suddenly they realize...the stranger is Jesus.  I've always gotten a kick out of those sudden transformations; they're startling, scary.  The Episcopal liturgy includes a prayer which references this story: "Risen lord, be known to us in the breaking of bread."

I find the breaking of bread in the Christian tradition utterly compelling: not for the Catholic notion of eating the body of a god, and gaining immortality through it -- but for the idea of people of all kinds coming together and eating together in peace and charity. This was why one of my favorite moments during the retreat happened when a priest produced a large loaf of kosher bread and divided it, piece by piece, between all of us assembled in the room. Were his hands clean? Were ours? It didn't matter.  What mattered was the imagery: we're all one body. For the Christians, that's one body in Christ. For me, it's one human body.  I long to break bread with all -- Buddhists, Muslims, conservatives, liberals, anarchists, musicians, scientists,  hippies and society dames. Regardless of beliefs, of culture, we all share the same basic desires, fears, instincts, and experiences. We all yearn for a friend's hand, a smile of understanding.

My hope is that  I can learn to offer that hand, that smile, more readily, without fear of being rejected.

Happy Easter.

Reopening those "Simple Gifts"

Recently some friends of mine and I were talking about the personal issues we are facing, and I brought up my having gotten away from simpler living. I used to be passionate about it, and still am -- but recently the value of simplicity hasn't been visible in my life. I adopted simple living as self-defense  years ago, before I began living with intent. Starting my first job taught me that everything had a price not in dollars, but in time. After figuring out what my daily take-home pay was, I could evaluate every purchase as one which cost me hours of my life. Whenever I had an itch to buy something, I'd ask:  is this worth a day and a half of my life to pay for? Three hours? Usually, the answer was no.  Simple living became a lifestyle for me when I moved to university, though, aided by the fact that I was penniless. I had an on-campus job, but after tuition and so on I was reduced to practically nothing in terms of discretionary spending -- enough to make one trip home every month, and buy the odd used book.

 Despite the lack of money,  those first two years remain two of the best of my life, because I found everything I truly needed was there at the university.  Not only did I have the basics of food, shelter, and companionship, but I was surrounded by beauty -- living on a campus of tasteful architecture, tied together with cobblestone roads and flowers -- and even outside of class,  opportunities for intellectual and creative stimulation, like lectures and art galleries, abounded. The town library, that portal to a world of infinite ideas and experiences, was only a short walk away. Though my living quarters were spartan, I lacked for nothing. Stuff was valueless: my life was filled with meals shared with friends, days spent lounging under trees reading, and nights of stargazing or conversations over coffee.

Although there the simple life was forced on me by financial circumstances, while living it I learned to appreciate minimalism as a concept -- starting when I read Erich Fromm's To Have or to Be? wherein he criticized our tendency to base happiness on what we possessed, rather than who we were. Ever since then, I've been increasingly critical about consumerism. Simplicity became a 'spiritual' value for me:  I enjoyed having so little to worry about -- not only did I have few things to protect or maintain, but I wasn't interested in getting more, or bothered if people thought less of me for not spending as much money as they did. My mind was as free of clutter as my room.


My studies, both private and academic, encouraged the flowering preference for simplicity. Inside the classroom, I studied history and sociology, where Marx redoubled my hostility toward consumerism and I began to see the world more deeply through the lens of conflict theory, and thought that if people were content to live simply, the needs of all could be provided for, and no one would need waste their lives in joyless work: I remembered all too well my days working in a factory, and counted every hour locked away in that noisy, dank warehouse cut off from natural light as a loss.

Outside the classroom, I explored philosophy --  Thoreau and the Greeks. I found many intersections between their critical perspectives and the knowledge I gleaned from history and sociology. Epicures promoted a quiet life of self-sufficiency, modest tastes, and the company of friends.  Epicures is associated with an indulgent lifestyle, for he taught that the only good in life is pleasure, or enjoyability.  His name is thus attached to revelers and hedonists, as well as to wine snobs and food critics who cultivate extravagant tastes and demands -- a cruel joke history has played on a man whose idea of a feast was a ‘little pot of cheese’.  Epicures believed that if we keep our tastes simple, we are easy to please and hard to inconvenience.  He preferred to live away from the hustle and bustle of the city, where people make livings by convincing other people to buy things they do not truly need.  Stoicism taught that the only good in life was virtue, and that only the degree to which we conformed our lives to he will of nature mattered. Caring about the judgments of other people and trying to construct our idea of self around our possessions was nothing but foolishness.  This echoed Erich Fromm's criticism  of the modern conflation of ownership and identity.

There is thus no question for me about the wisdom or practicality of living simply.  What has changed is not the value I place in it, but the environment in which I live. I don't currently live in a location where I can walk everywhere as I did in Montevallo, though one day I will, for Selma still has a downtown core which functions: it has lost some of its commercial activity, but not its soul, to sprawl.  My peers have changed, as well: my companions at university were hippies, Buddhists, and environmentalists. Now I have peers who the Joneses aspire to keep up with. Financially, I'm much better off than I was as a student. I now have ample discretionary money to devote toward Buying Things, and bought them I have: the amount of money I spent on books last year, even though most of them were used and some purchased for a solitary cent, is embarrassing.  And where have those books gone?  Everywhere.  When I returned home from a retreat a few weeks ago, I just sighed to view the disorderly stacks awaiting me.  I used to dream of surrounding myself with books, of sitting serenely in a private library with books covering the walls. The dream has come true and I view the multitude of objects as a burden.

And so I have decided to begin reclaiming my life. I have already donated two boxes of books to the library, and plan on giving more:  others are being circulated to friends.  I am too ardent a lover of books to turn into a minimalist though: even when I am finished decluttering, I will still probably have "more books than blood cells", as I once mockingly described myself.  My hope is that I can also dampen my rate of future acquisitions by using interlibrary loan more, and not becoming a book glutton. Last year I almost purchased five books on garbage and waste management. (I blame SimCity 3000 for ensnaring my interest in  municipal elements as mundane as sewers, power lines, and potholes.) I need to adopt the same discipline towards book purchasing as I've learned to have toward eating: go more slowly, enjoy what you have, and sit back from the table lest you have too much.


My first steps toward reclaiming simplicity have already made me feel a hundredfold better. Living simply means far more than decluttering, though, and I am intent on continuing to rediscover the old contentment to be found in having less.

Changes

Years ago, when I began this blog, I was a much younger man who had just escaped a constrictive, shallow culture and had to build my own worldview from the ground up -- my foundations being skepticism and human-centered values. I was then just starting my twenties: I am now entering their twilight, and feeling the advance of age (I am sure older adults will find that risible),  not so much for a declining body but for the increasing weight of responsibility and outside demand for deepening maturity. That owes, in part I suppose, to age, but perhaps more to the fact that in pursuit of certain ends, I have voluntarily placed myself into positions where more would be expected of me. Such, I believe, is the key to self growth.

The ends I speak of involve my community of Selma. After having lived for three years in Montevallo, I was won over completely to the charms of small town life, and in particular to the fact that I spent so much time relating with other people in our common place. My friends ate together, we explored the town together: we frequently bumped into one another in the course of seeing to our own separate affairs. When I returned to Selma, I was determined to restore that sense of community in my life. Although Selma is my home, I had never considered it such until then. After returning from university, I began to walk its streets, and immersed myself deliberately in what social fabric it had: I began volunteering at the library as I looked for work, and even began attending services at the local Episcopal parish, since they offer opportunities for community life and spiritual/personal growth without the usual downsides of religion, the suppression of thought and coercion to authority. (The Episcopal church is of course very traditional, but the relationship between humans and tradition there is proper: there, traditions exists for humans and are maintained or changed at will.)  In the time since I began both endeavors, I have become a member  of the library's reference staff, and an increasingly involved member of the parish life of the church.

There's an essay in my making peace with religion, one I have attempted to write but have never published because it invariably involves experiences of mine which had  a profound impact on my perceptions, but which are impossible to communicate to other people.  Not that I was felled from my horse on the road to Damascus, but I eventually realized there was sometimes more to people's faith in divinity than an arbitrary, stubborn belief in a Santa Claus for adults.  I think most people believe in deities for meaningless reasons, but I've developed an appreciation for the realm of mystery, of people being moved by things they can't explain.  I don't think religion can be banished from the human mind any more than the abuse of authority can be riven from human politics.  And while usually I wouldn't be one to settle for defeat, in this case I'm more willing to bury the hatchet with religion, and perhaps even embrace it as an ally, against anomie, meaninglessness, and consumerism. Marx wrote that religion was the heart of a heartless world, the soul of a soulless situation.  It will remain with us for as long as people need comfort against oppression, and I cannot imagining that changing.  That doesn't mean giving religion a free pass: I see it as useful, and sometimes benevolent -- but ever dangerous. It's like fire: protected against itself, kept in its place, it does good work and is charming in its own right. Outside of those bounds, destruction waits.

So the years have seen the furious fire of idealism within me be tamed into a murmuring hearth of their own; quieter now, but still hopeful despite a lessening of intensity. I think it a safe assumption that most people here will never be won over to some of the ideals I cherish, and so in the interests of relating with them and working with them, I turn to more pedestrian matters, matters of interest to everyone, subjects that cannot be boxed up and buried in a partisan camp -- matters like transportation.  As I spend more time with people of different political convictions, I realize how perfectly asinine the liberal/conservative dichotomy is. Why should fiscal conservatives embrace war and the waste of suburban sprawl? Why should liberals tolerate the increasing dominion of the state over individual lives?  The world of beliefs and values is more complicated than I ever imagined.

My own beliefs are not free of contradictions. There are moments when I am still the young social democrat, who believes in government and who thinks people should make health and education public issues out of pride: of course we should work together to do  this, we're a team! And there are moments when I want to run away, to retreat into the woods living a simple life and subsist on fish and mushrooms or something. I dream of the future, of what the human race can achieve -- and yet look nostalgically toward the  simpler past out of despair for what eager attempts to Create the Future have resulted in. In the end, of course, my world will neither be transformed into a Star Trek utopia, nor fall apart to such a degree that I would be justified in not being concerned with it.  What is left for me is to continue to live in the world I currently inhabit, the one with messy politics and people who act in distressing ways -- to continue to live in it, and to work to create and preserve a worthwhile life, to make my local community a better place to live...to practice the noblest virtues humanity has conceived to aspire to.

In future posts, I will be working through the contradictions occupying my mind -- the tension between individualism and community life, for instance, or between the value I place in science and the annoyance I have with human life being overly complicated by and dependent on gadgets and technotoys. Practical philosophy, especially Stoicism, is still of interest to me, but I may muse about the human environment more, from the viewpoint of a concerned citizen.  The particulars of the world in which I live are of increasing importance to me, not only because they give me an area to work with others to improve,  but because as I grow older, I look at the world through the eyes of someone who may one day introduce children into it...and I want it to be as conducive to human flourishing as possible.

Seneca on Death

Last week an aunt of my father's died, and he was asked to be a pall bearer. Unable to accept (being out of town), the honor fell to me, today. I began this morning reading from Oxford's collection of Seneca's Dialogues and Essays. In "Consolation to Marcia", Seneca writes to a Roman matron whose son died shortly into his adult life. The young man's mother Marcia carried her grief for three years, at which point Seneca took up the pen to offer advice.  Although it would be easy to console herself with the idea that her son had merely gone somewhere, somewhere where she would one day meet him, the best course of action is to accept it as a necessary part of life. He borrows from the Epicureans by pointing out that death is nothing to be feared, because it is nothing in itself but the cessation of sensation. Only our opinion of it gives it  substance, and our opinion can be changed.

What, then, is upsetting you, Marcia? Is it that your son hs died or that he did not have a long life? If it is his death, then you always had cause to mourn; for you always knew he would die. Reflect that no evils afflict one who has died, that the accounts which make the underworld a place of terror to us are mere tales, that no darkness threatens the dead, no prison, or rivers blazing with fire, no river of Forgetfulness, or seats of judgment, no sinners answering for their crimes, or tyrants a second time in that freedom which so lacks fetters: these are the imaginings of poets, who have tormented us with groundless fears. Death is a release from all pains, and a boundary beyond which our sufferings cannot go; it returns us to that state of peacefulness in which we lay before we were born. If someone pities those who have died, let him pity also those who have not been born. Death is neither a good nor an evil; for only that which is something can be a good or an evil; but what is itself nothing and reduces everything to nothingness, delivers us to no category of fortune. 

He points out additionally that death may be a savior: who knows what pains and disgraces might befall someone who lives a long life? He reminds Marcia of Pompey, who had he died of illness at the height of his power, might have been far more content then than he was years later, when Caesar had chased him into the sea, and to Egypt where he thought he might find refuge, only to be killed by the hands of those he thought friends.

Death frees a man from slavery though his master is unwilling; it makes light the chains of prisoners; it leads out of prison those forbidden to leave by a tyrant's power; it shows to exiles, whose eyes and minds turn always to their homeland, that it does not matter beneath whose soil a man may lie; when Fortune has unjustly distributed common goods, and has given one into the power of another, though they were born with equal rights, death makes all things equal; after its coming no man ever does anything again at another's bidding; it is death that makes no man aware of his humble condition; it is death that lies open to all; it is death, Marcia, that your father longed for; it is death, I say, that prevents being born a punishment, that keeps me from collapsing under the threatens of misfortune, that enables me to keep my soul free from harm and master of itself. [...] Life, it is thanks to death that you are precious in my eyes.