“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.”
Marcus Aurelius
“The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.”
Dolly Parton
For maybe the second time in all these posts, I took yesterday's down. Too dark, too negative, too personal. And what good does all that do? We've all got problems, bub. No point in obsessing over them.
My morning reading today included this essay from Reason, a libertarian online magazine that occasionally touches something that hits home:
Indeed, we are taking jobs that pay less, moving places we otherwise wouldn't consider, making consumer decisions every day that are not driven by what maximizes value in our lives, but by tribal politics. Our descendants will probably ponder this moment, this cacophony of political noise that makes everything from sports to dining out less fun, and wonder what got into the water. We can't even manage a winter storm without digressing into a political battle over windmills and coal.
This is simply stupid, pointless in that it is a sterile discourse that does not lead to a solution. There is no Hegelian synthesis that births an outcome bringing together the best of our strands of thought-, because there is no thought--only ideology. And besides, with no civil discourse ideas aren't being exchanged at all. We are just reinforcing the illusions within the echo chamber of our tribe, and screeching at the other side. It is a form of societal suicide.
And it makes us unhappy. Has anyone ever told you they were filled with joy after a couple hours of reading political blogs, or watching their tribal news network, or scrolling Facebook and discovering the people we loved and admired are living in an alternative reality? Me either.
Here at Wyldswood North, we can't afford the negativity and grief all this brings. We've survived together marauding ex-spouses, a hurricane that destroyed much of our material lives in the space of a day, the loss of what we thought of as a family when we walked away from our religious community, a vocation-upending pandemic that left us nomads and battling every day to keep the ship of our household afloat.
That's a lot for 28 months, and without patting ourselves on the back I'd have to say we've done okay. Our relationship has never been stronger, we've rebuilt a community around us that is surprisingly broad politically and geographically, and we continue to travel with hope when despair would have been the easier, softer way. Or maybe this was the easier path, not succumbing to the weight of it all. Every day is a victory.
So, this morning I'll share something fun that you may not have seen before, a website that is made for this moment in history, as we sit mostly housebound and look forward to herd immunity and moving freely again. The site is called window-swap, and it allows you to gaze out the windows of contributors from all over the planet, from Provence to Gambia to the Russian steppes, and see what others see from their homes. Trust me, it's far cooler than it sounds.
Be sure to turn up the volume--you can hear the traffic, the birds, the rustling palm fronds. I was just in an apartment in Israel a few minutes ago. It is amazingly therapeutic.
And you can contribute your own window view if you have the patience for it. I am looking outside a beautiful snowy morning here in Corning, with fat snowflakes falling with a rate of descent that tells me they're heavy and wet. Maybe I'll set up the iPad camera a little later and add our window to the gallery.
It's Friday, which means I am about to spend two days with my best friend, the person the arc of my entire life has led toward, laughing and cooking over a glass of wine, music playing, snow falling outside. To quote an old hymn I've always loved, how can I keep from singing?
Happy Friday. Go in peace.
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