... there's more to this notion of love for sustainability (I feel like the ideas are 3/4 baked at this point). In particular, the role of concepts like compassion, love, hocma, and their relation to appropriately bringing one's courage, wisdom, and capacity for expressing it in life that signify the significance of an individual in the world. I can see it, but it'll take me a while to put it all down into writing. For now, here's something I call the conundrum of compassion: How an unsustained instance of kindness can create tremendous pain through disempowerment.
Good education allows us to discover, and some of what we learn from discovery enables us to wisely live through whatever truly matters in life. Oddly enough, increased exposure to the sensations of a holiday like Valentines day, or for those who experience it, exposure to loving people (even those with non-amorous intent) can be painful and disheartening.
When suddenly lifting the burdens of oppression and anticipated threat creates trauma in itself. When realized opportunities for that kind of reprieve are unsustained or non-existent, it doubly serves to break one's hope. It's a different kind of growing pain.
Sometime last year I started to realize it was very likely I was still clenching a few grudges so closely that they might have influence over how I trust and engage other people. I know of a few people who always have "an ax to grind", and could feel myself teetering in and out of bearing preemptive hostilities in almost every situation I came across. I frequently considered it mandatory that I prepare something to validate and assert about myself or my presence before I engage another person, or whatever event or activity before me. I'd come to an event out of curiosity, but find ways to point to bigger responsibilities or obligations beyond self-interest. For the most part, it works--people might know there's something more to what you do or they'll find out if they do something to trigger the unveiling of whatever you had to say for yourself. Yet working in many public forums and among passionate and injusticed community activists, I also recognized that this kind of armed or hostile mental mechanism quickly becomes a detriment to the intended consequences that people seek.
Exposure to a genuinely compassionate person or event that makes any anticipated hostilities pointless can become profoundly painful experience of remorse. You spend so much of your life living in anticipation of hatred only to realize that some people currently don't or never had to deal with systemic injustices the way you had to for all or most of your life. You also realize that their life and community might actually have all of the things that allow them to express themselves in ways that you'd have never conceivably done before.
If you carry a burden on your shoulders for long enough, your body undergoes a kind of traumatic shock from its sudden release and removal. I've experienced this physically several times in my life, but taken as a metaphor, it's a fairly new phenomenon that arose for me in 2012.
The best illustration of this experience might be seen in a film. To make this a bit more realistic, imagine a film where a malicious dictator was apprehended and eliminated from a country, or where the oppressed people were extracted and rescued from the grips of the regime. After having endured and been rescued from a terrible situation, a person of few words and grim resolve suddenly breaks down even though they're in a safe environment and one would think that they should be overjoyed about their favorable new circumstance.
To the casual observer, it's a bizarre token of sadness in humanity, but sometimes it represents something really profound: suddenly lifting the psychological burden of living in anticipation of threat and oppression creates trauma in itself. It might be good, but it's almost unbearably profound and it hurts almost as much, if not more than being in a state of consistent oppression. In essence, they're growing pains, but the brevity of the phrase doesn't do justice to the extent of the challenge some people have to endure.
I most keenly realized this phenomenon last year after speaking with a person whom I initially was extremely guarded around and was taken by surprise when she allowed a long phone discussion for me to address a lengthy array of personal concerns, and much later I realized she had sincerely entertained the possibility of being a girlfriend to me. Months before, as smitten as I might have been, I was convinced that people were more disposed to using each other for temporary personal gain and let that overshadow and sabotage the reality and opportunity presented in our relationship.
I later noted something similar when I shared conversation with a few people who considered me a friend over drinks in Detroit as we discussed transformative ideas for social justice and proactivism. Simple acts, but a taste of ambrosia--you've discovered a brutal possibility about compassion, love's prerequisite. It's something that everyone should be able to live with, but for some, it's rare to find in the environment they live in. A moment of genuine reprise from a struggle so constant, you never knew there were other ways of living life that don't require hindrances from hostility as a preemptive defense. Instead, you discover what it's like to live with a part of yourself that's exposed and unfamiliar. For some, it triggers an overwhelming kind of grief that results from suddenly lifting decades, lifetimes, or generations of burden. It's a traumatic appreciation--good grief in a literal sense--that has you wishing you had found and embraced the opportunity to act without hindrance or burden sooner. It's a naked consciousness that's as fragile in its being as it is mysterious in its resilience. At the same time, I think some people, myself included, are inclined to fight the signals of reality so as to minimize the pain of trauma--especially when we see those opportunities to openly live remain rare, inconsistent, or non-existent. We uphold facades of hollow identity to keep excuses at the forefront of our existence to the world that we're willing to engage.
Last summer, Willie of the Wellness Center at UM-Dearborn had said to me: "some people don't know what love is, or how to love--they never grew up with it" (paraphrased). In the context of his story, he was talking about juvenile delinquents in Detroit but it was profound to me given my circumstances. Thrashing through a mix of hardened oblivion, self-hatred, and what almost certainly amounts to an iteration of unknown behavioral triggers for acute-traumatic stress coupled with behaviors to patch disingenuous actions [listen to Paper Cuts by Broadcast for a sense of this "the things you miss out when you try to mislead..."], I know I've squandered even simple friendships. From here, the only solutions amount to giving up—which doesn’t fit with my ethical framework—or belief in ideals that hold little other than disparate possibilities. Belief, and perhaps faith then becomes a requisite for social sustainability as well.
Good education allows us to discover, and some of what we learn from discovery enables us to wisely live through whatever truly matters in life. Oddly enough, increased exposure to the sensations of a holiday like Valentines day, or for those who experience it, exposure to loving people (even those with non-amorous intent) can be painful and disheartening.
When suddenly lifting the burdens of oppression and anticipated threat creates trauma in itself. When realized opportunities for that kind of reprieve are unsustained or non-existent, it doubly serves to break one's hope. It's a different kind of growing pain.
Sometime last year I started to realize it was very likely I was still clenching a few grudges so closely that they might have influence over how I trust and engage other people. I know of a few people who always have "an ax to grind", and could feel myself teetering in and out of bearing preemptive hostilities in almost every situation I came across. I frequently considered it mandatory that I prepare something to validate and assert about myself or my presence before I engage another person, or whatever event or activity before me. I'd come to an event out of curiosity, but find ways to point to bigger responsibilities or obligations beyond self-interest. For the most part, it works--people might know there's something more to what you do or they'll find out if they do something to trigger the unveiling of whatever you had to say for yourself. Yet working in many public forums and among passionate and injusticed community activists, I also recognized that this kind of armed or hostile mental mechanism quickly becomes a detriment to the intended consequences that people seek.
Exposure to a genuinely compassionate person or event that makes any anticipated hostilities pointless can become profoundly painful experience of remorse. You spend so much of your life living in anticipation of hatred only to realize that some people currently don't or never had to deal with systemic injustices the way you had to for all or most of your life. You also realize that their life and community might actually have all of the things that allow them to express themselves in ways that you'd have never conceivably done before.
If you carry a burden on your shoulders for long enough, your body undergoes a kind of traumatic shock from its sudden release and removal. I've experienced this physically several times in my life, but taken as a metaphor, it's a fairly new phenomenon that arose for me in 2012.
The best illustration of this experience might be seen in a film. To make this a bit more realistic, imagine a film where a malicious dictator was apprehended and eliminated from a country, or where the oppressed people were extracted and rescued from the grips of the regime. After having endured and been rescued from a terrible situation, a person of few words and grim resolve suddenly breaks down even though they're in a safe environment and one would think that they should be overjoyed about their favorable new circumstance.
To the casual observer, it's a bizarre token of sadness in humanity, but sometimes it represents something really profound: suddenly lifting the psychological burden of living in anticipation of threat and oppression creates trauma in itself. It might be good, but it's almost unbearably profound and it hurts almost as much, if not more than being in a state of consistent oppression. In essence, they're growing pains, but the brevity of the phrase doesn't do justice to the extent of the challenge some people have to endure.
I most keenly realized this phenomenon last year after speaking with a person whom I initially was extremely guarded around and was taken by surprise when she allowed a long phone discussion for me to address a lengthy array of personal concerns, and much later I realized she had sincerely entertained the possibility of being a girlfriend to me. Months before, as smitten as I might have been, I was convinced that people were more disposed to using each other for temporary personal gain and let that overshadow and sabotage the reality and opportunity presented in our relationship.
I later noted something similar when I shared conversation with a few people who considered me a friend over drinks in Detroit as we discussed transformative ideas for social justice and proactivism. Simple acts, but a taste of ambrosia--you've discovered a brutal possibility about compassion, love's prerequisite. It's something that everyone should be able to live with, but for some, it's rare to find in the environment they live in. A moment of genuine reprise from a struggle so constant, you never knew there were other ways of living life that don't require hindrances from hostility as a preemptive defense. Instead, you discover what it's like to live with a part of yourself that's exposed and unfamiliar. For some, it triggers an overwhelming kind of grief that results from suddenly lifting decades, lifetimes, or generations of burden. It's a traumatic appreciation--good grief in a literal sense--that has you wishing you had found and embraced the opportunity to act without hindrance or burden sooner. It's a naked consciousness that's as fragile in its being as it is mysterious in its resilience. At the same time, I think some people, myself included, are inclined to fight the signals of reality so as to minimize the pain of trauma--especially when we see those opportunities to openly live remain rare, inconsistent, or non-existent. We uphold facades of hollow identity to keep excuses at the forefront of our existence to the world that we're willing to engage.
Last summer, Willie of the Wellness Center at UM-Dearborn had said to me: "some people don't know what love is, or how to love--they never grew up with it" (paraphrased). In the context of his story, he was talking about juvenile delinquents in Detroit but it was profound to me given my circumstances. Thrashing through a mix of hardened oblivion, self-hatred, and what almost certainly amounts to an iteration of unknown behavioral triggers for acute-traumatic stress coupled with behaviors to patch disingenuous actions [listen to Paper Cuts by Broadcast for a sense of this "the things you miss out when you try to mislead..."], I know I've squandered even simple friendships. From here, the only solutions amount to giving up—which doesn’t fit with my ethical framework—or belief in ideals that hold little other than disparate possibilities. Belief, and perhaps faith then becomes a requisite for social sustainability as well.
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