Gate Carvings:
During last week's small group meeting, my co-leader asked me if I had seen a particular video. I remember it coming into my inbox, but confessed I had not reviewed it. I went home later and looked and there it was, buried four days back - along with a week's worth of incoming e-mail.
Suddenly I was struck by a thought: What if I opened none of my e-mail for a day? How much what I get? What is important?
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Like a great many people, I have a multiplicity of e-mail addresses.
I of course have my work e-mail address, which has varied across every company since I first started in the biopharmaceutical-medical device industry (which started, of all places, in Lotus Notes). The addresses have changed over the years - first name.last name, last name.first name, first name (for companies that are very small), last name.initial - but they are ultimately all short term, disappearing as soon as my time at the company has ended.
I have a second e-mail, the e-mail associated with this site. Other than appearing here, it is located almost nowhere else. The incoming e-mails there are few and far between, appropriate for an address which is only for contacts.
Google insists that I have an e-mail associated with this blog as well that I never use. I have another Google address as well, mostly because my family members want to share documents. I never use this except for family related comments.
The last e-mail is my public address.
I have this one the longest, probably since the days when AOL started to not be a thing and I needed a back-up. It is now one of the addresses that people look at and are surprised that it even works anymore - not quite "yahoo.com" in its antiquity, but almost as old.
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For the experiment, I did not open or delete any e-mails for two 24 hour periods. The tally was such:
Main E-mail Address: Day 1: 32 e-mails, Day 2: 15 e-mails. 47 e-mails total.
Spam/Junk E-mails: Day 1: 14 e-mails, Day 2: 9. 23 e-mails total.
Most of the main inbox e-mails were "legitimate" - in the sense that they were things that I had signed up for once upon a time; there were only four that were truly "junk". They were a mix: some SubStack notifications for SubStacks I occasionally read, a couple of notifications from the Community Garden, a receipt for my taxes, and some e-mails from the good folks from Permies.com.
The rest? Notifications that really are advertisements from sites that I have visited at one time or another and either purchased something from or signed up because I wanted the initial 10% discount, although I ended up not purchasing anything from them. All reminding me that something was for sale now, and I needed only to click through to buy something else.
Of all of those e-mails, only a handful were really "needed".
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I have started the process of unsubscribing. Some sites make it easy; some sites make it much more difficult. And some take time. But I will continue to work through them as they continue to come in. Given where I am in life, I scarcely need more e-mails reminding me that there are things out there that I "need" to buy.
Will I ever reach the plateau of no e-mails? No, there will always be some I should have; my goal is less than 10 a day.
Because of all things that take my time, checking my personal e-mails should not be one of them.
I have been feeling rather low this week.
I wish I could point to a single event or thing - but I cannot. There are some contributing factors of course: a rather pronounced lack of restful sleep, an unexpected reorg that work that impacted me not at all (but one of my good coworker friends), a series of unexpected postal issues (note: Send nothing you need to get there in a specific period of time through the U.S. Postal service).
One item that may be impacting me more than I anticipate is the fact that my work site is effectively rolling into the next phase of operations, away from the sort of start-up feel to one of regular operations and "organizational efficiency and excellence". It happens everywhere that companies and sites are successful of course; what it has generally come to mean is a loss of the close sense of connectedness the site has and some level of fun and much more of a rather un-fun, unengaging work environment.
I value my senses of connectedness and fun highly, so this is not a welcome development.
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For better or worse, I like a sense of "fun" at my work.
Work is, almost by its very nature, often not fun at all but rather a series of tasks to be completed. And often the work and the tasks are serious - to be fair, the industry I work in (biopharmaceutical-medical devices) can literally be a life and death series of actions. And there is a very distinctive time and point for seriousness.
That said, serious all the time can turn people into unhappy employees.
If I have a calling at my job - besides doing my job, of course - it is to make things as fun as I can. That means lightening the mood wherever I can. That means calling a joke on myself or playing the fool on myself (consciously) as I can. It means breaking out into song at random times (yes, I have done it).
About anything to bring a smile to someone's face, especially someone who needs it.
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Will my equilibrium be restored? Probably. Yesterday was a better day than most of the week, and even though things will be different, there is still fun to be had. It may require a little more creativity on my part (or a little more subtleness), but it will still be there. After all, people may not remember what you said, but they will always remember how you made them feel.
So give them something to laugh at.
One of the biggest changes that I have noted about our transfer from home living to apartment living is trash.
In New Home, we had a dedicated trash bin and dedicated recycle bin. With four to five people living there at the same time, we regularly almost filled both bins. Now that we have relocated, things are quite different - in two ways.
The first way is simply in the amount of "trash" we generate. If I am here on my own, I possible generate one "full" kitchen bag of trash a week, if I combine changing the rabbit three times a week, collecting litter box waste every day, and the detritus of modern living (I go more often of course because of the waste, but it could be contained in a single bag). If The Ravishing Mrs. TB is here, perhaps we generate 1.5 or maybe 2 bags. Our recycle is much less as well, as cans and bottles are saved for a premium, leaving only cardboard and plastic to be walked to the dumpster.
Mind you, we do not pay less because we generate less. That is a percentage fixed fee.
The other difference is simply in how people use the recycle and garbage dumpsters.
The garbage dumpsters should not surprise me so much, but it still does. People throw all kinds of things away, things that - having seen Cambodia and Vietnam - would have been reused and recycled in some ways. Furniture. Bags of clothing. Sometimes they make it in the dumpster, sometimes apparently "close enough" will do the trick.
Interestingly, some of those same items make their way into the recycling dumpsters as well. Not just the cardboard and plastic I am used to, but furniture, bags of clothes, metal - literally almost anything. Recycle, in some cases, seems to be another word for "The other garbage dumpster".
If nothing else, this experience has made me very conscious of the things that I am buying - and throwing away. I do not know that we can ever reach the point of zero trash, but likely we can make it less than it currently is.
Of all the temples we visited during our time, Engakuji seemed the most like a "temple" of all the ones that we visited. I am not sure what contributed to that: the lateness of the day (it was our last stop, post 1500), the weather which was overcast, or the relative lack of people present after the crowds we had seen earlier. But it truly had a sense of the otherworldly.
The Senbutsujo, or Zen Meditation dojo. The building dates from A.D. 1699 and is currently still used for Zen Meditation sessions:
Engakuji (Or Engaku temple, 円覚寺) is located in the northern part of Kamakura not far from the Kita-Kamakura Station ("Kita" being "North"). It was originally founded in the year A.D. 1282 by a Chinese monk at the request of the regent Hojo Tokimune as a commemoration of the defeat of the Mongol Invasion of Japan under Kublai Khan (A.D. 1274-1281). The temple is considered one of the most important Zen temples in Japan and as the second most important of the Five Mountains of Kamakura.
As part of the small group I am co-leading, one of the exercises we do is a specific fasting and prayer activity. We fast for a day, come together and listen to a Psalm and a song, then go off separately to pray for about 15 minutes or so. This happens three times, after which there is a group prayer followed by a breaking of the fast - pizza, as it turned out.
The property we were on included an acre or so of grassy lawn, so I spent my last 15 minutes prayer session meandering through the grass. It was later in the early evening and the sun was casting bright rays, but not enough to to offset the cold that seems to permeate even the Spring here. I turned from looking towards the sun to looking away from it.
And found my shadow.
It was tall - I am terrible at estimating lengths, but easily twice my height - and it stood there amidst the waving grass and slightly wan light of the sun, stretching out far beyond what my reach would ever be.
A powerful image, coming as it did during prayer.
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When I was growing up, I distinctly remember playing shadow tag on the playground. It is one of those games that I suspect may have been played for millennia. If you played it, you likely remember rules even if it was a very many years ago: the person who is "It" chases the participants around, trying step on their shadow.
The thing this game teaches you - beyond your first introduction to the idea of "refereed calls" ("I touched you!" "You did not!" "Did anyone see me touch him?") is the fact that our shadow is can be manipulated based on how we stand in the sun. Turn one way, we can shrink it to little more than our height; turn another way, and it grows to a point that it cannot but be "tagged".
Running back and forth, swirling and dodging like sparrows, the shadows ebb and flow over the blacktop. We are perhaps too young then to realize that casting a shadow has more impact than just becoming a target in a tag game.
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What struck me, as I stood there and watched my shadow - a tall, still presence that did not move while the grass under it did) was how casting a shadow was not just a physical image thing, but a thing that we do on all sorts of levels in the lives of others.
There can be other words for it - influence, training, even trauma - but there are people in our lives who have cast shadows - sometimes very long shadows - into our own lives.
The casting of a long shadow is not necessarily a bad thing; I think of my father TB The Elder, who cast a long shadow which worked both weal and woe in my own life. His shadow is well defined in the light, whereas my mother's is much less defined but none the less influential as well.
There are friends and family that have cast very long shadows into my own life, shadows that have outlived them or their presence in my current life. And there are those whose shadows have scarcely exceeded their time in my life, to quickly disappear as life's turn makes their shadow shrink.
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Casting a shadow is something that we cannot control at all. At best, it is something that we can influence (if we think about it) by how we stand in the sun. But the shadows we cast can be very long or very short.
Standing there, seeing my shadow tower over me, made ask the question what shadow I am casting into lives of others. It can be far bigger than I intend or see; I hope that it is the sort of shadow that makes them glad for the shade and the shape rather than burdened by the blocking out of the sun and the resulting darkness.
Some years ago - less years than I would like, honestly - I was in a meeting with the senior executives of my then-employer. About 10 minutes into the meeting, a colleague - a work friend, really - walked in and sat down. Reacting immediately - I thought much less then than I do now - I made a quip about the starting time. Executive management laughed. My friend said nothing at the time - but after the meeting, clearly communicated her anger and embarrassment at my comment at her expense. For weeks she did not talk to me and even when she started doing so in the last few weeks before her departure, it our relationship was never the same.
I learned a very important - and painful - lesson about the kindness of dignity that day.
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Dignity (dig-nǝ-tē): The quality of being worth of esteem or honor; worthiness; high repute or honor; the degree of worth, repute, or honor; proper pride and self respect. - Webster's New Word Dictionary, Second College Edition: 1948, Simon and Schuster, New York
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Dignity is a trait that has fallen on hard times in the modern world, partially because it has been consciously abandoned as a behaviour pattern and partially because it is not held as a trait of value. That is not surprising: after all, if one abandons something it becomes very hard to value it.
Society as a whole has abandoned the idea of dignity: individuals literally live their lives with no sense of restraint or things which simply are not put out into to public because (at one time) such things remained private matters. But society has also abandoned the idea of allowing others their dignity: too often, things are a combination of combat blood sport and personal/professional conquest on a scale that the Mongol Empire would have admired. People cannot be allowed the grace of exiting quietly or choosing to end a discussion or argument or even just of silently withdrawing.
The other side, of course, is the side that I exhibited: the fact that one sacrifices the dignity of another to get ahead. Be it the long overloud laugh at the expense of another in my case or be it willing misunderstanding of a position (or at least not being willing to take that time), we seem to have embraced the idea that there is nothing sacred in the path to get ahead or "one up" on someone else.
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How is dignity a kindness?
When we allow someone their dignity, we allow them their personhood - really, we allow them the image of God that they were created in, just as we were created in the same image. We respect that fact that people sometimes get it wrong, that people are sometimes off, that people do not necessarily care about the same things we do or that they may see things differently, that people are....just like us, with frailties and challenges that they have to address just like we do.
When we practice the kindness of dignity, we follow Christ - who always allowed the true seekers and those who needed His healing to ask questions and beg for His aid without making them feel anything less.
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What have I learned in the intervening period about allowing others the kindness of dignity?:
- I have learned that I need not always solve an issue right there in public, but much can be solved in private conversations.
- I have learned to let people defer or even retreat without haranguing them for an answer or commitment.
- I have learned to monitor myself and my humour such that the butt of any joke, if there is one needed, is me.
- I have learned that by treating people with dignity, I in turned show I value dignity.
It may seem a small thing, to treat something with dignity. But after all no kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.
The rest of the pictures from our visit to the beach last weekend.
I have been feeling a sense of disquietude over the last week or so.
It is somewhat hard to really say why. I cannot really point to one event, although there have been a lot of changes in the last two weeks: the death of my aunt, the death of a long-time volunteer at the Rabbit Shelter I volunteered at in New Home, the settling of The Ranch, the fact we now well into a month of interim-management with no sign that it is ending soon (this, at least, was expected), perhaps even a natal day that pushes the next world all that much closer.
But that is change. And I have experienced change before without this unique sense of....something I cannot fully express.
I could say "The World" - but my understanding of the world at the moment is pretty dim at the moment. Most of that is by conscious choice - those that I see focusing on the world seem incredibly unhappy and angry most of the time, no matter what their chosen side. Maybe I am reacting to their inherent rage, instinctively knowing that no matter what happens in the future, they will ultimately be no happier.
Perhaps there is some element of "the job" as well - my site is in a state of transition from one stage (early stage manufacturing) to another stage (regular manufacturing) and with that transition comes a change in the work environment as well. I have been through this process more than once and know it well: a great deal of the spontaneity and "personal feel" of the work environment disappears, to be replaced by more regular business processes made to enable regular work. It has to happen, but the spirit of a place always changes, usually for the worse. Work is more a task and less about the personal aspect.
Maybe this will all pass. I hope so: Spring is coming strong and there is a lot that needs doing. But I cannot shake this last little bit of Winter in my soul.
At the top of the stairs is the main shrine at Tsurugaoka shrine. Sadly (again), interior pictures are not allowed:
