Giving Up or Giving In? Read This First

I have run up on so many sandbars and shorelines in my life that they disappear into a generalized swooshing noise, with little to no specificity. The sound of a canoe bottom on sand, or gravel, silt or rocky shoreline is the end of just one leg of our trip. Occasionally we make these stops on purpose, occasionally they take us away from our perceived plans, we hit a submerged rock or log by mistake. It currently feels like our entire culture has been reset, a sort of hard stop to progress. There are dangerous eddy currents all around and we are hopelessly stranded upon a hidden impediment in the river of life. The reason I use the analogy of a canoe trip is quite possibly because we are all buoyed by our hopes, our dreams, our desires upon an amalgam of fears and anxieties, difficulties and problems that are frequently of our own making. As we look around we also see and hear about very real and existential threats to the very existence of our species. Rather than being only the domain of philosophers and Malthusians, even our children are learning of the sixth mass extinction and it is only a small step from understanding of this to utter nihilism. We must always remember that to stay afloat, we need to keep the weight of our burden under the displacement potential of our vessel.

If and when nothing matters, we are prone to surrender in the face of even the slightest impediment. I often wonder at the seemingly endless hours people will spend, literally twiddling their thumbs, "working" on their phones to play games, create digital landscapes, experience life vicariously through social media and "win" imaginary wars that result from billions of micro processing switches flip flopping between their two states, on and off. Yes, or no. In very real ways, I'm doing that now although I am also encoding a clear message about actual events, I do post these messages in the digital realm. The digital electron flux that allows me to reach around the world into your consciousness is the same one that some people escape to when they do crossword puzzles, create dynamic landscapes upon which to build imaginary kingdoms or "win" at Tetris. We can choose to either escape into the digi-realm, letting it use us or use it to further civilization or honor the humanity of other participants in this new landscape. I have chosen to honor you.

The canoe analogy was probably bolstered this week by a funny joke I heard during a conversation between Stephen Clobert during a digitally recorded conversation with Elizabeth Warren. You see, there is a now legendary concept here in the good old U.S. of A. that people want to vote for someone they would "like to have a beer with." This very idea is curious when you also want to keep alive the fiction that we are a prudish and Puritan nation. Puritans abhorred alcohol, realizing that it interfered with articulate thought and expression. But that is a discussion I will delve into later. It an effort to humanize Elizabeth Warren, one of the Democratic candidates for President, Stephen Colbert had a couple drinks with her. His preferred spirit and then a beer of her choosing. When she selected Michelob Ultra, Stephen was compelled to ask if she knew how making love in a canoe was like her beer of choice. The answer, "They are both fucking near water.", brought up some very nice, although slightly uncomfortable, memories. Processing all of this reminded me of all the canoe trips I have taken and they all were better than the alternative, staying on dry land.

When we run up on the inevitable stopping points in our journey, in a canoe, there are several tried and true ways to remedy the situation. If we are going to stay on land a while, we can immediately begin planning for our next trip. If we are not ready to do that yet, we can bask in the afterglow of our most recent one. If we have gotten soaking wet because of rapids or an un-planned for downpour while we were out, we can set about changing into dry clothes or drying the ones we had on. We can even prepare a list for our next excursion so that the things we might need in the future can be put into our travel pack. In extremely rare cases, we might even resolve to not do that again, but again, I digress. The long and short of the canoe trip analogy is that it is a mode of operation and a metaphor for life in general. What keeps us afloat upon the swirling and mysterious flow of life is the canoe. We must always displace as much water by weight as our vessel and it's contents weigh or we will swamp the boat and possibly drown as surely as nightfall follows sunset. We know that if we are in a river or lake and we hit that occasional submerged log or sandbar we have a limited set of options, just like when we encounter an obstacle in life. We can back-paddle, shift our weight or the weight of our cargo, jettison some of our baggage or as a last resort, we can bail out ourselves so that the vessel rises above the obstruction. The last thing you want to do is give in or give up. In fact, timely action is often the only way to keep from getting tipped out into the rushing waters and have the canoe swamp or capsize.

Some people give up on the whole canoe trip, or even learning the basic strokes needed to feel comfortable in water because they may be "afraid of water". Others may rationalize that they don't have time to do something as frivolous as float across water or brave the whitewater. They give up before starting but as we all know, when we get set out on the dark and dangerous waters of life, as babies, we must learn to master a few techniques and become brave enough to understand and read the roiling waters of life if we are to survive. This metaphor holds value in that we can also determine to "go with the flow", or fight the current. Planning our forays into the world strategically can often lead to better outcomes, just like when we canoe. Paddling upstream on our first few days out might lead to tired arms, but on the way back we can mostly float and not have to worry about being ferried back to where we left the car for instance, or planning to portage in a few places might result in a way to do a giant circuit that leads back to where we left our terrestrial transportation. we might even bring a bike along, leaving it where we intend to take out so that after a long, downriver stretch, we can retrieve the bike and ride it back to where we had left the car. Heck, I have even been on trips where someone who wasn't even on the adventure waited downstream to ferry us and our vehicle back to "civilization". Meticulous planning and attention to detail is often key to a successful trip on water. The same is true in life. There are many ways to do the same trip, racing through the rapids or finding resting spots behind boulders along the way. We can portage our gear around particularly dangerous rapids or even enlist the aid of kayaks or other decked vessels if we are uncertain about whether or nor we will be able to see potential problems before we can act to protect ourselves from them. Life does not always afford us as many options as we have when we elect to strike out on a watery adventure, but sometimes there are even more.

In any case, we always have the option of giving up. We can go home before we even launch the boat. We can turn back at the first challenge or avoid uncharted water altogether, sticking to the routes we have traversed a million times before. However, we must also be willing to accept the fact that we have chosen not doing something over a chance to learn, grow and adapt to changing conditions. In life, when we choose to follow others, stay safe and fit in, it may result in being somewhat successful, but by definition we may never explore new territory or solve problems in creative or novel ways. We may never have a stand out experience or make waves. Our veritable thought patterns will adapt to the landscape, which is finite and beaten down by the trails established by others who came before. I once tried to navigate an entire week in a giant flowage, created behind a dam that had gone through a draw-down of the water level. Hundreds of acres that had been flooded were just a tangle of sand bars and stumps, dry land and muck. Sticking to the deeper channels didn't even help. Often, when conditions change, the individuals most likely to give in or give up do it because they have not attempted to solve the "new" problems that crop up as the territory becomes "different". These people are referred to by psychologists as functionally fixed. If everything they have learned, or tried in the past does not work, they are desperately out of options. We see that in very real ways when investment bankers start jumping out of windows when markets crash. To give up is to say, "All I knew is gone." or "What I valued has become worthless." To give in is to say, "I am defined by my net worth." or "People only cared about me because I had money." In all likelihood, these assessments are not true, but we find ourselves believing what we have always believed and then we are out of options. These assessments about the way things "are" may seem silly when we look at them from a distance, but when they are happening to us, they seem very serious and often more real than fact or the things we can scientifically prove.

In the moment it may be difficult to understand, but humans are adept at trying new things, exploring options and learning from their mistakes. There are times when cultivating the adventurous spirit is just what we need to fins a new way out of a predicament or to find a new solution to a seemingly insurmountable challenge. This post is but a hint intended to spur readers toward a new direction, perhaps a new dimension. I offer these words with love, not just for you, but for all of humanity, including future generations who I hope will have an opportunity to cast themselves out into the rivers, streams, lakes and oceans of life.

Giving up and/or giving in do not define us in the way they would if we were on a canoe trip. It would be easy to see someone hopelessly mired in the backwater slough of a giant and ancient river system as lost, simply misguided or in need of help but in life, we may not be able to understand the morass of debt that surrounds someone or the turmoil that is building because they lack adequate skills to meet the challenges they face below the surface. This post is about developing the skills needed to make it past the inevitable sandbars and sloughs or rocks and submerged logs that stop us from moving forward. It is about the process of becoming unstuck, allowing ourselves to take necessary action if we do feel stranded and to regain control and our own composure after losing our momentum or being unable to make it past the snags and shipwrecks that are part of life.

First and foremost, even the most powerful supercomputer will not be able to solve the problem of which option is best in every situation. If they could, we would already be slaves of AI. I am reminded of my mother who consulted a very good financial planner. The financial wizard, as my mom thought of her wanted to help rescue Dar from her life of long term poverty and help her to plan for a retirement some day in spite of Mom's belief that she would, "Work until the day I die." The compassionate approach eventually got run over by facts but the whole process started quite well. Mom got sent home with homework. The financial planner told her to make two lists. One was to include all the ways that Mom brought money into the household and the average amount by month that she was typically able to bring into her accounts from all sources. The other was to list all the recurring bills and the average amount per month that they represented. This orderly approach to budget development seems to make perfect sense from a mathematical perspective, but numbers were never my mother's forte. Once these two list were compiled, Mom went back for another meeting with her financial advisor and she poured over them for a time, eyes widening at the disparity between the numbers. As she ran her calculator using the figures my mom presented to her, she worked faster and faster. In the end, I think Mom was running about negative eighty dollars per month, but some of that was attributable to a very slight overestimation of her monthly bills. After what Mom called "the longest time" spent calculating and recalculating the numbers several times, it was as if a fuse blew in the mind of this well-meaning lady. She had intended to provide financial counseling for Mom at no charge to help her out of what she had assumed were some bad choices or poor investment strategies. In fact, what she found when she looked at the results of all of that hard work and effort is that mom only had one choice, "Generate more capital." Neither my mother nor I could understand fully what this womyn was saying, because our "reality" was so much different than hers. but this turn of events goes a long way toward understanding why it is important to be flexible. My Mom had no way of fitting those words into a context. Her life experiences divorced her from the meaning of the word capital. My perception was slightly more well-rounded and I could capture the essence of what she said, but certainly not the full meaning. Asking a fifty year old woman with two children to care for to generate more capital probably meant have a rummage sale to my mother. Then, she probably got lost in the weeds trying to imagine how she would do that every month. I understood that the financial advisor probably meant get a second job, but that would be out of the question for a womyn like mom who had always been busy, filling her days with endless projects and errands to distract her from her failings. In any case, the communication between a person of one class ran up on a giant submerged log jam from which neither person on the adventure could reasonably be expected to know how to get free, so they just gave up.

Now, in the last years of her life, my mother has lost every penny of equity she had built up in her home, been robbed of any investments she ever sought to make and has become a ward of the state whose body will be used after death to train a doctor who will practice on the next generation. mom always wanted to go to med school, so as a cadaver, she may yet get the chance to do so, helping someone else to learn grow and develop beyond her own abilities and capacities. In the very end, we will all acquiesce, but while the fire of life still burns inside us, we must accept the adventures and bring all we can to bear on the challenges and snags that we find along our way. 

I have written extensively about the plight of the poor in these blogs. I grew up in poverty and it seemed that each time I would manage to boost my income above the imaginary line between how much it costs to make it out of poverty or remaining impoverished, they would raise the bar, keeping the middle class just out of reach. I have teetered right at the cut off for over fifty years now and have learned many, many strategies to "make it" without becoming swamped, capsizing or becoming hopelessly mired. On a canoe, the amount of boat that is above the water line is called freeboard. There have been times when I had but a millimeter left, but I bailed furiously and with ballerina-like grace so as not to rock the boat until the craft was again stable. There have been times when I ran aground so far and so hard that I had to give up parts of myself that defined me to lighten the load enough to get free and I have hit rocks so hard that they stove in part of the hull, but I have not once given up. I have even given in to a few things I probably should not have because I was too tired or broke to fight back, but these situations were only temporary. continuing the journey has occasionally required me to get out of the boat, give up the safety of my craft and develop completely new ways around the problems and challenges of the moment, but in the end, tenaciously clinging to this thing called life, making my way forward in complete darkness and often through uncharted waters has led to not only successful adventures but a richness that cannot be measured in dollars.

Mother Nature's Rules

We are in the depth of Winter here in Green Bay, but you would not know it. There is a smattering of snow across the fields, but mostly the ground is dark in color, not yet grey grass is still trying to capture some of the Sun's energy. I have a friend that has gone through the ice and lived to tell the story already this year and the pictures I am seeing from the brave souls who are catching fish through the ice don't give me much confidence that it will hold another month.We have been on both sides of freezing nearly every day for a month and the below zero temperatures that we are familiar with have not even come yet. I think that a recent report of our total snowfall this season was thirteen inches, but I shoveled it and I saw less than eight inches, and two of them were simply standing slush. Weather that used to find us in Southern Illinois seems to characterize winters in this Twenty-first Century. We have had a few bouts with freezing rain and mist, nothing that amounted to measurable precipitation, but it was enough to make walking treacherous. Now, don't get me wrong, the less the furnace has to work, the better I like the fossil energy bills, but this week I began to think seriously about it.

We are one species among many, it stands to reason that there is a complex relationship between each us and the whole that is unknowable due to it's vastness. We are passengers on Starship Earth. It now seems, at least to those of us in the U.S. of A. that no one is at the helm, few are able to elucidate a path toward doing a better job of stewardship and there are even agents within our own government that are beholden to foreign power (read money). The recent NRA admission that they laundered millions of Russian oligarch dollars to sway elections right here "at home" has caused many of us to wonder how we can have a democracy under the sway of our sworn enemies. Nations that have sworn to bring us down without firing a shot should not be allowed to influence our elections and they certainly should not be allowed to buy or install politicians. The more closely we look, the more people realize that is what has happened.

We are all aware that a certain percentage of our Representatives and a fair share of the Senate are cheerleaders for the Apocalypse. Spinning their webs of deceit that "god" wants humanity to fail or giving their gullible "base" that they will, one day soon, be able to use their guns at will or use up their survival rations under post apocalyptic conditions. My contention has always been, "What if the sky is not falling?" I do not say this because I am sticking my head in the sand, I say it because we have an unbroken history of the opposite to look back over which proves the opposite.

This Winter, for example. I will be saving, hold up, I have saved hundreds of dollars in fuel bills already this Winter. Every heating degree day I can avoid is putting money in my pocket and reducing my carbon footprint. Some parts of the world are actually investing in efficiency, alternative energy sources and new technology to keep carbon in the ground and in my neck of the woods, we are having our ecological impact reduced by the warming planet itself.

The reason that I mentioned political leaders is because they have been adept at doing the wrong thing, some would argue as far back as anyone can find. The idea of valuing the opinions of landowners over everyone else is not new, but when the most valuable thing changed from land to the ownership of debt instruments, a much smaller group was given political power. I am certainly not the first to say it, but our nation is at a crossroad. To help put our position in perspective, let us first think about population. If we were to imagine the world with only three nations, China, India and the U.S. Our precious U.S.A. would hold just ten percent of that planet. Both China and India are continuing to take major steps in the direction of sustainability.

I don't want to leave this idea of demographics alone just yet. To help get a sense of what is going on, Europe has twice as many people as the U.S. and they have been doing many of the right things regarding fossil energy for decades and Russia has about half the population of the U.S. and on the whole they have not. Now, we come to the two largest blind spots in the perception of most Americans, Africa and the rest of Asia. Africa has four times as many people as our nation, the rest of Asia, excluding China and India, has nearly three times as many people as China. If these numbers make your head swim, you are not alone. As I said decades ago, a tiny change multiplied by a huge number will also be a relatively large amount and that is how ecological sanity is creeping in, perhaps not here yet, but around most of the rest of the world, change is coming and it is changing fast! I may just need to relax. Mother Earth knows what she is doing.