What the World Needs Now...Is Less Calamitous Expectation, Less Diatribe, More Equanimity
Posted: Wednesday, November 30, 2011
by Christofer French
Rain Dancer Associates, LLC
I know, the answer to the question is: “Love Sweet Love”. It fits so well. Hail to Burt Bacharach and Hal David. If this were a writing assignment, someone would say: “Rather a sizeable load”. But it is a reasonable quest to consider how individuals might approach our world’s future. After all, what is the world, but us, and what is “us” but we collected individuals?
These three belief systems all have within them a belief in an “END OF DAYS”. The phrase “end of days” has many permutations from an “Incoming New Age to a “Christ is returning to quell all the violence” scenario. All the talk about the Islamic “12th Imam” makes Westerners contemplate a new world conflict.
It is as if we have a Right Hand Wrist Watch and a Left Hand Wrist Watch (Sorry left handers). We as individuals are ready to talk about Calamitous Expectation in church, and at bars and political meetings. This is when we check our Left Hand Wrist Watch. “Man, it sure seems like things are going to hell”. “Every day we get closer”. “The time is nearer than when we first believed.”
I love Paul as much as the next guy. Now I don’t adore him, but I respect him. All of his talk about when Christ was going to return, with his left hand wrist watch showing the 11th hour, every time he said anything like this, I’m sorry folks, he wasn’t wrong, but his watch was sure off. There is something warm that fills up the anguished soul when they contemplate their version of the “End of Days”. So, people never tire of anticipating the end of the world, or something close to it. Something inside us is operating, besides these doctrinaire questions, that creates in us a hunger and an angst and they both need mollifying.
So, what we need as “the World” “right now” is to stop referencing the Left Hand Wrist Watch, and take a gander at the Right Hand Wrist Watch – the one that makes you smile as you put your babies to bed at the proper time; the one that makes you enjoy a sweetheart lunch right at the stroke of Noon. The one that makes you thankful that you have a job when you roll home on wheels provided by the world for you, so that you can participate in the grand drama, and make a paycheck, at the stroke of 5. Start logging all of the wonderful things, big and small, that are a part of your life. Take a look at the Right Hand Wrist Watch and thank all the Positive Powers that be that we, us, individuals are twirling toward a positive, and yes, uncertain, but nonetheless, a positive outcome as God’s Children. “I Told You the Sky Was Falling!” You know what? Does anyone really want to be thinking about and be known as the one who was right, as the world gets an excrement laden load from on High that lays us all low? I don’t think so. To be the happily expectant one is to be the one who is carrying the world’s psychic load at these difficult times.
Less Strident Diatribe
There is a chosen career and personality path that many of your fellow individuals choose. It is the noisy hate-filled expression trying to divide and ruin and transform the face of our little invention we call “civilization”.
Oh the revolutionaries and the anarchists, the envious and the negatively empowered, the strident unbathed and the people who think debate means “more volume” --- all of these types tend to affect our airwaves and our broadcast themes, and the way we have fun, and our socials, meetings, schools and homes.
The irony is yelling back doesn’t work. It makes the Diatribe seem more valid. The best response for our world, which again is just us individuals, is to feel inside ourselves the solitude and strength that gives one a calm center.
I remember the high level cries of my infants. The only thing that worked was a kind of soft melodious sing song self chatter. You can’t scream at a crying baby, you can’t yell at Chihuahuas that are bounding around your living room. You can’t get a vicious loud drunk to be quiet by screaming at him.
There are factories of “bent thought” that spew out the disaffected, the dyspeptic and the permanently disgruntled. Their major is “Complaint”. Their skills have to do with untoward vocabulary and unsound name calling. This World, that is us individuals, can use as many calming, loving, sweet and thoughtful people as we can get. I wish there were a “Wild Fire” for peace, but it seems the disaffected have some secret that insures a loud disquietude that infects our streets, villages and cities. Good luck to the World, which is….just us individuals, in smiling benignly at the bellicose irreverent ones. Let them snarl at you. Me. I try to reach for that “soft melodious, sing-song self chatter” that I found as I tried to calm my upset baby daughters. The 70’s were hard to get through. But Daddy did it. The Future may be hard to get through over the voices of the Vicious Diatribe, but we will -- Us individuals, who are the World.
More Abiding Equanimity
Politics is designed to be disputatious. There is nothing that says that our stated policy as individuals couldn’t be – Achieving Greater Equanimity. As the World, we individuals need more formalized procedures that help our simplicity of purpose get more clarified. We all need to go toward our weaknesses and get consciously aware of those things that weaken us, and make us fall prey to paranoia, the media in general, noisy neighbors, abrasive buddies, challenging competitive people who call themselves your friends and lastly, but surely not less, importantly --- our loved ones who seem to be set on “disrupt”.
“It was my fault”. When I am in my right mind, I find that being ready to admit a lack of balance or singular ineptitude of mine has peace-making power. It is hard for your opponent to say, after your have sincerely admitted guilt or apologized, “You bet you are wrong, and I will tell you this, you are going to be wrong again, and me? Me? Well, I am never going to be wrong in my life?”
You can get real simple when it comes to defusing tension and anger. A strange retort that you might choose to let fly in a moment of rancor might be:
“I have a personal pledge to have much more equanimity. I just can’t raise my voice loud enough to respond in defense to your anger.”
“Well then confess quietly.”
“OK. I quietly confess. There, I feel better already.”
“You’re a superior phony.”
“OK, but I am a superior phony with much more equanimity.”
“There Are Mountains and Hillsides Enough to Climb”
That wonderful song “What the World Needs Now” by Hal David and Burt Bacharach contains this lofty thought. Sometimes it appears that there are those of us, especially in Western Culture’s lives of Modernity that march relentlessly through our goal setting agendas and wear our fingers to the bone. If in your search for the Right Handed Wrist Watch, and defenses against the Angry Diatribe and your hunt for Greater Equanimity, it might be good to just sing this song, with a quiet emphasis on this line: “there are mountains, and hillsides, enough to climb, there are oceans and rivers enough to cross, enough to last, ‘til the end of time”.
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Top-level comments on this article: (4 total)Excellent.Thank you so much. I love seeing your name. That means Elle, is there.
Hi Christofer.
"I remember the high level cries of my infants. The only thing that worked was a kind of soft melodious sing song self chatter. You can’t scream at a crying baby, you can’t yell at Chihuahuas that are bounding around your living room. You can’t get a vicious loud drunk to be quiet by screaming at him." That is just absolutely perfect! The rest was pretty darn good too!
Thanks and hugs,
DianneThank you so much. I smiled big when I read it again at your hand. Appreciate your stopping by.
another good oneThanks so much.
It all seems so superficial when I reach the Light druing meditation, society, human interactions. But, after all, we are spirits in the material world. I was not surprised to see several of the Quaker s.p.i.c.e.s. show up in your investigation (simplicity, peace, integrity, community, equality, stewardship).Yes. The Quakers have had the "truth" for the longest time. They know better than most that the "world, which is really just all of us individuals" is the way to see our work down here. I feel that there is a crest in the wave of human consciousness. It lies with the "worldly, busy types" who are ready to do their spiritual work to enhance their lives. There is a great middle that can become positively spiritually oriented. Thanks for your comments.
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