Far from just an adventure

The Odyssey has a clear political message warning about isolationism as the bronze age came to a close. The themes were clearly applicable to today as it warned about the folly of war (which it doesn't romanticize) for less than honorable purposes. 

This is obviously not meant to be just a simple adventure and the deliberate casting choices were perhaps also meant to rub against the fragile sensibilities of conservatives. 

The film is brilliantly executed in many ways with scenes that are genuinely captivating and enthralling. 

Bravo Mr Nolan!

It's too bad

I have come to conclude with great certainty that the only way to have a truly healthy relationship with another is to first love oneself and have some possession of authenticity; perhaps not perfectly but as close as possible to it. 

If this does not occur we are entering wounded and possibly ready to accept less than we deserve. We will at the same time not be able to provide the best version of ourselves to another person. 

I understand that I am presenting a high bar here but I've known too many people who hobble along and toil within co-dependency where each tends to the other's wounds. 

One such example would be the control freak paired with the disorganized perennial victim. 

It's not possible to have perfection but when we choose partners early in life we let surface chemistry and what we determine to be compatibility cover up the more nuanced and subconscious reasons lying underneath which tie us to childhood; as example the wounded daughter looking for the substitute father figure. 

It's a shame that we come to self-knowlwdge later but I suspect there is no other way.

Energy

Dr Gabor Mate talks a lot about childhood trauma and how many of our issues are sourced there. The child feels abandoned, not listened to, abused physically or verbally and so on. 

The trauma leaves symptoms in adulthood which people are unable to trace to the source of the problem. 

Compensation methods are then found in adulthood to mask the trauma such as always being agreeable, burying oneself in work and performance, substance abuse, etc. 

I think he is very much correct and our goal should be to go to the source of the trauma directly and heal the wound with our adult lens. 

Of course transgender people had a very particular kind of trauma in having to suppress identity and authenticity often for decades, but everyone likely has some childhood wounds they need to address. 

When one steps off the carousel of chaos and has time to truly reflect, we realize that much work went into pleasing others and being agreeable under a system that was not only rigged but completely flawed. 

We discover that much energy went into the wrong areas instead of repairing the errors inflicted upon us. As I've discovered it's never too late, but if only this version of myself could talk to my younger self.

Authenticity versus our training

Authenticity is problematic within the structure of a society that runs on and expects conformity. 

Most of us grew up with expectation and were praised or punished by parents who themselves experienced much the same process. It becomes legacy which is passed on to successive generations until we break the chain. 

Therefore becoming fully authentic is almost impossible since it requires ignoring so much of learned behaviour. If we start to determine the point of where the real us begins and the child who received training stops, we may be hard pressed to identify it. 

This is why it can take years or decades to fully determine identity. We then have a type of "coming out" where we say "I don't care what anyone thinks anymore: but only after we tire of doing it so long. 

Authenticity can be scary because it always risks breaking rules. It is disruptive in nature but if the alternative is to live a life full of suppression and being out of touch with the self, the answer becomes more obvious.

Buttons

Dealing with an older parent can be a challenge sometimes. They have slowly become more child like and the roles have slowly reversed. 

At 90 my mother repeats herself a lot and I have given up on my pronouns and dead naming because it isn't worth it. She you accepts you and loves you which is enough. 

My mother isn't educated but has plenty of life savvy to spare. Her prodding me out of shyness is what helped get me where I am and I will be forever grateful. It was my father who was the intellectual and counted on her earthy pragmatism as counter balance to his bookish ways..

Yes, they can frustrate us but that is because no one knows better how to push buttons we were certain by now were defective; the ones that prompted us to want to hide under furniture from the embarrassing behaviour they inflicted on us in public when we were kids. 

She is well surrounded with a large family who cares and is happy to return the favour for her tireless energy.

In reverse

Science doesn't work in the direction of trying to prove a hypothesis. It actually works in the direction of trying to disprove it. 

We notice a phenomena, propose a theory and go about, in a sense, trying to disprove it through experimentation. The aim is to make sure we don't infect the process with wishful thinking and bias. 

Pseudoscience works in reverse in that it proposes a theory which it then spends all its time looking for shreds of proof to bolster. 

The earth is flat and that's all there is to it. Don't bother me with evidence to the contrary.

In pseudoscience the bias is baked in and once enough data points exist to the satisfaction of the true believer, they can stop there despite the existence of gaping holes.

Social contract

What we need now is a new social contract; one which returns us to caring about each other. 

The navel gazing and chasing prosperity through consumerism failed miserably as did the oversharing the most mundane details of our daily existence on social media. 

No one should care about what you ate for breakfast or what your skin routine is. They should find out through living their own lives or look into what people who do it for a living recommend. 

I know I don't care and I say it with all due respect because we aren't all that important.

We've made ourselves less happy than when we worked physically much harder but then those times had a greater spirit of community and didn't obsess over productivity by timing bathroom breaks. 

We messed up and the clean up starts now in earnest.

Talk with the people

More reasons to love Mamdani :)

Passing

First time director Rebecca Hall makes a movie about passing for white. Her mother was a black opera singer who was light-skinned and so the subject matter invited itself as a matter of personal interest. 

Set in 1929, movie protagonist Irene Redfield is recognized in a very nice restaurant by former high school friend Claire who is now living her life passing as white. Irene is shocked at the transformation (blonde hair and all) even as she herself blends in well to white society under her snuggly-fitting flapper hat. Her brim is lowered at key moments when suspicion threatens her with trouble. 

Irene lives a more affluent life in Harlem than most black people of her time and she and her husband can afford to have a maid. However they are still second class citizens in an America that has always had and continues to have a clear pecking order. 

Claire is living in stealth but is married to a racist white man who has no idea of his wife's origins. She is getting tired of her life and the cover up and it gets increasingly complicated from there. 

The parallels with transgender people invite themselves here. The hierarchy of privilege, how people use it and how messy life is in general.

Frail

The best way to remove power from ill-intentioned people is make them feel small which is accomplished by magnifying their insignificance. 

When we show they don't matter it plays on their already frail egos; a problem which secure people don't have. 

There is nothing more frustrating than removing whatever small grasp on power they think they have.

On another note, this blog has been regularly receiving between 5,000 and 6,000 views per day, a healthy increase which I am at a loss to explain since I have not changed my approach at all. I never have, nor will I ever chase traffic.

However, I will take it I guess.

The why of it all

Online positions and viewpoints on things tend to be hard line and black and white because people often have very fixed ideas on subjects despite their lack of knowledge. 

If we recall Bonhoeffer's three tenets of stupidity: outsourcing critical thinking, willful ignorance and conformity, you can see why so much of what we take in fails the test. 

Nuanced discussions are abandoned in favour of staunch positions that are at best flimsy. They may have an agenda or simply absorbed it from somewhere else and are now preaching it. 

Being comfortable with grays is pretty much mandatory and because we don't have all the answers we must be prepared to say "I don't know" 

The problem is the ego gets in the way of many people who can be derailed very easily by asking them a simple question 

"Explain to me logically and clearly why you believe this?"

Gotcha.