September 11, 2007, es muey complicado

Complication is not a natural state. How to whip the complications of the day and live a happy life.

Friends and Kin:

It is September 11, 2007, the sixth anniversary of the day that will live in our hearts and minds as the most terrifying event that has happened to America in its short two hundred year history.  We are waiting for something to happen.  I think nothing will.  Yesterday I sent out to my list a picture of a street in some middle eastern country, filled with men in their robes and turbans, a man on a donkey, everything looking like it did in the year 01 BC.  I said, "here is the enemy, be afraid."  Muslim extremists and ordinary Muslims, in those countries such as Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, the other stans,  live and think as they did then, and are extreme in the extreme in all their ways. The way they treat their women is totally unacceptable. And they want the rest of the world to live as they live, or they will behead the offender. We cannot underestimate the power of even people living like this, living in caves, while we live as we do over here.  They hate our prosperity and our freedom.  We understand that. I sent that picture and the note of being afraid to lessen the worry people may have about the situation we are facing.  The media makes the most of everything, and our FBI and CIA live on strife and horror----they keep being paid that way. But it is true in large measure, that there is danger, but not nearly so much as we are manifesting as a result of the barrage of horror news every day. They have been killing women for adultery or looking another man in the eye for centuries, and we are not going to make them Western with Western ways. This is the mistake our president made in invading Iraq.

    So things have become complicated.

    Complexity is not the natural consequence of work by men of good will. 

     One of my friends, in an attempt to explain something occurring in the political-business world, seemed to sigh and give up, saying, "it's complicated."  My associate Bert Garraway's brother Butch, was a kind of diarist, if there is such a thing. He was multi lingual, understood and wrote Russian and Turkish, and other languages and was on the radar and radio on the Russian/Turkish border translating messages between pilots who flew along the periphery.  He looked at life with a justified humor and would send Bert things he wrote that were hilarious. He worked as a roughneck on offshore rigs and wrote about the lives of the Cajuns and Rednecks working the rigs that sent me into giggles.  He spent time in South America as well, and seemed to be one of those wanderers who never really found a place, but was always looking and never finding, like many of us.  The last time I saw him was at Bert's funeral where I delivered one of the eulogies.   In one of the stories he sent to Bert, there was this Latino who, every time he couldn't explain or justify something he was doing that was borderline legal or simply mystifying he would shake his head and say, "es muey complicado." 

    I grew up in a time when life seemed simpler.  Not easier, just simpler. I was born in 1935, at the end of the depression and remember my parents and my uncle and aunts hovering over that old radio listening to Franklin Roosevelt's announcement that Pearl Harbor was a day that would "live in infamy."  There was no such thing as homogenized milk, ball point pens, deoderant, many paved roads, air conditioning, nylon and dripdry, computers and certainly no internet,  FM radio, and everything was closed down tight all day Sunday, the day of rest.  Now everything is "muey complicado."

    So how do you handle this on a day by day, hour by hour basis?  How do you go back to quieter, simpler times?  You can.  It is easy.  Just stop what you are doing, wherever you are.  Look around you and actually see what you are looking at. Look at that cloud, that window, that door knob, and know you are looking at it.  Do this over and over at things near and far and soon you will feel yourself settling down and you get yourself located in time and space and realize that there is nothing in the environment that can harm you, and you are whole and well. You will begin to smile and relax and feel healthy and great. You can do the same by touching things around you,and you can look and see things that are not reminding you of the problem you are having.  Looking at that chair doesn't remind me of the divorce, or Bin Ladin, or whatever.  Then look at everything around you near and far with the same question, and you will begin to feel great.  These are workable locational processes discovered by L. Ron Hubbard. You don't need Prozac to do this. Then you can get to work and feel good about it.

    One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words."  Goethe

Have a great day
L D Sledge
Rantor
September 11, 2007

Comments

[Hans Eisenman]

LD, you are so very right.

A) it is a complicado world we live in. Muy!

B) We _can_ get back to simplicity, even if it takes the daily mental exercise you talk about of looking around and locating yourself in the present moment.

Heck, we go to the gym every day because we no longer challenge our bodies with the agrarian life we once lived as a species--shouldn't we also have exercises for the mind and spirit which help us reset? After all, we were built for a simpler time spiritually too. We had just a few dangers in the environment then (snakes, tigers, men with spears, etc.). Those alone would keep you in the present.

Now everything is fed to us with drive-thru efficiency. And if it's not, we can watch someone else being fed something on TV.

Complicado!

To combat this and/or to reverse the effects of too much daily news, it would indeed be wise to take pause a few times a day to look around. Admire the clouds, say hi to a tree, spot a cardinal in song.

In fact, I think I'll do that right now...