Mark Morford

Bliss


ob sent me Mark Morford’s SFGate column on Bliss the other day. He would like to start a “Bliss List” in response to the Bush Administrations “Terror List” or whatever it is called. It’s the list that the U.S. government has, and is still, compiling that names people who could have terrorist ties. Of a frightening length now, it targets people seemingly at random and does more for forwarding Naomi Wolfe’s argument that America is well on its way to becoming a totalitarian regime than most people care to think about. Anyway, Morford’s idea was to fight against the “darkness” by creating a list of people who live blissfully. He had a long list of criteria that could qualify a person for this list but the following paragraph caught my attention:

“Is there someone in your life who engages the world and thrives on books
and media, who works to understand the woes of the world and the yank of
politics and the guilty pleasures of pop culture, right along with the
sadness of war and cancer and divorce and yet still, somehow, manages to
wear really cute underwear and shrugs at contradiction and orgasms with
their mouth open?” (M. Morford)

Normally, I wouldn’t consider myself a blissful person, but the cute underwear and the shrugging sound a bit like me. I can’t vouch for the open-mouthed orgasms though only because there would have to be a mirror on the ceiling and that is just creepy. But I like the idea of a anti-list of those of us who are struggling to stay up in a down world. Doing our tiny bits to help ensure that the whole of existence is swamped by those whose sole focus in life is looking for reasons to be fearful and negative and to spread that fear and negativity to others. Which, I suppose, bring me around to attitude and optimism. Blissful people would say that a positive outlook is tremendously important in staying afloat in life. Those opposed would counter that sometimes life deals a hand too crappy for good attitude and rosy-tinted glassed to overcome. And while it is true that there are people who live sad and difficult lives, my experience leads me to conclude that while somethings in life cannot be avoided, many of the awful circumstances people find themselves in can be traced to decisions they made or avoided making at some earlier point in their lives. Much as one would like to say that people are sometimes victims of fate, it’s just not true the vast majority of the time. Using myself as an example, there was no life insurance money when my late husband died. The reason being simply that at the time we looked into it, we were in the midst of fertility treatments and though we could have come up with the extra cash, it would have tightened our budget quite a bit. My late husband talked me into waiting on the life insurance and by giving in I helped create the situation I found myself in when he was diagnosed with a terminal illness not quite two years later. Life insurance premiums are expensive, but probably less per year than what most people spend on their cell phone or cable TV bill. Neither of which is the necessity that life insurance is. Of course I am not an extreme example. As a teacher I saw single mothers who were living those quiet lives of desperation we so often hear about and it wasn’t hard to feel sorry for them. Yet, the majority of them had landed where they were by not finishing high school, for no reason other than they didn’t like school and thought it would be nothing at all to find a husband to support them in the future. Of course, life isn’t like that. Drop outs associate primarily with other drop-outs. They engage in behaviors that usually end up getting them in trouble with their parents, employers and possibly the police. These women ended up pregnant, a lot of times intentionally, thinking that it would net them life-long partners. But it didn’t. They were usually working multiple jobs and on some form of public assistance and wringing their hands trying to figure out why their children weren’t doing well in school and always getting into trouble. Probably an extreme example, but perhaps you see where I am going with this. Our lives are our responsibility. Bad things, and good things, happen throughout but it is our response to them that makes the difference. Optimistic people see where their choices are taking them. They accept that sometimes they will struggle but are confident that struggle is worthwhile and is taking them somewhere better. Pessimistic people see only the past and the now that their past has created.

All my life I have been a dreamer. As Yoda once said of Luke Skywalker “Never his mind on where he was. What he was doing.” That could be said of me. Hopefully I am a bit more mindful of my now than I was twenty or thirty years ago. And hopefully if I keep reading and reaching and dreaming (and wearing really cute underwear), I will one day be worthy of a mention on the Bliss List.

Fear


“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Isn’t that what President Roosevelt once told a worried nation? It wasn’t true in the strictest sense but the implication was clear enough. Fear is paralyzing and if you let it, it can rule and ultimately ruin your life as surely as whatever it is you are so deeply worried about or afraid of. I got to thinking about fear again after my husband sent me a link to a column by SF Gate’s Mark Morford. He is so left of center you would need to use GoogleEarth to pinpoint his exact location, and his ability to string a tongue contorting sentence together via adjectives and comparative phrases can sometimes overwhelm the thought train, but he usually makes a point somewhere in the verbiage. A point that is often barbed and an equal opportunity contempt-er. The column was entitled Welcome home, have some gunfire/Nothing like returning from vacation to the dulcet sounds of hardcore street violence, no? It was about urban violence and the way it effects and affects us. And it was about fear and the fearful way we live in this new brave new world of the 21st century. Although I don’t believe that we as a people are more violent, or are even more prone to violence, now than at any time in the past, I do believe that those of us who make up the washed masses are for the first time in a long while less shielded from it. You would think a liberal like Morford would see this as a good thing. A leveler whose time had come. I think, like most people who find themselves more or less face to face with danger and the in your face reality that characterizes the lives of so many more people than we of the “cleanliness” class wish to acknowledge, that it is too breath-taking, and not in a good way, for us to wrap thought processes around. Here is an excerpt:

 

To me, such harsh events merely serve to highlight the simple, but

incredibly potent choice: Would you like to move through your life in

ever-diminishing circles of trepidation? Would you like to live in a vague

sort of dread of what might lie around the next corner or behind the next

door or at the next stoplight? Because baby, you certainly can.

  It can affect every aspect of life. Would you like to be perpetually

worried about, say, getting into a debilitating accident every time you

start your car? Would you like to live in constant low-level fear of

robbery, of lightning storms, Internet scams and lead paint and a big

black Escalade slamming into your Accord at 90 mph? How about getting shot

at the liquor store or getting assaulted while jogging or accidentally

tripping on your shoelaces as you walk by a giant picture window and

crashing screamingly through the glass and tumbling 50 floors to your very

graphic and bloody and cinematic death? Hey, all you have to do is tune

into it, and it’s yours.

  And here’s the great divine kicker: The more you worry about it, the more

you abide in fear and anxiety, the more likely such trauma and drama will

happen to you. It’s the Great Inverse Law of Energy: What you fear most

will be drawn to you like a magnet. And the universe goes: Ha.

 

I don’t believe in the law of catastrophic attraction. I don’t believe in the laws of attraction period. The idea that you can think your way to any particular state of being is popular with the kinds of people who would rather not have to work for anything. Like my five year old, they believe in magic wands and sitting on their hands waiting for the timer to ding and release them from their situations like school children at day’s end. It also sits well with those who need excuses and places to lay blame to make it through their lives free from the inconvenience of personal responsibility and self-fulling expectations. 

 

Bad things don’t happen to you because you worry that they might. The Twin Towers didn’t fall as a result of someone worrying that they would. People don’t have heart attacks, get hit by automobiles or die from any number of diseases because they thought or over-thought the possibility. We are finite and frail, and we have constructed a world that can be hazardous to us, although the world before we began renovating it wasn’t overly user friendly either. Those of us who are cognizant of that spend time thinking about it now and then, and those of us who have experienced some of the very worst life has to throw at us range somewhere from yellow to orange on the alert scale thereafter. But whether our actions put us in harms way or not is simply the randomness we call reality, no one worries themselves to the point of attracting the negative attention of the universe because the universe already knows what is going to happen based on the law of probability that generally bears it out.

 

Morford does make one good point.

 

Because truth is, you are never far from the suffering and the hell. You

are never, ever completely immune, even on your most delightful and mellow

post-vacation days. The wolf is always — and I do mean always — at the

door. It is merely a question of whether or not you wish to simply see him

and smell him and give him a moment of respect before moving on, or

actually stop, and give in, and offer him the meat from your tired and

world-wary bones.

 

When lightning strikes the first question asked is “why me?” The answer is why not you? No one is special to the point of avoiding pain, suffering, despair, loneliness and grief. We are all vulnerable. The phrase “There, but for the grace of God, go I” exists for just that reason. It is “grace” from some unknown source that spares some of us from some tragedies, but it won’t protect all of us all of the time. And it’s not a bad thing to be aware of it. Giving some thought to the “what ifs” can help prepare a person for when disaster strikes; however, it can also serves as a reminder to live each day mindfully, if not always with full gratitude, because you never do know and regrets can leave life-long scars that can do far more damage than worrying about the possibility of acquiring them ever would.

 

I guess the Boy Scouts were on to something with their “Be prepared!” motto. I would add to that just one word. Live. Be prepared to live. Worry within reason. Expect to be your own salvation when tragedy strikes and be grateful if you don’t have to be. And live. Just live. In the moment and for the future with only occasionally glances back to keep your bearing.