162. Becoming Wise

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Open houses

Yesterday I was running errands in the Outer Richmond District -- a particularly suburban part of SF -- and while waiting for the bus and looking at the houses typical of the Richmond, I started remembering something about my youth. My mother's family had a tradition of visiting cemeteries, but our nuclear family seemed to have its own peculiar tradition of visiting open houses. In SoCal this was probably because we were living in a rental for once and my parents were probably always considering buying a house. But in Boulder, when we were living in a new house we had just built and still toured the model houses when a new development opened between us and the foothills, I think we were just being nosy.

I remember a new house in, I think, Semi Valley where the smell of the drywall made the biggest impression for some reason. Mostly, we toured houses that were for sale in the San Fernando Valley. Fortunately, this was long before the age of "staging" and the houses we visited were as the current owners had furnished them. So we were both looking at houses and at the way other people lived. This was over 50 years ago so I don't recall much detail, but there were some wonderful older houses in the Valley back then. 

I've checked out several apartments in my neighborhood over the years, and I would do much more snooping if I didn't feel I was wasting the time of the agents. 

An old friend from ASU is currently visiting Europe and posting museum photos to Facebook. I almost never visit museums when I travel unless I have time to kill or the weather is bad. But going to foreign cities and visiting open houses would be great fun. Now I'm imagining, "The Nosy Person's Guide to Inexpensive Travel."  

That little painting project

I knew when I started that there was a chance of feature creep -- or the home improvement equivalent of feature creep -- and it did happen. Besides the accent wall I de-accented, I've now painted all the window and door trim and touched up the paint on the south window. That's the one that gets direct sun and several horizontal surfaces had blistered from a combination of sun and poor prep in the past. 

I did a better job of sanding and spackling than I had intended, and it looks fine now, but I really should have stripped some of those surfaces down to bare wood. But why, really, if they're just going to get painted and not look much different than now. My dream is to find someone capable of retrofitting these old double-hung, sash style windows to modern insulation standards. But when I've looked in the past I couldn't find anyone who did that outside fine woodworking magazines. And to do that would mean ripping out some of the trim I just fixed so as to remove the sashes. I doubt the old trim would be reused. 

Since that process is just a dream, the final thing on my home improvement list is putting new weather stripping on the horizontal edges. I think I can make it significantly better than it has been.

The only thing in my apartment I have never painted is the ceiling in the living room and kitchen. The ceiling surface is a wonderful example of shit drywalling. And the paint looked okay, so I left it alone and have covered most of it with painted canvas. I briefly considered painting the visible surfaces the same color as the walls, which would have highlighted the canvases, but that would have been a lot of awkward work and I don't have enough of this 20 year old paint for that big of a job. 

Still, now that I've done all the things I was imagining at the end of last year, now I'm imagining what the space would look like with that change. It never ends.


There's one other thing I changed in my apartment. To reduce cord clutter, I replaced a light switch on a power cord with a connection to a regular wall switch. The room looks a little neater. However, muscle memory is proving an unexpected problem. I continue to reach for the place on the wall where the old switch was Every. Damn. Time. Mostly this is because I've had the switch there for so many years, but I'm beginning to think that another reasons is that the old location was simply more convenient.
 

Becoming Wise by Krista Tippett

Penguin Press 2016

Another book club book. I was over 100 pages in and convinced I wouldn't need to write anything about this one, as it is mostly teasers for her PBS interviews. But then I ran into something interesting relating to what is probably the most common theme in these blogs. 

p108 ...in American life, every vision must begin and end in an economic argument in order to be heard..."

p109 Rename these "issues" in light of what is at stake in human terms, and consider the complex mix of questioning, applied virtue, and, yes, political economic wisdom we need to muster for robust, sustained, generative grappling: the future human vocation, of how we punish wrongdoing and create space for redemption, how we treat outcasts and strangers and the hungry, how we reimagine health in a world of ever longer lives, how we nurture our children's minds and equip them for the world they will navigate and make...

Then we come to john powell. 

p116 You make this really fascinating point that there are two "parents" to the way we are now, the way we grapple with race. One is slavery -- I get that. The other is the Enlightenment -- that, in fact, it's from the Enlightenment that we inherited this idea that the conscious mind could know everything, and that we could be reasonable.

p117 Yes, and the United States became extremely, extremely attached to the notion of individuality and independence. Though think about the groups who were not independent. They were the Africans, they were the Indians, they were women, they were anyone who was not a white male. The Enlightenment Project had this hubris that we could control everything, including the world, when we can't even really control ourselves.

And if we were having this discussion in 1980, we'd say, "OK. Let's not do race. Let's look at everyone as an individual. Why do we have all these categories?" Well, now if you ask the question of why we have all those categories, science will tell us that's the way the mind works. The mind actually works with categories. We simply cannot process the world, we simply would not exist as a species, without categories.
...

p118 The human condition is one of belonging. We simply cannot thrive unless we are in relationship. I just gave a lecture on health. If you're isolated, the negative health consequence is worse than smoking, obesity, high blood pressure -- just being isolated. We need to be in relationship with each other... How we define the other affects how we define ourselves.

And so when we define the other as an extreme distance from ourselves, it means we have to cut off large parts of our self...
...

p119 ...At one time, we talked about integration, and we equated integration with assimilation... That was clearly wrong. We're not going to melt into each other. And yet, we do have to have a beloved community, not in the small sense, but in the large sense. And I would even extend it beyond people, to a beloved relationship with the planet. And to live that, and to have structures that reflect that, is a very different way of ordering society. 

This comes back to the discussion in The Brothers Karamazov of the State becoming the Church. I've skipped the discussion of the L'Arche communities that are also very close to what Dostoevsky was arguing for. 

p120 Then I think we can also learn to relax. Then we don't have to be afraid of the force. Yes, it will take us beyond what we're comfortable with, who we are right now. But I think we need help in getting there. And right now, we don't have the language for that because we still have the language of the Enlightenment Project. We still have the language of, "You can be anything you want to be, you can control, you're in charge of your destiny." Even the notion of sovereignty is very problematic. Whether it's a community or a nation, there's no such thing as sovereignty. We are in relationship with each other. It can be a bad relationship or a good relationship...
...

p121 ...I think actually people are longing for this. People are looking for community, right now, though we don't have confidence in love. We have much more confidence in anger and hate... 

p122 ...There are a lot of things we can do. But it needs to be animated by a sense that we are connected, that we share each other, and yes, that we in fact love each other.

Next - 162. It's been a while