Thursday 8 January 2004

Pic of the day: Men at work in Civ3. And toward a common goal, no less. Not like me.

Wait or hesitate?

It is hard to write, so I play Civ3 instead. It is easy and fun to play Civ3. And I don't put my soul in peril, or at least not in more peril than usual. For I am tempted to write about things that are important to me, very important. The very measure of my soul is at stake, so to speak. And quite possibly my eternal spirit as well. Such thoughts are not undertaken leisurely. Playing Civ3 is undertaken leisurely, so I do that instead.

I guess as we grow older, we ... no. Not all people grow older. Some just become older without growing, I think. They just stagnate, ossify and stop moving. And can I hold it against them? Moving forward is a terrifying ting to do, and doubly so when you have so much to lose.

You know why democracies generally don't go to war against one another? Or indeed against anyone else unless they think it will be an easy victory, or that inaction will cause massive tragedy almost immediately. Democracies tend to become wealthy. Actually it's probably the rule of law that does that, but the two tend to walk hand in hand. And then we have so much to lose. This is what happens in our lives too. We acquire so much, we collect so much, and then we have so much to lose. Not just material possessions, although they surely do their part. But we gain a reputation (hopefully a good one), we gain friends that are tied to us and we to them, and above all we build habits. Habits of action and habits of thought. A view of life that we feel reasonably sure of and secure in.

They say "my home is my castle". But is it not our mind that is our castle keep? We have built these walls around it, strengthened though years of affirming our beliefs. We have sought the people and places and opinions that could confirm what we already knew to be true, and used them as building blocks. We have rejected those stones that did not fit in. Is this wrong? No, it makes sense. There will always be many more lies than truths, so it makes sense to use the truths to the fullest and connect them into a greater whole.

But sometimes when you connect the dots, the picture is not what it first looked like. At first you may notice the growing heap of discarded facts just outside the walls. They looked OK, except that they did not quite fit in. Common sense says that since we can clearly see the sun and the stars rotate around Earth each day, the planets must do the same. But why the strange loops and meandering? And then suddenly one day we look in our telescope at the moons of Jupiter, and there is no doubt that they circle around that planet and not our own. What if other celestial bodies orbit around something else than Earth as well? Sure it is heresy, but suddenly all the meaningless observations make sense.

When we are children, we don't have all the old theories to defend, much less have we proclaimed them in public so often that we would lose face completely if we gave them up. And losing face is bad, but not the worst. The worst is losing our soul. If it were just any old theory that fell apart, we could live it down. But there are parts of our lives that are so fundamental ... yes, a foundation. To remove the foundation once the house has been built is to lose it all. How can we do that once we have lived comfortably in it for years? How can we see it all fall apart, especially if we have nothing better to move into?

Sometimes you have no choice. You wake up and the love of your life is gone. Dead or otherwise. It can be hard enough to survive. Sometimes the foundation shifts on its own, and there is nothing you can do to change it. You have to adjust, sooner or later, no matter how much you may lament your loss.

But other times you have a choice. You feel the change inside you, but you resist. Especially when it is not a person, you have the choice, you alone. It may be your religion, or your political view if that is very important to you, your ethnicity, even your sexual preferences (unlikely though that may be). You are no longer so convinced that you live the truth. But then again, you are not so convinced that you are wrong either. It could go both ways. Do you fight for your old self, or do you long for something new? The longer you have lived, I believe, the harder it is to change. As the now so famous Jesus said, you don't put new wine in old bags, or the bag will rupture and the wine be spilled; and nobody who has been drinking old wine wants the new, but says: The old is best.

There is a terrible irony in quoting this, I'm afraid. But I don't know for sure. As Johan Oscar Smith said, everybody should from time to time take his religion up for revision (or audit). There is an irony there too, I'm afraid, since the Christian movement he founded is often seen as one of the most conservative in Norway. Then again, there may be much good to conserve. But we don't really know unless we go outside the gates and look at the whole thing from outside, is that not so? As long as we unthinkingly say: "The old is best", we are only half alive.

To quote a once popular song by the Christian band Petra: "Good things comes to those who wait, not to those who hesitate." But how do you know which is which?