My new foot position is challenging the muscles on the outside of my left leg, but it feels like a good thing. I think this will make my leg muscles stronger.
Scott drove up to the house after Bikram to change Yvette's car battery. While he was here, I had him look at that alcove off the library, where I would like to put in a bath with a shower. He said it didn't look like too big a job to hook up the sewage line. Doing this is always a big challenge here in Hawaii. Anything that involves being underneath the surface of the earth means breaking up rock. Our water supply lines all run above ground until they get inside the house. Since I want a toilet, a sink, and a shower in that space, it will require a sewer line.
He also said that he had checked about borrowing equipment to blow insulation into the Yvette and Josh's ceiling to provide a buffer from the noise of people walking around upstairs. That equipment is not for rent. There is one company that offers the service, but it's expensive. He suggested buying cans of Great Stuff, aerosol cans of insulation, making small holes in the ceiling and blowing it in, and sealing up the holes again.
I'm planning at some point to have others living here with me. I'm not interested in being in this big house all alone, nor am I interested in leaving this house except feet first.
I called the credit card company to deal with a little problem they created for me. After making it a challenge to claim the reward points on Mike's credit card, they sent me a check with the incorrect amount. It was $300 over what it should have been. I was pleasantly surprised by the amount; I hadn't expected that much, but neither did I think of the company making an error.
Then a week later, I got a second check for $351. I thought it looked funny, getting two checks, so I set the second one aside without depositing it. A week later, I got notification from the bank that there had been a stop payment on the first check. This is without warning from the company and without an apology. The bank charged me $10 for the stop payment. I called the company today and was told that I would have to write a letter to ask for my $10 back and a letter of apology. Fortunately, the bounced check didn't cause significant problems in my life.
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Musings: I'm putting this separately so those who are not interested can choose not to read it.
Yesterday I wrote that our true nature can go either way: for good or evil. We're not filled only with love and compassion, but with our dark side too. In the homily, the priest said that love is our true nature.
Are we born loving? Well, yes and no. We are born needing to be loved, not just physically cared for. We need to feel we are a source of pleasure, delight, to those around us. When an infant doesn't feel that way, it can sink into despair and even die.
We know that just physical care is not enough to satisfy an infant. There were orphanages in eastern Europe where children were warehoused, physically cared for, but no one picked them up, expressed delight in their presence. The results were dramatic. Children died from a "failure to thrive."
Here we are getting into the definition of love. Love is an abstract concept. Each person has his sense of what it is about. In the play Marat/Sade, Peter Brooks dramatized Charlotte Corday's murder of Marat. They were both active in the French Revolution, overthrowing the royalty of France. If you don't know the follow up of the revolution, it was bloody. Corday sings, "And love meant one thing to you, I see, and something quite different to me," as she stabs Marat to death. Isn't it the darndest thing how love can mean one thing to you and something quite different to me?
I don't see an infant as capable of love so much as capable of being loved unconditionally. There is a difference. Loving someone has to have something to do with recognizing the other person is separate from yourself. Also, the power disparity brings mutual love into question.
So what is this impulse to be loved? I think it is linked to survival. If our tribe does not show us that they are pleased with us, our lives are as much in danger as when we are denied basic physical sustenance. Why?
During the hunter-gatherer period, our nervous systems were developed. The objective was our survival. We didn't only need physical nutriments, we needed to know that we were welcome in the tribe. If the tribe saw our behavior as unacceptable, we could be left for the wolves, literally, or killed. Those early tribes couldn't afford to carry people who couldn't conform to the tribal expectations. Some of those expectations had to do with no being a burden, having to be carried beyond a certain age, or being unable to participate in the tribe's activities for the of the tribe.. The tribe couldn't afford the luxury of carrying a 'disabled' person. They were all living to close to the bone.
I assume this 'knowledge' is part of our nervous system. We are social animals. Our need for connection and approval is part of our survival need. We look for signals as to what we are doing right or wrong. Receiving affection signals approval and delight, pleasure. If we are doing something 'wrong' by the trial standards, we know we have to get our act together or suffer the consequences, and those consequences could be dire, as life-threatening as lack of physical nourishment.
Let's say love is the need to be bonded with our familiars, to feel that they are a friendly part of our environment, Since they take delight in us, we take delight in them. Since they offer us security, and our security is dependent on them, we offer them security once we are in a position to do so. The connection feels fantastic! It leaves us feeling so safe and so at ease. How lovely to catch someone smiling at us just because we are there. Ah!
On the other hand, hate for those who are not members of our group can be just as satisfying. Research has shown that we get the same oxytocin boost from hating those unlike us as we do from loving those who are like us. That cry of hatred is one of the things that reinforces our sense of unity with our tribe. We are US, and they are THEM. US! US! US! Yeah for our team. Is our species capable of love without hate? Oh, boy. Isn't this the question of the hour at this time of history?
