Saturday, December 7, 2024

Saturday, December 7, 2024

    

 I  check my Tesla app regularly to see how much of our electrical usage the solar covers.  I had a shock this morning.  Our overnight battery coverage was low.  Had the electricians from Regis Electric done something when piggybacking the dedicated line on the solar panel?  I texted Yvette, Josh, and B to ask if anyone had used a lot of electricity.  Everyone reported no. I called the company to report a possible problem.  Now, I had three electrical problems: my car didn't charge when I plugged it in using the Kia charging cord with the undamaged plug, the solar system was underperforming, and my Internet was unstable to downright intermittent.     I temporarily fixed the car problem. I tried the other charger, the one with the slightly burnt plug. That worked just fine.  

    I weeded the vines growing on the rock wall on my neighbor's side more. It's a vacant lot.

    Dean and Nina came over for our regular game of Sorry and conversation.  I remember it being tense today. I wasn't in a very good mood, still recovering from my birthday upset. Perhaps Dean got into pushing some point about man's interference with nature.  While I agree with him that we've been disastrous for this lovely planet, I still feel duty-bound to battle nature, killing off the plants I don't want. 

   Before we started playing, Nina's phone rang. It was Dean's sister calling to wish him a happy birthday.  Neither one of us knew about the other's.  I had the Tuxedo cake from Judy, and we all had a slice. I offered to sing Happy Birthday. Dean, having heard my version once, declined. Tensions dissolved as we played.   I always feel renewed and refreshed after our time together.

    I had no students today. I might have had a chance to work with the Twins, but they were out and about for the day.

   We, meaning all of us, often do things to 'help' others that, in the best case, aren't helpful and, in the worst case, are harmful. My mother did that a lot. It was a crazy-making situation. She actually believed she would do me harm if she said anything positive. Sounds ridiculous, no?  I was as shocked as most of my readers must be, but she proved it to me.

   My mother moved into my home with Mike and me when she was 81.  She lived with us for the rest of her life, another 18 years.  A few months after she moved in,  she said, "I know I shouldn't tell you this. It isn't good for you, but I can't resist. I've been telling everyone what a good daughter you are."  Yeah, you read that right.  Expressing any positive feedback would be dangerous for me.  It's the polar opposite of parents who believe saying anything negative is bad for children. Too much of anything is harmful.  Too much poverty or too much wealth.  Both are out of the sweet spot for mentally healthy living.  As I said, we do harm in the name of caring.

   There are different levels of care based on circumstances. We care about the people we are bonded to.  We are responsible for their well-being.  The impulse to fix a problem is biologically driven.  When we see a comrade fall, we feel compelled to pick them up. When we see someone not of our tribe fall, we feel nothing. It's not our problem. 

   Again, here I am, viewing this from the perspective of evolutionary psychology.  10,00 to 200,000 years ago, the primary concern for ourselves and those we were bonded to was physical.  If someone fell, we had to rush and help them up.  If someone was injured, we had to find a way to fix the wound.  If someone was attacked by an animal or another person, we had to give aid. The impulse to help was and still is embedded in our nervous system. We're social animals. Maintaining the social body is as important as maintaining our individual bodies.  The well-being of others is intimately linked to our own well-being. 

Therefore, the need to calm our anxiety drives the impulse to fix someone else's problem. But that was then; this is now.

   How do then and now differ? Then, most of the problems were physical, much like a military combat unit is concerned about the physical well-being of all participants.  The concern for the other dimension of human existence, the psychological, is trivial by comparison.  The closer people live to the threat of physical survival, the less focus there is on the psychological well-being of others or ourselves.  The stress of living another day overrides all other concerns. There's no room for that sort of self-indulgence.

  But we've taken care of that for some people, at least in some parts of the world. I'm one of those people. I have not been without food, clothing, shelter, or physical safety for a single day of my life.  My parents weren't wealthy, but we had plenty of what we needed to survive. Survival was never an issue, except in our heads.

   My mom had faced a life-threatening illness in the first six months of her life that left her permanently traumatized, with a sense of danger hovering over her and her children. She also went through WWI in Berlin. That added to it. And, oh yes, she had to flee Germany in fear for her life because she was romantically involved with a Jew.  My mom faced several life-threatening situations. While none of those were active as she raised me and my sister, they loomed over us nonetheless.

  But there is the other type of caring that isn't driven by concern for everyone's physical well-being. Our lack of physical threat allows us to be more aware of our mental and emotional states. Yay, at one level, and OMG, what did I wish for on the other hand? We weren't designed for the good life. Like zoo animals, denied the stresses of the life they were designed to deal with, we've become neurotic, concerned about relatively trivial things, seeing threats where there are none- at least none to our physical well-being.  No lions, tigers, or bears are waiting to make us their next tasty meal. More to the point, there are no pressures to conform to the exact standards created by life-threatening situations. Back in the bad old days, an inability to conform to group standards could lead to a death sentence.  It was physically threatening. In the depth of our psyches, we don't know the difference between physical and psychological threats, and we're not aware of what our deep unconscious minds are projecting onto this relatively benign world.