Wednesday, October 23, 2024

 Wednesday, October 23, 2024

    I looked for Elsa and dragged her to bed before I went to sleep shortly after nine.  I woke up at 11:30. I believe napping causes some sleeping problems. It's not that I'm so rested I don't need the sleep, but I'm training my body to wake up after an hour or two.  My body thinks that's a good idea and does it at night, too.  I fell back asleep and slept through to 2:30. I can't remember if I slept or dozed after that.  I had some funny sensations in the back of my left leg.  Was it the beginning of sciatica?  Here, I had just bragged to Judy how I was in less pain now than I had been when I was younger, even as a child. Were all the exercises I was doing causing harm instead of making things better?  It is possible that my movement is limited because of the hip replacement. I did some in-bed stretches. I find wiggling my ankle until something cracks relieves discomfort.  My PT had no idea what cracked. She said the end of the sciatic nerve is down there.

    I got up shortly after 4:30 and did my yoga exercises. I was out of the house before Joseph left.   

     I texted RH's mom to call me. She got back to me immediately. The woman scares me.  I was actually hyperventilating while on the phone with her. Of course, the terror was triggered by something my therapist said the other day.  Terror is the underlying feeling I'm left to deal with. It's totally out of proportion to what my life was actually about.  It is the terror my mom dutifully passed on to me, not having dealt with her own PTSD, which was severe. I don't think anyone can think hers wasn't well-earned. Lord what that woman went through in her lifetime! 

   I mowed the grassy strip at the front of the house this morning.  Patrick and I consider it mowing therapy.  Focusing on those blades of grass being mowed down, particularly on my lawn with its seed spikes, is relaxing. The grass is too short to see where you have mowed last. You have to look for those tall, hard-to-see seed spikes.  Mowing requires focus. Wonderful!

   When wrestling with a conflict of interest there are two criteria: want and judgment.  If the focus is on judgment, people see themselves as entitled based on right or wrong.  What I want is better than you want. My judgment is better than yours. Who's right and who's wrong becomes the issue.

  The other option is conflicting wants and desires. That can be a working gauge in all circumstances.  Here's an extreme example: Ted Bundy needed to rape, torture, and kill young women.  If I were one of those women, I would not want to be raped, tortured and murdered.  Whether I'm right or wrong is pretty irrelevant.  I would do my level best to escape that situation, and Ted Bundy would have had to do without.

    I do need to say Bundy was in the wrong, an evil person out to do no good.  But I was entitled to say I didn't want what he had to offer without judging him. Now, that is an extreme example. I think people make judgments to justify their right to want what they want, to defend their right to want and their right to have.

   Ah, the right to have. Having a right to want does not guarantee getting what we want.  All we get with the right to want is the right to be ultimately ourselves and for ourselves.  The right to ask for what we want and say no to what we don't want. It doesn't say we have the right to get what we want just because we want it. That's a different matter. 

    How two parties negotiate separates the men from the boys.  Some cultures teach never to ask for what hasn't been offered. If we're asked directly, we might have to say no. That's scary if we're not around someone we can trust to respect our needs as well as their own.

     That behavior works if there are strict rules of entitlement that everyone understands. It can't be a multicultural situation where groups have different rules of social decorum. That's no longer possible in our modern world. We're not living in isolated groups unless we join a cult that forbids any contact with the outside world. We have to honor our wants as well as the wants of others. Tricky.  I know.

     Judging others works.  You can imprison, torture, and even kill people who disagree with you.  I just heard a talk by a Uijhur woman, a member of the minority Muslim group in China. The Chinese government sees anyone who disagrees with the cultural norm as an existential threat.  It is a problem of opposing wants. The Uighurs want to live one way; the Chinese government sees their way of living as a threat to their lifestyle.  Is it? probably. Does preserving their lifestyle benefit the Chinese? It certainly doesn't benefit the Uighurs. Is the vision of a single dominant cultural pattern doable in a day when anyone has immediate access to every other person on the planet.  Even remote Amazon tribes have Internet access.   We're in a jam.