The Way Back to Sanity?

Close to midnight, we were disturbed by yelling and horn honking. Of course, with the recent popularity of rioting, my mind immediately began creating pictures of crowds advancing down the road with rocks and bats and who knows what all. My brave husband ascertained that the disturbance was coming from the road to the right, not the left, so the next images in my mind included doorbell dashes and dead snakes in mailboxes, as we’ve been treated to such things in the past, courtesy of a fellow who is old enough to know better. I don’t know what reel was playing in Dennis’s head, but he grabbed a light and headed out the front door; I followed. He walked down the road; I stayed on the porch. The yelling continued for a minute or two, then I heard a car start down the road. Moments later, I heard, “… sorry, my parents abused me for sixteen years, and I … .” The vehicle then drove past our house, and I was relieved to see Dennis at the top of the driveway. He joined me on the porch, told me which house had been the scene of the disturbance, and explained, “She saw me in the road, apologized, and said something about parents, stepfather, abuse, and child pornography.” Once I had gathered myself, I told Dennis what I was able to make out. Back in the house, I explained things (as innocuously as possible) to Jack, Stella, and Sam, and when we sat down a few minutes later to pray our nightly Rosary, I asked them to include in their intentions the very upset woman who had suddenly broken into our world.

Now, I sit here, still wondering what to make of it all. Those neighbors have lived here longer than we have, but we’ve had almost no interactions with them. While I’d like to dismiss it all as nothing more than the melodramatic and likely untrue ravings of a possibly inebriated and obviously hysterical young woman, I can’t. I know too much. I’ve seen too many online postings from the U.S. Justice Department on arrests of sex traffickers and child pornographers. I have heard the stories of too many victims. I’ve stumbled upon the dark histories of too many well known and respected people with too much power, and I know that human nature never changes of its own accord.

**

Yesterday, I decided that it was time to write what I need to write. Simple as that. So, I can’t tell you where this post is going, and I cannot foresee what will get published here in the future. I like the idea of not promoting my work. It adds to the freedom. No worries about who might be interested in something I write allows me to write.

The distance between Don Quixote and the petty bourgeois victim of advertising is not so great as romanticism would have us believe.  

René Girard

Who tells you what to value? Who creates desires for you?

**

I recently unfollowed a number of people on Instagram, but I re-followed some. Did I fall prey to “cancel culture”? Yes, I admit that I did, and cancel culture is wrong. With this realization, then, shouldn’t I have re-followed everyone? Maybe. Maybe not. I had been wanting to trim down my IG feed for quite some time, because it simply took too long to scroll through. So, like with nearly everything, there are positives and negatives to the action I took with less-than-great intentions. I maintain, however, that such a situation is generally less dangerous than the opposite: that of taking action based on lofty intentions.

One of the Instagrammers I unfollowed was author Steven Pressfield. He started following me after I posted a negative review of his The War of Art. I found that amusing. If I cared more, I’d take the time to find out if he’s still following me, but I doubt he is.

**

One of my current projects is cleaning and reorganizing bookcases, because I long ago gave up on trying to fit all the new purchases onto the shelves, and I will not stop buying books.

Thankfully, Goodwill is once again accepting donations (using silly procedures to “keep people safe,” of course). Nevertheless, I have a venue other than a trashcan for ridding my life and my home of the unnecessary and unwanted. A surprising number of books is finally falling into one or both of those categories, and The War of Art may survive this purge, but that doesn’t mean in will remain on my shelf forever. It also doesn’t mean that other books focused on telling you how you’re doing it all wrong will remain in my home.

Freedom.

**

When Luke was a toddler and got overwhelmed by emotions that caused a tantrum, Dennis and I would bring him back to his senses by asking him questions: “What’s the matter?” “What do you want?” “Are you hungry?” “Does something hurt?” “Do you want to take a nap?” “Do you want to run around?” “Do you want to polish doorknobs?” Yes, that last question got asked more than once. Since we were just trying to get him to focus on something other than the fit he was having, the actual questions didn’t matter much. It was the asking that was important. The asking got him to stop and think, he got interested, and soon enough, he got rational.

Perhaps I don’t think about that strategy often enough. A great deal of humanity is throwing a loud, long, destructive tantrum right now. Does the way back to sanity involve asking questions? I think that it might, and who we turn to with our questions might be even more important that what we ask.