“Waterskiing on the Congo and Kouillou rivers is a popular sporting activity in peacetime.”
Source: From an actual travel site, http://www.wtgonline.com/data/cog/cog.asp, as posted on the web as of 16 October 2005.
Dysfunction is the word. What it is, is the question.
In the United States, and perhaps elsewhere, resources for self-help are available by the heap. Overcoming dysfunction is the under-belly of all of the self-help material, at least, so we say.
We think the urge to overcome dysfunction, to become functioning, is sound—it is the equivalent, however, of being asked to vote in favor of “motherhood”. It is hard to imagine a situation where a nay vote would make sense.
The source of dysfunction, not the yearning to overcome it, must be correctly enunciated. Most of us, until now, would be quick to nominate members of our immediate and extended families for attribution, to explain away abiding personal limitations and addictions. If we can work on ourselves, maybe the cycle of dysfunction can be broken.
Dysfunction is inherent in Nature, not in families per se. Nature, the context which contains all people the world-around, is for the most part, nurturing. Randomly, the succor of Nature can turn very cruel. The earthquake in Pakistan which has marooned thousands above the winter snowline with no shelter, the mudslide in the Philippines covering children and teachers with thirty feet of debris—from which they instant message and email to the observers above ground who lack the tools to free them, the Tsunami of 2004, the hurricanes of 2005—all of Nature, and each event wildly traumatic. How does one define functional behavior following these events?
If a mother or father were to behave as randomly with as much indifference to those caught in the moment—bingo—we would call this behavior abusive, dysfunctional, and maybe criminal. The trauma which perpetuates dysfunction is all about us. We learn dysfunction from Nature: It is nurture coupled with random acts of cruelty. It has always been so.
Eating disorders, addictions of all stripes and variety, and abuses which are mental, emotional and/ or physical, are all derivative of something very old and very entrenched in our experience, not necessarily, in our being. We have never known a time in this place, save for the Eden story, when it was otherwise. The Edenic world, if it must be acknowledged as prequel, is quite removed from the experience of anyone we are likely to meet in this lifetime.
Even the trauma of serious Illness is of Nature.
What we would like to suggest for today’s blog, is the following reflection: Valerie and I are in our early 50s today. Our frame of reference has been shaped since attending high school in the late 1960s in the San Fernando Valley of Southern California. We are simply another pair of voices intrigued with the context of our life’s experience, and wondering, like a zillion others precedent to us, and many zillion, hopefully, who shall come after, how it is we are here in this place? We have to declare ourselves—we are two people who find this place endlessly wonderful and humbling. While we have never been elsewhere as sentient beings, we are wildly and comfortably totally co-dependent with this place, this planet.
If dysfunction is of Nature, our co-dependence with the planet must surely follow. Co-dependent relationships may betray a reality of connectedness which is not negotiable. Co-dependencies may be matters to be celebrated first, if they are to be overcome at all.
When the quake roars from the interior throat of the earth, we do not consider counseling or self-help; we shudder, worry and remain in place until the fearful moments pass. The volcano, the hurricane, the tornado, even the tsunami, while they are terrible, it never occurs to us that there is a healthier venue for our lives. We curry the dysfunction of having to live, on some level, in fear that our foundation in this place will be upset by Zeus or the elements. This may explain why so much dysfunction is observable in the daily lives of people everywhere—it is the way we stand in relationship to Nature, let alone one another. It does not matter that Cal Tech can explain it away, or that MIT has an algorithm which faithfully reduces the behavior to mathematical function. Father Time and Mother Nature are scary parents. It is our relationship with the planet, and its a priori status as prequel to us, which defines where this blog, the Avarice Fellowship, begins. More soon.
