The Foreboding Frontier

 I am writing this on a Sunday night, and have been watching a channel called "The Farmer's Truth" on YouTube.  This channel is a riveting collection of stories about young kids who have been cast out of either group homes or foster homes, and then they find out they had some curious inheritance that changes their lives.  I am not sure if the stories are based on true-life situations or if they are complete fiction, but they do have an inspirational quality that will keep a person interested.  Watching these made me think of my own situation over the past few years - a divorce, followed by the death of both my parents, and then after completing a doctorate I was thrown out of my house and thrust into inner-city Baltimore although I also landed my first full-time teaching position that paid me the most salary I have ever received.  Although most of the dust of this earlier shifting of my life has settled, I am still sorting out a lot right now and watching those stories sort of connected with me.  Of course, it also made me rely on God a lot more than I used to, as I have learned about how important faith is.  It seems your faith is tested when you are hanging on a precipice, and mine surely was.  Although I believe the worst aspects of the experience are over, there are still things to sort out even now.  For instance, I am rethinking my position at the school I work at now for a variety of reasons, but mostly because I see a wind shift there and feel my season there is about to end.  That means I have other offers to consider, and the lines are set and the hooks are baited - I just have to wait on the big one to bite now.  That fishing analogy made me think of a dream I had a couple of years ago, and I will discuss that now. 

About two and a half years ago, when things were starting to look worrisome in our final year at the old place in Hagerstown, I had a dream one night.  I was fishing in this lake next to a cabin, and I remember catching this huge fish that looked like a muskie or something, and I was so excited about that.  When I talked to some friends and did some research on what a large fish is in a dream, I was told it meant that a big opportunity of some sort was about to happen.  In a way, that kind of did happen when I got the contract and offer to work at this school I am at now.  But, was it the end game, or was it just a bridge?  That is one of many unanswered questions I still have as my life seems to be taking some interesting directions.  Ultimately, it is about doing what God wants me to do and to go where he wants me to go, and I don't think my two years here in Baltimore were an accident - God had me here for a reason.  But, I also feel like it was temporary, as in all honesty I have felt like a proverbial fish out of water since I have been here - there are days this city seems like a foreign country to me, and the workplace even more so at times.  I have had this feeling of urgency telling me it is only a short season here, and what that means remains to be seen in all honesty.  However, I will be documenting what happens here as it unfolds, as at this point I know about as much as anyone else does in all honesty.  That leads me to a few other observations. 

Being on the edge of a new frontier, whether it is literal or in an allegorical sense in life, is both exciting and scary at the same time.  You feel impatient about what is ahead, but also scared - a lot of "what if" questions start to pop up.  Over the years, even as a very young child, I have always been a person who likes to plan ahead, and in all honesty it has helped me to survive this far in life.  I always feel like I need an exit strategy out of a situation if one is needed, and I begin to explore those options.  And, that leads me to discuss something a bit morbid but kind of how I thought as a kid.

I have told my story of growing up poor in Kirby many times, and there are some details I wanted to touch on that shaped how I deal with situations I face.  When I was a kid in Kirby, I was very poor - my mom was single then, she didn't work, and had it not been for a $100 child support check from Dad every month and SNAP benefits, we probably would have starved then.  It was even more complicated in that Mom was a drinker - she began to drink more heavily a year before we moved to Kirby, and it created a situation that was not the best for me.  Mom was never abusive to me at all, so please don't assume that - as a matter of fact, she was often the opposite in that she only got involved in my life only if it was completely necessary.  So, I mostly raised myself in a lot of the time, learning to cook for myself, clean, and do other more self-sufficient things.  And, I also read a lot - I was really good in school then (except for my first experience in 5th grade, where I got a bit apathetic due to the situation i was in then), and a lot of what I read inspired me in some interesting ways.  One of the books I had "inherited" was a hunting encyclopedia that used to belong to my grandfather but Mom had grabbed after she and my grandfather had a falling-out at around the time I was 9 years old.  I found that old hunting encyclopedia (which had been published in the 1960s and was a large green hardbound book) to be fascinating, especially in the construction of duck blinds I read about in there.  While a seasoned hunter saw a duck blind as a rudimentary utilitarian structure used to stalk prized waterfowl, I looked at a structure like that as potential.  Here is where it gets weird now, because I used duck blind schematics in an old hunting encyclopedia as an idea for an exit strategy based on a morbid thing Mom did when she was drinking.  Let me explain.

When Mom got really sloshed, she would talk some crazy stuff - it wasn't bad necessarily, but it was scary for a young kid.  She would say she was going to die, and when she did I would have to go to my dad's, which I really did not want to do.  I had stayed for six months after my 9th birthday with Dad and my stepmother, and to be honest I didn't feel they valued me for who I was (that would be proven right later, but that is a whole other story).  So, I made a plan to leave my house if Mom did die, and secretly bury her somewhere so no one would know, and I was planning on striking out on my own to create a place I would live as a sort of hermit until I came of age.  Of course, at that age, I was not thinking about the importance of school, a career, or anything else - it was bare survival mode in all honesty, and when you are thinking like that, you are not thinking the long-term but rather the immediate need to find safety.  Looking back on that now, it was silly, as Mom was just drunk and passed out then and not dying, and indeed Mom would not pass away until I was 52 years old and definitely an adult with my own life by then.  However, I often think about how I used to think then, and maybe there is something in what I was letting my imagination go wild with then.  Kids don't have imaginations about things like that without a reason behind it, and maybe I need to do something to explore that reason - definitely would need a life coach or something to sort all that out!  These days, my mind works overtime so I don't have the time I would like to really reflect on this stuff, and I want to wax a little philosophical now. 

I have been reading through Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper's seminal book, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, and came across something of interest in it that caught my attention.  What I have been discussing here, as well as all the sorting out of old memories and other things, is what Pieper calls in his book "intellectual labor."  He notes on page 40 of this book that the idea of "intellectual labor" has its origins in three different theses:

1.  The view that all human knowing is accomplished exclusively in the manner of discursive activity.

2.  The view that the effort that goes into thought is the criterion of its truth. 

3. "Intellectual work" vs. "intellectual worker," which he describes further as the dichotomy between work as a contribution to society, and the worker as functionary (albeit a specialist) who is nonetheless bound to the function of his or her work. 

What these miss are something important - "intellectual labor," as Pieper correctly theorizes, reduces imagination and creativity to a marketable commodity, only measured by its value to the "greater society."  This is problematic, as it then radically redefines the individual not in terms of the Imago Dei, but rather as just "more evolved" than someone whom the theoretician sees as having more value than another with "less" creative value.  That is social Darwinism, and thus is heretical, and it turns imagination and creativity into products of subjective value, subjective to those who hold power.  Dr. John Crosby notes in his book The Selfhood of the Human Person on page 106 that exclusivity turned outward to other beings - in this case relating to the idea of "intellectual work" - creates something called "bad transcendance," which essentially elevates the exclusivity of one over everyone else and viewing the exclusivity of others as unimportant and even contemptuous.  This leads to elitism, and is the sin of bigotry against others based on externals.  This is also what spawns evils such as racism and genocide, because if you start to diminish the selfhood of others, it makes it so much easier to treat them as parasites and inconveniences rather than as fellow human beings.  You see this on the political landscape today with the extreme - or "woke" - Left as well as the extreme - or "woke" - Right, the former being encapsulated by David Hogg, Greta Thunberg, and the Antifa crowd, while the latter is espoused by ding-a-lings like Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson.  In reality, both of these "wokes" are one and the same, and I watched a video by Evangelical apologist Melissa Dougherty that showed how similar these two extremes really are, and it is scary.   One thinks that White men are the ultimate evil, and the other thinks Jews are, but both are ultimately equally racist and elitist.  While I didn't mean this to turn into a political analysis, it goes in line with some things I have been listening to and watching this past week.  Also, it was a rabbit trail that now leads back to where I was going.

When one faces a new frontier, you begin to assess the toolbox of things you have accumulated mentally over the years, a process Crosby calls recollection in his book.  Recollection is necessary, and often it can jar us back to the person we should be in the first place, especially as we think about what drove us as kids in our imaginations.  Some of us had very active imaginations as kids, and I would definitely fall into that category.  This is why over the years I have been meticulous in my personal record-keeping - I save obituaries, I have copies of every church bulletin and other documentation I have kept over the years, and I keep journals in which I write down memories I recall, dreams I have, and even daily activities - those journals are the reason these posts exist too.  If someone manages to chronicle my life story in future generations, I plan on having a rich reservoir from which to draw.  There are those times - the "leisure" Pieper and others talk about - when you have to go back and revisit those memories, and often in them you can find an answer you didn't realize you had for yourself.  Some of it will sound crazy - the imaginations of a 10-year-old can be a bit colorful to say the least - but if you know what you are looking for, it will reap its own rewards.  I probably should do that more myself, but we also fall into the trap of the sin of acedia, which is what mere "intellectual work" as a mere "worker" leads to - the act of busyness will become an idol in itself.  I admit I am guilty of that, but not of choice - life and the responsibilities of it make it the quintessential Western vice.  The corporate world in particular has choked life out of people, and a lot of rich creativity has died the death in the puddle of obscurity because of it.  It's a scandal that needs more exposure and societal reform to fix, and in due time that may happen.  But, until it does, we wage a type of spiritual warfare - our unique creative being against the wall of acedia society has built, and we are the laborers who mortar the bricks in that wall without even willing or knowing it.   Any rate, we perhaps need to be less busy and more contemplative, and often it takes facing that "new frontier" to remind us.  God does work in mysterious ways after all.

I know some reading this are going to think I was a somewhat disturbed child due to the thoughts I shared, but here's the thing about that - my imagination, as does that of every other human being on the planet, is shaped by the environment we are in, and that environment is often not of our making but we are in it due to circumstances beyond our control.  Imagination, dreams, and other things serve as coping mechanisms to deal with those situations, as a person could truly go insane otherwise.  As I have said before, adversity stinks like fermenting manure, but it is a rich ground to fertilize greatness too.  Some of the most brilliant minds in history, as well as the most innovative, were birthed out of an adversity that fueled the imagination.   Keeping that in mind, let's not be so quick to dismiss an idea that may sound "crazy," or that odd dream we have on occasion - there may be a nugget in that somewhere. 

I wrote earlier this week than I normally would, as I usually wait until mid-week to share thoughts.  However, this has been sitting on my mind for a few days, and another aspect of imagination is that any idea - even if it is outlandish - deserves to be documented and re-examined at some point.   On that note, thanks again for visiting, and will see you next time.