The Direction of Intention

I took a week off from political commentary and general ranting about the current kakistocracy and my stats took a dive. I derived two conclusions. First, studies ad nauseam show that complaining is much more attractive than satisfaction. If a human being has a bad experience at a Disney theme park they will tell at least 18 people. If they have a good experience they might tell 3. Blame is like candy. It’s the reason fox news is so successful: victimization (blame story) is yummy and a great organizing principle for a club or a cult. Blame is delicious and once eaten, people can’t stop talking about it. It’s a great abdicator-of-responsibility which is why it fits maga and the fox-mind like a glove.

Second, it is a marker of the current era that even the least among us – someone like me – has stats. I have blog stats and weekly screen time stats. The steps I take on planet earth are recorded, compared to previous steps and offered back to me as stats on my health. We moderns locate our successes and failures through numbers. If I felt it important to chase blog stats I’d find it necessary to rant on a daily basis. As Kerri can report, I need no encouragement in that department.

The numbers are useful but the challenge with reducing everything to a number is that it simplifies the complex, it sanitizes the unconscionable. We’ve read that 13 servicemen and women have been killed in the war with Iran. We know that at least 160 school girls were killed by a US bomb during the first days of the war. The number allows us to distance ourselves. Violent death reduced to a stat. I can be outraged at the number while not having to deal with the actual savage death of a school child, let alone a school full of children. Faces and names and hopes and dreams. I’ve been a teacher. What if the 160 students were mine? What if the soldier killed was my son or daughter? Would the number matter?

A number is easier to swallow. Blame is terrific hand sanitizer.

I have a friend who intentionally keeps herself close to the margins. She doesn’t want to sleepwalk through life. Chasing comfort too often cultivates complacency. She wants to be awake. It’s akin to taking a cold shower to wake up. It’s the reason that when we walk our trails I often leave my phone and my stats behind. Kerri draws my attention to the living things, the smallest of buds, the trout lily bowing its head. A field of trout lilies. It’s visceral and wakes me from the numbers. It opens my eyes and ears and heart to the beauty and the inevitable roll of seasons.

It reminds me not to become what I hate, not to reduce myself and others to a data point, not minimize my life to the numbers. It reminds me to create a rich conscious life, to stand in my experiences, eyes and heart wide open and not measure the worth of my days by the number of people who know about it.

read Kerri’s blogpost about TROUT LILIES

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Filed under: Seeing, Two Artists Tuesday | Tagged: artistry, blame, complacency, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, numbers, Reduction, responsibility, sanitize, statistics, story, studio melange, the melange, victimization |