Janet McNeill

<March 24/10>

I just went shopping for a birthday card (yes, some environmental activists would no doubt frown on my “card habit.” It’s a fairly innocuous little addiction, seems to me, compared to some others I can think of).

I get a big kick out of looking at cards because I love laughing – & I came up with the phrase “card therapy” when I discovered some years ago now that I can cheer myself up lickety-split (& have a grand old time to boot) just spending 10 minutes looking at cards. My laughter generally even gets the store staff laughing too. (I’ve said it before & I’ll say it again – I’m a pretty cheap date!)

So, I found a card that made me laugh out loud, & then think some about families. Well. They sure do come in all shapes, sizes & kinds, don’t they?? Every one of them unique, every one of them almost certainly not at all what they appear to be from the outside, looking in.

My own “birth family” was a wee bit on the dysfunctional side. Of course they all are, as we understand now – but when I grew up in the 50’s & 60’s I laboured under the grand illusion that everyone else had it all together. I always felt like an outsider &, I suppose, an imposter – walking around acting as though everything was A-OK, meanwhile holding down the lid on the … confusion … that was my family’s life.

(I was fortunate enough to marry into a family that seemed to me like the very Waltons incarnate – really a very darn fine crowd of people! – & that was very nice & kind of a privilege for me for quite a few years there. Divorce took care of that, in time, although I can say with gratitude that I am still close to a number of very lovely individuals in that family.)

As a result of all this family-related…how shall we say, experience, all my adult life I’ve been a keen observer of this strange human animal called the “nuclear” family. Love & divorce & new relationships & friends’ families: one is endlessly being offered glimpses of the infinite variety of family configurations, our love (& hate) of them, their closeness (or lack thereof), their internal power dynamics… & the degree to which we can each probably be understood by others just by reciting a 5-minute snapshot or history of our childhood/family life.

My own birth family (which has always seemed to me to be pretty markedly dysfunctional, but which according to my sister was not a big deal at all) could be compared to some & seen as almost Waltonesque. (There are some pretty…hmmm….shall we say, off-the-charts families out there!) Compared to others, we look(ed) like full-on disaster. That of course is why I jokingly say it’s all relative. Pun intended…

I guess all this is what has made me crave all my life to be part of a (yes, fictional) “normal” family – one in which everyone gets together semi-frequently for birthdays & Mothers’ Days & Fathers’ Days & Thanksgivings & Christmases & Easters – & don’t all hate one another and, by golly, even mostly like (even love!!) one another.

I haven’t entirely lucked out in that department. Negotiating families of divorce can be quite challenging. Slight understatement here, hmmm? I’ve had more related experience in this regard than a person might strictly care to have had, but…perhaps the less said, the better.

Well.

The birthday card I came across that made me laugh right out loud said, “I was thinking about getting the whole family together to celebrate your birthday” – with a picture of a motley collection of people on the front of the card. You open it up & it says “But then I thought you might want to do something fun.”

It sure tickled my funny bone!!

Clearly, I am not the only person on the planet who doesn’t belong to that mythical “perfect” family, hmmm?

Well. I guess we all “wrestle” all our lives with the peculiarities & particular wounds of our own childhood & family, hmm? I know I continue to do so. I keep getting insights about myself – about my particular neuroses & idiosyncrasies – still! – & every time I get knocked on my butt by a new relationship drama, I learn yet a little more. (It seems a bit like an archaeological dig; one keeps on excavating unexpected things…)

One great lesson I’ve picked up along the way is that, while we don’t get to choose our family (on a conscious level, at least), we can find, & choose, a community – a tribe.

The big thinkers say alienation is the central bedeviling problem of the human race. The only way to beat that is to find a sense of belonging. Our families cannot guarantee us that, unfortunately. Once upon a time, each of us was born into a tribe. Belonging was our birthright in those days, I’m pretty sure.

While finding my own tribe was definitely something I did not set out to do by becoming involved in environmental work 20 years ago, that’s pretty much exactly what happened.

And as I write down that thought, it comes to me that I didn’t just sort of miraculously find the buried treasure under the spot marked X, I’ve been helping build the tribe to which I now so joyfully, gratefully & proudly belong.

I read in the Utne Reader some years ago this statement attributed to Kalle Lasn & Bruce Grierson: “Two centuries of philosophers stand in opposition to the modern American recipe for happiness and fulfillment. You can’t buy your way in. You can’t amuse yourself in. You can’t even expect falling in love to deliver you. The most promising way to happiness is, perhaps, through creativity, through literally creating a fulfilling life for yourself by identifying some unique talent or passion and devoting a good part of your energy to it, forever.”

Helen Keller said, “Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.”

For me, for sure, “following my bliss” has really paid off!! The road has been full of potholes & detours & has even led me off a cliff or two…but hey!

Here I am, now, leading (& loving) this unexpected life – a full, never-dull life adventure for which I am wildly, wildly grateful.

I didn’t (& couldn’t, & can’t) re-create the Humpty Dumpty life I once had (that perfect family, perfect marriage I’d wanted so badly to last forever). Instead, I’ve become a member of a wonderful, wonderful ever-expanding tribe (with members, btw, who are often just as kooky & “dysfunctional” as everything & everyone else on the planet, myself included).

“Perfection” is just an illusion, hmmm?

I know what Kurt Vonnegut would say about it all: “If that isn’t nice, I don’t know what is!”

Janet

‘Quote of the day’ w. this post: “The return from your work must be the satisfaction that work brings you and the world’s need of that work. With this, life is heaven, or as near heaven as you can get.” – W.E.B. DuBois

<April 1/10>

I’ve been doing environmental work for 20 years now. (Before that I did all kinds of other community-oriented volunteer work & was also a full-time Mom/homemaker, & before that I had a brief “career” in corrections & a short stint in the psychiatric world, & before that, I got a B.A. in Psychology at a very nice vine-covered Canadian university.)

What I actually set out to do, as a teen-ager, was “save the world” (we humans sure like to think big, don’t we?) and, as I like to joke, my career seems to have been a bit of a bust. Heh heh.

For sure my life – all the way along – has been one of privilege, although as a child in an unhappy home, “perks” like a big house & Yacht & Golf & Country Club membership didn’t bring the satisfaction one might have supposed. (As an adult looking back now, I can see that, as a kid, I took such privileges for granted. Privilege & entitlement: an interesting topic to muse upon…)

I assume I developed the “save the world” complex because I didn’t (& still don’t) like to see people suffer. Seems as though on this gloriously beautiful & abundant Earth there ought to be enough for everyone. Oh dear – subject for another essay, hmmm? I heard on the radio today of a woman who did not have enough money to bury her stillborn babies. Yesterday I’d heard about Ontario government employees who “earn” (ahem) close to a million dollars a year. Income disparities like that have always made me gag. But I digress…

Okay. Mixed-up childhood, “save the world” complex, a pull to environmental activism, a broken marriage. Meanwhile, an obsessive reader, I’ve gobbled more books about the environmental crisis – & self-help books – than would comfortably fit in a canoe. (An old boyfriend used to say he wanted to be able to put everything he owned in a canoe. Resonates for me somewhat. My books won’t make it, though…)

There have been some mighty outstanding books along the way. Ishmael – An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit and In the Absence of the Sacred – The Failure of Technology & the Survival of the Indian Nations and My name is Chellis and I’m in recovery from western civilization(1) convinced me that the problems of the human race date back to our decision 10,000 years ago to abandon the gathering & hunting lifestyle.(2)

When we stopped living in tribes, things gradually changed. From living with the constant support & encouragement of our fellow humans, we moved gradually toward separation from others. (Nietzsche said, “Sin is that which separates” & that also resonates for me.) “Nuclear” families (love that adjective, eh?) cannot give us what a tribe can.

We evolved to be communal creatures. Creatures who need the company & support & collective help & wisdom of others. We simply did not evolve to function in the individualistic fashion we now take so much for granted (that “Everything is all about ME,” heads-up-our-own-arses lifestyle so wonderfully nourished by the world of advertising & consumption, hmm?).

Okay. So. Life in a nuclear family often sucks. Two parents simply cannot do the job properly (especially if, as is likely, they were improperly nourished in their own dysfunctional families with shoot! Maybe war & dislocation & sexual abuse & violence involved in the mix. Jeez. No wonder parents screw up, hmmm?).

So, mostly, they don’t do so very very well.

A lot of us grow up feeling pretty mighty darn inadequate. To put it mildly. Without the love & affirmation we need & crave, we come to believe (I suggest) on some unconscious level, that “I am not okay. You are okay.”

We put other people up on pedestals – especially celebrities of any & all kinds. As long as they have lots of money & “look good,” we worship them & want to be like them.

And we amass, if we are able (since it’s a very inequitable world we live in, many or most are not able) lots of things. Houses, cars, cottages, boats. Expensive vacations. Etc. Theoretically at least, these things (& experiences) make us “happy.” Often, of course, they don’t do this at all. (In many cases, they just isolate us even more.)

Why? Because we are hollow inside. All that “stuff” we put in just pretty much falls out the other side.

So. What’s missing?

1. Gratitude. Gratitude is – or ought to be – the very basis of our existence. When we are regularly & actively grateful for this very beautiful Earth & the particular blessings of our own life (yes, this may take work & practice; see ‘Gratitude: A How To‘), a major shift gradually takes place inside us. We begin to lay aside customary preoccupations such as greed & envy & endless consumption & comparisons that leave us feeling inadequate. We begin to feel…full. Content. (I only suggest a regular gratitude practice to anyone who wants to be happy or help change the world, though; if you like things just the way they are, better not take it up!)
2. Community. Tribe. Belonging. When we feel we belong – when we feel supported, appreciated & affirmed – well, there’s really no limit to what we can achieve! We also “get” that the stupid game of “S/he who dies with the most toys wins” is not one we’re even vaguely interested in playing. The neurotic game of always doing our best to “look good” also tones itself down considerably.

There is still our self-loathing to deal with, hmm? I think self-loathing runs all too deep in most of us. Mostly unconsciously, I suspect…

This essay was in fact motivated by an attack of my own. I had sort of a personal little meltdown last night. Folks who know me well may suppose my self-esteem is rock solid – & it is relatively firm. But I have my demons, & my “holes,” & I can go down into a Very Deep Pit(3) just like anyone else.

The world is in quite a state, hmm? I’m not even sure why I keep up all this infernal writing. I should probably be off somewhere constructing an off-grid house, & gardening, & hunkering down to get ready for the apocalypse that seems to be heading fairly rapidly in our direction.

I suppose I hope that, the more I write & the more I help encourage others to pay attention, the bigger the tribe of us actually caring & doing things there will be. And the more of us behaving like the members of a caring & supportive tribe there are, the saner, perhaps, the outcome will be.

And the more like a party! I’m always up for a good party as much as anyone!!

Janet

P.S. Since I drafted this essay, I picked up 2 books by Alice Miller: From Rage to Courage – Answers to Readers’ Letters & The Body Never Lies – The Lingering Effects of Hurtful Parenting. Hooey! This is the psychotherapist whose brilliant insight “The way we were treated as small children is the way we treat ourselves the rest of our lives” rocked my own little world when I heard it. You may want to visit her Web site at www.alice-miller.com Ms. Miller doesn’t write about the environmental crisis or the pivotal need for the things I am always emphasizing so much (gratitude & belonging or community), but she sure does help us understand essential lessons about the roots of our individual (& thus societal) neuroses/psychoses.

‘Quote of the day’ w. this post: “People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning of life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re really seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.” – Joseph Campbell, “The Power of Myth”

<July 18/09>

Now, I’m not a psychological expert of any kind. I did get a B.A. in Psychology back in pre-history (1974), when really very little was yet understood about the human brain.

There’s plenty I don’t know about human psychology – don’t really understand – but I am a keen and constant observer of human nature – and I read a lot, think a lot, and have the occasional “Aha!” moment.

I believe there are two levels to our control freak-ism – the very, very personal, and the more global, shall we say.

I’m pretty convinced that the genesis of our tendency toward control freak-ism goes back to the time in human history, widely said by scholars to be about 10,000 years ago, when we chose to abandon the tribal lifestyle – the life of gatherers and hunters – and began to practice settled agriculture. Several books introduced this idea to me: In the Absence of the Sacred – The Failure of Technology & the Survival of the Indian Nations (Jerry Mander, Sierra Club Books, 1992); Ishmael – An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit (Daniel Quinn, Bantam/Turner, 1992); and My Name is Chellis & I’m in Recovery from Western Civilization (Chellis Glendinning, Shambhala, 1994). (I highly recommend all 3,btw.)

In doing so, we detoured away from millennia of placing our faith in the Earth/Universe to provide for us (which the Earth/Universe was so generously doing), and decided to “take control” of things. In retrospect, it now seems to a lot of us, I think, that this was a very, very problematic choice.

Abandoning the tribal lifestyle has had many unfortunate and no doubt unintended consequences (I love that phrase: unintended consequences; life is full of them, hmm?), to put it rather mildly. Separating ourselves from Nature – and from each other and our tribal ways – has been nothing short of disastrous.

That’s the global piece.

So now we all have 10,000 years of a control mindset wired into us – into our brains and our genes and our culture and our guts.

Bringing it down to the more personal level, many of us on the planet grew up in families in which dysfunctionality was rampant; is it not so?

There are/were alcoholic parents, parents who abandon/ed us in one form or another, mistreat/ed us, sexually abuse/d us, visit/ed violence upon us, berate/d us constantly – and we wind up/wound up very damaged in a startling variety of ways. If our childhood was very chaotic, unpredictable and out-of-control, as adults we tend to have an intense need to control our circumstances – our emotions, our surroundings, the people around us, and so on. (Even the appearance of our lawns! To the point of being willing to use poisons on them to “subdue” weeds. Sheesh!)

It’s not so surprising, is it? We want to somehow right the wrongs that were done to us, and so we become control freaks – to a greater or lesser degree. We want things to be predictable. No more out of control stuff, please, we are saying, hmm?

It’s a coping strategy, pure and simple. It doesn’t tend to work terribly well, of course, given that the very nature of life is to not be controlled or controllable. So it becomes a vicious cycle. The more we try to control everything around us, the more out-of-control things seem to become. And on and on we go, around and around, making ourselves (and the people around us) miserable, sick, and maybe even crazy.

Control freak-ism is kind of a losing strategy, you might say, hmm?

It often seems to take a personal disaster of some sort to make us see that our excessive need for control is causing us more problems than it solves. (Been there!)

When life throws an unexpected curve ball our way – especially one of rather large proportions (and Life seems to positively delight in doing so!) – and life as we’ve known it is shattered, often light begins to dawn. We see the illusory nature of the control freak-ism that has so limited us, and we begin to see that a generous Earth/Universe is there to support us, quite without our trying to always be the Great Big Sheriff of this, that & the other thing. We let go and, as it were, the Earth rises up to greet us.

It’s all quite magical, really.

I find all of it very, very poignant. Tragic, but poignant. So much of human endeavour and our human frailties (and worse) can drive us right around the bend, almost – but when we come to see that underneath all the nonsense we are really quite innocent creatures – innocent, but very, very damaged and hurt; well, it helps, somehow, doesn’t it? It certainly helps bring up compassion, if nothing else.

I’ve heard that some of the major writers (being terrible with details, I can’t remember who) have pinpointed alienation as the key human problem or issue. I think they’re right. A word I would twin with it is abandonment. So many of us feel we were abandoned in one or many ways by our parents (and we were, we were) and/or by spouses/partners along the way (we were, we were) – and this comes down through the generations, and Heaven help us all, we then pass it on down to our own children, one way and another; tragically, tragically, this is so.

We’ve all felt abandoned/alienated for 10,000 years, so how could things be otherwise??

We human beings evolved to be loved and looked after and cared for by a whole tribe of people, whom we in return love, look after and care for.

How then could we feel anything other than abandoned and alienated in a world that tells us to get by on our own, more or less – or in the care of a very small number of people, some of them too damaged themselves to do anything but pass along their hurts and pain and damage?(1)

It’s all very sad – nay, tragic – and so poignant to realize that we are all in the same darn boat. We’re all damaged – to greater and lesser degrees – and we live in a world – an industrial economy that, as Wendell Berry has said, “thrives by damage.”

Healing is always possible, however. It is human nature to change/grow/evolve. It may very well be that we have let the sickness go on too long, and our condition (as a species) is terminal – but at least as individuals, we can turn ourselves around (only if we truly want to, of course. That is a choice we make, and choice is key, key, key in human endeavour…).

Now. All of this is just my opinion. None of it is scientific fact, and you can’t put any of it under a microscope or conduct a scientific experiment to prove (or disprove) it.

As Einstein once said, “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted, counts.”

It seems to me like truth. Make of it what you will, hmm?

Janet

P.S. The essays ‘Control Freaks Anonymous’ and ‘Ditching the 2 x 4’s’ are also about the perennially important subject of control – which I see as the central issue/dilemma of human endeavour, pretty much… You can find those essays in the blog Index. I also wrote another essay on the same day as this one. It’s called ‘Out of Control,’ & I will post it eventually. It’s considerably more personal and more passionate than this one, & I’m just not quite ready to post it yet.

Isn’t it neat how we keep learning more and more about ourselves as we get older? I’m 56 and still getting to know myself – having insights about myself all the time. I guess it’s a life-long deal, hmm??

I sort of put something together for myself the other day (I ought to add too that it was twigged as the result of something someone had said to me; in other words, as a result of conversation – that great unpredictable, magical phenomenon that ties us all together and makes us all so much smarter than we are all on our own…).

Now, the “reasons” for my becoming an environmental activist are numerous, and there are some “smoking guns” or rather obvious things (e.g., the way the lake I lived on and swam in as a small child became “polluted” and un-swimmable by the time I was 6).

There may even be things in my genetic make-up that added to the inevitability of my becoming an activist.

But I think what happened to me as a child (in addition to what’s already been mentioned) is that I always felt kind of like an alien – an outsider. My family was a tad…dysfunctional, shall we just politely say – and I of course assumed (as we children of the 50’s & 60’s did) that all the other families had it all together. We were the only oddballs – imposters, essentially – and between that and the other things (genetic endowment, my father’s composting and abhorrence of waste, and a pivotal experience I had as a 14-year old in Barbados) – what grew up in me was a very potent “save the world” complex.

In the first part of my life, this took the form of wanting to do social work – social service-type work. Once I’d had my children (with whom I stayed home as a full-time homemaker in the early 1980’s) and spent several years focused on motherhood and locally-focused community (volunteer) work, I seemed to hear a “call” to environmental work.

What came to me the other day was simply that my “save the world” complex was nothing more than some sort of powerful pull out of myself – my own puny little life – and into work that was/is a whole lot bigger than myself.

In other words, years and years before I read and then really understood that human beings spent most of our history living in small groups(1), highly tied to our fellow tribe members, I discovered in a not-really-conscious way that I needed to be part of something “bigger than myself.”

I never wanted to have a job or career just for the sake of making money. I wanted to help – to be immersed in work/a career that “mattered.”

And of course, you see, I’ve had utterly fantastic experiences all the way along! I always-always-always get far more out of my volunteer (and paid work) endeavours than I put in, or than I anticipate at the start. So the energy to keep on with them keeps recycling itself, over and over and over…

It also simultaneously brings new friends, experiences and a sense of community – and so, while the path of my life has detoured way off any “plans” I had made for it, it’s all been quite surprisingly grand and wondrous!

I guess I just want to share with readers the insight that it may often be the lives lived outside the “lines” – or out at the borders – or off the 9-5 treadmill – that may provide the biggest rewards and satisfactions.

Feeling part of something vastly bigger than ourselves is what we all crave, if I’m not very much mistaken…

Janet

P.S. Why Am I an Activist, Part I was posted on March 29/09. You can find it in the blog Index.

P.P.S. Nietzsche said, “Sin is that which separates,” and I think that’s an assertion worth pondering on….