abstract contradictive notions: PAST AND FUTURE ETHICS: With Heart Agape

A woman is walking down the street. Her universe is solid. Her thoughts busy but controlled. Her morning starts with tea and periodicals, every day. Behind her trail the rigid structures of her past decision making, a tessellation formed carefully and completely. Her path is clear in both directions, backwards and forwards.

'a tessellation formed carefully and completely'

source:http://mathworld.wolfram.com/images/eps-gif/DemiregularTessellations_600.gif

She’s an unshakeable woman, and not for lack of being shaken. She sees hardship daily at work. She sees it, enters it into the formula, and calculates the appropriate response. The heat has been shut off in nearly half the units on Avenue B. Bonham Elementary just cut 6 teachers. There are no proposed budget raises for the education sector – or any sector. Crime rates have risen. She has eighty-seven unread e-mails, all urgent, all the same. And at her desk, tea getting cold, periodical set aside, she makes decisions that chip away, slowly and deliberately, at the inefficient cycle that is American Poverty.

Here she sits - successful, moderately affluent, rigorously intellectual. She sees justice in everything, by constant judgment and classification. Her views shift with the circumstances, reason intact. She follows the path of constant resistance; a skeptic. She finds joy in making things orderly, connected, part of a greater whole. But to create unity, she is consistently destroying the individual. She recognizes differences, she recognizes even her own uniqueness, but she continues to lump things – and people - together. Differences are but runs in the perfect cloth of her universe - a tapestry that explains everything, growing at the edges with beautiful and ever intensifying patterns. Complexity grows, disorder fades. The heat gets turned on in unit twenty-seven.

Out for her second biodegradable cup of chai. Metallic ringing tells her that her father is calling. She considers her schedule – does she have time for awkward banter? Irritating questions? Too much time, it turns out.

“Hi Dad.”

“Hello.” A sob, broken. “She’s dead.”

It’s not the call she expected, least of all from him. And in one moment her formula has broken down. She has contemplated the event of her mother’s death before; that she is reconciled with. But her father was not accounted for. One would not call their relationship loving, at least not on her end. Resentful, yes, impatient perhaps, but she never allowed him her sympathy before, and considering it now made her extremely uneasy. How would she deal with this man, this sobbing man, for whom she fostered little respect and less affection? He would need constant attention, the same attention her mother had wasted so much time on. He was a very needy man, incompetent in the most basic of household duties, easy to fluster, easier to depress. She didn’t have time for this. She didn’t have the emotional capacity.

That dull feeling starts welling up in her chest. A precursor to sadness perhaps, the unmitigated sorrow she never gets to feel. And why not? Why now, when she has an excuse to break down, to reach out, empathize in a common situation with a fellow human being (family no less), does she feel nothing?

What causes emotional paralysis?

source:http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/20/Gray784.png

Worse than nothing, she feels the barrier, pressed so hard against that wall she could suffocate. All she has to do is show something, some scrap of love or compassion, pathos – but she can’t. And she traces back to the why, because that’s all she knows how to do.

I was fifteen and I could feel everything. The ills of the world were my passions – everything in my future set aside to solve them one by one. Dred-locked, revolutionary, I felt that the trials of those less fortunate were my trials to bear, oppression mine to defeat. Apathy was the ultimate enemy, ambivalence disgusted me. My motto – never be content.

And then I met him. His passion rivaled even mine (though I definitely had the better dreds). Where I came from a loving, stimulating environment, his had been broken. And so his passion, though just as strong, was somewhat fractured - energy with nowhere to go. His ills were now more important than the world’s. His sadness – unbearable. And so with the selfless love we all contain – agape – I poured everything I had into him. And for awhile I was approaching that contentment I so loathed.

Young romance may seem frivolous to some, but for us it was anything but. We were entrenched. For once we each had someone else to take us seriously – our optimism, our compassion, our grandiose schemes – finally we were sharing them. It was a tumultuous love between tumultuous people – one of those huge life relationships, compacted into mere years. And despite many of my more skeptical, cynical moments, I will never discount what we had because of its scale or age. And that is the hardest to bear.

We talk about a selfless love, spiritual, all-encompassing, divine love – but how many of us experience that? Perhaps we sense some abstract form of it through our religion or our connection with the environment, but to create that love between people is a rare and amazing experience. Once you’ve loved like that, you can never forget human potential for compassion. You can’t forget your own potential, even if it never rears its head again. And so I can’t forget this relationship. I can’t deny that it left me how I am. I can’t deny the potential it showed me.

But maybe I do. To lose a love like that – or rather to give it up – is debilitating. To give everything you have to someone – to be truly selfless in loving someone – well, it can cause you to give up too much for too little. I saw a man suffering. I reached out with all available compassion, all possible love, demanding so little – but perhaps expecting too much. I expected to alleviate suffering. To help him help himself and the others suffering in his life. But sometimes another’s suffering is not in our hands. Sometimes love is not enough.

So I gave up on love, I gave up on his suffering, as he had given up long ago. But it was too late; I’d spent my reserves. The passion I once had was diluted. My old optimism seemed naïve. Love was too painful a concept to appreciate. But ethics – my ethics remained.

At the end of it all, I would still not accept suffering as a fact of life. That would be indulging in my own weakness – a weakness I had learned from him. But the path to alleviate suffering was no longer abrupt, loving-kindness – it was never to be rushed along again. It was cold, calculating, relentlessly driven. It required a steady mind andpatient labor. Most of all, it required constant risk management.

So a life emerged: numb of compassion, withholding of love. But driven to compensate for the one failure that meant the most.

What is life now, in this numbness?

A woman is walking down the street. It’s cold outside, but she feels the residual warmth of the space heater she just dropped off at unit twenty-seven, Avenue B. The home of a student, met working the afterschool program at Bonham Elementary. A new baby brother, a single mother, no heat. But the warmth is there now, and she can still feel it. She passes the café, hands three dollars to the man huddled outside. The city’s budget may be frozen, but hers remains flexible – she chooses which commodities to cut and trade. Her phone rings. Her father – a kind man.

“Hi Dad.”

“Sweetheart, your mom…” A sob, broken.

A sob, echoed.

“I’ll be there. I love you.”

Once she thought she was numb to this kind of pain, this kind of love. Once she thought, it is no one’s right to suffer.

But those thoughts were fleeting. And she entered life again, with heart agape.

Life is nothing in numbness. So I go forward in my actions, I do not run out of fuel, I do not run out of love. There are many ways to apply ethics in our lives. Some ways help reach people most efficiently. Other ways help us reach them directly. When we combine both, keeping in mind all our past and possible future experiences, we can change lives – across the world and across our dinner tables. I plan to apply my knowledge and appreciation of justice, democracy, and social responsibility to a career that alleviates the suffering of a community – a society – at large. But I will never forget the love and compassion that flows through me, though I may try to guard myself against it. I know it is there, and I know it can make a difference in cases where reason alone, where the most complex of calculations, cannot control an outcome. And I will love as if love is limitless.