Not my duck, not my bottle

There's something I'm quite sure I must have written about here before, but I can't find it so I apologise if I'm repeating myself tediously. It's just that this evening I saw a bit deeper into it.

We went for a walk, Tony and me, after supper. We only go round the block, and it takes about fifteen or twenty minutes, but that's far enough for us these days. Some of the houses we pass have a habit of putting out, "Free to take", any toys or items of furniture they no longer want. That's all well and good, but I get stressed about it when they put out a really good piece of furniture, nicely made, and I know there'll be a dewfall during the night, or it might come on to rain later, and then the finish on the wood will be spoiled. Why don't they move it on with more care? They could put it on Freegle or the Hastings Give-and-Takery on Facebook. 

This was how, back in the summer, Tony and I temporarily came to have the old coffee table that looked Chinese. Some people in that very same place just put it out "Free to take", so Tony (yes, with his bad back and his foot drop) took the car along the road so he could lug the table up the grassy bank, load it into the car and bring it home; and I polished it up and we put it on the Hastings Give-and-Takery and found it a new home.

Well, this evening they'd put out a chest of drawers. Beautiful, good quality, a lovely piece of furniture. It bothered me (and Tony) to think of it left out all night, now we have the heavy dews of autumn. We talked at some length about going back to collect it, but it was quite large and looked heavy, and our car is very small, and the place is down in a dip with a steep grassy verge to drag it up to the roadside.

Plus we've just gone through all our belongings to eliminate any surplus possessions and been really happy with how calm the house looks now it has just enough and not too much of everything. We have nowhere to put an unwanted chest of drawers, we'd only have to move it on, and our house entrance is up a flight of steps — long story short, we gave up on the idea and left it where it is.

But it made me think again of two stories that always come back to me forcefully when I think about taking responsibility (in this case, for disposal of a chest of drawers). These two stories belong together.

The first is a Zen type of story about a disciple coming for an audience with his Master. The master gives the disciple a bottle with a duck in it, and sends him away with it, instructing him to get the duck out. The young man tries every which way, and just can't do it. So he goes back to the master and confesses his failure and asks him what to do. The master just shrugs and says, "Not my duck, not my bottle."

I loved this story from first hearing it — I received it as being akin to the expression "Not my circus, not my monkeys", about knowing the boundaries of one's responsibility.

But this evening, thinking about the chest of drawers, it dawned on me that (unlike the circus/monkeys saying), the duck/bottle story is about restraint in accepting responsibility. This is important. The lesson for the disciple is about not taking on something unrealistic, too much for you, beyond your remit. 

That chest of drawers was not our duck and not our bottle. It was a pity, but it had to stay where it was. Our neighbours are forever fly-tipping their old junk. If we bring it all home it'll become a second career, and only encourage the practice.

But I said there was a second story that goes with the one about the disciple with his duck in the bottle. 

Again, it's about responsibility, and recognising what is yours to do and where that ends.

A friend recounted it to me.

They worked at a place staffed by volunteers, a sort of spiritual centre. On one occasion, they were walking along the main driveway to the accommodation buildings when they fell in with a young man who had been there as a volunteer. Not a very inspiring individual, neither interesting nor industrious, he had nonetheless been taken on, housed and warmed and fed and given work to do — and now he was tired of it and decided to leave. 

My friend stopped to talk — or, more accurately, listen — and heard his tale of woe and how he was leaving. He had no transport, the place was miles from anywhere, and (crucially) he had no money. 

My friend, ever kind and protective, immediately felt concerned for him, and was on the verge of offering to help him out — give him some money and a lift to the station — when the director of the place drove in through the gates in his Landrover, spotted them there and pulled up to chat. He, too, listened carefully as the now ex-volunteer regaled him with his troubles. 

Thoughtfully, not unkindly, the director said: "Oh, dear. What're you going to do, Jack?"

And that's the thing, isn't it? There are the things that are yours to do, and the things that are not. The director had given the volunteer bed and board and a chance to belong: but he didn't want it. He rejected it.

That was fine. No one blamed him. No one was annoyed with him. But when he wanted to pass on that duck and bottle for someone else to fix, in effect the director simply said, "No thanks. Not my duck. Not my bottle."

As the Tao Te Ching says (Ch.59): "In caring for others and serving heaven, there is nothing like using restraint."

It has taken me a long time to learn this. This evening, I thought that I might finally be making some headway.

Dogs, people, politics, assumptions

 When my children were little kids, we had two dogs. One was a cross-breed — a combination of bearded collie, border collie, labrador and spaniel — and the other was a wolfhound. 

The cross-bred dog only came up to the height of the top of the wolfhound's legs; but, as they say, "It ain't the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog."

When anyone called at our house, the dogs would come to the door with me. Freya (the wolfhound) would just stand there looking calm and interested, but Mary (the little collie-cross) would bark.

And the caller would assume that what had happened was that the wolfhound barked at them.

I think this must have been because they saw a big dog as somewhat threatening, and a barking dog as somewhat threatening, and they clumped them together and categorised them as one threatening thing. They stayed inside their own opinion/perspective/viewpoint, instead of remaining objective enough to notice what was actually happening.

So it is that many people find it difficult to distinguish between facts and opinions. If you can be bothered with it, there's a very good instance of this in a video about British politics that I'll put at the bottom of this post.

The man in it is talking about a hiatus to a proposed change for local political regions. To explain briefly, we had boroughs (relatively small, town-sized regions) and counties, each having their own council — so in Hastings we have a borough council for Hastings and St Leonards, divided into smaller neighbourhood wards each with their own councillor, but we also have the East Sussex County Council. It's all rather tedious because (for instance) the county looks after the roads, but the borough has to deal with endless complaints about the roads and a lot of councillor time is taken up trying patiently to explain to unconvinced residents that they're complaining to someone with no jurisdiction over the problem in question. 

The new proposal from central government is for larger regional authorities, each having a presiding mayor. Many of us in Hastings have been looking forward to this, because our town is very poor (though well-managed) and other parts of East Sussex are a lot richer. We hoped that by joining together with them, we would be part of something better resourced, with size giving us the benefit of streamlined costs: only one set of accountants, auditors, planning consultants, health authorities, etc, and more money to pay them. Our borough councillors consulted the local residents, gave us various options to choose from, publicised the consultation, gave us every opportunity to have our say, and the majority voted for the change to a bigger regional authority.

It's also worth saying that Hastings is quite a hippy place with colourful pagan festivals, a big arts scene, predominantly Green politics, and a heavy emphasis on inclusion — religious, sexual orientation, trans issues, all of that — despite which we have a superb treasurer who is no hippy, has his feet on the ground, and keeps us on a realistic fiscal base that helps us thrive. We voted him in. Hippies are not necessarily stupid.

Now in the video below, using many such words as brilliant, awful, good, bad, etc, the video man is rejoicing that this change to bigger regional political districts has been put on hold by central government.

He says this will save us money — it won't, we've already spent millions because we're well into the transition. He says the people who want the change are anti-democratic and want money and power for themselves, not for the people. Certainly in our borough, this is the opposite of what is the case. He says that all the mayors will be like Sadiq Khan (the mayor of London); well, they will in the sense that they will all be mayors, but they won't necessarily be like Sadiq Khan — we'll get who the majority vote for. He says the mayors will waste money on their own pet project and he cites trans pride processions as an example. But we already have such projects rolling big time in Hastings, and the people seem to enjoy it. We'll probably get less of that from a mayor elected by a wider demographic than our bonkers artsy Green Hastings-world.

In fact just about every single thing the man in this video presents as fact is in actuality his opinion. Most of it, if you look at Hastings, is (in our area at least) demonstrably incorrect.

How intriguing. Because I don't think the man in the video is (intentionally) lying. He speaks with great conviction and I think he is saying what he absolutely believes to be true.

On the one hand this feels somewhat frustrating, but I think it's also quite restful. It's like the Taoist farmer story — "Maybe yes, maybe no" — it means that what is (daily) presented to us as awful, bad, catastrophic, greedy, selfish and evil (private landlords, for example), may not be so at all. 

There is peace in this. It means that, though we should remain vigilant, watching and listening with real attention, it is probably unwise to take to the streets or shout slogans and carry banners. As a wise person once said, "The things we worry about will probably never happen, but things will happen that we didn't expect; so we're probably worrying about the right amount but about the wrong things." 

It also means that it is unwise to clump things together, to create categories (as callers to our house did with our dogs). Things are what they are, very individual, categories are almost meaningless.

Sometimes people categorise me and my husband into one undifferentiated unit. They assume that because we are married, we think the same thing (I know this by listening to what they say to us). And they make class assumptions about us, too. So there is an assumption that we are rich enough to go on holiday because we speak like educated people; that he is interested in Taoism and Celtic spirituality because I am; that we share the same theological outlook and vote for the same political party, and so forth. None of these things is true. 

Something I am really looking forward to is the publication of my husband's first novel. Because he has worked in Christian publishing, was a Green Party councillor for the borough, is supportive of other people even (sometimes) when he doesn't agree with them, and is an irenic spirit who avoids arguments, people think they know him. They don't. My husband is surprisingly hard to get to know. But when he begins to publish the fiction he has been writing, it will be a chance for his true voice, his own voice, to be heard. I wish everyone would write a book, so every voice would have a chance to be heard.

Anyway, this is getting too long so I'll stop now. Here's the video I mentioned. The man in it is hard work but curiously fascinating in his inability to distinguish fact from opinion, and grasp that other people see things differently. Politics, eh?

Sorted

 Comments glitch has fixed itself! Yay!

Comments

 I still can't reply to comments on this blog. Sigh. 

This has happened to me before, actually. In the sidebar here is a link to Beth's blog (BLT in MT). I couldn't comment on her blog for about a decade, and as mysteriously as the possibility of doing so vanished, now it has come back. Same with San's blog (Multicoloured Madness); years went by where I couldn't comment on her blog and then suddenly one day recently I could. And now I can't comment on my own blog.

It tries one's patience, it really does. These modern marvels sent to revolutionise our world — well, they do, but I've come to the conclusion they disable and limit as much as they facilitate and extend.  Back in the 1970s I would ever have known you unless we had physically met (or I had somehow heard of you and been given your address) and we would have stayed in contact by letter. And we all depended on letters so there was an evening post as well as a morning post. And there were no Zoom calls and there was no YouTube and no electronic games, so we came out of our houses and drank tea with our neighbours and there was still Evensong at every church and doesn't it all seem a long time ago.

But now things come and they vanish, out of our control and beyond our understanding, governed by a mad world of robots behind the scenes. And now, I write here, and you have the kindness to come and read what I have written, and comment on it, and I can't even reply to you, and I am angry about that. I have asked the robots what to do and they have advice about how to tinker with the settings of my blog and of my computer and their bright ideas have not worked.

I'll put my mind to it, but this is a time of endings and conclusions, so maybe after all these years it's time to start again elsewhere. If I do, I'll leave a post to let you know.

In the meantime, there were two comments I wanted to leave. I tried repeatedly and could not. So if one fine day you come along here and read the comment section and what I'm going to say appears there about thirty times, that'll be why.

On my post about modesty, Lynda left a comment. Because I'd said I looked at her photo on her own blog, and moved it to my desk top so I could enlarge it and look at her clothes properly, she said this:  

Oh dear, I'll have to be careful what photos I post of myself if people are going to enlarge them!! :))

And she described her own clothes, and then she said:

I really must do a blog post about it...

And I wanted to say — I would love to read that blog post! Please do it. And then I also wanted to say that every time a person leaves the house or opens the front door to someone, it's like an enlarged 3D photo of their self, so no need to worry. 

Waving to you, Lynda. xx

Then just today Krista left a comment on the post I wrote called "Parameters for perimeters", in which she described her wonderful green light that shines through the night and gives reassurance and a sense of presence to her neighbours. 

And I wanted to say — Krista, I think I can see your light shining all the way across the world; thank you for holding it steady.

And to all of you, my friends, thank you for being here and for reading my thoughts and sharing your own. It's such a cheerful thing.

So for the time being I'll wait to see if the comment facility comes back, and in the meanwhile I'll reply to your comments like this. 

If you really want to be sure to stay in touch, remember that you can send me your email address in a comment. All comments come to me to read, I manually and personally publish them, it's not automated. At least something isn't done by robots, thank God. So if you leave a comment with your email address, I will delete the comment and get in touch with you by email, so you can correspond with me as much as you wish. Then we can also exchange street addresses and write to each other in the old-fashioned way on paper, if the fancy takes us — though it's become breathtakingly expensive to send a letter now.

And if all else fails and the possibility of commenting doesn't return to me like a homing pigeon, I'll strike camp here and move to somewhere that works.

Google uh-oh

 The last post I put up here was blocked by the Google robots because they had some kind of unspecified objection to it.

I have tried numerous times to reply to Lynda's comment on my post about modesty, but my comments won't go through.

This kind of thing does seem to be an increasing problem with all the big sites since AI took over the world.

I'll give it a day or two, and if the wrinkles don't iron themselves out I'll set up somewhere else — Wordpress maybe? Anyone got recommendations?