Running from or running to …

I am not sure where I picked this up from, or from where I picked this up

[Nope, still ending my phrase with a preposition, but what can you do, rules are to be learnt and then broken.  I remember our Sensei explaining that one had to learn to do the katas and moves the way they were taught, and then, once we had mastered the lesson, we could make it our own.  Kind of like learning to cook and then suddenly not needing a recipe.]

but one of the early life rules we stumbled upon that must occasionally be broken, like when being attacked by a swarm of bees, is to make sure when you make a big life change, or indeed, even some everyday choices, that you are moving towards something positive and not just running away from something negative.

It was probably that loathsomely correct Dr Stephen Covey, who’s 7 Habits of extremely annoying people included the “clean and green” idea that we used with our kids [who no longer perform chores, other than removing small green pieces of paper from our wallets, leaving them nice and clean] to pretty good effect.  If, for example, you ask a 6 year old to clear the table, get them to clear the whole thing, and don’t start getting complicated, and rejecting items. The green comes from Dr Covey trying to get his teenage son to mow the lawn, and somehow the concept is eluding him, and finally Dr Covey points to a neighbour’s perfect lawn, and says, “Make it look like that, clean and green.”  [I am paraphrasing, as we read the book a long time ago, and our habits have gotten a little dirty, like monks gardening.]

But he also pointed out that you can get lost in the small stuff and forget to plan for the stuff that really matters.  He used a cool example, with a jar and sand representing the stuff we feel we have to do, everyday, and bigger rocks representing big things like relationships and travel.  If you put the sand in first, you cannot jam in the rocks.  But if you put in the rocks, you can pour the sand around them and it all fits in, ticket-boo.

Back to running from versus inching to, I remember a good friend from high school, and I use the term advisedly, who moved back and forth from Toronto to Vancouver, and it was always to get away from problems.  But they seemed to follow her, and if she had only waded through Conrad’s Lord Jim, she would have seen the difficulty.  As some clever fellow or gal explains at this convenient website,

We are confronted [in Conrad’s Lord Jim] with evidence of people’s questionable, bad, and just plain nuts behavior every day. Entire media empires have been built on people behaving shamefully (we’re looking at you, Real Housewives). And YouTube has made it so that no social faux pas or furious rant goes unnoticed.

So what does all this have to do with Lord Jim? Well, Joseph Conrad‘s novel is a meditation on shame, disillusionment, and what it means for the community and the individual when a disgraceful act is committed. Our 24-hour news cycle and live-blogging culture might make it harder for bad behavior to go unnoticed compared to times of yore, but the issues surrounding reputations, rumors, and secrets are nothing new. Jim may not have to combat viral videos and instant replay, but he’s subject to the age-old tendency to gossip and never let a scandal die out quietly.

But Jim’s behavior isn’t so much offensive as it is cowardly. It goes against established ideas of what “gentlemen” (or white British men of a certain social station) should be. Lord Jim doesn’t just ask us to think about the impact of bad behavior; it also asks us to consider why certain behavior is considered scandalous to begin with and what that can tell us about the society that’s doing the judging.

[Whoever wrote that gets a bit iffy with the white British men thing, since what the anti-hero of the novel does is abandon his crew mates during a shipwreck, hardly only an act of cowardice if you are a white British male.  That is one of the reasons I left academia, the idea that anything  that came from a white male was suspect, even presumably the Magna Carta.]

Now this is a kind of terrible example, as I am not suggesting running away from egregious acts of shameful behaviour.  It is best to avoid committing those, and if you have then you had best fess up and start cleaning up the mess.

But if you can plant an oak tree now, then do, rather than lamenting all the unplanted oaks of the past.  Easy to say and hard to do, I know.  But it is a question that must be answered, are we running away or running to?  And what if the goal is foggy?  Then incremental change, always the best kind if possible, can still be implemented.

So have a wonderful Woden’s day, and don’t do anything he would, pretty much, or you might have some ‘splaining to do, and need a fairly good exit strategy, which is both a running away and a running to, and since I am running on, I shall make it my exit strategy too, and with a preposition finish up.