Fri 27 Dec 1996 21:15
did not get much exercise today, but I have think I have got the
desire to think out of my system. I will go on reading certain things,
and trying to figure certain things out, but not really sure of my self.
My thoughts are disorganized, and do not usually cohere well. I wish I
knew what I were doing and that all my thoughts related to my goal.
I think I have important things to do, but I don't know what they are in detail. Well, Back to work,
love,
Colin
.
Thu 26 Dec 1996 19:03
[UTOP.DOC]
Utopia
Hey Rebecca, I like to write to you-- That, and that I've been thinking
about a lot of stuff make these especially long, and perhaps tedious,
but I hope not too tedious. Also, I have the time to do this.
My routine these past two days has been to get up and write you, then
go out exploring the stream I have been exploring, then to come back
and work on stuff. I've decided not to read any more until I finish
getting the stuff published I want to get published, one reason is that
I can submit my Aesthetic Experience paper to an undergrad philosophy
journal by the 15th.
It's good you got a 4.0 in the Islam class-I am relieved I did not too adversely affect your performance.
Yesterday I had a lot of fun. I found some kids' stories I read when I
was little ("I can read" books). I was thinking I'd bring back a few
and we could read them, only the best. There's a good kids' library at
the U and maybe we can research kids' lit a little at a time.
I finally left the house and was gone a long time. It is so incredibly
nice to have found this stream that I can walk/run/explore along, so
for the most part I don't see cars. It is a sort of long thin "green"
space winding throughout suburbia. It connects a few parks and goes by
a few swim clubs, a lot of huge rich people's houses, and the campus of
a rich kids' private K-12 school with a huge and beautiful campus. It
is very muddy though. I saw a red fox with a white ended tail, and a
family of white tailed deer, one with antlers. The deer are nice
because they keep the thorny brambles down and make paths along the
stream. I also like that there are occasionally people around, and the
backs of a lot of big houses to look at, and it's nice to be along a
stream. It was 60 degrees F almost all day yesterday, very warm, and
humid too, so that water would condense on the needles of pine trees,
and sprinkle down.
I found this one swim club, closed for the winter, with a road about a
mile long through an un-built-up valley finally ending at a main road.
There were tons of crows. It was cool to find a place with such a long
driveway. The only people on the road were a girl with two dogs and a
runner.
At the club I found the covered outdoor area of my dreams. It has
comfortable wooden benches along the edges and some picnic tables in
the middle as well as some strong wooden tables which could be moved
near the benches on the edges. The roof is sloped and overhangs the
edge of the shelter so that rain is less likely to get on the people
sitting around the edge. It was so nice, and in such a
beautiful/peaceful (relatively undisturbed by internal combustion
engines) I rested there for a while.
I was thinking about telling stories, and education (I had just explored that school), and then I saw that deer family.
Anyways, I had my goal of encouraging sustainable living, and I was
thinking about what is sustainable, and the idea that some people
reproduce and some don't. But sustainable living involves at least a
minimum of reproduction. Oh I know what it was.
I saw this monster house, huge! With a back lawn the size of football
field (what a waste), and there was a kid and a grandpa or someone out
there. And I was thinking, what would anyone do with such a huge house?
Is there any reason for something like that? And then I thought it
funny how a lot of rich people tend to not have many kids, while poor
people have a lot sometimes, yet the rich people have these huge
houses. And I imagined a rich person having a big family living there
with mom's and dad's parents, a few other relatives, a bunch of kids. I
also imagined one of those stories where a rich person takes
their big house and starts an orphanage, and I was wondering if that
might be fun.
I thought it might be fun, but it didn't really solve the problem, I suppose. There would still be more orphans.
I guess I started thinking about if I could "raise" kids, and I started
imagining it. Oh, and I wanted to ask you did your grandparents have to
pay for the kids they adopt? Anyways, I couldn't imagine it. But, I was
thinking, what if I had some help, not just one person but more.
Then I got annoyed (again) at this two adults/ one house, one family
image that we get somehow. Earlier I had been talking about how I don't
think I would want to live in a house with just one other person. I
think you have a good situation for yourself, in fact, close to the
best (maybe, what do you think?) where you're living now. Maybe the two
adult/house thing comes from looking at birds, or kings and queens, but
most people are neither of those. We live best where we have a fairly
small, close community that we like to be in.
So, I began to realize that there might be a sustainable ideal way to
live & include raising kids. Helen and Scott Nearing co-authored a
book, "Living the Good Life," which focused on sustainablity. Yet it
involved living in the country with lots of space for every family. I
think this it is a problem to encourage the idea that each family needs
its own large amount of space. This ecourages continuing development of
rural places and the spread of the sub-division disease. It also was a
very sort of isolated way of life, although they had a lot of visitors,
but I don't think that isolation appeals to most people. Secondly, they
did not raise kids on their place, which doesn't mean that they could
not have done that and lived the way they did, but things would have
been different if they had. Moreover, a society is not sustainable if
it does not maintain some level of reproduction.
Earlier, when considering what to do with myself, I considered people
like Tesla, who live for their work and Ideas, and pass on their ideas.
These people may be more prolific than the most ardent mormon or
catholic. What would it be to consider all the people in the world your
children, and to devote one's self to in some small way raising them?
Where you pass on your ideas rather than your genes. I think it's
Dawkins who calls these things "memes." For some reason this didn't
seem too appealing to me, but neither did the alternative. I still want
to do that, but that is not all I want to do. However, the idea (from
the Happiness book) is that "you can have anything you want, but not
everything you want." I don't think that means limit yourself to a
single goal, but realize what can happen if you don't.
So, I was thinking, how would it go if I and another had a kid, a baby.
I thought I would at least be around half the time, until the baby did
not have to be around mom all the time, and we could each take
care of the baby half-time. I thought it would suck being alone with
one (or more) very little kid with no one to help me out. How could we
work it so there would always be two adults around when kids were
around? Get the grandparents? no.
So I imagined four people who loved eachother somehow working this
thing out where there could always be two adults around when small kids
were around, and two adults doing what was needed to support the group.
Certainly the two taking care of the kids could also get some work done
during that time. My goal was to find a way where both partners of a
couple could be involved in nuturing kids yet not drop out of their
more cerebral (or whatever) career.
I am reminded of my Aunt's friend on Bainbridge Island who was working
in Physical therapy before her kid, and now she stays home (and has two
dogs) she does very much like being with her kid, in fact, it is almost
spiritual, and a very incredible time. She did lament, though, about
not reading so much of her journals, and loosing touch with what she
had been doing.
Maybe this four-person idea could work, if the four people were almost
all married to eachother. This may sound like an impossibility, but so
does two people being married. Marriage only seems reasonable because
that is what people do. Since I have been on this vacation, three
people have asked if I have a "girl-friend," the doctor,
understandably, but she said, You must not be so happy here because
she's not here. Well... Then my great aunt Bonita (who lives and plays
bridge in Salt-lake city) who asked me how I was doing. I said,
"Alright-" and she said, "So do you have a honey back in Seattle?"
"Well. . . yes."
"I thought you might, because you said alright [not wonderful]," she says.
Thirdly, was yesterday, I was running down this street and stopped to
talk to a neighbor, a very cool looking woman, she's married, has no
kids, and has the beginnings of that healthy gauntness about her. She
may be older than 50 but she looks younger and cooler than that. I
found out she's a Therapist, you know, like a psych, No wonder!. She
says, "So have you found someone special?"
"Yes.... Why do so many people ask me that? Three people have asked me since I've been here."
I think she (judy) opened up more then, and said, well, that's what
you're supposed to be doing now. I (colin) rememberd the psychologist
Erickson's stages of development. Around 20 years of age the stage is
Intimacy vs. Isolation (annoyingly true for me). If you get through it,
you find some sort of intimacy, if not, well, maybe someday you will.
Judy said, "I'm just kidding about that being what you're supposed to
do," "When I was younger most people got married when they were about
18. I waited until I was 22 and people thought that was late. Now
people get married much later."
My parents' friend David (head of the undergrad business school at
berkely, a psychologist who went back to school to get his MBA)
explained it to me like this, (note that he did _not_ ask me about a
girlfriend) "It's an optimization problem. As you get older than 20
your skin starts to clear up, but as you get closer to 30 your hair
starts to fall out." "At about age twenty-five, these two factors cross
at their lowest value, and you're at your optimum attractiveness."
{note that all these quotes are my approximations of my memory of what
was said} and he crosses his forearms, making one of of those economy
optimization graphs. "So this is something to think about while you're
in grad school (where he met his wife), then it's time to think about
who your lab partners are. :)" Then my dad said, well he has good hair
genes, so he can probably wait longer.
--
So I'm working on this idea of an attainable optimum way of living. My
goal is to write or co-author a new "living the good life" that
includes kids, and a less rural way of living. I will present an ideal
of a sustainable way of living an optimal life and detail the
transition that society can make to approach this ideal. Scott Nearing
was lamenting that people study all sorts of engineering but not social
engineering. Maybe I can be a social engineer. "I'm studying
engineering." "Oh?, what kind?"
I've thought more about it, but I'm wondering your opinions on both the
two person/four person images, as well as the idea that four people
would choose to stay together, in one place until they die, and be able
to maintian self-actualizing careers even while taking care of kids
half time. Another solution (which I'm guessing you might prefer) is to
be where there is extended family who can help take care of the kids,
the idea being that the old folks aren't career-making. That bothers me
because I think I would rather be more involved in taking care of my
own kids instead of waiting until I was 60 to take care of grand-kids,
and moreover, I would not want to be any less involved in my work at
60. Moreover, I think it would be cool to grow old close with three
other people instead of one, and it would be less of a problem if one
of the group died, because there would still be a group.
Sorry this is so long. It's been fun for me, but what do you think
about all this? Each day I think I've got it out of my system (and I
think this will be the last long one).
I get to go running/exploring now, and then work on that Maslow excerpt.
I hope you are having a good Monday,
love,
Colin
.