Sacrament Meeting Talk on Joseph Smith

Jan 31 2016

It was not an auspicious start for someone destined to change the world.  No one would have guessed that Joseph Smith, a poor, uneducated farm boy from New England would someday be ranked by the Smithsonian magazine as the most influential American religious figure of all time.  We all know the basic outline of Joseph Smith’s history; the religious revivalism he experienced as a 14 year old boy, his first vision, the appearance of the Angel Moroni and translation of The Book of Mormon.  We know about the founding of the church in 1830, the settlements at Kirkland and Missouri, the publication of the Doctrine and Covenants, being tarred and feathered, hunted, and imprisoned, the founding and flourishing of Nauvoo and his eventual martyrdom in Carthage in 1844 when he was only 38 years old.

Much has been written about Joseph Smith.  There has been everything from hagiographies that treat him as a nearly perfect man whose worst fault was occasional light mindedness to slanderous diatribes based on extremely dubious evidence and wild suppositions.  Over the past few years this discussion has moved to the internet and like most things on the internet the discussion tends to degrade to an irrational shouting match.   At the same time, the official church history has tended to become a little more open.  With the publication of the Joseph Smith Papers and the emergence of what appears to be reliable evidence from reliable sources, the portrait of Joseph Smith that has emerged is of a much more complex individual who made mistakes, who did not always understand new doctrines fully at first, and whose path to greatness was sometimes rocky.  To me the fact that the prophet of this dispensation was an imperfect and very real person is reassuring and not even very surprising.  However, we need to be careful what we believe.  Much of what is out there is mere speculation and the fact is we often simply don’t know many things because there is no reliable evidence or the evidence is contradictory.  Much of what is on the internet is just garbage based on prejudice and hatred.  And some of it really makes no difference to our belief that Joseph Smith was a prophet.

It is a little strange that we sometimes expect modern day prophets to be perfect when the prophets we read about in the bible are far from perfect.  Moses couldn’t resist taking credit for producing water from a rock.  Peter denied Christ three times.  What makes a person a prophet is not having a perfect character and having lived a flawless life, but having received revelation from God.  Of course throughout the ages many people have received inspiration for themselves and their families.  But a prophet is different.  He receives revelation for all of God’s children.  Despite his flaws, Moses was a prophet for the children of Israel.  He received the 10 commandments and the Levitical law from God in order to create a people, teach them to follow Jehovah, and lead them to the promised land.

Prophets are unique and remarkable people.    Sometimes I think we are like geese flying in a V.  Each of us flies in the slip stream of the bird in front of us.  This gives us smoother air and helps pull us along.  But the prophet is flying at the point of the V.  He has to bear the full brunt of the buffeting winds as well as steer the course to the destination.  Only the strongest birds can fly at the point and they often don’t last for long.

It must take tremendous strength just to be in the presence of the Lord.  Taking the responsibility for delivering a message to God’s people and often for leading them both spiritually and physically through perilous times and circumstances must be overwhelming.  It is not surprising that many of the prophets both in ancient and modern times have gone through a “why me” moment.

But as hard as it might be to be a prophet, being the first prophet of a dispensation is an order of magnitude harder.  Modern presidents of the church only become the prophet after having served in the quorum of the 12 apostles for many years.  They have been meeting regularly with the prophet and other members of the quorum and the doctrine and practice of the church are well established and fairly stable.  Make no mistake, being the prophet is still a hugely difficult and daunting task.  There are new challenges and problems every day and the need for revelation is as great as ever.  But they have at least had some training and have the examples of people they have known and worked with for years to follow.  Even Peter had walked and talked with the Savior for three years.  Prophets of an existing church are like builders doing additions or remodeling an existing building to protect it from new threats and to increase its usefulness.

But the first prophet of a dispensation has a much more difficult task.   At best he has the dilapidated ruins of an old building which he must somehow restore to its full splendor.  Moses had no training to be a prophet.  He probably had a vague sense of the traditions of the Hebrews, but he was raised in the house of the Pharaoh and probably knew a lot more about the Egyptian gods than about the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.   He may have been taught some by his father-in-law.  But the burning bush, like the first vision 3500 years later, was a fresh start.  Moses had to create an entirely new religion from scratch.  More properly, he had to restore a lost religion from a vague and corrupted memory.  For every dispensation after Adam was essentially a restoration.

Joseph Smith had a similar task.  He had to restore the original church of Christ.  At least Moses was an educated man of privilege.  Joseph Smith was an uneducated farm boy.  To understand how truly unique this is we might compare Joseph Smith to Martin Luther.    Luther was 34 years old when he posted his 95 Theses on the church door.  He had been to good schools as a youth, had attended university, and finally become a monk and then a professor of theology.  While payer and inspiration undoubtedly played a role is his developing ideas, his study and scholarship also played a major role.  Joseph thought Luther’s translation of the bible into German was the best translation he had seen.  It was the bible we used in the mission field in Germany and I loved it.  Again there must have been inspiration there, but much of Luther’s translation was the result of superb scholarship.

I love reading history.  I usually forget the details, but retain some patterns.  One thing that has jumped out at me is how difficult it is in politics, science, philosophy, or religion to introduce a whole new idea.  What is sometimes called a paradigm shift.  Sometimes the ideas are not even new.  Many of the Greek philosophers believed that the earth revolved around the sun, but when Copernicus introduced the idea in the 16th century it led to persecution and denouncement.  Joseph Smith’s view of the Godhead although consistent with the bible was a complete paradigm shift from the standard view of the trinity in Christianity.  But there is a big difference here.  Copernicus was an astronomer and made this new model based on exact observations.  Joseph Smith was no more a scientist than a scholar.  So where did his paradigm shift come from?

The simple answer is from God.  Revelation.  I have always been interested in epistemology, the study of what we can know and how we can know it.  There are several sources of knowledge.  Experience, logic, experimentation.  These all work fine for medicine, science and even philosophy, but for religion they are insufficient.  Religion is based on revelation.  This is direct communication with God.  Since most of us do not have the faith and righteousness for such revelation, it comes to us through prophets.  We know that God the Father and Jesus Christ are separate beings because Joseph Smith saw them both together.  Then this was later explicitly revealed to him.  Of course, Luther also believed in revelation.  But he believed it had ceased when John finished the Book of Revelation so that the pathway to truth was by studying the bible and what the early church fathers like St.  Augustine had written about it.

I don’t think Joseph Smith ever read St. Augustine although he had read the bible regularly.  His path to the truth was not led by scholarship, but by prayer.  This was not to say that he was not a remarkably intelligent man with unusual learning abilities, but that the basis for his teaching was not scholarship but direct communication with God.  And what he was learning from God was very different than what he had learned from the prevalent Christian ideas he had grown up with.  It was a complete paradigm shift.  These new ideas must have been difficult for Joseph to grasp all at once.  When something is so new, it takes repetition, exposure, and above all experience to be able to fully grasp it.  So we should not be surprised that some of Joseph’s teachings evolved as he continued to receive revelation and put it into practice leading the church.  I think Joseph was also sensitive to the fact that this was also very new to the early members of the church.  I suspect there was a lot he understood that he did not make generally known until the general church membership became ready for it and probably some he never did reveal.

The sheer volume of recorded revelation and teachings that came from Joseph Smith is astounding.  It has been 16 years since I last spoke in this ward.  Ironically, my assigned topic back then was also Joseph Smith.  In the 16 years between the time that Joseph received the plates and his death he translated and published The Book of Mormon, wrote the revelations that made up the Doctrine and Covenants, and wrote and translated The Pearl of Great Price.  Over this period there were thousands of talks and letters and teachings.  He had introduced radical new (actually ancient) teachings about the nature of the Godhead, the relationship of man and God, and the afterlife. By contrast, I haven’t really done much in the last 16 years.

But Joseph Smith was not just a man of words and new doctrines. Like Moses he was a man of action and the leader of his people.   During this same 16 years he organized the church and guided its evolution into pretty much what we know today.  He sent out missionaries who made thousands of converts, he founded communities in Kirkland, Missouri, and Nauvoo.  He built temples and introduced the temple covenants.  He trained new leaders in Zion’s Camp and the School of the Prophets.  Again all of this was new.  Although there were some correspondences here and there with other religious groups at the time, as a whole it was very different than the religious practices of the day.

As a religious and political leader even with the revelations and inspirations of God, I suspect he sometimes made mistakes.  And sometimes the members were not able to live up to what the Lord asked of them through Joseph.  It is easy to speculate that things would have gone better if Joseph or some other leader had done something or not done something.  But it is not only completely unfair, but also a fallacy to project our outlook and values to such a different time and place, especially under such extreme conditions.  We have no idea of the struggle they had to survive or the very real fear of death and destruction that they lived under.  What is remarkable is not that the Saints made a few mistakes along the way, but that they endured and survived and what they accomplished.  Perhaps the most impressive indication of the greatness of Joseph Smith as a leader was that the church carried on after his death.  Many religious movements die with their founder.

Over the last 5 years I have lost most of the feeling in my feet and lower legs.  When this first started happening I limped a lot and walked very slowly.  But I learned over time that if I just trusted my feet and legs that I could walk almost normally.  Many of you may have seen me walking up and down 1st North which I do around noon virtually every day.  I am convinced that if I had not done this for the past two years, I would not have been able to walk up onto the stand without a cane.  At my age once you stop and give in, it is all over.

If you could see my spiritual legs you would notice that I sometimes limp rather badly.  Watching parents suffer the ravages of old age, family problems, questions, and being a blue person in a very red state have taken their toll.  But I read my scriptures, I pray, and come to church.  And I give thanks for all that I have been blessed with.  At my age once you stop and give in, it is all over.

It is not in spite of the fact that I believe that Joseph Smith was less than perfect, that I believe he was a prophet, but because of it.  To me this makes him a real person that I can relate to and believe in.  I stand in awe of all that Joseph accomplished as the prophet of this dispensation.  It is all about revelation.  Without the revelations of Joseph Smith, I would not even know about, let alone believe, the things I believe.

The words of section 135 of the Doctrine and Covenants are not hyperbole.

“ Joseph Smith, the Prophet and Seer of the Lord, has done more, save Jesus only, for the salvation of men in this world, than any other man that ever lived in it”

With all my heart I join in the song “We thank thee, oh God, for a prophet. “

In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.

Pessimism of Eeyore Introduction

This was written over 20 years ago while I was waiting for a new computer to start some consulting work.  In the 90s eastern religions were all the rage and two popular books had appeared.  The Tao of Pooh and The Te of Piglet. It was partly as an answer to those that I wrote The Pessimism of Eeyore.  It was never published and only a few people have ever read it, so now that I finally have a blog site, I thought I might as well put it up.  I am still learning to use the blogging software, so it is not very clear how to get to all of the chapters. You should be able to scroll through the first 9 chapters and then click on Next to get to the rest of the book.

Some of the references in the book are dated, but unless they were just wrong today, I l did not update them.

Pessimism of Eeyore 1 — Conformity

Eeyore is different.  He is not like any of the other animals in the hundred acre wood.  He is not cute or cuddly.  He doesn’t hum or make up songs.  He is gray, a little disheveled and stands with his feet too wide apart.  And his tail is not attached very securely.  Not unlike some of the rest of us.

This is not a big problem for either Christopher Robin or the other animals in the forest.  They all seem to accept Eeyore for what he is.  They are usually kind.  There were a couple of exceptions.  One day Pooh discovered that Eeyore’s tail was missing.

“That Accounts for a Good Deal,” said Eeyore gloomily.  “It explains Everything.  No wonder.”

“You must have left it somewhere,” said Winne-the-Pooh.

“Somebody must have taken it,” said Eeyore.  “How like them,” he added after a long silence.

How like them, indeed.  Eeyore’s friend Pooh found the tail serving as a bell-pull at Owl’s house.  Owl had found it hanging over a bush, rung it soundly, and when it came off in his hand, taken it home for his own use.  Thoughtless and silly surely, but not really malicious.  Nor was Tigger’s bouncing malicious, even though it got Eeyore very wet.  Tigger doesn’t have a malicious bone in his body.  But then he really doesn’t have any bones in his body.

Often it is just thoughtlessness.  The assumption that everyone is like you, that everyone wants to be like you want to be.  Too many people can’t bring themselves to believe that anyone would want what is not popular and fashionable. Would not want what we want.  But some of us are greatly attached to our very unfashionable and poorly attached tails.  For me it was a black cowboy hat.  I was five and the cowboy hat was part of me, part of who I was.  It was an ugly hat, crumpled and bent.  So my mother was understandably reluctant to let me wear it to Kindergarten.  And when after many tearful battles she finally relented, my teacher would not even argue the point.  No cowboy hats allowed in class.  Not now, not ever.  Since it was not firmly attached, I lost.  She didn’t use it for a bell-pull, but she might as well have.  How like them.

Sometimes having strange tastes actually works in your favor.  Eeyore had pretty well decided that everyone and forgotten his birthday.  But Pooh and Piglet scrambled around to find presents.  Unfortunately Pooh got a little distracted and ate his honey.  This sort of thing happens to Pooh quite a bit.  It makes you wonder if it happens to other Taoist sages.  What Piglet’s Virtue was becoming in this case was all tangled up in his own feet.  The sad result was the bright red balloon he had intended to present to Eeyore popped and became a limp piece of rubber on a string.  So Eeyore’s presents were an empty honey pot and a broken balloon.  Not what most people want.  But Eeyore was delighted because he had something to put something in and something to put in it.  One advantage of pessimist is that they are really easy to please.  Or not very smart.

On the whole the animals in the hundred acre wood were kind to Eeyore and willing to accept him as he was.  But in the outside world things are not always so rosy.  That nice gentle gentleman from Oregon who turns Pooh and Piglet into Taoist sages, goes on to blame most of the ills of the world on Eeyore.  Everything from pollution, to mis-applied technology to radical feminism.  What did Eeyore ever do to him?  How can you make a flop-eared donkey the heavy?

It’s that pessimism thing again.  In fact, in the real world, it is more than just that Eeyore is pessimistic.  It is that he is different.

And for most of the world, different is bad.  There are a variety of reasons for this, of course.  One reason for this is the belief that there is a single standard of goodness.  One formulation of this single standard of goodness was done in classical Greece by Plato.  This concept has filtered down into the cultural sub conscience of western man and become cookie cutter metaphysics.  I doubt that this is really what Plato intended, but the messages of our wise men often are twisted to meet our less noble needs and desires.

The concept of Ideals has a strong epistemological basis.  The fundamental questions of epistemology are what can we know and how can we know it.  One of the puzzles is where concepts and ideas come from.  Take the concept of an elephant for example.  I was amazed many years ago when my two year old son recognized an abstract purple figure on a billboard as an elephant.  Where did he get the concept of an elephant that was flexible enough to recognize even a very abstract representation?  He had never seen an elephant and had only seen a few pictures of them.  Plato’s answer is that there exists an Ideal elephant and because my son had this concept in his mind, he was able to recognize even an abstract instance.

At a simplistic level these Ideals are the metaphysical cookie cutters.  They are templates like the bar in Paris that defines the perfect meter, except that they define elephants, dogs, etc.  The physical elephants we see in the zoo are stamped out with this cutter and baked.  In baking they grow and shrink and distort and become imperfect.  The Ideal contains the essence of being an elephant.  You can also think of it a prescription for making an elephant.  Or a prescription of what an elephant should be.

The problem comes when you apply the concept of Ideals to people.  You end up with the Ideal Person.  While this may not seem too bad, the next step is a disaster.  It is to define goodness as conformity to the Ideal.  The more different someone is from the Ideal, the worse that person is.

Of course each culture, each community, and each individual can define the ideal to be like themselves.  Thus everyone different than us is different than the Ideal and is bad.  This is obviously not what Plato intended.  And there are enough other factors contributing to xenophobia (the more general form of pessimiphobia) that people probably would be pretty much the same even if Plato had never articulated the concept of Ideals.  But the Greeks were not known for their tolerance and it is hard to imagine a Greek statue of a broken down old man — or an Eeyore.

Many more recent philosophical schools (and some ancient ones) have denied the existence of these Ideals.  Their claim is not only that there is no metaphysical Bureau of Standards where Ideals are kept, but also that there is no prescription of essence anywhere.  All that we can do is abstract a description of classes of objects based on real world examples.  This view recognizes diversity as a simple fact of nature rather than as a deviation from an Ideal.  Arguing the epistemological and ontological issues of Ideals is way beyond the scope of this work and would make even Christopher Robin’s head spin.  But in any case, that is even if you adhere to the reality of Platonic Ideals, there is no philosophical justification for claiming that anyone who differs from your own personal view of goodness is bad or strange or weak or weird.

In fact, the worst example of a society which sought to impose a single standard of goodness on itself and the world did not come from anything like a Platonic background.  The Nazi’s claim to a monopoly of goodness did not come from any claimed insight into Platonic Ideals, but rather from survival of the fittest.  Similarly the monolithic value system of communism has a pragmatic origin in what is deemed to be best for the state (by a small and powerful ruling elite).  Narrow and repressive societies can, in fact, derive their claim to a single standard of what is right, proper, and good from almost any source.  Some even claim divine sources.  The issue is not the source, it is the single standard.  Forcing everyone to march to the same drum.  Military parades become the most sacred rites of some of these societies.

Some people have a naive belief that a free market society insures diversity.  I have my doubts.  But then what would a pessimist be without doubts.  A few years ago I stopped into a department store in Munich to pick up a present for my kids.  I took the escalator to the first floor and then to the second.  As I got off on the second floor it suddenly hit me.  I suddenly realized I could be in any department store almost anywhere in the world.  It was the same stuff, arranged in the same way, the same advertisements, the same sales people.  There were Sony tape players and Adidas sport shoes and Fisher Price toys.  Have you ever noticed that every city in the country has the same radio stations?  That everywhere you go there is a Chevrolet dealer who sells his cars in a sicky sweet voice with elevator music in the background?  How long has it been since you have seen a store in a mall that you couldn’t find in a hundred other malls?  We are witnessing the homogenization of western culture.  And the Japanese and Chinese seem more than anxious to pour themselves into this blender.

Ironically, we have learned in the last few years that it is similarity that signals the end of an endangered species.  For many species about to die out the fatal step is that the individuals become too much like each other.  This lack of genetic diversity can often be fatal for the whole species.  If they are all the same they have almost no ability to adapt to changes in their environment.  The real danger is not from being too different, but rather from being too much the same.

The same argument, though much harder to prove, can be made on the social level.  It is in diversity rather than in sameness that our potential lies.  And it is too many people too much like us rather than people too different from us who pose the real threat.

This is not to say that there should not be bounds.  A society cannot treat murderers or rapists as interesting variations in the human spectrum who should be left to do their own thing.  Nor can we allow someone to practice medicine whose only training has been a series of dreams following late night pepperoni pizzas.  But we are better off to set the bounds as wide as possible and abandon forever the concept of an Ideal Person and the practice of judging people by measuring them against our private view of the Ideal.

What I am really saying, of course, is that the bounds should be set at least wide enough to let us Eeyore types in.  We don’t want center stage.  A place in the bog will do fine.  A little damp is OK.  Come by on our birthday once in a while with a pot and something to put in it and we will be happy.

When we hear the phrase “not like us” we think of skin color, religion, or gender.  But it applies much more broadly.  It is people who are poorer, richer, went to different schools, have different jobs, have different priorities in life, wear different clothes, live in different neighborhoods, eat different food, read different books, or read books at all.  It shows up in formal and informal clubs, in homogenous suburbs where people who all went to University live in little boxes all made out of ticky-tacky, anywhere we can retreat from the diversity of the world and relax with the good people — the people like ourselves.

Pooh and his friends set the example.  They were a diverse lot with different personalities, different likes and dislikes, different abilities, and different species.  With them it is not just a question of tolerance.  Too often tolerance is simply “Do what you want, but stay out of my way.”  They were friends, they were a community.  They did things together.  The worked together and played together.  In each tale, a unique characteristic of one of the animals saves the day.  Their diversity was their strength.  And their charm.

Learning to deal with people very different from ourselves is not easy.  Especially pessimists, who by their nature are somewhat standoff-ish.  But befriending an Eeyore can be very rewarding.  We are really quite sweet, eager to please, easy to please, wise, insightful, and above all, interesting.  A life without one or two good pessimistic friends and neighbors is like a garden without turnips.

Whatever you are, pessimist or optimist, Coptic scholar or mud wrestler, do what you believe is right.  (Note that this is very different than simply doing what you want to.)  Sometimes the pressures are tremendous to conform to society’s standard or fashion.  In all cases you loose your individuality when you conform.  In important cases you loose your integrity.  Make your life’s decisions based on your own concept of good and bad, right and wrong, lasting and temporary.  March to the drummer that you hear even when you walk alone.

There are however, dangers in non-conformity.  The first is taking a stand and fighting on trivial ground.  Nothing is more trivial than my Sunday tie.  All the other men wear their ties.  Most of them even wear suits.  I save mine for special occasions.  Funerals, weddings, that sort of thing.  Part of the reason I don’t wear a tie is to protest the judgments that our society makes of people based on their clothes.  But most of the reasons have to do with multiple chins.  I find it easier to concentrate at church if I can breathe.  But it is really pretty silly.  I should just admit that I am a middle aged, overweight Mormon, buy bigger shirts and wear a tie.  Maybe even a suit once in while.  But then there are limits.

The second danger, which I am happier to say is not on my top ten list of flagrant faults, is to react to the pressure to conform to one group by conforming to a reactionary group.  Many things can be said about the flower children of the sixties and early seventies, but non-conformist is not one of them.  Conforming to a smaller or less powerful group does not make you a non-conformist.  It just makes you less popular.  You are still letting someone else make your decisions.

The third danger is to try to make decisions that you are not qualified to make.  Deciding at the age of six to live entirely on Cocoa Puffs may seem like a brave assertion of your independence at the time, but is not really wise.  Deciding at twenty to live on rice is not a lot better.  The next time you want to do something weird, ask yourself if you really have any idea what the hell you’re doing.  It is easy to lie to yourself in this circumstance.  To tell yourself that you are different than other people.  You may in fact, be different, but different does not imply better or smarter.  The weirder it is, the better your reasons should be and the surer you should be of them.

The final danger is to think that you are better than the group just because you don’t conform.  They could be right and you could be wrong.  In fact, they probably are.  The statistics are all in their favor.  Or their decisions could be right for the members of the group even though they would not be right for you.  You should be as tolerant of them as you expect them to be of you.

What I am saying to other Eeyore types is that it is OK to be different.  But only if you are different for the right reasons.  Your worth as a human being is determined by what you do with your life, how you contribute to the families and communities in which you live, and how you relate to those around you.  Not by some measure of how you compare to some imaginary Ideal Person as defined by society, your boss, your coach, or your hairdresser.  You can stay a pessimist.

But don’t expect much on your birthday.

Pessimism of Eeyore 2 — Smart Asses

Eeyore is a smart ass.  Well, a smart donkey really, but it comes to the same thing.  When asked by Rabbit what he was doing floating down the river, feet in the air, Eeyore gave the typical smart ass reply:

“I’ll give you three guesses, Rabbit.  Digging holes in the ground?  Wrong.  Leaping from branch to branch of a young oak tree? Wrong.  Waiting for someone to help me out of the river?  Right.  Give Rabbit time, and he always gets the right answer.”

When asked by Pooh whether he had been bounced into the river as a joke or an accident, Eeyore again gives a smart ass response:

“I didn’t stop to ask, Pooh.  Even at the very bottom of the river I didn’t stop to say to myself. ‘Is this a Hearty Joke, or the Merest Accident?’  I just floated to the surface and said to myself, ‘It’s wet.’  If you know what I mean.”

Sarcasm and satire go with pessimism.  They are part of the package.  At first its a temptation, then a habit, and finally an art form.

After having been introduced to Tao by Pooh, and to its finer points by Piglet, it has become clear to me that sarcasm and satire are inherently Taoist activities.  A thing which I never had suspected.  This is best illustrated by the following quote from the obscure but important Taoist sage Pun-tzu:

A farmer went down to his fields every day to work.  When the sun was high overhead he would stop work and eat his lunch under a large tree on the edge of his field.  As soon as he would spread out his lunch, a black bird would start to caw and scold and finally poop all over the farmer’s lunch.  This happened day after day, so finally the farmer went to a nearby city to get help.

He first went to a Confucian teacher and explained the problem.  The Master presented the problem to a class of his students and they argued the pros and cons of various solutions for hours.  Finally they told the farmer that he should cut down the tree.

The farmer was unwilling to loose such a beautiful tree which also provided shade for his lunch and afternoon nap, so he went to a Zen monk.  The monk responded with the following koan:

There was a fisherman walking along the river when a large fish poked his head out of the water and said, “If you are a fisherman I will eat you, but if you are not a fisherman I will eat your children.”  The fisherman replied.  “My wife ran off yesterday with the baker”.  The fish smiled and said, “Now do you understand?”  At that moment the fisherman reached Enlightenment.

The farmer sat with his legs crossed in front of the Monk and thought for a very long time.  Finally he said, “What does this have to do with bird droppings?”  The Zen monk reached over and picked up a large stick and hit the farmer in the back of the head.  “Ah, now I understand”, said the farmer and left.

So finally the farmer found a Taoist sage.  Warily, for his head was still very sore, he presented the problem to the sage.  The Taoist replied almost at once, “Eat your lunch somewhere else.”  The farmer went home and lived a happy and prosperous life.

Sarcasm and satire are a little like the Asian martial arts.  The secret is to use your opponent’s strength and rage against him.  When someone makes a really pompous, smug, or just plain dumb ass comment, there is always the perfect opportunity to deflect it and turn it against him.  Once you get the hang of it, it is easy.  Your smart ass replies just start to flow out of you like water almost without thought or willing.  They just say themselves.

And the opportunities, oh the opportunities.  All you need is a pompous, self inflated, self gratifying, self centered, mean, nasty, or thoughtless victim.  These days a lot of people qualify.  The most fun are the rich and powerful.  A smart ass reply to the CEO or even a vice president can make your day — and ruin your career.  In fact, if you care about your career you need to mind your tongue.  And whatever you do, never, never write sarcastic memos.

I learned this the hard way.  I had started up a group to target a new business opportunity and it was going quite well.  Too well, in fact.  As long as the business was not causing many problems or doing very well, everyone left us alone.  But once we started getting some success, the inevitable transfer from engineering to marketing came.  Now an Eeyore type has enough trouble anywhere in the business world, but waking up one day and finding yourself in the marketing department is a rude shock indeed.  So I wrote the infamous yellow tie memo, pointing out that the only real qualifications my new boss had to manage me were a blue suit and a yellow tie.  It was written in the finest satirical style and became an instant underground classic.  And, of course, made it impossible for me to work there anymore.  I don’t write memos any more.

My favorite targets are people who spend their lives asserting themselves.  Asserting yourself is too often simply another name for being domineering, pushy, and rude.  For assuming that you are better than anyone else and deserve special treatment.  Now there have always been these kind of people in any society.  The trouble with modern western society is that we have come to look on this as a positive quality.  We have chosen these people for our leaders.  We not only condone, but praise this type of behavior.  Business wants to hire managers and sales people who are aggressive and assertive.  If you don’t get the job because your not assertive enough, you can go into assertiveness therapy or take one of a thousand seminars.  Lots of nice people are turned into pushy bastards this way.

Someone asserting himself all over your lunch makes an ideal target for smart ass replies.  Often they are too caught up in themselves to really appreciate even your most clever responses.  However, they usually notice that you are not making the appropriate submissive gestures.  So if they can hurt you, one way or another, it is best to be quite careful.  With practice a really talented smart ass is able to subtly weave sarcasm into superficially submissive responses.  Since your assertive lunch partner will likely miss it entirely, this is merely a small private pleasure.  But it can help get you through the lunch.

Even when attacking someone who is being pompous or silly, don’t allow yourself to get pulled down to their level.  A good smart ass reply is like throwing a glass of cold water in their face.  It should get their attention and remind them that they are saying or doing something mean or hurtful or silly or dumb.  But it should not really hurt them.  If you start using satire to assert yourself and attack someone with the intent of really hurting them, you have missed the point entirely and become no better than your opponent.

Body language is sometimes very effective as a smart ass response.  A raised eye brow, a look of astonishment or surprise, or even a wry smile can effectively poke fun at many an over-inflated ego.  But there is a special danger in body language for pessimists.  It is pretty easy to stop writing memos.  In fact, you can go ahead and write them and then just tear them up rather than send them.  It is harder, but possible, to mind your tongue when the situation calls for discretion.  But controlling body language is all but impossible for me and many other pessimists.  What I think is usually written all over my face and this gets me in no end of trouble.  At least I recognize this.  I would no more attempt to play poker for money than try to make a living as a rock star.  But then a gambling pessimist is pretty much of an oxymoron in the first place.  Given our need to learn to control body language generally, using it for sarcastic responses should only be done with the greatest caution.

Or when you can’t help it.

 

Pessimism of Eeyore 3 — Off in a Corner

When we first meet Eeyore he is standing by himself in a corner of the forest where the thistles grow.  If you are ever looking for a pessimist, off in a corner is a good place to start.  We like being off in a corner.  Any corner will do.  Out on the edge of town, in an obscure college, in a corner of the organization chart, making stained glass windows.  Forests are good.  Deserts are wonderful.  Anywhere out of the spotlight, away from the crowd.

It may not be that all pessimists are loners, but there seems to be a very strong correlation.  In fact, this retreat from the main stream of life is in many ways at the heart of the pessimism of Eeyore.  Of course there are lots of simple answers for why this is.  Most of these simple minded explanations come from psychologists, self help book writers, and other, perhaps well meaning, optimists.  All of them are wrong.  Or at least vastly incomplete.

The easiest answer is self doubt.  Self doubt is in fact an occupational hazard for a pessimist.  Many pessimists have this tendency.  Eeyore certainly did.  And I must admit that I slip into it all too often.  But pessimist are not alone in this.  Nor is the corner always the only way to deal with self doubt.  Loosing yourself in the crowd is an even more popular alternative.

Withdrawal and self doubt form a cycle.  Each a cause as well as an effect.  The questions are how the cycle gets started, and more importantly, how to end it.  Again there are lots of answers about how this all starts.  Falling out of high chairs, inattentive Mothers, that sort of thing.  The view from the bog is that there are two main causes.

The first is being different.  We have dealt with that issue at some length already.  At an early age those of us with gray fur, floppy ears, somber dispositions, and wrinkled black cowboy hats soon realize that we are different.  People, especially those who conform to the current fashion of the Ideal Person, are quick to point out any differences we have failed to notice on our own.  As the earliest social groups form, we find ourselves on the fringe, or left out altogether.  The first corner is usually in a playground somewhere.

But these are childhood traumas, often counter-balanced by loving families, a few good friends, success in school or shop or 4H.  Most of us get over these things.  But the next discovery is more difficult to deal with.

It’s called the pecking order.  You find it in almost all social animals, including — especially — man.  What starts out as cute play in baby animals as they wrestle and spar, turns deadly serious when they become adults.  The bigger, stronger, or simply more aggressive animals begin to dominate the others.  In the more complex social structures there are clearly discernible domination hierarchies.

Domestic animals are usually caged or leashed.  And they have been spared the survival of the fittest because they are fed and sheltered by their human masters.  For modern pets, it is survival of the cutest.  You will notice some more aggressive and some less aggressive dogs and cats.  And they occasionally get in fights, if they are able to escape from their homes.  But to a young child at least, it is not clear exactly what those fights are about.

Enter PBS and the nature shows violating the privacy of wild animals.  Especially in the last few years as these show have become more realistic, again and again we see savage battles for dominance and territory.  The announcer is usually quick to point out that one contestant usually withdraws before there is too much blood.  But is all too clear that these are real battles.  Too many of them have too many scars to think otherwise.  The stakes are not just sex once a year (being a dominant male is not all it’s cracked up to be), but often, quite literally life and death.  Even if he survives the battle, a deposed dominant male is usually banished from the group and his chances of living out the year are dim.

But surely civilized man has risen above these domination hierarchies.  No such luck.  You find domination hierarchies almost everywhere you look.  The will to dominate begins in the human families among children just as it begins among puppies and kittens.  Since children are usually born one at a time, it is usually the older child that tries to dominate the younger siblings.  But not always.  Sometimes an aggressive younger child will actually dominate an older brother or sister, often causing both of them real problems in later life.  Your kids aren’t fighting over nothing.  It is just that the fights have almost nothing to do with the trivial issues at hand.  They are fighting for dominance.  Unfortunately, some of the worst problems between siblings arise when they are not able to fight openly for some reason.  The competition can fester and poison the relationship for life.

As we grow up and go to school, we are exposed to formal and informal social groups.  Again and again, there is competition for dominance.  Who will decide what a group of friends will do after school?  Who will pick the topic for the group to report on?  Who will decide who is one of us and who is not?  Who will be the leader of the gang?  Of course, for most of our lives as young children and teenagers, we are subject to various levels and forms of domination from adults.  They tell us what to do and how to do it.  They set the rules and try to run our lives.  The rebellion of youth is usually against the domination by parents, teachers, and other adults.  It doesn’t really matter what they are telling you to do.  The problem is just that they are telling you what to do.  That they are trying to control you.  That they are in a position of dominance.

As we move into adulthood, the groups and social structures get even more complex.  For some of us, work is a real killer.  Aside from an abortive attempt at an academic career, my early years went pretty well.  I was young and inexperienced and expected to be told what to do.  But more importantly, I was lucky to work in environments which encouraged and rewarded innovation and where the domination was the natural leadership of the older, more experienced, and more skilled.  But as you begin to master your craft, the experience and skill levels no longer correlate so well with the management levels.  One day you wake up with a boss who doesn’t seem to you to be qualified to tell you what to do based on skill or experience, whose only real qualification seems to be aggressiveness and the willingness to do whatever the next level boss wants done.  In the worst cases, this can be someone who seems to be more concerned with their own position and place in the pecking order than with the success of the enterprise.

The trouble is not so much in the structures themselves.  In many situations a hierarchical organization is clearly the most appropriate to meet the needs of society.  I am not advocating anarchy here.  The trouble is in the way the people in the upper levels of these organizations treat those in the lower levels and in what people will do in order to move up the pecking order.

The dominant individual doesn’t just kill off all the weaker individuals.  That doesn’t leave him much left to dominate, nor anyone left to feed him.  Rather he demands a gesture of submission from each of the members of the group at regular intervals.  You have to roll over and expose your belly to him.  Of course you in turn get to dominate those below you in the hierarchy.  You get to show your teeth and growl at them and they have to roll over for you.  In the military they encode the submissive gestures in salutes.  Other organizations have other signs of submission.

If you feel strong enough and aggressive enough, you may one day decide to challenge the individual over you.  You growl back.  Then the battle begins.  One of you withdraws or is defeated.  In complex social groups, the challenge may be made by a group of younger individuals.  But one still ends up on top.

In human organizations, the signs of submission are sometimes, but not always, more subtle.  A domineering boss doesn’t usually show his teeth.  Growling is usually enough.  And you don’t have to show him your belly.  But you have to find some submissive gesture to let him know that you are willing to submit and do whatever he says.  You have to show him that you are loyal and will support him in whatever he says.  You have to kiss up.

Being submissive to your boss is not enough.  He expects you to dominate those under you.  You are supposed to know how to keep your troops in line.  Hierarchical organizations want people who know how to play the game.  They like people who are ambitious.  They like climbers.  The fast track crowd who know what to wear and what to drive and who to drink with and when to submit and when to challenge.

Those who don’t want play the game at all are the greatest threat to the organization.  Bosses are used to dealing with the employee that wants their job.  That’s the way its supposed to be.  The problem is with the employee who doesn’t want to move up the organization at all.  For a while there was a myth in corporate America of the “individual contributor”.  They almost never survive (well I didn’t at least).  They are too hard to control, too unpredictable, and they keep forgetting to make the appropriate submissive gestures.  When someone no longer wants to move up the organization, his boss has lost the most important carrot and must resort to the stick.

So how do you deal with the pecking order that infests so many corporate, academic, and government organizations.  One approach is just never to get involved.  Many people, lots of Eeyore types among them, choose careers or jobs that do not require them to fight for their slot in the organization chart.  They practice a craft, or run a small business, or ski a lot.  Right from the start they choose some nice quiet corner where they can make a living without having to face the pecking order of a large organization.

Others survive for a while in the corporate, academic, or civil service jungles until they finally bale out or are thrown out.  I always imagined that my personnel file had a red stamp across it warning “Not management material”.  Still I had somehow stumbled to a director level before I was thrown out.  I am not really sure why I was “made redundant”, to use the delightful British euphemism for getting laid off, but I firmly believe that the underlying reason was that I did not fit into the pecking order very well.  Not “sound”, to use another British term.  Too independent, not enough submissive gestures.  And worst of all, not able to keep what I really think from being written all over my face.

So I looked for a quite place in the bog.  Something with a few thistles to keep body and soul together, but where there was little competition and no organization.  No more pecking orders for a while.  Quite a lot of us Eeyore types are former warriors from organization charts, now off in a corner licking our wounds and discovering that you can, to some degree at least, get out of the game.  It is not just that we don’t want to be dominated.  It is as much that we don’t want to dominate.  We simply don’t want to play the game at all.

A third option is to choose your organizations carefully.  While oppressive domination hierarchies are all too common among humans, there are lots of examples where individuals and even organizations are able to rise above this baser instinct.  Where human values manage to transcend animal values.  Where respect, decency, and tolerance overcome the will to dominate.  Where skill, dedication, and hard work are the measure by which people move up the organization.  My experience has been that, especially in large organizations, there are pockets where humanity and concern for human values dominate, and others where its pretty much dog eat dog and cover your ass.  So sometimes it is not so much a matter of choosing the right organization as the right group.

Once you have found a good group, staying there can be hard, and costly.  Especially if you are forced to pass up a promotion to stay there.  Passing up a promotion, or even not actively seeking a promotion, will set of alarms in many organizations.  I was accused of being “un-American” because I did not want to apply for the vice president position.  Perhaps it is un-American.  Not only in America, but in all industrial societies, we have let the primitive concept of a pecking order become a measure of success.  How many people report to you?  Are you the CEO?  A vice president?  A director?  A Manager?  Are you the chair of the committee?  Are you the president of the club?  Are you on the congregation’s advisory board?

But Eeyore types know there are other, more meaningful measures of success.  You don’t necessarily need to be in the spotlight.  You don’t need to be near the top of some pecking order.  You don’t need a big house on the hill or a fat Mercedes.  You can be off in a corner, and still live a happy, useful life.  Success has to go with goals.  If your goals are domination and status, then the pecking order is the place for you.  But if you have other goals in life, you may want to ask yourself if you are being dragged along by the crowd, trying to find safety in numbers, doing what everyone else is doing, because everyone is doing it.  Never mind that most of them have no idea why.  You may want to bail out, a least for a while, and find a quite corner, off in the bog to think about things for a while.

I used to think that the pecking order followed the three laws of thermodynamics.  You can’t win.  There is always someone over you, and even if you are the most powerful person in the world today, you won’t be tomorrow.  You can’t break even.  If you are not moving up the pecking order, you are, or soon will be, moving down.  And you can’t get out of the game.  Here is where I have changed my mind.  I now think that you can indeed get out of the game.

Of course, you can’t really escape completely.  You have to work and live in this or some other society.  And in any society there will be some domination hierarchies.  Some you can escape, but others you have to learn to live with.  Besides, man is a social animal.  The will to dominate is the down side of being social, but there is a positive side.  There are family and friends and Pooh and Christopher Robin.  There is concern and caring and love.  So Eeyore lives in the corner in the bog, but stays in the forest.  He thinks about

“Why and wherefore and inasmuch as which?”

and tries to avoid the pecking order.

But it usually gets you in the end.

 

Sacrament Meeting Talk on Joseph SmithPessimism of Eeyore IntroductionPessimism of Eeyore 1 — ConformityPessimism of Eeyore 2 — Smart AssesPessimism of Eeyore 3 — Off in a Corner

Pessimism of Eeyore 9 — Age

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Pessimism of Eeyore

 

Eeyore is an old gray donkey.  Old is an essential part of the picture.  There is, of course, no real evidence that Eeyore was actually born (or stitched together) long before any of the other animals in the forest.  But whereas Pooh and Piglet radiate youth, doubtless because of their unconscious adherence to the life force of Tao, Eeyore just seems old.  Pessimists are precocious agers.  I was old at 22 — ancient by 30.  I have the unique, if dubious, honor of violating all the laws of biology by being older than my mother.

The signs of aging are well documented.  Getting almost to the end of a book before you remember that you have read it before.  Not being able to find your hair brush, or your hair.  The creaks and groans and moans.  Having to sit for a minute to gather your strength before getting out of the car.  Hobbit hair on your ears.  Crawling up the stairs on your hands and knees after a late night conversation in the family room.  Wanting to throw teenagers into the heavy duty cycle of an industrial washing machine.  Starting to see those grand conspiracies everywhere that you laughed at your parents for.  Wanting to dump a bucket of water on a young girl for minor grammatical errors like replacing “said” with “goes”, as in “…and then she goes ‘Well, like duh…'”.

Some signs of aging are more subtle.  Like when every mall, every housing development, every suburb starts to seem the same.  When not just car parts but people seem interchangeable.  When you can’t tell television programs or movies or popular songs apart anymore.  When you would rather watch the fireworks from the hot tub than face the traffic and the crowds, even though there is a hill in the way and you can’t really see anything.  Especially because there is a hill in the way and you can’t see anything.  When you are more than willing to trade the exotic German car you had lusted after in your youth for the hot tub so that you have a comfortable place to not watch the fireworks.  When a good night’s sleep becomes more important than fame and a quiet walk on the beach is better than fortune.  When scrambled eggs sounds like a wonderful dinner.  When talk show hosts seem to have the wit and sophistication of high school freshmen.  And your youngest child is six foot two.  When, to your horror, you finally realize that “Grandpa” means you.

Of course, everyone ages eventually.  Some more than others.  Pessimist, however, believe that old age should not be wasted on the old.  So we skip quickly over all the bother and sweat and struggle of being young and jump directly to old age as soon as possible.  Perhaps it’s the inevitability of it.  Maybe we have warped psyches.  Maybe we are just lazy.  I was crushed when my 11th grade English teacher discovered my secret.  She had put “See me” on the paper.  I thought it was a pretty good paper, so I went up expecting some sort of compliment.  After all, I was the only person in the class who had ever heard of James Thurber, let alone read most of his works.  The rest of the class were really impressed, especially that I had actually read a book that I didn’t have to read.  So I went up to her after class like an expectant puppy all but wagging my tail.  “You lazy little wart!”, she said in a disgusted tone.  And my world came crashing down.  How did she know?  I thought I had hidden it so well.  I got quite a bit older that day.

I have spent many long hours trying to figure out why pessimists age prematurely.  It is not so much that I really mind being old, it is just that it doesn’t seem quite fair to my wife and kids.  Being married to an old man can’t be very fun and having one as a father is, according to my kids, a real bummer.  They try to make the best of the situation.  When I asked for Gregorian chants for Father’s Day, my youngest son went to every game store in town to try to find this new game called Gregorian Chance.  It is just hard to relate when your father is separated by so much more than a single generation.

I figure it must start out by being exposed to the wrong sorts of things at an early age.  There are certain influences that must be “ageogenic”.  As I look back at my early life, I suspect that the Swingle Singers, Henry David Thoreau, and above all the Russian novelists had a strong influence on my premature aging.  A solid diet of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky can put a real damper on the exuberance of being sixteen.  The Russians have honed pessimism to a fine art.  I studied at the feet of the real masters of pessimism.  Carrying around the burdens of Mother Russia, even in overblown sophomoric delusions of profoundness, can age you in a hurry.  And make you a rather strange child.

Being slow also makes you age prematurely.  Cause and effect are somewhat tangled here.  It is not clear whether you seem older because you are slow or get slower because you are old.  In any case, it is hard to imagine Eeyore at full gallop.  Plodding along is more his style.  I ran the hundred yard dash in sixteen seconds in high school.  The fast kids were under ten seconds.  Sixteen seconds wouldn’t win the Grandmothers Only race at the church picnic.  So I figured I would run distances instead.  But I was too good in math.  It did not take me long to figure out that an 880 yard run at a 16 second per hundred pace was not competitive even at the suburban high school level.  I would be barely competitive at the mile if I ran full speed the whole way.  When you run like an old man at seventeen it is hard not to think of yourself as an old man.  So I decided to leave it to the Tigger types to go racing around.  And I went back to my bog to munch thistles and read dusty old books on the history of the cathedrals of the middle ages by obscure 19th century pessimists.  Not only strange, but slow.

I was what is sometimes called a late bloomer.  Unfortunately, life doesn’t always wait around until you have bloomed, especially if you are a Mormon.  I was just getting a grip on puberty when they sent me off to Germany for two years on a mission.  Six months after I got home, I was married.  My youth wasn’t so much mis-spent as just missed.  Of course, most of this was my own fault.  And I have never for a second regretted the marriage.  It is by far the best decision I ever made.  Nothing else even comes close.  But it did drop me into the whole business of paying the rent and buying detergent at a tender age.  And a year later I was changing diapers.  Unless you are careful, having a family can age you prematurely.  And I wasn’t careful.

There are times when even a pessimist has to put all this aside and come out of the bog and play with the kids.  When it comes time to be a father, you have to put away the pessimism, put on a party face, and join in the fun.  That I didn’t do that more often is a regret that I will never out live.  Instead I worried and fretted and got a lot older very quickly.  Being a weird kid may be OK, but being a weird father is not fair to your children.  It certainly wasn’t fair to mine.

Nothing makes you age as quickly as getting behind.  By 25 I was years behind where I had intended to be when it came to my schooling and career.  And like Alice’s rabbit, the faster I went the behinder I got.  This was just silliness of course.  At least looking back on it.  But at the time it was easy to get depressed that I hadn’t made it through graduate school yet.  Of course it would have helped if I had gone to class a little more often.  Since my job was 2500 miles from the campus, I tended to miss quite a few classes.  My abortive attempt at an academic career was just as bad, except that it was much harder to skip class.  When I finally did get my degree and got an academic position I lost both my freedom and most of my income (my part time job during graduate school was rather unusual).  Further and further behind.  Older and older.

However, there are a few bright spots in this rather somber tale.  At times I have managed to slow down, if not entirely reverse, this process of premature aging.  I have done it a couple of times by running.  Nothing competitive mind you.  I am still as slow as ever.  But at some point you can impress people, and more importantly impress yourself, not by how fast you run but by how far you run.  It doesn’t really matter how long it takes.

I started running with some of the guys from work.  I was in my early thirties at the time and running was all the rage.  We ran up the canyon near work.  About 3 miles.  After a while, I felt like I could run a little further and so I started running about 6 miles.  One afternoon as I was finishing my 6 miles, I suddenly thought to myself, “I could run a lot further.”  So I decided to run a marathon and started training.  I over-trained and trained far too close to the race, so I developed knee problems within the first few miles.  But I kept going.  By the time I got down into town, people started wincing when they looked at me and offering me Band-Aids.  I thought they figured I had blisters, so I politely turned them down saying that I was running weird because of my knees.  When I got to the finish line a heavy set military looking nurse ripped off my shirt and came at me with Vaseline.  It was then I realized why people had been offering me Band-Aids.  I was used to running without a shirt, but had put on a shirt for the race since we started in the mountain chill and so I would have a place for my number.  It’s called jogger’s nipple.  I looked like I had been shot twice in the chest.  The blood was dripping down to my waist.  But the jogger’s nipples didn’t matter.  It didn’t matter that I couldn’t step over a curb for several days.  All that mattered was that I had finished.  I didn’t get much older that year.

I have had other minor victories with premature aging.  Another marathon, without knee problems this time and without a shirt.  A triathlon.  A bike race up a steep mountain canyon to a ski area.  Riding some young turk into the ground at our noon time trek up the mountain at work.  Being congratulated by the Governor for successfully negotiating the worst rapid on the river with a nifty spin at just the right moment (he just happened to be on the same river at the time).  All these helped slow the aging.

But it wasn’t just endurance sports that helped.  I found that any success, at work, at home, or with the family helped me to feel not quite so old.  I eventually discovered that one thing that makes us old is not participating fully in life.  It is sitting in the park and watching rather than being a part of the action.  As pessimists, we tend to go off in our corner.  The problem is that it is too easy to just watch from the corner.  And just watching makes you old very quickly.

As pessimists we may live in the bog, away from the crowds and the fast lane, but we should still live, not just observe.  Eeyore was an active part of much of what went on in the forest.  He was a participant, if somewhat bumbling, not just a spectator.  Leading a quiet life is very different than leading an inactive life.  It is the activity that helps keep us young.  Of course, nothing works like success. But even failure is better than non-participation.

Pessimism tends to turns sour when we withdraw from life.  When we hide away and watch life on TV or read about it in books or watch the little dramas play out at the office.  Being a pessimist means choosing what parts of life to get involved with very carefully.  Choosing them based on our own appraisal of their worth and value rather than their popularity with the crowd.  But it will not do to withdraw entirely.  The goal of pessimism is a quiet life, not a quiet death.  If you find yourself getting old prematurely, it is probably because you have abandoned life and are just waiting to die.

But once you turn 40, it’s all over and you might as well give up.

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Pessimism of Eeyore 10 — Minimalism

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Pessimism of Eeyore

 

Pessimists are simple people who want to lead simple lives.  We try to avoid complexity and entanglements.  So while Owl will attempt complex spellings like HIPY PAPY BTHUTHDTH THUTHDA BTHUDY Eeyore is content to contemplate the letter A.  I suppose for some pessimists this simplicity has a deep philosophical or religious basis.  Some seek simplicity in a monastery or a convent.  But most of us try to find simplicity off in our corner of the forest.  Bogs are a good place to lead  simple, uncluttered lives.  And for us the attraction of minimalism is not so much philosophical and religious, but practical and aesthetic.

There are three principles of minimalism:

  1. Quality,
  2. Order,
  3. Number.

And in that order.  Quality is a term so over-used that it has lost much of its meaning.  The first feature of quality is that it works.  It does what it is supposed to do.  And it does it well.  It does not make broad sweeping claims that it cannot fulfill and it does not pretend to be what it is not.  It does its job quietly and effectively without a lot of huffing and puffing, without a lot of theatrics.  It is reliable.  It works year in and year out, when it rains and when the sun shines.  And when it does break, as everything eventually does, it is easy to repair.  Pooh is a bear of quality.  Owl is a little questionable.

Minimalists avoid junk like the plague.

Order is a little harder to pin down.  Like many things, it is most easily characterized by its opposite — chaos.  Chaos is what happens when you do nothing.  Even if you start with order, you can get to chaos, usually in a hurry, by doing nothing.  Scientists have formalized this universal characteristic of matter in the laws of thermodynamics and created a metric for it called entropy.  People with children don’t need to study thermodynamics to know that everything has a natural tendency to disorder and that it takes energy and constant vigilance to preserve order.  They know all too well what entropy means.

A simple box for storing toys illustrates an important principle of order.  In engineering disciplines it is called modularity.  Once you get all the toys in the toy box you can then treat it as a single thing.  You can move it into the closet, put it in the basement, or give it to the Salvation Army as a single item.  You don’t really need to know the details about what’s inside when you put it in the closet.  In fact, you probably really don’t want to know what’s inside.

Another example of modularity is a library.  Libraries illustrate another principle of order called structure.  A library is not just a container for a pile of books like the toy box is a container for a pile of toys.  The library has an internal organization and structure.  When things are organized in logical structures they become a new kind of thing.  A library has useful characteristics not found in a pile of books.  You can find things in a library.  You can lend out books and keep track of who has them.  You have a place where Christopher Robin can go to learn something.

It is the logical organization and structure that creates order and makes a useful new thing.  A set of woodworking tools can be organized into a shop which, as a whole, becomes a useful tool for making things.  But without that organization and structure, the same set of woodworking tools is just a pile of tools.  The shop is ordered, coherent, and simple.  The pile of tools is cluttered, incoherent, and complex.  Simplifying your life does not necessarily mean throwing away everything in your garage.  It may be more a matter of organizing and establishing some order.

Order is sometimes interpreted as harsh, utilitarian, and geometric.  The formal gardens of Versailles come to mind.  Lots of right angles and shrubs trimmed to precise geometric shapes.  But order need not be geometric and sterile, it can be organic.  There is just as much order in an English country garden.  It is more natural, warmer, charming, and a much nicer place to take afternoon tea.  Order does not mean having 100 boxes all the same size and shape and forcing every  piece into one of the boxes.  It does not have to be exact and rigid.  The critical feature is that the parts work together and make up a coherent whole.  Natural organisms are the best example of order that we have.  When you stop to think about it, the number of parts that work together in a human being, or a donkey, dwarfs the number of parts in the largest man-made machine.  Organic is not the opposite of order, but its highest goal.

The third principle of minimalism is number.  This is the most obvious and some people think minimalism is nothing more than minimizing the number of things and people that you have to deal with.  In fact, number is the least important of the principles of minimalism, but it is still very important.  Why have two if one will do?  Quality is expensive, so having two usually means that they are both of inferior quality.  One good one is usually a lot more useful, easier to care for, easier to store, and easier to use.

There is also a danger in buying things that are too specialized.  Gadgets.  The difference between a gadget and a tool is that a tool will usually work for a wide variety of purposes or in a variety of circumstances.  Gadgets are very specific and useful only for a certain job.  There are occasions when a specialized gadget is needed because no general purpose tool will do the job.  But in many cases gadgets are not worth the trouble.  Gadgets are like mice.  Once they get started in your closets, they start to breed.  Pretty soon they take over your whole house.  A more general tool may work almost as well.  Most gadgets are created by marketing departments so that you will have something to buy your Mother-in-law for her birthday.  Minimalists hate gadgets as much as Tiggers hate honey.  Unfortunately, some of us, like Tigger, only realize this too late.

The final question to ask yourself is if you need one of these things at all.  It may well be that everyone else has one, or lots of them.  But that does not mean that you need or want one.  With the less than altruistic help of the advertisers of the world we have all come to believe that having more stuff will make us happier.  Things are supposed to give us status and excitement.  It is almost never true.  It all has to be stored somewhere.  It all breaks and has to be fixed or gets dirty and has to be washed.  It is just one more thing to worry about.  For many people the happiest day of their life is not when they finally get that boat they have always thought they wanted, but when they finally sell it — at a big loss.

The three principles of minimalism apply to three domains:

  1. People
  2. Things
  3. Aesthetics

The choice of the people we deal with is the most important choice of our lives.  The most important factor to look for is quality.  Minimalists look for people who are what they claim to be, who make a contribution to those around them, and who are constant and true.  The famous, powerful, and rich sometimes start to feel that the normal rules of behavior don’t apply to them.  They come to believe that they are “exceptional” and therefore not subject to the same rules as “normal” people.  This elitism can show up at almost any level in almost any domain.  You find people who think of themselves as the elite in government, business, academics, professional societies, in knitting circles.  It is usually best to avoid those who think of themselves as elite.  They are usually more interested in image than substance and with domination than friendship.

Also avoid all men with gold chains and women with tattoos.

Minimalists should also avoid people who leave chaos in their wake.  Who wander through rooms and lives creating one mess after another.  Never stopping to clean up after themselves.  A little exuberance is OK.  In fact, for us pessimists, it is a nice change.  So you can have maybe one Tigger in your life.  But that is the limit.

A little variety is good too.  If all your friends and colleagues are just like you, your life is likely to be pretty boring.  Particularly if you are a pessimist.  Pessimism is a counterbalance to life.  A spice.  A steady diet of it is dead boring.  If the whole forest had been populated with Eeyores, Christopher Robin would have ended up in therapy.

Sometimes it is nice to have someone to learn from and someone to teach.  Someone to go to foreign films with and someone to go fishing with.  Someone to jog with and someone to sneak out to the ice cream shop with.  Someone to go to church with and someone to love.

With people as with everything else, minimalists try to keep the sheer numbers down.  A few good friends is what you are after.  Too often we treat our friends like a spoiled child treats a new toy.  Today it is the best thing in the world and the object of every drop of love and attention.  Tomorrow it is forgotten in a corner under the bed.  Minimalists try to cultivate life long friendships that grow and refine as they age like a well cared for garden.  The gardeners at the office complex where I used to work did brute force gardening.  If something was not doing well, they pulled it up and planted a new one.  Never mind trying to figure out what the problem was.  Just pull it up and replace it.  In stark contrast, one of the gardeners at a Cambridge college was asked how he kept the lawns so smooth and green.  “It is simple,” he said, “You just roll and mow it for 400 years.”  Today’s trend towards the disposable and replaceable tends to apply to people as well.  At the first sign of yellow around the edges we pull them up and throw them away.  But quality friendships take years of rolling and mowing.

The second important choice we make in our lives are the things.  Houses, cars, clothes, computers, sail boats, skis, etc.  It is not that the things themselves are that important.  They usually aren’t.  It is that the wrong things, or more often, too many things can intrude on our lives and ruin them.  How many people do you know who are working two jobs so they can afford the RV which they can never use because they are working two jobs?  Or who spend every fourth Saturday cleaning the garage.  Far too much of our lives are oriented to lusting after, buying, using, maintaining, and finally trying to get rid of things.  Of all of the promises of Christianity, the one I find the most comforting is “You can’t take it with you.”  Free at last.

One of my minimalist heroes is Dr. Elliot Butler.  He was my professor for freshman chemistry and my wife’s boss as the chairman of the chemistry department.  He loved clarity and precision.  The first thing you noticed about Dr. Butler was the way he talked.  His English was so proper and articulate that it immediately grabbed your attention.  It was like BBC English without the accent.  Not what you would expect from someone from a hick town in Arizona.  But it was saved from being pedantic by his insight, understanding, and wisdom.  When it came time for my wife and I to get married he gave us two pieces of advice.  The first was to be very careful about taking advice from anyone.  We have been very good at that.  The second piece of advice was to put out more garbage on Wednesday than you take in during the week.  Despite occasional strenuous efforts, we haven’t done very well with this one.

When it comes to things we almost always forget the key structural questions.  How will this thing fit into my life?  How will it make my life better?  Does it replace some other thing that I can now throw away?  Does that other thing really need replacing?  How long until it breaks or goes out of style?  Where can I get it fixed?  And the all important — Where will I put it?  Of course, you have to be a little careful asking yourself all these question or you can end up like me.  Consumer block.  Sometimes it takes me twenty minutes to decide on a can of soup.  A new car can take years.  And I have given up on clothes altogether, much to the dismay of my family.

And finally, minimalism is an aesthetic choice.  Minimalist love quality.  The cheap ones like me, especially love quality at a bargain price.  We love workmanship and craftsmanship.  And we get ecstatic over the handmade.

I can’t think of craftsmanship and quality without thinking of our friend, an old Swiss master craftsman named Andre.  Every time we visit Andre, to take him a loaf of my wife’s bread or a Christmas goodie, we get a tour of his house.  The house started out as a rather ugly 60’s style ranch, but it has slowly been transformed into an authentic French Swiss country house.  It is like walking into a fairy tale.  Nothing is straight, but everything fits.  It is whimsical and solid.  Magic and magnificent.  And Andre himself is no less magical with his white hair and beard, his short round body, and the iron grip of his handshake.  The twinkle in his eye enchants you as he leads you away into a world of hand carved beams, hand forged iron doors, hand painted woodwork, and inlaid leather floors.  A world where there is absolutely no compromise in quality and craftsmanship.  And through his heavy French accent, there shines a soul as honest and direct as his designs.  A quality every bit as high as the quality of his workmanship.  An enchanting old world craftsman who completes and is completed by the enchanting house he lives in.

Minimalist like things that fit together.  Pieces that complement each other.  Harmony.  It is often the interplay between the parts that makes a piece of music, a sculpture, a painting, or a tool interesting or even beautiful.  I once had a chance to travel in Europe with one of my friends from work.  Lewie fixes things.  If you have anything that is broken or about to break, you try to lend it to Lewie because it will always come back fixed.  And when Lewie fixed it, it was not just as good as new, but better.  It was interesting to walk through the Rijksmuseum with Lewie since he had a keen artistic sense and a special feeling for design.  But the most fun was watching Lewie in a Dutch hardware shop.  The Rembrants and Burghers interested him, but the door knobs made his eyes light up.  He could not get over the quality of the design, the craftsmanship, and the fit.  He was like a kid in a candy shop.  Lewie, of course, is a pessimist.

Minimalists also like simple classic lines.  We prefer a string quartet to a full symphony, a Greek temple to a baroque gothic cathedral.  We like cottages better than palaces and deserts better than jungles.  The ornate leaves us cold.  The pompous and overblown irritates us.  The simple and elegant lifts our spirit.  Of course, as pessimists we realize that we have no claim to artistic truth here.  The simple and sublime are merely our tastes.  To each his own, but we prefer ours to be carefully designed, carefully crafted, and elegantly simple.

Minimalism is an attempt to strip life down to its essentials and get rid of all of the unnecessary junk that tends to clutter up our lives.  It goes well with pessimism because pessimists tend to think that there is indeed a lot of junk in our lives.  But minimalism is ultimately just a choice, a strategy for trying to get through life and get the most out of it.  A way of trying to minimize pain and find fulfillment.  It is not for everyone.  But some of us like it.

It probably won’t help much.

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Pessimism of Eeyore 11 — Dull

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We are not dull!  We are just recreationally impaired.  This is not a disability that I inherited.  My parents took us skiing, camping in wilderness areas with the horses, and on countless white water rafting trips (actually my father didn’t really start his career as a master boatman until after I had left home).  I grew up in Boulder, where outdoor recreation is a minor deity; for many a major deity.  So I can hardly blame this dysfunctional part of my personality on my upbringing or my surroundings.

And I wasn’t always this way.  Although looking back now I can see signs of dullness (oops — recreational impairment) as a child, I was generally an enthusiastic participant in many of these activities.  I loved to ski and conceived and perfected the bake sale scam.  I was the head of our church Explorer group (Explorers are scouts who have gotten too old).  We needed to raise some money, so we decided to have a bake sale.  Our mothers would slave away for days baking all this great stuff, we would gather it up and take it to the mall where it sold out in a few hours, and then we had all this money.  It hadn’t really been clear why we needed the money in the first place, but raising money is one of the things Explorers were supposed to do.  So I watched the attendance of our meetings very carefully and when we had a majority of skiers present, I brought up the question of what we should do with the money.  Off we would go on a three day ski trip.  This actually worked several times before our leaders, and our mothers, caught on.

I used to get really excited having fun.  I still remember my first fish.  I was about ten years old and had gone fishing in the mountains with my father.  My father is one of those fly fisherman they make movies about.  It is a finely crafted skill and an absolute dedication.  We were at this lake one summer evening and normally reserved trout had completely lost their self control in a feeding frenzy.  This was great for everyone but me.  I was using worms and the fish were feeding on anything and everything with wings.  And worms don’t have wings.  My father was, of course, using dry flies — anything else is sacrilege — and catching fish as fast as he could cast.  After a while he came over to me and told me that he would get the fly out to where the fish were feeding and hand me the pole and I could catch a fish.  You have to be really quick with flies he said.  You really need to see the fish start the strike and set the hook before the fish has a chance to spit out the fly.  I was supposed to jerk the pole when my Dad said, “Now”.  So he worked the fly out to the feeding area and handed me the pole.  We only had to wait for a few seconds before my Dad said, “Now!”.  Even a somewhat klutzy ten year old can do amazing things with enough adrenaline.  I gave a mighty jerk and the fish never new what hit him.  He flew about twenty five yards through the air and landed at my feet, his jaw a couple of inches longer than it had been only seconds before.

Even though the river running mania struck our family after I had left home, my wife and I went on several trips and I, eventually, became a passable boatman.  We even organized a couple of the trips and put together all the food and transportation.  There is nothing in this world like floating down a wild river in a raft.  It is four days of pure bliss.  I still own a raft — somewhere.  But somehow we never make it on the river anymore.  They changed the rules for giving permits so the only people who get to go on the river are either the very wealthy who can pay commercial people to take them down or the leisure bums who can camp on the phone every morning all summer and put together the trip with 24 hours notice.  But I suppose the real reason is that we all just got too busy.

My siblings have picked up where my parents left off, and even taken it to new heights.  My little brother is off skiing or sailing or backpacking or biking or something every weekend.  His wife is an expert kayaker and their family shops at REI rather than Nordstroms.  But it is my youngest sister who has elevated recreation to an art form.  She has been on the ski patrol, a ski instructor (along with my brother and another sister), an Outward Bound expedition leader, a professional boatman, a swimming instructor and a life guard.  She has won endless sailing trophies, together with her husband and on her own, and she is an expert wind surfer.  Last summer she went to a wind surfing competition with her husband.  She was furious when she found out that they didn’t have a women’s division, so she entered the men’s division — and won.  She has run marathons and trekked in Nepal and won a 100K trail race in Mongolia (1st for women 3rd overall).

So why is it that I spend Saturdays mowing the lawn and then retire to my bedroom with a huge bowl of popcorn to watch a football game on the tube?  And those are the active weekends.  It gets worse, but I am too ashamed to go into that.  Why haven’t I taken the family camping for years?  Why is a new Tony Hillerman novel the most exciting thing that happens all summer?  How can someone from a recreationally gifted family end up recreationally impaired?

I think it goes back to pessimism.  While it cannot be said that pessimism necessarily leads to recreational impairment, the tendency is undeniable and the statistics are all against us.  One of the reasons for this is the tendency of many pessimists to be athletically challenged — you know, klutzes.

Last fall I finally bribed my way onto a house boat on Lake Powell.  The lake is spectacularly beautiful and we had a great time swimming, kayaking, and just enjoying the warmth of the desert colors in the sunset.  But then there was this jet ski thing.  Jet skis were invented by some guy who was once embarrassed by the class brain in algebra.  Just to get even.  For the athletically gifted they are endless fun.  I’m told.  It’s like a tiny little boat, which is OK, that you are supposed to stand on as it bounces across the waves at barely subsonic speeds, which is really hard.  If you are a real klutz you can ride around on your knees while your polite relatives try not to laugh at you.  But the killer is getting started.  You can’t just stand up on a jet ski when it’s stopped in the water.  It has to be going about 90 miles an hour before it will support the weight of a middle aged pessimist.  And at least 120 before it provides the stability necessary to stand.

So the problem is how to get this play thing from hell going at this speed before you get on.  Now there may be an easier way and my brother-in-law was just teasing me, but what he told me is this.  You drape yourself up over the back of the thing.  Trying to hang on to the handle bars with your hands with your belly hanging over the end and your feet dangling down into the water.  Sort of like an overweight fish thrown half way onto a dock.  Now you are supposed to give it some gas.  What they neglect to tell you is that the jet ski goes forward by propelling water out through a small whole in the back at a force that would strip the paint off a boxcar.  And the exhaust port in the back of the jet ski is, you guessed it, between your legs.  So your first thought on giving it some gas is, “Well, that ends that part of my life”.  So you let go in a hurry but continue to be force-fed lake water for several seconds until you finally come sputtering and coughing to the surface.  Now you try to figure out how you can assess the damage without drowning yet again or getting arrested.  Distracted by the terror of singing soprano for the rest of your life you don’t notice that this diabolical “toy” is not content just to castrate and drown you, but has come back looking for you to run you down.  The relatives are rolling on deck of the houseboat in uncontrollable laughter and the jet ski inventor smiles contentedly on his Caribbean island thinking that revenge is indeed sweet.

After the jet ski I didn’t even try water skiing.  The thought of what a much bigger boat might do to me was too terrifying to even contemplate.  It’s much safer on my bed with my bowl of popcorn and my remote control.

But it is not just the fear of dismemberment and humiliation that causes recreational impairment.  There are other causes.  One of the major culprits is the “Unfinished Task”.  I think it was Thoreau, probably quoting someone else as usual, who said that play can only come after your work is done.  The unfinished task is work that is not done.  That last patch of lawn that needs to be planted, that report your boss has been asking for for months, the bedroom that needs to be finished in the basement.  Anything that you really ought to do but really don’t want to.  So it sits there and stares at you.  You know you have to do it some day and you promise yourself to do it just as soon as you have the time and the dollar stops falling against the Yen and there is a full moon.

Of course, everyone has unfinished tasks.  Life is an ongoing event.  You are never done with all your work.  So it is isn’t so much an issue of having something that needs to be done as having something that has been neglected.  Seriously neglected — by months and years.  Unlike many things, unfinished tasks thrive on neglect.  They grow at cancerous rates and get scarier and scarier.  Pretty soon they take you hostage and keep you in the house.  Oh, you can get out to go to work or church, but if you even think about something fun, say a little ski trip or a picnic at the beach, the unfinished task threatens you with all sorts of dire consequences.  So you stay at home, but you are not quite up to the unfinished task today.  There is that headache and the stomach is a little upset.  It’s better to ask your wife for a bowl of popcorn and check to see how the Celtics are doing while you gather up your strength.  One thing leads to another and pretty soon the day is gone.  After a few months of this you realize that the season is gone and you didn’t get out skiing or to the beach once.  And, of course, the unfinished task is still there — just waiting for you and getting bigger and bigger.

Another problem is what chemists call the activation barrier.  Many chemical reactions will release energy, but they need an initial push to get them over the activation barrier.  It’s like that first hill on a roller coaster.  Once you get to the top of that first hill your speed and momentum will carry you through.  But it’s work getting to the top of that first hill.  To go camping you have to dig out the tent, clean it up.  Find all the old sleeping bags and have them cleaned.  Patch the holes in the air mattresses.  And these days, you probably have to make reservations a month or two in advance.  You have to find sensible shoes for all the kids, jackets that can stand to get dirty, and mosquito repellent.  You have to buy a fishing license and find and untangle all the fishing gear.  And then there is all that food and ice and didn’t the red cooler leak last time?  After a while it’s easier just to remember how crowded the camp grounds are these days, have another bowl of popcorn and day dream about a really great backpacking trip into the wilderness as you slip off into dreamland and sleep away another Saturday afternoon.

Serious recreation is serious work.  My father spends weeks planning, buying, packing, repairing, and re-packing for a river trip or the annual elk hunt.  My sister’s husband spends endless hours at his industrial grade sewing machine repairing his sails .  My brother has his bike apart more often than not.  Of course, in each of these cases, they actually enjoy the preparation.  For them it is part of the fun.  It is probably at the preparation stage that recreational impairment first develops.  When it starts to be too much work for some of us to have fun.

Of course, pessimism itself is a major contributor to recreational impairment.  If you think that you won’t be able to find a camping spot, that it’s impossible to get a river permit, that the snow is probably gone this late in the year, or that one more try on that damn jet ski and you may qualify for a job in the harem, you are less likely to get up early and just do it.

But ultimately that is what it comes down to.  Getting up early and just doing it.  Being recreationally impaired is not really a lot of fun.  That’s what it means, not being able to have fun.  Those of us burdened with all that responsibility, all that worry, all those unfinished tasks, all that popcorn, have none of the thrills and spills, none of the excitement and wonder, none of the relaxation and renewal, none of the fun.  I am not sure it is a curable disease.  But every once in a while, I do manage a little recreation and even manage to have a little fun.  I stick with small things like an afternoon at the beach.  A few people over for a meal.  Maybe a movie or dinner at a nice restaurant.  Nothing too complicated.

I do, however, have big plans.  There are these sea kayaks that we rented for a couple of days for Lake Powell.  One day I’ll buy my own kayaks and start at the east end of the Lake Powell and paddle all the way to the west end.  One day I’ll do the Seattle to Portland bike ride, the long way around (down through the Rockies and up the Pacific coast).  I’ll walk the full length of the West Highland Trail in Scotland.  I’ll actually use my cross country skis and get a decent fly rod and learn to cast without popping off the fly and to catch fish without dislocating their jaws.  One day I’ll break out of my shell and have a wonderful time.  Just as soon as I get my business going and loose another 20 pounds and finish this bowl of popcorn.

Maybe I am not really recreationally impaired at all, I’m just dull.

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Pessimism of Eeyore 12 — Living with a Pessimist

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Pessimism of Eeyore

So now you know more about pessimism than you ever wanted to know.  The question still remains, what do you do when you wake up one morning and find that your child or parent, or worst of all, you spouse is a pessimist?  An Eeyore.

Rule 1.  Don’t panic.

First of all, make sure of your diagnosis.  Is this real long term pessimism or just a little temporary depression because she didn’t get asked to the prom or he didn’t make the team or she didn’t get the promotion or he added another ten pounds over the holiday.  There are two tests.  The first is time.  If the suspected pessimist gets over it in a week or a month or a year, this is not real pessimism.  The second test is good news.  A real pessimist will treat good news with extreme suspicion and skepticism.

This is not because pessimists believe that the world is against us.  We believe the world doesn’t really care.  It simply ignores us.  So it is not so much the fear that the world will try to get even with us if something good happens as it is the doubt that anything good could really happen in the first place.  The odds against it are too high.

If your suspected pessimist passes (or flunks depending on your point of view) these two tests, still don’t panic.  Worse things could happen.  Many pessimists live long and …, well, long lives.

Rule 2.  Don’t expect to change him.

Pessimism is not a disease.  It is not something you are going to cure.  This does not mean that pessimists never change.  People sometimes do change.  Age, work, love, health affects us all and we all react differently.  But don’t count on it.  Pessimist usually stay that way.  Pessimism is the way that Eeyores react to life.  It is our attempt to cope.  Who is to say that it is wrong?  Who is to say that is abnormal?  Why does it need to be cured?

Attempting to change a pessimist is not only futile, it is usually counter-productive.  More likely than not, you will drive them deeper into their pessimism.  Christopher Robin and the animals in the forest know this.  No one ever lectures Eeyore on his pessimism, not even Owl who loves to lecture.  No one carts him off to therapy sessions or enrolls him in a support group.  They all accept him as he is.

Rule 3.  Don’t blame yourself.

First of all, nothing that terrible has happened.  More importantly, pessimism is a combination of inborn tendencies and personal response to the total environment to which a person is exposed.  You are only a part of that environment.  Of course, if you are a really nasty piece of work, you might be a substantial factor.  But far more likely, his pessimism has roots that predate his even knowing you.

Blaming yourself may not only cause problems for you, it may also make the pessimist worse.  Guilt.  Pessimists have more than their share.  If you start blaming yourself for our pessimism, it becomes just one more thing for us to feel guilty about.  The more guilty you feel for having caused our pessimism, or even for not having been able to cure it, the more guilty we feel.  There is no real issue of blame here at all, so don’t create one.  As sure as you do, the pessimist will manage to grab the donkey’s share.

Rule 4.  Be nice to him.

Pessimists need love too.  We are not some sort of heartless or evil beings, we are just people, a little gloomy at times, but people none-the-less.  Or sometimes donkeys.  Pessimists are not very good at expressing appreciation for the nice things that people do for us.  Eeyore never did thank Piglet properly for the violets.  We sometimes get too tied up in our own problems to behave properly.  I am not excusing this.  It is wrong and it is common in pessimists.  It is one of our many weaknesses.  But we really don’t mean to be mean or ungrateful.  So we ask a little patience sometimes.

The best way to treat a pessimist is like you should treat anyone else.  No pity.  No special “cheer up” parties or pep talks.  Nor should you go to the other extreme and just ignore us.  We may expect that, and even pretend that is what we want.  But what we really want is to be loved and treated kindly like anyone else.  Eeyore got no special treatment, but the other animals were always kind and understanding.

Rule 5.  Adjust your expectations.

Pessimists are a little different.  They will react differently to situations.  Don’t expect your pessimist to bubble over with enthusiasm.  For a pessimist, a quiet smile or a sigh may be a sign of pleasure and contentment.  They won’t bounce off the walls at Christmas or jump up and down in anticipation when opening birthday presents.  But this does not mean that they do not appreciate the gifts or even that they are not happy, in their way.

You should deal with a pessimist, like anyone else who is a little different, on his own terms.  You should encourage him to grow and develop his talents, but you should not try to force him into being something he is not comfortable with.  Don’t try to make him join the country club or switch into marketing and sales where the real money is.  Help him to be a good pessimist, but don’t try to make something else out of him.

Rule 6.  Enjoy the difference.

Difference is the spice of life.  If we were all the same, it would be really boring.  Eeyore is an important part of the menagerie.  He helps make the hundred acre wood an interesting place.  It would not be a better place if he were more like Pooh or Baby Roo or anyone else.  It would not be as interesting and fun if he weren’t there at all.  Eeyore is an important part of Christopher Robin’s world.  Much of the charm of that world is that all the animals are different.  Each of them contributes to that family his own talents and personality.  Without any of them, it wouldn’t be the same.

We spend far too much time and effort worrying about the differences between us.  Even worse we worry about the differences between us and some imaginary norm.  We should spend more time and effort learning to live with these differences by dealing with each person on his own terms.  We should learn to appreciate and cherish the differences.  We don’t need another Pooh or another Piglet.  We need an Eeyore.

The special case.

Although it is rare, there are cases on record where there is more than one pessimist in a family.  More than one Eeyore in the forest.  What should you do in these cases?

Panic.

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Pessimism of Eeyore 13 — How to be a Pessimist

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Pessimism of Eeyore

Please note that this is not a chapter on how to become a pessimist.  It’s not something you really want to be if it is not already deeply ingrained in your nature.  Nor is it a question of “coming out of the closet”.  Pessimists are never really in the closet.  It is not something we keep to ourselves.  We are more than willing to share our dismal views with anyone who will listen.

Nor is it a chapter that will try to convert you from pessimism with some unexpected final twist.  There are no magic words anyone can say, no magic potion that will change you from a pessimist into an optimist.  There is not even a proven course of hard work and personal struggle that will get you there.  Pessimism is a life long condition.

Rather, this is a chapter for those of you who know you are Eeyores, have always known it, and just want to get a little better at it.

Rule 1  Don’t Panic.

So you are gray and shaggy with floppy ears and a bad back.  An Eeyore.  A pessimist.  Worse things could happen.  You are different.  Much of the tyranny of conformity is that we impose on ourselves.  It is OK to be different.  It is OK to be a pessimist.  In very few theological systems will it condemn you to hell’s fire.  You don’t have to move to a special island.  The clubs and social groups that will exclude you for being different, you don’t really want to join.  And the people at the top of the pecking order who look down on you have very short life expectancies.  Just as they get ready to go off and enjoy their spoils, retire to their yachts and condos, they have massive coronaries and die like flies.  Or die of a drug overdose.

Rule 2  Don’t expect to change.

Pessimism is not like smoking, a terrible habit that will ruin and shorten your life.  Nor is it like dishonesty, a moral and ethical weakness that will destroy your relationship with your friends and family and eventually make you an outcast of society.  It is a personality trait rather than a moral weakness.

Now this is not to say that change is impossible.  If being a pessimist is really making you miserable, and you don’t in fact like being miserable, then you probably should try to change.  But there are no quick fixes.  This is a long and arduous road.  On the same scale as the 96 pound weakling becoming Mr. Universe.  You will pretty much have to devote your life to it.  And even then, it only happens once in a great while.  Most 96 pound weaklings go on to become 200 pound weaklings.  All right, 220.

So unless it is causing you a real problem, you are better off learning to live with pessimism, learning how to become a good pessimist, than attempting to change your spots.  Eeyore is quite happy being a pessimist.  He is hardly likely to go into therapy or enroll himself in a support group.  What’s the point?

Rule 3.  Don’t blame anyone.

If you are only six years old and a real pessimist, it may be your parents’ fault.  If you are any older, it is not.  In western society we have gone through an epidemic of blaming everything on our parents.  People in the business of selling psychological advice are all too happy to tell us that all our problems stem from some imperfection in our families.  Now no family is perfect and sometimes they are pretty awful.  But except perhaps in the extreme cases, the problems that we inherit from our families are simply part of the struggles that we go through as we become adults.  That the problem was there when we started to grow up may be our parents’ fault.  If it is still there at thirty, that is our own damn fault.  Nor should we forget that for most of us, the heritage that we took into adulthood was overwhelmingly positive.  There may have been a few traumas, but they were usually few and far between in the overwhelming background of loving care.

Nor is it your old boyfriend’s or girlfriend’s, your boss’s, or your spouse’s fault.  Pooh didn’t make Eeyore a pessimist, nor did Piglet nor Owl nor even Tigger.  Not even Christopher Robin.  You can’t blame your pessimism on Nixon or Viet Nam or cholesterol.  It is just one of the flavors that people, and donkeys, come in.  It is no more anyone’s fault than baldness or thick ankles.

Rule 4.  Be nice.

A little doom and gloom is OK once in a while, but there is no excuse for nastiness.  Being mean and nasty is not part of pessimism.  Eeyore was never intentionally mean.  Being nasty is not OK.  It is a moral failing that you should fix.  It is all right to sigh when people talk to you, but if you find yourself growling and snapping at them, you need to change.

Being nice means that you sometimes have to swallow your pessimism.  Destroying other people’s hopes and letting the air out of other people’s balloons is nasty.  You cannot justify it as part of your inner nature.  This doesn’t mean that you have to become the head cheer leader, but it does mean that you have to know when to hold your tongue.

And watch the smart ass tendency.  That can easily drift into mean and nasty if you choose hapless and helpless victims.

Being a pessimist doesn’t mean you get special treatment or get to live under a special set of rules.  In order to be loved, you have to love, just like everyone else.  In order for people to be nice to you, you are going to have to be nice to them.  People may overlook a little glumness, even learn to live with a little grumpiness, but if you are spiteful and nasty people will avoid you, as well they should.  Being a pessimist means living off in a corner with a few close friends and family, it does not mean isolating yourself on an island and railing against the injustices of the world.

Rule 5.  Adjust your expectations.

This seems redundant.  After all the essence of pessimism is having low expectations.  However, pessimists sometimes want it both ways.  We sometimes want all the advantages of being like other people without paying the price.  If you avoid marketing and sales and management paths, you will have a much lower income.  You can’t expect the estate, the vacation condo, and the Mercedes if you choose a different path.  You can’t expect to be the life of the party or the belle of the ball if you sit glumly in the corner.  There are all sorts of exceptions of course, but most often you get what you pay for.  If you order from the pessimist’s menu don’t expect to get served from the optimist’s kitchen.

If you really expect to get to be Vice President, to be elected to the City Council, to be grand master at the parade, you will have to give up your pessimism.  These roles are reserved for optimists with their smiles and slaps on the back and “Isn’t it a wonderful day?”  As a pessimist, you have chosen a different path with a different destination.  So don’t spend your life following pessimist’s paths and then complain because you never get to Emerald City.  That is not where pessimism leads.

It leads to a quiet life with family and a few close friends.  It leads to a cottage, not a palace.  A Toyota, not a Mercedes.  Friends, not fame.  A pleasant meal, not a fortune.  These are OK choices.  They are, in fact, my choices, but many would find them disappointing.  Make sure you know where you are going and what you are going to find when you get there.

Rule 6  Enjoy the difference.

Occasionally a pessimist, who demands that the world accept him on his own terms, turns around and refuses to accept others on their own terms.  He wants everyone to be like him.  A whole forest of Eeyores.  Yuuch.

Keep your pessimism to yourself as much as possible.  Of course a grunt or a moan will slip out once and a while, but don’t overdo it.  And for goodness sake, don’t try to convert other people to pessimism.  That misery loves company is just a myth.  It only thinks it does.  Eeyore doesn’t really want to be around a lot of other Eeyores.  He wants to be around Pooh and Piglet and Tigger and all the rest of the gang.  Optimism can be taken in gulps, but pessimism must be taken in small sips.  A little of it goes a long way.  One Eeyore in the forest is more than enough.

A final thought

Pessimism is a way of life, not a replacement for life.  Like everything else, there are good pessimists and bad pessimists.  A bad pessimist will wallow in his pessimism.  He uses his pessimism to hide from life.  He will never attempt anything, never reach out to make a friend, never struggle to overcome a weakness.  This is not the picture of Eeyore.  He is a good pessimist.  A good pessimist goes on living.  He doesn’t expect to win the lottery or become CEO, but he keeps striving anyway.  He doesn’t expect anyone to celebrate his birthday, but he is delighted when they do and pleased with his popped balloon and empty honey pot.  Above all he cares about his friends and they care about him.  Not such a bad life, after all.

Above all else, never take advice from a pessimist.  We are always wrong.

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