City Of God 50

I get particularly concerned about the way self-improvement and self-loathing can so easily overlap. The frenzy of modernism, methinks, with the tyranny of capitalism thrown in for good measure. We're fine the way we are. We need to get better. These are the two contradictory messages many of us seem to carry around with us all our lives. I think we want to be loved and accepted the way we are, given how difficult it can be to really change. Neither do we want to be punished through censure and exclusion for not living up to the standards of others. Then there are those of us who impose on ourselves some of the most brutally exacting and unattainable standards. Recently I heard from a friend that he doesn't think that I accept him for who he is. Well, I don't accept some of his behaviour or values, nor do I agree with everything he tells me. Do I love my friend? Hard to say. I think sometimes that love is more of a process than an already given. But I also understand that without love, we are nowhere. It seems to always come back to love. I am trying to imagine what happens to us if we never change. It isn't pretty. Try to imagine, being stranded in the terrible twos for all eighty-odd years of your life. You have not yet graduated from potty training, and always need someone to wipe your bum for you. You are only beginning with language and getting stranded there, you are going to be inarticulate for the rest of your life. In order to express your needs and wants you are going to resort to whining, crying, screaming and meltdowns. What is particularly scary will be the way you can only focus on yourself, because age two is the age of narcissism. It's all about me. It's mine. And you are very adept suddenly with the word no. The frontal areas of your brain, which should be developing and growing like mad, have slowed to a halt, so you are never going to become literate, but the TV and computer and phone screens will always be there to keep you entertained and diverted. Now fast-forward this arrested development just past puberty and....YIKES!!!!! You have a contemporary adolescent! Arrested development plus testosterone (for males, anyway), sexual development, greater size and body strength and you have a candidate for a street gang. Or for Donald Trump's dream team. Take your pick. We cannot afford to stay where we were, nor as we are. I wonder if part of love, whether we are loving ourselves or others, could be in recognizing in ourselves and in others the potential for development and growth, the potential to evolve, and that is what we need to love. This doesn't mean that we fall short on forgiveness. None of us ever really gets there, and really, I think that for most of us our progress in life is going to be slow, miniscule. We cannot stay as we are. Common sense demands that we grow. In growing, if it is done right, we can also become less selfish and more caring, more giving and more actively concerned with others, with our communities, with our world, because it is for this very lack of concern for anything outside of immediate gratification, taken on a large scale, that has got us into this mess of global warming and climate change, not to mention the growing crisis of poverty and homelessness in our own country. Steven Pinker and other privileged Pollyanna eggheads and prattle as much as they want that things are getting better. Right now we are faced with such challenges as to prove whether or not he is right. In the meantime, we lurch forward, slowly, we stumble, we fall, we forgive ourselves, we forgive each other, get up again, help each other get up again, and move forward a little bit more, always being present to support one another in our anguished and slow progress to the City of God.