Anything Considered

I read through a few of the Psalms today, and to be honest, I felt somewhat bored. There seemed to be so many of the "Praise God", "The Lord is beautiful" types that didn't feature much else. They were much like those praise & worship songs that go on and on in repetitive loops without particularly meaningful verses. I have never really enjoyed them.

But I might have been missing the point altogether. If I cannot relate to the songs, then somehow, my focus is in the wrong direction. Everything, and yes I mean everything, should begin, proceed, and end with God as the central focus. God, and not what God gives. God, as He is.

Other possibilities are opened for us when God is the central focus. Struggles in life? I know I haven't had much success trying to make things right. But in God's city, we become immutable. And not because of anything about ourselves, but because of where we are and who we belong to.

God is in her citadels;
he has shown himself to be her fortress.

When the kings joined forces,
when they advanced together,

They saw her and were astounded;
they fled in terror.

PSALM 48:4-6 (NIV)

I try to make it a point to count my blessings when I have trouble in life. And it certainly does help. But the writer of the Psalm sees this in a completely different perspective.

Walk about Zion, go around her,
count her towers,

Consider well her ramparts,
view her citadels,
that you may tell of them to the next generation.

For this God is our God for ever and ever;
he will be our guide even to the end.

PSALM 48:12-14 (NIV)

In a sense, GOD is the blessing. And if I can finally see Him in that light, the counting will stop, and the praise will begin.

On the way home today, some old thoughts came to mind. I find subtle expression in words difficult for now, so pardon the blunt writing.

I've been thinking about impressions. It goes without saying that we all like to be liked. None of us want to be thought of in a negative way with respect to the standards and ideals that we have. And so, to avoid being thought of as sloppy, we dress neatly; to avoid being thought of as unfriendly, we put on pleasing expressions; to avoid being thought of as less than intelligent, we maneuver ourselves into situations which allow us to showcase our opinions.

Of course, the things which are important differ from person to person. There are things which I may completely disregard, which you consider as fundamental. The bottom line is that I have my ideal standards, and you have yours, and we all want to achieve them.

The problem is that success in these areas can be highly subjective. For instance, when can you be truly considered fashionable? Or sociable? Or friendly? We are judged by society, and the results of today's judgment will always be replaced by that of tomorrow.

I think this is the reason why impressions become important. I may not know that you will exhibit a certain quality tomorrow, but because of my past judgments, I have an impression that you possess this quality innately, and assume that you will exhibit it continually. If this 'I' represents the collective sentiment of a community you belong to, then in their eyes and yours, you have become successful.

Now it is likely that you are not yet at that perceived level. And we humans, with our various systemic and random flaws, are unlikely to ever attain our ideal standards. So the natural outcome is a chase after the next best thing - impressions.

This leads to some perplexing outcomes. For one, people begin to perceive changes in impressions as more important than the actual difference between reality and the ideal. Also, because impressions come to matter so much, we form impressions of others much more readily - becoming judgmental - without realising that we are all collectively far from the ideal; by doing so, we allow ourselves to become the ideal.

It is a kind of pride of which I am guilty of, and which I hate. It annoys me incessantly when, for instance, people make negative comments about the host and some of his failings in a party, and allow these comments to become the defining impression of the event. The fact of the matter is, he is the one who is most likely working towards the ideal, and the critics, as critics, have made no advances in that direction. Any idiot can tell you that 30% > 0%.

Nobody wants to look bad. Impressions are important but they can blind us. Nobody wants to look bad.

Don't be blind.

Have you ever been in love? Horrible, isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens your heart and it means someone can get inside you and mess you up.

You build up all these defenses. You build up this whole armor, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life. You give them a piece of you. They don't ask for it. They do something dumb one day like kiss you, or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore.

Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so a simple phrase like 'Maybe we should just be friends' or 'How very perceptive' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a body-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. Nothing should be able to do that. Especially not love.

I hate love.

NEIL GAIMAN; Rose Walker's Soliloquy in Sandman #65: The Kindly Ones

It's strange and puzzling how small actions, perhaps even performed unknowingly by those you love, can hurt so deeply. Even simple words with only the best of intentions can be like receiving a knife's blade through the heart, again and again.

And when it happens you have to ask yourself, who is at fault? Who is the fool? And every time this question plagues you, the conclusion must always be that you only have yourself to blame. You had the armor, and you let it down.

You let it down for one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, who sees you in that exact way.

I find it strange that for something so often thought about and spoken of in people, beauty has an increasingly narrow definition. Almost everyone has thought or said at some point that physical beauty is superficial and inner beauty in the form of character and personality is better and lasts longer. And I must admit it can feel somewhat dull for a high ideal to be made commonplace.

I think there is always a place for physical beauty. Inasmuch as we would not want to discriminate or pre-judge people for a lack of it, the truth is that physical beauty is something everyone aspires toward in some way or another. Yes, it is physical, and purely physical, but that doesn not make it in any way unimportant or merely superficial.

After all, we are physical beings. We interact and garner information using our senses. Yes, "beauty is in the eye of her beholder", but this beauty is beheld - with the eyes! And the presence of physical beauty is something wonderful to behold. Let no one deny that.

There is nothing wrong with physical beauty. The only fault is that of man, who live and die by it. They see it as more than it should be. Never overlap what is physical with what is emotional or cognitive. Society fails in that respect more often than not.

But the alternative, putting down physical beauty, is not much better. Yes, good character and personality are beautiful things. We speak of beautiful minds, beautiful hearts with just as much respect, if not more. But to act as if physical beauty is unimportant is to do the same thing as those who make it too important.

Why is it so difficult to appreciate beauty as it exists in different forms? Give credit where it's due, whether the beauty is physical or innate or both. There is no fight between them, so let us not marginalise what was made to be appreciated.

"He who fails to plan, plans to fail" is a maxim many of us have been ingrained with since our youth. In many ways this is sound advice. Lofty aims are made possible with tiny, focused steps, and no piece of work/project can be completed without some form of prior planning.

I always feel a pressure to want to do something about my problems. I don't know whether it is really a subconscious aspiration for an ideal, or some kind of unsettledness in being wounded and not addressing the pain. It is a fix-it mentality that has served me well in many ways. Academically, and in other personal interests.

But there are some things that are simply beyond easy fixing; some problems that remain malignant in spite of concerted attempts at a solution. And these things remain, causing me the most pain, and yet defy the simple label of a problem, instead becoming a very part of life.

Approaching every difficulty seeking simple solutions reduces men to sophisticated machines. Life is such that the monochrome extends itself multifariously, where every good in one dimension is a bad in the next. Sometimes giving up the pain is selfishness, and taking it in the only way out.

John Lennon once remarked that "Life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans." In a sense, it's true. But life is the plan making, plan breaking, and empty waiting rolled in one.

I wish there was a favorable answer to my problem and my pain.

Dear brothers and sisters, whenever trouble comes your way, let it be an opportunity for joy.

JAMES 1:2 (New Living Translation)

The Beatles sang "let it be" as the answer to our sadness in suffering. And very often in these unhappy times, I'm told to just let it be, that nothing can be done about it - c'est la vie. It then seems so strange, so contradictory, that for James trouble is an opportunity for joy for Christians. But will we, or do we, let it be?

I spent some time last time looking through CSS guides. It's been a long time, and I am completely out of touch. Dreamweaver now under Adobe? Wow.

As always, with reading HTML/CSS guides, it is always best to see how they are executed. And after one random walk through blogskins, this happened.

I love layouts with clear, simple form. It's pretty without being cluttered. The text is eminently readable, which is a must for me. And all in all it's like a throwback to the old serendipity days, when I did all the coding myself.

I think this randomness will last me a while. But a placid house, even in a different time, is neither random nor red. And no one expresses your self better than you do.