Month: June 2018

Familiarity.

/ toseealife / 3 Comments

 If I understood you

and you understood me

we could speak with complete familiarity

but since I just met you

and you hardly know me

we only speak with incongruity.

How pleasant and natural it would be

if at once we could see

each other plainly.

But I don’t know you and you don’t know me

so we have no real clarity.

 

I wrote that. It came to me yesterday in ASL class because I had been thinking about how we speak to each other.

Maybe this isn’t your experience, but I’ve noticed that people who know each other really well, they can be more honest.

I say things to mys sisters I would never say to a friend. Why? Because my sisters will know what I mean.

I won’t bother to be polite to siblings all the time, since I know they won’t get super offended. But I will be polite to a stranger or a classmate because they don’t know me well enough to know when I’m not serious.

I actually sometimes get taken seriously when I’m kidding and I think it was obvious that I was kidding. I know that’s not unique to me, doesn’t it bug you when it happens?

I might tell my sister to shut up and know she won’t be that bothered by it, but I wouldn’t say that to someone else unless I had the intention of making them feel I was angry.

C. S. Lewis observed in The Four Loves that when people have affection for each other, they can say offensive things and not offend. And that the deeper the affection, the better they will know what times to say such things.

Which is not to say we can just insult each other, there’s a time for it and a time when it will be hurtful. If someone in your family is pouring out their soul or crying their eyes out, that is not the time. Or if they’re angry and venting to you.

Usually it’s when we’re in a good mood that we can poke fun at each other and feel  closer and not father apart.

Why are we so polite to strangers? People often theorize that we are scared of what they will think.

But I submit to you that not everyone is scared. at least not of being disliked. Often when someone does dislike us, we feel that they have misunderstood who we are.

“He/she thinks I’m just a—- but I’m not.” Does that kind of talk sound familiar? It does to me.

The reason we don’t speak our mind to strangers is often simply that we know they will not understand us. They don’t know us. And they have their assumptions about people with our opinions that only knowing us better would change. They won’t want to know us better if we scare them off.

The are times when that doesn’t matter and we need to speak our mind regardless. But those are fewer times than when we need to understand each other.

The better you know me, the better you understand me, the better we can communicate. Lack of communication equals lack of understanding. Even if you hate someone, you can still understand them, provided you know  them. You’ve seen movies where the hero and villain understand each other perfectly, that’s why they are at odds.

I don’t me tat we understand English, or whatever our language is. I mean that we have a knowledge of a person’s character, quirks, and feelings about things. That is what tells us what they mean.

This kind of understanding can happen very quickly between some people, especially if they are alike in opinion and character. Others it can take twenty year,s or it may never happen. Some folks lack the ability or the desire to understand each other.

I think that we wish it were different. That we could speak our mind to strangers as easily as to our closest family or friends. In a perfect world we feel everyone would be able to communicate like that. It would be great.

But we need to beware the Tower of Babel. God in His wisdom perhaps has made it hard work to understand each other. A lot of people see it as the worst part of humanity that we have so much conflict. you might want to question that person’s motive.

Conflict is what keeps us pushing forward and it keeps us from corrupting each other completely. Where there is good, there will be conflict as long as men choose to do evil. You better hope so anyway. The most dead-in-soul people never argue with each other, they just sin. We don’t want that.

IF you understand the people around you perfectly, you are either dead inside, or a saint. Because only people who have extreme wisdom, or else just don’t care, are without conflict.

I hope to be saintly, bu I fully expect to have conflict on the way. Because I will meet with the unsaintly. And I won’t always be good either.

So while it would be nice to have total familiarity with each other, perhaps it is for the best that it is hard work. I look forward to the day when evil will not be a thing, and we will all be on the same page.

Until next time–Natasha.

I Voted.

/ toseealife / Leave a comment

Hello everyone, hey it’s the last week of the term before finals.

I am not slowing down though, I have VBS in two weeks and I jump back into the Summer Term, got to get those credits under my belt.

I also voted for the first time this month. I was registered and even got the little card telling me where to go, but me and my family all were somehow left off the list. It happened to a lot of people in the state. My dad sad he’s suspect an conspiracy if it hadn’t been in the more liberal areas.

Not that that guarantees anything. We’re very conservative as you can guess.

About that, I’ve got nothing against liberals as people, but their policy are so whacked out. I’ve known plenty of them, and though some of them are nice, caring, and sweet, there’s always a certain glitch int heir thinking on certain subjects. I suppose they feel the same about me.

Basically they react to me like “That Natasha, she’s just so stubborn and determined to speak her mind. We don’t agree but hey, why argue?..It’s not like it’s important.”

Except often it is important, and tat’s why it bugs me. Back off from an argument over sushi vs tacos, sure, (they don’t usually back out from those kinds of arguments actually) but from Abortion? Politics? Respect? Marriage? This stuff shapes our lives.

My state had a voter turnout that was less than a fifth of the population. And I think hardly a fourth of the registered voters. I didn’t hear anyone at my college talking about it, I don’t think the other collegiates voted, not many anyway. And I was the youngest person at the place I voted at by at least ten years, likely more.

Young folks don’t care, or don’t know how to decide who to vote for. Both alternatives are frightening.

I felt the responsibility of the country for the first time. I don’t know how effective our votes are now, but they do something, as the 2016 election showed. So I could end up changing someone’s future. Do I want to live with that?

I’d better, because otherwise I put that ability into the hands of people I don’t even know who probably don’t share my values and who’ve been destroying my state for years. I have a very blue state, just so you know.

Think about it, suppose I vote for tax cuts, and in a year or so when they go into effect (if we’re lucky) someone can afford to send their kids to a better school, or buy a car, or even more food. OR at least they can but more of what they already use. In the snowball effect that could mean less health problems, a better education, a better job, and even better relationships.

Suppose, in the dream of a dream, the money for our roads was actually used for our roads, and people have less accidents or bad dents or jolts on their car, and better tires.

Makes you wish you were in America huh?

Just kidding, though for all I know it could. Everyone seems to want to come here.

I ask you Americans, do you think about this anymore? Or do you vote just to keep the person you hate out of office? To make your life better personally. Do you think about the greater good?

Do you consider the hundreds or thousands of people affected materially by these elections.

Did the people who voted Marijuana in ever stop to think about the hundreds of deaths resulting form driving high? and the people who are going to get addicted to it? and maybe to heroin since that often comes after pot. Did those people ever ask themselves if it was right to hand the right to get high over to a bunch of 18 years olds fresh out of high school, ready to do stupid things just because it’s legal now? Pot alters your brain, it’s true. And we made it legal to do that.

We made it legal to smoke pot around kids who will grow up thinking that’s okay. We are allowing people to raise their risk of getting into accidents with equipment because their perception is affected.

That’s just three examples. My question to you is do you care? And hey, I hear Canadians vote too, so if your from Canada I ask the same thing.

If you’re not in a country with that kind of power in the people’s hands, I would just ask if you wish the government would take the needs of everyone into consideration.

Our Republic over hear in the USA is far from flawless nowadays, or even the  force for good it once was, but it remains able to effect some things for the better still thanks to the people. And call me and old fashioned Yankee, but I still believe it’s the best system, next to the Biblical one.

And I believe in independence and responsibility for my own life partly because of my American heritage, though also because of my christian one. I love our history over here and I don’t apologize for it, so take that!

I mean, sure we’ve done some bad things. So has every country, I don’t catch them apologizing for it. You think Iran is ever going to make amends to us for terrorism? No. They want us to help them.

Not to throw Iran under the bus, my point is, we don’t need to feel ashamed to be Americans just because we’ve had slaves and bigotry here, and invented the atom bomb.

As countries go that still only makes us average, and as for how we’ve used our system to end those things as much as we can, we’re a cut above almost everyone else.

But a country isn’t something you love because it’s perfect, you love it because it’s your home and you want to take care of it. It’s just that America’s whole foundation was built on understanding that the people  are the country, kind of like Asgard in Thor: Ragnarok was described.

So, voting,  as small as it seems, is our duty. Our job. Our chance to help each other.

Until next time–Natasha.I_Voted_Sticker_5