For

What are you for?

I ask myself that lately. I am fast coming to the conclusion that it should be a mantra.

Last year, I pared back my contribution to certain activities: I am halfway through my forties. I must squirrel away many acorns for the declining years of my body or mind or both. I can’t attend every festival planning meeting or commit whole work days to helping with elections without betraying future self. Sad, but reality. And because this was successful, I have pared back more and also focused better this year. It has been great. It has been helpful to set expectations and openly explain why, to those who rightly expect contributions to continue. People are generous. No one disputes the need to stash acorns.

This decision to focus has caused an internal, ongoing reckoning: The limited time I devote to non-acorn-stashing activities needs to be best-possibly-spent.

So: “What am I for?”

We spend a lot of time saying what we are against. It’s understandable. The bad people are skilled at making us devote too much of our limited time and emotional energy to things we are against. They create urgency to fight the bad things. Some of the fighting has an effect. By all means, vote. By all means, articulate your thoughts when it will matter for the listener. But a lot of the fighting doesn’t have an effect. Especially if it is done by raging in the direction of people who are either all sewed up for or against the bad thing, rendering our raging meaningless.

It is a vital exercise to work out what you are for. State on paper or in your mind or phone. No adding what you are against. No structuring the statement to imply what you are against. We feel a need to be on the record against things we think or know are bad. The chance to do that is every day and in most every forum. Set it aside. This is a safe moment. What are you for? Sometimes the answer comes slower than it should. It is easier to be against things than for others.

Several years ago, I left the religion in which I was raised. There was an initial period after leaving when I spent a lot of time and thought being against it. It had left a void that required mourning and replacing. Over time, I identified the things that were good about the religion. It turned out that they weren’t unique or exclusive to it. Therefore, they were eminently replaceable. (I also arrived at the personal conclusion that the unique things weren’t good.)

My napkin calculation is that the right balance is 80/20—things you are for deserve 80% of your emotion and capacity for action. Everyone is different, but I for one can’t spend even a lot of time thinking about things I’m against. It is not sustainable. It is deleterious to the soul. Especially if, wisely, you choose to act only on things you can affect.

Some things I am for—the “easy ones,” let’s call them:

I am for the human connection and the insights that come from one-on-one communication. Ideal settings for this include a long walk and a road trip. These let the conversations stretch out their legs and grow to their proper length. Stunted, abandoned conversations, that would have enriched us if only allowed to go through a proper conversation life cycle, are the victims of our hurried modern capitalist lives.

I am for letters, another ideal venue for conversation, if we can exercise the patience it requires.

The common thread of these two above is that each party can more fully and intentionally articulate their thoughts. Modern life sucks up our time for pondering, both alone and with others. We can’t transform modern life completely, but we can carve out time for these with very little work. That is really good news: Sacrificing the taking-in of mindless reels and content opens up a surprising quantity of time. If you want to rebel against the bad in the world, making time and spending it this way might be the most effective tactic.

I am for writing. It clarifies thoughts. It clears out that nagging mental ambiguity. The writing I am doing at the moment is doing exactly that for me. I am making many edits and deletions. It remains embarrassingly unpolished. Whatever. What a way to ponder.

I am for time with loved ones. Mundane time is just fine. A thought I had lately while driving down a street in Nagoya: Mundane joys become treasures with the passage of time. (I reserve the right to articulate this better at some point.) The mundane times we spend now will become cherished memories. I look back at having small kids in the house and realize this truth. The emotions of doing this crush me. I can’t do it very often. It hurts to know that time will eventually take away what are now our mundane joys: Walking, talking, eating, thinking, being with someone. I take away the lesson that we have a duty to enjoy mundane joys now. Now is when we can do something.

I am for reading. My brain strengthens lately as I do more attentive reading.

I am for interacting in person with people in my geographical community. They may not be loved ones, but they are partners in society. I like when people treat me well in society. I like when people live as though the rules apply to them. It enables us to have nice things. I think one thing that motivates people to let social rules apply to them is a modicum of mundanely positive interaction with others, especially strangers. “Others” are society. As an “other,” do I interact in a way that will make this stranger (to me) glad to have been part of society? Do I let social rules apply to me? I have an extended spiel on this. It involves a robust bureaucracy, which I think is vastly underappreciated. When it is ready I promise to share it.

Baseline interactions in a community mean far more than we have given credit for over recent decades. We rightly bemoan a loss of commitment to the greater social good by bad actors and their supporters, but we also haven’t personally maintained a modicum of human interaction with those around us. In other words, we have been part of that person not feeling the benefits of being in society. We call them “randos” and treat them like NPCs. And when I say “we” do these things, I mean me. I do these things all the time. I need to do better. People are isolated. Whole communities are designed to isolate, with vehicle travel and lawn moats and the avoidance or elimination of community activity.

So I am for having positive interactions with people, whether or not I can or should try to tell if they deserve it. Again, I need to work on this.

I am for pointing out mundane joys. People benefit from taking notice of how good we have things, and the root causes of those good things. The greatest root cause of mundane joys and the ability to enjoy them is a good society.

Writing this has honed my mental direction and given some rudimentary thoughts on what to do. Thanks for sharing the journey. I hope to expand on some of this, if only for my internal benefit. I welcome your thoughts.