Giving Thanks

Right now, I would love to be asleep, but there are construction crews working a priority repair and I have this nagging cough… so jack hammers are at full blast at 2:45AM, and I am singing harmony with them using “cough counterpoint”; however, this is a “first world” problem. It’s not like I don’t have a bed, or fresh water, or a toilet. I have all that, and much more…so, a sleepless night – heck, some people would dream of being able to have a sleepless night where I am!

2013 has been quite a year.  A lot of things have happened and some can be posted on a blog, and some of it cannot! Bottom line is that I am truly thankful for what this year has brought.  I have been brought many gifts: time with family, good memories with friends, some solid career progress, a focus on balance and health, renewed energy towards goals which have been pushed aside for years, and renewed focus on achieving those goals.   I have been brought many challenges: family members I am going to visit in person, rebuilding my life when certain plans didn’t go how I thought they would, overcoming the loss of people near and dear to me, and pulling myself off the cross I created.

That last one is probably the most important.  For all my levels of introspection (and I do count myself as highly introspective) that was still another layer of self-sabotage that I had to crush this year.  Nobody cares about my crosses, nobody cares if I nail myself to them and whine and complain about how painful they are…  There are many rules of engagement I have generated over the years.  Some of them are good, but some of them create patterns that hold me back.  I’ve been re-scripting those. Then, even worse, there was my tendency to make OTHER people’s crosses MINE.  Like I would be helping them if I did that? Welcome to the “classic enabler.” The line between enabling someone else and helping them is sometimes very fuzzy – especially if that help is expanded incrementally over time.   I haven’t done it a lot, but there have been a few key places where I practiced this pattern – picking up other people’s crosses when the best thing I could do is let them build their strength and resolve by just coaching them instead!

Live and learn as they say! I am squashing unhealthy patterns – I am erasing negative self-talk, erasing unhealthy self-imposed rules, I am done making other people’s problems MY problems. Dunzo! I might need to clarify that a little more. I’m talking about the practice of making other people’s individual issues my individual issues; supplanting the priorities of my life with someone else’s priorities at the expense of achieving my aspirations. I still might assist with someone else’s priorities, but it will be because it furthers the goals that I have in place.  Another example, there’s a billion people that do not have a bathroom.  If I choose to accept the challenge of solving that problem, I already know I am not contacting one of the billion, making their bathroom problem MY problem and then building them a bathroom. They’d have a bathroom, but wouldn’t know how to maintain it, and then they would be mad at me when it broke or blame me if there was a problem with it… see how that enabling thing works? Unhealthy I say!!  In this particular example, there would be strategy, like researching how to best have their home country tackle the project from both an educational and infrastructure perspective. Yes, education is a huge reason why building bathrooms is a “waste” of time (oh, that was definitely “potty” humor): Governments must be teaching people WHY bathrooms are important (health), and teaching a workforce how to build/maintain bathrooms (plumbing, parts, water/sewage systems, etc).

Anyway, I could go on and on (surprise).  Happy Thanksgiving to everyone  – and hopefully, in the near future, I will be doing more to make this little blue orb a more effective place for everyone.  I will probably be writing more about that soon, but note the key word is “probably.”  Even with renewed focus, I have found life is ever-changing and the best plans must bend instead of break. Sometimes the shortest distance between two points is a curve, anyway.  It just depends on the terrain, and viable methods of reaching the destination. That’s the 50,000 foot view of 2013 and it is an amazing view, whether plotted as a line or a curve!

Toilets Before Spaceships

Many folks have heard this phrase… “he’s so poor, he can’t even afford a pot to piss in.” We use it as a figure of speech, but for 1 billion people on this planet, right now, in the year 2013, it’s a reality.  Literally, according to the United Nations,  “1 billion people, 15% of the world population, practice open defecation.”  These are people who literally do not have access to a toilet, not even a shared one, not even an OPEN one where a bunch of people sit in front of each other and do their business because there’s nowhere else to go…

That really drives some perspective.  How is that even possible? Why don’t we see that on the nightly news? Maybe because it doesn’t sell.  I laugh all the time about how it is 2013 and our species seems so behind its capabilities collectively.  But when I think about it, it is usually in terms of “first world” problems like education systems, justice systems, civic and governance systems, economic systems…blah blah blah.

Now I am reading about the most basic system of all: a place to go poop, and there’s a billion people that don’t have a place?? Like for reals? That’s ridonkulous.

OK, so now what…I am just supposed to go back to my life and say,”Sorry you billion people but, I sure am glad it ain’t me. haha!”

Well, that’s what typically happens, I guess.  Everyone’s kinda focused on their piece of their pie, and I am not much different. . . . BUTT, maybe I should be.

Let’s think about this… we got 7 billion people now?  6 billion of them have a place to poop.  That’s a plus.  But what does that do? It does things like raise the child mortality rate, slows the spread of disease, and improves the sustainability of the planet.  I mean, poop is good for the planet, but 7 billion people worth of poop is a lot of poop.  So let’s say we give this missing billion a place to “pop a squat” as they say… let’s say we do that.  Then what happens?

We still have 7 billion people… now they all have bathrooms.  That’s good in some ways, but there’s still 7 billion of them, and the more we improve health the more crowded it is going to get.

At this point, some people put their villain hat on and say, then maybe we should be getting RID of places to poop.  So mortality and disease can go up and we can all die a little younger on average. . . . .  as long as it doesn’t happen in MYYYYY neighborhood (wink wink).

I don’t think that’s the answer.

And there’s a gazillion other factors to consider… for example, a lot of economic systems are reliant on growth in consumerism in order to thrive, so the more people the planet can support, the more money there is to be made by the Illuminati or whatever.  But then, if I were an Illuminati, would I care about money? Not really – at that point it is about power.  So maybe they aren’t interested in the planet supporting more hoomanz, maybe it is part of the cosmic plan for things to go to a certain breaking point.  Who knows. . .and that’s me speculating on someone else’s agenda.

I care about my agenda.  What is my agenda? Well, when it comes to poop, I think we should all have a place to go – from the Illuminati to the Indian salt farmer, to the African Saharan sand comber.  I have what Covey calls an “abundance mentality” – so let’s pack as many of us as we can on this rock, let’s foster ridiculous amounts of learning across all of civilization, lets colonize this galaxy.  But first… let’s all have a damn place to poop!!

Or so we think. There are other factors to consider.  For example, we might think, “if we build it, they will poop.”  But, this is not the case.  I have a good friend, and one day we theorized that if an advanced species came to Earth, an effective way to kill us all would be to simply give us free light sabers.  Seriously, we’d all be dead in like, an hour.  Research already shows, without proper education, some people have a toilet, and instead they use it to bathe, or store their weed and stuff.

So, maybe the first step is education and let people DECIDE what they want, then let them put policies and government in place to obtain it, or something like that.

It’s not as easy a problem to fix as I would hope… there’s serious infrastructure involved and people need to have the skill to engineer, build and subsequently maintain the physical structures, the ongoing supply chain, the financial systems, and of course the laws/policies that pertain to these systems.   Just building it is not the answer… communities need to evolve and mature to the point where they value having a place to poop.

Then there is the whole debate of what system to put in place… think about it – our current poop systems waste a LOT of water.  Are toilets REALLY the way to go (pun intended)??? Isn’t there some way to do this using other technology?   Something that requires less infrastructure, uses less or no water, and produces useful output (fertilizer, or maybe fuel pellets, or something)?  Just saying!

Anyway, today, I learned this crazy fact… and I realized we need to figure out toilets before we figure out spaceships, and I still think the answer is going to be in empowering people through knowledge.

One thing is for sure, I’m never gonna look at a toilet the same way again…