Not self help

This is not a self help book.

I'll admit there are some similarities. You might find a flow chart here or a seven step process there. You will probably read some poetry too mediocre to get published as poetry, and instead included here because it makes my point.

But this book differs from self help books in very important ways. First, it was not written by an educated man who is telling you that all he had to do to succeed was to have a good attitude. Thanks for that tip. I had no idea that all well off people needed to do to have success was to get their heads out of their asses. Maybe if the book included a copy of their diploma it would actually make me more effective.

There is no attractive picture on the flap of this book. While I suspect my fiancee actually finds me attractive, my looks have not been known to stop traffic or cure cancer patients. I do not have a finely chiseled chin, my smile does not gleam, and my hair does not do that wavy professional thing. Rather my teeth are a bit worse for wear after a childhood of stunts and my hair looks like an electrical burn victim.

Finally, and most importantly, this book is not trying to convince you that while you may have a problem you have the capacity solve your problem if only you listened to me.

It is for this reason that this is not a self help book.

Rather, this is an other help book.

Even as I write, I am trying to convince you that other people have a problem, lots of problems, actually, and that you are the one capable of solving them. This is not an equation for how to make your life better, but the lives of the people around you better.

The pages leading up to this one are stories of my life, an ongoing account of how I got to these ideas and how they changed me. But to be perfectly honest, I am basically done talking about me. From this point on, there will be a new subject.

You.

It is your life, your choices, and your actions that are now the defining drive behind this writing. See, the idea is pretty basic. I can't save the world alone. I could try my ass off, but even with the most brilliant of plans I am doomed to failure. But that is where you come in. Where WE come in. Solving world problems seems a bit out of reach for a single person. Even a few people. But what if the world tried to solve the world's problems? Seems like there would be just enough help to get it done.

My reason for writing this book: to get you to help me save the world. To that end, we need to change up the style of writing. Before, I was telling stories, stories you constructed imaginatively in order to visualize what had happened. But now your imagination needs to serve a different purpose. You need to imaginatively construct visions of what can happen.

This process involves telling you about problems in the world. It goes on to reflect on how to evaluate and solve them. And I'll be perfectly honest, I rely on some of the very same techniques used by the endless wading pool that is self help literature. Flow charts. Step by step processes. Crappy poetry. I'll never suggest that this book is better written.

But I do contend that this book has a better aim. I am not here to increase your satisfaction by making you be a better you. No, my goal, and I can only hope our goal, is to make a better world.
What could be more satisfying than that?

Darkness and Fear

Last night I learned the power of darkness and fear. My walk out to the canyon had been nothing out of the ordinary, save for the dying batteries in my headlamp. I suppose after months of use, the three triple A's had finally met their end. Time to pay my electric bill. :)

While it had been a bit surreal setting up camp with so little light, I managed, and once in bed I promptly fell asleep.

In the middle of the night I was awoken by a creature walking across my chest. I startle, it scurries off me, and I fumble for my headlamp. Its pale light does little to illuminate the tent, and I am mostly still asleep, with only fear quickening my otherwise groggy awareness. At the very end of the tent I see the shadowy yet familiar silhouette of a field mouse.

For some reason, it's innocuous form fails to calm me. Having been startled out of my sleep has me in a weird mental place, and the poor lighting makes my tiny tent seem even smaller. The game begins, as I try to get the mouse out of the tent, and he runs like hell because he thinks I am trying to kill him. But I am at a disadvantage. I can't see what his happening, and I'm only half awake and slow. The mouse, on the other hand, is all over. He darts under blankets and around pillows. He even climbs the insect netting up the side of the tent, and at one point scampered up my sweatshirted arm and across my back. His frenzied evasion (and crawling on me) does not improved my addled state.

I am now desperate. My light is dimming by the second as the batteries struggle their last moments of light. The mouse has evaded me. I can't see him. I don't think he has gone, so I move the blankest slowly in the ever fading glow of the headlamp. I move cautiously if clumsily around the tent, trying to find the intruder.

After looking everywhere else, I pull back the camping mattress that in effect covers the entire floor of my one person tent. There, beneath my pad, in a curled and shivering fetal position, lies the dying mouse. In the mayhem, he had apparently sought cover under my mattress, only to be crushed by me in my frantic attempt to oust him from my home. One of his front paws is clasped tightly. The other paw shudders outstretched, almost as if to reach for something in his last moments.

I am flooded with despair. Not knowing what else to do, I pick up his broken body and put it outside the tent in the bush. Sleep came quickly, but not before a shadow passed over my spirit.

I awoke in the morning haunted by the nights experience. The death of my little friend had sunken in during my sleep, and as I hiked out of the canyon a sense of futility started to settle. I had moved into the wild to simplify my life. Intending to consume fewer resources, intending to take less for granted, and intending to ease my strain on the environment. But despite my best intentions, last night I had smashed an innocent creature under my weight.

In the darkness of the fading light and the haze of my goggy fear, I had caused a meaningless death. As the day warms I take off my jacket, and I relive in my mind the scramble with the field mouse.

Darkness and fear.

And suddenly, and in shocking completeness, it comes to me. Of course coexistence starts with desire. A desire to do good. An intention. But even my good intentions can fail to do good if I act in darkness and out of fear. If I want to do great good, or even, the greatest good, I must do more than want good things to happen. I must also seek to illuminate the issue. To see what is happening, so that I know what actually is and where the problems really lie. I must create light.

Similarly, when trying to do this greatest good I must act with faith, and not out of fear. While I had not desired to be violent, I harmed another because I was fearful. Because I did not have peace.

Desire, then is the beginning. The want to do good. But I also need knowledge, the ability to see what is so as to do great good. And finally, I need strength of character. I am perhaps unfinished and unready to perform what will be needed from me. For that I must strengthen my resolve. Wanting good, knowing how to do it, and having composure in the face of hardship. With those three things, I could see neigh impossible goods come to pass, solutions to complex problems and bring resolution in frantic times.

With these, I could do the greatest good.