Wow. Was that 4 years? Mind numbing.
In the last 2 years we've often mused about how some things feel long and some short. In short, good things feel shorter than expected, and bad things feel long. That's how things can feel both long and short at the same time - and by asking yourself which feels short, you get to know yourself and you can remind yourself what you like - and probably need more of. But sometimes bad is good and good is bad, and if you mix it up just right you get the real good you want - which is good enough, and always striving toward better, but knowing you can never achieve it because you already have it, but if you stop striving you will lose it.
So where do good and bad mix up? I think its when you confuse lots with long.... they're easy to confuse. For example, if you spend the holiday doing the same thing every day, it feels short... and if you do something different every day, it feels long. But a long work day is seldom great, and neither is a short holiday.... a long holiday feels good, while a short work day feels good....
So how did the clothes horse last so long after the previous fixes? I can't even remember, but I don't recall going all out in fixing it... and neither did I now. I just completely removed some lattices, and replaced them, properly... the broken lattices I replaced with brand new ones, with pilot holes drilled to the exact right width and depth... and some of the worn pine ones I put in longer screws. It's markedly less crooked... so what did I learn?
I love metaphors, so lets see what we can compare this to...
The clothes horse is to dry clothes... so it needs to take the weight, when the clothes are wet. Perhaps more weight for longer, in winter... the weight puts force on each lattice. If they're all equally strong, they all carry equal weight... but as the weight shifts around, some take more weight than others, and those taking more weight will get weaker, and the balance will shift so that yet others take more weight... until at some point a weaker lattice will crack and a screw gets loose... and a lattice gets loose, and the whole thing collapses.
If we made an analogy to an economy, what would the best analogy for the clothes be?
Cycles of clean and dirty... dirt can be our unfulfilled needs, or selfish urges. Or less biased... market demand. The clothes horse can be the structures of society... market demand puts pressures on those... as the weaker ones fail the stronger ones get more pressure? If we can make small tweaks, we can contain the damage? It's better to fix certain things at certain times in the cycle? Quick- or bad fixes don't last long... and some fixes are better than others. A clothes horse is pretty egalitarian... every joint and lattice carries similar weight... Okay, this analogy is getting old already.
Four years?! I would've guessed 2 years... isn't it great that we have language and writing to supplement our memories? In the olden days, we used to have vibrant oral storytelling, and community, too. Well, one thing I learned in the last 4 years, or re-learned, was that roughly 1/3 of the world is still living like that... so by olden days, I would suppose that we mean "like our great-great-grandparents...." who still lived like that, like many still do today... they remember things we don't and see things we've become blind to. They are connecting to the internet... and I think that is how we will learn more and more about this... finally, again...
I've been helping some such communities... and it's been a healing process. Not because "I've been doing something good", or because I might have been doing it in a good, super consultative way... unlike most, but because the people I've been working with are so much more humane... they understand people and social things so much better, and they've helped me to understand myself better, as well as my past, and what was wrong with my thinking... and what is still wrong with most of the "first world" thinking...
