It’s the day after Memorial Day and back to being hot as blue blazes. I think later in the week it’s supposed to get into triple digits again. The one thing I’ve been getting used to living in Texas is keeping the house dark in the summer. Growing up on the East Coast winter was dark and and gloomy but during the summer I wanted it bright inside. It’s too hot here to do that, so I’ve got insulating curtains up and it’s cool and dark. Not night-time dark, just dim. It adds a nice mood.
I finished my painting of the Dr. Eugene Clark Library today. It’s always nice to finish and sign a painting. It was a detailed building to paint but it didn’t take as long as I thought it would. The color palette I used was: titanium white, cadmium yellow light, yellow ochre, burnt sienna, cadmium red light, chromium oxide green, sap green, courbet green and cobalt blue hue. I’m still trying to mix a neutral tint for sidewalks and concrete. I was happy with how close burnt sienna matched the color of the brick building. It made painting it a lot easier. I would still like to learn more about color mixing but I guess that’s a matter of practice. I know painters who regularly create color charts and I think I will start doing that soon. I’m pretty good at practicing drawing, but not color mixing. There’s always something to learn, some new direction to grow in.
I was reading in Library: An Unquiet History that when the printing press was invented there were different opinions about its impact on society. Some people felt that the availability of knowledge was a benefit to all, that it decentralized knowledge, empowering communities far and wide. Others felt that it created chaos, confusing people with all the diversity of knowledge available. Sounds like a lot of arguments we have today. Modernity can leave people feeling repulsed and disgusted, terrified and ashamed. At the same time it can leave people feeling liberated and excited, inspired and full of life. I honestly found it interesting to find that, in the beginning, there was a debate about the merits of something that most people today recognize as essential to progress. I wonder what the general consensus will be about transgender issues in the future or if it will be so normal we wouldn’t even consider debating it (or, will it fade out as a an interest?).
Over the weekend I spent time with a lot of people and the subject of the Uvalde shooting came up quite a bit. Just about everyone I spoke to was touched by it, some still shaken, but I couldn’t help wondering how many of them will still vote Republican without even thinking about it. It’s hard for me to grasp. I was ready for gun reform after Newtown, as I’m sure were a lot of Americans. Not only has nothing changed but in Texas it just keeps getting easier to get deadly weapons. I understand that mental health is a part of mass murders, but so are guns. In fact, I don’t know of a lot of mass murders that don’t involve guns. I know banning assault rifles will not stop murders, or even mass murders, but it could decrease the number of mass shootings by a large percentage, 75% (National Review: Mass Murder Without Guns), which seems like a large enough percentage to do it.
The subject of disagreement and debate has been on my mind a lot. I find in my personal life I’m always wondering what’s appropriate when I’m angry or frustrated with someone else. Am I being a doormat? Am I unwilling to see someone els’s point of view? What’s the appropriate response? It doesn’t always seem like it’s enough to be clear about my feelings and my needs. What if I don’t have all the necessary information? What if I’m jumping the gun? What if I’m being vague? It doesn’t seem like there’s ever a right answer.
I would like to live in a society that’s cohesive and compromising. I would like to see well-kept roads and bridges. I’d like to know that kids in school are well-read and developing the skills to reason things out. I’d like to live in a society where people are able to work 40 hours, even without much education, and support their loved ones. I’d like to live in a society where contributing to the overall well-being of our communities and the people in them was seen as a good thing.
Something that I’ve learned that’s benefited my life greatly is how to let go of the environment. The environment we grow up in shapes our self-concept and our belief system but a lot of us don’t realize that the environment we grew up in was stressful and that our character developed out of that stress. I never stopped to see that the world is not the same as my intimate environment and that I don’t need to bring my old patterns and beliefs everywhere I go. In fact, a lot of the character traits I developed as a child were based on being a dependent child, not a grown adult. So even if we grow up in a peaceful environment we still don’t need to look at the world the way we did as children.
Sometimes when I look at the world out there and listen to the arguments and the debates I feel like we’d all be better off getting therapy than investing in politics. What if we all let go of the environment and sought help for ourselves? What if we stopped getting heated over what’s happening in the world and instead focused on our personal needs? I try so hard to do that. I try to remember that my reaction to ‘out there’ has more to do with what’s going on ‘in here’. But it’s hard. It’s hard to pay attention and not react. It’s hard not to care. Perhaps what it would look like to care for the world is for me to care that my needs are met and my feelings validated and managed. Maybe that’s the best I could do for the complicated and complex world we live in.