Can't Buy Me Heart

I observed once to my psych teacher that there seems to be a strong inverted correlation between how much you love your job, and how much you get paid for it. She agreed completely. This is not always true, obviously - I worked the typical fast food job as a teenager, was not a fan, and was not paid at all well for it. But I also worked as a waitress, which meant that with tips I was making double the fast food wage. I think that job might have been okay if I wasn't carrying two others at the time, but it wasn't exactly something I believed in.

I know a pastor who spent a year living under a bridge in England, in the years before he really knew what he wanted to do with his life. He lightly recommends this to the college students - he plainly thinks it's a good idea, but he's also aware that he's talking to the doctors' kids. ARC is the doctors' church, in the doctors' town. The teenagers know that if they turn their backs on their parents' substantial financial support, these same parents might take it personally, that the kids are rejecting them, not just the money.

It's been pointed out that most people keep that kind of teenage-brain until they're about twenty-five. This has a lot to do with my mom's preference that none of us sisters marry before that magical half-decade. But, we still expect kids to know what they want to do well enough to pick a degree and finish it up a few years before then. I admire the kids who do. I kind of wish I was one of them.

Frankly, if I could survive on it, I'd work with kids, teenagers, whoever wanted a counselor/teacher/random-buddy in a camp setting for life. I probably could survive on it, if I wasn't living in an ecosystem where humans required protection from the elements for three-fourths of the year. I've a friend who wants to spend a year or two riding trains hobo-style, and forget about the money and the systems. Another friend wants to move to Wisconsin, away from all the people, build a cabin, get married (we think he may have to come back in contact with people again) and raise his kids with nothing more technologically advanced than a radio in their house.

Of course, this is the same friend who believes that he was sent to this world to replace Garrison Keillor.

There's a recklessness, I commented to someone recently, that comes from losing everything. Liked the idea and it ended up in a paper where I may have done more rambling than actual writing. Despite losing my English teacher's respect for me (if, by that point in the semester, he had any left), I think the idea holds true. "Solid!" as Spaz would say. I think that once a person loses everything that he thinks matters - not losing everything, just everything that matters - then he reaches this point of absolute fearlessness. No one can take anything more away from him - there's nothing to be afraid of losing. No one can really reward him, either, because he now has this understanding that everything can be lost. He's probably not far from going beyond what makes us human by then, but there's no fear left. Without fear, and without rewards, there's no control left.

In keeping with my 'nerdlet' title, I can explain that this is where the Reavers come from in the Firefly series. They've been alone too long, they've seen too much blank space, they've lost what it is that makes them human, and they're now uncontrollable. They don't rape, murder, and cannibalize for pleasure, they do it to steal the humanity from everyone else. "Because the status is not...quo." Or they would if they had enough rationale left to analyze why they do it.

I don't know what I'd be like if I lost everything. I know that I don't want to know. There's a very ugly side of every person somewhere in there. You combat it with finding joy, appreciating beauty, helping people who need you, all that good stuff. Maybe I just work at Camp because it's the best combat I've found against all that. Or maybe it's the satisfaction of giving everything you've got to somebody who needs it more than you do.

There's a thought. Huge difference between giving everything you have to something that matters, and having everything that matters be taken from you. The psychological response is fascinating. Practically speaking, you're still empty-handed at the end of it, but you're not. Life generates. As long as you're alive, you've still got something, even if it's bitterness. You can hang onto bitterness.

So, what if we're all giving everything we've got, to something that matters, so that nothing can come along and steal it? Is that good? Is it acceptable? Can something like that even be morally judged?

It's entirely possible that, the instant you believe that you're qualified to morally judge another person, you're disqualified by that belief.