Fighting the good fight.

Impotence versus Competence

“People think responsibility is hard to bear.  It’s not.  I think that sometimes it is the absence of responsibility that is harder to bear.  You have a great feeling of impotence.”

                                  Henry Kissinger

“Reckoned physiologically, everything ugly weakens and afflicts man.  It recalls decay, danger, impotence; he actually suffers a loss of energy in its presence.  The effect of the ugly can be measured with a dynamometer.  Whenever a man feels in any way depressed, he senses the proximity of something ugly.  His feelings of power, his will to power, his courage, his pride---they all decline with the ugly, they increase with the beautiful.”

                                  Friedrich Nietzsche

         There’s a lot of ‘ugly’ going around today---joblessness, homelessness, fire, flood, destructive weather, wasted time and frustrated energy.  People look at the way the world has changed in the last five years and feel despondent, impotent.  What will it take to turn this around?  We could argue that endlessly, but we would still be confronted with people out of work and people working for less; people who have lost homes and don’t know when, or whether, they will ever be able to afford another one; people who have gone through their savings and retirement accounts, yet still have children to educate.  It’s ugly and depressing.  The hardest part is having skills that you desperately want to use, but having no venue in which to use them.  That is pure frustration.

         I do not have answers to the economic dilemma, but I do suggest that people who are confronting this ugly situation find something they can do—volunteer or otherwise—to move themselves out of the inertia created by frustration.  There are plenty unmet needs in every community, and going out and serving others is one way to shift the energy of depression.  Volunteering at a museum, botanical garden, humane society, literacy council, zoo, or as people are doing in Alabama right now, a disaster area, can get your mind off yourself and encourage a sense of responsibility and potentiality.  When the energy begins to change from impotence to competence, the ugly diminishes greatly and beauty emerges to refresh the spirit.  This sour economy will pass, but in the meantime, we must do what we can to rouse ourselves from despair.  A fighting spirit is necessary to overcome any kind of challenge.

                                  In all things give thanks,

                                   Jane