Out Of Balance

Today I had the occasion to have an intriguing conversation with a coworker of mine who is from Hawaii about the weather. Among my many interests is an interest in amateur meterology, and paying attention to weather conditions [1]. One year when I was a college student, I had the opportunity to spend a large part of the summer in Western Pennsylvania, where I was born and where my father’s family has farmed for more than two centuries. That particular summer was not a good one. Every day for more than a month there was rain, making it impossible for most of the summer for my family to harvest hay for our dairy and beef cattle. Even if I have never been a particularly proficient farmer, I was deeply concerned about such a disastrous hay harvest for the sake of my family. When I returned to Los Angeles after the summer (where I was a student at the time), I relayed my concerns about the alarming weather, only to find that some people had no interest at all or concern in such matters, nor any comprehension why someone would be concerned about such things.

Coming from a farming background, one has little choice but to be interested in the weather, as it has a massive role on the survival of one’s animals and even oneself. Even as a child, though, I paid attention to the patterns that weather provided. Being a person who has always been very sensitive to my surroundings, I find that knowing patterns helped me feel slightly more at ease in my surroundings by providing a bit of advance knowledge as well as a bit of security in the familiarity of the patterns. As a child in Florida, for example, there would be be rain in the summers in a consistent pattern in mid-afternoon, around 3PM. By the time I was a young adult, these patterns had ceased to hold, and even if the timing of rain in the day is a small manner, when those little patterns are wrong it tends to make one exceedingly anxious, whether it be too much rain, not enough, the wrong temperatures at the wrong times, and all of those other ways in which our world is out of balance.

When the patterns of life have gone awry, the response that people have is to seek larger narratives that explain it. The sort of narratives that we construct depend on our own worldview and the material that is at hand that most plausibly (to us) serves to fill up our fears. Do we believe ourselves to have too much control and power or too little? If the former, we will tend towards explanations that involve almost magical power and our fears will be about our own lack of wisdom. If the latter, we will tend towards explanations that minimize responsibility and agency and that accentuate conspiracies. Of course, depending on the circumstances we may pick options on both sides depending on the specific issue. Developing an accurate understanding of such matters sometimes takes decades or even centuries before enough information is available. Such patience is unheard of in our hurried times. Hopefully we can find it as we seek to understand why our world is out of balance, and what we are supposed to do about it.

[1] Weather conditions have been a frequent subject of my own blogging, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2013/10/29/a-change-in-the-weather/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2013/12/07/let-it-snow/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2013/06/30/in-the-heat-of-summer-sunshine/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2013/05/30/a-walk-in-the-woods/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2013/05/01/every-silver-cloud-has-a-dark-lining/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2012/12/25/what-can-brown-do-for-you/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2012/11/25/we-are-not-a-sunshine-people/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2012/10/25/what-makes-a-perfect-storm/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2012/05/07/here-comes-the-rain-again/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/05/21/when-and-how-nature-strikes/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2013/10/23/a-cenotaph-of-fog/