Just rolled out a new theme I spent the last 2 days developing. Let me know what you think in the comments!

Moon in Virgo. I’ve been exceptionally productive. There’s still lots to get done, but the new year is starting out on a fair positive note. I’m not feeling stressed about money a whole lot, and none of my responsibilities are feeling very overwhelming at the moment.

I’ve been in the mood to write, but haven’t had a lot of things to say the last couple of weeks. A lot of that is simply that I feel kind of out of touch with the world at large. I’m not sure why that is, but I don’t feel as though I’m really connected the last few weeks to a month. I think this is a larger feeling connected with some of what the Brotherhood is going through at the moment. I feel as though I’ve been insular, and lost contact with the world around me.

That isn’t really true, but that’s how I feel. I think I need to spend more time with other people and be more social. Not in the demanding way, that would be a disaster, but just doing more out of the house. That’s a goal for the year, but I’m not going to get very far while the weather is this cold. The cold doesn’t generally bother me too much, but I don’t like getting to and fro in it.

I’m also thinking a lot about my talents and the things that are important to me. I have been really feeling drawn to working with kids the last month or so, and I’m trying to understand how that fits into it all. I don’t have any desire to be a therapist or teacher of children, but their rights are really important to me. There is a part of me that is constantly aware of how unjustly we treat our youth. Perhaps it has ever been this way, but I think we do them and the world a great disservice by treating them as lesser adults. I’ve never been comfortable with our, to my mind, arbitrary division of life stages and the expectations we place upon people in different phases of their lives. There is such panic consistently in our cultural consciousness about protecting our children, about taking care of them properly, about so many things. I can’t help but feel that this level of cultural obsession is not only overkill, but ultimately poisonous to our children and our civilization.

For instance, the obsession with letting kids be kids and not burdening them with the weighty thoughts of adulthood. I am not so old that I don’t remember being a kid. From a very early age I was aware that my family often had trouble with money. So much so that with a few exceptions I always tried not to nag my parents for expensive things. I suspect you have your own memories of things you were aware of and that affected your decision making and behavior. This does not mean our parents didn’t properly sheild us from these things. The idyllic childhood where we are carefree beings doesn’t exist. I don’t think it ever did. It’s a myth we continue to perpetuate, and it places unrealistic expectations upon parents and children.

A lot of the things that bother me come down to something that bothers me in the grand scheme of things. We, as a race, seem to be unwilling to think about the principal meanings behind our behaviors. We seem to avoid even thinking about why we do things, and what those things mean about our ideals. The second part is perhaps worse than the first. It’s bad that we don’t think about things. But that we don’t extrapolate meaning from our actions is terrible in my mind.

Take a common circumstance. The germaphobe who won’t shake hands. I’m not picking on a person who has this practice, but it’s generally understood that if you refuse to shake someones hands because of germs you’re pretty much saying they have dirty germ-ridden hands. This isn’t a hard concept to grasp. We see it in social situations all the time, and the same thought process extends to all sorts of backhanded compliments and quirks of behavior. Most of these things we write off. We know the germaphobe is not trying to insult us by refusing to shake hands, so we let it go. But the truth is, the behavior speaks clearly to a belief the germaphobe has: “All people are dirty and will make me sick.” This may or may not be true. There are plenty of people with weak immune systems who may very well pick up illnesses left and right from such casual contact. The truth of the belief isn’t important. The belief is.

I carry a messenger-bag style laptop case most days. The flap of this case has a zipper compartment on the outside. I tend to throw items like books in there where I can get at them easily. I typically don’t zip it up unless it’s raining. Often I clip my blackberry to the inside of it so I can get to it without much work. It loads from the top so I’m not worried about things falling out of it.

Often, the bag rides in my lower back, so it’s behind me, out of sight. Still, I’ve yet to have something fall out of it, or someone steal my random book or my blackberry. Two years, no attempted robberies or accidental losses. In that time however, I’ve had at least a dozen people pull my book out and give it back to me to demonstrate that leaving it open is dangerous. An equal number have come up and zipped it closed for me while telling me “Your bags open,” operating on the assumption that I must have just forgotten to close it. I couldn’t possibly want my stuff so accessible.

This says a great deal about the mindset of our culture. Whether we express it or not, we live our lives in an almost perpetual state of fear. Fear that we’re going to be robbed, or that we’re going to suffer loss. The fear is bad, but just as bad is the fact that we never challenge that fear or stop to think about it rationally. Is someone really going to steal a paperback novel out of my bag? Or an ancient blackberry worth maybe $5? Or a hairbrush?

This “close your bag” behavior is rampant. It’s interesting because of what it says about people. One one hand it indicates the obsessive and constant fear they experience, not just on their own behalf but nobly, on behalf of others. But it also says something about what they think of me. The “I could have stolen your book.” approach tells me that they think I’m being careless with my property, that I’m not obeying the fear-compulsion properly.

It indicates to them naivete on my part, or disregard. That’s not entirely inaccurate. I am not terribly worried about someone stealing my book. If someone feels compelled to steal a badly written novel they must have more need of it than I do. I am certainly naive about this in some lights, or perhaps I just have a strong conviction that is counter to their own. I certainly avoid obeying the fear-compulsion. (When I had a car, I did lock the doors, however I don’t lock the door of my apartment.)

The thing that bugs me the most here, is what that fear-compulsion says about us. It says that we should mistrust each other, that we should fear each other, and that most people are not just not looking out for us, but are actively out to destroy us. I don’t believe that. I think a lot of people don’t believe that. If they don’t much of their behavior makes no sense and they should change it. But the connection from principle to practice is too weak to convince most people to change their behavior.

Sad truth is, most people don’t believe that their day to day behaviors, the standard ones like zipping up their bag and crossing the street to avoid the four teenagers on the corner, have an impact in a larger sense. I believe, deeply, that it is those smallest behaviors that define our lives. They govern the largest part of our experience, and are in some ways more defining because of it. Someone who abuses their child verbally on a daily basis is not absolved because he donates a large sum to a childrens advocacy group. It’s the things we do every day that determine who we are, and so those little things deserve as much attention as the big ones. Perhaps more.