Greed Is A Terminal Disease

While intellectually, many of us know that anything taken to an extreme can lose its goodness, practically, our culture seems to have forgotten that this is so. While the Wall Street culture promoted the idea that greed is good, just as a person who lives on a diet of junk food will ultimately become seriously ill, too much greed for too long exacts a toll. This toll is felt by the greedy, the people taken advantage of or shut out from the food chain, and by society as a whole.

Bernie Madoff's uncontained greed not only led to his sentence of life in prison, but also to the suicide of one of his sons. Greed on Wall Street, in business, and in the political arena, has left countless people adrift, unemployed, homeless and displaced, without hope of any change in their circumstances. And the greedy who put so many people in such difficult positions turn their head the other way and watch their bank accounts grow.

We have example after example that greed is a terminal disease, and perhaps an addiction in our culture where success is measured in financial terms, not in meaning, contribution, and making a difference in the world. In his article, The Real Social Security, published in Ode Magazine, Kenyan microcredit bank managing director, Kimanthi Mutua notes that the only REAL social security is our collectiveness.

Mutua notes, "Centuries of individualism and materialism have destroyed most of this essential support structure in the West." We have no collective infrastructure to catch people when times are tough, and falling through the cracks of life is all too familiar a risk of hard times and forces beyond our control.

While Americans may look at Africans as residents of third world nations, emotionally and spiritually, America is a third world nation, or worse. The richness of daily connections with people, face to face, where people know and care for one another, cannot be made up through bonding in virtual reality. Mutua notes that in Africa, people connect in the daily reality of their lives. They naturally support each other, which builds an experience of community and compensates for the hardships of their lives."

Mutua notes as well that based on data from a World Value Survey, "most people in Africa do not report feeling less happy than people in developed nations despite being the poorest people on the planet. African is a living example of the fact that more money does not bring more happiness."

So, if we can stop looking at our own reflections in the narcissistic mirror that is so common today, perhaps we can look at ourselves through the lens of other cultures that may be more spiritually and emotionally rich than we are. As we are lost in the trance of working ourselves to death, and pursuing the American Dream, that a Psychology Today article notes has transformed into the American Nightmare, we lose sight of what really matters, and what we really need to survive.

Copyright 2011 Linda Marks

See "American Nightmare" in April 2011 issue of Psychology Today, and "The Real Social Security" by Kimanthi Mutua in the October 2007 issue of Ode Magazine for more.

Exercising My Service Muscles Feels Good

For many decades, I have been a devoted gym goer. Doing my daily cardio is good for my spirit as well as my heart. And all the long-term health benefits of caring for my body are something I treasure as the years pass on. Same with the oxytocin exercise generates.

However, another set of muscles that feel really good to exercise are my service muscles. Doing acts of genuine kindness feels just as good as my workout routine, and giving from a place of love nourishes the emotional heart of both the giver and receiver.

One of the ways I love to nurture is through cooking wonderful, healthy food. Food is just so basic to our existence. And good, healthy food is so fundamental to our health and well-being.

Two members of my greater community have been going through hard times. One friend is recovering from breast cancer and complications of an infection post-surgery. She and her husband were exhausted from the medical parts of life, and since none of us can do everything all the time, I had an inkling that healthy food was a way I could offer support. My friend is diabetic and she and her husband are choosing to eat a modified vegan diet, so healthy food, in this case, is VERY healthy and pure.

I found myself having a wonderful time the afternoon I was preparing all of the features of their menu, from the bean vegetable stew, to the Israeli couscous with baby chickpeas and quinoa, to collard greens sauteed with portabello mushrooms to mixed berry fruit salad, and a mixed vegetable salad to top it off. Pouring love and artistry into what will nourish people I care about is pure joy!

Today was another day I got to exercise my service muscles. A family in my church community who lost their 25 year old son, was welcoming dinner deliveries. And once again, learning that my friend loved beans, with no wheat or sugar in any menu item, I had fun being creative with their menu. A lentil stew with chicken sausage, brown rice, millet and chickpeas with black sesame seeds, roast potatoes with sea salt, pepper, and olive oil, a beautiful mixed salad, bananas and strawberries, and a special bonus tub of 3 bean turkey chili became their custom menu.

I'll be delivering their dinner very shortly, but am basking in the feeling of sharing from the heart.

Life Itself Is a Matter of Timing

When I was in about 20, I wrote a song called, "Seasons," looking at the waves and forces moving and shaping our lives....including the actual flow of the seasons. One of the lines I wrote in the lyrics was, "life, itself, is a matter of timing," followed by "and our lives ebb and flow."

Today, my son, Alex, and I were part of the community that gathered at a Memorial Service for a 25 year-old young man who died just about a month ago while traveling in Argentina with his best friend. It is sad to lose a loved one at any age, but for his parents, who have been members of the UU church I've attended for the past 13 years, and his younger brother, this kind of loss is beyond devastating. It just isn't supposed to happen this way.

His parents are wonderful people--kind-hearted, service-oriented, authentic, attentive to their two sons. I know his mom best, and she has a heart of gold. I didn't know her son well, but I do remember him as a 12 year old when I joined the church, and I remember when he read his Credo--the personal statements of values and beliefs that each kid reads when they complete the churches' Coming of Age program, which my now 14 year old son is engaged in this year. A piece of Matthew's Credo--a statement about the importance, power and underlying desire for human relationships between all people--was included in the Memorial Service program and the service itself.

Matthew seemed to, on the one hand, have a deep heart, a desire to serve, the ability to build things with his hands and appreciate the natural world, including its human inhabitants, yet on the other hand, be struggling to find a place where he could set his feet down, grow roots and feel a sense of purpose and meaning for his life.

Though clearly loved by many, and surrounded by lots of love, some place deep inside of him must have been horribly dark and lonely. Matthew died at his own hand. He took his life.
Thanks to the information that passes through a loving community, I learned he had hung himself.

And that brought up even deeper sadness for me. Though I was not inside Matthew's heart or mind and have no idea what his personal demons were, when I was 13, I was deeply despairing, felt all alone and in spite being externally known as "the class president" and "the brightest girl in my grammar school," one day when almost no one was around after school, I took hold of one of the long ropes that hung from the school windows, tied it into a noose, and prepared to hang myself.

I was standing on a desk or a chair, so that if I jumped off, I would be suspended by my neck, hanging on the rope. Someone walked in and found me. I was too deeply into my own trance of despair and heartache to remember who it was, a custodian, a teacher or some random staff member of the school. All I know is someone found me and stopped me. And I remained in a catatonic state of shock for a long while afterward, including the shock of the school's reaction to my action: pretending it never happened and that everything would go on as usual, ignoring and moving beyond my act of desperation and pain.

Had I been alone in Argentina, my life could have ended the way Matthew's did, with no one finding me until it was too late. But while someone stopped my actions, no one really FOUND me. I don't know if the school even officially dealt with the reality that a star student was that miserable to have attempted such an unthinkable act. Did they tell my parents? Not that telling them would have done any good. I remember dissociating at a town governance meeting later that year, and telling the adults there that I was not feeling well and to please take me to the hospital. Instead of honoring my wishes, they took me home. That only made things worse.

I was not surrounded by a loving community. I did not have an emotionally safe place to go. Yet nobody saw my despair. Nobody saw my isolation. And my attempts to reach out, to get help....or to even try to end my pain....were ignored, because they "didn't fit" the image of who I was, or at least how I was supposed to be, or what anyone else was equipped to deal with. I guess some dark places are just too hard to see.

Yet, somehow, in spite of the depth of the pain I suffered, and the invisibility of my pain to others, I am still here. And Matthew is not. I do not pretend to know Matthew's inner story, and in every way, it could be completely different from mine, somehow I faced death at my own hand, and managed to live. He faced death at his own hand, and he has died.

As I got older, my suicidal impulses had other expressions, including anorexia at 13, and being externalized in an attempted rape-murder attempt on my life at 16. When my suicidal impulse was externalized, and someone ELSE was trying to kill me, not me, I finally realized that this life and death stuff was serious business and I really WANTED to live. I did have a sense of mission, scary as it was to commit to it, and I did choose my life. And since the time I was lying on my back in the alley with the stranger trying to rape and murder me, I have never wanted to end my life or die.

Yet, I am struck by how much life, itself, IS a matter of timing. A school staff member found me, in time. A car came down the alley as the attempted rapist/murderer was making what I thought would be his final attempt at ending my life, and scared him away. I was anorexic at a time when a major research project was being done on very bright women from critical families that starve themselves, and I was sent to the project leader. Even the fact that women get pregnant every day, and carry children to term and that children grow into adulthood is full of those magical moments where life wins.

I am very grateful that, somehow, in spite of all the pain, trauma and suffering I experienced that made me want to end my life, I managed to, in time, learn that life itself is a gift. I am very sorry that even with all the love around him, the timing swung in such a sad direction in Matthew's darkness hour.