Barrel Strength

What do you do when you have just filled in the crossword puzzle? You toss it away with complete lack of interest, right? Up to that moment, you have been obsessed with every letter. Up to that moment, you have been spending hours, over the course of days perhaps, decoding. Then poof! A sudden change of value is made in your mind. I draw this to your attention because I am obsessed with attention, and how it shifts, and what happens when it does.

Once I removed an old piece of equipment from a circuit board in my house. The heavy piece of electrical equipment had been functioning perfectly all its life, since the 1920s probably. The next moment it was scrap. Who declared it scrap? I did. Another mental event. Useful one moment, scrap the next. 

Global warming of the man-caused variety. When did it move from “useful”or “true” to “scrap” or “false” in your mind?

But this is only one of any number of changes, decisions, evaluations we make in life.  Some of them are far more significant for our self-perception and social status. Grew up Protestant, become a Jew. Grow up Jewish, become a Unitarian. Grow up Unitarian, become a Roman Catholic. Grow up atheist and find yourself thinking a whole lot about Jesus and what He accomplished. Always thought you were gay, marry a woman and live happily. Always thought you were straight, move to Sante Fe with Allan and open a boutique. Eat meat, dyke and, behold! you do, and marry the rancher who tends to the cattle, move to southern Alberta and join the Presbyterians.

Most of our changes are far less dramatic in nature, I grant you, and occur at a slower pace than dropping the old circuit breaker into the garbage.  Most of them, in my case, have involved ceasing to concern oneself with issues that used to fascinate me. Most of them have involved retreating from publicly relevant associations, such as political parties and church, into my own private pleasures and concerns. As I am not the first to have done so, I assume it is a feature of ageing. Many go in the opposite direction.

But the topic  here is evaluation: the mysterious process that says this one, not that one. Which brings me around to us, you and me. Who does the deciding? You and I. So in effect, and in reality, you and I are the source of the value. We make the decisions. We make the evaluations. We say: “this, not that”. So how on earth did we ever get the idea that value comes from somewhere outside of us? We are the value. We are value. Not God, not earth, not Gaia, not dad, not neighbours, nor the wife. Us. You and I.

So value is not extrinsic to us. It is us. It is we who judge a thing or a person by its or their fitness to a purpose, and we judge the purpose.  We are not just making valuations, we are the source of the value by which things and people are evaluated.

Maybe this is just this morning’s approach to the saying that the Kingdom of Heaven is within you. It is amazing sometimes to consider what happens when you decide to throw away the crossword puzzle.