Resolutions and Gratitude

I will usually make a New Year's resolution but I'm bad at keeping them. I don't think I've ever lost a pound based on my good intentions of January 1st.  Oh, but I continue to try and that's important.

A few years ago I made a resolution to say "Yes" instead of "No" in social situations or when asked to do something or be somewhere. My wife had passed away a couple years earlier and I was not dealing very well with things in general. I left my job and became a full-time retiree in a house by myself. I wasn't particularly reclusive but I was slowly closing down my social circle. My resolution to say "Yes" was a very important change in my life and led me to seek out more opportunities to say "yes". I made new friends and re-entered a familiar zone where I felt better and belonged to friends as much as they belonged to me. My weekly bocce club outings and my weekly hiking club started me on my way to a brighter existence but I did more than that and enjoyed it.

Last year I made a resolution to express gratitude more often and more openly. I started off and accomplished it for a while but I got caught up in my move to New Mexico and setting up my house and getting settled. I lost track of my efforts to express gratitude.  I don't think I ignored it but I didn't go out of my way or even be particularly conscious of expressing gratitude.

This year I'm going to try it again. There is a blog that I red that is written my a Doctor born in India and educated in Cuba who works with American Indians. I enjoy his insights and agree with his point of view in general.  His recent blog post was about gratitude and he advocated keeping a notebook that helped one to see and experience gratitude and enjoy it.   Here is the URL to the blog entry.

http://medicoanthropologist.blogspot.com/2013/12/gratitude-lise-how-it-may-help-you.html

Among other things...
"Writing down three acts of kindness that made the writer felt grateful for, was as effective at increasing well being, equal to spending one hour with a therapist! Wow! The power of our connection to the mind!!"

"We teach our children to be grateful, not for the sake of being polite, but also for them to understand gratefulness. Studies have shown that children who understand gratefulness tend to be better at academic performance! Seeing the recent results from an International study of performance of children from various countries, most of the top spots were taken by Asians, the USA was way down the ladder, and perhaps there is a connection? Perhaps not understanding gratefulness be one of the reasons?"

In our culture "Gratitude" is a noun, not a verb. I will see if I can make it more of a verb. I don't know if I will keep a notebook or a list but I'm going to try to express gratitude more freely.
 

The Perils of Genealogy -- Part One

My sainted grandma was Irish...very Irish. She was born in Kerry Patch in St. Louis so technically she was born in the US but it might as well have been Dingle or Tralee where her mom was born. Her dad was so Irish that he managed to be scarce most of the time. Not all of the time, though, because there were about ten kids born in a few short years...but only five lived past the age of 15. Her mom died of TB at age 34 and dad went to New York City and a new relationship without the kids.

There were three boys and two girls. Grandma and her younger brother bounced around in orphanages and convents but the older boys would stage a "jail break" and liberate them so things were always in a state of disarray.

St. Louis was then the fourth largest city in the US and the site of the 1904 Worlds Fair. In "Meet Me In St. Louis" you don't hear about Kerry Patch or the Irish gangs that ran much of the city in the early 1900s. Grandma's older brothers were busy gang members but not all that successful at their work. They spent time in the city workhouse and managed to get caught when other gang members got way. Finally, they decided to go straight. One married and then died shortly afterward of the family illness...TB. The other became a constable to an Irish city magistrate....and then died not long afterward of, you guessed it, TB. Both of the older boys were dead by 1911. The girls fared better and both married and went on to happy family life. The youngest boy  married and escaped from St. Louis and lived a long and productive life.

Grandma managed on her own for a while. She became a domestic and worked in the homes of wealthy St. Louis families and later in some fancy hotels. She was also a cook and in later years she worked in a number of high-end restaurants. Around 1907, she married a shoe worker from upstate New York and they had four kids....three girls and one boy.  They moved out to the western edge of the city and bought a house and settled down. Grandpa's family was not Irish or Catholic and were somewhat upset with his choice. Not only had he run off and left his widowed mom and his siblings but he married this Irish Catholic maid.

Grandpa's family went way back in New York and New England. English ancestors arrived in Massachusetts in the mid 1600s. His NY Dutch connections went back even farther. Then there were the French Walloon Huguenots. All were solid protestants with nothing good to say about Catholics.  When you read some of the letters or cards that were sent from New York, the words are sweetly poisoned...nothing was ever said directly or outright but you can sense the attitude. "Come home where you belong" was the message at first then it became "it's hard times here, send money".

It's ironic that folks who were descended from Walloon Huguenots, a terribly persecuted minority in France, would be so blatant in their dislike of the persecuted Irish minority...once again, religion rears it's ugly head..

One of grandpa's ancestral families was the Drake family. The story was that he was descended from Sir Francis Drake or maybe Sir Francis's brother.  Grandma seemed to be interested in this connection but with a twist. In her most Irish voice she would recount the family connection to Sir Francis and then say that we should never, ever, ever tell anyone that we were related to him because he was a pirate and went around pillaging and stealing. I, of course, went out and told everyone who would listen. This was too cool to keep a secret..we had a pirate in the family.  ARRGH!

Things are never as they appear. Sometime in the 1800s a story circulated that Sir Francis Drake's estate was unclaimed and rightful heirs should come forward to claim their share. Every family with Drake connections went into high gear and rewrote their family history or, in some cases, hired someone to research their connection to the old "pirate". An industry grew up for a while as researchers cranked out all sorts of dubious family trees. It was a swindle and it is still circulating today. Sir Francis had no children. Heirs would be descended from his brother,  There are also more than one Captain Francis Drake so there is room for honest confusion.

It turns out that our Drakes were uppity cousins of the venerable pirate who were not impressed with his exploits or his claim to nobility. That family has a story in its own right but it doesn't involve piracy.

I'll cover more of the story in another post.

On Universal Randomness

I recently had an email exchange regarding how we got here...


"Wow, I came upon the statement from a neuroscientist on the Internet this morning as one of the explanations for the perplexing question of "Why are we (humans) here?"  Tell me what you think.........."

quote:

"Any single brain, including yours, is made up of atoms that were forged in the hearts of countless, far-flung stars billions of years ago. These particles drifted for eons and light-years until gravity and chance brought them together here, now. These atoms now form a conglomerate — your brain — that can not only ponder the very stars that gave it birth but can also think about its own ability to think and wonder about its own ability to wonder. With the arrival of humans, it has been said, the universe has suddenly become conscious of itself. This, truly, is the greatest mystery of all."


I gave it a little thought...not too much...and responded:


"It's hard for me to fathom how randomness and coincidence brought us to where we are. The reason is because I can see how that might happen maybe all across the universe in a limited fashion -- here and there -- but it would have had to happen many times here on our little planet. We have such a diversity...have had over the eons...that it doesn't look like randomness to me. Life forms from a virus or lichen to the deep sea vent tube worms to the dinosaurs, corals and hummingbirds have all been created here. We have no proof that these exist anywhere else.

But, I know why I'm here...somebody has to clean out the litter box.

Ken"

The issue stayed with me a while and I pondered it a little more.
I worked in statistics and dealt with randomness and research for twenty years. I wonder whether the neuroscientist or others who make similar statements are working backwards rather than in a forward fashion.   Do they frame the question with the end product (us -- our existence) as the starting point? Randomness is absolute.  One should start at the beginning - not at the end. There are countless random events -- atoms crashing together or missing each other -- in the universe. There are possible random outcomes that would foster a certain outcome but there are countless random forces working against any single outcome...many more than are working to push the outcome forward. Chaos.

I can see that maybe somewhere a chemical compound randomly comes together and maybe once in 100,000 years it has a spark of life....that is snuffed out by the cold of interstellar night or the searing heat of scorching light of a nearby sun. Maybe in 100,000 tries the spark survives and something like a virus lives, sustained in some manner off of neighboring chemicals. In many cases that is as far as it goes but once in a while the conditions might allow it to grow and even replicate itself into a colony of virus thingys. Maybe once in a great while conditions would fall into place where one of these very rare virus thingy colonies get big enough to look like a stain on a rock and then, eons later, it develops into something that we would think looks like a small lichen. Billions of years go by and it has progressed to be something a astronaut would want to be careful to clean off her shoe....not recognized as a being at the apex of life's creation on this far away planet.

People - scientists - are searching for intelligent life somewhere else in the universe. They are looking for a sign -- some sort of signal from an intelligent being. So far we have not found evidence of unintelligent life in any form except on our planet. Intelligent beings are messy -- we make waste and we make clutter. We leave evidence behind when we do anything or go anywhere. Somehow, I think we would be aware of somebody else's trash if there were many similar random outcomes of intelligent beings cropping up in the universe.

Of course, next week we will have a visitation from some other planet....go figure.

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Update: interesting article discusses the difficulty of evolution   (July 2014)
http://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.com/2014/06/evolution-depends-on-rare-chance-events.html#.U74PInbnbbU