Spirituality and the new year

The new year is more spiritually significant to me than Christmas is.  The new year is something very real--our planet completes a full cycle around the sun, and the seasons are set to repeat.  The exact date to mark a year completed is arbitrary, but once you start keeping track, at some point you have the start of a new year.

The story of the birth of Christ troubles me more than it inspires me to celebrate.  I don't want to be a junior high school essayist here, so you can go elsewhere for intelligent thought regarding Christ worship.

I'm not sure that the new year is spiritual to me.  I have the problem of being an atheist who doesn't believe in the supernatural but is spiritually curious.  Yeah, the fact that there is something rather than nothing is as spiritual as any mystical assertion, and art and love move me deeply.  But I'm not sure that I experience spirituality.

About the weather

I'm not any kind of Pagan earth-based spirit, new age smaggler, but I have an appreciation for what a blizzard can do.  Obviously I don't want a storm to damage anyone's health or property.  But it is certainly nice to see the world stop for a day due to things beyond our control.  I love sitting by the window sipping tea and watching the world come to a halt.  It is the inconvenience factor that moves me.  We are forced to break our routines.  I don't envy those who have to be somewhere no matter the weather, and I've been in that situation.  But I find a tranquility in it all.

Xmas Failure

No, it ain't working.  I'm not a Christian and I don't like Xmas.  Nonbelievers need to stand up and shun Xmas.

Capturing the spirit

I haven't had a religion-filled Xmas since I was just a little kid.  But I feel a spark of spirit in this one.  Nothing canned, just an affirming sense of goodness resulting from rethinking the way I participate in the spiritless commercial hellfest.  Sticking to my commitment to shop locally has been gratifying.  I care deeply about my community, and it feels right to act in line with that.

JohnEdwardsScamFreak

Q: Should our political candidates be proud family men?
A: No.

Q: Should their sex lives matter to us?
A: No.

Q: Why then should we be offended by Edwards?
A: Because he claimed to be deeply in love with his wife and paraded her around as part of his political brand.  And he turned out to be full of shit.

Q: What does this have to do with your search for substance?
A: Authenticity is part of the search.  The voting public pushes candidates to paint a picture of a wholesome family life whether it is real or not.  I'd rather candidates keep quiet about such things.  They can have whatever affairs they have, but it would be less scandalous if they never claimed to have been moral superstars in the first place.

Meaningful work

In our time of high unemployment, it is hard to say much about what kind of work is meaningful.  When so many people are out of work, even shit jobs have meaning.  In times like these, just being valued enough to be paid to do something beats the alternative of full rejection.  So this is perhaps a subject for better times, and a mere thought exercise in these hard times.

I know that there's a risk of appearance of elitism that runs with a discussion of what constitutes meaningful work, since it could seem intuitive to propose that low-end jobs are less meaningful.  But I think, to the limited extent I've thought about this, the claim of elitism can be dropped.  I remember the scene in Bonfire of the Vanities where the protagonist is unable to explain his Master of the Universe job to his young child.  I found that to be a poignant test of the meaningfulness of a job.  A janitor can easily explain to a child that he keeps a building clean.  But the novel's high-earning financial worker can't explain much beyond "I make a lot of money."

Making money is typically enough meaning for a worker, and that is ok for someone who is more family oriented than career oriented.  In that case, work is a means to an end--to support a family.  It probably is important that the worker doesn't compromise himself for the work.  But otherwise, work merely for pay isn't without respect.

There can be some simple tests of how meaningful your work is:

• Do you enjoy your work?
• If for some reason you could not do your work professionally, would you do it as a hobby?  Or if you were very wealthy and did not need the income, would you still continue your work in some form?
• Is your job compatible with your values?

I might want to think more about this.

Does everything happen for a reason?

I think the outright assertion that everything happens for a reason is easily refuted.  Over 200,000 human beings perished in the 2004 Asian tsunami.  The number of Jews killed in WWII is nearly half of the current total Jewish population.  And, well, if we are talking numbers, around 60 million people died in WWII.  If these things happen to teach us a lesson, perhaps appreciation of human life, it is quite literally overkill.

I think that people who claim that everything happens for a reason often mean that a benevolent god makes these terrible things happen.  And although they may seem terrible to us, they are means to some benevolent end.  But come on, that would be at the very least an inefficient method of achieving a benevolent outcome--whatever the heck that could be.

But at a very personal and subjective level, the spirit of the idea can make sense.  An individual may face terrible adversity, find personal meaning in it, and make the best of it.  It isn't necessarily that every terrible thing that happened to such a person happened for a reason.  It is more the case that the person wouldn't be who he is today without having these experiences, and he embraces his sense of self.