Calculating the incalculable

[gurdonark]

During my wife's brief time teaching school, I liked the notion of a rubric. I'm not entirely clear on what a rubric is, as my common understanding of the term and the context in which it seemed to be used in education classes do not match up.

In practical terms, a rubric seemed to be what a school teacher used as a template to evaluate essay answers. One got points for this, points for that, with the points each amounting to an assessment of how well the essayist/examinee got the point of the assignment/question. I'm sure I'm saying this all wrong, so I hope anyone who knows what I'm talking about will forgive that I really don't.

What I do know is how easy it is to "tote up" our lives. It's like one has some internal Jones with which one is always keeping up. One's internal sense says "I should have a beau", and suddenly one feels the lack of one intensely. One's internal sense says "I deserve better respect in my chosen calling" and suddenly one is deeply unappreciated. One says "I should be happier", as if one has some omniscience about the way one is "supposed" to be.

I am anything but a great thinker on matters of the internal life, but I suspect that surely our upbringing imprints us with notions of what is "normal", which we never quite shake.
Somehow, then, some internal counter, imprinted deep within us, runs a constant math problem--do I add up, do my sums balance?

I am pleased, I suppose, that I rarely meet anyone who says "I really come out to an impressive sum", because my own limited experience is that such people are insufferable (and further, interestingly, they usually have a deficit in the credibility calculation). Indeed, I find myself insufferable when I feel that I've achieved an impressive total.

There are some ways, of course, in which we can assess whether our basic human needs are being met--enough to eat, a roof over our heads, the ability to pay our bills, and the presence/absence of cruelty and exploitation in our lives.
I suppose some "toting up" makes sense on things like "can I afford to buy meat?" or "am I being hit?".

But I think that so often my own internal calculator is humming away at equations such as "am I appreciated enough?",
"do I achieve enough?", and "do I have the things I want?".
There's nothing wrong, per se, with stray thoughts like this,
but there is a certain Olympic gymnastics quality to it. Will my ego someday replace that "7" sign with a "9"? I'm concerned that all the tens go to teen girls who train all the time.

I think it's very hard to just "be". I think that just living in the moment, accepting that one is just doing what one can, is a genuine challenge. Yet all the things I've ever done right I've done when I put aside the internal calculator of whether I'm doing them right. I've observed, too, that achieving a goal does not quite bring the joy that striving for it brings. The destination is not only worth the travel, the destination is the travel.

I have no great conclusion to all this. I guess I should put on a "rah rah" coda like "I'm going to be very zen from now on". But in fact, I don't think a journal post is going to change my internal calculator, or redefine my values. But I'm aware this morning of how incalculable the joy of living can be, and yet how I tend to "tote it up" anyway.

Comments

[amatrixangel.livejournal.com]

Great words. The only one who totes things up in our lives are ourselves. Not other people (heh, except parents maybe :) or God or anything else.

The rubric I know of. I used to teach ..but I thought they didn't follow that too strictly nowadays. Come to think of it, Oscar Wilde would have failed on that one. And (yes, see - I failed, I began a sentence with 'and' - well, it seems to fit anyway :) ...where was I? Oh yes ...and for some reason this thing popped into my head as I began reading, something from George Burns. Mr. Burns was asked by an interviewer when he was nearly 100 years old, why has he lived so long? George said, "Because it's better than the altenative."

:-)

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

I'm always amused at how in grammar class we learned one set of rules, then in lit class learned about the folks who excelled at breaking them stylistically.

[marstokyo.livejournal.com]

Comparing myself to others, and coming up short, was something I wasted a LOT of years on. It's gotten better with time--gradually in my 30's and 40's I stopped comparing myself to other people. It's an essential in feeling *okay*.

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

I think you're right. I fall prey to the comparison to others thing sometimes, but I more often fall prey to some internal "where should I be" concern.

[gregwest98.livejournal.com]

When we met with the kids' teacher, she had that word "rubrics" on the handout. None of us knew what it meant either. We jokingly asked if she meant one of those Rubric's Cubes.

I know for a fact that I contain such an internal counter and I constantly try to ignore it and it rears its ugly head anyway. My counter tends to count up the square footage of my friends' homes but I'm sure everyone's is slightly different.

I think it is this that makes a man take out a second mortgage on his home to finance a Corvette on a seven year note. (When he is not a wealthy person with the disposable income that he really needs for such a frivolity.)

Even the Bible mentions this when Jesus makes his brief sermon about not worrying where your next meal will come from or what you will wear tomorrow.

Still, I do it and I believe that most other people do it too. And if ever I manage to forget about the counter for a while, either the wife or kids will say something that brings it to the fore again.

I'm looking forward to the day when I don't care any more. Or at least, that I only care about the right things.

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

Yes, it's a fine line. One of my in laws says "always buy more house, car, etc. than you can afford==makes you work harder". My style is so different.

It's so regional, too. Our house in La Crescenta was TINY, and yet sold for nearly 1.75 times what our home in Allen cost. Odd.

[ladyelisa.livejournal.com]

Are you familiar with Leonard Jacobson? In his book, "Words from Silence" he wrote "You get lost because you think there is somewhere to go. If you give up believing in a goal or a destination, then you cannot get lost. In the present moment there is no destination."

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

Wonderful quote. Thanks for sharing it!