Parameters, Practicalities and Compromise (getting away from 'black and white' once again)

When I lived in Hawaii, I knew people who so eschewed gasoline that they would not even accept a ride in a car from someone else, nor use chainsaws/weedwhackers/lawnmowers that were key tools for many in that farming community. I knew people who would not eat anything that was not locally grown/hunted/gathered. There were people who believed that all soaps were toxic (even locally-produced ones!), people who would not eat food that had been refrigerated, let alone 'tampered with' or altered in any other way. Many people very successfully used solar panels to generate adequate electricity most of the year, but there were people who decried the manufacturing process that went into the solar panels and batteries and eschewed those too. The constant availability of used clothing generated by the transient portion of the population provided a gray area as far as avoidance of manufactured clothing.

This may seem extreme, and apocalyptic thinking and paranoia are certainly prevalent in that community. But these parameters were all so readily comprehensible to my 'black and white' aspect that I felt I had truly found home; and the longer I lived there, the more like that I became. And the universe laughed out loud and sent me out to Alaska, to a place where very many people truly 'rough it' with few basic amenities in a much harsher climate, and where very few indeed care a jot about the obsession with clean diet and its relation to health that sent me to Hawaii in the first place. It is also one of the few remaining places where there are still good supplies of wild fish and game to be hunted, and in the short but manically intense months of midnight sun putting up as much of this 'protein' as possible is the focus for many people.

Polar therapy for my black-and-white tendencies in all sorts of ways, then! The experience has provided the reflection that all of life is filled with parameters along which we make our choices, and that an inflexible and extreme parameter is nigh-impossible to maintain throughout the circumstances that life offers up. Especially when we choose to share our life with another person or persons, or when, as Lynn's sister so cogently put it, we desire to participate in life, compromise is a necessary and graceful temper to the parameters. Of course, it inevitably occurs in life that one of your parameters may be in conflict with another, and so you discover within yourself, or else consciously choose, an optimality hierarchy of parameters to guide in the decision. For example, the surprising and strongly therapeutic life lesson that my move to Alaska is providing me was precipitated by my realization that my parameter of desiring a long-term loving relationship with someone was ranked higher than my parameter of requiring to live in a tropical or near-tropical climate (my belief that the latter was a non-negotiable parameter had initially delayed my relationship with Phil from moving forward).

Making this incredible shift brought the concept of parameters and their hierarchies to my awareness, and ever since I have been in a practice of identifying them and seeing how they are always subject to exceptions.*

Here are some parameters that I have been learning to become more flexible on. What are some of yours?

Often, parameters are polarized, or else pairs of parameters compete. For example, I have a life-long challenge with the pair of parameters 'take care of yourself' versus 'not wanting to have special needs.' 'Take care of yourself' was long demoted, partly consciously, partly through obliviousness and obsessive focus on other parameters. 'Not wanting to have special needs' could summon up other parameters to bolster its cause. For example, 'Don't waste water' could lead to my washing myself with a quart of tepid water and a cloth rather than affording myself the relative luxury of a gallon or so of solar-heated water (which is quite often possible in the summer here). Or, 'save energy wherever possible' could lead to my not preparing myself a smoothie if it was going to be 'just for me' ('no special needs'), instead either consuming the ingredients without the synergistic effects of blending, just mashing them up as best I could, or having something less attractive/appropriate to save the effort.

For very many people, the parameters of time and convenience compete with doing something more slowly and with more personal effort but less external energy. How many people look for a parking spot as close as possible to their destination rather than walking some, or even all, of the way? How many people row across the Bay rather than taking a motor boat? How many turn on a stove rather than gathering wood and building a fire? What about drying laundry? Most people at the laudromat use the dryers as well as the washers (we like to take ours home wet and use it to humidify our cabin as it dries).

Now, of course, my beautiful Pyrrhonism comes in to remind us that all of these actions that privilege time/convenience over frugality/energy efficiency are very appropriate in certain contexts. At certain times of the year in Hawaii, if you didn't put your clothes through a dryer at least sometimes, they would mildew! When the snow is several feet deep, or when there is a genuine emergency, park as close to the door as you can get! In many contexts, it's actually more efficient to use a stove or a heater than to build a fire, not to mention 'safer.' Parameters are tempered by practicality. I worry (and have some parameters) about emf's and wifi's but they provide me with certain things that enhance the quality of my life too. I worry (and have parameters) about spending too much time on the internet as opposed to building high-quality relationships with people face-to-face, but some of my dearest in-person friends I met either over the internet or else facilitated by it in some way, and many of my dearest in-person friends live thousands of miles away from me but are within reach through internet or phone.

It is very important to foster and build consciousness about why your parameters are ranked as they are. Is there a self-destructive part in there that is gaining leverage by forcing the 'be frugal' parameter to be ranked higher than 'take care of yourself' to the point that you consistently let yourself get far too cold before turning on the heater, or far too hungry before eating, or far too sick before you address the situation in an appropriate way? Is your 'do something just for fun' parameter so far demoted that you make a martyr of yourself, or is it so highly prioritized that you don't pay attention to what else might be adversely affected by a temporary high?

Living in Hawaii, I was able to adhere pretty rigorously to the 'eat local foods' parameter, and eat mostly plant-based and raw foods in doing so. The whole 'eating local' parameter is interesting and involved enough that I'll do a whole separate post about it at some point soon. Suffice it to say for now, 'eat local foods' in Alaska is challenging indeed if you want to eat exclusively plant foods, especially in the winter and especially if you have any kind of parametric inclinations about freshness of food (versus frozen or otherwise preserved). I am reminded of the problem among many raw-foodists, brought to light (to my knowledge) by Frederic Patenaude in his book 'The Raw Secrets:' to wit, that many raw-foodists had made the parameter 'eat only raw foods' a higher priority than 'eat only foods that are healthy and nourishing to my body,' and that this was causing undesirable consequences.

Parameters are tools, guidelines, shortcuts. I have found it revealing and also fun to make lists of my parameters in all kinds of contexts, and am working towards having flexible hierarchies so that, for example, whilst I still place a high ranking on 'frugality,' I am able to treat myself on occasion, to purchase life-enhancing products and to open myself up ever more to the flow of abundance whilst maintaining a consciousness of ensuring plenty for all.

If you make it a practice to explore what parameters are in play for you in a given context or decision-making process, you may find that you become much more conscious about your own inner workings, and also much more empowered to choose to prioritize what you _really_ think is most important in the situation, as opposed to just making your default prioritization automatically.

Sticking with a default prioritization automatically, prioritizing 'extreme' parameters with no exceptions and not examining other possibilities are all very safe strategies. I know that I have tended to gravitate to these practices, despite a life supposedly dedicated to increasing awareness and consciousness, because I have been so afraid for so much of my life! If my parameters become fixed in rank, become absolute rules, I can feel so safe because I know how to react when my button is pushed one way or another. I don't have to be afraid. But I don't want to be that safe anymore! I don't want to be on autopilot, waiting for something else to push my buttons! I don't want to react, I want to act! And so I am working toward having a hierarchy of flexible parameters that can be reranked based on specific circumstances, that allow compromise and practicality. It is a practice that is building consciousness about my moment-to-moment decisions and that is challenging my fearful parts. Deeply-ingrained habits are being brought up for scrutiny - often after the old pattern has been slipped into again and again. Do you agree that this is an exciting process?

*Anyone who has studied some Linguistic Theory might recognize the concepts of 'Optimality Theory,' where competing constraints are ranked in a hierarchy and selected in order to generate phonological and syntactic rules and their exceptions. For this examination of lifestyle choices, I have always conceptualized in terms of parameters (a key term, coincidentally, in an earlier and perhaps competing linguistic theory)rather than constraints, perhaps because this feels like a more positive description. One of the criticisms of Optimality Theory as a model for Linguistics is that it proliferates thousands of constraints, some of which seem very ad hoc: in other words, it is not reductive or elegant. For what I am talking about here, I think that that is a positive thing: I am not trying to create a reductive, rigorous explanatory system but merely to help myself (and hopefully others) become more conscious about how choices are made.