Hopefully Talk About A Better System For Everyone - Tumblr Posts
A Brief Note on Deserving -
Recently, brilliant @moonchild0297 put me in touch with a friend of hers. And so began a delightful correspondence (I like talking like I’m a BBC Radio Host from the days of old, take note).
It (the correspondence not the note) turned to the feeling of worthiness and deserving. In trying to write back with a fitting response and wanting to soothe this new friend about the whole ‘deserving’ debate that rages in all of our minds, I enlisted the help of an ingenious technique that my best friend uses in times of uncertainty and ambiguity with his feelings.
What he does is he turns to the dictionary. The precise definition, the origin of the word gives him cues to what he feels about it or how it is framed in his world. And it worked!
The definition of deserving hinges on ‘being worthy of…’ The Latin root of ‘deserve’ means ‘to serve well, or zealously’.
Put together, to my mind, the answer becomes quite clear - and the insidious logic reveals itself - to be deserving is to be thought of as worthy by the one you serve.
This may have been easily digestible in days of monarchy or in places ruled by a strict god… to me, however, it does not apply. I do not serve a person or a god. At most I would say I serve an idea… more precisely a set of ideas. Following this thread, I have to question - what person would the idea of… say… freedom or equality or natural living hold as worthy and unworthy? There is none that is worthy or unworthy. There are complex people who do complex things.
If you (or rather I since I mostly am talking to myself) think of the self as deserving or undeserving, ponder this - who is dictating worthiness? What idea or, pray tell, what person are you acting in service of? Jesus? Krishna? Moses? You don’t need to comb through the Bible or the Gita or the Old Testament to know what their stance on the issue was. Let me save you (again, I’m referring to myself here) some research - it was kindness. To look upon one’s self, and one’s neighbour (those were the really old timey days) with kindness.
The issue, to me, is that the ideas of capitalism and consumerism do dictate worthiness and often we find ourselves trapped in those constraints - mentally. Freedom within this idea slyly becomes Freedom to “choose” the winner’s product and more often than not Freedom to do what they tell you (this is not my line, it belongs to a most remarkable comic called Bill Hicks). It’s a dire situation. All the same I do believe a more sustainable, greener, more natural system is possible. If not a system for the world, at least a system of thought - within myself. Progress is slow but research and development is ongoing.