Yearly Reflection

I’ve had a number of posts lingering in my mind that haven’t made it to WordPress yet. There are reasons for that, the first being that I found it more difficult than I thought to write a eulogy of my coworker who passed away just before Thanksgiving. I will eventually write that post, but I often don’t realize the emotions I have operating under the surface because I’m disconnected from them. They show up in unexpected ways such as resistance to action and daydreaming. Okay, so those aren’t exactly unexpected. Grieving still happens for logical people; it is uncomfortable when they wake up and realize they can’t make a logical argument to get out of the process. This is quite startling and can be entirely avoided for the less aware logicians in the population, who will instead use alcohol to maintain a pretense. Or they will conversely become grumpy, taciturn, and withdrawn.

The other posts that are in my mental queue are political or apologetic in nature. Political posts are an easy out, and so I haven’t allowed myself to write them. What I ought to be doing are apologetics posts, but I haven’t found a way to bridge the gap between where I was when I was younger — cold and argumentative — to where I prefer to be, which is more akin to my patron saint, Francis DeSales, who was gentle and kind, and through that method, brought many Reformed back to the Catholic church. That is fine for a man, but it is not beneficial for a woman to show that kind of weakness. When women show kindness or any vestige of weakness, their arguments are then written off as emotional. As a young woman, I used to make people, especially men, very angry, but I was never accused of having emotional arguments. I’ve only been accused of that after the age of forty, when I decided that emotions were important to humanity, even more important than logic when it comes to human interaction and connection. However, my ability to grasp logic is still unfortunately a point of pride for me that needs to be eradicated if I’m to move forward. I can’t go backwards; I understand that deeply. I’m therefore stuck in a state of apathy. That sounds emotional, doesn’t it? That’s because no one can get around emotion. At best, most people won’t acknowledge they are making decisions and arguments based off emotions and will rationalize — that is, use reason — after the fact. Rationalization is for a materialistic population that prides itself off eschewing emotion. This obviously will create much psychological conflict, which one sees in the world around. Ultimately, our culture has the special distinction of worshipping logic while simultaneously leaking emotion out the edges and never learning critical thinking or logic in school. We worship something *most of us* don’t understand. Not that we really understand God, either. So maybe the worship of logic is simply another type of illogic based off faith. Woe to those who truly grasp logic, for theirs will be the way without faith.

That was a little more than I meant to say. In other words, I’m finishing off the year very much where I started. I’ve long felt (emotion, ha ha) that God is prodding me to do more in apologetics, and here I sit, waiting for a bolt of lightning or something. I’ve been doing what I always do: writing fiction, playing the accordion, studying Spanish, and reading. I’ve read so many books this last year, mostly mysteries, but a handful of biographies and nonfiction. I will end the year with my two current reads, a historical fiction about King David (not my typical choice; a friend and coworker lent it to me) and a reread of Augustine’s Confessions. Speaking of an inability to understand logic, I find modern approaches to St. Augustine bizarre. Augustine tended to start with a premise, work it through a logical framework, and then determine whether the initial premise stood up. Why is it that moderns look at his initial premises and hastily decide that they were also his conclusions? That is so frustrating. Our educated modern population doesn’t hold a candle to men like St. Augustine. That was an emotional statement, for the record, though no doubt objectively true.

You know what gets me really emotional? Music. Spotify and YouTube have informed me (creepily) that my most listened to artist last year was El Coyote, and my most listened to song was Te Vas Amor. It’s true that I can listen to that song on repeat. It’s been one of my favorite songs for over twenty years*, I’m going to say. I’m sure I’ve posted it before, so I’ll spare you this time.

*it came out in 2002, so right around 20 yrs