As I remember from books I’ve read, the Algonquin language does not contain a word for time. People invent words for things that have meaning for them and apparently time meant little in the Algonquin culture. For our culture, time is of the greatest importance. Whether that’s good or bad I’m not sure. In some ways we are controlled by it. We go to bed, get up and eat by it. We measure our daily activities by it. We use it to decide our ability to perform tasks, accomplish our work, enjoy our day.

Just what is time? It’s not a constant; it varies. That’s been established by science. Some say it doesn’t exist at all, that there is only the “eternal now.”  There may be deep meaning in that but don’t try telling that to your boss when you’re late for work. Others say time is money. They use the measure of time to measure the size of their wealth—or loss of it. When people find themselves faced with more than they can accomplish, they blame the lack of time. They say there’s not enough time in the day.

But just what is it? Actually, it’s an invention of ours, created by us to bring some order to our lives and to coordinate our activities with others. It is a convenient way to measure progress and to plan the future. If we use it wisely it can serve us well. The danger in time is when we allow it to have power over us and control us. That’s up to us, for whatever meaning or control or power it has, we give to it. There is neither too much time nor too little time; it is neither a master nor a slave and it is not money. Time itself is meaningless and is worth nothing. It is only how you use it and for what you use it that gives it any value. That, in turn depends on another measure, one that you yourself construct. It depends on what you consider to be of value.

I’ve been thinking about boxes lately, as in the kind of boxes that one is supposed to or not supposed to think outside of. They’ve shown up in my writing and as an almost daily reference in my life from a variety of sources. Another theme that has been prominent in my life is peace. That’s one I have affinity for and encourage.

Just recently, these two subjects came together for me in an unexpected way. I’ve been reading a book called The Human Potential for Peace by Douglas P. Fry, an anthropologist. In this book, Fry traces the tendencies for non violence and war in a number of societies and over millennia of the human presence on earth. In one of the final sections o the book he unites the concept of peace with my understanding of a box.

Fry states that a common contention is that war is an integral part of humans. It is a given fact and is therefore inevitable, or so goes the common belief goes. Not so, says Fry. Throughout the book he maintains that that popular belief is in error and not supported by scientific evidence. In the section to which I make reference, he states “. . . new modes of thinking are relevant to replacing war with other approaches to seeking security.”

In other words we are, according to Fry, thinking inside the box, one which we have constructed for ourselves. Fry quotes Einstein as saying in reference to the nuclear age “everything has changed, save our modes of thinking.”

What society regards as unchangeable—our propensity to wage war—has no basis in fact. This is what Fry argues throughout his book. It is only what we have become accustomed to, what we have made true simply because we, as a society or a people or as a planet, believe it to be true.

Apparently, we construct all sorts of boxes, from our own personal enclosures to large, national and international constructs. But no matter how large the structures may be, they all depend on the beliefs of those within the box for their longevity. In the end, our own personal boxes are what decide what stands and what fails. If enough individuals learn to think outside their own little individual boxes, the larger boxes of society, nations or the international community cannot hope to contain them.

At a discussion group last night i was reminded again of the quote by Mother Teresa concerning anti-war demonstrations. The exact quote is, “I was once asked why I don't participate in anti-war demonstrations. I said that I will never do that, but as soon as you have a pro-peace rally, I'll be there.”

This quote keeps coming up, prodding me, demanding my attention as if there is something about it I’ve been missing. I understood the concept of an anti-war demonstration putting the emphasis on war, the very thing the demonstration is organized to protest. What other significance is there? I took another look at the quote and saw it in a different light. “Anti-war”, while trying to be positive, places the emphasis on something that is negative. Organizing a pro-peace rally would be something positive to be sure, but would that be the only alternative? The essence of Mother Teresa’s thinking, it seems to me, is not in anti-war vs. pro-peace, but in positive vs. negative. To counteract a negative thing, it does mo good to place great emphasis on something that is equally negative. What is needed is emphasis on something positive.

That would be a natural thing for Mother Teresa to propose, for was that not the message of her whole life? To combat the ills and injustices of the world she did what she could to heal some of those ills and injustices. So, in approaching great injustices such as war or other work of negativity, perhaps the best course would not be to simply oppose it, but rather to engage in some positive activity that would improve some other sector of life. That makes sense. If all the energy that goes into protest against negativity, were turned into positive improvement of some sector of existence, who knows what volume of good works might be accomplished. Eventually, such a practice of positive activity might become the more common endeavor.

Spring ambushed me this year. It seems to have come suddenly. I thought that was my own mistaken impression until I heard others mention it. The trees have become green overnight; one day the grass lay dormant and the next it was 6 inches high. An exaggeration? Yes, but it did seem that way. As a result of those observations, I got two items out of the shed—my bicycle and my lawnmower—and dusted them off. I used the bicycle for the first time since last November to ride to the mailbox to get the mail. I haven’t used the lawnmower at all yet. Using it is a little less palatable than using the bicycle.

I feel I’d better put the lawnmower into use soon, though I’m not one who is in favor of having a manicured lawn. As long as it’s short enough to keep a groundhog from getting lost in it, it’s short enough for me. But the longer I put off that first cutting the harder it is to cut. Several years ago the spring was very wet. My lawn is only a little bit above a swamp anyway and that year I had an inch or so of water lying in one section of it for weeks. There was no way I could get it mowed. When it finally dried out enough to accommodate the mower it was so high I had to mow it several times, lowering the mower blade for each succeeding cut. This year it wasn’t water in the lawn that was the culprit. It was surprise.

Yesterday, before dark, I got the chance to go over the mower. I cleaned it up, and gassed and oiled it, with the best of intentions of giving the lawn its first cutting of the year today. That just didn’t work out so that first cutting will have to wait until tomorrow. I don’t imagine that will cause too much of a fuss. Nobody has yet commented on the length of the grass and I haven’t seen any groundhogs lurking around. I understand the weather will cooperate. Sunny, dry and not too hot. Perfect grass cutting weather. Everything in its proper time. As long as the grass doesn’t grow another six inches overnight.

We often hear mention of thinking “outside the box.” That’s usually thought of as being a good thing and I think it is. It’s by original thought that goes beyond our normal concepts that progress occurs. But I wonder if our “boxes” don’t extend deeper into our lives than we realize. Perhaps each of us structure our own boxes without even realizing it. Such boxes would be much harder to escape.

Where do such boxes come from? In these days of mass information they come from everywhere. There are many sources claiming to have the answer to any problem imaginable from diet to exercise to belief in God to success in life. Our acquaintances are willing to pass such solutions on in case we haven’t seen them on the internet. Add to this the power of the advertising industry, a little bit of prejudice (we all have some), a smidgen of ego (that too) and a good gollop of fear and . . . voila! A box—one we don’t realize we’re in or how we got there or how to get out of it.

All this is just my own ramblings and probably the product of the box I’m in and don’t know it, but it sounds to me as if there is more that a small amount of truth to it. You’ll have to make up your own mind about that. I believe, though, that such boxes are at the bottom of many of the troubles in this world. The problem is not the boxes themselves but the fact that we are so comfortable in them that we believe everyone should build a box just like it in which to be comfortable. And each of us is more than willing to furnish the plans and specifications for the project.

But what’s the solution? First of all getting out of the box; that’s the hard part. Then comes another hard task—not building another box to climb into. I suppose the way to stay out of boxes is to keep a totally open mind about everything—not believe everything but recognize that there may be value in everything and be willing to give everything a fair hearing. Now that’s really the hard part. At the bottom of each box we might find that there is just a little bit of truth in everything. If we could take each such little bit of truth and put them all together we could have something of great value. We just have to climb out of our own boxes to be able to see it.

In the movie What the Bleep Do We Know, there is a sequence in which the natives of a Caribbean island are not able to see the ships of Columbus because they had never before experienced anything of the kind. I thought that a little far fetched. Didn’t the well being of those natives depend on their being aware of things in their environment? Surely they would notice strange ships near their shore.

The other day I was reading an incident in a book that gave me new insight on the matter. The book, The Forest People, was written by an anthropologist, Colin M. Turnbull, who had spent an extended period of time with the Pygmies of the Congo. The Pygmies inhabit a dense jungle area in which they are totally at home and in which they are competent and happy. In the book, Turnbull related an incident that occurred when he took a Pygmy who had become a friend of his out of his jungle home to another area of Africa containing broad plains, snow capped mountains and a large lake. Turnbull and the Pygmy, Kenge, stood on a high rise looking over a vista of grassland and lake. Turnbull pointed out a large fishing boat with a number of people in it floating on the distant lake. At first Kenge refused to believe it was anything of the kind. To him the craft appeared to be just a small piece of floating wood. When Kenge saw a herd of 150 buffalo some miles away on the plain, he took them to be insects. He could not recognize them as buffalo though he had seen buffalo before.

The writing by Turnbull made me revise my opinion of the ship sighting incident in What the Bleep Do We Know and about some other things. People can become so controlled by their environment that they cannot even recognize the existence of things that are foreign to it. Taken out of context, they may as well be invisible. This is true of physical objects. Could that also be true (perhaps more so) of things dealing with our mental and emotional functions, such as ideas and concepts? What about the concept of peace? I have long thought of peace as requiring a new mindset to bring it into existence, but I have been thinking of that as a matter of the rearranging of existing thought patterns. Perhaps it is much more than this. Perhaps we are so far from the concept of peace that we do not even recognize its existence when it presents itself. We cannot take meaningful steps toward achieving peace if we do not even recognize it when we see it.

This, perhaps, is the real problem behind the illusive nature of peace and this is the problem that must be solved before peace can be brought into being.

This piece is related to the one I posted a few days ago. I’ve been thinking more about the way we regard things and how they are presented to us.

I remember an instance that, in an odd way, illustrates the point. A number of years ago I was visiting in the state of Virginia and the county I was in was “dry” but had a referendum on its ballot as to whether it should remain dry or legalize the sale of alcoholic beverages. I was told that there were two forces in the county that were very much involved in the issue on the side of wanting to keep the county dry. One was the county’s churches; the other was its bootleggers. Each faction had its own agenda but the purpose of each was satisfied by the same result.

People with different points of view can have a common purpose—or they can be persuaded that that is the case. The tool that’s used to persuade them these days is known as “spin” and its effective use is in great demand. It is used by the government, industry, business, the military and other groups. Probably it is most used in politics. Usually it is employed to focus on something that people fear, or to cause them to fear something. That’s an effective way to do things because fear is a very powerful emotion. It can quickly focus a person’s attention on a problem and get quick results. But those results are most likely to be limited, partisan and selfish.

That’s not so good if you’re trying to get positive progress in a society. Fear is negative and when it is used extensively as it is in our society it causes division, suspicion and other negative emotions that are harmful to the society. That is where Mother Teresa’s approach of always putting the emphasis on the positive makes sense. If our attention were always focused on the positive, we would be much more likely to make progress that is positive and for the good of all.