Daniel Farrell

Alicia is away this weekend as she mentioned in her blog. I stayed because baby showers aren’t my thing and I had a work project that needed a sizable amount of afterhours attention. So today I spent over 11 hours alone at Crown Title working on their computers. I switched them from a ~220Gig drive system on their file server to a ~600Gig drive system. I also switched out a pair of Dell(Adaptec really) Serial ATA RAID controllers that are horribly slow with RAID 5 for a pair of Promise controllers that give much better performance. It was a pretty big project… and I was able to knock it all out today. Good stuff.

After that I went over to Rebecca and Suzanne’s place where a bunch of people were playing games and hanging out. Fun stuff.

Tomorrow morning I plan on getting part 1 of the compassionate living series done… better 1 week late than 2.

Here in America, consumerism dominates our lives. If we are not out buying something or working to be able to buy things then we are being bombarded with messages telling us we should be. This is the world we live in. This is our reality. This reality hides from us much of the ugliness of the world… or when it shows it to us it does it in a way that makes it seem disconnected from the rest of our lives. But all of life is integrated. Our habits effect people all over the world.

I’m sure just about everyone reading this blog wants to make the world a better place. Everyone wants to end suffering. Everyone wants to love people better. We want to live a compassionate lifestyle in this global village.

This is the intro and start of a series of posts about little things we can do to live a more compassionate life. I would like to state first and foremost that I am far from living all(most really) of these ideas. This is about me brainstorming things we(our family and our community) can do rather than me telling you what you should do.

I would like to tie that in with an idea from complexity science, chaos theory. Simply stated, in a complex system a small change over time can make a huge difference. I’m not advocating we try to throw away our current culture and everything involved in it, I’m advocating we start making small changes that will, over time, make huge differences in the world.

I’m going to focus mostly on how we deal with our stuff… what we buy, eat, throw away, etc. I’ll try to post one part a week them sometime… Stay tuned.

Updates: These aren’t gonna happen. For a good site that deals with a lot of this stuff visit Tame the Monster.

I just found this Henry Nouwen quote in a article by Len Hjalmarson:

“To die to our neighbours is to stop judging them, to stop evaluating them, and thus become compassionate. Compassion can never co-exist with judgment because judgment creates the distance, the distinction, which prevents us from really being with the other.”

-Henry Nouwen, The Way of the Heart

As my lovely wife has already mentioned our Monday night group did a 2 day fast from criticism. We were inspired by the first fasting reading in the Renovare Spiritual Classics that we are going through.

My experience with it was pretty revealing. The first day was pretty slow at work and not stressful… and I realized how critical I am of myself. I would do something in the ideal way and find myself saying “I’m such an idiot” or “stupid” or something like that. At the end of day one I thought my lesson would be on how I view myself. But then day two came. Day two was a full and stressful day at work. And guess what? Yep, I found myself being horribly critical of everyone around me. I reflected on it quite a bit that whole day and took a nice nighttime walk and discussed it with God. I realized just how critical of a person I am, and how it is a defense mechanism of sorts. It keeps me from having to be vulnerable. I thought about the people I know who are not critical of others and how they really are great at befriending all kinds of people. I want to be one of those people…

Day two was a lot harder than day one and Alicia joked that she will only do it again for one day. Instead of stopping at one day I think I need to press on for more than two days. I desire to deal with the critical spirit that I have and the root issues behind it, not just realize I have it.