I'm cross posting from my own blog "Living on Purpose". It took three days to write this post, it'd be a shame to only alert one group of friends about it! If you comment, would I have your permission to cross-comment ; to post it on the other blog?

http://liveonpurpose.info/blog/?p=40

Getting a Fresh Start

When web site developers are building code for an online application, like a proprietary shopping cart, they need to know exactly what the application is supposed to do before they even start. They need to know who the audience is, what the end goal is, whether there will be volume discounts, whether the opt-in email list will be offered before or after the sale, and exactly how many steps the user should see during checkout.

As the developers near completion, and testing begins, managers will ask for new functionalities that nobody anticipated in the beginning. This is called “scope creep.” Now the developers have to go back to square one and try to hack in the new function without completely rewriting the entire application. It’s a patch, because deadline is coming.

Then, two months after launch of the application, users are demanding their own control panel so they can change details about themselves easily (just pretend this wasn’t written in the first place). Now the developers have to take code from another source and make it work with their own application. It increases the “bugginess” of the application because of some loopholes and perhaps not enough time built into the project for testing.

After a year or two of changes to the code, the developers feel it would just be better to start over, taking into account all these new features, and rebuild from the ground up. It would be a cleaner application all around. But budget constraints disallow this approach, and the application must make do as-is.

This is my allegory for how today’s society has been built. Systems and governments and political divisions have all been put into place piecemeal. Our society is built patchwork style, with lots of loopholes and bugs. People are falling through the cracks. People are losing their lives, their livelihoods. The bugs in this system run so far down and there has been so much scope creep in the infrastructure of our daily lives that it only makes sense to me to make a fresh start.

For instance, I know that to combat depression, a person’s diet needs to be clean, and free of highly processed junk foods and refined sugars. To be free of depression, a person needs to be able to make a living doing what he enjoys, whatever gives him a sense of purpose in his life. To be free of depression, a person needs to be able to communicate with his family members calmly without fear of an emotional blowout (often these blowouts are due to poor nourishment in the first place, which predisposes a person to fits of rage…)

But when I try to envision living like that in this society, I draw a blank. I go to work, I want to eat lunch, but there are no alternatives to fast food; nothing I can grab in a half an hour that fits into a “feel-good” diet…unless I really work hard at preparing lunches at home, which I don’t. I send my children to school, but they also do not have a healthy choice for lunch at school and they’re overwhelmed by soda machines and candy sold in the school store. Anytime I want my family to watch TV, I have to subject them to false advertising, violence, foul language, lack of morals…ok I’m sure you get it by now. Unless I extricate us from society, how can I make healthy lifestyle changes work, especially when the rest of my family is resisting any changes?

This is what an “intentional community” is all about. Wouldn’t it be nice to build your own society with a higher purpose in mind? Yes, there are monasteries, there are ashrams. These are communities centered around spiritual growth and connection to God. What if you wanted to include anybody who is hurting because of today’s society, regardless of religious views? Could it work? It certainly gets complicated. In mentally building my own “simcity” I realize I’ll need stores that only stock whole foods; nothing refined. I’ll need either our own tv channel or no tv at all. I’ll need schools that don’t treat children as cattle moving towards the guillotine, but as real individuals with infinite potential. I’ll need a medical care system that is radically different from what we have now, with no insiders’ links to big pharmaceuticals. Hmm, get rid of the bribery, the lies, the coverups…Wow, we really need to start over it seems!

But then remember that everything is already just as it’s supposed to be, because of God’s divine plan. Of course, we have free will to do what we want with our lives. It is by our own choice that we come to a healthy lifestyle; not because our parents forced us to move into this intentional community far removed from society’s current reality. And it is by our own choice that we come to know God, or reject God, or deny God, or whatever. Once a viewpoint is forced upon us we tend to resist it, don’t we?

Take M. Night Shamalayan’s movie, The Village. click for a full synopsis–a spoiler.
Although fiction, we can see from this story that a forced intentional community can feel like paradise for a while, but then something always happens to spoil it! In the movie, the village elders “ferociously” protect the secret that their little idyllic village holds. And then the illusion they worked so hard to protect is shattered. They wanted to shelter their children from violence, and it was violence that shattered their world yet again.

So, while we live in our patchwork web application of a life here in society, we can bring positive intention to our selves. Truly, the answer to straightening out the twisted web of society is to love one another, then although the web of society remains the same, our perception of it is changed. To crawl out from the darkness of depression while encompassed within it seems very hard, much like you just need to start over; yes, a fresh start! But the way to do it is start by loving yourself, accepting yourself as you are, and exercise your free will to choose a better life for yourself.

I started writing at Helium last year. I have not had very much time to devote to this little sidetrack, and I've only contributed 6 articles. But I've just noticed that one of my articles is now in the #1 position out of 11 articles. I wrote it in November 2007and have no clue how long it has been #1.

It's a technical article about valerian and its use as a sedative.

http://www.helium.com/items/718243-valerian-and-its-use-as-a-mild-sedative

Helium presents its own writers with a pair of articles and asks "which is better?" The ranking system allows good articles to rise to the top and the weaker ones to be ranked lower.


Elsewhere, I've established an "expert page" at SelfGrowth.com. I've linked to more technical articles there related to wellness and brain health.

http://www.selfgrowth.com/experts/jessica_alvarez.html

I know, I know, I'm patting myself on the back here, but I also realize it is time to celebrate success in my life. This is my way to be thankful for what I already have.

Well, really, nobody else cares when somebody else's kid is finally potty trained. But it is a huge deal to me, the mommy. I had a potty training dvd sent to me from the Pull-ups brand and it informed me that potty training takes from six to eight months.

That's a long time. The parents are so, so ready to not have to pack a diaper bag or worry if there will be an accident in public. And I was feeling like a broken record, for those of you who remember records, repeating to him, "I want you to poo poo in the potty. Big boys poo poo in the potty." It was like talking to a picture on my wall, he ignored me for so long.

But this week he "got it." So, it's a landmark moment when he finally willingly does his business on the throne. I do think it's been about eight months.

Oh, and remember that small power drill I bought myself? He taught himself how to use it correctly and now it's his favorite passtime. That's a good one, yep, he can now unscrew all the battery covers to his favorite toys. I've really got to hide that drill much higher, in the closet.

This town Alegria, in El Salvador, has words of peace printed throughout. The bottom of the electric poles are painted red with white letters painted vertically to form words of peace. On one pole, the word "Paz", Spanish for "peace". On another pole, the word "dignidad", Spanish for "dignity". There are other telephone poles that say 'esperanza" (hope), and amistad (friendship).  The town itself, Alegria, means Happiness.

My digital camera's batteries died before I could get a shot of the telephone poles, so this shot, from a cobblestone road at the top of a mountain, holds the memory for me. It's one of my favorite landscape shots from my trip earlier this spring.

Down at sea level, the heat combined with the humidity was intolerable. Up in Alegria, the air was crisp and comfortable. There was the most beautiful restaurant in the world also doubling as a mini zoo (vivero in Spanish) nestled in this town.

We sat in an open air patio with a gorgeous mountain-top view of the valley below. Tropical birds flew from one side of the valley to the other, and they were at our eye level.

In the vivero were many breeds of birds in cages - parrots, tucan, dove, turkey, finches, parakeets. There was a field full of caged exotic chickens with tail feathers so long they curved to the ground. There were banana trees and papaya trees. They had a caged racoon and two "zorras" that looked like foxy badgers.

There were little houses (cabanas) for rent at about thirty dollars per night.

In the restaurant a man and his son serenaded our table mariachi-style. They sang us two songs at first, and another during dessert that was so nostalgic and beautiful it nearly brought my husband's uncle to tears.

This was the restaurant that didn't want us to leave. We were all in the car, ready to go, but some men were working on the gate, welding the hinges on it, so we couldn't pass. We asked, "how long?" and the men said to wait a little bit, "un ratito".  We asked another man, who jokingly said, "20 minutes".

So we got out of the car to wait, admiring the view and talking about life, and it was ready in about fifteen minutes.

Out in the town, I needed to change my baby's diaper. We pulled over at an outdoor public park with park benches, where I began changing him. I noticed guards watching us. As I finished up, I realized these were armed guards, and my husband said they were there to secure the safety of everyone in the park. I quickly packed up the baby and we left, passing all the telephone poles painted with peaceful words.

If, in your wanderings on this earth, you ever find yourself contemplating on how to end your suffering by killing someone else, you know you're on the wrong track. Right and wrong are subjective, you say? This "Santa killer" in the news has me thinking.

My husband started talking to me about the man who open fired on his ex-wife's family at a Christmas party while dressed as Santa in front of our 11 year old. First I chastised him lightly for not waiting until we were alone for a ghastly topic like that, and I don't even promote the idea of Santa as the family's gift giver to our son. Then I tried to explain what happened to our son very matter-of-factly.

I explained that this man thought that all his suffering was caused by his ex-wife and their family because of the bitter divorce. He thought that if he could only get rid of the source of his suffering, he would feel better. But the mistake was to look outside himself for the cause of his suffering. And when you're so deep in the blame mentality like he was, it's too easy to overlook the fact that you'll end up suffering more when you go through with a murder plan.

You are responsible for your own suffering based on your reactions to the things around you. Don't let yourself get to the point where you think life will be easier if someone else were dead. That's when you have to look inside, at yourself, and see what you can change in you to make things work better for you.