RESOLUTION comes after ORDER

RESOLUTION is the virtue for this week. Interestingly, my friend Ben had the foresight to situate his virtues in an ORDER that would work through an earthquake. Many people will now have to resolve the primary order of their lives, to stay in Christchurch, or to leave.


My thoughts are all over the place on this one, as will be those for many others. I have entertained all kinds of scenarios half-baked, protruding into my consciousness from some deep seated unconscious fear for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, showing my roots and re-establishing the fact that I have gone from immigrant to refugee in the blink of a one minute event that will forever alter how I view things from the arrangement of my books to the space which I may or may not occupy.

Right now I am in Clyde, a safe enough distance to think outside the shake, rattle and roll that my fellow Cantabrians are still forced to live through.

And, while I am here, I have been deploying what I learned many years ago as the Benjamin Franklin process for making a decision, to create a RESOLUTION to which I might adhere (My good friend CW taught me this one). Take a blank piece of paper and put Christchurch at the top and two columns, one for why, one for why not. Write down all the reasons for one, as opposed to the other and see how the numbers stack up. Try as I might to make Christchurch a negative place, it still stacks up for me at this moment, even after all the devastation. The Garden City still blooms deep for me inside my conscious and unconscious soil.

The important thing is to write it down. Trying to keep track of all the things inside one’s head is too difficult and seeing the list in black and white will bring things up from the unconscious and puts them squarely in the frontal lobe. The thing is, is to be honest with one’s self...write down what you really feel to be an asset and a detriment for each space you plan to occupy, do the numbers as many times as you need and then intend to resolve yourself to one space over another with the clear understanding of what will be positive and negative issues, of which there are always both, to live and work through.

In the past few days I have resolved to go back to Christchurch for now, though a few days ago I was searching property advertisements in other parts of the world, I did the Benjamin Franklin process on paper and found, my heart, my head and my life still clings to Christchurch in some pretty stable ways that no earthquake can shake out of me.

I think you will all understand if I don’t bother trying to resolve any other issues at just this moment in time. For now, it is enough for Cantabrians simply to decide, do I stay or do I go....