Sadan Jose: where is your homework?

As today is March 31st, 2011, and, as yesterday was the birthday of my sister and grandfather, I would like to publish a blog post. I´d like to write a little about reflection.

Reflection is difficult, I suppose, no matter what the reward or findings. I usually heed things as they tend to change from week-to-week, but I myself am not critical enough. I don´t profess to understand why some assign such an atypical value on reflection per se. Frankly, I am not sure I have ever been outright eager to reflect. Albeit, I maintain to this day a proclivity to wonder.

  

In general I recognize that I spend a lot of my time feeling as though I am waiting. Usually, we don`t think about critical reflection while we wait or when we´re in a state of waiting. I think especially of instances such as those hard moments we pass in a hospital awaiting the outcome, or, when at the post-office, as letters and packages metamorphose into shackles, encumbering our minds, and we can all but brook the anxiety that accompanies standing-in-lines.

To me this lack of critical reflection appears to be the ruin of most appetitive people as well, whether they think they sift reflectively or not. (Socrates, the Republic) Barely able to preclude their frustrations as they transmute into straw men, their explosive and mercurial interactions manifest themselves at the dawning of certain stresses. I am left to wonder in earnest how one can reflect amidst constant self-subjection to the stumbling over of self-made blockages, attempting nonetheless to hurdle them one at a time. What are we doing to ourselves here? Who is made absurd then: the hurdler who makes for him or herself an infinite array of hurdles, or the person who wades through the murk of critical reflection, never knowing the immediate outcome? I know which  horse I`ve got in that race.

I don´t espouse that reflection should be a sort of ad hoc response to glorify our positions or beliefs. And perhaps it may be agreeable to all that critical reflection, in certain instances, pre-exists waiting as something nearly pre-reflective. In a sense real sense, reflection always awaits us. But if we make reflection our doormat instead of a doorway, I am left to wonder whom then reflection benefits, if it is to serve a predetermined purpose. How then might one propose that we attempt grow through it?

I also feel confident in saying that I notice change when I reflect, even when I´m battling the ‘wait’. I just do not take sufficient note of it. But, sometimes life forces our awareness of such negligence, such shirking. Whether “too late”, or, “just soon enough”, life has its way of reminding us to take note, to throw off insufficiency, and to put the pieces together. Sometimes it happens extraordinarily so. And I don`t think there`s anything absurd when reality pieces itself together for us. Kierkegaard said something about answers to unasked questions being unordinary blessings in and of themselves.

Example: last night I walked down the street after we convened for supper. I shopped around for coffee and found two containers, each containing 50g each of instant-coffee. The funny thing about instant-coffee is that, at home, I do not think I know or know about any one person in my life who drinks it. 

As the coffee lay placed on the store shelf in front of my eyes I thought: given our subscription to immediacy and efficiency, thousands of Unitedstatesians must drink instant-coffee. They just must. 

I view this as a sort of “if, then” coincidence. If I`m buying coffee I`m bound to think about it. This doesn`t indicate that I know what I`m bound to think. Does this logic all follow? I am not absolutely sure. It may all just be deductive nonsense.

My point is that this simple and unassuming inquiry leads me to behold an analogy that instant-coffee does not automatically portend. I assume this analogy -- if Socrates´ bearing on dialectic investigation proves valuable here -- ought to point me towards a truth I cannot yet uncover: instant-coffee is a lot like adapting or learning to operate in a culture not ones own. 

Coffee-producing countries export grounds and beans as they are. We say they are exported from because of the fact that all of these we import. Countries quickly become coffee plantations in the consumer`s mind. Because I consume something that foreign places export to me from their country, I am able to know with a great deal of certainty that I do not drink coffee grown in my own country. No coffee beans appear on the shelves of supermarkets in which I shop, bagged with stickers that seal-in the freshness, signaling that “these beans” were proudly grown in the U.S.A. 

One further notes here the rhetoric of “those countries"  / “my country”. It happens upon us as a mere linguistic dichotomy present-inherent in this somewhat economic example. This might also extend to the instant-coffee / ground coffee disparity as well. Do we drink instant coffee? If we do consume instant-coffee then I only reason all of the above by asking when, how, and why? Again, I don`t readily know anyone who does.

Whichever the case, no one can honestly disagree that something like coffee is a double-edged sword, impoverishing the same time it enriches. The proof is simple enough. Coffee-producing countries are economically tumultuous, not prosperous in any sort of industrialized sense, and they sell to foreign markets which dictate the terms of supply and demand. Along this line of thinking, they begin to take the shape of coffee colonies in fact.

It is an interesting thought that the I.Q. enhancement which Wallstreet undergoes due to the caffeine found in coffee should have an affect on money management, investment banking, and decisions that gear worldly power in general. Think about it: caffeinated people working under the influence of a performance-enhancing substance, consumed on a regular basis, constantly produced the world-over to supply a specific and yet diversified demand.
 

This is simplistic, but not farfetched. Although my aforementioned thoughts are light-hearted and harmless, “conspiracy” is a word I have also considered throughout my fledgling deductions. After all, it is as Noam Chomsky says about investigative, institutional analysis, “…in my view—‘conspiracy theory’ has become the equivalent of a four-letter word: it`s something people say when they don`t want you to think about what`s really going on.” (Understanding Power) Still I ask: where would our money — Wallstreet`s money — be without coffee from coffee-producing countries? 

Having said all of this, I now return back to the ‘truth’ which I mentioned I could not yet uncover. This truth arrived at my feet via an internal dialectic investigation as to whether or not people of my native soil drink instant or brew. The analogy pointed me towards a truth: instant-coffee is a lot like adapting or learning to operate in a culture not ones own. 

At first, I was accustomed to drinking coffee procured from supposedly fresh grounds. This was during a time when I chose to spend a certain amount of money on it, and to take part in a culture that encompasses the drinking of coffee altogether. After I took-in so much coca mate I have since yielded to coffee`s addictive power once again, and now in its 'instant' form. Slowly but surely I have forgotten for the most part what the coffee I used to drink tastes like. Not even from memory can I make a sufficient contrast to weigh the difference now. But, at times I am able to obtain a cup of the stuff I used to drink -- made from real bean grounds -- and I all of a sudden remember it. 

Navegating, operating and living an experience that one wouldn´t immediately describe as original is, a lot like switching from brewed coffee to instant-coffee: it´s a process of forgetting and remembering where, both the realities are invariably different, at times they are similar, and, partaking in both can be consuming when we are truly present to what sits before us -- be it coffee or human beings who have wisdom to impart.

As I pulled the coffee down from the shelf and contemplated Gringos drinking this powder café, a drunk man walked in and started petitioning the clerk for cigarettes. He noticed me and in coming over to present himself, shook my hand and implored me that I go ahead of him in line. There hasn´t been any sort of line here in which people willingly establish themselves according to any order, or for the sake of order. This was a first for me as I am navegating this new place, and it was salient like difference between instant and brewed coffee.


After I presented myself he told me virtually the following: "Sometimes people see each other and they know there´s an order to things. I don´t know if you work with the parrish but I don´t respect you firstly because you are a priest or from Spain; I respect your position in line because you are a person, and because we´re both in this store together. We have to respect each other." 


I learned then not to try and mollify or pacify this person by finishing his sentences, as sometimes helps in communicated with people who are drunk and seek out interaction. And, albeit he was very drunk, when he started his exposition on respect, I couldn´t help but listen.