138-12-11-2009

Human Kindness and the Hamster Wheel
Finding the Sweet Spot
By W. Owen Thornton

A recent car advertisement depicts a man racing on a giant hamster wheel.  He runs on the wheel at home, at work and on the trips to and from work.  I thought it was both tragic and funny.  I thought it was tragic because being on a hamster wheel would seem to reflect something counter to human kindness: where I’m thinking to experience human kindness we would like to be free of that hamster wheel.  Conversely if we’re in a rut we’re not dynamically charged about our lives.  And I thought it was funny because someone so accurately depicted much of what life is like in an visual manner that was not cruel or mean-spirited.  The cleverness of the ad is that the man only feels like he is out of the hamster wheel “rat”-race when he enters his new car.  There, in his new car the man experiences the way life “should” be if we were living in a world full of human kindness.

The more I thought about what I was watching I began to wonder if the hamster wheel depiction was a good and real depiction of life that runs true with human kindness.  Humans do well with repetition and routine, don’t we?  It is understood that our work-week wake-up time should be kept throughout the weekend so that our sleep cycle remains constant and we remain healthy as a result.  And without routine, sometimes we’d be lost.  Think of the ISO-2000-and-whatever strategic plans that were created by the auto-industry and which raced through secondary and tertiary businesses as well as it being similarly incorporated in the service sector.  Instead of acting upon instinct when it came to rework and mistakes, it was deemed advisable for businesses to create an action plan or a “hamster wheel routine” to ensure the same mistake wasn’t made twice.

Still there seems something wrong with a hamster wheel depiction of life, regardless of where that depiction occurs in our life: at home, to and from work or at work.  When a hamster wheel is a true negative that suggests we’re running on the spot, or maybe, a better example is pacing back and forth.  Pacing back and forth when equated to that hamster wheel creates a rut, in which we can become permanently stuck: we can entrench ourselves in places that are not meant for us.  When this happens that hamster wheel analogy is a wake-up call that we are supposed to find some way of getting out of that rut.  It is best to see it before it gets too deep, because the deeper they become, the harder they are to climb out of.

I’ve mentioned this idea before, but it is really nearly impossible to grasp.  We need to both be on autopilot and fully engaged … at least semi regularly.  What I mean is, it is okay to be on the wheel, as long as we step off periodically and check to ensure we’re on the right wheel.  For example, say marriage has fallen into a routine.  This can be a good thing when things are going well.  Here we need to rinse lather and repeat.  But from time to time, it is still great to have heart-to-hearts with our spouses to ensure we’re both on the right wheel at the same time, and that both wheels are pointed in roughly the same direction: IE saving money for a big vacation or in disciplining the kids, etc.

I think the real problem with hamster wheels today, and what makes them particularly dangerous to our overall human kindness is that we don’t have enough time to stop them and to get off and assess where we are.  We lean on them for too long.  We don’t see them in our mind’s eye often enough and suddenly we’re caught in places where we’ve been spinning in circles for far too long.  Let me tell you a story about that at first doesn’t seem connected to hamster wheels.  I’m 48 and I was born a half-generation out of sequence: my parents were a half generation older than most folk are when people have children.  The thing is I remember things that are far older than I ought to because of the age of my parents and how they were raised.  Because they were older, I only ever had one grandparent.  I remember my grandmother well.  The Sabbath was sacred to her.  She wouldn’t even play rummy (a card game) with me on Sundays because that just wasn’t appropriate.  SHE knew what it was like to step off her hamster wheels.  In fact, she had created for herself a hamster wheel that compelled her to examine her other hamster wheels: she did nothing on Sundays.  Now, zoom forwards 40 years.  My wife recently read a book from a world-class theologian who suggests the loss of the Sabbath day of rest is a big detriment to our society.  We’re on the go so much of the time, now, that we don’t even realize we’re on the hamster wheel, and even if we do, we believe we don’t have time to step off of it to make any kind of value-based assessment of our lives and to see if we’re on the right hamster wheel or wheels at all. 

What I’m saying is that my Grandmother knew how to turn life off.  I suppose you could say that once a week she stepped onto a pensive hamster wheel … a hamster wheel that forced her to contemplate about all the other wheels she might have been on at the time.  She could step back from her life and give it a bird’s-eye view.  We don’t have that in our lives any more do we?  We just jump from wheel to wheel without thinking.  It is this pattern where the danger of hamster wheels lie!

The busy-ness of our lives and the speed with which we lead them is seductive like the dark side of the Force, to use a Star Wars metaphor.  We can be on those sick and twisted hamster wheels, the ones that make us perennially unhappy for years before we realize what is happening to us.  And when we’re on these wheels, I think human kindness is one of the first things that go straight out the window.  And we can justify that too, can’t we.  “I don’t have time to do that special thing for someone else.  I want to, but I don’t have the time.”  A big thing to remember is if you have thought that a friend is on an unfortunate hamster wheel, then someone else has probably had that thought about you.  It won’t necessarily be a one-to-one correlation, but it will be a thought in the form of a large circle.  You believe A is on a wrong wheel while A believes B is on a wrong wheel, while B believes C is on a wrong wheel until Z is looking at you and thinking, She just needs a little shot of encouragement to make her life better.  I wish I had the time to make that call and tell her …

To be fair I don’t know what the perfect hamster wheel kind of life looks like.  Life is full of good routines.  But there are also bad ones.  There are sticks out there used to place in the spokes of those wheels that jam up our ill-advised hamster wheels.  The problem with the stick is that we often fall flat when they are used.  But, even so, when a stick is used we then have a chance to assess our lives from a bird’s-eye view.  I’m not talking about the random, life-re-evaluation type of sticks like the following.  Life sometimes places those sticks in our wheels whether we want them to or not.  A distant acquaintance of ours lost his wife.  He finds himself a widow with two young children to raise without a mother.  That’s a big stick in the routine of all of that family’s hamster wheels.  I would imagine, in his position, there is not a hamster wheel in his life that he is not considering right now.  What should he continue to do?  What wheels can he no longer get on (without his spouse to help him)?  What new wheels should he start up? 

The kind of stick in the wheel I’m thinking about is the self-imposed type: where we take time, slow down and force ourselves to get off a hamster wheel of our lives and really take a proper assessment as to whether or not we want to get back on, or whether we want to be on a totally different wheel altogether.  An example of this is like someone who suddenly realizes they are overweight and they want to get off the wheel of overeating.  Another one is doing the kind of work the way in which we continue to do it.  Has life lost its zest?  Hamster wheels are designed to give us zest, but with no self assessment they can also be a trap.  Like any good thing, too much of it can lead to a life without the degree of human kindness we desire.

So we need to use our hamster wheels and carry a big stick … one that compels us … for the better … to get off our wheels and see if we’re really running the right race for us. 

My prayer for you and your 2010 is this.  May all your hamster wheels be ones made by you.  May they all be happy hamster wheels.  May you all be given a large, meaningful stick to stop your hamster wheels so you can stop your own hamster wheel (before the random wheel-stopping-stick of life does it for you) and with complete awareness you assess if you are in the right spot(s) for you.  You will know you are in the sweet spot if you are in hamster wheels that have no guilt in their results … where there are no regrets.  May you be on your wheel, or off it, assessing your predicament in the exact right proportions for you during this upcoming year.  When you are in balance along these lines, you are in the sweet spot of life.  And when you are in the sweet spot of life, look for ways that you can help others: places where you can practice human kindness.  I’m thinking, to continue my analogy, that sticking sticks in hamster wheels only works when we do this for ourselves.  So, to help others, you can give them sticks in order to help themselves … nudges of human kindness that lead your friends to help themselves to stop and assess their own hamster wheels.  In fact, your willingness to practice human kindness towards others is an indicator of whether or not you are in the right series of hamster wheels for you because you have the right way of thinking in order to have time to reach out to our fellow travelers.

I realize that sometimes the sweet spot cannot always be maintained.  Sometimes something or someone else comes along and stops us cold and we don’t even see them coming.  But even in times like this if we are running our lives well, enforced stoppages of the wheel cannot stop us for long.  We fall off, assess we were in the right place … and we get right back on.  A hamster-wheel life can be good and human kindness can flow from us like water from a fountain.

God Bless and Happy New Year.

Owen