Let It Be

(First published in the Bali Advertiser, Feb. 24, 2010)

“Essence may be taken as the very being of anything, whereby it is what it is.”
              -- “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding” (1690), John Locke, in what may be the earliest use of a phrase that was to become much overused in the early 21st century

I have never been a glass half-full or glass half-empty sort of a guy. What’s always mattered more to me is whether the glass is supposed to be half-full or half-empty, which is a fine distinction of perspective over volume. I am quite certain I would be happier with a quarter-full glass than with a half-empty one, as long as someone had explained to me that the glass was intended to be only one-quarter full.

This may at first seem to be a sad way of looking at things, a subservient approach to life that is good for wage slaves and other beasts of burden willing to accept anything as long as someone has told them the “right” thing to do in a given situation. But with another subtle shift, such a view can reach the almost enlightened position that if things are not necessarily as they are intended to be, then things are intended as they are. It seems a better approach anyway than always arguing that a half-empty or half-full glass should be something more when there is no more water to be found.

Such is the flawed viewpoint that I would offer up as a solution to those that bluster and fulminate against this and that on this island paradise. Recently a reader sent an e-mail asking me to highlight the need for drivers in Bali to be more disciplined about using the left lanes on divided and four-lane roads when traveling at less than overtaking speeds. And it’s true, traffic would flow smoother and be more orderly if slower vehicles kept to the left, and if nothing else, the reader would be happy, if only for a little while.

Because not long after some miracle of traffic management competency, I’m certain he would become fixated on something else that wasn’t just quite right. I’m not suggesting he is an extraordinary whinger; I just think that, like me, he would soon find another aspect of life in Bali, or of life anywhere really, that he felt wasn’t as it was intended to be, and he would expend time and emotion thinking and worrying about something – that in all likelihood -- he would never be able to do anything about. My apologies to him, but I don’t think an article from me is going to have any impact on the chaotic state of Indonesia’s road traffic. I am a writer; not a wizard whose incantations on paper can magically order the universe just so.

At one time or another, I have been able to get myself worked up about the return of candy instead of coin when making purchases; street vendors who push unlit carts along the road at night and who can’t be seen until it is almost too late to miss them; neighbors in our apartment building in Jakarta who swept dirt from their units into the hallway as if sweeping debris from their kampung garden out into the gutter; people in Singapore who still don’t let those on an elevator or train exit first before rushing an opening door -- despite 20 years of courtesy campaigns by their government telling them not to do exactly that; all the perennial complaints of every Jakarta resident -- the clogged roads, the poisonous air, the corrupt cops and officials, the lack of walk-able sidewalks and wide-open green spaces; and on and on down the list of things that aren’t done according to a cultural imprint that tells me how things are supposed to be.

Sadly, none of my fulminations ever did a bit of good in rectifying any of these half-empty situations. In evolutionary terms they were wasted energy and therefore the way to extinction – a prospect I am not ready to entertain just yet. So, the only option is a complacent acceptance of the things I cannot change, through whatever trick of logic makes the unacceptable acceptable.

The flaw is that there are things that really do need to change – such as the use of plastic bags for every little purchase – and where the concerted effort of one individual or group may be enough to convince a society and culture to change the way that things have always been done. Yes, Virginia, there are windmills worth being nobly tilted at, even if the chances of victory are slim.

But to expect and hope for a magical descent of discipline and the logical application of driving rules on Bali (or Java) roads? That’s folly of the highest order.

Copyright © 2010 Lee Roy LeRoi