WE DEVELOP FOR STABILITY

This morning I didn’t get breakfast. This wasn’t by my choosing, but the result of the baker not receiving any flour. The problem wasn’t just today, but for the whole week. The other days my morning bread was replaced with donuts so I didn’t go hungry. These weren’t any donuts, but possible the worst donuts I have ever bit down upon. They tasted like they were baked a month ago in a cheap bakery in small town USA. When they had become stale they were sent to Indonesia, where a local seller tried to sell them. Once they didn’t sell in Indonesia they were sent to Timor-Leste. During this whole long ordeal, I’m certain that resuscitation of the donut was attempted with a microwave several times. The donut arrived on my plate cold, hard and stale. If this wasn’t the life that the donuts had lived, I couldn’t venture to guess what harder life they could have had to make them so bad.

Back to the baker and having no flour. The subdistrict of Passabe has just one bread baker. Bread is popular for breakfast here. The flour comes from Indonesia; I’ve heard that it is smuggled across as the tariffs are so high. The stability of the community’s breakfasts has been interrupted.

The trauma of not receiving my daily bread has sent me pondering deeply on the meaning of life and what we really strive for. We also discuss how we work hard and develop for wealth. That wealth is important for a high quality of life. I do not disagree, but I think that we strive for predictability and stability of our lives. A life where we have some semblance of control over what we are going to do and when we are going to do it contributes greatly to our quality of life. The more of the basic things that are stable in life the more we can focus are finite worrying on loftier things, like whether the curtains match the furniture or not. When we know are bread will arrive each morning, that the bus will come to take us to work at 7:10 plus or minus a few minutes, that the local copy shop will be open until 10:00 so we can make the important copies that we need, we breathe a little easier, we relax our tight muscles a bit. Sure, we use wealth to buy a lot of the stability we desire, but there are limits to the quantity of stability we can buy, some of it depends on the society we have developed.