Dichroic Reflections

setting a compass

I just read an entry in a journal I enjoy that's got me thinking. It's written by someone I respect a lot and disagree with on most issues. The writer is a Christian, a religious one who would probably use that as one of the first three nouns in describing herself. She's just back from a retreat and feels her life has changed, that her memories will forever after be divided into Before and After. I'm sure she's right; she knows herself more directly and frankly than most anyone I've met and tend to be very sure about her choices for herself. At the same time, it felt too sudden for fickle humanity. I have never yet come across a person who's changed all at once and forever. Even people who have made a real change (and it does happen) usually wobble in their direction a bit, especially at first. Sometimes there's real backsliding, but even that doesn't mean a change hasn't been made, as long as each step backward is matched by one or more steps forward.

I may not be reading what she intended to write and it's probable she never intended to imply she thought the change would be instant and total. She was trying to use limited words to explain something not entirely explainable and so the words might have oversimplified something not meant to be simple. Yes, I'm hedging here. I'm trying to say that the rest of this is about what her words made me think, not necessarily a comment (and certainly not a criticism!) on what she was actually saying.

Anyhow, it got me thinking about compasses. Most airplanes have at least two compasses, a magetic one and a gyroscopic one. The gyrocompass is easier to use while flying; it has less of a lag and it turns the same way as the aircraft, only mapped vertically instead of horizontally. (I mean, the aircraft's nomarlly-horizontal yaw axis, the one that swings north, east, south, or west, is shown on the vertical instrument panel.) However, the gyrocompass in a light aircraft doesn't have any permanent reference point. It just responds to the resistance of a turn against its own spin. A mag compass, on the other hand, has a bit of a lag before it responds to a turn, and it turns the opposite way to he aircraft (same axis but when I go clockwise from North to East), it goes widdershins to get from the N to the E) so it's a little harder to use. On the other hand, it has the Earth's magnetic field as a permanent reference, so it always knows where magnetic North is. That means that I use the gyrocompass for normal operations, but occasionally when I'm flying, itwill precess and I have to reset it to match the magnetic compass.

I think people are like that. In normal operations we use our own sense of what feels right as a guide. Sometimes, though, a moral compass may precess and you need to reset it to match true North, whether you do that from the Torah or the Koran, the U.S. Constitution or the Ethical Humanist Manifesto, from talking to an advisor or just thinking about your own ethical poles for a while. I think that's the best explanation I've come up with in words for why, in each of the last several years, I've felt a need to spend some time at the High Holidays just thinking and what I've done and thought and what I should do. I'm resetting my compass.