Busy Days Require Slow Ones

OK, I get it, I get it. Happiness contains the seeds of sadness. Life implies eventual death. Cold and hot cannot exist without each other. If the world were tepid all the time, we would not have hot and cold and that first chill that catches your breath on a crisp fall morning would never occur. It's the yin and yang repeated over and over, but people still deny, deny, deny. The important thing to understand is that it is all in the tension between the interdependent forces in the world and their interplay. We are given life and occasional happiness, what comes along for the ride? Well, it does. It just does and denying it doesn't change the fact. My good friend has told me we must expand our hearts in the face of this tension. That is true courage. But the fear remains, shrinking the heart. But I can stop that. Or can I?

Oh my—is this where you use OMG? I know this one! It's the endless knot—you've probably seen it before.

It has many interpretations, officially it's "the interplay and interaction of the opposing forces in the dualistic world of manifestation, leading to their union, and ultimately to harmony in the universe." Another interpretation is that it symbolizes samsara-- the endless cycle of suffering or birth, death and rebirth within Tibetan Buddhism. But I like two others—love and friendship is one. I continue to know those throughout my life at all kinds of intersections. Another is wisdom and compassion, still a work in progress there. But I'll keep working this endless knot, with a little help from my friends. On some busy days, I lose track and forget it all, trusting life and happiness are not that fragile. Oops.

At some point in my life, this made more sense, but now I know what we're in for. Now, when I have busy days, I know slow ones will be coming. It's a requirement. Those slow days will come with time to come back and think it through again.

Courage, Fear and Freedom

At the risk of beating a dead horse, there is another element that keeps popping up for me—courage. People say I have courage because I face my reality. I am not sure where the courage is in that. It's not life or death courage, it's just inevitable erosion. Aristotle, in the Western tradition, defined the virtue of courage as a mean between fear and confidence, pointing out that too much confidence can be mistaken for courage in the foolhardy or those rendered overconfident by a string of successes. As far as I know he did not offer any indication that someone displaying fear could be mistaken for one having courage. In fact, the way he expressed it was that avoiding fear was more important than avoiding overconfidence. The extreme that one normally seeks to avoid that true courage moves toward and faces. When it comes to courage, it heads people towards pain in some circumstances, and therefore away from what they would otherwise desire. Huh? So far, it leaves me wondering how anybody recognizes courage when they see it, except maybe facing what you fear the most.

The Tao Te Ching, on the Eastern side is less specific, but still engaging in its way. There are four characters associated with courage—"loving," "causes," "ability" and "brave.' It goes on to distinguish two forms of courage this way, "One of courage, with audacity, will die. One of courage, but gentle, spares death. From these two kinds of courage arise harm and benefit."
Now, we can add gentleness to facing fear, at least for some.

There is also a distinction between momentary courage that a soldier must have to face his fear of death in just that instant and that which must be sustained in the face of what is slowly advancing, like a rising flood, a leaking boat or a chronic condition. Both must face what they fear, but the soldier must have audacity, more so than gentleness. There is also physical courage and moral courage. Physical courage is held in the face of pain, hardship, death or fear of death. Moral courage is to persist in doing the right thing in the face of public opposition or shame. But neither addresses that momentary aspect, and we are still left with that "gentleness" issue to contemplate.

You told me once that freedom sometimes evoked fear, just an undefined fear, similar in some ways to the realization that death is an inevitable fact of the human condition. Our reaction to that fear can and must only be to make certain the way we are living is enough. Are we now living as if we know we don't have unlimited days yet to live. Whether our fear has been narrowed to a specific threat or arises simply from a sense of our own mortality, doing enough for the others in our lives, being enough for those others, loving them enough all show up at once. We have freedom to thank for that. We can choose to be and do enough or not. The daily measure of this "enoughness" (your term) is a measure of a kind of courage, too. Everyone's courage in the face of impermanence is a measure of his or her virtue. I think gentleness can fit there, too.

Tai Chi Makes A House Call

I was disappointed to learn the story of James Reston's appendectomy and acupuncture in China in 1971 was apocryphal, however much it is recited by devotees of Eastern medicine. Some describe it as the "tipping point" for traditional Chinese medicine in the West. After that report, people began to sit up and take notice. It turns out the article was not a description of his own anesthetization by acupuncture for his emergency appendectomy while visiting China with President Richard Nixon. He did have the appendectomy, but without the aid of acupuncture. With that said, the good news is that the benefits of another aspect of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) have been firmly established. Tai Chi has been proven to benefit people with Parkinson's and other chronic diseases. The New England Journal of Medicine has published a clinical study that clearly establishes Tai Chi has a beneficial effect on PD patients that exceeds those of both weight resistance and stretching exercises. As a practitioner of both in the interest of maintaining my independence, I pursued it further.

Tai Chi is known (albeit up to now, unscientifically) to have benefits to its practitioners, in stress reduction for example. I have been doing a bit of research, and am learning more with every hour I spend. I am spending my time as I usually do—reading about it, even watching a video clip or two. I'm doing this instead of living it, of course. I often read about life as a substitute for actually living it. But, there are some things you have no choice about. One of those is chronic disease. I'm living that one, just now (see Blog Archive on February 10, 2012, The Full Catastrophe).

Into the midst of my usual approach of developing knowledge without making the commitment of actually doing anything about it, strode a friend and a friend of a friend and a friend of that friend (Whew! That was clear, wasn't it?). Well, they did it; I am not making this up. At dinner my friend was listening to her friend describe the findings reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, and she mentioned my interest in the means to do battle with the effects of Parkinson's. They agreed they should put me in touch with a newly-trained Tai Chi Exercise Leader who had some interest in working with people with Parkinson's. So, e-mails were exchanged and we made contact. She, because she had trained for some hours to become an exercise leader and wanted to make use of it, and me because it was time to put up or shut up, so to speak.

Consequently, S__ and I agreed to meet at my home to talk about it—note, we could have "talked about it" over the phone, I knew it would involve some element of practice. It turns out I can be talked into all sorts of things by the right people. I needed a nudge to move from watching and reading to doing and S___ needed a "first victim" to teach. So here I am, my third session is now scheduled, and I am learning Tai Chi. It seems Tai Chi has come and got me—making a house call.

Reading and Writing

It's a remarkable world we live in (Oh God, I sound like my father). Oh well, I suppose some of my voice is really his. My brother said the other day that when he hears my voice on his voice mail that I sound like him, that is, the way he sounds to himself. I have learned that writing is a kind of voice too.

But back to this remarkable world—yesterday, a dear friend recommended a book to me, really an author. When I couldn't sleep tonight, I sampled and then downloaded the e-book, and the author, Marilynne Robinson, leaves me speechless (imagine that).

Now, I am sure we have all had books recommended to us in conversation, I know I have many times before. More often than not, I can never remember them when I am in a bookstore. It's almost as if a curtain is drawn across the part of my brain where such recommendations are stored. I hope the books I missed were not as remarkable as this one.

From the first line, the voice comes tumbling out. I only wish I could write like that—not just to have the words come tumbling out—but for the words to have the capacity to catch you off-guard, to startle you into full attention with their speed and something else, something I can't yet get my head around. I will probably have to read the rest in a day or two just to figure out where we (she and I, the reader) are going with this. The book is entitled Gilead, and won the Pulitzer in 2005.

But this is not about the book; it is about what has happened to that process of recommending a book to someone. Having started on this little adventure, I am starting to rethink the process of recommending a book for someone to read. When you do, the person you are recommending it to can now connect almost immediately. It can, for a dedicated reader, become a new language. With the ease the e-readers provide, a whole heart and mind full of ideas, feelings and thoughts can be sent along by adding the book to your message. Sending your friend a recommendation might be more powerful than you think.

In the days of Cultural Literacy, when we all had a common vocabulary of ideas drawn from our common cultural reading list, people probably used characters and events from those stories to paint on their conversational canvas. If you have a lot of time, pick up the book, Cultural Literacy, its author, E.D. Hirsch, provides a much better explanation. But that's not a recommendation now, just acknowledging the source. I am learning to be more careful about my recommendations.

If You’re Going….

A friend of mine is planning to spend the summer in San Francisco, and I think she's looking forward to it. She's a much better writer than I, so I am hoping she'll write a sort of travelogue describing her experience. It's all for purely selfish reasons, as I am planning to spend a week there in October and would like someone to screen it for me so I only see the best parts—we don't have all summer, you know. For now, the best way I know of to share the experience is to pretend it was really me heading there. For reasons I do not understand, music is often the first thing that pops into my mind when I picture myself traveling somewhere. I am not a musician, and, while I enjoy listening to music, I don't take the time to work it into my life with ear buds or stereos. I'll listen in my car, but, living on an island, I am blessed with a life of only brief car trips in my leisure time—twenty minutes is a long car ride.

Anyway, back to the task at hand, it is not "I Left My Heart In San Francisco" that comes to my mind first (old fogeys come in degrees, and that one is just a few degrees older than I am). Instead, I remember this is the 45^th anniversary of "the Summer of Love" and the tune that comes to mind goes like this—

If you're going to San Francisco
Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair
If you're going to San Francisco
You're gonna meet some gentle people there

For those who come to San Francisco
Summertime will be a love-in there
In the streets of San Francisco
Gentle people with flowers in their hair

Yes, it's Haight-Ashbury in the 60's. Newly formed hippies (perhaps as many as 100,000) flocked to this old bohemian neighborhood in SF, seeking an ideal some never found, some found and lost, and some found and still retain. There were skyrocketing ideals, and lowlife experiences. As Bob Weir, guitarist for the Grateful Dead, puts it: "Haight Ashbury was a ghetto of bohemians who wanted to do anything - and we did, but I don't think it has happened since. Yes there was LSD. But Haight Ashbury was not about drugs. It was about exploration, finding new ways of expression, being aware of one's existence."

The musical artists they flocked to hear still reverberate in my head, among them the The Doors, Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Otis Redding, The Byrds, and Big Brother and the Holding Company with Janis Joplin.

But, with all that said, I wouldn't seek the hippie experience. I loved the music, but…. Even by October after that summer, homelessness, drug abuse, poverty and more set in.

Yet today, we still spend more time asleep to the present moment, reliving the past, and pre-living the future, and missing out on the real present. Still, it's the mindfulness and the awareness I seek. Being in the present moment was a part of all that and probably the only part worth keeping. It's still worth seeking for as long as we still breathe. So, if you're going to San Francisco, you can wear some flowers in your hair (some of us look better than others that way), but better yet, be mindful of the precious moments you have and aware of where you are.

Taking A Chance

Early today, someone told me a story about three statements he heard one day in a hospital room, and he asked me to think about them—"Why am I here?" Then "It must be something important." And finally, "I don't have much time left." The point is, spending a bit of time with these questions can be worth your while and might make a difference in how you live.

"I don't have much time." Without being morbid about it, none of us knows how much time we have. Surprises happen.

"Is it something important?"I am not among those "who feel that life is but a joke." There have been just a few too many meaningful and rewarding moments to let me believe what we do doesn't matter. I prefer to view that one on the smallest of scales—there are people I can directly touch and that has added meaning to my own life. So "why am I here?" and am I on the right track?

Someone reminded me today that every time I've made a change or moved, I've wound up better off. Now, these are life-changing choices I'm talking about. This comment was made on the anniversary of a lucky change I made many years ago. There have been thirteen since the one I just mentioned—some of them overlap--moves from job to job, company to company, house to house. I count nine jobs, within three companies, in ten different places we've called home. Counted that way, it's twenty-two. Either way, I regret none of them. Oh sure, I wish I could have avoided the equity drain from my current house, but who has been able to avoid that one, besides renters?

Choices. As you might have guessed, I am facing a couple of them right now. I'm sure it's time to just get on with it, but still I wish I knew for certain which way to move and when. But, if I reflect on most of those choices, I was just ready to roll the dice. It often had to do as much with what I was leaving behind as it did with what I was moving toward. Oh, I know you aren't supposed to be running away, but I know it was a factor at least four of those times, maybe more. Only once was there no clear evidence I expected the change would improve my life—a lateral move motivated more by who/what I was getting away from than what I was moving into. Ironically, that move proved to be a real game-changer, perhaps the best move I ever made.

So, today I'm making the first step in a two or three step change. I know what I'm leaving behind, the good and the bad about it, and I know an increasing part of my motivation is coming from a desire to leave it behind. Leaving it will entail some sacrifice, but I think it's time. The first step is really making this change possible. But the focus is still on what I'm leaving to an extent. So, where to? I think I'll figure out why I'm here just by taking a chance.

How Well Do You Know Your Brain?

Earlier this week, I received an email with the question above in the subject line. It prompted several thoughts, none of which landed anywhere close to the subject of the email message which was sent by Web MD. I am not sure if Web MD has me pegged as someone interested in brain research, or if they were just trying to attract the attention of all their email subscribers. In any case, it was a quiz on brain research. I started it twice and, the 2^nd time I had 88% right, and was branded 'an Einstein among responders,' for answering 88% of the questions correctly. That's 15 out of 17, but I guessed right on three of them, so I could as easily have scored 70% and been an 'also ran' like anybody else.

The truth is I thought it was a message about knowing yourself, a subject I don't suppose even occurs to modern email publishers, including those at WebMD. Reading a PR expert recently, I came across the notion that the best speakers aren't those with the best content, but those that share a little bit of themselves when they speak. It reminded me of Thoreau, who famously wrote "I should not write so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.' People can engage with writers like Thoreau, not because they like the woods, but because they know they will get a bit of Thoreau himself in the mix, and they keep coming back for that—at least I know that's what I come back for. The facts about the woods surrounding Walden Pond hold no particular interest for me. There's a pond back of my house I could walk around, but Thoreau wouldn't be along sharing what enters his mind.

The other thought all this gives rise to is Socrates' oft-repeated dictum—"know thyself." It is inscribed atop a famous building from that era, too….OK; I looked it up—the Temple of Apollo at Delphi… There are at least a dozen ancient Greeks to whom scholars attribute the statement, but Socrates spoke about it a great deal. One of the many takeaways from Socrates on the topic was the folly of attempting to learn the seemingly obscure things without first attempting to know oneself. You simply don't have a reference point for all those factoids you assemble. Makes a lot of sense to me. All too often, I hear people drone on and on about some obscure notion, but they never relate it to themselves (and thus don't reach me).

But another lesser-known aphorism Socrates liked was "nothing too much," a concise way to say "all things in moderation." So, enough about all this.