March 19, 2023

Steps to a More Peaceful Life

You need no reminder of how much our current moment is filled and fueled by public and private disrespect. Instead, I shall offer guidance to a life less vulnerable to giving and receiving discourtesy and help you make it so.

Small steps within your power. Though modest, they can be life-enhancing.

Such changes present the chance to enlarge our humanity and agency while reducing the sense of isolation, fear, and distrust.

Reflections on How You Feel and Behave:

Consider the pace and pressure of life. If we pile up our existence with a tower of obligations, errands, and responsibilities, our much-desired calm, thoughtfulness, and room for others become elusive. Yes, we have inescapable demands, but most realize we also occupy ourselves with inessentials.

Perhaps it is worth reflecting on what is necessary and what is superfluous. We can free ourselves from the shackled and abnormal routine that has become the norm: texting, emailing, tweeting, and looking into the pixels of our attachment to the computer god. We observe its icons on our desks and in our hands.

Will triple scoops of virtual contact with people a thousand miles away leave a lick of the ice cream cone for those we love or might discover nearby?

Prepare for Respecting Others by Respecting Yourself:

Do we eat well, exercise, or trust that our bodies will quietly accept years of ill-tending and inattention?

The sun-gifted glories of the natural world wait for us, but the computer deity shades our lives as an autocrat might. He cares not whether we will be touch-starved, with only a memory of human sighs, breath, fragrance, and torsos extending beneath our line of sight. Are we practicing to be cave dwellers? 

Remember that our lanternless ancestors lived by the hours of the sun and invested in the earth with cooperative others who were not chained to a desk.

Might we reorganize who we have become and are becoming? No one ever offered these last words: “I should have spent more time in my home office — like the best years of my life.” Nor does anyone define shopping as leading to anything resembling the richness possible in our brief time here.

Calming and Centering Yourself: 

Treating ourselves with respect and kindness opens the possibility of service and duty to another. In time, this can become a prioritized source of mutual joy.

Before we can have benign emotions, we must recognize what is impeding us, what gnaws, irritates, or angers us. Think of a stone pitched into a placid lake, spreading ripples lasting well beyond the time required to make the toss.

Those who analyze their day may find it helpful to think about mood-changing moments. Where, when, why, and how did the sky darken or the clouds part? With whom? Doing what?

Therapists ask patients about the patterns of their lives — disappointments and repetitive relationship challenges. They wish to understand the kind of people one chooses to spend time with and those with whom one falls in love. When our mistakes persist, the critical question to us becomes, what does that cost you?

The knots into which we tie ourselves restrict our capacity to embrace those who might appreciate us and wish for our friendship, laughter, and romance. Tied to a rope of our invention, we are prisoners who desire freedom but offer ourselves to enslavement.

Civility and concern beyond our own troubles become more burdensome in a body and brain tightened and twisted into a coil, like a spring-loaded jack-in-the-box. 

We need hands to hold and a friend to embrace. Consider the dour cashier at the end of an endless grocery checkout lane. What do a smile and a thoughtful word of thanks to this person cost? Smiling and speaking another’s name enrich the human joint bank account, where withdrawals only add to the wealth of all involved in the transaction.

Social Life and Conversation:

Especially when parts of the world outside are in conflict, we must do our best to avoid abrasiveness and inconsideration elsewhere. Take lunch. What happens when we fail to prefer the sight of our partner or friend to the latest intrusion of the phone? Do we reach for the phone, or does the phone reach for us? Hard to tell.

Still, no couple reserves a table for three or four, where the inanimate placeholders get their feelings hurt.

When a get-together begins, do we become impatient to speak? Waiting allows us to hear the voice, watch the expression, and listen to the ideas of a person of value. Few are pleased to be cut off, cut short, and talked over, unseen and unknown.

We can find better ways to express affection and interest in a companion’s well-being, emotional life, and opinions. Dismissing the other’s words leads to the poverty of our intellect — the assumption we needn’t understand one more thing or one more of our fellow women or men.

Slowing the conversation is a paradoxical alternative. A silent interval when your partner expects an audible response can exert control over the moment and create an opportunity to interject the thought, “where are we going?” Two people working together can reimagine and change what happens.

It is within our power to ask the counterpart politely whether he is ready to listen and what would be a mutually satisfying interchange. It is OK to express the desire to talk about something important and ask that he remain attentive.

No one wishes to be just another checkmark on the daily to-do list.

Seeing Yourself in the Other: 

We categorize and rate everything. Race, religion, nationality, homes, jobs, salaries, etc. We see too much that is different and too little that we share.

An unreflective mind starts at home, where he recognizes people he loves and steps past the homeless to return as if they are as inhuman as the cardboard boxes in which some of them live. Recent fMRI research tells us that they register in our brains like furniture.

We fight over differences. In lands where individuality is encouraged, one person can be at odds with most of humanity, trying to be #1. All others be damned, sometimes literally.

The planetary situation finds wealth accumulation on one side and child malnutrition and disease on the other. Finger-pointing leaves the unfortunate judged for their misfortune. It also leaves the wealthy vilified for their good luck.

We conclude the other does not believe in the right god or any god; they are immoral, culturally or genetically inferior, and poor managers of themselves.

Meanwhile, we keep our closets well-stocked with towels to wash our hands of responsibility, silently repeating Pontius Pilate’s words, “I am innocent of the blood of this person.” Or perhaps, our hand washing resembles Lady Macbeth without her sleeplessness and guilt.

If we focus only on what we do not like in those who are different, what will become of us in a world of shorter supply, insufficient clean water, climate change, and the reduced availability of liveable spaces?

Consider whether we, in the most encompassing sense, would be better off seeing ourselves in the other and recognizing our capacity to embrace the shared responsibility of well-being for our children, our fellows, and every creature Noah was told deserved a place in the ark. 

God did not say, “those living beings are on their own.”

If we can, might we try to see that even the resentment and desperation of people are sometimes justified? They, too, wish for more than blame, disregard, mistreatment, and self-righteous indignation.

If we cannot, we are lost. 

Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, ends this way: “There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”

==========

The first image is a photo of Dave Garroway, the original anchor of the Today Show on NBC. According to Wikipedia, Garroway’s “easygoing and relaxing style belied a lifelong battle with depression.” In 1960, reviewer Richard F. Shepard of The New York Times wrote, “He does not crash into the home with the false jollity and thunderous witticisms of a backslapper. He is pleasant, serious, scholarly looking, and not obtrusively convivial.” As the picture displays, Garroway’s signoff included the word peace and his upraised palm.

The second picture is the Offering of a Handshake, created by Pixabay. Finally, the sculpture by Ian Capper is called Embracing the Sea. All of these were sourced from Wikimedia Commons.

March 12, 2023

Redefining Exhaustion

I was never the most energetic young man. It took me into the second inning of a softball game to remember I was playing the game, not watching it.

Call my adrenaline unobservant.

Well, this week, I discovered what genuine exhaustion feels like. Thank you, COVID-19.

Now finishing my fourth full day, I am a bit better. I can keyboard.

Here is an example: xvlW2k9*%=^

See!

This will be short. Oh, I forgot. I sound like a frog, too.

🐸

If you need an under-energized pet frog, I am available. I hope you like green.🤢

Of course, he might give you a disease.

To the good, I think my green phase is ending as of this afternoon; fingers crossed.

The advantage of experiencing illness at my age is that you can identify with the physical troubles of more and more people you know.

Sometimes you can recommend the right MD, medicine, the proper food, and other comments to remind them, “this too shall pass.”

Today I am reminding myself. That, Paxlovid and a wife serving as a benign caretaker are the best I can do.

Life, love, learning, and laughs go on despite feeling craptastic.

COVID-19 is survivable, yes; desirable, no.

———

The cartoon is called The Headache, by George Cruikshank, sourced from Wikimedia Commons.org/

March 5, 2023

Overcoming Suffering and Our Fear of Change

Suffering, both physical and psychological, cannot be escaped. We can, however, minimize it by not adding to our discomfort.

For Buddhists, much suffering comes from our desire for permanence. In the West, we often refer to this as difficulty adapting to change.

It is hard to think of anything that doesn’t change. The weather, our relationships, and life itself are all temporary. We age and die. Our children grow, create their own families, and become independent — a double-edged modification necessary for their well-being and requiring an adjustment that, at times, is painful for us.

One’s effort to establish a vice-like grip over all the “temporaries” we hold dear can only fail. Our attempts to freeze-dry and maintain ideal moments of perfection are fruitless.

Those who believe in an afterlife often imagine the best parts of this one and hope the future will contain some glorious, magnified, blissful version of these moments. Many believe there will be permanence, for example, in their joyous reunion with departed loved ones.

Others run from thoughts of inevitable loss or nightmare difficulties ahead of them in this life. They seek TV, music, alcohol, drug abuse, or other distractions from such possibilities.

What if we could become impervious to suffering using a magic potion? Imagine further that the rest of the world stayed as it is.

Without any sense of loss, we would become indifferent to the misfortune of others. We would lose ourselves, become unrecognizable, and be unable to understand anyone else’s hardships.

Without the capacity to sustain personal injuries, our lives might be described as robotic, wooden, and hardened — indeed unchangeable. No new learning would be possible.

Doesn’t love require compassion and understanding, put out of reach by the magical drink? Would we even wish for love, be moved by a tender film, beautiful music, or art? Why might such an individual read fiction without caring what happened to the characters? Nor could he capably raise children to become decent human beings.

Given that the suffering connected with an impermanent human state is inescapable, we must come to terms with our lack of control and inability to achieve more than a temporary evasion of external stressors. 

A worthwhile alternative is the transformation of ourselves into creatures who, recognizing life’s inevitable difficulties, hold our knowledge of human transitoriness gently.

Rather than gnashing our teeth over the uncountable unfairnesses befalling the human race, there are alternatives. One might do better to recognize that we pay for love, the appreciation of beauty, and the blissful moments of exhilaration with the suffering and change that make up the other side of the coin of existence.

We can learn to give up the struggle for control of everything except that which is in our power. We can accept the pain and the shortness of our lives and learn how to live with them.

One step is to recognize we will not achieve permanent happiness in an ongoing process of craving much of what we believe will make us happy. We tend to react to purchasing a dream home or finding a desirable mate as if they are Christmas toys: short-lived sources of joy. We take them for granted before long, at least to some degree. As the English author Wordsworth reminds us, “Getting and spending we lay waste our powers.”

Homo sapiens do better to shift their focus from the complexity and lack of ease in any life by focusing on self-care, kindness, gratitude, displaying compassion, and listening to and recognizing the true nature of our friends and acquaintances.

We can ask those we care about whether they believe we understand them. And if they say no, tell them we want to do better. An essential feature of such attempts to improve relationships involves working on ourselves and diminishing whatever anger might lead us to hurt them.

Self-knowledge and meditation may lead us along this path. The latter also allows us to live more often in moments of tranquility.

The Buddha told a story about “the second arrow.” The arrows he described referred to the pain from events outside us. Of course, when the first arrow strikes, we feel anguish. We are advised, however, not to wrestle with it. Instead, begin by recognizing it.

One can come to an acceptance of the harm by releasing the tension and embracing our distress. Gentleness with ourselves, meditation, and ensuring not to enlarge our suffering allows the injury to heal to the extent possible.

The agony will grow if we keep struggling with the wound and remain preoccupied with the affliction and how it occurred. As the Buddha tells us, worrying over our pain is like a second arrow we shoot at ourselves.

===================

Both of the images come from Wikimedia Commons. The first is Meditation at Empty Cloud by Rikki. The second is the Buddha.

February 26, 2023

When Your Doctor Gives You the Finger: Why Men Fear “Digital” Medicine

Some problems are eternal. One is a doctor’s examination of body parts no one should fiddle with. I am not talking about playing the violin.

Read on if you are brave enough to know more about what your physician recommends and what your partner wants the M.D. to examine. I promise I will deliver some laughs by the end.

Dr. Gerald Stein

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/41/Dedoduro.jpg

An early medical rage of this century was the move to electronic medical records (EMR) and the digital practice of medicine. But I’d like to say a few words about some rather different digits. One in particular.

Patients may not be afraid of the doctor touching the computer keyboard to bring up their personal information, but many of them certainly are afraid of the docs touching certain personal body parts and telling them something is wrong. To be specific, men are especially ticklish about another person putting their hands anywhere near their underwear-absent bottom.

Computer digits are OK, but human digits to perform the routine prostate exam, aka the single-finger digital rectal exam — no thank you. As Shakespeare would say, “There’s the rub.”

A 2011 Esquire Magazine internet survey sheds some light on this dark place in doctor-land. The survey should not be interpreted as gospel since it was…

View original post 1,079 more words

February 19, 2023

A Message to Future Generations

Here is a thought experiment for you:

Imagine you are famous. Because of your renown, you are given a chance to leave a message every future human will receive in 1000 years.

What would you say?

You have two minutes to say it, but as much time as you want to choose your words.

I’d suggest you make it short. You do have some competition in this department — from Bertrand Russell.

Lord Russell (1872 – 1970) was one of those impossibly famous people. Just to name a few aspects of his remarkable life, he was a British philosopher, mathematician, logician, and public intellectual. He even did a small amount of time in Brixton Prison because of his pacifist opposition to England’s involvement in World War I.

Talk about making a principled stand!

Not to be broken by the experience, Russell made his time in confinement useful:

I found prison in many ways quite agreeable. I had no engagements, no difficult decisions to make, no fear of callers, no interruptions to my work. I read enormously; I wrote a book, ‘Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy’… and began the work for ‘The Analysis of Mind’. I was rather interested in my fellow-prisoners, who seemed to me in no way morally inferior to the rest of the population, though they were on the whole slightly below the usual level of intelligence as was shown by their having been caught.

Russell was a man who turned a defeat into opportunity and found humor in it.

On the BBC TV interview show Face to Face in 1959, Russell was asked the question I posed to you.

His two-minute message to the future was in two parts: intellectual and moral. Now you can leave whatever message you wish in whatever format.

Take courage, my friends! I’m here to listen and might even take a crack at coming up with my own answer to the big question.

But even now, I’d say this:

If our species doesn’t make it 1000 years, it will be because we didn’t take the great man’s advice.

=====

P.S. I’d add a brief bit to Russell, with apologies to his ghost and with thanks to those who have or will have given his words some thought.

For centuries, the world has had in mind a very lofty goal — to “love thy neighbor as thyself.” As Freud suggested, this might ask too much of us, a dream we’ve failed to achieve. But perhaps we should shoot for something more modest: to respect our neighbor, be kind, and hold back our judgment and anger until we put ourselves in his shoes.

One more thing. Property and material objects have limits in their ability to produce the happiness everyone wants. We have been persuaded that more is better while our fellowmen go hungry and homeless.

We will do better to the extent we think of ourselves as custodians of physical objects and the planet we call our home. Material things will break down, but we mustn’t treat the earth the same way. We have it on loan.

Like curators of fine art, we must treat it gently and work to return it and our environment to the state best disposed to allow our ancestors and all the world’s flora and fauna to live. Without life, there can be no “after” life.

February 12, 2023

Michael Gerson: Fighting Depression with Hope, Faith, and Love

On the day before the Super Bowl, I’m guessing the short supply of serious newspaper readers is smaller than usual.

Still, the mention of Michael Gerson in today’s New York Times demands attention, though he can no longer know that anyone cares. He was a good man and perhaps a great one who died in December. Fifty-eight is too young for the departure of a person whose presence on the earth made it a better place.

Funny, I should say that. I didn’t always agree with his politics and didn’t vote for the President for whom he wrote speeches.

But in my book, I don’t have to agree with you to admire you, as I did him. I envied his gift of language, his principled stance on matters of importance, and a heroic battle that found him outlasted by death: a bigger-than-life opponent with an undefeated record.

Gerson fought a chemically-based depression severe enough for hospitalization, serious heart disease, and cancer that killed him. Outnumbered, you might say, but not out of hope, faith, and love.

I don’t have to believe in your faith to praise the way you go beyond the weekly attendance at a house of worship to live it. Gerson lived his own beliefs in deep consideration and helping the unfortunate. President Biden just hailed the 20th anniversary of the “President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief” created by President George W. Bush and Mr. Gerson. In today’s Times, Peter Baker said their effort saved more than 25 million lives.

Since my words pale to Michael Gerson’s, I hope you watch and listen to him in the video above, an invited Sunday sermon given three years ago. He will tell you enough about his troubles, his concern for the disadvantaged, and his belief in something transcendent to regret his early passing.

The Super Bowl can’t do that, though I hope you enjoy it.

A few seconds at halftime won’t be wasted to remember a humble, wounded, and wise man beyond describing with anyone’s words but his own.

February 5, 2023

Who Will You be in Twenty Years?

Once we reach adulthood, most of us believe we possess a permanent essence. We are not identical to others but unique and different, expecting to remain much as we are. 

Holding this belief, we plan for the future, assuming our happiness will depend on whether we achieve our twenty-something goals.

Ah, but goals change, at least for many. Moreover, the exact form of our transformations can’t be predicted. Here is a simple example:

As a boy, I loved vanilla ice cream, chocolate less, strawberry never.

Surprise!

In middle age, I discovered I fancied the strawberry flavor, like my father, and now, as my oldest grandson does.

My first awareness of such possible alterations began in 1971 when I listened to a radio broadcast of the Mahler Symphony #2 given the year before at Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony. Leonard Bernstein (LB) conducted.

The 80-minute Resurrection Symphony (as it is called) moved me to make myself a promise. If I ever had enough money to take a trip to wherever LB performed it again, I’d do so.

Time passed. I completed school, and my professional life began. Bernstein continued his own.

After more than 15 years, I read the announcement I’d been waiting for. The New York Philharmonic would offer the music under Lenny’s baton in April 1987. I made the trip.

You could say I expected too much. Perhaps. But veteran music lovers recognize no two performances are identical, even within the same few days. The rendition was fine, but the rocket to the celestial realm failed to arrive.

Why?

The simple answer was this: Lenny and I were more than a decade older. Before the downbeat, I’d attended a few live presentations of the same work, caught many recordings of the composition, and lived a fistful of years.

That slice of my existence contained numerous shake-ups, shake-offs, amendments, revisions, complications, joys of the heart, and tweaks of all kinds. Tempests arrived and departed, fears were faced and faded, and triumphs and defeats lived in and through.

I imagine the conductor would have said something similar, though he came in an older body, one he was wearing out.

In its entire nature, the aging process can’t be anticipated. We cannot predict who we will become, no matter what we believe.

We understand mortality not at all unless a near-death experience has convincingly threatened us. Our knowledge of personal death is otherwise abstract, neither gripping nor complete.

Just so, imagining the fullness of the career I enjoyed was unknown, nor how my children and patients would transform me.

Does your crystal ball foresee what doors will open to you, what people you will encounter, the accidents ahead, or the betrayals of your body by your body? 

Who can predict the lucky breaks, world events to be written in history books, the kind and unkind people around the corner, or the impact of a thousand other things?

Neither your brain nor your physical makeup is a stationary entity. 

According to the April 1, 2021 issue of Scientific American*, “In 80 to 100 days, 30 trillion (cells) will have replenished—the equivalent of a new you.” The automated process will reinvent you to some degree regardless of your best efforts in exercise and diet.

Trust me, you will not be the same and shouldn’t be the same, given the tuition-free experience of a lifetime.

Were you to meet your older self on the street, you might perceive the resemblance but not the full character of the fellow.

I’d venture that most of us believe the wisdom of the old is the gift of self-awareness and experience rather than changes to the operation of our brain and body. If the common man is correct, how do we account for the extraordinary intensity of emotion we observe in an active child?

He did not learn this.

In our teens, we continue to possess a similar intensity, perhaps more on occasion. Still, it begins to decline so that many unwise, unthinking, non-self-reflective souls often appear sedate and thoughtful before their end.

Rather than supposing such a one grew from increasing mastery and reconsideration of his mistakes, I’d venture his body often took the lead in the mellowness and acceptance the years delivered.

In Plato’s Republic, the author recalls a conversation between Socrates and an aged friend:

Socrates: There is nothing which for my part I like better, Cephalus, than conversing with aged men; for I regard them as travelers who have gone a journey which I too may have to go, and of whom I ought to inquire, whether the way is smooth and easy, or rugged and difficult.

And this is a question I should like to ask of you who have arrived at that time which the poets call the ‘threshold of old age’: Is life harder towards the end, or what report do you give of it?

Cephalus: I will tell you, Socrates, what my own feeling is. Men of my age flock together; we are birds of a feather, as the old proverb says, and at our meetings the complaint of my acquaintances commonly is, ‘I cannot eat, I cannot drink; the pleasures of youth and love are fled away; there was a good time once, but now that is gone, and life is no longer life.’

Some complain of the slights put upon them by relations, and they will tell you sadly how many evils their old age is the cause.

But to me, Socrates, these complainers seem to blame that which is not really at fault. For if old age were the cause, I too, being old, and every other old man would have felt as they do. But this is not my own experience, nor that of others whom I have known.

How well I remember the aged poet Sophocles. He was asked, ‘How does love suit with age, Sophocles? Are you still the man you were?’ He replied, ‘Peace! Most gladly have I escaped the thing of which you speak; I feel as if I had escaped from a mad and furious master.

Four points should be emphasized:

  1. Socrates was about 71 at the time of his death.
  2. Years before, he could not have forecast that he would be sentenced to death for impiety and corrupting the youth of Athens by encouraging in them the thoughtful questioning he practiced.
  3. A reduction in sex drive is standard in aged men, many of whom are at relative peace with it. No man in his prime would find the decline or the acceptance imaginable. Of those who maintain an active sex life in old age, few say the experience is as mindblowing as during their sexual heyday.
  4. There is much to enjoy for curious seniors who maintain adequate but imperfect health, good luck, and enough money to meet their needs without significant concern. Other advantages include a sense of calm, freedom from many worries and responsibilities, self-acceptance, and gratitude for what remains. Of course, the present is not identical to their past life. Much of their joy comes from friendship, children, and grandchildren, not heroic achievements.

Shakespeare, among others, noted we are “time’s fool,” meaning that time plays with us as ancient kings did with their court jesters (also called fools), kept nearby to entertain the monarch.

We do not know how much time we have and who we will be as we progress through whatever allotment comes our way. Nor is the breathtaking acceleration of the day’s pace conceivable until we find each 24 hours speeding ahead.

Best to fulfill your hopes early, especially if their fulfillment requires the energy, enthusiasm, and intensity a young body was made for.

Bucket lists come without guarantees. If it is unlikely that you can grasp the experience of mid-life and old age ahead of time, the list may need unexpected revision.

Those much older folks look strange, don’t they?

You see, I am time’s fool, as well.

I laugh more than ever in playing my part.

If “all the world’s a stage,” as Shakespeare said, I have been well cast.

===============

*The authors of the Scientific American article are Mark Fischetti and Jen Christiansen. 

All of the images above are sourced from Wikiart.org/ In order from the top, they are Futuristic Woman, 1911, by David Burliuk, Flight to the Future by Wojciech Siudmak, Teiresias Foretells the Future of Odysseus by Henry Fuseli, ca. 1800, and Future, 1943, by Agnes Lawrence Pelton.

January 26, 2023

When the Stars Disappear What Happens to Romance?

Not long ago, all school-aged children were expected to master cursive handwriting. In those days, the sky was clearer, and the stars stood out against the darkness.

No more.

Ironically, “progress” might be the cause.

According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the definitions of progress include “a forward or onward movement” and a “gradual betterment” of our lives.

The French novelist Gustave Flaubert (1821 – 1880) disagreed. For him, “The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.”*

While polio vaccines and antibiotic medication would defeat Flaubert in an argument, I don’t think he’d give up. His notion of progress would look at what we’ve lost, not what’s been gained. 

Perhaps no one should be surprised if values such as beauty created by human hands, artistic and detailed craftsmanship, and looking at the stars aren’t considered all that valuable. How could it be otherwise? We live in a country where profit and pleasure are widely applauded goals. Everything else takes second place, at best.   

We are addicted to speed, productivity, and the things that work, be they techniques, machines, or thoughts. Because they work, we risk shutting off our brains and our awareness of something going wrong, eating away at the fabric of our lives. The esthetic element of existence is replaced by well-functioning objects no matter their form and how little those new forms please the senses.   

Gadgets surround us, lawnmowers kill the silence, and highways and planes drone on like a boring speaker who always needs another hour to finish his talk. Do we risk becoming as automatic and unthinking as a toaster? The toaster doesn’t hear the din surrounding us. Those who never spent time in a quiet world don’t realize what they missed and are missing.

It is harder to recognize the worth of vanished practices if we never played the game of life by the old rules in the less industrialized circumstances of those times. If you were born surrounded by skyscrapers, you don’t remember walking downtown in the big-skyed sunshine of a world without their long shadows.

You applaud air-conditioning, right? Window air conditioners in homes only became popular in the 1950s; even then, not more than a few could cool their entire house. After dinner on hot days, people sat outside on the cement stoops leading up to their flats. They talked with neighbors every day. The sense of community grew. People slept in public parks to catch the breeze and escape the heat captured indoors. 

Progress demanded efficient use of space, meaning taller buildings with more apartments. High rises didn’t bring us moral elevation; they delivered anonymity and discomfort around strangers who, a few decades before, wouldn’t have been strange.   

A laptop will generate sentences faster than a college student with a pencil or pen. A notebook full of inked-in class notes carries no prestige. We must have the latest innovation in everything. Thus, old technology tends to lay dormant and unused.   

Yet our computers offer us little esthetic fulfillment in their creation of letters and words. Anyone with graceful penmanship does. Another element displayed in longhand communication is to let the recipient know you cared enough to write it. You didn’t email, text, or use snail mail enclosing a machine-created message.   

Yes, reliance on penmanship takes more time, of which we have less. That is the point. Our time-preoccupied way of spending our time has robbed us of some of the joy in it.   

Those folks in the evening park could smell the grass on a lucky day and feel closer to their earthen bed. Looking up, the stars were present, lots of them.   

The stars remain high overhead, but more of them are shrouded now. Like “progress,” the word “shroud” is supposed to tell us something. It is a burial garment employed as far back as the time of Jesus.   

The ancients didn’t have light pollution to cover the heavens. We do. A new study published in Science measured what has happened to the darkness. “Trends in the data showed that the average night sky got brighter by 9.6% per year from 2011 to 2022, which is equivalent to doubling the sky brightness every eight years.”  

The stars have always covered the sky, but now they have to contend with our blinding lights as if we were shooting at them. Have we scared them into hiding?   

Our ancestors didn’t live by night. The sun governed their wakefulness and sleep. No wonder sleep disturbances proliferate today. Without intending it, humanity has manufactured a competition between the starlit romance and mystery of an indescribable summertime and the convenience of an unnecessary brightness no one requested.   

“A child who is born where 250 stars are visible on a clear night will see only 100 in similar conditions by the time he turns 18,” study co-author Christopher Kyba told AP, according to Axios.”   

How many love songs talk of the moon and the stars?   

Enchantment can’t be found on a pharmacy shelf, no matter how many bulbs are on the ceiling. Will the singers of tomorrow fall into the spell left by darkness, beauty, and a gracefully written love note in a moment of stillness?   

All I know is this. A lover’s kiss in such a moment is not progress or profit.   

It is beyond words.

==========

*Thanks to my friend AGA, who informed me of Flaubert’s statement, leading to an enjoyable discussion that prompted this essay.

The first photograph comes from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, “the globular cluster Messier 56 (also known as M 56 or NGC 6779), which is located about 33,000 light years away from the Earth in the constellation of Lyra (The Lyre). The cluster is composed of a large number of stars, tightly bound to each other by gravity.”

Next is a handwritten postcard sent by Langston Hughes, including his poem Youth.

This is followed by Laura Hedien’s Arizona Sunset ca. 2020, with her kind permission: Laura Hedien Official Website.

Finally, Sunlights Kiss by Octavio Ocampo.
January 15, 2023

What to Do When You Don’t Know What to Say

Some people talk too soon, some too late, some too much, and some too little. Others pile up the sentences so fast you’d think they have to catch a train. Some talk too loud, soft, or close (in your face).

One of the most common regrets I heard in my clinical practice was from patients who believed they lacked the right word at the right time. Something had happened. Perhaps an offensive comment had been made, and they didn’t know how to respond.

The right words arrived by United Parcel Service (UPS) about three hours later. Others couldn’t imagine a good repost even after three weeks.

There are too many ways to go wrong in everyday conversation and even more in a public presentation if you don’t have much to contribute. Adlai Stevenson II told the following story.

It seems that a young and none-too-impressive new member of the British House of Commons approached his party leader and Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli:

“Now, Mr. Prime Minister, I’ve just come to the House; do you think it would be well if I participated in debate?” And the Prime Minister looked at him appraisingly for a moment and said, “No, I think it would be better if you did not. I think it would be better if the House wondered why you didn’t speak rather than why you did!”

Even though we don’t have the benefit of Disraeli’s advice, many of us have thought of ourselves as Disraeli did of the young member of Parliament: that we’d cause embarrassment by opening our mouths.

Well, sometimes we will, and indeed, all of us have done it before. Few will remember our blunders, however, and there is no chance of making an impression that is clever, thoughtful, kind, or enlightened without moving our lips.

No amount of potential eloquence does us any good if we forever have the mute button on.

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I’ve made some unfortunate comments myself.

In my teens, I visited a cousin whose mother had died after a long and grueling struggle with cancer. I extended my condolences, and, as often happens during such visits, we discussed other things.

Indeed, I forgot the sad occasion for a moment and mentioned a recent minor mishap, characterizing it as a “fate worse than death.”

Oops.

Too late to suck it back in. No way to un-ring the bell.

I apologized, of course, and my kind relative forgave my mistake. She was dealing with the real thing, death itself, not something trivial and stupid such as my comment. Years later, she couldn’t recall it.

Tactless remarks arise, as uncomfortable as they are. As I said earlier, we often wonder why we didn’t know what to say.

For a lucky few, their command of language comes as a genetic gift. They also have the confidence to deliver a line that others might keep to themselves.

While I can’t give you natural eloquence, I have a few suggestions to increase the possibility of saying the right thing and avoiding the wrong one:

  1. Make a recording of yourself as if you were chatting. There is nothing like hearing how you sound to discover what might be imperfect about how you converse. Yes, it could fuel your self-consciousness temporarily. But the project of self-improvement rarely comes without courage and pain.
  2. Have at l least one joke in hand that isn’t dirty or politically incorrect.
  3. Cut out “stance adverbs” and participles when beginning to talk or as interjections. I’m speaking of “uh,” “um,” “like,” “so,” and “you know.” Limit how often you say “awesome.” And never put these words altogether: “So, uh, you know, like, um, it was awesome!” Don’t say “fail” when you mean “failure” and “reveal” when you should use “revelation.” You will sound 20% more intelligent once all this is accomplished.
  4. Wait a bit before answering, at least sometimes, to create the opportunity to formulate what you have to say. The conversation isn’t a race to hit the buzzer on a TV game show.
  5. Part of the reason for waiting is to grasp what your partner means, display respect, and understand his point of view. Repeating what has been said to you can be helpful. Identifying and acknowledging his ideas is essential if you wish to have friends and loving companions. Fewer disagreements will be one of the benefits.
  6. If you expect a wise guy to put you down (because of your history or his), prepare some comebacks in advance. There are books on this sort of thing, so you don’t have to be original. Don’t forget, however, that sometimes the best put down is to ignore the barb, and ending the relationship occasionally is necessary.
  7. Try to sound au courant (a French expression meaning “up to date” or “fully informed”). A good start would be to read something other than an internet story on the life of the Kardashians.
  8. Discover some new words. Thirty Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary has been around since 1942 and is a worthy place to begin.
  9. Don’t circumambulate (circle the idea you are trying to express). Get to the point so as not to lose your listeners.
  10. If you are in the habit of employing lots of pronouns, be sure the pronoun comes right after the formal name of whoever the “he” or “she” you are referring to is. If you don’t, the listener might think you are talking about someone else.
  11. In general, especially in public utterances, wait until you have the attention of others. Trying to talk over people is frustrating, and those who specialize in preventing you from completing your thought are rude.
  12. Asking dinner partners to stop texting should happen much more often than it does. It is not impolite to tell them you will wait until they are finished.
  13. Most people who are nervous tend to rush what they have to say. Instead, think of your oral communication as a landscape painting, where the words become the foreground, and the silence becomes the background. It will help if you allow seconds of quiet to put your words into relief.
  14. Consider going to Toastmasters. It is an organization whose meetings (also online) are “learn-by-doing” workshops “in which participants hone their speaking and leadership skills in a no-pressure atmosphere.” And they’ve been doing it since 1924.
  15. Unless you are gifted in delivering an unrehearsed speech in front of an audience, try to memorize your address or at least bring an outline.
  16. One last piece of advice comes from an anonymous author:

Be careful of the words you say,

Keep them short and sweet.

You never know, from day to day,

Which ones you’ll have to eat.

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The revised edition of Thirty Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary was published in 2022.

The second image is a 1630 self-portrait of Rembrandt, sourced from the National Gallery of Art. The cartoon is called Conversation by Richard Melo da Silva, sourced from Wikimedia Commons.

January 8, 2023

At the End of the Day, Do Personal Accomplishments Matter?

When I attended my 20th high school reunion, it looked as if status and appearance mattered greatly to the assembled throng. Friends came to an identical conclusion. It could have been called a “Festival to Impress.”

I wasn’t that impressed.

The 50th reunion was different. No one cared about what you’d done professionally or were still doing. Friends, old and new, were pleased to talk, get to know you in some depth, and share the light and dark sides of distant memories.

If you’d achieved something worthwhile, you were now at ease with yourself. Everyone seemed grateful they were still in decent health, pleased to laugh with each other, and happy most of those they cared about were alive.

Of course, some who didn’t attend felt ashamed of their place in the world or how they looked. Others, also absent, felt no large attachment to the school or their classmates. They moved on, as the saying goes. Nor did embittered souls want to remind themselves of longstanding anger or sadness. Perhaps they recalled their time at Mather High School as an accumulation of humiliating experiences.

All of this raises questions about what is of value in any life. I can’t offer you a personal prescription, but I can relate a little about myself and what I know of those closest to me. Here goes a short version of what is important to me now and what isn’t.

Having lived almost 10 years since retirement, I’ve become rather indifferent about the kinds of items you put on resumes. My ego is still helpful for taking a stand about things, but I don’t spend too much time pulled back by my history or driven to look far ahead.

That is not to say I have no idea what is ahead, though I’m not expecting to vanish soon if you get my meaning.

I have a minimal selection of regrets and recently reduced that number by apologizing to an old friend to whom I was unkind years ago. He said he’d been thinking about me and hoping I’d do just that.

I have very little in my life worth hiding, and I tend to talk about anything you want to hear from me.

I want to keep learning, which means reading and engaging with people. An instructor in a Shakespeare course I just began said he would not only question each of us orally during class but hoped to make us a bit uncomfortable when he required us to justify our conclusions; the better for our understanding to grow.

When I heard that, I felt like jumping for joy. Seriously.

I care deeply about the well-being of loved ones and friends. I am at the stage when the latter are swept away without fanfare.

Everyone I know my age must deal with one malady or another, and all with aches and pains. In general, these are uncomfortable conditions rather than mortal ones so far. We all adapt.

As an old, retired psychologist, I won’t tell the young what is ahead of them if they live as long as I have. They’d neither understand it nor believe it. Young people cannot imagine the physical changes ahead, and I don’t want to be the guy to tell them. Better they just assume it is all either magic or bad luck.

When I became a new father, I hoped my children would achieve something meaningful. But, you may discover for yourself that regardless of what they accomplish, in the end, you care about their health and happiness. Your approach to your grandchildren is much the same.

Woody Allen commented about the value of accomplishment in a conversation with Dick Cavett just after Groucho Marx died in 1977:

He had achieved everything I wanted to achieve as a comedian but he still got old and he still aged, and nothing special was going to happen because he had achieved this enormous artistic accomplishment.

What did it mean anyhow — that he was going to get a long obituary?

I tend to agree with Woody on this point.

I have little interest in what is said about me, and I don’t expect, need, or deserve anyone cutting down part of a tree to produce the paper needed to enhance my posthumous reputation in the printed news. All who survive me, whenever that happens, will be far better off with the tree.

One piece of advice I shall leave my kids is that it’s OK to tell jokes about me and to imagine I’m laughing with them. No hallucinations of me allowed, however.

Speaking of jokes, I laugh more than I ever have. If you must choose between viewing life as a tragedy or a comedy, I just told you how I prefer to vote. Not everything should be taken with grave severity.

Being a “good” person is not as easy as being kind, though kindness is necessary. It is also a matter of what you do to help repair the world. That means some combination of effort and giving away money unless you are down to your last dollar.

And yet, I don’t want you to think I would leave it at that upon “taking off.” Don’t assume the humans you care about know how you feel about them. Considering it is nice, repeat it to make sure, and keep doing so. Endlessly.

With my kids and grandchildren, the last thing I say on the way out the door after every weekly visit is, “I love you.” We hug at the same time, too. So it has been and will be.

What would be better than to offer those three final words and a hug?

OK, maybe a kiss, too.

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Greg Williams drew and uploaded the caricature of comedian and movie star Groucho Marx to Wikimedia Commons. With her generous permission, the second image is Laura Hedien’s photograph of the Chicago River at the End of December 2022: Laura Hedien Official Website.