Branch Rickey

December 23, 2009

When the Lover is Ready the Soul Mate Will Appear

Mel Nudelman and Sally

I’ve read or heard two different meanings attributed to the Buddhist saying, “When the student is ready the master will appear.” The first suggests the universe is ordered in such a way that things happen when they are supposed to:  knowledge will be offered by events in the universe (or God) at the right time. If I am allowed to amplify the meaning slightly, the saying would also refer to the idea that when you are ready, the right person for you might also appear, not just a teacher, but your future love.

I prefer, however, another, more psychological way of thinking about this aphorism: there are always available “masters” or other persons who might be important in your life, but the “student” doesn’t notice the presence of those persons until he is ready. Or, to look at a different aspect of this notion, important knowledge is always or almost always available to us, if only we are open to it, prepared by experience or mind-set to receive it.

In other words, we must be ready to learn, to think and feel differently than we have before in order to recognize there is something important to be learned.

Those in life who have all the answers — certain of everything — will never learn anything new. Those afraid to do new things are unlikely to learn, since in order for the “master to appear” one must have one’s eyes open and actually get out of the house — the master being unlikely to call you to make an appointment, unsolicited.

But if you are humble about what you know, humble in the knowledge there is always more to learn, you might just learn something. Branch Rickey, the baseball executive, said “luck is the residue of design.” I’d add to that, so is learning the residue of design. And part of the “design” or preparation is to put yourself into situations where it is possible to be enlightened, whether by people or events or your actions; by books or theater, music or child-rearing or romance.

A good therapist is enlightened by his patients. He experiences a whole world, the world of the patient, seen through the patient’s eyes. His patients also inform him, directly or by their response to him and to the therapy, what works and what doesn’t.

People in less formal relationships than therapist and client teach us too, and enrich our lives. For example, some people believe there is only one person who represents our romantic destiny. When the person comes along they might say, by the first definition I gave you at the top of this essay, the universe or God put this person in our lives at just the right time. There is a Yiddish word that captures this notion nicely: “bashert” or “beshert.” In other words, to be “fated.” It is used when someone tries to say an event was “meant to be,” and is often employed with respect to a reference in the Jewish Talmud that God has chosen your soul mate.

My own opinion, however, is that most of us might have met, fallen in love with, and married any number of good people and had equally good lives as we have with the person whom we did marry; different, certainly, but just as good, more or less. That we didn’t marry someone else might have been due to a lack of maturity when the “other” person appeared, poor judgment about the value of the qualities in a person, or fear of rejection and heartbreak, to name just a few possible reasons.

If you protect your heart against the poisonous arrows that can harm it, you also might prevent Cupid’s arrow from reaching it.

One must be open, then, for the right person, for the master, for whatever knowledge or experience might enrich us. Vincent Van Gogh wrote the following to his brother Theo in 1880:

Many a man has a bonfire in his heart and nobody comes to warm himself at it. The passers-by notice only a little smoke from the chimney, and go their way… I am drawn more and more to the conclusion that to love much is the best means of approaching God. Love a friend, anyone, or anything you like, and I tell you, you will be on the right road to learn more. You must love with a high and intense determination, with your will and your intellect, and seek always to deepen, expand, and improve your knowledge. …”

Which makes me think of my late friend, Mel Nudelman. Mel was an old friend in both senses of the phrase — I’d known him since the ’70s and at age 87 he lost his wife of 50 years and was devastated. But, to his credit he fought through and grieved his broken heart to the point of making a new girlfriend! (A lovely woman, by the way). And so, Mel lived as he always did, learning, taking classes, counseling others, being with his children and grandchildren, making friends young and old; ever curious about politics, music, sports, medicine, and the world. All this until near the end of his days in his 90s.

Put differently, Mel was open to life and whatever it would reveal to him.

My advice then, to you and to myself, is to keep learning and keep being open to “possibility,” including the possibility there are things yet unseen, unexpected, or unacknowledged to enlighten us if only we keep our eyes open and look.

We are all students of the greatest teacher of all: life.

—

The photo above shows Mel and Sally Nudelman.

October 22, 2009

Is There Such a Thing as Bad Luck?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a5/6sided_dice.jpg/240px-6sided_dice.jpg

I once met a man called “Lucky.” My garage door had failed and he was the repair man. I saw the name on his jacket and asked him about it. He said that until about 10 years before, everything had worked out just right in his life, hence the nickname. But then the wheel of fortune turned and illness and death followed, including the death of his wife. “Lucky’s” luck had run out.

Shakespeare had a sense of such things. Thus, in Hamlet, following the deaths of Polonius and Ophelia, we read the words, “…When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.” More colloquial usage tells us that bad events come “in threes.” Same idea.

The other side of bad luck, is the good. Branch Rickey, the baseball executive, famously said,  “Luck is the residue of design.” Of course, he was talking about good luck and how careful planning and persistence helped create it, or made it look as if it had been created. And a woman of my acquaintance, someone who lost a parent early and a husband late, has only recently met the love of her life. Better to have good luck late than early, it would seem.

Still, if one reads Greek mythology, one finds Solon, a wise man, counseling that no one should consider himself (or be considered) happy, until the last possible moment of his life, because misfortune yet has time to occur. “Lucky” would agree.

Some believe that there is no such thing as luck: that you get what you deserve and you deserve what you get, a Karmic view of things. Churches of prosperity promote “right thinking and right living” in the belief that you will be rewarded in this life and the next for such action and the correct form of religious observance. And if we read the Book of Job, in the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament) we find a man who has all manner of bad fortune thanks to a friendly wager between the angel Lucifer and God.

Job had been a prosperous, religious, happy, and good man. But he is made to suffer all sorts of loss and pain so that his devotion to God might be tested. Three friends come to ask him what he could have done to deserve such misfortune. Surely, they tell him, he must have done something iniquitous. Clearly, they don’t believe in the notion of “bad luck.”

Many years ago a social psychologist name Melvin Lerner proposed something called “the Just World Hypothesis.” Lerner contended that when we observe misfortune occurring to another person, we prefer to believe that the individual has done something to deserve the negative events befalling him. But, if it is clear that he did nothing, then we will tend to devalue him personally, in effect saying, “well, maybe he didn’t do anything to cause his problems directly, but he isn’t a good guy, so, in a way, he deserves what has happened anyway.”

Lerner maintained that people do this sort of mental gymnastics unconsciously in order to fend off the notion that something bad might happen to them. “Terror Management Theory” has picked up where Lerner left off, looking at how we manage and try to mute the anxiety caused by our mortal state.

You say you don’t believe in luck? Well then, you must believe that all disease and all accidents “happen for a reason,” that the explosion of a volcano, for example, is guided by some divine hand. But when those illnesses, accidents, and misfortunes target the innocent, especially little children who are raped or tortured, you will be hard pressed to find a reason that is adequate. “Ah,” some say, “we, on earth, don’t understand God’s ways; but surely, this will be for the best in the end.” The conversation is never ending, and it is unlikely that either side will persuade the other.

Finally, there is the question of how to define when a thing is good luck or bad. According to another Greek myth, Cleobis and Biton were the two sons of Cydippe, who needed to attend a religious festival at some distance from her home. However, oxen to draw her cart were not available, and so these two good young men yoked themselves to the cart and got mom to the festival on time.

Their act of devotion to their mother won wide praise, but since they were exhausted, they soon needed to nap. Cydippe, who also had been praised for having raised such offspring, prayed that her sons would receive the best that any man could obtain. And, ironically, this wish was granted in the form of the their painless deaths as they slept, dying after having received great accolades at the pinnacle of their lives; now they would not have to suffer whatever else might come as they aged.

Good luck? You be the judge.

—

The photo of four colored dice above is the work of Diacritica, sourced from Wikimedia Commons.