Magical Thinking

In another year, the date will be 2 22 22. Will something special happen on the day when the 2’s all come up together? Will something special happen on this day when we are only one digit off from full numeric alignment? Let’s imagine Yes.

Let’s imagine that today something special will happen but that it might not occur in any recognizable form. Like the small event that happens early in the novel, the significance of which is only revealed toward the end. And only later do you get to look back over what has happened and say ‘Oh, now I get it, that was the turning point.’

It’s kind of a lovely feeling, when the brain rearranges the furniture of the mind and a new room, a new life is created. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and all that. These maps of the mind that masquerade as the world we live within. This life that is invisibly co-created in each moment.

Our understanding is only ever partial. Our small conscious minds alive in the middle of the vast cosmos. The vast cosmos alive in the middle of our small conscious minds. Outside only appears because of inside. Inside appears only because of outside.

My Zen teacher used to say ‘Subject needs object. Object needs subject.’ There is no self, no perceiver without something to perceive. I know myself only when I meet something that is not myself. The thing perceived, the object, is a mutual creation arising spontaneously in my neural circuitry as I receive bits of information from the world around and within me.

In Buddhist philosophy this mutual creation is called dependent arising (pratitya samutpada). It’s a fancy word for the natural and subtle process of awareness. (One that has been supported by current brain research – see once again Lisa Barrett’s How Emotions are Made)

But back to the notion that we might imagine that something special will happen today because we are only one digit off from all 2’s in the numeric writing of today’s date. Of course, this is a silly notion based on superstition and magical thinking. Why would all 2’s be any different from any other random combination of digits?

We could also say that any numerical (or other) representation of the date of today is magical thinking. Days don’t really contain numbers. The first day of the year is just another rising of the sun, albeit usually a cold one for those of us in the northern hemisphere. February is just eight letters strung together that we have agreed, here in the English speaking world, that refers to a series of days that come after January.

When we look closely at time and language and the myriad social agreements that we take for granted, it all gets pretty squishy. The whole world, it turns out, is pretty much a magical and jointly agreed upon construction. So why not appreciate and play along with this ongoing impossibly and constantly constructed universe?

For my part, I will set reason just a little to the side today and keep my eyes open and my senses alert for something really special—some intimation of radical change coming, some sense of a hitherto unrecognized gift or talent, some precious aspect of life which I never noticed before.

And I suspect the looking (not even the finding) will take me through the wardrobe to Narnia once again.

Asking For Help

I woke up this morning wondering what kind of help I need.

This is a harder question than it seems, especially for those of us who were trained in the value of independence. As a child, I looked forward to being an adult so that I would no longer need to ask for help. Being dependent always felt like something I needed to fix. The message I heard from grown-ups in my life was ‘Take care of yourself and don’t be needy. Be a big boy.’

Well, I’m as big as I’m going to get and find myself still dependent on the people around me. Of course, I appreciate this dependence more than I used to. Needing others, asking for help, giving help are part of what it means to be alive. Marshall Rosenberg, creator of ‘Nonviolent Communication’ claimed that our needs are our gifts to each other. We are, he wrote, hard-wired to receive great satisfaction from helping each other.

This doesn’t make sense to me when I think about my own needs which often feel like they must be an imposition on others. But when I think about times I’ve been able to make a real difference in someone else’s life, I feel a sense of fulfillment and gratefulness that I was allowed to give something of value. We all want to be able to give something of value to people we care about and to the world we live in. Few things are as satisfying as making a difference. While parenting young children (and older children too) is incredibly demanding, it is also incredibly satisfying. To be able to support and protect and guide another human being is a deep privilege.

The traditional model of giver being the powerful one and the receiver being the weaker one who is in debt relies on a kind of common-sense theoretical thinking that is not really true. There are different roles and different levels of capabilities and influence, but beneath these differences is a web of interconnection where all the roles are necessary and equally valuable.

But many of us are more comfortable being the helper rather than the helpee. We’d rather be the one being thanked than the one expressing gratitude. We’d rather not be beholden to anyone for their kindness. But the truth is that we’re all dependent on each other’s consideration. Blanche DuBois said it memorably in A Streetcar Named Desire: ‘I have always relied on the kindness of strangers.

So if we all need each other and depend on each other, can we give up our need to appear to be grown-up and independent? Let’s be grown-up and interdependent. And maybe, if we get really advanced on the path, we can even be grown-up and needy. But that is probably a higher level of development than most of us can aspire to.

What is the help I need? How can I clarify and ask for what I really want? It’s precarious business, to be self-aware of our incompleteness, our longing, our dreams. What do I really want? What do I really need?

When I was writing my first book, I asked for help from someone who worked with aspiring writers to support them in clarifying their ideas and intentions. She coached me to ask two different groups of friends and colleagues to come together to help me understand more deeply what it was that I was trying to say. It was a little awkward to make the calls, but every person I asked was happy to help out by being part of the process. And the two sessions I convened gave me information about myself that I could not have received any other way and were critical to my discovery of the book that it turned out I had already written.

Part of the trick of asking for help is really meaning it. That’s part of the danger as well. Asking for help when the stakes are low (‘I could really take care of this myself.’) is quite different from asking when you really mean it.

So the question with me this morning is ‘What is it I could ask for that would make the biggest difference in my life?’ Or, perhaps starting a little less grandiose, ‘What is one next step on my path and what is the help I need to take it?’

Discovering New States of Being

1. It snowed all day yesterday. Not in a serious kind of way, but more as if point were atmospheric rather than accumulative. Maybe three or four inches of the fluffiest crystals landed around the Temple. Not a lot by Worcester standards. Still it was pretty and enough to have to do something about. The gasoline driven environmental polluter snow blowers which have saved my back and given me hours to sit inside instead of shoveling endlessly came out occasionally, but a couple quick passes with a snow shovel worked as well for most of the clean-up.

As this morning dawns, trees are laden and streets are white. It’s a lovely sight, this monochrome coating. As if some child was charged with whitewashing the world but only managed to get the topsides of things before she lost interest and moved onto something else. Vertical surfaces, tree trunks and sides of houses are their natural color while roofs and branch tops and sidewalks are all fluffy white.

2. I woke early this morning without much feeling. I always check, first thing, when I’m just beginning to know I am me, to see how I am doing. ‘What is the state of the Dave?’ as a friend of mine likes to inquire. I begin with bodily sensations, then go on to emotions and thoughts. It’s a fuzzy process as there is no specific moment when I’m asleep and then suddenly become awake. Some hazy process lies in between—a place where the snow of sleep is not deep or restricting but is still everywhere to be muddled and waded through before arriving definitively in the land of consensual reality.

3. The in-between places, the boundary places, the liminal places are the most interesting. And since nothing is really fixed or permanent, life is, essentially, only and always in-between. Though the words I use imply clear (and useful) distinctions, my actual experience is much more fluid, borderless and inclusive.

Awake is a state. Asleep is a state. Then there is the vast expanse of waking up and falling asleep. Even within awake and asleep, there are infinite variations. A friend has a watch that charts her sleep. She can read out the story of her night on her computer screen the next morning as a line of peaks and valleys with some plateaus along the way. I would suspect any measure of ‘awake’ would also have to include the sluggishness of the late afternoon and the arousals of various events and times of the day.

4. In the book HOW EMOTIONS ARE MADE, Lisa Feldman Barrett makes a compelling case for emotions as complex constructions rather than fixed responses in regions of the brain that are triggered by outside events. Things don’t happen and ‘make us’ feel a certain way. We experience emotions based on the concepts and words we have learned. We interpret the signals we are receiving from the various parts of our body and make creative guesses about what it is and how we should respond. In order to appreciate the subtlety and variation of our emotions lives, Ms. Barrett encourages expanding our awareness of the particularity of our moment-to-moment experience, learning new words that describe specific emotional states, and even making up words that describe specific new states.

5. This morning, as I lay awake in my warm bed on a cold winter morning, I wasn’t particularly tired nor particularly anything at all as far as I could tell. I was just slightly reluctant to get out of bed even though I was looking forward to a quiet morning of writing, sipping tea and looking out the window at the new fallen snow.

I have decided that this feeling of slight to moderate disinclination to get out of bed should be called an instance of beddrag. (Pronounced as a combination of bed and drag with the emphasis on the first syllable.) Beddrag is the feeling of reluctance to exit the warm comfort of the horizontal life of dreaming and enter into the vertical exertions of daily life. It doesn’t refer to the dread of facing life again or the exhaustion that sometimes accompanies morning, but just that almost sweet disinclination to change state. Perhaps one might even experience some beddrag after reading a good book in a comfortable chair and then having to get up to get on with life.

Exploring with this new concept, we might even begin to distinguish different versions of beddrag based on the temperature in the room, whether one is sleeping in flannel or regular sheets, whether one sleeps alone or with a four-legged or two-legged partner(s). A whole new universe opens up with one word.

6. The morning light has fully arrived. Snow and icicles decorate the neighborhood. It’s quiet and cozy here on the couch looking out through the windows. I’ll just enjoy a few more moments of beddrag before I get up to go out to clear the front steps.

Waiting in Line

My partner and I are now waiting in line with millions of other Massachusetts residents aged 65 to 75 to get an appointment for the vaccination shots now ‘available’ to protect us from COVID-19. Our official eligibility began yesterday. I dutifully switched on my computer at five a.m. when I first got up, naively thinking I might be ahead of the rush. The web site crashed several times over the first two minutes I was on. Apparently I was not the only baby boomer up early to catch the worm.

We baby-boomers are a fairly entitled generation. Born between 1946 and 1956, we grew up in America’s post-war boom of jobs, houses and optimism but also remember hiding under our desks in elementary school to ‘practice’ for the looming nuclear war. We came into adulthood with soaring rates of college attendance, the Vietnam war, Woodstock, and LSD. Some of us thought we were going to change the world from the sordid commercially driven oppressive social structure it was to a utopia of peace and love. The adults of our country had made a mess of things and we were sure we were just the ones to correct the wrongs and live into the dawning age of peace and love.

Many of my friends in college had long hair and we were suspicious of anyone who was over 30 or wore a tie. We were arrogant, innocent and incredibly hopeful. But, after often circuitous routes, most of us became lawyers, doctors, entrepreneurs, teachers, insurance agents, artists and members of the professional class of power and privilege. I too eventually got a full-time job and wore a tie and joined the local Rotary Club.

A close friend, just a year older than me, became (along with millions others) a Trump supporter, perhaps seeing in his anti-establishment authoritarian message a new hope for what we had dreamed of fifty years ago. The age of Aquarius has certainly slipped through of our grasp. Though we have all done the best we could, the crises of environmental degradation, economic oppression, and institutional racial injustice seem worse than when we came into adulthood.

But however my generation has failed or succeeded, I still wanted to get a vaccine. On and off yesterday, I dutifully went to the web site to find an appointment. The site mostly crashed, though occasionally I got messages that some appointments were available in scattered locations across the state. For twenty tantalizing minutes there were three spaces available at a site down the street at Worcester State College for Saturday afternoon. They eventually disappeared. My efforts were slightly frustrating and ultimately fruitless. But not unexpected.

So I’m thinking this morning about the spiritual virtue of patience, the third of the six paramitas of Mahayana Buddhism. One writer describes the paramitas as the ‘bases of training’ for those of us wanting to wake up to the fullness of life. (The other paramitas are: generosity, discipline, effort, meditation, and wisdom.)

I suspect, if I am disciplined in my effort, I will eventually get an appointment. In the meantime, I’d rather not disturb myself by feeling righteously entitled, anxious, left out, or angry. All those are possible and perhaps inevitable, but this might also be an excellent time to practice ksanti: tolerance, forbearance, acceptance, endurance and patience.

I’ll be interested to see how well my plan works out.

Profession of Love

Maybe he was inspired by Valentine’s Day. Maybe because I hadn’t seen him for a while, I’ll never know. But he finally said it to me. I know he’s felt it for a long time, but until yesterday he hadn’t managed to say the words. It’s funny what a difference it can make when someone finally finds the words. You may know they care about you, you may know you’re in a serious relationship, but until the words ‘I love you’ are spoken, something is missing.

We were just hanging out. It was the late afternoon and we were sitting across from each other drawing on the large white board that covered the whole surface of the small table between us. We were so focused on our lines and colors, so physically engaged by our co-creation that sometimes our heads would nearly touch as we leaned in to fill the white space. He was into large and quickly repeated purple circles. I was focusing more on smaller orange and red highlights. We would draw with our erasable crayons for a while, then he would decide it was time to clean the board. I let him take the lead.

He began to notice that the color trails left by the crayons on the board would actually color the damp paper towel that he used for erasing. I suspected, as he vigorously wiped away lines and images, that he was investigating the transitory nature of life as well as the surprising possibilities of the conservation of matter. I myself was pondering the de Kooning drawing that Rauschenberg erased in 1953 and is still on display at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. We kept our thoughts to ourselves and I wondered if our erased white board was perhaps the best display of the ocean of feelings between the two of us. But I digress.

I was singing softly as I drew. Sometimes I would stop and he would happily demonstrate his knowledge by filling in a word or two. For some reason, I was inspired to render a very slow version of that perennial classic ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.’ Other people were in the living room with us, but they were reading or computing or doing something. ‘Up above the world so high.’ In my mind, our simple activity filled the universe, drawing and singing and being together. ‘Like a diamond in the sky.’ Of course we are not special, thousands and millions of humans are enacting this ancient drama of care and creation at each moment, yet the mystery and preciousness of it all. ‘How I wonder what you are.’

I finished and paused and looked at my grandson—a small miracle of universal proportions. In the silence, he looked up at me and said ‘I love you.’ Softly. And I said, ‘I love you too.’ Softy.

Having spoken our truths and exposed our deepest feelings, we went back to drawing and erasing and singing as if nothing had happened—as if we had not both been forever changed by this one passing and indelible moment.