Month: February 2019

I offered the dieting advice as if I knew what I was talking about.

“Try changing two things,” I said. “One thing in your diet and another thing in your day. Such as, no more pretzels and doing 15 minutes of daily yoga.”

It seemed like a good formula; after all, it had worked for me years earlier. I hadn’t been trying to lose weight. I had just stopped eating pretzels (“empty calories”, my wife called them) and had coincidentally started doing fifteen minutes of yoga each day. I was terrible at both, in the beginning. I craved pretzels and I was so tight that I practiced with the VCR yoga tape in the darkness of the spare room, lest my wife or children see how inflexible I was. But then, Bam! I lost more than ten pounds. Without trying to.

Based on my own history, I smiled at awaited the person receiving my advice. “It’s amazing how small changes can bring big results.”

What’s amazing is how easily I came up with the advice, how quickly I forgot I had given it, and – this is the most interesting part – how well it actually worked. A couple of months later, and a healthy amount of pounds lighter, the recipient of my dieting advice suggested that we start a website. We laughed about calling it “Two Things”.

With age comes uncertainty. Or so I often tell myself. And yet sometimes I say the darnedest things and I say them with the darnedest certainty. When those sometimes occur, I don’t deserve for them to be right. It bothers me if they in fact turn out to be right because, deep inside, I know it’s not me that should get the credit.

It’s life. It’s the cosmos. It’s some collective consciousness that occasionally channels itself through my casual commentary.

The mother of a college classmate was an actual channel. She wrote a book about it and was, unfortunately, criticized for sharing her experiences in print. Like many college students, I wanted to be, and hence I thought I was, open-minded. When I met my classmate’s mother, I acted as if being a channel for friendly consciousness from another dimension was common. It made sense, at least to me. This woman was a lively, intelligent, and insightful person. What did it matter to me if she was or wasn’t really in contact with some other form of consciousness? Besides, who was I to say that she wasn’t experiencing what it was she wrote about?

She probably was. I say that not because I myself experienced anything remotely similar to what she described in her books; I didn’t. Instead, I just decided to believe my classmate and what she told me that she herself had experienced through her mom. In short, I turned off skepticism and turned on acceptance. In return, I made a lifelong friend. And I never worried whether or not her or her mother’s reported experiences could be fact-checked as “true”.

Whose advice is it when we spontaneously offer suggestions that turn out to be good? I’m not sure. But I’ve learned some things about my own suggestions-sound-like-wisdom-because-they-worked experiences. Two things, actually.

First, my better advice is spontaneous, genuine.

And second, the stuff works best when I forget that I even gave it. No expectation, for me. Only good intention, for someone else.

It’s nice to channel some of life’s wondrous side when I am able to get myself out of the way. It’s even nicer when I never know I’m doing it.

Her name was Vivaldi but we called her Viva. She sang to us when we first met her. She was a calico cat.

I almost referred to her as “our” calico cat. That would have been wrong. Viva didn’t belong to us.

It’s strange how relationships work. We meet so many life forms, during our time in this dimension, period of consciousness, or whatever it is that we should name the human experience. Many of our fellow travelers leave a mark on us. They make us who we are. We do our best to appreciate these beings during the time we have together with them. And yet something extra is added to that appreciation after they have passed.

Yes, Viva has passed. Day after day, year after year, she was there, following one of us, and then there, sleeping on one of our beds, and then, oh yes, there, hollering early in the morning for food. She was gentle, sweet, and, mostly, undemanding. We enjoyed her. We loved her. We knew – when illness struck – that we would miss her. We are saddened to be proven right about missing her.

It’s a cliche that a human never really appreciates another person or being until she, he, or it is gone. We do recognize others, sometimes very much so, when they are alive with us. What we don’t recognize, what we can’t be expected to recognize, is what our lives will be like when those special others – whether human, pet, or other – are not physically here. It’s impossible to know that, isn’t it? And it’s also a bit different, isn’t it, similar and yet unique in its own feeling, each time one of those special others departs from us.

We all have an impact, on and for each other. So we all matter. The world is not the same when any one of us leaves it. The music changes.

I wasn’t thinking about humans and relationships when I sat at the piano last week. I was thinking about Viva. I was thinking about how fortunate my family was that she chose us those many years ago in the animal shelter. How she wouldn’t leave us alone when we walked through the cat area. How she was softly singing for our attention.

The melody that follows is how it felt for me remembering her song. It was recorded in one take. No rehearsal. Spontaneous.

Just like Viva.

It was snowing, heavily. I’d just finished helping clean the martial arts academy after our instructor training class and had bundled myself into a blue down jacket, a faded patterned hat, and a single black glove. Drats. I’d arrived with two gloves but was now leaving with only one. A check of pockets and jacket sleeves failed to turn up the missing glove.

It’s no fun when things disappear from our lives. Some of those vanishings are inconsequential; while it is annoying to lose a sock or a glove, the world still turns at the same velocity. Other disappearances are more challenging. The globe’s spin is never the same when someone we love leaves us. It is off-kilter, at least temporarily, when good health or job security slip from our grasps.

This, fortunately, was not a major loss. So I zipped, bundled up, and trundled into the cold night, both hands stuffed into their respective jacket pockets. One glove worked just fine when I cleared snow from the car’s windshield and windows. I tried to put its partner’s departure from my mind.

The subconscious, however, has its own ideas. It perseverates. It observes perturbations in the typically smooth surface of space-time and it tries to suss out their source. This guy entered the kung fu school with two gloves on his hands. He left with only one and he’d shared the duties of sweeping, mopping, and tidying up the school. The glove should not have had an opportunity to exit his life. Someone would have seen it.

Stop, subconscious! Hands, don that other glove pair there, the ones you inherited from Dad that are always sitting on the passenger seat. Eyes, focus on the road before you. Let’s all pay attention to the unplowed six inches of snow covering that road, the swirl of precipitation falling atop us and the night, the poor visibility that accompanies a winter storm.

My conscious self can be so serious. It can forget things about me, such as the enjoyment I get from driving in the snow, especially when other people aren’t doing the same thing. I used the back roads as much as I could and had a nice car-ski home. The trip required a nice blend of focus and forgetfulness.

Once out of my car, the conversation restarted. Hey, the subconscious said, where did that other glove get to? It doesn’t make any sense that he lost it. Is he sure that it’s still not stuffed into a pocket?  The conscious tried its best to ignore the banter. It focused on a little bit of shoveling by the front door, on getting dry things from the garage into the entryway, on the comfort that a nice wool hat brought to the head and ears, on the hat itself and how long I’d had it, on the worn wool of the hat covering the head and ears, on the hat, on the bulkiness of that hat, on the possibility that – no, could it be possible? – that the missing glove was sitting inside the hat, atop of my head.

No wonder the hat was keeping me so warm!

There are plenty of things that I wish my mind would leave be. Every day, usually without any effort, a steady stream of thoughts flows behind my forehead. Some thoughts I pay attention to. Others I seem to have no awareness they are happening. Occasionally, I either direct my mind to think on a particular topic or I sit down by the banks of my mind’s river and just watch the thought current bounce by. It’s nice not to always feel responsible for guiding the mind flow. It can feel reassuring to dry off on the shore.

Until, that is, when I do things without paying attention. This morning, for example, a bobcat crossed the road in front of me. I was just leaving the house, on the beginning of a drive to the airport, when I saw an animal that, at first from a distance, I assumed was a large domestic cat. As I pulled closer, I realized that this wasn’t someone’s pet. As if to prove the point, the animal stopped and a second bobcat appeared on the other side of the road. I stopped too, to let them pass. They were very polite; the second bobcat only crossed when it was clear that it was her turn. Her partner, already on the other roadside shoulder, waited patiently for her. Once across the road, they turned and looked at me. The second cat seemed to suppress an instinct to wave.

Hey, I almost heard her say before she slipped into the bushes, are you sure you put your luggage in the back of your car?

What?

The luggage? You know, those clothes you need tomorrow in Philadelphia for your meetings?

Of course I’d put my luggage in the car. Hadn’t I? To humor my new friend, I pulled off the road, not too many yards away from where she and her partner had disappeared into the bushes. Wait, I thought, were those really wild cats that had just sauntered across the morning road? They looked like kids going off to school. Had I really just seen what I saw?

Ah. How things out of sight like to sometimes stay in mind.

She was sitting on a backpack at the end of the exit ramp. Although I barely had time to look at her, I saw enough as I passed in my car to notice that a) she appeared clean, b) she held a cardboard sign on which the word “traveling” was printed, and c) she resembled a young woman I know.

The last part of that observational triad jumped at me. It made me want to stop in the middle of the road (after I had made the turn) and find a way to go back to her, to give her some money or encouragement.

That’s when I realized my bias. Because the young woman reminded me of someone I know, because she didn’t display any obvious signs of extreme poverty or substance abuse, I was more inclined to feel some connection with her, I was more open to feeling empathetic.

She was somebody’s child. That was somebody’s daughter asking for travel money at the end of an interstate exit ramp.

It’s not easy to see others through the sympathetic and caring lens of a parent. It’s especially difficult to recognize common humanity with someone who is or seems drunk, someone who is or seems high, someone who is or seems mentally unhealthy. And yet we see them every day, there, by the side of the road, or here, leaned against the walls of downtown buildings. They hold signs, often with lettering that is difficult to read even if we made an effort to do so. They aren’t typically well-groomed. They aren’t usually well-mannered. We know nothing about them; we don’t really want to know more about them. Their presence disturbs us. We feel powerless to know how we can help, if at all. We often convince ourselves not to help, not usually at least, as if that single gesture, even done just once, could cause us to wonder why we don’t repeat it or, even worse, cause us to someone touch accidentally or otherwise talk and connect with a person whose life may represent a giant heap of trouble, poor decisions, terrible luck, and general human mess.

We aren’t wrong to hesitate. We aren’t wrong not to help everyone with an outstretched hand. We aren’t wrong to pass some of these people without any action. It’s not clear who each person is and what it is they need. It’s not practical that every person we encounter is someone that each of us should help. It’s sometimes simply not safe to try to give that help when people are asking for it in high traffic locations such as exit ramps and busy interactions.

There is something we can do, however, something that doesn’t require pulling off the road or rifling through our pockets at a traffic light. It needs no money. It doesn’t require physical contact or interpersonal risk.

We can remember that all of these people – and all of us, together – are somebody’s child.

Parents aren’t perfect. Many children never know one or the other of their parents. And too many children suffer abuse at the hands of one or more of their parents. But there is something special about the relationship between a parent and child, something unique. While some of the people we see, people whose lives are stuffed into backpacks and shopping carts, while some were maltreated as children, many were not. Most likely have family who wonder about them, every day, who worry if they are safe, who hope that the world will show a bit of kindness to people – their children – lost in the sometimes hope-depleted maze of modern existence.

For each of these struggling souls, whether fretted about from afar or adrift alone in the sea of life’s struggle, I can try something new, something that takes little time and may or may not be associated with a five dollar bill or any visible gesture of recognition. I can imagine, briefly, what that person with a cardboard sign may have been like, months or years ago, before things took a turn for the worse. I can remind myself that this moment was not one they envisioned would happen when they were young, when they were innocent, and when they dared to dream.

All of us, once, were children. In some ways, all of us still are.