Month: June 2019

Are you ahead in life?

Recently, I took a long international flight. Although I’m a relatively small person, the cramped nature of airline seating still affects me. You don’t have to have long legs or a wide torso to find air flights uncomfortable. The seating space, even on the aisle, feels tight. People bump into you. Elbows jockey for positioning on arm rests. The curvature of the seat back and head rest makes everything turtle inward. Joints get stuck. The breath is constricted. It is difficult to keep a normal alignment of anything.

So, for my recent trip, I upgraded to a seating class called premium economy. While it wasn’t a whole lot of money to upgrade, from the perspective of being cost-conscious, it wasn’t a small amount either. But it had benefits. Our section had wider seats. There was more leg room. Food was provided off a menu.

This wasn’t business class; those people pay a lot more for the pleasure of reclining and having their own toilets. And who knows what first class looks like because folks in first class turn left on boarding an international flight as the everyone else turns right. Still, this upgrade was something. It was “premium”. It had footrests. It was better.

How quickly the experience of something better can lead to the perception of actually being better! Yes, there’s a certain feeling of financial entitlement; I paid for this, you didn’t, and so don’t give me that look when I walk past you headed to use the same airplane toilet. But, sadly, there is more. There is, in some small way, the “I’ve worked hard in my life to be able to pay for this so don’t give me that look when I walk past you headed to use the same airplane toilet”. There is even – dare I say it – a sense of personal entitlement, the self-satisfied feeling of having made it further in life than others, than the masses, than everybody seated in regular economy. I am a bit ahead in life. I have succeeded. I deserve to be seated in “premium”.

The entitlement perspective on a plane has exceptions, for sure. Some people simply are bigger and need more space. Some have travel anxiety. Some are ill. Some in fact need to be alert on arrival because work or a life situation requires a heightened state of readiness after disembarkation.

Still, there is a shift in mindset. It isn’t massive, it’s not necessarily constant and it is, perhaps, barely perceptible. But the segmentation is there. For the most part, passengers on airplanes are segmented based on financial means. And financial means is, unfortunately, often associated with the self-satisfaction of feeling that you or I have “made it”. The flight travel experience can provide a very visual and palpable cue of where a person is on the western scale of life progress.

I hear you objecting. “Wait a minute! Life is more than making money. It is more than feeling physically or situationally comfortable. There is emotional growth, spiritual progress. There is purpose.”

I agree. I am, however, admitting the difficulty I sometimes have of sensing that purpose and not trying to quantify it. My experience has patterned me to seek milestones, to evaluate myself in terms of progress. I look at my daily circumstances, my work, my relationships, my bank statements, my health, the image of myself in the mirror and the depth of compassion or self-awareness that I see in my face and eyes. I look at all these things and I wonder: am I making the most of myself? Am I getting better? Am I living up to some intangible potential that is the essence of being me?

I know – there probably isn’t a score for living. I’m just admitting that I wouldn’t mind it if there was. Imagine receiving, once every year, a glimpse of that score. Wouldn’t that be nice? A number written in the clouds, a single letter grade on a postcard, even a word whispered to me in my sleep. I sometimes would take anything. It would be helpful to have an objective assessment of my value and how useful an investment I have been for the planet, for the universe, for evolution, for God, Allah, Buddha and everything the human species has ever called the prime mover in the world.

Am I approaching enlightenment? Do I have deserve a spiritual afterlife?

The core of our experience is probably not about a score – at least as long as our consciousness is permitted or is able to inhabit the human form. It is, most likely, about grappling with the absence of such an external evaluation, at least as long as we breathe. And yet something tells me that there is or there should be, after the last breath, some review, analysis, or score. I can’t accept that the heart stops, the lights go out, and there is nothing. I can’t accept that there won’t be some reckoning when I disembark from the final ride from “this” to “that-which-is-more-than-this”, that which is more than nothing.

One thing I feel certain of: my ability to sit in premium economy will not be part of such a reckoning. And I suspect that there won’t be different classes of seating arrangements on whatever form of transportation is used to take me to whatever it is that comes next.

A memory suddenly reminds me that I may be wrong about all this. Just before he died, my father told me that he was worried of how he would be received when his spirit approached the gates of heaven, as he believed in it. “Are you worried about what St. Peter will have to say?” I asked, smiling. My dad tilted his head and aimed a look at me from the depths of his soul. “I’m more worried about your mom will have to say.”

Are we supposed to help each other keep score? Is that the scoring system readily available to me, each and every day? If so – Yikes! The thought of evaluation from fellow humans, from people I love – from you – is somehow more unsettling than the notion of receiving a progress report from an all-forgiving supreme being. You are living something similar to me. Your review won’t come with any warranty, assurance, or guarantee. I think I have more life to live before I’m ready for that sort of feedback. It may be too accurate. It definitely won’t be the grade I’d like to receive.

Because I’m a guy still trying not to feel superior to people who can’t afford premium economy on an airplane. Please bare with me then while I prepare myself to stop worrying about places on life’s seating chart. I need to earn your trust. I need to get ready to offer you my seat.

We are an interesting species, homo sapiens. For all our sapience, we sure do some non-sapient things.

Take our penchant for sunbathing. Every year, the part of the global population that spends winters indoors travels to places near and far where sun is plentiful and the opportunity for skin darkening abounds. During those times, the part of the global population that spends winters outside does its best to stay indoors while the rest of us turn ourselves on sand and poolside recliners like kabobs on a barbecue.

It feels good to have the sun warm the skin, I grant you. But it is an odd arrangement, perhaps an even somewhat perverse one, to spend unpleasant mid-day hours trying to change the color of our skin.

We don’t easily feel satisfied with ourselves.

I’ve recently had a wonderful opportunity to travel to Greece. The history, culture, and gastronomy of the country and the Aegean region are rich. So too is the potential for people watching. The world gathers atop the Athens’ acropolis and on the Greek island beaches, in search of its ancestry and itself. It is fascinating to observe the challenges of people from the far reaches of the planet as they lurch and lunge to find what they often do not know they are seeking. Most appear to fall far short of perhaps idealized expectations.

You don’t need to be a linguist to witness the insecurity; it’s plainly there, visible in people’s faces, in their gestures, in the way they move. We stand atop ancient hilltops, we stare absently from beach blankets and chairs, we move along rope-lined paths without being able to touch massive columns of stacked stone and we struggle to avoid the existential questions of ourselves amidst the heat of the day, the fatigue of sore feet, and the press of fellow seekers around us. We want to be happy. We hope to be satisfied. We thirst to feel complete.

And yet we cannot do so, not fully at least. Or seldom with consistency, finality.

It’s not our faults. It is who we are. It is fundamental to the condition of being sapient.

I am learning to find comfort in the collective unease. Personally, I’ve never felt very relaxed on a beach during the mid-day. Early morning or sunset are different; that’s when people walk. The borders of day are when we aren’t so self-conscious. Mid-day on a beach, however, has often felt somewhat nightmarish to me. My body has never been the perfectly sculpted one of the ancient Greek statues. It has irregularities, imperfections. Somehow, those blemishes and flaws feel magnified in the exposure of high surf and sun. And so I move differently, sit differently, even think differently. I find it hard to not adjust a swimsuit, suck in a stomach, wonder why I’m not darker or more balanced or some other feature of physicality that I don’t like about myself. It’s as if I’m on a stage and some invisible audience is watching.

Then I realize that the audience is very visible indeed. It is me. It is you. It is each of us, observing each other, making mental notes and judgments about one another without most of us wanting to do so. We can’t, it seems, help ourselves.

But the children – ah -the young are different. They run, jump, cry, laugh, and act like people should who come to a beach for fun. They don’t fuss over their foibles and frailties. They don’t let their sapience get in their way. They are themselves.

What is it about our need for individual identity that makes it so difficult for us to find personal peace?

Some time in Greece has taught me this: the answer lies not in the sand, the sea, the sculptures, sky, or even the inner self. It isn’t buried beneath volcanic ash or written in ancient prophesy or philosophy. We can’t find it atop prehistoric hilltops or within the recesses of a caldera in the Greek Cyclades.

Because there is nothing hidden about your or my identity. It is right there, in front of us, all the time. Excavation isn’t required. No team of personal archeologists must be recruited to remove layers of physical and psychological ash. Who we are is inherent to who we choose to be. It is – we are – immanent. “Mydentity” is nothing more or less than the experience of being me.

Our sapience is ourselves.

The mice are leading us. My wife read online the other day that mice that have a certain amount of quiet time each day develop more connections in the part of brain that stores memories and strengthens focus. The conclusion? Quiet time may be good for humans too.

Now there’s something worthy of front page attention! I don’t necessarily object to the reasoning behind it. But I must admit to a certain disillusionment with the process required to reach it. To begin with, the mice all died. So the ones that were lucky enough to have a couple of hours per day of decreased environmental stimulation weren’t so lucky in the long run. They benefitted from better attentiveness and neurologic functioning only to suffer a shorter lifespan in their cages. Obviously, that’s a rough trade-off for them. It saddens me that we still raise and sacrifice mice or any other species to perform such studies.

There’s another reason though that I find the report a bit deflating. This one has to do with human insight and, dare I say, wisdom. Have we really failed to progress so far such that we need to prove the biologic importance of intermittent calm – i.e. basic peace and quiet – in our daily life?

There is plenty of medical literature for human health that reports a reliable correlation between excessive stress and poor outcomes. There is also millennia of human experience that demonstrates the same association.

When’s the last time you felt good commuting to work in heavy highway traffic or a super-crowded subway? I don’t see too many people seeking out opportunities for constant stimulation. Quite the reverse. More and more of us decry the encroachment of continuous noise in our modern lives. It is harder, in fact, to find protected moments to breathe, to withdraw, and to just be.

No worries though – business models have developed in our midst to help us learn to block out the noise. Unfortunately, much of that industry targets the unwelcome intrusion that comes from the space between our own ears. And so we teach ourselves to find calm amidst the growing cacophony through meditation, breath, and other self-soothing techniques. There’s nothing wrong with this; those skills are vital for survival in the modern world. I just wish we’d pay a little more attention to the sources of our discombobulation and discontent. It would be great if we worked together to turn down the volume, even just a bit, of the 21st century.

I can hear the scientific rebuttal.

“The mouse experiment helps prove that there is a connection between regular periods of peace and the health of our brains!”

Ok. But why is that a big advance?

“Because this could demonstrate the importance of interventions such as breaks at work, or quiet zones in hospitals, or rest for the elderly!”

Hmmm …

“You don’t understand at all. This is evidence! People who make decisions about policy and payments will have to listen. All of us will have to listen. The brain is plastic! It can change. Positive habits directly relate to positive brain health. People need to know about this research!”

Many years ago, medical science showed that support groups for women with breast cancer improved outcomes. When I scratched my head about the need for such a study, I was told that the results would change insurance reimbursements. Well – they didn’t. Then I learned that the researchers didn’t expect to see benefit from the support groups. They didn’t think that such activities “worked”.

We haven’t come as far as we think we have. Think about it. We’re still experimenting with the brains of rodents in order to learn more about our own. We’re still playing the human value game by the rules of economics. We’re still designing studies to demonstrate what it is we already should know, subjecting what we used to know to a different set of criteria.

I’m not saying that learning about the intricacies of who we are and how we work isn’t worthwhile. I am saying that we should be careful about how we define worth before relying on imperfect so-called objective studies to do that defining for us. We may put our core values at risk.

Despite this, I offer a big thanks to our four-legged friends who participated in this research. While I wish that you might have lived your days under your own schedules for quiet time, I appreciate the new terminology you’ve given me for communicating my need for some peace and calm in my own life. Why just this morning, when I was staring into space and my wife worried that I wasn’t feeling well, I was able to gently whisper “Mouse time” in response to her concern.

She knew immediately what was – or wasn’t – happening inside me. And she winked and left me to my mindless staring.

I often think about one thing while doing another. You probably are familiar with the experience. You are brushing your teeth and suddenly are remembering something you did or didn’t do without focusing any attention on the feel of the toothbrush bristles or the technique you may have of brushing first one quadrant, followed by another. Then, “absent-mindedly”, you wash your mouth and move off to another activity, such as selecting socks or putting things into your pockets and, the next thing you know, you’re standing at the front door ready to go, patting yourself down, wondering if you have everything you need, including your keys.

“Did I brush my teeth?” you may ask yourself.

There is nothing absent-minded about this experience. Your mind has been present – and very active – the entire time. It just hasn’t been connected and moving in synch with your actions, hasn’t been consciously considering your physical movements and your motives for those movements. And so you can’t recall what socks you are wearing, what items you’ve stuffed into your pockets, and whether or not you’ve completed your usual morning routines, such as brushing your teeth. You may not even be able to recall what mind musings were so important when they occurred that they distracted you from the actions of your hands, feet, and body.

You’ve been on automatic, we like to say. You’ve acted reflexively, mechanically. There has been no thought associated with your movements.

But has your automaticity been purely physical? You’ve had thought, not been without it. However, because that thought has been dissociated from physical action, you may have little awareness of what you were physically doing during that time and hence – later – weak memories of what you have done. You have been, to coin a term, on “mentamatic”.

There is an almost instinctual, involuntary quality to mentamaticity. Like sleep, if we release to it, it just happens. I can be typing away on my computer and suddenly I am off into worry about the safety of one or both of my daughters. The rain tapping at the window may be the instigator; it reminds me of the weather when someone I love was in an auto accident. Without hesitation, an emotional switch is flipped deep inside me and the neural circuitry of concern begins to race in one or another portion of my brain. I separate from words and the connection between awareness and my fingers resting against the computer keyboard. The magnet of mental imagery and its language of hope, fear, and “what-if” lifts my fingertips into the air pending conscious reassociation of mind and body in collaborative intent. When that reassociation happens, then ah, here I am, sitting in front of my blog. Down go the fingers again. Words appear before my eyes. I relax back into the stream of synchronization that some call awareness.

“Be gone, mentamaticity!” I may command. All will be ok. Or it won’t. I can’t control it, everything, or most things around me. I can barely control which hand holds the toothbrush every morning and night.

Wait. Did I brush my teeth this morning?

There are techniques we can learn to manage the speed of our thought flittering. Meditation is one; it teaches us to sit back and watch thoughts pass by, as if we are observers on benches next to the raceway of our minds. These techniques are useful. They help us slow. They remind us to breathe. Unfortunately, at least for me, they do not always connect me with my movements, motions, and activities. Calming the mind is vital for health. Our brains, and the vehicles of thought transport traveling through them at high speed, need rest, just as our muscles do. They also need guidance, direction. Mine sometimes needs a neural traffic cop with a whistle and a large red-gloved hand to control the flow and direction of my mental traffic.

Pick up the toothbrush. FWEET. No, you can wait, first meeting of the day! Pay attention to the toothpaste tube. HALT. Engine off, fear of dying without doing something in the world! Cap off the tube, squeeze toothpaste onto the brush, notice if the brush touches the end of the tube. Stay where you are, question about spread of germs from tube to brush to tube to brush to … FWEET! Quiet! Just brush your teeth. First top, then bottom, then side, then spit. I am brushing my teeth. I am not fixing the world. I am not staying alive. I am not slowing down the cars that are threatening my family as they drive when I’m not there. I am here. I am not there. All you thoughts are about there. Get back to thinking about here. And don’t forget to make your lunch today. No, wait, I’ll be in a meeting and lunch will be provided. FWEET. Teeth! Toothpaste. Let the meeting and lunch go through, mentamaticity. Off you go now. I’m putting the cap back on the toothpaste tube. I’m rinsing my mouth with water. It’s good to have clean teeth. It’s good to have lunch, to pray for protection for my family, to have a purpose in life. It’s good to also put the toothbrush back where I store it. FWEET. You can go now, fear of failing. I’m going to figure out what socks match these pants, what things go into my pockets, and what sandwich I’ll bring to the office, just in case lunch isn’t provided. I’m also going to apologize to my wife for ignoring her in the kitchen a few minutes ago and I’m going to text my daughters to remind them to please drive safely today. And, gosh, look, the rain has stopped. Maybe the clouds will clear and it will be sunny today. Maybe I won’t need my rain jacket. What time is it anyway? Do I have my phone? What about my keys? Ah, well, at least I started the day knowing that I brushed my teeth while I was doing so.

Automation is part of our lives. It is part of our actions and part of our thinking. Occasional pauses to notice both the automation and mentamaticity, and to try to synch body time with mind time and vice versa, are good. They remind us that we live among the spaces of voluntary and involuntary being. And the more we experience the feel of those spaces, the more in harmony with the world we may become.

I say goodbye this week to my sixth decade. It’s not a sad occasion; I’m pretty lucky to have had a wonderful first sixty years of life. I’m ready for number seven. When the clock strikes midnight on Tuesday, I aim to transition gracefully into my next decade of breathing and being through a regimen of four S’s: sleeping, smiling, and simple striving.

Routines can offer magnificent respite to the vicissitudes of our days. This isn’t the type of insight I might have reached during decades number 3, 4, or even 5. Honestly, it took number 6 for me to understand that pace itself can bring peace. Sleep – on a reasonable schedule – is one of those core biological needs that we resist or ignore at our peril, especially during the middle years. If you are in any way driven to excel like I have been, getting seven or eight hours of sleep per day can seem wasteful. You may, consequently, cut some corners. You may be proud of that pruning, even brag about it to your friends and family. “I don’t need all that time in bed,” you might boast. “I can get by with five or six. That gives me extra time to do more things, to learn more, to enjoy more of life.” Well, decade number six taught me the ego-centric folly of that attitude. Millenia of evolution have programmed us to live longer and healthier if we sleep sufficiently and with regularity. I function better when I give sleep its due.

So please don’t send me any texts of well-wishing at 12:01am on Tuesday; I’ll be snoozing. I will gladly welcome such communications after sunrise.

Smiling is the second ‘S’ of my plan number 7. When I examine the creases of my face each morning, it’s painfully clear that I haven’t exercised my mirth muscles enough during decades one through six to sufficiently counteract the drag of gravity, muscular laxity, and worry. I’ve laughed plenty, sure. But smiling – from the heart – is different than chuckling from the intellect. I like a good joke with the best of us. That’s been good for my heart and my soul. It’s also kept the larger muscles of my face limber. It has not, however, trained the smaller facial muscles and neural patterns that control my ability to broadcast kindness, support, and positive intent with my eyes, with the lines of my cheeks and lips. That type of smiling is proactive. A joke stimulates a response; it is externally-driven. A mindset of kindness lifts my view, helps me see through a different lens. It is, fundamentally, about identity. And that comes from within.

So I aim to smile more from my insides during the next ten years. Success will hopefully smooth some of the features of frown that accompany physical aging. More importantly, it may soften and rejuvenate internal patterns of perspective that may, like my cervical discs, have become somewhat arthritic over time. Radiance emanates.

Which brings me to the last two ‘S’s for my seventh decade of sun cycles: simple striving. Whereas sleep and smiling may be somewhat easier to achieve through a procedure of physical reminders and existential hygiene, this pair of curvy guideposts requires more in the way of moment-oriented awareness, balanced in the broader context of personal purpose and being. I still have goals. I still need goals. I still need to work to achieve those goals. And yet decade number six has a message for number seven about the nature and intensity of those goals: keep them simple.

There are plenty of things that I have yet to accomplish in my life. If I’m being honest, most of what I’ve truly achieved has been fairly limited in both scope and importance. Yes, I’ve been fortunate in career endeavors. I’ve been even more fortunate in health and happiness. But many, if not most, of those so-called successes are more attributed to the people who have taught, guided, loved, and come into my life over the past sixty years than to my own skill, decision-making, or abilities. Great prosperity – in family, friends, and mentors – has shaped and nurtured me more than goal-oriented effort. Genetic luck, in partnership with some personal habits, has sheltered me from an excess of health challenges. Providence, much of it divine, has held me closer.

There is much that I don’t understand about the nature of life, consciousness, and human existence. Book learning, journaling, and deep thinking can only get a person so far. It is increasingly evident to me that there is more to our world that what we sense. There is something else – Spirit. Religions may have imperfectly formulated the framework for approaching and appreciating the nature of spirituality. They have been, nonetheless, expressions of the hope, joy, and possibility that is nestled within the essence of the spiritual. There is grace in our world. There is wonder. I don’t pretend to any special insight or knowledge about the nature of God, Allah, Buddha, or our other limited references to the divine. But I do know that help is often there when I ask for it. And I do feel that I can be part of how that divine – Spirit – helps others, if I only keep myself open and if I maintain a certain simplicity and humility of intention and purpose. Spirit has flowed through others to sustain and nurture me. Perhaps, if I try to keep my strivings to be relatively unadorned and uncomplicated, that same Spirit can flow through me to benefit others in the years ahead.

Thank you, decades one through six! You have been very kind to me. I hope to begin to return that kindness during number seven.