Month: March 2021

It has happened to us all. We are thinking of something else, or sometimes thinking of nothing at all, and an idea pops into our minds, a solution to some challenge or problem we have. For me, this typically happens when I am engaged in something physical, such as hiking and, when my knees used to cooperate, running. Or I can be bending over the pick up a dropped piece of paper, taking a shower, or just walking across a parking lot. My body is active, my mind at rest. I am not trying to avoid thoughts. I just don’t have them, have forgotten to either think or to worry about thinking too much. There is no meditative state being sought. There is just movement. And then, almost as if it is placed inside me by an invisible hand, there is an idea.

That’s your subconscious, you might be thinking. Well, sure, maybe. But using the word “subconscious” to refer to the vast uncertainty and murky experience that lies beneath the level of my awareness is like calling everything under the surface of the earth ‘subterranean’. It is little more than a name for a part of the world, its matter, or its presentation that we want to reference. It tells us nothing about that space or place. I have conscious awareness. And I have stuff beneath or separate to that conscious awareness. While I suppose it is useful to acknowledge that the separate stuff exists, it does not advance my understanding, access to, or leverage of that stuff. It merely frames the subconscious as a proverbial “black box”.

This argument, however, ignores the possibility that you and others have insight into the subterranean world of the mind and ideas. Because I bet you have theories and a set of your own experiences.

You might counter: Mark, your brain, mind, or whatever we want to call it likes to process problems when you aren’t consciously thinking about them. In other words, I am thinking about something when I’m not thinking about it.

Sure, I’m open to that. At work, I sometimes tell colleagues that a particular issue, something that feels serious and weighty but does not need an immediate decision, is a one, two, or three ‘night sleep’. We all identify with this, the occasional need to “sleep on” something. Doing so relieves the pressure of immediate analysis. It can help establish some emotional distance with a situation that, at first glance, does not seem to offer good choices. Or perhaps the options are clear but there is unhappiness or upset associated with them. We want to choose wisely. So we request the gift of time associated with one or more rotations of the earth beneath its sun. For me, particularly thorny issues require seven nights of rest. The extra time buffers the need to choose from the emotions associated with both selecting and then implementing that choice.

You are simply placing the problem into a queue for your mind to address when you aren’t paying it attention.

Uh, well, maybe. If the concept is that the brain processes and “thinks” without my awareness in a directed and intentional way, that sections of the brain work on difficulties with independent agency in the same way that operational components of a large organization tackle and report on assignments they receive, I can accept that such a process is possible yet I must admit to feeling a bit unsettled by it. It conjures to my internal image-making a set of subcontractors at work inside my head, each responsible for different tasks, all addressing those tasks in ways about which I have, and can have, no visibility or oversight. “Here’s a problem”, the main contractor I call my consciousness instructs its subs. “Report back when you have it sorted.” Then I sleep, have dinner, and carry on with the routines of my life while some tiny, immaterial parts of me busily process, sort, reprocess, and finalize.

No, no, you are framing this the wrong way. Those aren’t mini-consciousnesses. You should consider them more as software programs. Your brain is one large supercomputer. You give different parts of it scripts, bits of code, and it runs those code sets through neural networks that, in sum total, we call your mind. There is no conscious or subconscious. There is no mind at all. There is only the physiology of neuroanatomy and its intricately dynamic relationship with immunochemistry through a complex array of electrical and intra-cellular neurotransmitters. What you experience as your mind is none other than the experience of your own unique constellation of connections, synapses, and sub-cellular communications.

Yikes. Who said that? That’s not the direction I intended this blog post to head. I was expecting to share examples of great scientific and philosophic breakthroughs, stories of how individual people pondered, toiled, and set to solve sticky problems who were unable to do so with intention, chalk, or pen only to somewhat miraculously land on solutions when their attention was pre-occupied with daily life. I also thought I’d share my own recent experience of encountering solutions for unsettling circumstances when I have reached up during a stretching pose or massaged my scalp with shampoo while taking a shower. I wanted instead to speak about the immense potential of our innate ability to connect with sources outside of our physical bodies. Could our internal breakthroughs in thought sometimes arise from flickers of inspiration lit by our spiritual selves and how those parts of our being interact non-atomically with the immanence of other spirits, other consciousness, the collective spirit, and even God itself?

My fingers felt the need to rush those last few sentences onto the page, lest the voice or perspective that represents pure physiology establish connection with the keyboard on my lap before the intuition that motivates my imagination got its chance to express itself.

Swiftly though I recall – how I do this I don’t know – that light is both particle and wave, that existence is both solitary and communal, that experience is both explicable and ineffable. And in turn it seems fitting to mention how the German scientist August Kekule reported, in the nineteenth century, that his discovery of the ring structure of benzene was the result of a daydream involving a snake seizing its own tail while he was riding the upper deck of a horse-drawn omnibus in London. Some lampooned Kekule for sharing what sounded like an outlandish story. All the rest of us identify with the experience of ideas arriving inside our awareness seemingly of their own accord. We aren’t trying, like Kekule, to figure out the chemical structure of the world. We are only trying to sort out the meaning of life and the source of its inspirations. If the answer to that search involves a combination of mental software, physical hardware, and incorporeal engagement with a marvelous essence outside and within the experience I have come to know as “me”, well, I, for one, can’t wait to stop thinking about it.

Some of us are always looking ahead – for the next step, the next job, the recognition we deserve, the day when our value will be appreciated, our potential realized. This is more than simple longing for greener pastures. This is desire for fulfillment, longing for arrival. Today is never satisfactory. I myself am never fully satisfactory.

Which is why I was so intrigued by a recent conversation I had with someone named G.E.. What did G.E. stand for?

Good enough.

Although I figured that the initials represented something to the contrary, I decided not to push the matter. It’s not every day that you meet someone with such a moniker. Besides, I liked knowing that there was someone like G.E. who was fully filling their own shoes.

“How do you know when you’re good enough?” I asked.

Apparently accustomed to the question, G.E. offered me a long, patient look. It was the sort of visual survey that made you think you might answer your own question and, when you did, the person to whom you had originally posed the question would nod and smile. But I don’t like being treated like someone who knows better than I show and so was having none of the tactic. Name yourself worthy of self-satisfaction and you need to go first. Eventually, G.E. did.

It doesn’t mean I’m satisfied.

Silence still, on my part.

It just means I’m not dissatisfied.

The “dis” had been emphasized, gently, no doubt to help assure that I caught the differentiation. Double negatives, however, can leave me singly uncomfortable. It’s like announcing that an afternoon’s weather is not unpleasant. Why not just say it’s pleasant? Is there any other option?

I don’t see the point of being good enough, I wanted to say. It feels like a compromise, a decision not to try to excel, to improve. Instead I inhaled and posed: “Can you describe what it feels like – to not be dissatisfied?”

Seeking to avoid a direct challenge to my new discussant, I draped my words in a non-confrontational tone. A passer-by who overhead me could have assumed we were considering the ambient temperature.

A tuft of G.E.’s hair lifted gracefully in the breeze. The response seemed to float with that wisp of that browny gray.

It feels like release.

By now it had occurred to me that G.E. was an embodiment of non-attachment, a walking incarnation of non-desire, someone who repudiated suffering through a choice to accept circumstances as they presented themselves. I’ve read about such people. I’ve even aspired to be like them. Unfortunately, I have this mental script that inserts itself in my inner dialogue whenever I attempt to adopt the demeanor of a seemingly carefree spiritual traveler. Our actions are meaningful, this script screams out. The universe depends on our decision-making and efforts. I don’t have to resolve myself to pain, mediocrity, and the status quo. Would not doing so represent capitulation, a lackadaisical resignation to laissez-faire living and existence?

I shifted my gaze above G.E., narrowing my eyes as if something that had been set loose needed to be reconnected. “I choose to fight the good fight,” I said slowly. “I choose to refuse complacency.”

It suddenly occurred to me that G.E. might enjoy playing the role of provocateur, offering different answers for varying situations when asked what the letters G and E stood for. Good enough, for me. It could also be Great Expectations, for you. Or Grand Enthusiasm, for another. Even Galloping Ego.

Do you think we should teach our children to be good enough in this world?

This was not the rejoinder I was expecting. My instinct was to distract, mostly because the question was a bit destabilizing to the mindset I was trying to hold. I exhaled, deciding to let the fullness of the inquiry penetrate. Why was I so resistant to the phrase “good enough”?

A memory arrived. When my oldest daughter was still riding in a car booster seat, she told me, quite emphatically, how it was wrong to aim for perfection in life, whether it be at school, home, or in any pursuit.

“You can’t be perfect,” my daughter declared. “It’s not good to try to be something you can’t be.”

I remember looking at her face in the rear view mirror, seeing the defiance that was set in the angle of her jaw. “We can try to always get better though, can’t we?” I asked.

“You need to be careful,” my little girl replied. “Because you can just get disappointed.”

We teach our children, and we expect each other, to be good. We want to offer sufficient good such that we contribute in a positive way to the world and to its movements. How then did the term ‘good enough’ come to signify an average performance? And what was wrong with that anyway? Besides, there might be another way to use the expression. It could be interpreted as bringing ‘enough good’ to others that I, you, or anyone are part of the overall improvement project we call the earth.

I could feel G.E. watching me. I could also sense the other memory banks of my years spinning in search of examples where doing good, of being good, had definitely been “enough”. And I could almost hear the ache of countless humans on the planet wondering, daily if not more frequently, whether they themselves mattered, whether they personally made a difference, whether their unique lives and existence was meaningful, was, in fact, enough. One thing was wonderfully, unexpectedly clear: most of us, especially me, and most of our experiences, despite our naive desires to the contrary, are extraordinarily, and somewhat magnificently, average.

“We should teach everyone that they are good enough,” I told G.E. “Because that way, together, we can be better.”

The perfect is within the whole, not the individual. The individual just helps make the whole possible. The contribution to the whole is what manifests the possibility of the perfect out of the joy of the sufficiently good.

Ah, the things life has left to teach. Thanks, G.E.! Today, I’m trying to be pretty darn good enough. What a gratifying experience.

When someone leaves the planet, returning is not easy. There is the desire to be back, yes, the will and yearning to have feet on terra ferma, to have hands intertwined with those who are loved. But the process of returning is risky. There is the atmosphere, the angle of descent, and the performance of the heat shield on the spacecraft. There is the landing itself. And there is the departure from a new perspective afforded by leaving the earth’s surface, the requisite return to a life that will forever be different because of the experience of suspending that life, even temporarily, while traveling outside the bounds of our planet’s gravity.

A new sense of normal must be found.

So it is with our species as we exit the first (and hopefully last) year of a pandemic. While we may not have broken the bounds of the earth’s pull in the past twelve months, we have certainly been required to witness the tearing of ties with much of what we previously considered “normal”. Too many have died; it is estimated that at least a third of Americans know someone whose life was lost to the virus. Most of rest of us have experienced fear, been tested for the virus, or have ourselves fallen ill and recovered. All of our lives have been disrupted.

How then should we re-enter the world if and when it is declared to be “post-pandemic”?

While it is easy to adopt the language of return, the perspective that we must and will get back to normal, I hope we will collectively try to do better. Because the old normal was over-rated. Yes, there are some basic daily rhythms and freedoms of movement we would all like to again experience. And we should. But there were some other restrictive, unfair, and inequitable aspects of our previous life – things that remain part of our current world – which have been starkly exposed under the glare of viral illness and death. Despite many advances in science and technology, we remain, unfortunately, a flawed society, within and across our political boundaries. There are fundamental structural challenges and regrettable hatreds that continuously plague us, their impacts greater than a novel virus, their existence dramatically evident under the siege by that virus. There are widespread imbalances in human rights, in access to basic services, in social supports for fundamental human decencies, and in leadership. We are fallible; our blunders lie naked before us. We are selfish; our vulnerabilities to self-protection and personal wealth aggrandizement are visible in our response to spreading hardship. We are fearful; the collapse of our confidence in institutions and those who run them is stunning reminder of the delicate nature of the unspoken contract that helps bind us together, that protects our individual freedoms, that facilitates our ability to listen, learn, and aspire to be better.

And yet – the pandemic may still improve us. In fact, we may already have experienced such change. The outpouring of interpersonal support, often at the local levels, sometimes quietly, among people who live and work in close proximity, between those who volunteer for others and those who request help, should be acknowledged and celebrated. Many people have contributed in ways large and small to the common good. Some have done this with actions. Others through donations. And many, I would venture, through intentions, through thoughts, and through silent expressions of compassion.

How many of you have found yourselves watching and listening differently to others, even if just occasionally? How many of your neighbors, co-workers, and people you may not know have themselves listened, watched, or observed you, not in your moments of human weakness, but instead during the times when you manifested hope, generosity, and caring? Have you thought and prayed, even in the smallest of moments, for people you don’t know? Have you ever wondered how many other people on this planet have done the same? Imagine a world in which we recognize that everyone, at some level, has aspirations greater than themselves. Breathe the inspiration that comes with the possibility that all humans, even those you think are fundamentally different from you, want a better world for everyone. Hold – just for one moment – the idea in your heart that everyone knows we are all more than our individual selves.

Maybe we have all, in some way, been astronauts this past year. The pandemic has blasted us out of our routines, severing our connections with daily expectations. We may often have felt loosed, untethered, even weightless. We may have questioned the point, the very purpose, of being. While the experience may not have been something we sought, it has, perhaps, given us opportunity for new perspective. I think of my own struggles and then I try to see them from outside the earth’s atmosphere. My woes recede when I let my view hover beyond the oxygen-enriched embrace we so cherish, are invisible amidst the grandeur of the greater image and vista, blend with the totality of the events teeming across the entire planet and cosmos. I know that I cannot continue to drift weightless above and outside the consciousness that I call my life. I know that I must return to the spot within that whole that I cannot see when I watch and witness from the outside. It helps me, however, to feel the release, the freedom, of being less, of being invisible, of being a part of something I know little of and am little within. I become nothing, and everything. I feel the all within the awe.

Re-entry is necessary. And it is challenging. Yet the experience of relinquishment is steadying, strangely calming. When I surrender to the realization that so much more is possible, that so much less is necessary, I feel ready to slice back through the layers surrounding my daily breath, feel comforted by the awareness that there has never been normal, that the search for so-called normalcy is a transient grasp at the view from the ground level, not a deliberate deliverance to the majestic weightlessness of the whole. Whether or not I continue to need a mask, or to practice some other response to a virus, I can still be inspired. Whether or not you continue to need a mask, or to respond in some separate way to this same situation, I can still feel your inspiration too.

May we co-create. May we continue to take flight.

The human enterprise is messy. History is full of evidence for this. So is daily experience. Our species can demonstrate amazing compassion and selflessness. We can also be guilty of deplorable acts of cowardice and brutality. Somewhere, in the deep expanse of being that is beyond our simple three dimensional experience, there is a semblance of a scorecard about the human race and its progress on the planet we call earth. And on that scorecard, in the place of letter grades or numbers summarizing the status of human existence, there are written, perhaps, single words. Such as unfinished. Uncertain. Meandering. Messy.

Last Thursday, I was walking through a line of cars at a mass vaccination site in Phoenix. All the vehicles, thousands during the course of a day, contained people who had just received the COVID 19 vaccine and were awaiting receipt of follow-up appointments for 2nd doses, or the documentation on their vaccine medical cards that they had completed the two shot vaccines series. Most importantly, they are idling in lines to be sure that none had the rare yet still real reaction known as anaphylaxis. Having just checked in with colleagues who were overseeing this station, I was on my way back to the station that preceded this one, the location where cars entered tents, people rolled up sleeves, and vaccines were administered.

“I need to change lanes!”

Two car lines to the east, a solitary man in an older sedan, his car window down and his mask misplaced, was wildly swinging a left arm into the air while hollering to someone, anyone who might listen, that he was in the wrong lane. He needed to change.

No one seemed to hear the poor fellow. Not that I can blame them. Most of the people working the lines were volunteers, many younger in age. Their role was to make appointments, guide cars forward, and signal for help for the occasional circumstance when someone who had been vaccinated was possibly having a reaction.

In the normal world, if you are walking along a busy city street during rush hour and some guy is yelling out his car window about traffic, common sense and basic survival skills guide you away from the situation, not toward it. This not being a normal world, and the situation anything but a busy city street, I decided that someone should figure out why this fellow felt the need to change lanes. That someone was, apparently, me.

“Good morning, sir. What seems to be the problem?”

In my defense, it was a good morning. The previous afternoon had been windy; many of us were still finding dirt and desert sand inside our hair and ears. Today though was sunny, calm, and spring-like. It was a morning that seemed ready to wrap the world’s inhabitants in reassurance – except, it seemed, this bearded, unmasked, and tending-towards-unhinged-status man in a white t-shirt.

“Look at this!” he gestured. “They’re all moving and I’m stuck! I need to change lanes! I have to get out of here!”

There was nothing subtle about the man’s frustration. His hands gripped the wheel like he was ready to spin it counter-clockwise, turn the car left, and leave tire tracks over my toes.

“How are you feeling?” I asked. “Are you doing ok after your shot?”

Please don’t laugh: it was a reasonable question. He had, after all, just received a vaccine. I needed to check to see that he was aware of his general circumstances and was not experiencing a reaction, either from the vaccine or an underlying conditions. That was, after all, the main reason why he was sitting in a line of cars.

He was clearly oriented to place and time. But the question did help – if only a bit. “Well, yeah, fine. I feel fine. But look! It’s past my fifteen minutes!” He pointed dual index fingers at his windshield, on which the time of his vaccination had been written in impermanent Expo. “And I need to get to work! I haven’t had a shower and I need to get home so I can change and get to work!”.

Ah. A person who was worried that his wise decision to get a vaccine might cost him his practical job. Now I understood the reason for the traffic-type rage. I confirmed from the time on his windshield that he was indeed past his allotted waiting time. Then I surveyed the four cars in front of him, the orange cones to the right and left of his car, the cars inside the lanes on the other sides of those cones. Yep, he was stuck. And I knew the reason: there was an information technology problem that was holding up the car at the head of his line. I started to explain this to him but that’s a bit like telling someone who needs oxygen that a tank has been ordered from the warehouse and should be delivered soon. So we embarked on a different course.

“Tell you what,” I offered. “If I can safely get you out of here in a few minutes, will that work for your schedule?”

It was a bold bet. The guy’s hands relaxed their grip on the steering wheel and he took the bargain. “I doubt you can get it done,” he said, resting his forehead on the knuckles still holding the wheel. “But go ahead and try. I’ll be watching you though.”

Behind my KN-95 mask and baseball cap, I laughed. “Ok, fair enough! Let’s see what can happen.”

People who work together for a common goal can get a lot done. When the volunteers and staff working in the area observed that I had survived the close encounter with the melt-down in the middle of line seven, they were more than happy to help make my plan successful. The universe did its part as well, allowing a rebooted iPad to connect to the information system that resolved the delay for the car sitting at the front of the line. Appointments were swiftly finalized. All in the four vehicles were well following their recommended fifteen minute waiting period. And so, in less than five minutes, these cars and their occupants safely exited the wellness area, each off towards the next part of their day and hopefully immune protection from the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

That brought my new friend to the first position in line. I cleaned the numbers off his windshield. Like a plane authorized for take-off from the tower, he was released. The man had replaced his mask. His shoulders and entire demeanor had relaxed. He made a congratulatory fist and offered a single phrase as you slowly departed: “God bless you all.”

I’ve never seen myself much as a people person. Shy by nature, I don’t seek opportunities to meet people, especially those who seem intense. But a career in medicine, and a year in social isolation, have helped me realize just how interesting, thoughtful, and surprisingly cooperative and caring many people can be. It is not easy to work ten hour shifts in mass vaccination sites. There is plenty of cause for fatigue. The engagement with hundreds of people, however, buoys and boosts the spirit. Even when they are anxious or impatient or angry, most people are not looking for separation. They are seeking a sense of connectedness. A reason for tomorrow. Even the joy that comes with having breath.

The man in the car who needed to get to work, and the scores of others who opened small windows last week into the experience of their lives, reminded me how much I still like people. Despite the acrimony and bitterness awash in our current world, notwithstanding the ugliness of bigotry and the sometimes diabolical division deliberately sown across the human field by those who would see a tolerant society fail, we are still a species with possibility. The human enterprise is indeed messy. Yet people themselves can, even if just occasionally, open the glimpse of the marvelous.