Category: Lifestyle

What if: Reducing chronic worry

We worry about a great many things:  How will my interview go? What will people think of me?  Will I pass the test?  How will I pay this bill?  Will I get the loan?  Do I have cancer?  When worry becomes chronic, it can be debilitating, souring our relationships, triggering illness, and fostering pessimism.

Worrying is always an exercise in control.  It prospers because it temporally gives us a fix, falsely giving us a sense we’re in charge, only to reach an inevitably higher threshold to keep our anxieties in check.

One lasting memory I have of my father was his spending long hours in his favorite chair looking out the window, deep in thought, most of it worry.  In doing so he lost a great deal of life’s joy.  It’s what worry does in overdrive. If he had been paid for every worry he’d have been very rich.

Worry is a bully you need to standup to, not indulge, to make it go away.

It’s also a habit and in this case, needs undoing, and like all bad habits, can be unlearned.

The good news is that its remedy may be less difficult than you may have expected, or a matter of getting a handle on it by changing the way you think about life’s inevitable stresses.

The vast majority of our worries fall into three categories, each with its own remedy:

1.    The unimportant:  So much of what we worry about turns out to be trivial if you apply the test of time.  You’re having trouble with a neighbor. That can be unpleasant. Or what about the deadline for getting that assignment done at work?  Or that you may not get that job or promotion you had your heart set on?  Or that Nancy or Bill may not return your affection?  For perspective, ask yourself what would something like this matter a hundred years from now?  

 2.   The unsolvable:   Common sense should tell us the futility of worrying about fixed verities like death and taxes that can’t be changed no matter how we try.  I know such things can be scary, but we lessen our anxiety when we accept life’s randomness and adopt coping strategies to keep ourselves reasonably safe, and pile-up while we can, the nows of life around us as in fostering good relationships, doing what we enjoy, and thinking positively.

3.   The uncertain:  This category may include what we worry about most.  Will I still have a job?  How can I pay my bills?  Is it cancer?  If we could predict the future, we’d invest wisely and profit immensely in the best stocks, bonds and real estate. But even here, the experts at this sort of thing often predict wrongly and fail miserably. The consolation is that most of the uncertainties we worry about never happen or that we”ve simply squeezed out alternative possibilities with one scenario conclusions, making ourselves miserable.  As Montaigne in his inveterate wisdom once put it, “My life has been full of miserable misfortunes, most of which never happened.”  The trick is to accept uncertainty by not reaching conclusions you’ve no way of knowing are inevitable. It’s always a good thing to question your assumptions and consider alternative outcomes.

Summary:  Worry has a positive role when it alerts us to take action as a preventative. It’s why we save for retirement, buy life and health insurance, limit our indebtedness, change our diet, etc.  It becomes a weight when we wake to it, carry it throughout the day, and take it to bed with us at night.  It can harm relationships and affect our physical and mental health.  Remembering the three primary worry types and putting their coping strategies into daily practice can help you retrieve the happiness you mislaid.

Be well,

rj

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Love as a many splendored thing

Recently one of America’s favorite singers, Rihanna, reconciled with her on and off again boyfriend, Chris Brown.  You’ll remember he had beaten her up several months earlier.

In a similar vein, about a year ago I got to know a girl in her early twenties who complained of her uneasy, abusive relationship with her boyfriend. While she didn’t tell us of any violence, she made it clear she was undergoing daily verbal abuse.  All of us, puzzled by the dynamics, wondered why she didn’t bang the door shut on the guy.

When it comes to this kind of thing,  I can be pretty sensitive.  My mother, after all,  endured an abusive relationship with my father across the years that sometimes included violence.

The poet Sylvia Plath, shortly before her suicide,  wrote famously of the masochism underlying such manacled couples as “a love of the rack and the screw.”  As a professor who taught this poem for many years, I take it she had in mind the role of culture in nurturing feminine subservience in a patriarchal world, the “for better or worse” syndrome of  the traditional marriage vow.   Women, however, were the only ones taking it seriously, as may still be the case.

But I think Plath’s conclusion errs in its reductionism.  In those days, few women had access to employment and thus independence.  And then there is evolution’s maternal instinct that still kicks-in, the children to be protected at all costs.

Today’s scene, however, is vastly different and still changing as women have secured options earlier women perhaps never thought about, since they were precluded possibilities.  And yet a good many women, and some men, still cling to demeaning liaisons.

The truth is that many relationships should never have had their genesis.   We live in a culture that dilutes love by conceiving it falsely, with our movies, harlequin novels, and music playing out the theme of lovers “as the luckiest people in the world.”

Romantic love, or ”being in love,” has a fixity about it, a must have it now and abundantly; a possessiveness centered in emotional absolutes.  Root bound, it cannot grow and lacks a future.   At best, it turns habit.

“Loving,”  on the other hand, is like a fine vintage that gets better with the years.  Here lies the advantage of postponing life choices until the grapes are ready.  I was raised in a world that told me that first love was true love.  This may be so for some, but I think not for many.

Unfortunately, a good many relationships pose a latent psychological component, or dread, that the late psychiatrist Reuven Bar-Levan nailed down persuasively when he wrote that “what holds people in destructive  and humiliating ’love’ relationships, and what makes them plead and even beg to be ’loved,’ is extreme fear of abandonment.  The force of this fear is so great that people degrade and humiliate themselves to avoid it”  (Thinking in the Shadow of Feelings, p. 145).

This dread, overwhelming and prevalent, primarily traces back to our parents and whether they succeeded in making ourselves feel lovable.  When missing, it pursues us, like a shadow, all of our life and through mistrust we prove quite capable of driving genuine love away in wanting rather than giving, demanding and not allowing.

Again, authentic love lacks stasis or rigidity.  As such, it maturates and transcends love’s vicissitudes because, with time, it grows in wisdom, acknowledging flux in all relationships, and allows even for exits, since loving abounds in the context of freedom, or ability to sometimes let go.  Genuine love has its ending ultimately in our mortality if from nothing else; but whatever its source, its loss results in sadness, not fear or anger.  Free from fear,  love thrives.

Removed from anxiety, love is, indeed, “a many splendored thing.”

On the joys of learning Arabic script

Just by way of follow-up on my attempting to learn the Arabic alphabet and fuel my brain, I’ve surprised myself in learning about ten letters already in the last several days since my previous post.  My Apple iPad app helps me a lot, as it groups letters by similarity, and so you quickly begin to recognize that letters fall into families.

Seems to me, this is a good way to learning inventories, whether of vocabulary, birds, trees, flowers, etc.  If you do this with a language with many English cognates like Spanish or French you can actually acquire a reading vocabulary of several thousand words in a matter of an hour since, for example, our –ion ending words are virtually the same in spelling and meaning in those languages, confirming the wise pedagogic axiom of proceeding from the known to the unknown.

I haven’t actually practiced writing the letters at this stage, but see a challenge when it comes to connecting the letters in script.  You also mustn’t make the frequent Westerner mistake of writing the characters from left to right. In its cursiveness, Arabic script reminds me of the now defunct shorthand secretaries learned years ago.

What always amazes me when you start a new interest is its snowball effect, or tendency to get larger as you get into it.  Now I’m becoming aware of just how dynamic and relevant Arabic is in its growing number of speakers and considerable literary heritage. (The Arabian Nights comes to mind).  And of course there’s the sacred Koran, recited in mosques around the world.

I’ve also learned that Arabic script is employed in writing Farsi (Iran), Urdu (India and Pakistan), the latter rivaling Hindi in its vast number of speakers.  Additionally, a score of other tongues use Arabic script.

If you go beyond written Arabic, you quickly learn how important it becomes to choose its dialect version wisely as considerable variations exist between, say, Egyptian versus Iraqi Arabic.  If I were to actually make a stab at acquiring conversational, or everyday Arabic, I’d probably pick the Jordanian variant simply because several of my student friends in France years ago came from there, and I associate them with many kindnesses. I also happen to like Jordan’s progressive royal family.

220px-RichardFrancisBurtonArabic has rekindled my memories of reading the biography  of ebullient 19th century explorer Sir Richard Burton (1821-1890), who lived one of the most remarkable lives on record, with a facility for learning languages quickly, including Arabic, without an accent.  (See Lovell’s A Rage to Live).

tresi827And not to be outdone, there’s the extraordinary story of Gertrude Bell (1868-1926), fluent master of Arabic, advisor to kings, and a principal architect of the post-Ottoman Middle East.  (See Wallach’s Desert Queen).

On more familiar grounds to most of us, though I’ve not read his classic work, The Seven Pillars, we have the saga of Bell’s good friend, T. E. Lawrence (1888-1935), better known to millions as Lawrence of Arabia via the movie version of his storied life.  By the way, all three acquired Arabic outside the classroom, or without formal study.

In sum, there are so many reasons that can enter into your choice of a language to study:  ease, heritage, utility, etc.  One that’s often missed, however, is distinctiveness.  If you want to find a less traveled path, try taking-up Swedish or even a language drenched in euphonious vowel syncopation like Hawaiian or Maori that always leaves me mesmerized.  You’ll have a leg-up on the herd and find new friends, flattered that you chose their language and culture.

I happen to find this also occurs with a language like Arabic. Though it’s a first language for millions, it’s still a rare acquisition for Westerners.  And among languages, for me at least, it smacks of the exotic.

Be well,

rj

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Learn a new language to keep your mind young

As an older, retired person I’m aware of the need to keep my mind in shape just like my body.  How can I forget when I’m bombarded with all these health memos of a possible tie-in between lack of brain stimulus and dementia, including Alzheimer’s? That’s a frightening scenario I want to avoid, if I can.

Fortunately, my iPad tablet’s a big help via its many learning and game applications.  For me, maybe it’s the professor in me, but I prefer problem activities that test my mental skills rather than dexterity.  Sudoku is my favorite, though I’m also fond of games like Whirly Words, Word Ladder, BrainExl, and N-back Suite, the latter especially challenging.

One thing that’s important in keeping your brain young is adding variety to your mental life by trying new things, not necessarily games, but things like learning bridge or taking-up gardening or starting a blog site, which forces you to be observant and creative.

My primary hobby other than keeping a blog or gardening is studying languages. They say that when you can pair vocation with avocation you’ve punched the right ticket.  In my case, definitely Yes, so I was delighted the other day, though I’ve heard it before, that one of the best exercises to keep your brain young is taking-up a new language.  According to Neuromage (Oct. 15, 2012)), studying a new language intensively “over a short time stimulates the growth of the hippocampus, the brain region involved in learning, memory and spatial navigation.” This study involved new recruits at the Swedish Armed Forces Interpreter Academy who committed 13 months of study to mastering a foreign language.

Brain scans before and after three months of study indicated “significant” brain growth, while those studying medicine and cognitive science in the university showed static results.  What’s more, and again I’ve seen multiple research studies on this, those who are bilingual or multilingual develop Alzheimer’s disease at a more advanced age.

Applying this research to myself and in keeping with the idea of something new to energize my gray matter, I’ve hit upon giving the Arabic alphabet a go.  We’ll see what happens after that.  I just thought it would be thoroughly brain-stimulating, given its particular challenges as a script you read from right to left and its omitted vowels like its semitic neighbor, Hebrew.  While the Arabic alphabet has 28 letters, there are actually nearly three times more than that, as letter forms change according to where they occur–beginning, middle or end.  Apple just happens to have a marvelous application, Arabic Alphabet, to facilitate mastery of this often intimidating script.

Can you teach an old dog new tricks?  Well, I did learn ancient Greek many moons ago and, later, the Cyrillic alphabet used in several slavic languages, including Russian.  Anyway, I’ll let you know later as to how this wild experiment turns out.

Be well.

rj

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The folly of being in control

Often life can unexpectedly catch us in a high wave and we lose our balance and may even go down.  Not liking this, we try to lasso life’s randomness through structure or control and spare ourselves surprise.  Though this may help some, it doesn’t always work and, oddly, may even work against us when control assumes our identity.

Some of us are more prone to controlling than others, having been forced out of our nest early to look after ourselves.  I think of children of alcoholics, for example, who must not only escape, but prevent betrayal reoccurring.

Control is a ritual to relieve mistrust and smooth out the winkles.  All of us resort to defense modes from time to time to cope with an often aggressive landscape of human ignominy and nature’s caprice. There exists, too, an existential dread in us, or sense of our impotency against life’s vagaries, resonating vulnerability and whispering our mortality.

But to live this way daily filters life’s joy and shrinks life to a prison cell.  While we need to be wary, we should drop the reins when control becomes its own end and we become its prisoner and it hurts more than it helps.  Control, at its extreme, masks a latent masochism or inverted narcissism that feeds upon its wounds.

We cannot know what each day brings, nor always preempt its events, but changing our thoughts can help ransom our freedom in a world where the surety remains that flowers do bloom and there are people worth loving who will love us.  Experience affirms that we find love only when we extend  our hand to grasp the extended warm fingers of those around us.

I can’t say just how we find the switch that turns on life, nor assure its recompense when we do; but I know that abundant living begins with a giving of ourselves, and not withdrawing and yields release from the confines of our fears.

In sum, we become our choices and when we commit we find life gives back.  William James, one of America’s foremost early psychologists, said it very well:  “The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings by changing the inner attitudes of their minds can change the outer aspects of their lives.”

How do we do that?  It begins with realizing the futility of our attempts to impose order on life, for life has a way of happening.  What matters is living in the Now, one day at a time, one step at a time, finding joy in each other, delight in the canopy of the stars, and the promise of every new day.

–rj

Trust me!

Wingswept FarmKentucky
Wingswept Farm (Kentucky)

I’m not upset that you lied to me, I’m upset that from now on I can’t believe you.”     –Frederick Nietzsche 

Karen and I were recently visiting our friends’ new horse farm when I spotted a mare and her two young saddlebred foal companions (see photo) and decided I’d saunter over and say hello.  Just wished I’d had some peppermints along.  I started with the mare and took her stillness beneath my hand as consent.  Of course, the foals wanted in on the action, too, though each time I’d reach out, ever so slowly, they’d flinch. In short, they hadn’t yet learned to trust, at least with regards to me. Trust, after all, is one of those life staples you must earn.

In our human world we can be skittish, too, when it comes to trust, especially if memories linger in us of its betrayal as in a broken promise, lying, infidelity, irresponsibility, abandonment and, alas for children, poor parenting.  It’s hard finding an antonym for trust, but deceit comes to mind.  For the great Italian poet Dante, it was the worst of human short comings and he classified its several types into betrayal of family, friends, and nation.

I wish I could say trust has the numbers, or upper hand, when it comes to humans, but I know better and so do many of you, and so I treasure it when, serendipity, I stumble on it.  Being from New England and growing-up along its coast, I think then of lighthouses, rock solid, faithful sentries shredding the darkness with their rotating beams of pulsating light.

I’ve always held the acute test of trust lies in the context of anonymity, or when we think no one’s watching.  If someone runs stop signs, they probably take other short cuts from honor as well, making up their own rules that serve their interests.  Deceit, if you will, is uppermost rooted in narcism, or satiating ourselves, damn our fellows.

Deceit or fraud gets frequently collectivized in power and money conclaves, with near daily sightings of their misdeeds in government and banking. The aftermath, of course, is the bruising recession fallout for the rest of us, instigated by CEO greed and spendthrift bureaucrats that jeopardizes our future.

I hurt when trust gets violated by manipulative charlatans.  I want to believe the ad tells the truth or a doctor’s new book isn’t a facade for making money or that my local car dealer is giving me the best deal.  I want to believe that my friend will keep his word, that my life partner will always love me and my children live honorably.

If love is life’s consummate grace, without trust it will prove tenuous, or like a house built upon the sand, succumb to time’s erosion.  Love may be life’s elixir, but to be trusted may be even better.

Idealist that I am, I want to believe, not doubt; to embrace, not shun.  Like the young foals, I don’t really want to flinch.

Who am I? Reflections on being an Introvert

Isabel Briggs Meyers
Isabel Briggs Meyers

Mary takes her lunch alone, sitting on a bench.

Johnnie stays in his room, reading as his friends go off to play.

Susie likes to sew by the hours.

Neil is glad the party got cancelled.

I’ve always been interested in personality dynamics, or the way we interact with others,  our environment, and even ourselves.  Then I came across Carl Jung’s notion of two selves resident in all of us: one Extravert; the other, Introvert.

Unfortunately, psychology often goes astray, treating one dynamic as sum total, when both exist in perpetual tension, though one will prove primary. Think of it in terms of being left or right-handed.  We’re born with a tendency, or preference, to use one hand over the other.  While we use both hands throughout the day, that preference reveals itself when we take to writing our signature.  If you’re right-handed, try writing your signature with your left hand, or vice versa.

It was Katherine Briggs and her daughter, Isabel Meyers, however, who provided popular access to Jung’s personality archetypes, or modes, and built upon them through the eponymous inventory they developed.  Its advantage lies in its facility for speed, simplicity and scope in identifying sixteen distinct personality types.  The Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is now routinely used universally, taking-on adjunct status in the business world as a screening tool for new employees or setting up work teams, etc.

The test measures four basic components comprising a personality type (see Tieger and Tieger, The Art of Speed Reading People [1998]):

1.    How we’re energized:  (E) Extraversion ——(I) Introversion

2.   How we access information:  (S) Sensing ——-(N)  Intuition

3.   How we make decisions:  (T) Thinking——(F)  Feeling

4.   How we organize our world:  (J) Judging——(P)  Perceiving

I remember taking the MBPI years ago and how accurate, despite its brevity, it turned out.  It was me!  INFP.  Like your fingerprints, it’s your fixed id when it comes down to what makes you tick. While you can’t put the MBPI under a microscope, we know empirically that it functions well in assessing personality dynamics.  It may even help you to better understand and relate to those around you or even to avoid relationships fraught with potential personality conflict.

What I’d like to do here has simply to do with Introversion, the canopy I come under, though I’ll also contrast it with Extraversion.

Introversion trademarks:  less talkative, more reserved; thinks first, then talks; slower, more precise conversation quietly delivered; focused; doesn’t mind being alone at times; shuns spotlight; cautious;  sequential in conversation, providing transitioning.

These traits are in marked contrast to those of the Extravert:

Extraversion trademarks:  noisy, enthusiastic;  talkative; thinks aloud; desultory  in  conversation; easily distracted; enjoys attention; impulsive; interrupts or finishes sentences.

In my school days I daily envied the football players who seemed always to hold their place in the sun, the focus of school assemblies, and loved by girls.  Older folks would tell me to enjoy this time as best ever, though I couldn’t fathom why.  Tall, gangly, pimple spattered and timid, I found shyness got me nowhere, except I compensated some through academics.

I can’t say life beyond high school made it any easier in a world enthralled with high profile athletes, movie stars, TV celebs,  charismatic politicians and other People Magazine types.

On the other hand,  I’ve found fellow soft-voiced Introverts with their reserve a relief to be around.  They tend not to dominate a conversation, or have need to gesticulate with their hands, or interrupt you at nearly every turn, or to stray in their attention.  There’s often a sincerity to them that one finds frequently missing with all-talk Extraverts.

Introverts are linear in their preferences. They shun the desultory, preferring to exhaust the topic before moving to the next and keep a steady gaze, unlike the perfidious Extraverts with their disconcerting, wandering eyes.

Extraverts draw strength by the numbers they keep.  They love Facebook and accumulating long lists of friends for validation.  They prefer doing over thinking, flamboyance rather than simplicity, the latest fashion, the flashy car, loud colors.  Introverts, not liking the spotlight, prefer simpler amenities, say a Prius over a Lexus; subdued colors, a less frenetic music.

Introverts are often strong people, able to find a pathway away from the crowd,  confident in their values while avoiding arrogance.  Revolution and social change begin most always with the Introverts, whom the Extraverts eventually follow.

Sometimes you can distinguish the two entities by way of the hobbies they keep.  If you like gardening or fishing,  reading or chess, sports like tennis or golf, you’re more likely to be an Introvert.  On the other hand, if you’re into team sports like softball, or enjoy card playing, or participating frequently in social networks, then it’s likely you’re an Extravert.

Extraverts and Introverts can be found across the job spectrum, so that generalizations can be faulty as to which occupations allure them.  Introverts, however, with their preference for fewer numbers, quieter spaces, and focused challenges, are often found in endeavors associated with medicine, college teaching, libraries, accounting, and computers.  On the other hand, Extraverts perhaps find greater contentment in occupations such as entertainment, marketing,  and public relations.

Introverts, as proponents of the inner life of the imagination, are often the Artisans, whether in painting, music or literature.  Extraverts, in their need for people, make for great actors.  We need both:  the Introvert to teach us to reflect; the Extravert, to make us laugh; the Introvert to broaden our horizons; the Extravert to make us feel good about ourselves.

But back to Introverts, per se, since this is my primary focus here.  We Introverts needn’t deem ourselves second-class citizenry in a gregarious world or be overwhelmed by the social pressures exerted on us in such a world.  I would even wager that overall we’re a happy, well-adjusted bunch, at peace with ourselves and proud of our contributions to making a better world.  I always remember that Steve Jobs was one of us.

Do well.  Be well!

–rj

Reflections on the psychology of lying

LanceArmstrong_620_011513I’ve always found it hard to understand how there are people who can look you in the eyes, never blink, and spin the biggest lie.  Of all the kinds of deceit, lying is probably its most common form.  My mind boggles at some of the big names across the years, not surprisingly, political:  Congressman Dan Rostenkowski; Washington mayor Marion Barry; and then there’s Bill Clinton (“I did not have sex with that woman”).

Lately, icons from the sports world have swollen their numbers, though like most liars, they’re often teflon coated when it comes to making the allegations stick. Think Bonds, Clemens, McGuire.  And now there’s Lance Armstrong and a confession–of a sort.

I probably don’t need to tell you that lying is also endemic to the business community.  It’s estimated that the average consumer is exposed to up to 200 lies daily via advertising.

But let’s not be self-righteous.  The truth is we all lie, so maybe our outrage is simply projection rather than seeing ourselves in the mirror.  Psychology Today (May 1, 1997) cites the 1996 study of lying  by University of Virginia psychologist Bella DePaulo, who found “most people lie once or twice a day.”

Lying sometimes comes with the territory, say law, politics, car sales.

Sometimes it may even seem the moral thing to do. Should a doctor tell every terminal patient his/her prognosis?

Sometimes lying may seem the only way to avoid being punished for telling the truth.  Should you tell your boss you were late because you got stuck in traffic rather than the truth you overslept?

Sometimes it may be wiser to tell your wife you like her new dress or hair-do than blurt out, “What were you thinking?

From another vantage point, lying can often be viewed as an ego prop for those with low self-esteem to boost themselves in the eyes of their beholders. The bigger the fish story, the better the payoff in admiration.

Lying is generally motivated by a desire to achieve a goal or to avoid responsibility for a behavior, e.g., overspending, drug addiction, etc.. There is, however, the  compulsive liar who does so inversely related to any goal.  Such behavior hints at a pyschiatric disorder, requiring treatment.  This also gets us into the criminal mind of the sociopath who can lie and even kill without remorse.  I think of Susan Smith (1994) who drowned her children, but initially claimed a black man had done it.

While granting that lying is an intrinsic human behavior, I still draw the line between the Lance Armstrongs who lie to mask their wrongdoing such as wholesale cheating or abuse of power and everyday Johns and Janes who lie to cover their embarrassment, or to prevent friction, or to opt for kindness.

What really arouses my disgust is when these self-serving schemers repeat their lies endlessly.  We had a decade of this in Armstrong’s case.

Ironically, we often reward our consummate liars. Though they didn’t make it into baseball’s Hall of Fame this year, Bonds and Clemens were candidates and drew over a third of the votes.  We also have two recently elected senators, one of whom falsely claimed service in Vietnam repeatedly; the other, to claims of Native American ancestry, presumably to take advantage of affirmative action. In reality, those who vote for such people share the same bottomline rationale of the end justifies the means.

The worst lies, the ones that grieve us and erode our trust, occur when we’re deceived by those we’ve invested our emotions in most, our family and friends. The medieval poet Dante assigned such people to hell’s deepest circle in The Inferno to keep company with the likes of Judas.

Liars are hard to detect because they ape sincerity, empowering their ability to manipulate the rest of us who want deeply to believe we’re being told the truth. This is why polygraphs aren’t always accurate, as they can’t readily filter out the feigner of sincerity.

Some have written in depth on the refined art of lying and strategies for its detection, the best of these being Paul Ekman’s classic 2009 book, Telling Lies:  Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage.  You’ll find his take on body language fascinating, although I’m dubious about this since body language can also be feigned.   Nonetheless, as an expert on emotions, he brings the closest thing to science on the subject, though he confesses the frequent difficulty, even then, of spotting the skilled liar.  Our best defense, in my own view, borrows from Reagan’s maxim:  “Trust and verify.”

We do know we resent people like Lance Armstrong, perhaps because he and others remind us of our own vulnerability to manipulation and the hurt we’ve experienced when our trust is violated

South Pacific seascapes and my Siren temptress

Aiutaki (Cook Islands)

Since I was a child I’ve always had this thing about the South Pacific, and, no, I’m not talking about the 1949 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, whose music still grabs me.  No, I’m talking genuine volcanic rock strung out, pearl like, across the equatorial Pacific.

I’ve never gotten there, unless you count a military stopover in Honolulu on my way to Korea or our trip (Karen and I) to New Zealand in 2006.  No, I’m thinking of other island hops: places like Tahiti, the Marquesas, Somoa and the Cook Islands.  OK, let’s throw in Pitcairn Island, too.  Hey, I’m thinking the likes of Captain Bligh, Gauguin, and Robert Louis Stevenson.

How did this hankering ever get started?  Hard to say, but I think I drew from the deep well of books I insatiently imbibed as a street child lured daily into the quiet coolness of the Montgomery Street Library, the next best thing to a ten cent matinee ticket to the Jumbo theater on Girard Avenue or an open hydrant in providing relief from Phiilly’s baked asphalt on hot summer afternoons.

In particular, there was Bligh’s account, popularized hither and yon, in the  Nordhoff and Hall’s riveting novel version of a mutinous crew and the aftermath of 17 souls set adrift for 41 days across 3600 miles, before finding safety.  Just thinking about this book makes me salivate at reading it again.

The novel account had its movie version, one of several beginning in 1935,  starring the swashbuckling Clark Gable as mutineer leader Fletcher Christian in bold rebellion against the tyrannical Bligh, portrayed by Charles Laughton.  A box office biggie that shreds historical truth, I didn’t get to the Jumbo replay until many years later.  I liked sequels, so I tried Pitcairn Island.  By God, I was hooked!

I’d be in my bedroom, several hours nightly, supposedly working on my high school algebra, when the truth was I’d be looking at maps, charting mind-journeys.  Their very names spiced my excitement:  Manihiki, Pukapuka, Yasawa, etc. In another era, I’d have been a runaway, perhaps sailing with Columbus or Magellan.

Fast forward into adulthoood, I’d venture into travel agencies and ransack their slick, glossy pamphlets of South Pacific cruises, always in the end smacking into the reality that such things cost money, lots of it.

In my late twenties, however, dream nearly took on verisimilitude when I was granted the next best thing:  permanent resident status in New Zealand, with a teaching post waiting for me in Hawera in Taranawki on the North Island.  As it turned out, this gave way to a greater priority–finishing my graduate studies.  My wife and I, nonetheless, did visit Hawera on our memorable New Zealand venture in 2006.  Still, no South Pacific paradisic lagoons!

After graduate studies, I went through a French phase, learning French and pursuing its art, especially the Impressionists and traveling to their haunts like Aix-en-Province and nearby Mont St. Victoire with their Cezanne echoes.  But then I also discovered Gauguin and, naturally, quite understood his flight from the Paris bourse to, yes, the South Pacific.

In later years, I would catch-up again with Robert Louis Stevenson.  (What child in that video-game free era of my early youth wouldn’t have enjoyed the likes of Treasure Island?)  In graduate school, Stevenson’s sentient lyricism captivated me.  Even more, I admired his uncommon fortitude in the face of debilitating illness. Then, of course, there was his leave-taking for Somoa, where his final home, Villa Vailima ( now a museum), gazes down into a verdant velvet of swaying palm, edged by Pacific waters.

I’m older now, and pragmatism has undoubtedly pinned my romantic palette like a butterfly to a wall.  I also know that it’s the imagining and not the obtaining that often yields the most, or something like Keats meant when he wrote, “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard/Are sweeter” (Ode on a Grecian Urn).  As a Jungian devotee, I know the universality of the Edenic quest and the lotus eater lure of its garden.  I suspect, too, much of that once pristine garden world has now been sullied by commercial interests and tourist hordes.

Still, in those langorous moments that sometimes sweep ashore into daily life, my thoughts drift to paradisiacal islands like Raratonga, Bora Bora, Tauata, Moorea, Raiatea, and Aiutaki; soft murmurings of attending, giggling maidens; falling coconuts; gentle breezes; slumbrous waves; sheltering lagoons with coral necklace; and of life as approximating what in our musings we mortals sometimes dub “heaven” with its reprieve from time and event.

I think again of Keats (Ode to a Nightingale).  Am I awake, or do I sleep?

Do well.  Be well.

–rj

How the East can teach us to master our anxieties

fences

In the daily round of life, all of us are prone to experiencing conflict.  It’s just the nature of the beast; but what if I told you that a lot of this conflict is of our own making?  As Jungian analyst Ken Wilber reminds us in his insightful No Boundary, we’re often into the habit of creating boundaries, by which he means barriers, walling off a great deal of life’s potentiality of larger experience, since we’d rather feel safe in the confines of the familiar.

That said, it reminds me of the fences Robert Frost  writes of in his beloved poem, “Mending Wall, that people erect to wall out their anxieties:  “Good fences make good neighbors.”

Let’s sidetrack for a moment.  Have you noticed how many things in life fall into contrary couplings, with one of them tending to be more positive?  By way of some examples, here’s my partial list put into categories, and you can add yours:

Spatial:  up/down, inside/outside, east/west, near/far, above/below, over/under, wide/narrow

Temporal:  morning/evening, today/tomorrow, past/present,  sunrise/sunset

Attributes:  short/tall, beautiful/ugly, clean/dirty, brave/cowardly, smart/dumb

Theological: heaven/hell, good/evil, God/Satan, flesh/spirit

Philosophical:  logical/illogical, realist/idealist, rationalist/romantic

Biological:  male/female, child/adult, young/old, thin/stout

Psychological: bold/timid, aggressive/passive, introverted/extroverted

My point:  These couplings belong to our world, not nature’s, which brings us back to “Mending Wall,” where nature abhors Man’s barrier artifacts represented in the stone wall.  While nature may feature its own divergencies such as ripe and unripe, it possesses no mindfulness about them or the accompanying paroxisms that plague us.   No dog thinks about its ending or worries about present illness.  No bird deliberates on life or death or the hereafter.  While nature includes pain and animals respond, it’s physiological and thus without angst.

By contrast, humans hover around their drawn boundaries as bastions preserving their control. In turn, this results in anxiety, limiting their happiness.  Ken Wilber sums up our dilemma when he writes, “the firmer one’s boundaries, the more entrenched are one’s battles. The more I hold onto pleasure, the more I necessarily fear pain.  The more I pursue goodness, the more I am obsessed with evil.  The more I seek success, the more I must dread failure.  The harder I cling to life, the more terrifying death becomes.  The more I value anything, the more obsessed I become with its loss” (p. 19).

At the heart of what Wilber says, though he doesn’t mention it, lies the concept of polarity, largely an Eastern notion not understood in Western cultures with their foregrounding in dualism.  In the polarity approach, which I’m proposing here, we encounter the healthier option, opposites being viewed not as contraries but complementaries, succinctly captured in William Blake‘s dictum that “opposition is true friendship.”

In our Western dualism for instance, we think of good vs evil as utterly opposed and embattled contraries.  In the East, this becomes unfathomable as how can you have one devoid of the other?  How can you know what good is, unless you have the yardstick of evil?  How can you know love unless you also know what lacking it means?

Like virtually all Westerners, I couldn’t get a grasp around this notion of polarities, or two sides to one coin.  Then one day it clicked and it’s been a norm for me, informative and helpful, across the years.   I had been invited to give a paper at the University of Delhi.  Afterwards, I fell into conversation with an Indian delegate and somehow, as often happens in India, it turned metaphysical.  I mentioned the Problem of Evil, a salient concern  in appraising the credulity of religious belief in the West.  His response, simple and direct, startled me:  “Problem of evil?  What problem?  Do we not have day and night, hot and cold, life and death?” The light turned on.

And how does any of this bear on our well-being?  If you’re still belaboring this question, go back and review my earlier Wilbur borrowing, as it gets to the very heart of the matter.

When I try to wall out anxieties about what will happen today or tomorrow, or how people will regard me, or matters related to my health, finances, relationships, etc., I invariably allow worry to wreak its cortisol devastation to my health and on my daily well-being.

In the West, we measure progress across the board in science, religion, business and private life as movement towards the positive and elimination of the negative.  This is the wrong formula for living the happy life, since it’s foreign to life’s dynamism, or plentitude.  Those we love can decline, die, or even engage in perfidy.

Today’s job may not be there tomorrow.  Accidents and genes may ultimately define our futures.  I think of baseball:  very few hitters ever bat 300 and when they do, fewer still repeat it.

To live life well, you need to take the spectrum approach that takes-in the full sweep of life’s potentiality.  By the way, this is heart and soul behind why we get life and health insurance.  We’re actually better off or lessen our anxiety in facing up to life’s quirkiness.

Opposites aren’t really mutually exclusive anyway.  They require each other to exist.  I can’t know pleasure apart from the possibility of pain.

Polarity, the notion of complementaries, can ease our wrestlings with our fears, reflected in our desperate folly of erecting fences or boundaries.  It also teaches us to simplify our values, particularly the material kind;  informs us that nothing is ever really ours, that everything is on lease as it were;  helps us treasure what we enjoy now, our families and friends; most of all, enjoins us not to cling. When I give up my exclusions, an unexpected pleasure exhilarates, and I call it grace, for then I am set free.  Or as  The Bhagavad Gita, or Hindu scripture, has it:

He is to be recognized as eternally free
Who neither loathes nor craves
For he that is free from the pairs,
Is easily freed from the conflict.