This Was 40 (The Year I Was Right About Everything)

              I was intending to write a big piece for New Years day, to wish everyone well and tell them how important they were to me this year.  Time did not permit it, but my birth date is close enough that it feels the same as a passing year.  Plus, it is way more personally symbolic.  I can comfortable say that 40 was the single most significant year of my life.  This year closes in nowhere near what I had imagined or anticipated.  When I got divorced a few years ago, I had this odd feeling—what the hell was that?  That entire decade?  It felt like a lifetime.  I remember telling people that I had never given much thought to David Byrne’s lyrics in Once in a Lifetime, but here I was in that decade with a beautiful house and a beautiful wife, and there was never enough time ponder—how did I get here? 

              Later in that song the lines change to “you may say to yourself this is not my beautiful house, this is not my beautiful wife?”  That is the feeling I was trying to explain to people.  How is that I ended up with a beautiful house and a beautiful ex-wife? How did I get there?  Year 40, ends in that space, exhausted and realizing I lived an entire lifetime in the past year.  I can say this because I lived an entire lifetime from birth to 40.  It was this year that I recognized how fundamentally mistaken I was about almost everything.  I credit Buddhism with this revelation. Meditation revealed layer upon layer of things I mistook for reality. The world is a lie, as the John Dickey biography title suggests. I saw that on a bookshelf one day in a moment of synchronicity, which is what happens you realize that you were sleepwalking through the first half of your life.

              I can assure you that I am fundamentally different person from the one you knew at the beginning of the year.  I feel confident in staking that claim, because it has been my direct experience.  Today, I am not sure I even believe in the self anymore.  I believe in the ego (the Buddhist conceptualization as opposed to the Freudian one)  Today, I believe more in the idea that there are multiple versions of the self because identity is multifaceted and that these versions are cleaved and born, often dramatically—a child is born and your identity as parent is new or expands, you lose a loved one and your identity is transformed instantaneously.  In the early months of my separation and divorce a friend said to me—“you’re a single Dad now.  You have to establish a new identity.” Not long after that I joined a single parents group, recognizing that the move to the suburbs and leaving a job that helped to destroy the previous life had left me in a position with about zero friends.

              This notion of identity and selfhood is complicated and probably consumes a lot more thought than it should.  The only thing that I can share is my own experience as accurately and authentically as language will permit. There was a version of myself that died somewhere during the year. I cannot give you a time or place, this is figurative and qualitative.  I can share with you that his funeral was well attended.  A lot of people loved that guy.  I thought he was ok, at times remarkably good and kind, dedicated, willing to believe the best in others. But, he was also way too externally reinforced—wanting to be seen as good, kind, dedicated.  And rather than simply being those things, he questioned whether he truthfully was those things.  He found out he was because he was encouraged to follow his gut and stay out of his head.  These are practical techniques, I recognized their correlates in DBT which was my professional training, but I don’t know that I had every had to live them so intensively as I did this year. Like any techniques, they are not enough, or they work half of the time.  I am a Taoist at heart, so I will go only so far as to say that they work to bring balance and harmony, until they don’t, otherwise they would not be the Tao.

              I mentioned in previous writings, and herein that I have been studying psychology relentlessly.  Dissertation and comprehensive exams forced me into a place where I had to reacquaint myself with foundational texts.  The consistent meditation and the application of positive psychology caused ideas to fuse in a way they had never done before.  I said to Mickey, it’s odd that I am reading all of the stuff that I was reading at 23 and that it’s like I had never even grasped it, even though I understood it intellectually.  When I tell you that the first forty years feel like I was living a lie, it was because I lacked some of the direct experience to situate many of these ideas that have been swimming about aimlessly in my mind for decades.  As a compliment I was once told I had a kaleidoscopic mind, it never felt that way, it felt more like a mobile strewn with garbage.  It may have looked like I had a mental model, but I confess now that I was winging it.  We all are.  But, the T.S. Eliot line to arrive at the place and know it for the first time is this experience.

              I was struck by a line in Peter Senge’s the Fifth Discipline.  This is my new reading, and I anticipate that it will be another one of those massively influential readings.  The book has proven enormously popular in the area of organizational science. The line that struck me was “we live our mental models.” The subject matter of this book is systems thinking.  And this connected with my recent Buddhist and Cognitive Psychology studies on the self.  If there is no self—no singular entity that we can regard as the self, and if indeed the mind is more accurately modular (the more prominent view in cognitive psychology these days), then I might be better off thinking of the self as a system.  This is one of the things that helped enormously when my suffering was at its most acute.  I was not thinking of it as a system yet, I don’t even wish to go that far because I have not read enough of the book to apply any of the insights.  It did introduce me to the new term metanoia which I will probably be using more frequently to Senge’s consternation.

              In hindsight I do now recognize that what I was doing during the summer was a conscious act of reconstructing a mental model.  Identity and selfhood were necessarily a part, but not the only part.  Both the Buddhists and some of the later psychoanalysts recognized the trappings of the ego, and that it is a part of our being that we are most prone to identifying as the self.  But, the social psychologists, since Goffman have regarded the self as construct that is represented by dual entities: there is the self that you recognize as the self and the one you present to the world.  Social psychologists later elaborated on this model, recognizing that there is a powerful dynamic between the actual and ideal versions of the self.  Cognitive dissonance is experienced when these two dimensions are misaligned, and especially when those involve features that are salient and important.  Nobody likes feeling like a hypocrite, it feels even worse to be outed as such.  Unfortunately, cognitive dissonance theory and motivated reasoning increase the likelihood that you may find yourself doubling down on methods that do not work, because they feel familiar and comfortable.

              So, recognizing the situation I was in I thought about what I liked and what I did not like about the most recent version of myself.  I confess, that at first, I thought only about the recent best version of me.  I liked that I was enjoying parenting and thought of as a good Father, I liked that I was learning and that people appreciated my knowledge and help, I liked that I was concerned with the upkeep of my home and wanted others to notice.   I now recognize that I was neglecting other areas of life, which is far too easy when you are as busy as I am.  And when I found myself in hell, I recognized that I needed to do certain things to leave hell, as I had done in the past.  When I was going through divorce I began exercising and developed a new routine.  In an early stage of life, writing was what carried me out of hell.  I also recognize that a great amount of life is marked, and always will be, with the “shit we don’t want to do.” 

              See, if you like back to the statements in the first few sentences, you will notice that my problem was that a great deal of this was externally motivated.  I hate keeping the house up, it sucks, and I did it because I wished people to think I had my shit together.  But, I don’t, a lot of the time.  But, I know that it is important or my ex and my family will start complaining. This will produce counterproductive stress because one needs less, not more concern, when they feel like they just stopped drowning and got into the lifeboat.  What was different this time around is that I developed a mental model aimed at establishing the ideal self, as opposed to what was present before.

              I want to also get to this notion of the shadow self—an idea advanced by Carl Jung.  When you have one of these moments where you recognize how massively wrong you got everything it is both crushing and liberating.  Jung’s notion of the shadow self is the self you do not want to see, the negative qualities of the self.  I think there is value in the concept, but it has limitations.  What years of working as a counselor and my own personal experience has taught me is that it is a necessary and incomplete version of the self.  One of the heartbreaking facts of life is that we often are forced to confront this inadequate version of the self violently thrust on us as in trauma.  One of the heartbreaking things that I have observed in my professional practice is how dominant this version of the self becomes in cases of prolonged and repeated trauma—especially the type that goes back through childhood:

              “It sounds like so much of your life was just built around survival, and that you had to construct this version of your self, that told the world you were tough, all was well, that whatever it was didn’t really hurt.  But, it’s not really you, and “you” didn’t get to grow.”

              “That is exactly what it felt like.”

              There is a lot in Zen about the master and the student.  It is said that the master that cannot see himself in the student, is not a master and that a student that cannot see themselves in the master, ought to reconsider his instructor.  I am not suggesting that I am a master at counseling, but I am lucky enough to have learned from what others have felt vulnerable enough to share.  I was no master at supervising, but I was fortunate to have some incredible people that trusted me enough to guide them. I am no master at parenting, but I try to learn from these kids who are stuck with me, not knowing that I am winging half of it.  They ended up part of the mental model.  Yes, the model that I have been promising you.  My model of the ideal self, that dragged me out of hell. (crap, my fancy diagram won't cut and paste, it had bubbles and lines, it was not sophisticated but pleasing)

                                                                                        1. Exercise
                                                                                        2. Shit I don't want to do/deal with

                                                                                        3. Meditation

 Ideal Self                                                                       4. Be a good Dad

                                                                                        5. Give back to others

                                                                                        6. Study

                                                                                        7. Do art/creative work

        I selected 7 domains, not for any specific reason other than that I felt that these captured me at times I either felt at my best or they are the things that got me to those places.  I don’t believe that I have ever been my best.  Best is “fixed” and past tense.  There is only better.  That does not imply that the best version of you is not ahead.  Somewhere in March I was told by my uncle that I had to find my Tao.  These are the things that have kept me balanced, I schedule all 7 on my daily schedule and do my best to hit them.  I am human, some days I get 5/7.    They correspond with physical health, emotional/spiritual health, important roles, and responsibilities.  I am lucky that my profession allows me to give back to others daily. I am lucky that I live in a moment of time and space where I have the support to pursue school.  I am lucky that I have three children who provide purpose. There were days where that was the only one that got me out of bed.  All of those 7 are subject to change, otherwise they would not be the Tao.

       I still have no idea where any of this is going.  I can only share that it got me to a better version of myself.   I did a lot of ranting this year. I’ve been on a tear.  I’ve jokingly been told I was high or manic at times.  I assure you I was not.  I was often in pain.  I sometimes experienced ecstasy.  I had some experiences that I cannot comfortably classify, but resemble experiences I read about in the Buddhist literature.   I told Mickey that I figured out the shadow self thing, for my model, and that I then went and drowned him in the bathtub.  She said, “please tell me that you did not tell victim of trauma to do that.”  I can’t remember, she is convinced that you must love every part of you.  I am not sure how I feel about that, but I reluctantly invite this self to dinner.  We laugh.  I say to him “remember that life you were, where you got everything wrong?”  And he says, “My God yes, I could be such a pompous ass at times.” And I say—“yes, but you were also kind, and generous, and I really see only a handful of things that I did not like about you.”  And he says:

“oh, do share…”

“well, sometimes in your exuberance you interrupt people that’s a bad habit, and because you are extroverted and impulsive you can come off egotistical.”

“yes, but it’s actually not egotism, it’s egoism—more like Walt Whitman.”

“well that’s another thing Shadow, aside from a penchant for grandiosity, you have a habit of trying to explain everything.  I know, I know, you don’t want to be a nuisance or hurt people, and you really hate it when people misunderstand your intentions.  But, other people perceive this as anxiety and defensiveness.”

“makes sense, I never felt that I was doing enough. I

  “Shadow you did enough, you’ve lived some incredible lives in the last 40 years.  Can you forgive me for trying to drown you in the tub?”

“For sure.  This Tao thing is working for you.  You have some weird type of confidence I have never seen in you.  Keep up the writing, keep at the dissertation, yell at the kids less, keep at this mindfulness meditation. For God’s sake just please do me a favor, and be better than me, and ok with just that. This is hard on the psyche.”

"I am at least aware that neither if us leaving here is the actual true self."

"you son of a bitch."

        The title of this essay was an obvious joke, the year was replete with failures.  I quoted Beckett once this year—Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail Better.  But, this was also the year I ended up right about everything, in so far as it was the Tao.  It proved right because I have arrived at the later lines in that T.S. Eliot passage—"A condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”  I remember quoting Whitman this year too—“you will hardly know who I am or what I mean.”  I am often unsure of who I am or what I mean.  The lines are from Song of Myself.  It also contains the lines “so, I contradict myself” and “I contain multitudes.”  He’s right.  When I was going through my divorce, and I was prone to angry ranting, my Father often said “to whom much is given, much is expected in return.”  At the time, it was often more than I could tolerate hearing, but he proved right.

       Once in a lifetime (see what I did there) you will reach 40, and if you were lucky enough to have good parents you get to realize how right they often were, even if they were winging it half the time.  Once in a lifetime, you will pass 40 and if it has been as rich as this life has been, you will need a lot less, you may get to let go of a huge chunk of ego through this idea of not self, and you will find (at times) that you are just heart, and that the more you give away the better off you will be, because more will come to you in return.  A couple of years ago my Sunday School teacher Mrs. Zug passed away in her 90’s (I believe).  My mother said she visited her in the hospital and the first thing she did was ask about my son, who was diagnosed with one of those lopsided heads which require a helmet--something so insignificantly trivial relative to the matter at hand.  That is what I want to be, so utterly satisfied with life that I am only concerned with you.  I want to be Aunt Shirley who passed away this month, who up and got married in her 90’s.  I want to be Albert Ellis who saw clients well into his 90’s, cursed constantly, and was known to say I will retire when I’m dead.

      I owe a lot to a number of people who helped with insights and ideas that contributed to the model I outlined.  There is still a lot more being worked on, this is actually a side project to the dissertation. But you contributed and you probably have no idea when, how, and where. You will have to take my word that you did: (Anna, Dena, Mickey, Melissa, Dev, Meghan, Kanishka, Sean, Derek, Sonia, Uncle Clay).  Once in a lifetime you get people like this.

Once in a lifetime you get friends like Jen, Jessica, Brett, Shawn, Sara, Samantha, Laura, Ryan, Zen, Jim.

Once in a lifetime you get to be in the Hip Single Parents group.

Once in a lifetime you may find your self in writing group, or a sangha, or a Quaker meeting house, with a bunch of beautiful and talented local people, and you may ask yourself how did I get here?

Once in a lifetime you get people that believe in you when you have lost all ability to believe in yourself.

Once in a lifetime you get a family like this. Then they all start to feel like family

It’s always right here, as in Zen it is right before you.  It is always right here because it is now, and now is the only thing we experience in our human lives that is eternal.  It is the only place you will ever be right about everything.

If you lost the thread, it is not your fault, I am all over the place, but I was trying to convey that feeling that you live multiple lives in multiple versions of the self.   I don’t know that I convinced any of you, and that really wasn’t my undertaking.  But, I am convinced that I did none of this without you, because I believe that the only thing that one can claim to know as true comes through direct experience.  I know nothing but through my relationship with others.  The Gestalt Prayer:

I do my thing, and you do your thing

I am not in this world to live up to your expectations

And you are not in this world to live up to mine.

You are you and I am I,

And if by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful,

If not, it can’t be helped.

And this is how you fall in love with anything.  See you in this lifetime.

stuff on zen, rejection, Dweck

              There is a post that I have not been able to get to, which includes much of the research that I have been working for dissertation.  If you know me, you will know that I am prone to derailment and tangential thinking.  I realized that this is a habit I will have to curtail, or at least manage, for the Action Research project I am intending for dissertation.   I have a preternatural gift for distraction, discipline is not my strong suit.  But, all of this writing helps, and it allows me to get my focus back to where it needs to be.  Much of this writing is about what consumes me during the week, which is research, parenting, conversations with my friends, and the counseling work that I do which is less frequent than I would like.  I was talking to a friend yesterday, who had a relationship end abruptly.  I had recognized in him an orientation toward growth already in the early days of the event. 

              All year I have been obsessed with the idea of the journey.  I have been on quite a journey for the last 4 years.  I have often mistaken the journey for other journeys.  Almost every friendship I’ve developed recently and all of those immediately present have this certain and relatively prominent feature of self-discovery, revelation, rebirth, etc.  I suspect that this impression is part of two things—my own innate personality features which manifest in a bad habit of conflating other’s stories with my own.  I wish to emphasize that, this type of journaling can have the effect of sounding pompous and egotistic—everyone is on a journey, we always are.  A few of my personality traits of openness, gregariousness, and extroversion too easily lead me to outlandish exuberance at times.  But, there is a counterpoint that intersects here—age.  I just happen to be in a space where many people are sharing midlife transitions and some of them are massive—love, death, loss, parenting, divorce, precisely the type of events that necessitate self-discovery, revelation, rebirth.

              Personality theory is less in vogue these days—especially the psychoanalytic developmental type that Erikson laid out that conceived of personality encompassing the lifespan.   I suppose I could go back and read this, and it would place everything I am trying to say in language from the 1950s.  But, I have little time for that, and I suspect that it is much more ego gratifying to believe that I have stumbled on one of the hidden mysteries of the universe, or at least social psychology, through my own intuition.  And at least I have the source material to go back to.  One of the blessings of being in psychology, as opposed to say history, is that it is a relatively recent institution.  I don’t have to go far in time to read the foundational texts. 

              Presence to this awareness that many close to me are dealing with huge transitions requires acknowledgement that the antecedents are often massive amount of suffering and trauma.  I worry constantly about the supports and resources others have, because I simply do not see them present in the healthcare system, our social fabric is frayed, the village it takes to raise a child is not well supported.  I worry constantly that we are missing something huge, or something huge is about to happen.  I am no longer able to discern if society is hurtling toward something awful, or whether we are just in a transformational moment.  The news is despair, I avoid a lot of it, never thinking I was going to become that person.  Yet, I go out and live and I am heartened by the level of community activity and engagement that I see.  I spoke to a friend the other day with a deep trauma history, and I went straight to my soapbox that the behavioral health system is failing everyone badly—that we are not treating despair, addiction, or trauma well at all.  And then I watch a video like Healing Neen, and I am floored at what is possible. And, not only that—what is possible in one human being.

              I was in dialogue with several friends over the past few days regarding this documentary.  It’s available on YouTube and its worth 50 minutes of the viewing time.  A few people whom I have discussed the video with, have been likewise baffled at the capacity for resilience displayed.  My Mother asked me what do you think it is about her?  It’s multiple things, I am certain of that—timing, encountering specific people at the right time, vulnerability, and mindset.  That last one is something that I am harping on this week.  I confess that I am having a bit of an intellectual love affair with Carol Dweck’s work for the past three weeks.  I think that I have about 7 friends, one client, and multiple family members reading it.  It is also quite possible that they are just saying this to pacify my evangelism. I am very aware that this could be one of those things that is way more relevant in my own mind, the same way that my McSweeney’s writings, repeatedly fated to rejection, seem brilliant and hilarious the moment I send off to the editor.

              So Carol Dweck’s work is pretty incredible, and I have been struggling to find how it fits into the model that I am working on for dissertation.  I have several research papers that I am working through at the moment.  If you are familiar with the Fox and Hedgehog story popularized in Isaiah Berlin’s essay, you will recognize Carol Dweck as a classic Hedgehog style thinker—like Foucault.  This style of thought sees a fundamental pattern or idea present, in a way that comes to feel so abundantly present that it seems almost a given constituent of reality.  For Foucault it was the idea that knowledge equates to power, and that insiders of the power structure use this power to suppress and marginalize others.  For Dweck the overarching theme is that mindsets can generally be reduced to either fixed or growth orientations.  She applies this relentlessly to multiple areas in education and psychology, and has the science to support her arguments. 

              I was speaking to another friend this week, and she asked what I thought about narrative therapy.  I told her that I thought that it is a very effective method for PTSD treatment, but that it needed to be coupled with other methods.  Fortunately, this friend also happens to be a brilliant writer and versed in deconstructionist literature, which I tend to avoid because my head starts to hurt when I try to translate too much of a language only tenuously grasped.  Dissertation has also pushed me into this area, and it got me to thinking that Carol Dweck might have some deconstructionist qualities in her work that are worth further consideration.  If you have read other posts of mine, I have repeatedly and probably obnoxiously insisted that something was terribly wrong with our behavioral health system.  It leaves me with that gnawing feeling that we are missing something huge.  Again, I insist that we are not treating trauma, addiction, and despair well, if it all. 

              After the conversation with my friend, I remarked that whole edifice of psychology is ripe for deconstruction.  My opinion is born of a combination of massive dissatisfaction after working in this system for 20 years, and the hope that positive psychology may bring more balance to our present condition.  The two Carol Dweck articles that I have been reading are on personality, one in particular deals with self-definition and entity versus incremental orientations.  In her popular work Mindset, she uses the language fixed versus growth.  Essentially, the dichotomy is how you view a given capacity—can it be developed versus whether it is fixed and determinative? Entity and incremental theorists respond to a given problem differently.

               I use “given” because it is my belief that we all have elements of fixed and growth mindsets.  I suspect that it is more of continuum, some people are highly prone to fixed mindset thinking, Dweck repeatedly references John McEnroe and his endless capacity to externalize blame and emotional dysregulate into public tantrums.  I also think that “given” is appropriate because some problems are so enormous that we end up in positions that force us to fixed mindsets. The important point that I want to note from her work on personality is that some of the things that we might typically assume as personality, and therefore fixed, may in fact be malleable.  Think for a moment about values, attitudes, beliefs, temperament, preferences, dispositions, and traits and how much of these things we intuitively just label as personality in our common every day experience. 

              Dweck argues that we may have underestimated how much of our so called immutable personality traits are open to development.  My own research area in positive psychology also suggests this.  Hope, Optimism, Resiliency, and Self-Efficacy are all now considered to operate on a continuum as opposed to fixed traits.  They are regarded as states and therefore open to development.  Certainly, some individuals have innate tendencies toward optimism and hope, but that does not mean that hope and optimism are not developable within each of us.  A lot of the research that I have accumulated is related to the workplace; what I described is demonstrably evident to anyone who was generally an optimist who ended up in a department with poor morale.  Personality is the interplay of tendencies and context.

              The second article is more complicated and deals with a more specific aspect of selfhood, self-definition.  The context of the article is rejection and how self-definition shifts depending upon entity (fixed) versus incremental (growth) orientations.  In an effort to find humor in what is otherwise a shitty circumstance, I will use my recent efforts at publication in McSweeney’s.  I am on my third rejection.  If I was dating in a fixed mindset I would go to another bar, and blame this bar for it’s crappy music, and tell myself that the women there were garbage, never once considering that it might be my approach.  See—if I never question my own approach, I never open to the opportunity to learn and refine this approach.  And since I am purely joking in this example above, it is entirely narcissistic—the real tragedy is that I never bother to learn what the women can teach me about life because I’ve only relentlessly pursued my own need.

              One of the great revelations in this article was that fixed and growth mindsets reveal that we make certain interpretations of the world, and through our behavioral responses may end up impeding our growth.  Individuals with a fixed mindset were observed to changed self-definition even on relevant traits.  I will spare you all of the cognitive mechanisms that this runs through (you can pm me if you are really interested in knowing).  This struck me as counter intuitive and worth sharing.  I think the ultimate takeaway for me is that we all have fixed and growth mindsets within us.  This is also consistent with Albert Bandura’s beliefs on self-efficacy.  I had always assumed that when I got something wrong about the world around me, the appropriate response was “crap, what did I do wrong?” better change myself in orientation to the world, as opposed to “well, that sucks, maybe I did the best I could and the world happened to me.”  This seems so transparently obvious, but I can assure you that it takes practice to place yourself in the latter mindset. I am sure that I fail that task multiple times a day.

              What specifically impedes us?  At this moment I am inclined to say that it is often emotions and ego (I am using ego in the Buddhist sense, not Freudian).    Dweck does not follow this thread, but does identify behavior that reflective of fixed mindset in the area of self-definition.  The following behaviors are reflective of fixed mindset and rejection:  a) lingering negative affect b) expecting and guarding against future rejection c) goal oriented to suppression d) less likely to see opportunity for growth and acceptance.  So, as promised, I will use myself as an example with regard to my persistent efforts to convince McSweeney’s of my comic genius.  Why? I can joke about this, and it does not hurt, because my self-definition is not contingent on publication in McSweeney’s.  I can honestly care less, because I am having fun, my writing gets better, and I generate new ideas because of it. 

              I have achieved a.  I am not saying that there is no lingering affect when I receive the rejection email—it’s actually kind of nice that this outfit responds personally to your submission.  I am not sure I am fully there on b, I do anticipate future rejection, the difference is that I really don’t care.  I am also not guarding against—I have this gut feeling that it may happen eventually if I choose to keep submitting. On c, I am not engaging in the mental dialogue of suppression where I tell myself that they did not appreciate my comic genius, or that their publication is garbage and something not worth pursuing, or that I am just not cut out for it.  This could reach comic proportions if I denied that McSweeney’s ever existed or that I had ever submitted anything at all.  I could insist that this was fake news and that they were part of the disgusting media and I would protect my fragile ego.  But then I would never come up with a hilarious idea like the Pope writing a series of yelp reviews for restaurants in the Vatican.

              Instead I am solidly in the inverse terrain of d.  I can assure you that I am happier.  It’s much more satisfying to have thoughts like “ok, assholes I am sending you my fourth effort and opportunity for rejection by week’s end.”  I often reference Zen in these blog posts, and that is because it has had a remarkably transformative effect on me.  It is inextricably tied to everything I have experienced and learned this year, and I still know nothing about it.  I know nothing of comedy either, because like love, life, anything that involves learning is through process and praxis.  I only know that I have made others laugh.  I know that I laugh.  I know that I have made unkind jokes I regret because they have hurt others.  I know that I have had some success with standup.  I will probably try it again, and may even extend myself by trying improv (the actual zen of comedy).  See—none of this is self-definitional, it all is.  If I choose to identify too strongly with any one of those, I am in pain or I am identifying too closely with ego.  Everything in Zen comes back to direct experience.  I clearly know nothing of what it takes to be published in McSweeney’s.  I could care less, but I also do.

books from 2018

Booklist for 2018

Several, or a few, people have been asking me to just make a list of the books that I read recently.  I guess I have been proselytizing a bit too much.  These same people have said, my God, how did you do it? How did you utterly transform your life in just a few short months, and how did you add twenty pounds of muscle why simultaneously dropping to a BMI of 4.  Because I’m full of shit!  I don’t even know if that’s a good BMI, and my life is only partially transformed.  But, this much is true.  I am at peace most of the time. I got here because I have incredible friends and supportive family, and I listened more than I have ever been required.  And, I read, and applied lessons, and took notes, and talked, and debated, and argued, and advised, and lectured.  Point being—I didn’t any of this on my own.  So, if you want to read what I’ve been ranting about at various times this year, or if you read my blog posts and thought “what the hell is he talking about?” it may be herein, or it may be that I have no idea what I was talking about.

Learned Optimism—Martin Seligman.  If you had psych 101, he is the guy that did the learned helpless experiments with the dogs.  The dogs can’t predict when they are shocked, they can’t leave the situation, so they learn to be helpless and no longer try to leave the situation even when there is a clear exit.  Poor dogs, right?  What psych 101 did not tell you is that they reconditioned the dogs and they regained the lost capacity.  Seligman is later challenged by a colleague who argues that he is onto something much bigger, a theory of learned optimism. Yes, the research now supports that optimism can be learned, and there are certain techniques to enhance it.  He also wrote a book called The Optimistic Child.   Why you should read it?  Depression might be a preventable condition with proper guidance.  The diagnosis of depression is stunningly consistent with the descriptions of the behavior observed in learned helplessness conditions.

Why Buddhism is True—Richard Wright.  Evolutionary psychologist persuasively argues that certain aspects of the philosophy of Buddhism are true in the sense that there is scientific evidence to support them.  Mindfulness meditation has been demonstrated to be effective in regulating emotions and stress.  Cognitive psychology has revealed that there is a massive amount of illusion that is generated by the mind for specific purposes—namely to protect us.  But, this is a condition that the mind has been provided as an evolutionary adaptation that served a particular purpose at a specific point in time.  We needed to make decisions that would protect our offspring and to procure resources.  Emotions serve the purpose of helping us to evaluate threats in this area and respond accordingly.  We no longer live in conditions where our survival literally depended on these instincts.  If you were part of a hunter gatherer tribe and you offended people taking their possessions, they kicked you out of the group, and that was a death sentence.  Today if you offend the group, they say mean stuff on Facebook, and it hurts (because we have the same biology) but you still can go to the store and not starve.  I could go on and on about this book.  It connected a whole bunch of thoughts in ways I had never thought of.  It set me on my course for further study in Buddhism.

The Way of Zen—Alan Watts.  Absolutely, the best place to start if you have any interest in knowing more about Zen.  He traces the path out of Mahayana Buddhism through China, where it intermingled with Taoism to produce Zen.  Zen becomes an export to Japan where it takes its own distinct shape.

An Outline of Mahayana Buddhism—Beatrice Lane Suzuki.  Distinguishes the two main sects of early Buddhism, Hinayana and Mahayana, the small and large vehicles.  Mahayana was an expansion of the Buddhist teaching that places the mind at the center, with less emphasis on the strict interpretations of text and custom, to arrive at the essence of the teaching. This is not my area of expertise by any means, but it strikes me as similar to the gnostic tradition in Christianity.  The Mahayana tradition also dispels the critique that Buddhism is self-centered and not fundamentally concerned with the salvation of others.  The Mahayana tradition takes the position that no one is to enter final enlightenment (nirvana) without first ushering in all sentient beings.  It is fundamentally concerned with the suffering of all beings.

An Outline of Zen Buddhism—D. T. Suzuki.  Very similar to the Alan Watts book, though slightly more in depth treatment.  It’s very good, I just can’t think of anything at the moment to distinguish it from the other book.

Drive—Daniel Pink.  Related to my professional development and dissertation, but it is popular material and worth reading.  Pink traces the development of about 20 years of social psychology material on motivation, extrapolates from the work of Ryan and Deci, Carol Dweck, the guy that wrote Flow (I can’t spell his name) and various business leaders.  This is distilled into three core themes that Pink believes drive employee motivation—autonomy, mastery, and purpose.  Good luck finding a job that gives you all three.  Personal opinion.

Zen in the Art of Archery—I forget, some German guy.  I could now care less.  I remember reading the book and for the first 50 pages it was ok at best.  Then the last two chapters nailed it.  Yesterday a Jewish friend tells me that the guy was actually a Nazi.  And so off to Wikipedia.  And, yeah apparently you can spend years learning Zen and end up being a Nazi.  Not that this should be considered shortcoming of Zen, plenty of German Christians managed to reconcile their beliefs.  I actually don’t recommend this book.  It’s seventy some pages and really nowhere near as informative as the others.

Zen and the Birds of Appetite—Thomas Merton.  Read if you are burning to have a much deeper exploration of Zen and how it parallels and contrasts with Christianity.  Thomas Merton is that rare scholar who can almost effortlessly translate heavy theological concepts into something accessible.  This book entirely changed my understanding of the “fall of man” and the condition of “separateness” that results from knowledge.  The Buddhists hold that the separation of the world into objects, creates a dualism, that in turn creates all of our suffering.  There is a series of debates in the latter chapters that are a correspondence between Merton and Suzuki.

Mindset—Carol Dweck.  I am still reading it.  The first several chapters were revealing.  I have a ton of Carol Dweck’s work but have not read enough of it.  I started reading Mindset, just to have a more superficial grasp on her theory.  There is nothing terribly complicated here, it’s almost intuitive.  What is revealing is how pervasive it can be, and how it shapes behaviors that can remain entrenched for years.  I am still in the section on business leaders, but I can’t help but think of the lines in an earlier chapter—“I could have been…”  I spent forty years of my life with way too much of that mindset.

The Art of Loving—Erich Fromm.  The psychoanalyst that finally strikes the proper balance, in more ways than just the sexes.  It is dated, there are comments that could still be regarded as sexist, there is a painfully out of date comment on homosexuality.  But, there are arguments about how capitalism has shaped our present notions of love, that make it still relevant today, quite possibly even more relevant. There are painful takeaways. There is the recognition that so much of what we believe about love, is relative to our specific time and place, painfully removed from a much richer history, painfully underdeveloped and then spent or traded away as a commodity. Love is an art.  It is born of process, as in any art.  Like other mindsets we learn when it grows.  Where it is not growing, it is not love. Love and growth are iterative, and byproduct of each other.  If you don’t believe me look at your child’s picture from year to year.

5 Practical Uses of Facebook Recommendations (McSweeney's reject)

I will be doing a lot more writing on Action Research/Action Science in the coming weeks, since it is the chosen methodology for my dissertation.  You do not need to know much about this other than that it is collaborative in nature, and consists of cycles of plan, act, observe, reflect.  This research is a labor.  I have managed to find enjoyment here and there, but there is nothing hilarious about it.  Most of you know that I enjoy comedy.  I was lamenting to some friends that I had no time to participate in that part of my being.  I have had an urge to try improv, because it connects with the part of me that has been studying Zen.  I will get to it eventually, just to prove that I fear very little anymore.  I have found a lot of purpose in writing and doing, and like the other material I keep posting on the blog, this is stuff I just toss out to the universe because a) it triggers more thought b) I have to dump these thoughts to focus c) I have no idea what to do with them d) it makes me a better writer and more familiar with my material e) reading post structuralist hermeneutics is fun in only half hour increments.

In the spirit of Action Science:

Plan: I should really work humor into this whole venture so that I don’t feel dead inside

Act: I shall post ridiculous recommendation requests to Facebook

Observe: This is funny

Reflect: Ok, this may have been way funnier in my head. But, I now have an idea for my novel involving a bunker and the one man who thought to collect artificial organs instead of canned goods.  That’s funny, and practical, and a potential and dwindling pile of baboons will appreciate the effort at humor.  See how that works?

1.       Anyone know where I can buy a Jarvik 7? NWOT. Thnx.

M.R.:   Artificial heart?  Actually I might.

R.R:   M. I am trying to make a DIY bagpipe for a competition.  Only entertaining serious offers.

M.R.:   R.R. I wish you luck my friend, ambitious undertaking.

R.R:    Also, good to have one on hand for the coming apocalypse.  Everyone is thinking of canned goods for their bunker.  Guarantee you that nobody is thinking about artificial organs.  There’s gonna be some sorry ass people come judgment day. Someone is gonna be like “this worthless baboon was an incompatible donor. Does anybody have a Jarvik 7?  Maybe a 4? Must we start at square 1?

2.       Does anyone know a plumber with possible pet psychic abilities?

S.F.:  Do you really need a plumber?? Because I work for a wholesale plumbing supply company and know dozens of plumbers now : )

R.R.  S.F. here’s the thing, I have a tub filled with waterfowl. I tried Ouija.  They suck at it.  There little webbed feet kick that damn cursor all over the place.  Tub has a slow leak.”

D.E.  S. doesn’t sound like he needs a plumber, sounds like he needs a cat.”

R.R   D.E.  I don’t know if I was clear.  I don’t want to be rid of these birds.  They’re picking lottery numbers.

3.  Does anyone know if there is a laser eye surgery provider that also does laser hair removal?

D.E.  Probably.  My dentist does botox for wrinkles now…

R.R.   D.E.  I am worried that my eyelashes are too full.  I was thinking of having them laser beam out every third one.  But it could just be blurry vision, so gonna try the eye fix first.

J.P.: (face palm)

R.R :  J.P. back up plan. I don’t know if you are aware but the 90’s are coming back, big time.  if the eyes check out, I may get those hash lines laser carved into my eyebrows.  I also need to get just my left ear pierced.

4.  Non-emergent tattoo removal?

L.S.: (Mr. Clean ad)

R.R.: Tried it.

L.S.: Hi traffic area?  (Resolve ad)

R.R: Left bicep, big tattoo of a heart, says MOM.  Home for the holidays, found out I was adopted.  Done with this shit.

K.R. (brother): Lies, if it was on your bicep it would be a really tiny tattoo.

R.R.:  K.R. I still need to get the face one removed.  I was so heartbroken that I went and got a teardrop.  Now nobody wants to come near me.  Except for male teens who keep nodding there approval.  These kids are in touch with their feelings—is this that Emo you were talking about?  Sensitive 70’s making a comeback, big time!

5.  Does anyone know a Buddhist monk that also does children’s parties? Thnx.

J. F.: They’re quite common in Lost Angeles. Have you posted your request there?”

L. S.: fatchurchhomeentertainers.com

R.R: Aww, you guys are the best.  Gonna be a tight year and I wanted to get the kids acquainted with “nothingness.”  If he can chant that’s even better, it will help me ignore questions like “Dad, what’s a nothingcake?”

J.B: You could always give them the children’s version of the feel-good classic Being and Nothingness.

R.R:  J.B. what a wonderful idea.  I’ve been trying to explain that the “void” is the true source of all gifts, and that everything returns to this state.  The younger one gets it.  My oldest is out back digging around in the sinkhole.  That kid is too literal.

In Memoriam

In Memoriam 

It’s not an obituary—many of my blogposts end up being way more about me than I would like them to be.  I note this at the outset, because this post is of a very specific nature and I wish to express the significance of the person as selflessly as I can.  I’m in this weird space of my own life where things just happen now, and sometimes it takes days before I can make sense of the relevance.  This was the case on Thursday morning when I received a text from my mother that stated: “Dad got a call from Aunt Betty that Aunt Shirley passed away this morning.  We don’t know any more than that.”

After a day, thoughts started to come to me, and I thought particularly about the “we don’t know any more than that.”    So, I figured I would share some things that I did know.  I may get details slightly inaccurate, but this is what I remember. Aunt Shirley was from Virginia, and had an unmistakable southern accent, distinct from my Grandmother’s other sisters.  She sent my brother and I Christmas gifts every year.  There is a cookbook from Virginia still in my Mother’s house with unmistakably Southern recipes that are probably taking years off of my life.  She had an angelic voice, if she had been born in New York she might have been an opera singer.  I know she sang in the church.

I know that she married John Parker, and they raised her only son Jimmy.  I never knew John.  My Father tells me that he was a good guy.  I never knew cousin Jimmy.  He passed away after briefly surviving a car accident in 1970.  The Aunt Shirley that I knew often came to visit with her sister Betty, or with her friend Jim Steele.  They made it to my brother’s wedding, where we secretly discussed Virginia going blue for Obama, away from other family.  I was at the reception dinner with Val and my eldest son Aiden who was probably no more than one.  She asked me when I was getting married, and told me that I had better “get to it” because it was getting harder to travel.  In a month Val and I married quietly at the Justice of the Peace, to no fanfare.  I know that she probably would have traveled even for something like that.

A few years ago, her friend Jim passed.  I remember my Father consoling her on the phone, and saying specifically that “Jim was family.”  I regret that we did not live closer.  I don’t know much about the last few years and I regret that I won’t be able to attend her service.  Aunt Shirley could not make it to her sister’s service (my Grandmother) due to weather and recent surgery. This was somewhere around 2000. She made it to multiple weddings after this date.  And she visited my Grandmother in the declining years of Alzheimer’s long after my Grandmother forgot her, because this is what you do. 

My Grandmother’s service was a small affair, very few people, which is what happens when you outlive everyone.  At 21 this made me profoundly sad.  Part of the purpose of my writing is that Aunt Shirley also outlived many of the prominent figures in her life, but she had even less family than my Grandmother.  I’m sure it weighed on her that she could not make the service.  But, around this time she sent her yearly Christmas gift which included the unpublished manuscript that my Grandmother had written following the death of her youngest son Neil (my uncle).  This was ten times more meaningful.

I remember her sense of humor and her warmth.  She loved music.  I have a memory of her sitting in my room.  I must have been in high school because I remember she was inquisitive about my taking up the guitar.  “You know, my Jimmy was in a band.”  She said softly, proudly.  

She was a character, you could just tell.  Last year she contacted my Father and announced that she was getting married.  There was understandable concern, following Jim’s recent passing.

As I conclude here—I want to get to the heart of why Aunt Shirley was so relevant to me today--the what occurs to me after a few days.  I am pretty sure, that I am that character in my family.  I suspect I will be like that oil tycoon who met the playmate who took half his fortune. Why not get married in your 90's?  I am pretty sure it is precisely that spirit which allows you to live 90 plus years in a life that often did not go as hoped or planned.  At 40, that’s me.  She’s my family model of finding hope, year after year despite the tragedies.  She did that for nearly a century.  I can only hope I have strength like that—that I’m still invited to weddings at 85 and still traveling to make them.  There are days where a stubborn part of me cannot give up on an afterlife, probably out of hope. I need there to be a place where one goes to see the face of your only child whom you have missed for fifty years.  That is my hope for her.

She was family.  She was my type of family.

Zen and Some Thoughts on Poetry

            With as busy as I have been, I regret that I have not been able to keep up with reading and writing poetry.  Nonetheless, every now and then I run across something that resonates for one reason or another.  I also tend to write when emotion is at its rawest.  I’m just not in that space right now.  Zen and all of the meditation that I have been engaged in have placed me comfortably in the analytical mode where I need to be to complete this dissertation.  If all goes well, that journey completes itself within the year. I have the distinct feeling that I will be making sense of that journey for some time. Too much has happened, the path has forked, the path disappears, the path resumes.  Robert Frost, presented with two paths that diverged in a yellow wood, chose the one less traveled.  Luxury to choose.  The Taoist in me says that half of the time there is only one path.

            I will stick with this metaphor for now, because I suspect that a lot of the time we are clearing the path.  When I actually started studying Buddhism three or four months ago, I read something about Mahayana Buddhism appealing to psychologists, and Zen appealing to the poets.  This makes more sense to me now, Zen is inextricably tied to the arts and culture of Japan.  It also makes sense to me why Zen appealed to me instinctively.  Poetry is probably closer to the natural state I wish to be, psychology is my profession, and while enjoyable it can be exhausting and unhealthy for me.  I end up analyzing my own mind, and applying mental models that all eventually find their necessary inadequacy and leave me in a recess where I have produced enough existential dread to power my next three years of work.

            Zen also appeals to the Taoist in me.  Zen was birthed out of Taoism, which was a rejection of the formalism of Confucianism.  The art of Japan can be strikingly minimalist, which leads to the perception that Zen is to be associated with the most austere formalism, and while it cannot be disconnected from the activity, Zen occupies the space just beyond. It is knowing the form so thoroughly that one is liberated from it, free to pursue the artless art.  Zen in the Art of Archery illustrates this much better than I can.  Poetry is the language for this space.  It is our best effort to put language to direct experience.  It never captures it, but it can arrive so close that it achieves something that appears universal.  I have no idea if e.e. cummings, Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath, or Anne Sexton knew anything about Zen, but I see in their art the points where the formalism breaks under the emotional weight of direct experience.

            I was in the library a few weeks ago and happened on a biography of James Dickey, entitled The World as a Lie.  I had been oddly attracted to his work when I ran across some unfamiliar pieces this Spring.  But, this title was now wedded to all that I had been reading about Buddhism.  The world as it is perceived is filled with illusions.  A massive amount of what you are visually perceiving at this given moment, is not accurate, the brain constructs a lot of the periphery based on assumptions—it has no time to see every brick when the point is seeing the wall that you may be about to hit.  Such is life, where our goals, impulses, emotions, and memories all compete for attention.  This is not necessarily a regrettable position, there is beauty and history in all of that.  I sometimes wonder if this a necessary condition for our existence, without mystery, confusion, ambiguity we would have something that probably resembles certainty.  What purpose would we have to living?  Zen rejects this not on the grounds that these things don’t matter, but that they are incomplete and therefore certainty is an illusion, even when we feel certain.  We miss the world for the lie.

            So, back to the journey I have been on for the past 4 years. In March I was convinced that I had a moment of Zen. I had no idea what I was talking about, because I have now studied Zen and I can tell you that I know nothing about it.  It was probably closer to what they call satori, an awakening in perception, an awareness.  If you read anything on Zen you will find countless examples of this experience. It is both fleeting and unmistakable, and it really cannot be captured in words because it is so elusive.  It can be described, but what is the point? I only I have access to it. 

            As best I can describe, I felt time was suspended.  It was not that I could see the future, that is ridiculous, and please slap me if I ever say anything that grandiose.  But, I could feel the future, and the past, perfectly.  There was no distinction to time.  All of the love of my friends and family, every person that came and went through the first 40 years of my life, the joy at the births of my three children, the losses that haunt—all of it was there.  So you do not mistake me, this is not one of those spiritual stories of bliss.  Bliss was there, but there was also dread.  I still have no idea what the significance of this moment is, but it continues to fuel a massive amount of writing, creative and professional.  It was the first time that all of the dissertation ideas fused and my vision for that project presented itself.

            Zen is present in spontaneity and that is why it appeals to poets and artists, but I suspect that it is present in a great many pursuits—Fritjof Capra wrote similarly about this experience in the Tao of Physics.  One of the things that I am most thankful for in this odyssey is that Zen has placed me in such wonderous state of curiosity.  I sit to write creative work and I have no idea where it is going and could care less, because that is the point—its’s fascinating to see where it goes.  I write these blog entries, without much care if they are read or not, just out of curiosity what others see in it.  I am utterly transfixed with my dissertation work out of the pure curiosity of what my investigation may reveal.  To go back to the path metaphor—something tells me that Zen is what lies just beyond the path I’ve been clearing.

As I prepare to read some of my work this week, I will offer some of the poetry that resonated over the last year:

The Waking,

by Theodore Roethke

I wake to sleep and take my waking slow.

I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.

I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling, what is there to know?

I hear my being dance from ear to ear.

I wake to sleep and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?

God bless the ground, I shall walk softly there

And learn by going where I have to go

Light takes the tree, but who can tell us how?

The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair.

I wake to sleep and take my waking slow.

Great nature has another thing to do

To you and me, so take the lively air

And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady, I should know

What falls away is always. And is near.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

I learn by going where I have to go.

I am not sure I can add much analysis to what is plainly said here, but this has often been on my mind in those moments where I am subjecting myself to the verbal abuse that comes with not working on dissertation.  It says to me screw it, you’re onto something, have faith in yourself and the process, it will unfold on its own.

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s farm in Pine Island, Minnesota, by James Wright
Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,   
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.   
Down the ravine behind the empty house,   
The cowbells follow one another  
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right, In a field of sunlight between two pines,   
The droppings of last year’s horses   
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.   
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

There was debate in my writing group about whether Wright earned the last line.  What I can tell you, is that it spoke to me. All of what is present to him in this moment is elemental.  There was a moment in the past few months that I had the distinct feeling in those last lines—that I have wasted the last forty years of life.  There was way to much of me governed by externals—worry about offending others (people who truly know me, know that this can be nearly compulsive), worry about the next steps, worry that I was being misunderstood.  So little of that matters.

(From) The Strength of Fields, by James Dickey

The strength of fields. Lord, let me shake   

         With purpose.    Wild hope can always spring   

         From tended strength.    Everything is in that.

            That and nothing but kindness.    More kindness, dear Lord

Of the renewing green.    That is where it all has to start:

         With the simplest things. More kindness will do nothing less

             Than save every sleeping one

             And night-walking one

         Of us.

                         My life belongs to the world. I will do what I can.

     It sounds like prayer to me.  I hope I have lived up to me efforts to be kind.  I can tell you that about a month ago I was raving like a lunatic about how my dissertation, and life, and Zen and how this is all interconnected and I could not stop writing about it, Sonia said—“well it sounds like purpose.”

  

      And this, I ran across a few days ago.  It was unfamiliar to me, and I see so much that is universal.  We are born into suffering, there is sorrow, there is regret, and yet it is worth refusing this—to live, and to tell.  The tell can be a thousand different things, a thousand gestures of kindness, finding one’s voice through art in spite of life’s thousands of torments.   

      

   I go back to May 1937, by Sharon Olds   

   I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,

   I see my father strolling out

    under the ochre sandstone arch, the 

    red tiles glinting like bent

   plates of blood behind his head, 

   I see my mother with a few light books at her hip

   standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks,

   the wrought-iron gate still open behind her, 

   its sword-tips aglow in the May air,

   they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,   

   they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are   

   innocent, they would never hurt anybody.   

   I want to go up to them and say Stop,   

   don’t do it—she’s the wrong woman,   

   he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things

   you cannot imagine you would ever do,   

   you are going to do bad things to children,

   you are going to suffer in ways you have not heard of,

   you are going to want to die. I want to go

   up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,

   her hungry pretty face turning to me,   

   her pitiful beautiful untouched body,

   his arrogant handsome face turning to me,   

   his pitiful beautiful untouched body,   

   but I don’t do it. I want to live. I   

   take them up like the male and female   

   paper dolls and bang them together   

   at the hips, like chips of flint, as if to   

   strike sparks from them, I say 

   Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

   Laura said to me a few weeks ago, “wherever you are going to, I’m glad you’re writing it all out.”  I suppose that’s what this is—the telling about it.