Still Alive and Kicking—Update on the Author

It’s been a while since my last blog, and in the world of blogging there probably is no excuse for not keeping in touch … after all, a blog can be as long or as short as we want to make it. It can be on any subject  It can be informal as well as formal. It doesn’t even have to be well-structured, coherent, or in any way make sense. What could be easier?

Not that it’s an excuse, but I think a lot more and do a lot less these days. Partly a health issue; partly that it is easier than trying to have directed, logical thoughts. Sometimes you mine nuggets; sometimes you end up with trash. It’s just the way life is. But always you find ways to participate, to be part of life. It’s what we are.

Day dreaming passes for “thinking” for most of us. We call it “lost in thought,” but we usually mean that stream-of-conscious, disconnected quasi-logical thought pattern which is pure escapism. Probably best kept private because most of it is of a personal nature and would put the average voyeur to sleep. It’s more-or-less an unwritten agreement, perhaps even a law, not to confess.

Besides the lack of entertainment value, there is always the risk of becoming maudlin and dumping on friends, who by the way are having the same issues and problems in dealing with their own lives (which they don’t dump on me). Yes, better left unsaid, better to be alone in our thoughts so the next time we meet, we can both answer, “fine, everything is fine,” thereby maintaining some sense of not being the victim, but of having some control over random attempts of life to victimize it’s participants.

As is often said, “don’t take any of this too seriously because we will never get out of this alive, anyway.” Know that no matter how it seems, you are not actually alone. There are billions of human lives all over the planet, and in some trivial way, our lives are connected.  Call it the “collective unconscious” (Carl Jung), or the “transcendental oversoul” (Ralph Waldo Emerson), or “the force” (Stephen Spielberg). It doesn’t much matter.

The only thing that matters is that being connected provides strength when needed to pursue the dreams we have—regardless of how we personally define those dreams, and of whether or not we ever fully attain them. I was here, I did what I could, and what I did was good enough.

Copyright © 2009 by Graham

Reflections on Life (Part 2)

The spiritual side of my life seems to be missing. I have, once again, lost my centering.

Part of the problem is sleep deprivation. There is a direct correlation between sleep and …

• Speech
• Mood
• Memory

Part of it is how easily I slip under other people’s influence, which causes me to move away from my baseline behavior.

Things I would like to have a reason to change:

• No more swearing
• No more complaining
• No more getting entangled in other people’s hang-ups
• Maintaining presence at all times
• Focusing on, and deriving some satisfaction from, work
• Finding balance in my life

But would it really matter?

My parents never believed I would amount to much. Now they are gone.  There is nothing more to prove, no one to prove it to. I feel less urgency, but not completely. I may not have to prove anything, but I am still in the habit.

Part of my malaise is the feeling that merit is not enough, that fairness isn’t a requirement. I don’t know what I think, but I don’t feel anything:  not emptiness; nothing negative, but no sense of what I really want, of what or who I really am.

I am aware, intellectually, that I am finite … that nothing I do will last or matter at some time in the future.  Making a difference is a myth in a cosmic sense. Nothing lasts: nothing good; nothing bad. Nothing at all.

Yet it seems to matter. There seems to be a connection between my finiteness, my parents, and my behavior. I don’t fully understand it, can’t quite make the connection.

Am I only the product of my habits? What are the necessary conditions for change? Will I ever be the man I wanted to be? Not what everyone else wants me to be, but what I want?

I don’t want to be an act. I want to be whatever I am, but I want what I am to have substance. Why am I letting it eat me up?

Symptoms include fear and fatigue (success or failure?). Seems to be success, but know this isn’t what my boss wants. He can’t want to do this, as he has used every delaying technique known to congressmen and lobbyers.

Sense that he is trying to screw it up, or to screw me over: not fear of success, nor conspiracy.  Might have been at one time, but this fear is that he will prevent it if he can. The fear is real, even if exaggerated.

Also have fears about my health. Could be that I am finally entering midlife crisis, but even if true, labeling it isn’t much help. I have had similar feelings at every level; I never expected to succeed as well as I have.

Mixture of feelings, but not a single identifiable feeling. Complex issues:  fear of lost opportunity; slight fear of failure; fear of loss of energy; fear of loss of control (aging, failing abilities, facing my own mortality).

Touch reduces fear, not sensual touch, but signaling that you are there. I must remember to breath. Searching for my source of strength. The “who am I?” in all of this. Suddenly I realize “I” am a construct:  the sum of all I do and all things done to me; embodied in flesh, particularly brain and nervous system cells.

The “I” that is not much more than the sum of the influence of my parts. It is the “me” in motion, the executing program instructions formed by the wiring and chemistry of my computer-like brain. This is why I must continue to deal with the past … in order to deal with the future.

The “demons” are hard-wired. With effort I can rewire the connections, but as I rewire myself I become something other than the “me” I know. I can’t change everything or I would be somebody else. In other words, I must accept the parts of me that trip me up. They are me, whether they bring me down or lift me up.

If I get passed over, I need to understand the often “accidental” nature of success. It isn’t necessarily anything I have done or have not done, and I don’t need to make up my mind in advance regarding what I will do next. I don’t need the additional stress, for one. Work isn’t, and shouldn’t be, my entire life. This isn’t the Holy Grail, it’s a pay grade.

Insight comes in many ways. It isn’t necessary to follow rigid methods, such as meditation or analysis. Stream of conscious writing seems to make me feel better even if I do not achieve resolution every time (no method produces resolution every time). Just because I have my demons does not mean I can’t lay down the burden from time-to-time.

Think there is some residual, some fallout. Once again, letting others define my personal value. I know that if I spend a lot of time in dysfunctional environments, I have a tendency to become dysfunctional myself. This is natural, and may point to the only good reason why I may have to move on.

While I should not move on bitter feelings, I should move away from a damaging environment. Most of recovery is seeing clearly. See “opportunity” for what it is. It doesn’t in anyway validate me. Fortunately I don’t need validation: I am one of the better managers, and most of the leadership knows this.

In the universe I occupy, it means only that someone in the food chain wants me to stick around and keep doing what I have been doing to make them look good. Different people may see different meanings, but that doesn’t change what it really is.

In truth, we control almost nothing. Life is mostly influenced by everything outside us and only a little by us, directly, by what is inside us. We try to game the system (a process which we have agreed to call competition), but the game is not owned by any one of us: different circumstances, different timing, different discoveries … different results.

If we are lucky, we learn to control ourselves.

Copyright © 2000, 2009 by Graham

Originally written March 2000, Updated April 2009 for Inclusion Here.

Have You Ever Noticed?

… how two people can meet for the first time, disagree on almost everything, and go their separate ways, each inflexibly convinced that they are in possession of absolute and immutable truths, each thinking the other a bit stupid, and each believing that what they have disagreed about is among the most important issues of their lives.

Stranger still, if those same two people are thrown together again after the passage of time they often continue the argument, but now on opposite sides of the same issue, unaware of the influence each has had on the other. Usually, neither recognizes the fundamental issue; more likely, each immediately seeks out friends who re-enforce what each already believes (and is miserable if none are available).

This is as true of scholars, teachers and their students as it is of garbage collectors or children. One can be intellectual in private, but one has a vested interest in a world-view when in public. And if either is persuaded to the other point-of-view they honestly think it has been theirs all along.

A variation on this theme: sometimes an individual sees the argument of your enemies most clearly until he and that enemy have a falling out, at which time he begins to realize how cogent your argument was. Suddenly you were right all along, but “I just didn’t see what you were getting at.” He honestly believes you were both always in accord, but that you both were tripped up by that old nemesis, Mr. “Semantics.”

And still another variation: sometimes the individual is compelled to defend everything issued forth from his own lips simply because he said it (without waiting for further data, or in heated argument, or foolishly because he was tired, hungry, or perhaps not feeling so well), though a wiser man would chalk it up quickly to a temporary mental aberration, recognizing that given the right conditions, all men are fools.

And one last variation: if the same two people are of different sexes, they very often see the other in the disagreement phase as somewhat unattractive, if not downright ugly. But as their positions merge and they discover that they “were in agreement all along,” each seems more attractive than the first time they met. Unchanging physical features suddenly change right before our eyes!

Copyright © 1971, 2009 by Graham

Life Is a Quarrel for Independence

Life is a quarrel for independence. It is an attempt to free oneself from the domination of our programming, which we never fully achieve. Programming is all around us: parents, teachers, friends, peers, clergy, and many others have this influence over us. Without it, we would never feel confident about a chosen course of action for the vast majority of issues, even though so many of these issues are essentially repetitive. To avoid endless debate, we simply play the program that seems most relevant.

The danger is not so much that we will play the wrong program, in the wrong context, or at the wrong time—yielding an unacceptable result. In most cases we can simply apologize and try again. The danger comes from the association of each member of our particular set of programs with evaluations or criticisms of how effective they are, or more likely how ineffective they are.

If a parent criticizes everything a child says or does, without offering a method for constructive change, the program continues to play each time the situation occurs, but the child has no confidence in the learned response. Hence the child is reticent to share an opinion, and remains flawed—usually reflected as the absence of the ability to engage in “small talk.”   

Life is fatalistic without external influences. These influences are required to bring about changes in our programs; for example, the transition from a child’s view to an adult view. We all have motivational forces within: forces when discovered that free us to some degree from a basically reactionary level—even though we never become completely free from habitual reactions. Such is the snare of fatalism. 

But if we understand why we do things, even if we continue to do them, we gain another degree of freedom because awareness is the first step in reinventing ourselves, and because the doing part of this process is not nearly the problem that the critique is. What must be overcome is the judgement that you are inferior. Learn to apologize, to begin again, and to let go of the past.

False change generally backfires. We can do what we want to make it look like we’ve changed, externally, but whenever we do, we most likely find that we don’t like that person that we are becoming because it isn’t really us. When this happens, learn to apologize, to begin again, and to let go of the past. 

And finally, fame makes awareness difficult because fame goes to the head—whether fame is already present or only sought after. Fame is generally associated with expectations for consistent behaviors, which serve to distract and derail. It requires considerable personal investment to change what is cast in stone. Fame exacts a high price. The more famous you become, the more change costs in personal sacrifice: apologize, begin again, let go. The more you do, the sooner you will become you. 

 

Copyright © 2009 by Graham

An Alternative View of the Nature of God

The problem is destiny and one’s sense of destiny. We want things that we do to have some lasting importance. I can do the scut work, the dirty work, along with everyone else, but it must eventually point to something meaningful. There must be a visible relationship between performance and importance. There must be some underlying rationale for our existence to continue in some form, even if the price is living in Hell.  

The answer, as always, is that there is no way of knowing in advance if you are right or if you are a fool. Living with the uncertainty is self-defeating. It makes you afraid to commit, but you still find yourself having to make commitments and having to throw yourself into the breach with no guarantees of success, not even by degree. For some, God is a matter of convenience. God is the miracle worker who will deliver us from Hell.

In most of us, life corrupts and destroys no matter how we view it. The magnitude of courage required to continue any but a defensive posture is beyond what is reasonable to require. There are no commitments in return. God may not play dice with the universe, but he seemingly does so with the lives of its inhabitants; either that, or he has no interest in outcomes.

If it were God’s will to destroy those who think, and who speak what they think, then so be it. Then God’s love for man must be as man’s love for an insect – as long as it doesn’t annoy, no need to destroy. This in no way connotes that the insect has sold out to Satan, only that the insect chooses to follow its own nature, as given to it by God. If God punishes what is in our nature, then God has created the most perverse universe possible.

I do not renounce God; I do renounce the popular views of God. If God exists, and if God creates all that there is, then God forgives our mistakes. What I reject is the notion that God creates weaklings so he can punish them for making mistakes and for not begging for forgiveness. I reject most people’s interpretations that present God as a judge and warrior, spewing fire and damnation. If God made me in his image, it makes no sense to torture me for my mistakes.

If God is love, then He asks nothing of me. My creation was a gift, a mutual gift for it involved the lives of other human beings to produce my life. Is God’s love any different (except that it be more perfect) than the love of parents for their offspring? And do we not say that a parent who loves the child must give up the child at some time in its development? Doesn’t the empirical evidence point to God having given up the child?

We are not on earth to live our lives in constant fear of God and death. That I know. That would be pointless. We are here to take responsibility for ourselves. For whatever reasons, we have the awesome responsibility of choice, as individuals and as a group. But having said this, there is nothing to learn in a physical plane that we need to know for the spiritual plane. There is nothing we must do, except as our environment has shaped us, and except where our interests carry us.

The drive to achieve anything comes from societal pressures, peer pressures, and parental pressures. For some, outright manipulation through a monopoly on the definition of God; for others, an honest belief gone wrong. God requires nothing from us, for we are taught that God’s love is unconditional. It is not that we are free to hurt others through our mistakes and lapses in judgment, but that God understands the nature of his creations and accepts the imperfections.

It’s the only thing that makes sense, that makes it possible to suggest that God is the positive force in the universe. So forget the rapture. There will be no judgement day. God doesn’t need or use revenge against the insects. It is people who need revenge, for God is not petty and has objectives that are not mundane. In short: God does not take sides. It is man who takes sides and it is man who interprets the Bible, or similar book, to prove that he is on the right side.

There are many paths to God: Christianity and Judaism, Islam and Hinduism, to name but a few. I would never suggest that you walk away from your beliefs. I can only say that my view seems right for me, but that doesn’t mean that you are wrong. I can accept your diversity if you can accept mine, and God would applaud all of us for having the good sense to show each other the respect due us for making that choice. 

 

Copyright © 2009 by Graham

 

Blogging is Supposed to be an Exchange of Ideas

At least, that’s what I was told when someone suggested I take it up. Makes sense: who wants to listen to the lone self-appointed guru, composing and handing down the ten tablets from Mount Sinai—especially when it has already been done, and lets face it: Moses is a tough act to follow. Riding the ego-train, telling ourselves that we have all the answers or at least most of them, that gets old, too, doesn’t it? Sometimes I think we do as much damage as good in trying to deal with some of life’s issues … I know I have.  

Maybe I should change my focus and talk about all of my screw-ups in life, but somehow I’m not sure that would be of any more interest than my successes, although sometimes I do wonder. It’s amazing to me that my “about the author” page has had twice as many hits as the most popular blog I have written. I don’t know what that’s about, but I suspect that at least a few of us are trying to figure out who this idiot is, and why he thinks he might have something to say that is even remotely worth listening to?  

I guess I don’t blame anyone for that but myself. I wrote it. I suspect that it requires at least a pint or two of Guinness to make me even moderately interesting. And any more than four would put me over the side with an excuse, but nobody wants an excuse. My guess is most just want to be heard even when they know they aren’t saying anything. Honestly, six or eight billion people (or whatever the world population has become) can’t be all wrong. There just aren’t that many new ideas, folks, so it must be something else.

Well, I guess I’m no closer to the truth, such as it is, nor perhaps to even basic understanding, but I do know this: every once in a while I ring somebody’s bell out there, not realizing the impact that something I wrote has had on them. Sometimes it seems to be helpful and sometimes it appears to be harmful, owing to significant diversity in backgrounds, influences, and needs that each of us have. I don’t always get it until it’s too late, but I would rather you tried to explain it to me than to live with a mistake that could have been avoided.  

You don’t have to listen, or waste your time responding, I can get used to that … that’s one of the great things about America. But if you do listen, before you think you have received the “answer”—from anyone, especially when you are about to make a major decision based on that answer—before you commit, this would be the one time that you must push back. Question my reasoning or lack thereof, and get a firm understanding of what I (or anyone) said. It’s your life and your decision because you have to live with the fallout. And the bigger the decision, the more important it is for you to get the best information you can.

That’s it … nothing particularly earth-shattering. But if you ever listen to anything I say, this would be the time.

P.S., – I guess it’s easier to have that exchange if I remember to enable comments. My apologies; it is on now …

Copyright © 2009 by Graham

Gay Marriage Is About Equality (California Prop 8)

There has been a lot of talk about dissolving the 18,000+ gay marriages which were performed in California before the referendum, but it can’t be done. The US Constitution states that no ex post facto law shall be passed by Congress. Then it defines “an ex post facto law [as one that] applies to an act committed before the law was passed, or that was not illegal at the time it occurred.”  [Article 1, Section 9, Limits on Congress] It goes on to say that no state is permitted to pass any ex post facto law. [Article 1, Section 10, Limits on the States] In plain English, no new law can be enforced retroactively.

It remains to be seen whether or not the state can dissolve marriages performed after the date of the rollback (presumably November 4th) because those 18,000 voices are not going to be silenced, and there is no compelling reason why some are and some aren’t allowed to be married. There may be some additional legal issues, as well; for example, I’m not certain, but I believe it takes a 2/3-majority vote of the legislative branch to actually make a constitutional change (not 51% of the voters). I think we should give some thought to why our founding fathers imposed that requirement before we start changing our fundamental agreement on what constitutes freedom.

Furthermore, the state has already come most of the way towards legalizing gay marriage by enacting “separate but equal” legislation: “Registered domestic partners shall have the same rights, protections, and benefits, and shall be subject to the same responsibilities, obligations, and duties under law, whether they derive from statutes, administrative regulations, court rules, government policies, common law, or any other provisions or sources of law, as are granted to and imposed upon spouses.”  [California Family Code: Section 297.5.(a)]  Let me suggest that in trying to please everybody, we have come full circle and pleased nobody. Do we really want to go down the “separate but equal” path again?

In my opinion we have already established a precedent regarding “separate but equal,” which is to say we already know that it doesn’t work, that it isn’t right, that it isn’t honest and that it isn’t “equal.” But it is “separate.” Nothing better illustrates this fact than being required to identify yourself as a “registered domestic partner” instead of as a “spouse.” How many ways are there to say “registered sex offender?” How about for our first shot at equality, we start using the term “registered house spouse?”—”domestic” and” house” being reasonably synonymous for the one who stays at home. Better yet, we can just stamp “gay” or “straight” on everyone’s work records, making it much easier to invade their privacy.

With regard to California’s proposition 8, I have only heard two arguments for preventing same-sex marriage, both of which are born of fear and have no compelling justification for singling out and excluding a rather large segment of the US population: (1)  We have to protect our kids from gay sex education; (2) We have to protect our churches from being forced to perform gay weddings.

If anyone actually believes the first argument, I would ask why didn’t you think of protecting all of our kids, back when we legalized gay parenting and gay school teachers. But lets face it, more kids have been molested by straights than by gays. Different problem—a crime in fact that we should take seriously after due process in the legal system, or do we take that right away, as well? As to the second argument, I think the Church is on firm ground in refusing to go against their beliefs by performing the ceremony. Freedom of Religion doesn’t mean except for marriage.

If you don’t like what your kid learns in school, then get involved with the schools. Join the PTA. It isn’t the Government’s job to do your parenting, and it damn sure isn’t worth a constitutional amendment to enforce your version of parenting. But it is Government’s job to protect everyone’s rights, and that might just take a constitutional amendment. Pray they get it right if we go down that path because there is nothing worse than being next in line of an angry mob who wants to control your rights.

Personally, I believe that gay people will continue to fight this battle long after the rest of us get tired of it, although I don’t understand why we require them to fight for what the rest of us already have. I applaud them, I encourage them to continue, I feel grateful and indebted to those who do because the next battleground for protecting our rights may be on my front porch. Furthermore, I predict that one day we will all wake up and realize that we are quarreling over the legal meaning of a word, and that words should never be defined by lawyers because they have already abused and obfuscated the language quite enough.

So here we are again: lawyers all primed to make a killing on billable hours, costing in the millions of dollars (which you and I as taxpayers will pay); voters all primed to protect the churches and the children from imaginary threats to argue a no-brainer in perpetuity. Somehow we ignore the fact that the threat is everywhere, such as decades of heterosexual attacks on children by one of the largest churches in the world. Somehow we forget that unlike the churches, gays aren’t recruiting to expand their ranks, so they don’t spend a lot of time proselytizing. They are simply asking for “equality” in place of “similarity.”

The solution is not all that difficult. First, separate matters of church from matters of state. For marriage as a “sacrament” let your church define it (prescriptive), for marriage as a civil ceremony let the dictionary makers define it (descriptive), O.K., and the law-makers if we must, and for marriage as a personal experience, that bonds two people together for the rest of their lives as soul mates, don’t try to put it into words because the experience is inherently mystical and words cannot do it justice.

Copyright © 2008 by Graham

Version #2

Musings on the Therapeutic Side of Golf for Movement Disorders

Last year, or the year before, I played golf with a man I had never met who had Parkinson’s Disease. At first he was fearful of telling me why he could play some holes like a pro, and others like it was the first time. I guess he decided that I would understand, perhaps because I wasn’t critical, I wasn’t trying to teach him the game. The conversation that followed made me much more aware of the dimensions of this disease, and of the difficulties we all face, sooner or later, in trying to deal with our finiteness. 

I told him I might someday immortalize him in a short story. He requested that I not identify him because he has enough problems without telling the world how “different” he has become. We agreed to use the fictitious name, Sam. I also included some observations (and attributed them to Sam, making him more like a composite) by two other Parkinson patients whom I have since met on a golf course. (Many physicians who specialize in movement disorders recommend golf as excellent physical and mental therapy.)

Sam was diagnosed 14 years prior to our conversation: he was 73 when I met him. The others (call them George-1 and George-2) were also male: George-1 was 62 and had few outward symptoms; George-2 wouldn’t reveal his age, but looked to be in his 80’s, and his symptoms were more pronounced. He only played 9 holes. Later I would understand how important those 9 holes were. They gave him something he could point to, even if only for a little while, and say, “It isn’t over, yet.”

Quotation marks in this blog only mean that I tried to use the words and phrases of the speaker, but some time has passed and I only have cursory notes (jotted down following each game). If I got it wrong, I apologize to Sam, George-1 and George-2, wherever you are, (and to the reader) for any misinformation in the article. However, I have a confidence level of 90-95% that it accurately reflects the intent of the participants, which was to talk about the things you won’t find in a book.

THE INTERVIEW

Sam: Parkinson is often referred to as the “nuisance disease,” as though it were only a matter of inconvenience. I can assure you it causes more than inconvenience in the average household. But because it has a very slow rate of progression, and even this is masked by some of the current drug treatments, it sneaks up on us slowly, allowing us to remain in denial for a very long time.

Graham: How long have you had the disease?

Sam: About 14 years. Yes, … I think that’s right. It sounds right.

Graham: You aren’t sure?

Sam: Sure I am sure, but I forget everything for a while, then it comes back.

Graham: You mean recall is slow?

Sam: Yes, that’s it. “Recall.”

Graham: You don’t appear to have dementia, but I notice you are slow to respond.

Sam: I do everything slower. I read slower, I talk slower, I dress and walk slower. Sometimes my legs freeze up and won’t move at all. Everything is affected … including thinking. Sometimes my brain locks up. I get it eventually, but people assume I’m retarded, so I don’t always try to join in.

Graham: Has there been a change in any of your mental abilities?

Sam: You mean, uummm … It’s coming, just a second.

Graham: For example, your “reasoning abilities.”

Sam: That’s it, “reasoning” … no, I can still reason, but I have lost memory skills. My IQ was tested a few months ago, and I haven’t lost much more than the average adult my age. I just process slower.

Graham: What was the actual diagnosis, and what are the symptoms the doctor used to determine the diagnosis?.

Sam: Idiopathic Parkinson’s Disease.

Graham: Idiopathic?

Sam: It’s the most common type. It means cause unknown.

Graham: They don’t know what caused it?

Sam: No. And that’s a problem.

Graham: Hold on a minute. I don’t understand. Isn’t Parkinson caused by pesticides getting into our drinking water?

Sam: Possibly, it certainly is one of the suspects, but the disease has proven to be more complex than originally thought.

Graham: How so?

Sam: We used to think the loss of dopamine producing cells was the cause. We now know that several genes, perhaps 6 to 8, and a few chemical messengers (including dopamine and norepinephrine) are involved. But we remain focused on dopamine because the dopamine system is involved in all of the major symptoms, and we have effective medicines for these symptoms. I take a lot of medicine.

Graham: What’s that about? I mean if you don’t know what causes the disease, why would you throw so much medicine at it?

Sam: Good question, but the answer is still symptoms. Parkinson symptoms can be very debilitating. There is no cure, and there is no medical procedure that can delay the progression. If we don’t know the cause, we can’t know the cure. But we do know the symptoms, and we can and have minimized them.

Graham: Can you tell me … ?

Sam: Wait. Let me finish. While there are no known medicines that can delay progression, coffee in moderation and even smoking cigarettes in moderation have been shown to slow progression. Nobody knows why, but for me it explains why I worked my way up to drinking 2 pots of coffee a day before my system couldn’t take it any more. 

Graham: I guess you pick your poison with those choices.

Sam: Literally. And what makes it worse, dopamine, like all chemical messengers has more than one use. It not only affects fine motor movement, it also is used in the pleasure centers of the brain to reward behaviors. When we take our drugs, we can’t restrict delivery of dopamine to only the movement circuits, we also deliver a hit to the reward circuits. The result is, for some patients, the medication (especially the agonists) creates a stimulus for arousal, and sometimes inappropriate behavior. Only 5 or 10% act on these drives; more accurately, the reporting rate is under 10%. 

Graham: Are we talking aphrodisiac?

Sam: Officially, no one in the business of medicating Parkinson patients would suggest what seems to be implied, and would be quick to point out that another behavior influenced by the drug is gambling, so maybe the issue is that the drug raises risk-taking thresh-holds.  

Graham: I guess it depends on whether or not you can choose your poison.

Sam: All I know is that I have a much higher interest in sex than before I got the disease. You might think this is not much of a problem, but you would be wrong. My wife no longer trusts me because she knows its the drug, not me. She is angry at me a lot. This isn’t just a viagra-type drug, which works on the mechanics of sex. It’s a drug that turns up the libido, and simultaneously undermines the ability to perform. 

Graham: They get you coming and going.

Sam: Double whammy. Particularly the agonists.

Graham: As interesting as this is, we still haven’t talked about the set of symptoms used to diagnose the disease. 

Sam: I knew I was forgetting something, I’m sorry.

Graham: No problem.

Sam: There are over two dozen symptoms associated with Parkinson, but there are only three main symptoms: tremor, rigidity and bradykinesia. Parkinson tremor is most active at rest. If you have tremor in an arm that you are moving, chances are you have the yips, not Parkinson. Rigidity is stiffness in the muscles. They get harder and tighter, making it difficult to move about and maintain balance, causing postural instability. Bradykinesia is a slowing down of normal movement, and in advanced cases becomes akinesia or lack of movement.

Graham: So the main symptom is loss of motor movement?

Sam: You could say that, yes, but you can also have involuntary movements, or dyskinesias, which are caused by the drugs used to manage bradykinesia. For me, there are other problems that scare me more than losing the ability to move around. That’s the easy part. For a very long time, we can use walkers, motorized carts, or some other means to get around. It isn’t very pretty, but you can milk it for all its worth.

Graham: What would be worse to you?

Sam: The hard part is that Parkinson is a disease that takes away your ability to communicate. It affects speech, which gets softer and softer until you can’t be heard. It affects hand writing, which gets smaller and smaller until you can’t read it. It affects your eyes in a variety of ways, which makes it more and more difficult to read printed material. So while you are becoming more and more dependent on others to help you get around, you are becoming less and less able to communicate with them. You are alone, trapped in a body that is sentenced to watch its own death, unable to connect with either your world or the people in it. Ultimately, it destroys your personality, your relationships, and everything that you spent a life time building. To me, that is the closest approximation to living in Hell I can imagine.

Copyrighted © 2008 by Graham

Throw The Bums Out!

As I sit here watching the 19th rehash of the vice-presidential debates on CNN, I realize that I am not particularly surprised that there is corruption in Washington—that almost everyone lies, that we substitute personal attacks for campaign issues, and that virtually all of our representatives profit, many illegally, from their positions of public trust. What does surprise me is our business as usual approach to the global economic meltdown, literally while Rome burns.

The more we learn about this package, the more it looks like everyone got a piece of the pie, the result of which diverts 110 billion dollars away from the bailout. And for what? To pay for a stock car race track, wooden arrows for children, reduce taxes on the rum imported from the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, and nearly 1/2 billion dollars to keep movie making in Hollywood—to name a few. From all indicators, it is nearly impossible to find anyone who has read the parts pertaining to the bailout.

While lawmakers were making sure they got theirs, another 159,000 jobs were lost in September (about 750,000 since the first of the year), and state governments were weighing in with more financial issues. California alone needs seven billion dollars just to continue essential services. And somewhere along the way we hear the stimulus package is actually aimed at credit markets. It all seems complicated, doesn’t it? How can anyone figure out what to do?

And then it happened. Larry King had had enough. “Anymore interrupting and I turn off the mike.” Suddenly, it was no longer acceptable for three people to get their three different sound-bites out simultaneously by shouting louder than anyone else. We had to take turns. It was really that simple: control of the mike was the only defense at Larry’s disposal to make people do the right thing, but it worked, it was simple and efficient, and it underscored what we already knew, that sometimes we just have to make an effective threat.

As voters, we also have one simple but effective means to alter the outcome. It would involve severe blood letting, which we may have felt was overkill—up until now. But the time has come: the only way we are going to get Washington to change is to fire nearly every incumbent up for reelection, with very few exceptions. It may sound draconian, but I am absolutely convinced that at least for a decade or two, we would have their attention. And just maybe we would get our country back in the process.

 

Copyrighted © 2008 by Graham

The Fine Arts Are Alive and Well

This has been quite an amazing week for me. What started out as a few observations on my feelings about the fine arts (traditionally paintings, music, and literature, but evolved to include stage plays, movies and photographs and even silliness posing as art), turned into an opportunity to exchange ideas with a group of high school kids through a program called the Fine Arts Survey.

What made the week so amazing is that there really are kids out there who really do dig the arts, who enjoy discussing their ideas about what art means to them, or who aren’t afraid of asking the hard questions while they struggle to understand this little piece of a very large universe. And believe me, sometimes they can get pretty deep about nuances of meaning and the difficulties of seeing meaning in ambiguity.

I actually considered not posting my blog (What Makes Art, Music or Literature Great?) because I was concerned that nobody would read it. After arguing with myself for a couple of days (an argument I lost, obviously) I decided to post it with an apology. The apology was a short statement of what I perceived to be the facts, that I knew it would have limited appeal, and that we would get back on track next week.

Well I didn’t know, it turns out, and thank heaven that I didn’t act on what I understood to be indisputable knowledge of the facts. The arts are alive and well precisely because they are so open to interpretation, and anybody can have an opinion about what art is or isn’t, and whether or not it is great or not-so-great. We the people now have as much right to own the arts as the critics once did. And we are, as often as not, able to pick out greatness without the assistance of an expert.

I know that last statement scares my Western Civilization (PhD, Harvard) professor, and I still see a role for him (I will let you form your own opinion about what that role might be), but he is no longer the driver, he is no longer in charge. I guess you might say there has been a revolution in the last few decades and the good guys won. I guess you realize what this means … I take back my apology, and you will probably get another shot at expressing your opinions on art in the near future.

Click on the Copyright Statement if you want to start early.

Copyright © 2008 by Graham

Self Help Experts, Gurus & Their Books (Revisited)

Of the half dozen or so topics I have posted to date, Self Help has generated the most interest … and the most questions. This blog will address some of the unanswered questions raised by the original blog. It in no way replaces the original, rather it augments and further clarifies. Specifically,

• I will expand the discussion of the principles to improve our base of understanding, and
• I will add some examples of how these principles can be used outside the work place

The original blog, by design, makes no attempt to formalize the method. It discusses three principles that worked for me, but it avoids the appearance of describing a system because you must be the one to decide whether or not these general principles work for you.

 

The Three Principles Form a Repeating Cycle

[1] All of us make mistakes, but some of us have such low self-esteem that we get defensive and go into denial. When that happens, we lose our connectivity to others. This is true whether “others” are your boss, your co-workers, your spouse or your children.

[2] Being alone and ignored, our self-esteem gets worse, which brings on harsh judgmental, internalized feelings that we try to suppress. But we can’t suppress them because deep within our brains, we accept that there is something wrong with us.

[3] This gradually leads us to the source of our feelings, which is usually ourselves, although sometimes we provoke a negative response from others (family, friends or co-workers) and misdirect the blame.  Either way, we are the root cause of our own pain. To end the pain, we need to do two things: accept ourselves and accept our mistakes. Then we need to get on with resolving the problem, refusing to look back.

 

The CYCLE in which we Find Ourselves

• Begins with denial - We tell everyone who will listen that “It’s not my fault!”
• Then we feel badly about ourselves - denial slowly shifts to anger at self, often with feelings of being stupid or worthless
• And finally we begin to sense that we can get back to “normal” – which we do by reinterpreting history, by putting the event in the best light we can muster
• This brings us back to Step One, where we wait for an opportunity to repeat the cycle

 

The Only Way to Stop is to Break the Cycle at One of its Transition Points

[1] Accept responsibility while staying out of the blame game – most people will respect you for wanting to be part of the solution. Do not get defensive. The moment you do, you lose. If you are sincere and focus on the solution to the problem, you are less likely to be ignored and more likely to be given the chance to help fix the mistake.

[2] Accept that your feelings are valid, but do not let them tell you what your next move is. If you deny your feelings, or if you do the opposite and let them do the driving, either way you lose – feelings associated with low self-esteem rarely change through analysis, but often change when we achieve a series of small successes. In the work-place, a small success might be praise for your role in a task. At home, a family member begins to spend more time with you because you have stopped yelling when they make a mistake.

[3] Stop evaluating yourself and others, and focus on the issues, problems, or task at hand – it’s the only way to get the little successes started in your life.

 

Here are Some Tools You Can Use to Improve Your Odds of Success

•  Postponement - Instead of letting your mind seize control and run you through the ringer, make an “appointment with yourself” to have this “conversation” in a day or two. Chances are good that you will forget to do it later; otherwise, postpone it again. If you do this, you will eventually gain control.
• Forgiveness – Never blame anyone for your problems, not even yourself. Attack the problem, not the people. However, acknowledge your part in the mistake by letting others know that you want to help, and that you want to make sure it doesn’t happen again. (Blaming is not Acceptance and vice versa.)
• Focus on the Issues, the problem or the event – If you focus on people’s shortcomings instead, the result will almost always be that you fail to break the cycle.

Do not do any of this to prove anything to anyone. Be yourself. But recognize that humans need other humans in their lives to be happy. Some of us get this companionship through service to others, some get it through focusing on the family, some get it through work, to name a few. It’s up to you, but it should not be ignored because we all need to have someone we can go to, someone we can rely on to provide stability.

Finally, in my experience just because a person is having self-esteem issues, doesn’t mean that they need to let someone else step in and run their lives. It’s just exactly the opposite. Unless you are part of the cure, your self-esteem is not likely to show much improvement. If it isn’t your success, how can it be your improvement? Worse, if you rigidly adhere to other people’s advice, every time you make a mistake you will see it as failure, but if you are actively engaged in the changes you want to make, you are more likely to see mistakes as the price of admission.

Now here’s the beauty behind the beast:  there is no right answer. We aren’t all going in the same direction, with the same motivation. What you want out of life isn’t necessarily what I want, and vice versa. And ideally, we need to recognize some of the “happy mistakes” we make. I doubt that they are fully random. I like to think that once we begin to nudge the brain in the direction we have chosen for ourselves, that it keeps working the problem and sometimes even demonstrates that it’s getting the message.  

 

NOTE:  As before, if at anytime you experience suicidal, homicidal, or otherwise destructive feelings towards yourself or others, then by all means see a medical doctor because your problem may require medical treatment.

2008-0824 Self Help II Copyright © 2008 by Graham.

What Makes Art, Music or Literature Great?

Would You Call This Art?

Recently, I heard that age old question again, the one that suggests that to understand art you need an expert who can explain it to you. Having just written a blog that rejects this idea for self help victims, I felt that I had to accept the challenge to address the same issue with regard to art, music and literature. I will admit some bias: I do not understand the idea of having little or no participation in the important events of my life, especially if the justification is because someone else is claiming to be an expert, and insisting that I don’t have the proper credentials for such things. I believe we lead better lives when we consider the advice of others, but make our own decisions. This is true whether we are talking with financial experts, medical doctors, or the gardener.

That said, back to art, beginning with an observation: to describe genius in painting in terms of brush strokes is like describing genius in literature in terms of typography, yet I’ve heard it said in a graduate class. The professor insisted that we cannot appreciate art without exercising our “higher faculties” (our intellect). “Great art,” he said, “is only knowable through an understanding of its period in history and its place in our culture.” If this were true, I suppose it would mean that we need several experts. In short he was suggesting that only an intellectual could reveal a painting’s greatness.

That got me to wondering: how intellectual is a picture? It seems to me that the very nature of a picture is anti-intellectual in that it is primarily visual, emotional and sensual. It’s strongest appeal is on a gut level. I suppose it’s true that a picture can make a statement, but I think a large number of people would have to agree on the meaning of that statement for it to have any validity. And how intellectual can you get, when a picture-as-statement is only an instance in time, frozen in some sort of suspension of life?

How About This One?

To over intellectualize our view of art requires the mind to build a construct for interpreting a 2-dimensional flat world to create the illusion of more than is there. The buildings above, for instance, were painted by an architect who understood and used perspective to create the feel of 3-dimensions.  A tentative conclusion is that technique is perhaps the intellectual part.

If that were true, however, then craft is more important than message and that would imply that the painting exists primarily for intellectual reasons. Art becomes nothing more than the illustrated history of desicated concepts, more fully explained in the footnotes of old philosophies, histories, and formal religions. There are more important uses for the intellect. I would argue that the intellectual approach to painting should be secondary to the sensual experience of vision and emotion.

A picture makes you feel something about it. Even one replete with intended symbols must be taken in for itself, in totality, apart from all else except for ones own raw experience. And if the observer has not yet had sufficient experience to which he or she can relate, that person will not be able to fully appreciate the art work and can only talk about it in general terms. We will come back to this point. For now, however, let’s just say that the intellectual part seems to be associated primarily with craft.

Before we further pigeonhole an artist’s work through classification (e.g., assigning it a place in history as part of a movement), and before we start discussing its similarities through comparative intellectualizing (also called the study of art history), we need to let it work on us. Only when it gets into our gut and works its way around our more visceral feelings will we fully digest it. Without this direct “experiencing,” we might just as well begin without the picture. I would further generalize this assertion by saying, in contradistinction, that we cannot underrate our “lower” faculties, or we might as well dismiss all art forms.

Paintings have been found on cave walls, such as those at Lascaux, that were created more than

Room of the Bulls, Lascaux

17,000 years ago – long before written history, and long before the intellectuals stepped in to explain their historical context, or to speculate on the role they might have played in early French culture. Most of us can make the connection between our distant primitive relatives and our contemporary families without assistance. Most of us would stand quietly in a place like this and feel the personal nature of the experience, might feel some emotion from crossing 170 centuries to see ourselves in the faces of these primitive tribes.

I would say that the Intellectual approach is not the only method, nor necessarily the best method, to understand our physical world. Words in fact are not the primary medium. Indeed, a great deal of cerebral activity is pictorial imagery, and a great deal of art is understood through this imagery (including the big three:  paintings, music and literature).

Next, I would suggest that it is fairly easy to find the association of this image-generating mechanism in literature, through the act of reading, i.e., we “see” images in our minds when we read. The author can’t tell us everything or the fictional account would be very long, and very boring. The reader has always been assigned the task of filling in where the author leaves off, though perhaps it is difficult to understand this when we are surrounded by video, movies, television, and other visual media devices that do this for us. Literature with a “big-L” is meant to engage us emotionally, unlike “small-L” or genre (which is intended to be just for fun, such as science fiction, detective stories, romances or westerns).

The same line of reasoning can be used for music.  You can take almost any piece of symphonic music and the composer will describe the real world events that inspired the music. And often we find ourselves listening but imagining visual affects, such as shifting colors (amorphous) as the mood of the music shifts. Additionally, music affects our emotions through hearing, but we also feel a sensual quality while listening, which in its most intense form can be experienced by standing too close to a modern rock band and feeling the sound waves bounce off our internal organs. Again, in spite of the differences between how we hear music vs see art, we are back to the emotional and sensual experience.

I do feel that there is an intellectual component to virtually all art forms, although not a little effort has been expended in recent years to break away from underlying structure and to introduce free form approaches. But this has driven our appreciation of these modalities into an even lesser appeal to large numbers (without the interpreter).  One can argue that we have freed the artist from arbitrary constraints, or maybe that the artist has sold us down river – depending on your point of view.

In my opinion, it doesn’t much matter which because I make the claim that art is personal and appeals differently to different people. The more intense the appeal, the more personal it is. In my view, greatness with regard to art is an opinion. The larger the number of people who share the opinion, the greater the work of art. And this cuts to the chase. Great art is ALWAYS an opinion. So the answer to our question is: You make great art great, by expressing your opinion.

There was a time when art was for the privileged, when you and I did not get to vote because we didn’t belong to the club. But that time is likely gone forever. For now, it is one person, one vote. Almost nobody argues the point. Not sure how to vote? The first picture is Picasso’s Three Musicians. And the second picture is Krasnyansky’s Augsburg, Germany. Does that help? It shouldn’t make any difference, but it’s O.K. if it does because you are not alone, and it’s your vote to use however you choose.

There are those who point to this trend and pronounce that art is dying or has already died. If art is dying, this isn’t the reason. The cause is self-pity. The humanities can only be destroyed if we let it happen. Art today tends to reduce the state of man from heroic to pitiful, no longer depicted as stately, no longer waging the eternal battle for universal principles; in other words, it is the artists (not the scientists) who have sold us out … depending on your opinion.

Text Copyright © 2008 by Graham

Pictures appearing herein are very low resolution, small copies of the originals, used for educational purposes only. It is likely that they are under copyright (this is unknown) or some other form of protection, but are used herein consistent with the protections and laws that govern copyrights.

Reflections on Life (Part 1)

The “Quest” does not give life meaning, but neither does inward direction. The quest is a group hug, seeks to understand meaning through group effort, pushes outward into life for answers to the question. Inward direction seeks meaning through personal, individual experience. Whether you believe in creationism, evolution, or modern physics, the basis for “discovering” meaning in life is a belief system.

But what if there is no meaning? Perhaps no meaning is the meaning. What if we are here to give meaning to life? Then each of us would construct our own definition in any terms we choose. These terms must only be consistent with other individual choices, and could be valid even though other choices coexist throughout the universe. Maybe this is what we mean by free will, which by definition is free choice.

1. We can verbalize what we think we are, but the facts may not bear out the verbalization. The only fact of which I am certain is that I am uncertain. I refuse to drift. I need to do something, and at the same time, nothing. On some level I want to be reserved, but passionate. Being reserved minimizes mistakes, but somehow lacks commitment. Passion exposes. I may be afraid of that exposure?
2. If we believe that all of our problems are the result of one specific person, event or issue, then we miss the point. Chances are that they are due to the belief that they are the result of one specific person, issue or event. Our attitude affects our reality. We can see this in others without much difficulty, but when it comes closer to home, it becomes a bit more cloudy.
3. What I mean by this idea that we create our own reality is that because we act as though the belief were the reality, in effect it is. And we tend to seek out friends who reinforce our beliefs, with the result that we muddle through life without any real insights about where we are going and how we intend to get there. It’s our choice, of course. If we choose to muddle through life, no one has the right to say that we have made the wrong choice.
4. If we work in demanding careers, then we get wrapped up in only one highly specialized aspect of life. We commit to understanding life through a distortion. Most of us have heard this expressed as, “a surgeon sees every solution in terms of cutting the patient.” We are what we do and what we have done. We must name what we have done as truthfully as possible – we cannot know where we are going in a cosmic sense until we know who and where we are.
5. When I say that I am what I have done, I do not mean that getting caught up in activity is in any way a definition of me.  I mean what I have done in comparison with what I think I am or have done. It is likely that one cannot inflict his or her personality on others without closing doors and losing friends. But if one does not, then the wrong doors open and one either changes into something he is not, or loses something because he cannot change.  What he loses is him or herself – either way.
6. Although I will always believe that military service helped me to grow, there are those who profess to have hated every minute of their enlistment (same experience, different belief system). If you hate a thing enough, it becomes a part of you. It becomes so much a part of you that you never shake it. That’s one reason why those who really hated it still wear parts of their uniform; it is also why they often go back … those who hated Vietnam the most, seem to be the ones who voluntarily returned. Like the moth to the candle.
7. Hating prevents growth, which gets in the way of going forward. You must identify with your demons because they personify the rejection of something that is a part of you. The more you reject what you hate, the more it becomes a part of you. Only when you accept what you hate will you be able to let it go. Disillusionment is catharsis, even if it only results in a new illusion that is closer to the truth.
8. We are all brought up to believe that we are just a little better than the next person – which ought to tell us something. The thing that is “better” is usually expressed as personality, or some extension to personality. But the measure of a person’s value can only be seen in totality if viewed in proportion to the number of enemies he or she has made because otherwise they are simply reflecting back parts of others. It is only when you are not a reflection that you become an individual because it is only then that we see your true uniqueness, i.e., that part which is your own personality. Of course, this can be carried too far. For example, if one is role playing and mistakes the role for the reality.
9. Rebellion is a feeble means to represent ourselves as individual or unique, for we end up becoming like so many other “rebels” that it defeats the purpose. It is only through the natural expression of our personalities that we actually become individualized. On the other hand, I do not think we ever express our true selves to anyone, unless we wish to run the risk of ending our relationship.
10. The whole notion of being “individual” suggests that two different people must have two different personalities. The “opposites attract” theory. And if each personality were truly different, this would result in difficulties in just getting along for any length of time. I suspect that this is why people who have known each other for a long time fight or argue, and why people “change out” their friends, sometimes many times, without really being aware of the underlying dynamics.

We can will all we want, Rollo May, but we are still impotent if we will an illusion. Not everyone must face his demons.

2008-0815 Random Thoughts Copyright ©2008 by Graham; adapted from my personal journals, dated November 1970.

Some Thoughts On Raising Children

I find myself sitting here and thinking about my relationship to members of my family.  In particular, I remember something of how love was expressed in my family between parent and child, between child and parent, and between siblings. And I came to some conclusions that I think might be universal, and therefore might be worth sharing with prospective new parents.

The positional nature of parents to children influences (in general) the nature of the love experienced between them.  Parents (unless dysfunctional) probably feel unconditional love for their children, while children feel a mixed, dependent love for their parents.  Parents are seen as the creator (perhaps somewhat god-like); children are the created (weak and dependent).

It is perhaps difficult to see ourselves as giants who can be threatening at times and playful at other times. There must be occasional resentments on the part of children, owing to the behavior of such powerful parents, which is aggravated by what may seem capricious and unjust treatment.  Whereas, parents would feel some pride, reinforced by the knowledge that what they do for the child is actually rational and necessary.

It would be my guess that children, who are totally dependent, cannot love independently of this dependency.  They most likely love for “things” and feel that parents love for “performance.”  They see their parents as withholding love for unsatisfactory performance, rather than as administering punishment for guidance. And I think that when one loves through dependence, one cannot help but resent the dependency.

Lastly, I notice that siblings are often in competition with each other.  If one of them feels he or she isn’t getting their share, mainly of attention, they can get pretty rough on a brother or sister when the parents are looking the other way. What amazes me is that when you question them, they give a pretty convincing argument that either it didn’t happen or someone else started it.  

There must be a message somewhere in these observations. I suggest that this is a pretty powerful indicator that spanking children, especially the very young, is both a waste of time and perhaps a form of child abuse. I also suggest that maybe we shouldn’t push them too hard in the development of academic skills in the early years, but that we encourage participation in group behaviors and focus on developing social skills – not that we ignore the academic skills, but that they develop in a context of having fun.  What’s your take?

     

     

2008-0802 Raising Children Copyright © 2008 by Graham 

Once Upon A Time

A Short Story by Graham

I am sitting on the steps out front thinking about the last time I tried this, and realizing that I failed because I’m weak.  I’m afraid.  I knew I had to do something, and the only thing that seemed “right” was to leave, but I wasn’t strong enough, wasn’t ready because I was only nine, but I think I’m ready now.  

Pause

She was cold.  I never thought she wouldn’t even care.  “You want to leave?”  She said, matter-of-factly, “Here, let me help you,” going to the closet and taking down an old battered suitcase.  

I should have left without telling her what I was doing.  That was my mistake.  But there she was, throwing all of my clothes into the suitcase, latching it up, and then going to the front door and setting it on the porch.  “Don’t write,” she said.  “I’ll be much too busy to have the time to write back.”

By now I’m crying because she doesn’t care and I’m committed to something I’m not ready for, so I go out on the porch and sit on the steps, and still crying I yell, “Don’t you think I won’t go, because I will!”  

And my daddy comes out on the porch, looking a little confused, and says, “Where you going, Paddy?”  

And my mom says, “He’s leaving us, and not a moment too soon.  I was thinking of renting out his room, anyway.”  

“Oh, hush,” Daddy says.

“I’m going,” I say, and I grab hold of the handle on the suitcase and start dragging it down the steps.

“Are you sure you want to do this?”  Daddy asks.

But I’m angry, now.  So I say, “Yes,” still crying, and I start off down the driveway, turn into the unpaved road up to the highway’s edge, and drag my suitcase about a block before I just can’t drag it any farther.  I sit down on the suitcase and try to fight back the tears just as my daddy drives up in the Nash and opens the door.

“Get in,” he says.  

“I can’t,” I say.

“Why not?”

“Because Mama doesn’t want me anymore.”

“Your mama’s a bitch, Paddy.  I can’t change that … but I want you.  Now get in the car.”

I stop crying and get in the car, and my daddy backs the Nash up the whole distance I dragged the suitcase, right into our driveway.

“I know it’s going to take some courage, son.  But you square your shoulders and walk right in there and put your stuff away.  Don’t even listen to her.  She’s never going to be happy, no matter what either one of us does.  That’s just life.”

 

So here I am again.  Only this time I’m not crying.  Now that I’m twelve, I have some ideas about how this is done.  I can’t find the suitcase because I think Daddy threw it out after my last attempt, so I take two pillow cases from the laundry basket and I stuff them full with my clothes.  And then I follow the tracks heading down to the railroad yard, where I’ll hop a freight train to the coast of California.  I saw it in a movie, so I kind of know how it’s done.  

It’s time, way overdue in fact.  It’s all well and good that my daddy understands my situation, but he’s never here and doesn’t have to put up with that bitch.  I was a bone fide hero, and she didn’t even say thank you, probably would have been happier with one less child.  Neither of them said thank you.  Come to think of it, Sean didn’t even say thank you.  And he was the one I pulled out of the river.

Pause

It’ll be dark soon, I need to get going.  I slowly swing the pillow cases over my shoulder and start off down the driveway and into the road, up to the end of the block where I had surrendered to the sergeant on my last attempt.  Pressing onward I realize I have passed a milestone, and I start to feel good about that.  I start thinking about how they will find out.  I didn’t leave a note.  Mom will be doing bed check, and she’ll see that I’m missing.  I don’t know where the Hell Dad is, probably at the base.

Looks like a great night for it, I think.  I never knew running away could be so exciting.  I start to whistle, which my brother Buck says I do whenever I have a secret that I can’t keep, but I think I do it more when I’m feeling happy.   It’s just that some secrets make me happy.

When I get to California, I’ll have to get a job.  

Doing what?  

I don’t know, but I have to make some money so I can eat.  I can always sleep out under the stars, but I have to eat.  

Pause  

Sleep under the stars.  It’s getting dark.  Should have brought a flash light … Moonlight helps, but not much.  

Pause  

I wonder what Buck will say when he hears I’m hopping freights.  He was always the one who was going to “ride the rails.”  

Pause  

You didn’t leave a note.  How will he know that you are riding the rails?  

Pause  

Poor planning, I guess.  Half the fun is them knowing what I’m doing, but they don’t know … don’t know, don’t care.

This stuff is getting heavy.  Should have packed lighter.  I switch shoulders.  Never cared.  Never, ever, ever cared.  Not about me.  Wouldn’t care even if I died, which I almost did once ‘cause I thought it was chocolate.  She could have told me when she took it away and put it on top of the fridge.  But she went ahead and let me think it was chocolate.  So I climbed up on the counter, got it off the fridge, and ate the whole box of EXLAX.  

Had to have my stomach pumped at the emergency room, which made me sick and on the way home I had to throw up, so they pull over near a railroad crossing and let me out of the car, and there I am heaving my guts, and she says, “Serves you right!  Maybe if you had died you would have learned something.”  

And Daddy says, “Oh, hush, Madge.  Let the boy alone.”  

Man, this is heavy.  Got to do something.  I drop both stuffed pillow cases on the ground, sit down and rub my neck.  After a few minutes of sitting, wondering what to do, I start looking through each one and try to assess whether or not I really need everything I brought.  I really hate this pink and gray shirt I got for my birthday.  Only a sissy would wear pink.  Maybe I could just leave it here.  

That’s all it took.  If I could leave one shirt behind, I could leave one whole bag behind.  So I resort my clothes into the two pillow cases:  one I hide under a bush, the other I swing back over my shoulder and renew my quest for the coast of California.

More like walking the rails than riding, I thought.  Can’t wait for the riding part, my feet are beginning to hurt, my neck still hurts and I’m getting hungry.  

Pause  

I wonder if I will see any hobos.  I hear they live around train yards in cardboard boxes, and they cook over open fires without even taking the food out of the can.  It must be a great life!  

Getting cold out here.  Good thing I kept my jacket.  I stop to put it on.  That’s better.  It even lightens the load.  Should have put it on sooner.  Have to learn these things if I’m going to make it.  

Pause  

Was that a rain drop?  I can’t believe it’s going to rain.  I wonder how far I am from the train yard.  I stop and head for cover under a large, thick tree.  It isn’t a bad rain.  Should be over soon.  Then I can get on with it.  

The rain continues for more than an hour.  I hunker down and try my best to stay dry, but soon realize I have no control over the elements and can only hope that it will end soon.  I doze on and off, withdrawing from the immediate reality of this stupid adventure and when it finally lets up, it’s nearly 9pm, and I wonder where the time has gone.  I’m soaked and shivering, frustrated with my inability to handle such problems, and I’m practically starving.

Maybe I should wait to run away until I have enough money, I’m thinking.  It takes money when you’re in a jam.  I should probably save up at least $40.  Maybe more.  Without conscious thought I start the long walk home, retracing my steps so I can find my other bag of clothes, but I never do because one bush looks like another and I had to be so clever to hide it without marking it.

I get home around midnight.  Nobody is waiting up for me, but the door is unlocked.  I sneak in and put away my remaining bag of clothes.  Wonder when they’ll figure out I lost the other half, I’m thinking.  Won’t be long because you can’t hide the fact a pink and gray birthday shirt is missing.  But if they knew, they never said, never even asked why I was out so late or where I had been … never really cared.

 

2007-0614 Once Upon A Time Copyright © 2008 by Graham; Excerpted from my Novel, Childhood Lost.

Self Help Experts, Gurus & Their Books

It has been claimed that self help books outsell all other categories. (The only exception is the Bible.) Why is this? Are there really that many different types of problems that we need a comparable number of solutions? Its only my opinion, of course, but if these books were effective I doubt that we would buy so many of them. In my experience, they rarely work as advertised, and we assume that it’s our fault, so we feel some guilt while we escalate the search for the holy grail of self help, or for one of it’s high priests.

The concept of self help is pretty straight forward, but to write a book on the subject requires that we complicate the message to justify the need for the book – or the need for yet another book explaining the first book. The books themselves almost always try to convince us that the author has found the correct system. And if we would only follow the methods dictated by the system, we would attain the mystical experience required to change our lives. Only trouble is, I don’t like the silly exercises, do you?

And there is the key to this whole business, isn’t it? We don’t want to change: we want to be accepted as who we are. In some cases, we want the world to change, but it’s rare that we are willing to reciprocate, even when we continue to say otherwise. If we are honest about it, at least to ourselves, we never really learn the method proposed. And we keep talking about “the problem” until our friends find other friends, and our family discovers the virtues of having things to do somewhere else, other than at home.

Been there, done that. But along the way, I discovered three principles that changed how I felt about myself, and how I felt changed how I behaved, which changed how others saw me. I didn’t discover a system; I discovered some basic, practical approaches to dealing with my world. One thing led to another, and I went from high school dropout to running a 900-person information systems group, which convinced me that making minor adjustments can result in successes which lead to greater successes.

Let me summarize these approaches for you, and if there is any further interest, I will follow up later with more detail and perhaps some examples. 

Principle #1:  Take Responsibility for your Actions and Outcomes

You can’t outsource this to a therapist, even if you decide to hire one. This does not mean that you should grade yourself, tell yourself you don’t deserve success, or in any other way focus on your mistakes. Focus on problem solving: and be sure to solve the problem, not the person. Success breeds success, not books. Books, which are a subtle form of criticism, breed more books (as we have seen above).  

The bottom line is that most people don’t need therapists, gurus or books to tell them how to behave. They need operating principles – a short list of things to focus on, from someone who has been there, tried everything, and failed a few times before finding success.

Principle #2:  Let Your Feelings Be What They Are

Vestiges of the past, about as useful as an appendix. From an early age we have been instructed to control our feelings. The emphasis was incorrect. We don’t need to be at odds with how we feel, but we do need to refuse to act on feelings alone. Do not let your feelings run your life. They are not an indicator of your sensitivity, only of your preoccupation with self. You don’t need to analyze them, change them, or even control them. You only need to recognize that they are reminders, that they are only one input, and that in most cases they will lessen their hold on you if you stay the course.

Everybody has doubts. Most of us can’t ignore them, but we can postpone them. The next time you start running yourself down, tell yourself that you really are going to give yourself a good talking to for being so stupid, but that you are going to wait until you have more time, say in a couple of days. By the time two days rolls around, you will very likely have forgotten about the “promise.” More important, chances are good that the act of not running yourself down will make a permanent change in you, and in the way your friends see you.

Successful people focus on the process, not on the feelings of self doubt, and they recognize that it may take more than one try to be a success. Ever played a video game? Did you beat it the first time? Or did it take several tries?  Why should life be any different?

Principle #3:  You Are the Source of Your Pain

Am I saying that your pain isn’t real?  Not at all:  the pain is real because you make it real. You are the source or the cause of this pain. People around you almost never appreciate how they are affecting you. Therefore, you are the only one who knows how you feel. Recognize that how you feel is a choice, and that expectations create outcomes.

Once again, delay being critical of yourself, or critical of others, and you will find yourself becoming less negative regarding outcomes, and feeling less pain in your life. Let me sum up the summary for you:

The quicker you own your own mistakes and take action to fix them, and the slower you blame others for theirs, the greater the likelihood that you will feel right about yourself, and that success will follow.

 

NOTE:  If at anytime you experience suicidal, homicidal, or otherwise destructive feelings towards yourself or others, then by all means see a medical doctor because your problem may require medical treatment. However, if you are like the vast majority of us, you can go a long way with some minor tweaking to old habits, attitudes, and behaviors.

2008-0729 Self Help Copyright © 2008 by Graham.