Yesterday, this moment and tomorrow

I had two firsts this past election: For the first time ever, I voted a straight party vote, and for the first time ever, I voted by mail. Then, with the rest of the country, I waited with some anxiety in the uncertainty of the final result. Eventually, it became clear that we had a winner, and this brought for me a noticeable sense of relief. Nationwide there was both a massive outpouring of joy by more than half of the electorate, as well as an equivalent experience of disbelief and non-acceptance by the nearly other half.

I personally did not experience as much joy as many did, not that I wasn’t happy with the result. What was much more troubling for me was that nearly ½ of the country had voted for the other candidate. I had the thought that had the results been otherwise and had the other candidate won, it would have been the other ½ of the country would have been ecstatic. There are more than 70 million people in this country whose mindsets, and values, and perspectives I don’t understand. Should my response have been unmitigated joy? And even here in liberal Massachusetts where 2 in 3 of us voted for Biden, 1 in 3 voted for Trump.

Yes, for sure. I get it. For more than half of the electorate, this election was about finally paying attention to the many things that have been neglected for such a long time. However, maybe we needed the last four years. Would we have paid as much attention to the issues ailing our country had the situation not been what it was? Might another candidate in power not have led to the very polarization that we needed to bring critical matters to the front pages? Would the entrenched injustices simply have continued to go unaddressed?

I recently went to get a haircut from my favorite barber, a jovial young Italian addicted to coffee and cigarettes. He was uncharacteristically glum, and I asked him what was up. He said, “I voted for Trump!” I nearly jumped out of the chair, but he was holding a sharp pair of scissors. I decided to listen instead.

“You know, all you people in Lexington, you can all go to work by zoom when the governor shuts down the economy, but you know what? I need this job. I can’t cut hair by zoom! I have no money, I take pride in my work. Don’t you think I can take precautions and keep my barbershop safe? It’s in my financial interest to make sure that people in my shop don’t get sick. It’s not the government’s job. I voted for Trump. He said he wouldn’t get us into wars, he didn’t. He said he would lower taxes, he did. He said he would nominate conservative judges, he did. With Trump, I had money. I felt that I was in charge of my life. When COVID-19 hit, he wanted to keep things open, and now this fool, the governor wants to close everything down again. What am I going to do? Don’t I matter? All I see is Black Lives Matter signs everywhere? What about me?”

What about him? He was so upset. He felt so unheard. I grew up in apartheid South Africa, and there, our politicians taught us that Black Lives Didn’t Matter. White lives certainly mattered, but people of color were always second class. In our elections, you could choose between one conservative government or another. It seemed a dangerous path. Surely when the oppressed finally had a chance to vote and took power, they would exact an understandable vengeance on White South Africans?

And yet from the confines of the tiniest of prison cells, Nelson Mandela, who would later become the first democratically elected president of South Africa, vengeance was not what he sought. Rather, he wanted equality and reconciliation. Mandela had endured far, far worse oppression than my barber, and yet he lived by a value system that caused him not to suffer; he was the embodiment of compassion and dignity and in living this way, he did not hate, and by not living in hatred, did not suffer. How could this be? Surely, he had every reason to hate, seeing what had happened to him, to his murdered friends, and to his community. But he rose above it all, saying: “No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin or his background or his religion…People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love…For love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”

I was coaching my patient the other day, a young person who was more upset than I had ever seen. “I just called my dad. I found out that a close relative just voted for Trump. I’ll never speak to that relative again. They are disgusting. Can you believe it? My relative voted for Trump!” And yet this was a child whose relative had bent over backwards to ensure that my patient felt loved and protected. A relative who had been there when no one else had visited them in the hospital. Someone who had driven them to therapy, when they needed a ride.

Mandela did not find his oppressors disgusting. His approach to leadership had three core principles: forgiveness, understanding, empathy. He forgave enemies who had perpetrated heinous crimes. He never hated his haters, nor did he attack his attackers. He saw promise in each person, and he was able to validate even his most seemingly evil of adversaries. He recognized that they were products of their circumstances and that because of this, they could only see the world the way they had been taught to see it. Had he retaliated in anger, this would have perpetuated a false narrative that we had been taught to believe about who he was. With deep compassion, he said: “The oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed.” For Mandela, leadership was not about closing his mind and narrowing his view but was instead about opening his heart to include the suffering of those who had been his captors and oppressors.

My parents had two very different perspectives on parenting. In my youth, my father believed that you pulled yourself up by your bootstraps, whereas my mother believed that people were doing the best they could, given their circumstances, and that it was more compassionate to help where you could. Both had a point, and although I mostly agreed with my mother, I learned from both. My mother was a devout Catholic who told me she was waiting for the Messiah to return. Her reason for treating everyone with deep compassion was that, as she said, “We do not know when the Messiah will come and so it could be anyone. I don’t want to take a chance and treat that person dismissively. Also, my day goes so much better when I act with love and kindness towards someone than when I judge or even hate them.”

With the experience of Mandela and my mother, when I discovered Dialectical Behavior Therapy, I found a natural psychotherapeutic home. DBT was different than any other therapy I had been exposed to. It had in its approach and at its core, an articulated list of assumptions about people, whether patient or therapist that resonated powerfully for me. Marsha Linehan, the developer of DBT, wrote the following:

We assume that patients, therapists, and all people, are doing the best they can.

“The first philosophical position in DBT is that all people are, at any given point in time, doing the best they can. In my experience, borderline patients are usually working desperately hard at changing themselves. Often, however, there is little visible success, nor are the patients’ efforts at behavioral control particularly obvious much of the time. Because their behavior is frequently exasperating, inexplicable, and unmanageable, it is tempting to decide that the patients are not trying. At times, when asked about problematic behavior, the patients themselves will respond that they just weren’t trying. Such patients have learned the social explanation for their behavioral failures. The tendency of many therapists to tell these patients to try harder or imply that they indeed are not trying hard enough can be one of the patient’s most invalidating experiences in psychotherapy.”

The second DBT principle that resonated was Linehan’s seemingly simple observation that we should see people through a non-judgmental stance and recognize that everything is caused. Wasn’t this what Mandela and my mother had been talking about? Yes, bad things happen. But things don’t “just happen”. Everything is caused. Many times, we are asked: “What is the root cause of my, or my loved one’s problems?” DBT is different from other therapies in that we don’t spend too much time looking for so-called “root causes”. If I accept that reality is as it is, and I accept that everything has a cause, I then see that it makes perfect sense that things turned out the way they did. I also see that my liking or not liking an outcome is not relevant to the fact of the outcome. If you like it, it is as it is, and if you don’t like it, it still is as it is. Also, have you ever considered that we typically only ask ourselves, “Why did this happen?” when things don’t turn out the way we wanted, but we almost never ask the question when things do turn out the way we wanted them to turn out. Fairness is almost always a point of view.

And yet even if you get to the cause, those causes had causes. The reason patients, politicians, the country, and we ourselves are how we are, is that we are all caused and shaped: by our genes, our experiences, the information we get from the news channels we watch, and the morals we learn in our spiritual communities. Knowing this deeply is key to arriving at what we need to do in order to create enduring change.

My mother, Mandela, and Marsha saw the best in people, even those who were the most difficult to deal with, whether patient, politician or anyone else. They recognized that our private expression and experience of anger and hatred doesn’t always impact the other person, but instead often keeps us stuck in a cycle of our own anger and hatred. Mandela, politically, and Marsha, clinically, saw that the open expression of hostility, would only lead to further hostility and move us further away from a goal of political harmony or clinical equanimity. And so, because everyone is caused by their own particular circumstances, it makes sense that not everyone sees things the same way. The child who learns to hate, grows up hating; the child who is invalidated, self-invalidates. It all makes sense, whether we like it or not.

We bring our own nature shaped by our own experiences, genes, and learning history to how we see others. We may think that we are not judgmental, but is this accurate? Do we judge a difficult patient on the unit or a politician of the opposing party pontificating on TV? Can we see them as caused by their circumstances, and that given who they are and what they have experienced, it makes sense that they would behave in the way that they do? Are they not, like we ourselves, shaped by the forces that got each of us here?

Now here is where we delve into a beautiful paradox. On the one hand, we have the option to continue to hate and fight and to judge, but if that is our response, the status quo endures. On the other hand, we can choose to change the causes that reliably predict and lead to alienation. For instance, if we have previously shunned our politically opposite neighbor, we can agree to meet with, and then listen with open curiosity to their perspective. Or as therapists, can we commit to notice and change any judgmental attitude we have towards patients whose behavior we find annoying, confusing, or oppositional. Then, if I recognize that something I do causes alienation, I can commit to change that cause and try a new approach. Changing habitual behavior is the element that will generate a different outcome. I don’t pretend to know what the outcome will be, but if I am dissatisfied with the present state of political affairs or clinical outcomes, doing something different is key.

What if we could hold in mind the understanding that all people are a product of their circumstances and are doing the best they can? What if we could sit with them and listen to their legitimate fears? Are 70+ million people in this country evil? Do they not aspire like all of us for a better life for themselves, their children, and their communities? Is the difficult patient not someone who deserves your compassion, rather than someone to be judged and labeled? Do you speak of patients whose behaviors are off-putting and complicated as “that borderline” or use even more colorful language for the politician you dislike?

On a personal level, I struggle with understanding politicians. I don’t always get their motivations and choices, and yet the decisions they make can impact so much of our lives. On the other hand, I also realize that as a White male, it probably does not matter too much to me personally who is in power. I likely won’t be impacted that much. Because of this, in my position of relative privilege, it is important to me that I commit to fight for the rights of people whose voices seem to matter less than mine, while at the same time listening openly to those with whom I disagree politically. But what is even more important than this, is that this fight not be an endeavor to undertake only every four years when the rhetoric is at its most deafening and the plight of the disaffected most jarring. It is something I need to do every single day.

And then at work, can I be open to seeing the ways in which I have more in common than not with the patients who confuse and challenge me the most? Am I open to listening to their fears and concerns, recognizing that the struggles that brought them into therapy are a manifestation of their biology and their circumstances, rather than of some choice to make life difficult for me? In seeing them in this way, and engaging with them with a less judgmental and more compassionate attitude, perhaps they, in turn, will see that I am not the enemy or some dispassionate caregiver.

By practicing living this way, committing anew to seeing the most dissimilar among us with compassion and open curiosity, then tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that, the other too can begin to believe in the possibility of a shared and healing humanity.

Needing to Pee

 

It is the terrible year of COVID and in my 25 years of being in the field, I have never experienced a greater demand for mental health services. My father had asked for some legal documents to be notarized, and then to get something called an apostille.  I had never heard of an apostille before, but it turns out that it is a form of authentication that is issued by the Secretary of the Commonwealth that verifies the authenticity of a document, including the verification that the notary who notarized the original document was legitimate. It was with a lot of maneuvering that I was able to free up the two hours from work that I would need to go to the State Department offices to get the apostille.

I chugged my iced coffee and headed down, documents in hand, and arrived at the John W. McCormack State Office Building located at 1 Ashburton Place in Boston. Earlier in the day, I had been on zoom for my morning calls, and when I stepped out, noticing that it was colder than I expected, took off my shirt and put on a zippered sweatshirt. On arrival at the security desk at the John W. McCormack State Office Building, I handed in my phone and took off my belt before I headed for the scanner.

“You’ve got to take off ya sweatah,” said the officer in that distinct Boston accent.

“Ok,” I said, “but I’m not wearing anything underneath.” I imagined the experience of what that might be for the people waiting in line behind me. He shook his head and waved me through the scanner.

Arriving at the 17^th floor, I was first in line. This looked promising. The person at the desk looked at the documents and told me that they had not been correctly notarized and that I could either take them back or go to a local bank to get them redone. I had waited for so long that I decided to go to the bank. I had time before I had to return to work to run a group.

On getting to the bank, I noticed that the coffee had started to take its toll and that I needed to pee. The bank officer kindly offered to notarize the documents but informed me that, due to covid restrictions, the bathrooms were not open to the public. After notarizing the new documents, I realized that the ones that my father’s lawyer had sent were different from the original ones and that it was unlikely that the new ones would be valid because they were missing my middle name. No problem, I would call my father.

It was at that precise moment that the speaker on my iPhone 7 died. I could neither make outgoing calls nor receive incoming ones. I could text, but that was all. My dad, who lives in Cape Town, rarely texts and would only have answered his phone had I called, but there was no way for me to make the call. I had to get back to work but could not call to say that my phone was down. I decided to reboot the phone to its original factory settings. It restarted, but the phone still did not work. It was OK though. I had two hours to get my group.

I thanked the bank officer and now the need to pee was significant. It got worse. It had started to rain. I had no raincoat and the drip, drip, drip of the rain made the urge even worse. Glory! A Starbucks in sight! No luck. Bathroom closed. A Dunkin’ Donuts! Same problem. Covid restrictions. I was in the middle of a highly secure government building area with lots of cameras, otherwise, I would have found some obscure wall, but there was no obscurity. When the urge to pee is so strong, everything is miserable, and the stronger the urge, the greater the misery. Drip, drip, drip, and the iPhone isn’t working and it’s running out of battery and the documents are all wrong and I need to pee!

I got to the parking lot and thought, ‘I am just going to go next to the car’. Security cameras everywhere. Images of me peeing on the front page of the Boston Globe flashed before me. Harvard psychiatrist arrested for disorderly conduct. Maybe I should just go back into the rain, get soaked, and just pee in my pants?

I was squirming. It looked like I was doing some bizarre cross-legged version of the macarena and a tango combined. I went to the ticket office where the attendant, clearly recognizing a fellow human in deep distress, allowed me into the staff bathroom. Words cannot capture the joy, so I won’t even try to describe the sensation of relief!  I texted the group co-leader to say that I was on my way. “I’m in group now,” she texted back. I looked down at my phone. It was an hour early, reset to daylight savings time. My schedule was off by an hour.

Emotional and physical distress narrows our focus, and when severe enough, become the singular point of our attention. It is easy to judge people for being rude, for not having foresight, or for behaving badly… but you never know. Maybe they just need to pee.

Live less in the WHAT IF and more in the WHAT IS!

August 2019

The late Thursday evening Cape Air flight from Boston was remarkable for two main reasons. The first was that I was on a Cessna 402 described by Cape Air as "the workhorse of the Cape Air which serves the majority of the destinations in the Cape Air route network." It is a 9-seater plane which allows you feel every air pocket along the way. The second was that, other than a mom with her one-year-old infant, I was the only other passenger on board. I had noticed the toddler at Logan running around the terminal. His mother was wearing a triathlon shirt and seemed like she would have no problem keeping up with the energetic child.

As we took off, the child started to fuss, refusing to stay in his seat and wanting to alternately breast-feed, point out the window, or cry. "Time for my skills," I thought to myself and played a whole host of silly games including peek-a-boo, blowing in his face, and getting him to give me high-fives. This particular intervention brought him endless joy. My distracting the child seemed to be very helpful to his mother who told me while pointing at her shirt  that she had competed in a triathlon the previous weekend and was heading up to the Adirondacks to join her husband and her two other kids. She told me that it had been an impossible day of travel with missed flights and long delays and she was glad it was nearly over. I continued to keep the child distracted while she settled in her seat, relaxed.

"So where are you going?" she asked suddenly.

"I've been invited to teach in Lake Placid at a wellness conference held by the New York Council of School Superintendents," I replied.

"Teaching what?" she continued.

"Skills for teachers. Validation. Distress tolerance. Mindfulness." She seemed interested as long as I was distracting her child.

We landed and entered the  terminal at the Adirondack Regional Airport which described itself on its website as "a full service operation offering regularly scheduled commercial flights as well as charter flights and a full service facility for private aircraft." It is located "in the heart of the Adirondack Mountains in Upstate New York."

The three of us and the pilot disembarked. I did not see where the pilot went, but the mother and her child picked up their bags and left the terminal. They were greeted outside  by her husband who had driven a Toyota minivan to pick them up. "Thanks for your help with the baby," she said turning to me and then climbing into the car.

I stood waiting for someone to pick me up. This was not a completely ridiculous notion. These days I travel all over the world and someone always picks me up at the airport. On very rare occasions I take an Uber. But no one was there to meet me at the Adirondack Regional Airport.

I tried to call my hosts. I should have paid more attention to the fact that I was "in the heart of the Adirondack Mountains in Upstate New York." This I realize is a euphemism meaning: "There is no cellular coverage here."

I saw a Hertz car rental sign above a door. Three cars were parked in marked bays in the parking lot, but there was no one in attendance. The office -- actually more of a garden shed than an office -- was closed. A sign on the door announced that the office would open at 9 the next morning.

The sun was setting and I had run out of clear ideas. I walked around the parking lot holding my phone in the air and then hopped onto a cement barrier where I found a single, although not very enthusiastic, bar of reception on my phone. I requested an Uber, but the app told me that there were no cars available in the area. I called my hosts. I heard laughter and music and the clinking of glasses in the background: "Hey, Dr. A. Welcome. Hope to see you soon. We have a cold beer waiting for you!"

"No wait! I'm stuck at the airport. Lake Placid is 15 miles away!" I shouted into the cacophony on the other end.

"No worries! We'll send a cab for you! See you soon!"

As I waited, the single employee who had greeted us at terminal left through the front door and locked it. I had never been to an airport where someone locked the front door! Skeptical that my partying hosts would be able to locate a cab, I asked the attendant if there was any way I could get to Lake Placid.

She smiled and said "sure!" She made a call and said "Bob will pick you up in 15 minutes," and then got into her car and left. There was very intermittent cellular coverage. At one moment I received  a text from my hosts saying that there were "no cabs available in Lake Placid" at that hour. A few minutes later, "let us know if you find a ride. We're at Jimmy's 21"

I waited and breathed in the glorious air of the Adirondack State Park. All alone. It was not a bad moment. I sensed a stillness that I had not in a while. What joy! I sat on my suitcase looking at the evergreens. They had no trouble just being. I thought of them as as vast army of soldiers fighting against climate change. Grateful.

And then Bob showed up. He was an older man in a large SUV. He welcomed me with a booming Santa-like "welcome to the Adirondacks," and I jumped into the front seat. "First time visitor?" he asked.

"Yes, it's quite beautiful, and certainly vast from what I saw from the plane!"

"6 million acres," he said, almost proudly.

From pickup until the drop-off he spent the next 25 minutes telling me all about the region, the flora, the fauna, the impact of tourism and climate change, his two daughters, one of whom was a physician. He himself had a doctorate in biology and had been the head of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation for 25 years until his retirement. He had started a livery service after that, but it had become too difficult to manage so now liked to do the occasional ride.

And then we reached Jimmy's 21.

The moments in our life are so rich with nuance and possibility. We spend so much time worrying about all the things that might happen rather than appreciating the moments and lessons of the ones that do happen.  "OK, but what if there had not been a Bob?" asked a skeptical colleague.

There are so many "what ifs" in life. I have rarely found it helpful to dwell in them. We certainly need to plan for situations. I imagine that eventually someone would have come to pick me up. They had 150 people waiting for me to lecture the next morning, but "what if" is NOT what happened. By accepting the moment as it was, I had a wonderful opportunity to appreciate being completely alone, in a place I did not know, surrounded by a powerful army of trees. How sweet is that!

THE SINCEREST FORM OF FLATTERY

JUNE 2018

I woke up exhausted on Wednesday morning. Yesterday had taken a toll on  my resilience. I was carrying three particularly complicated cases of adolescents struggling with enduring thoughts of suicide and all of whom wanted out of treatment. 

One of three had come into my office together asked for my blessing: “You know exactly just how much I am suffering. I can’t believe that you won’t let me die. If you really cared you would let me kill myself.”

At work, the phone was ringing off the hook and I wondered where the expression "ringing off the hook" came from and I thought I should Google it. Pleasant distraction. But then someone knocked on my door asking me if I had seen the new policy on the allowable alcohol content in shampoo before it be considered an intoxicant and as such contraband. 'Really?" I thought to myself. 'Has some administrator decided that these kids are going to get drunk on frigging anti-dandruff shampoo?' 

I needed to get away from work and find some quiet place to breathe. I thought of going for a walk on my favorite Minuteman Bike Trail from Lexington to Concord. It was too pleasant a day and I worried that I would bump into neighbors and other acquaintances and that then I would have to hear about their children and whether I considered 30 milligrams of fluoxetine to be a high dose. 'JUDGMENTAL YOU,' I berated myself. 'What happened to people doing the best they can and the world being as it is?' It was too hard a battle. I had to leave.

I went home for a cup of tea and then announced to my family that I would head off to the Cambridge Zen Center for a brief sit. To my surprise, my teen sons asked to go along with me. I had been on 5-day silent retreats quite a few times, and they were always curious about my experience with sitting, but they had never expressed any interest other than the curiosity. “Really?” I asked.

“You seem to like it. It seems to relax you,” they answered.

The boys are not the kind of children whose idea of a free summer afternoon is hanging out with their dad, meditating in Cambridge. They are typical boys, robust adolescent males who spend time playing basketball in the driveway, hanging out in the town center with their friends, occasionally sneaking a beer from the fridge and arguing with each other. I noticed a sense of tremendous gratitude as we headed off to Cambridge. They had noticed something in the way that mindfulness had changed me and they wanted to find out more about it and even go to practice with me. “Is there anything particular that we need to do when we get there?” they asked.

“I haven’t been there before but the website says it is a one hour sit. I am not sure as to the format, but unless they instruct in a different way, you will find a cushion and sit cross-legged on it. Keep your eyes open, and find a spot on the ground in front of you. It will be like a mental anchor point.Then you want to simply start noticing your breath as you inhale and exhale. As you breathe gently, not forced, count your breath. You will notice your mind wandering to all sorts of things. This is completely normal. When it does wander you might not even be aware that you have drifted away, but then you will realize that you are in the Zen center, and this in turn will be the realization that you are here to be mindful!  Simply notice that your mind has wandered and go back to your breath,” I instructed them. “But really, you don’t have to worry because there is no ‘right way’ to notice; the moment you are aware that your mind has wandered and can bring it back to the focus on your breath, that moment is awareness and that is mindfulness.”

Not having been at the Center before, it took a few minutes longer than I expected to navigate the one-way streets and then to find a place to park. Anxious to not be late we quickly went in and were instructed to wear robes. I had never worn robes during meditation before. “A new practice,” I thought.  We put on the robes and headed to the hall where we were told to sit only along the side-walls, “but neither in the back of the hall nor the front of the hall.”

There were perhaps fifteen other people in the hall, all sitting in silent pose. The group consisted mostly of older men and women all facing the center of the room, and all with there eyes closed. The teacher sat at the front of the hall with his back to us. I took two blue zafus, the round cushions used in Eastern meditation, and sat in the more comfortable Burmese pose rather than the lotus position that the others in the room were sitting in.  My boys took their cushions and my older son walked quietly across the hall an sat across from me.  My younger son sat to my right.

After fifteen minutes of sitting, my older son appeared uncomfortable in his pose.  This being his first sit, and not knowing what to do, he moved his right leg out in front of him on the floor to stretch. His distress appeared to ease but his left leg must have similarly ached and out came his left leg. Rather than sitting cross-legged he was now sitting with both legs stretched out in front.

I noticed a sense of mortification. ‘Was he violating some sacred practice or rules of the center? Was he being disrespectful?’ came the thoughts.

I tried to make eye contact with him, but he remained seated and staring at a spot in front of him as I had instructed.  I observed my own physical discomfort and reminded myself that discomfort is OK and that it need not consume me. I let go of the discomfort and then looked back to him. Now his shoulders must have started to hurt. He leaned back onto his elbows and soon he looked like someone enjoying a day at the beach.  My younger son was watching his brother later confided in me that he thought his brother’s behavior to be a bit strange. Nevertheless, he too, noticing his own discomfort, did as his brother did and stretched out a bit before settling back into a more formal position. Just before the end, my older boy recomposed and once again sat formally as the master clacked the wooden blocks to signify the end of the session.

I noticed relief at the end of the sitting. I had been so worried that we were going to be kicked out or reprimanded and was grateful that we hadn't been. Then I realized just how attached I had been to them sitting in a certain way and yet was also overcome by an overwhelming sense of gratitude for the experience and I started to tear up. My boys had given up their afternoon to be with me and to sit, or lie, or stretch at the Center. To BE with me. On the way home, they shared their observations of the hour. Even this brief practice had been useful. “It’s just strange that all the world was going on around and no one knew we were in there. It’s just a different point of view. That was cool,” they reflected. 

I left with two strong conclusions. Simply talking about mindfulness or teaching mindfulness skills is not enough. It was the effect that my mindfulness practice had had on my relationship with them, a more thoughtful and reflective connection and they wanted to know more. If you want to be a teacher, be a practitioner too.

The second was more of a note to myself:  My kids are far less predictable than I thought them to be and that in truth, is a wonderful thing.

TRUE

In the shadows of intention 

Deep below your wakeful sleep

Underneath made-up delusions

Awe filled truth will make you weep.

Yet endless, mindless repetition

"I am good and, how are you?"

“Just two sugars in my coffee”

Block your seeing what is true.

Reality awaits you, dreamer

But fear and ignorance arise.

And block the path to morning’s sunshine

Obscuring knowing you are wise.

Oh, blinded sailor, on your voyage

So lost, adrift, your home so far

The windless wind that guides your sails

Asleep you’ll never see your star

Now ask yourself one final question

Lest all be gone in endless night

That does not waken in the morning:

“Did I live true with all my might?”

The Curious Case of the Missing Snow

It's Wednesday morning, February 1st. To be precise it is 4 a.m on February 1st when I am awakened to the sound of a snow plow going up my street. Out of a deep slumber I smile to myself, happy that we've been blessed with winter snow and open the curtains to see what the overnight storm has brought. But there's nothing. The road surface is essentially black. There is a dusting of snow on the sidewalk. It must have been a dream. Slightly disappointed by the lack of snow and my snow-plow hallucination, I climb back into bed. 

To be clear, by not much snow  I mean there was less snow on the road than there were attendees at the recent inauguration. To claim otherwise would be  an example of "alternative facts."

But then just as I am about to pull the covers over my head and hoping for a more pleasant outcome to the rest of my sleep I hear the plow again. However, this time I am definitely awake. I grab my iPhone and go to the front door and take a photo of the black-top. 

Winthrop Road Feb 1, 2017



I hear the truck, but don't yet see it and then the plow comes around the corner. And then another follows soon after. They are plowing the black and clear surface of our road. I take pictures and videos so that I can show any disbelievers and I wonder what on earth is going on. 

What has reality become? Are these climate change denying plow-drivers? There is no snow! There are only sparks flying off the road where your plow meets the tar. We are paying to plow snow that isn't and then will have to pay for potholes that shouldn't have been. 

There is so much suffering in the world and I truly appreciate how well we are taken care of in Lexington. I don't take it for granted. We live a life of such privilege and have so much to be grateful for, but it is over the top to send the plows out when there is no snow, especially when it is 4 in the morning, I mean if we are going to waste tax-payer money, money that could be going to our schools and plenty of other worthy causes, don't rub salt in the wound by waking us up. And speaking of which, they did not appear to have spread any salt, so that's something.

THE NATURE OF THE CHOLLA CACTUS

A Reflection After Mindful Walking at the Desert Renewal Retreat in Tucson, Arizona

After the morning sit, our group of thirty retreatants would go for a mindful walk. As I was rapidly discovering, anything I could do mindlessly I could do mindfully, including walking. Up until that point I am certain that I had never paid attention to the act of walking, or at least certainly not since infancy when I first stood from a crawl, spread my arms and took those first tentative steps towards my mother. Walking is something that I  take for granted, a way of getting from one point to another. But this walking mindfully was a different matter altogether. Not in the sense that the biomechanics are any different, but in the way of paying attention to it. "Notice each step," instructed Father Pat, our Catholic Priest and Zen Master (but that's another story), "notice how it feels, how your foot touches the ground, the sound that the step makes, and then expand your awareness to the path, the other ambient sounds, and the temperature of moment."

The first morning walk in the desert had us meandering in a single line on a path behind the retreat. Marsha (Linehan) led us on the route which took us up a slight hill between the many forms of cactus that call the Sonoran desert home. On reaching the top of the hill, we stopped to take in the sight of the yet-to-rise sun reflecting its light on the pink underbellies of the desert clouds. Then we turned around and went back to the hall for more sitting meditation.

On the way back the person in front of me brushed up ever so slightly against a very bushy, almost cuddly-looking, cactus. A round stem snapped off the cactus and landed on the path in front of me. I need to fast forward to say that I later came to discover that the cactus is also known as the jumping cholla cactus or teddybear cactus. It is said to jump because the joints between the seed-bearing stems are so weak that they break easily, which is its way of ensuring that it will easily disperse and spread its seed. The very thorns of the teddy bear cactus are in turn covered by hundreds of tiny scales. There are thorns on thorns, and there exists no process for easily removing the stems from clothing. I am also told that it is extremely painful to remove if it attaches to the skin.

But I knew none of this as I walked mindfully down the path. When I spotted the stem on the path, and mindful that many of us were wearing sandals, I timed my step so I could kick it off the path for fear that someone would step on it. What happened next was that the stem, which was round and the size of a small apple, stuck to my sandal but it was only after I took the next step that I realized that it was stuck to my footwear. I became increasingly self-conscious with this prickly ball clinging to my sandal. As discreetly as I could, with my next step I tried to shoo the cactus off my sandal by waving my foot into the air. This attempt seemed to embolden the cactus which simply dug in deeper. The battle was on. I did not move faster as we had been instructed to walk at a steady pace. I did not want to disrupt the rhythm of the line, but my attempts became more vigorous in trying to jiggle the cactus off. Eventually I was hopping on one foot and shaking my leg violently, but to no avail. This had to stop. I could not even imagine what my fellow walkers were thinking. I bent down and tried to brush it off with my hand, but all this did was force a few thorns into my fingers. I was contemplating my dilemma when I spotted a forked stick lying ahead on the path. On reaching the stick, I picked it up and pried the cactus off with the fork at the end of the branch, and eventually reached the safety of the meeting room and sat on my cushion.

During the afternoon sitting sessions, when the irritation of the thorns embedded in my fingers was more than I could stand, I was relieved by the opportunity to meet with Father Pat in a one-on-one session to reflect on my experience of the day. This was the one and only time we broke silence and it lasted only minutes. I told him of my attempts at paying attention during the walk, how difficult it had been after my encounter with the cholla cactus. “I don’t think I learned anything today. I have these thorns in my fingers that I want to remove, but I can’t as all I do is sit. I learned nothing about my nature today.” He smiled and looked kindly on me. “Perhaps,” he said, “but today you understood the nature of the cholla cactus.” 

I went back to my cushion, meditating on his brief reflection and the next thing that popped into my head was a joke my brother had once told me.

            “Dad was a man of few words. One day he came up to me and said: “son...”’

That was father Pat. Quiet. A man of few, yet profound words. And then something seemed to make sense. Father Pat was as he was, just as the cactus is as it is and just as I am as I am.