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. 

Saving Jesus: A Confession

I was raised Catholic. This fact is relevant to the story but more of it later. On a late afternoon run in mid-December, I headed up Highland Ave and across to the grounds of an old convent not far from my house. At one time the religious community had been home to a thriving kindergarten and grade school but the secular life had taken its toll on interest in a spiritual education. With dwindling enrollees and finances, the nuns had to sell off many of the buildings no longer in use. Today, the main building is the last one in use, and functions as a retirement home with nursing care.

One of the buildings on the grounds is the former school and I read in our local rag that the town had recently bought it with the idea of creating more public-school space. I decided to jog around the building before continuing on my regular route and stopped at a window to see if there was anything of interest. I am by nature a very curious person.

There is an excitement that comes with curiosity, which, when added to the cold weather of that December afternoon, led to a sudden filling of my bladder and an overwhelming need to pee! 

I started to squirm. Desperate, yet worried that I would be seen by the nuns or the elderly residents of the retirement home and with no easy toilet solution in sight, I walked to the other side of the school where the bushes, the building and the low light of winter's early dusk would provide enough cover to answer nature's very insistent call.

As I relieved myself behind a bush, and looking over my shoulder to make sure no one was coming, I noticed a white “something” in another bush maybe twenty feet away. 

After I was done, I walked over to the bush and parted the branches. There, standing at four feet  tall and with wide open arms was a statue of Jesus on a pedestal facing the school. He did not seem happy and I don't think it was just me. Years of neglect in this suburban wilderness had left the white paint peeling all over his body. He had a discoloration under his eyes that gave the appearance of him crying and immediately I put my hand on his head and said “sorry Jesus.” I noticed a twinge of guilt at having relieved myself in front of him, but I knew he would forgive me.

Fast forward a few weeks to Christmas Eve: I hadn’t been to Mass in a long time. My relationship with Catholicism had been and remains complicated and not relevant to the matter of this entry, nevertheless I thought that it would be great to go to midnight Mass and connect with the community of faithful who were celebrating. I asked my 17 year old if he wanted to come with me and I was pleasantly surprised when he said “yes.”

After Mass, he said “hi” to a few of the young people he recognized from school and overall, despite the lateness of the hour, seemed in bright spirits. We got in the car and an unexpected thought popped into my head. It may have been best for it to have stayed in my head but instead I blurted it out “Hey! I have an idea! Do you want to go and save Jesus??” I told him about my run and finding the statue of Jesus slowly decaying at the abandoned school.

I knew that there was something wrong about my idea but there also seemed something right.  He smiled and said "alright," but then as we approached the convent he asked: “Dad, if you think we are doing the right thing, why are you turning off your headlights?” He had a point.

I parked as far away from the main building as I could. We got out of the car and quietly closed the doors. I walked him over to the appointed bush and Jesus had not moved. Instead he stood, sad and cold on his birthday. “What are we going to do?” whispered my son. “Let’s take him and put him in the gardening shed at home,” I suggested excitedly. “That way, he’ll be out of the cold and then maybe we can find some paint and fix him up!” "Shhh," he said pressing a finger to his lips, "too loud."

We tried to lift Jesus. He was heavy but movable, but just then the voice of reason emerged from my son: “Dad what the heck do you imagine will happen when mom opens the shed and finds a statue of Jesus staring back at her from inside?” Another good point. “Also, there is something wrong about stealing Jesus, and leaving him in the shed especially on Christmas Day!”

“We’re not stealing him; we’re saving him so that that he can be restored to his glory!” Jesus was getting heavy so we put him back on the pedestal. “Hey, I have an idea. Why don’t we put him in the car and take him to the Church? We can leave him on the front steps!”

He thought about it for a while and finally said “Dad, it’s a good idea, but it’s too weird. Can you imagine the parishioners finding Jesus on the steps on Christmas morning? What if the cops stop us? What are you going to say to them? That you were bringing Jesus back to Church? Let's leave him. He’ll be OK here. He’s been through a lot over the past two thousand years, he’s going to survive a little snow and rain and flaking paint.”

My boy! 17 and so wise. With that, we wished Jesus a happy birthday and headed home, my heart filled with the joy of the shared experience with my son on the blessed night. 

The kiss, the pamphlet, and the love

My father-in-law died today. On my way to the hospital on an already dreary, rainy late-November day, fall's empty branches hung from miserable trees, forlornly accepting their lot. Siri guided me through unfamiliar back-roads but all I recall of the drive to the hospital is the branches. It was as if all of the roadside trees had decided that this was weeping-willow day, and had dressed the part.

I definitely would not be able to retrace the drive from work to the hospital. Other then the trees my next memory was walking into bay 5 in the Newton-Wellesley emergency room where my wife, my sister-in-law and my mother-in-law sat at the bedside of my father-in-law's lifeless body. We all started to cry, and hug. There was nothing else to do, no more to be done.

He was a brilliant man. It would be easy to say this out of respect but that is just a fact. He spoke many languages, traveled widely, read profusely, and exercised regularly. He was a mathematician who got his PhD from MIT, graduating with distinction and was best known for his work on "pseudo differential operators and the heat equation approach to the Atiyah–Singer index theorem". He wrote papers entitled: "Trace Expansions for the Zaremba Problem",  "Conic degeneration of the Gauss-Bonnet operator" and "Contraction semigroups for diffusion with drift". He was a brilliant man.

He was a New England Yankee, and in his case the stereotype of the "pull-yourself-up-by-the-boot-straps, no complaint, stoic, maple syrup and nature loving, wood carving, intellectual renaissance man" fit to the proverbial T. In this sense, in his nature he was sensible but never overtly demonstrative. A hug given was one most definitely deserved.

Over the past few years and more so in recent months, his heart began to struggle with the burden of incessant beating. All the top minds in cardiology worked to figure out why a man as fit as he, someone who had run track at Haverford and who would be seen biking around the hills of Meredith and Sanbornton in New Hampshire in his early 80s could be struggling so. Neither pacemakers nor medications made an enduring dent. Earlier this month, he was admitted to the Brigham and was diagnosed with cardiac amyloidosis which we were told is a condition caused by deposits of abnormal proteins, known as amyloid, in the heart, and that when this occurs, the heart becomes stiff, unable to pump properly and thereby causing fluid build-up in the lungs, in turn making breathing difficult.

The last time I saw him was Thanksgiving. He labored walking up our front steps and he lay on the couch while waiting for dinner.  Throughout his struggle, his mind never failed. He had a wonderful sense of humor and purpose. His moments were rarely wasted with frivolity and that night he saved his energy to bemoan the current polarization of our country, sharing his fear that many progressive aspirations would be undone after years of fighting for a more compassionate country, one tolerant of many views and one capable of listening even when the views were dissonant. He lived the peaceable principles of his Quaker faith.

At the end of dinner, when the effort of sitting at the table surrounded by loving children and grandchildren was more than he could bear, my in-laws decided that it was time to leave. As I walked him out, he looked at me, put his arm around my shoulders and said "thank you". Then for the first time in our 26 year relationship he planted a kiss, through bearded lips, on my cheek. I could still feel the bristles, when he said "good-bye."

When I arrived at the hospital, the grand old man lay peacefully still, surrounded by those who loved him. It is one of life's truths that there is no perfect thing to say in the face of such a loss. It is hard to know exactly what to do or what to say. The best option is probably to be there for those you love while they come to terms with the finality of everything that will forever more endure as memories. It was on entering the room that I noticed the irony in this most sacred of moments when a well-meaning attendant came in and left an otherwise nondescript pamphlet entitled "What to do when your loved one dies." It was the kind of pamphlet street vendors give out when selling their wares at 20% off, or that supermarkets dispense with recipes for cream of pumpkin soup. How the magnitude of a life could be diminished to a check-list of "to-dos" further surrealized an already surreal moment.

I came home early to meet my soon to be 13 year-old, and knowing that he would be surprised that I was home, I told him of his grandpas passing.  We sat together and cried for 10 or 15 minutes, and then he asked me "Dad I have often wondered what I would say to someone that I loved when I knew that I might only have a little time to be with them. You just never know when that will be." I held him and told him I had no plans to leave him anytime soon, and then through his tears he whispered, "I love you dad," and then through mine I hugged him even harder.

R.I.P Bob, you lived each moment pure.

Striking Oil

The other day I received the following text from my 16 year old son:  "Do we have omega-3 oil at home and if not can we get some?" This was rather different from his usual: "can I have 4 friends for a sleepover?" or "there are only 3 girls downstairs"  or "OK I'll turn the music down." An unusual text from an adolescent is not unexpected, however this one immediately brought to mind Twain's aphorism: “When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”

A Brief Detour

Before saying more about the text, I need to tell you about my obsession with omega-3 oil, a substance without which our brains could not exist. Back in my youth my mother would give me a teaspoonful of cod-liver oil. Cod and other cold-water fish, have plenty of omega-3s in their flesh and cod-liver oil is an excellent way to get concentrated omega-3.  One of the omega-3s, docosahexaenoic acid -- also known as DHA -- is not only the dominant omega-3 fatty acid in the brain but is also essential to brain function and this is because it is a major component of brain cell membranes and it influences the way that brain cells talk to each other. You would think that over millions of years of human existence we would have evolved multiple ways to manufacture and accumulate this essential element of brain structure and function and yet despite its critical role in how the brain works, humans cannot make DHA and the only way to get omega-3s is through our diet.

Of particular interest, DHA accumulates in the areas of the brain associated with learning and memory. DHA regulates the formation of new nerve cells, new connections between nerve cells and impacts the speed of messages between neurons. It is also a key component of the covering that surrounds and protects nerve cells, a substance known as myelin.

Myelin, is a fatty substance that wraps around the nerve cells in our body. Scientists have found that the more myelin around a nerve cell, the faster and stronger a message travels down that nerve cell. Most myelination happens naturally and most of it during childhood. Myelin forms when nerve cells fire, and they fire when they are being used. Children generate more myelin than adults do because they tend to be more active, both physically and mentally, than adults are.The way that myelin forms is the more an activity is repeated the more the nerves that control that activity get myelinated, and with the more myelin that wraps around those nerve cells, the quicker and easier the activity becomes. 

Understanding the role of myelin means not only understanding that repeating behaviors (quantity) improves the activity, whether it is walking or Olympic running, but repeatedly doing it correctly also improves the quality of the practice. Practicing doing things repeatedly, but incorrectly means becoming good at doing the behavior incorrectly! When I trained in Judo many years ago, my coach used to say, "It's not that practice makes perfect, it is that perfect practice makes perfect." It is important to make corrections before myelination wires the "incorrect" way of doing the behavior. Myelin is essential in all of this and so DHA is essential.

My 16 Year Old as a Child

Because of how critical omega-3s are and because the only way to get them is from our diet, many of the foods we bought for the children were rich in omega-3s. As they got older I felt that they were not getting enough in their diets and I bought all sort of supplements and tried to get my kids to take them. For my 16 year old, as a young boy he found that most omega-3 pills were too big. He refused the cod-liver oil liquid form and he said that the gummies "tasted yucky". Eventually found a cream form and told him that he had to take it saying: "You have to take this. It is good for your brain, heart and nerve cells." When he was very little I would hide it in ice-cream or yogurt, and at times simply put it in a spoon and told him he had no choice. He was a good sport and agreed, though with great disgust, but eventually he didn't care how good it was for him. He started to hate the ordeal so much that he increasingly fought me on taking the stuff and by age 7 it was not worth forcing the issue so I gave up even trying.

Back to the Text

Fast forward to the text. I was sitting at my desk at my outpatient clinic when his text came in. I texted back that I was sure we had some and that I would find them when I got back home. That evening I asked him what the omega-3 thing was all about. "Well do you know how good they are for you? My wrestling coach was telling me. They make you faster, with better reflexes and help your memory and everything! Even your heart! Do we have any? I have to start taking them."

Sam Levenson was right: "Insanity is hereditary; you get it from your children!"