Aging

(This piece was written by an ex-girl friend, and sent to me via e-mail. I think her words strike a chord in all of us who have grown and aged a little.)

Old age, I've decided, is a gift. I am now, probably for the first time in my life, the person I have always wanted to be. Oh, not my body! I sometime despair over my body---but I don't agonize over it for long. I would never trade my amazing friends, my wonderful life, my family for less gray hair or a flatter belly. As I've aged, I've become more kind to myself, and less critical of myself. I've become my own friend.

I don't chide myself for having that extra beer, or for not making my bed, or for buying those three pairs of cowboy boots.I am entitled to overeat, to be messy, to be extravagant. I have seen too many dear friends leave this world too soon; before they understood the great freedom that comes with aging. Whose business is it if I decide to read until 4 a.m., and sleep until noon? I will bring out my hate of the ruling class like some dark jewel from time to time and polish it with my tears for an age called "the sixties that never was and if I at the same time wish to weep over a lost love, I will. I know I am sometimes forgetful. But there again, some of life is just as well forgotten - and I eventually remember the important things.

Sure, over the years my heart has been broken. How can your heart not break when you lose a loved one, or when a child suffers? But broken hearts are what give us strength and understanding and compassion. A heart never broken is pristine and sterile and will never know the joy of being imperfect I am so blessed to have lived long enough to have my hair turn gray, and to have my youthful laughs be forever etched into deep grooves on my face. So many have never laughed, and so many have died before their hair could turn silver. I can say "no", and mean it. I can say "yes", and mean it. As you get older, it is easier to be positive. You care less about what other people think. I don't question myself anymore. I've even earned the right to be wrong. So, to answer the question, I like being old. It has set me free. I like the person I have become. I am not going to live forever, but while I am still here, I will not waste time lamenting what could have been, or worrying about what will be. For the first time in my life, I don't have to have a reason to do the things I want to do. If I want to play games on the computer all day, lay on the couch and listen to old tapes or if I don't want to go to the lake or a movie, I have earned that right. I have put in my time trying to save the world, so now I can be a bit selfish without feeling guilty.

I sometimes feel sorry for the young. They face a far different world than I knew growing up, where we feared the law, respected the old and the rich were envied but not hated. I never felt the need to use filthy language in order to express myself. And they too will grow old someday. I am grateful to have been born when I was, into a kinder, gentler world.

Yes, I like being old!

Love,
Sharon

10 Reasons To Love This Woman

1) She’s really smart without being pretentious, and teaches me many things about living well.
2) If she has something to say she says it. Getting her to stop is sometimes a problem, but it's usually worth it to hear her out.
3) She’s self-aware and helps others be the same way. She knows herself. She figured me out pretty quickly, too.
4) She’s compassionate toward others. She gives her time, her love, and shares what she has with others freely, including certain members of the animal kingdom.
5) She’s sometimes a very silly person, and knows it. She laughs at herself with as much gusto as she laughs at anything. She knows irony when it happens. She finds me most amusing when I'm trying to be serious.
6) She’s very snoozely. (That means that when I snuggle her, she snuggles back.)
7) She has an obsession with 80’s music that I neither share nor understand, but it’s cute anyway. Her erotic dreams involve shoe shopping with Pierce Brosnan. (That's from listening to too much 'Dead or Alive'. )
8) I’ve never seen her pray, and she doesn’t even refer to gods when she’s angry.
9) I’ve seldom seen her rush to judgment about anything.
10) She is a great friend to all her friends, and if there is anyone on Earth who doesn’t like her, I haven’t met or heard about them. Those friends are good people, too. She is surrounded by people of good character and many kindnesses.

I love you Janice. You are my life and my light, and I don't want to ever be without you (except for those times that I do something really dumb, and you're kind of mad.)

Lest We Forget

The one phenomenon that unites the Jewish People, the one devastating reality that obscures each and every argument we create amongst our own kind, is the raw and unexplainable hatred of others toward us. I am a heretic, and an unrepentant one. I am a man who changed his mind, his life, and his gods. Yet, I am still a Jew, no matter where I go, whom I lay next to, or what I consume. My paradigm shift, radical as it seems to my kindred people, will not save me from the ravages of blind hatred, and nor will strict adherence to Torah save me either. The Talmud says, “Once the Destroyer is permitted to destroy, it makes no distinctions between the good or the bad.” Though I wholeheartedly disagree with the theological implications of the concept, it conveys an accurate picture of the chaos brought on by warfare and human failings. The Holocaust, being perhaps the truest expression of that dictum, is the singlular event that unites Jews more than any other in our long and troubled history.

The Holocaust, however, was not an exclusively Jewish matter. It never was. We were not the reason for it. We were the excuse for it. Blood-lust, greed, racism, nationalism, and envy still infect the collective psyche of humanity, and every so often, as in Armenia, Europe, Uganda, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, and the Sudan, this subconscious thirst for war and tribalism surges to the surface, and takes both the weakest and the strongest from amongst us without rhyme or reason. We must remember the Holocaust because we remember our own possible failings as human beings; the latent desire for revenge of presumed wrongs committed, allegiances to imaginary gods, or blind and raving fervor for a dyed piece of cloth hung from a tall, fancy stick in the middle of a town square, unfurled amidst the clamor of patriotic hymns and military cadence.

No, we are not the German people of 1930. We are somewhat worse than they were. We envision the Holocaust as something that happened to someone else in another time, when we know quite well, that deep down, even we may find ourselves saying similar words, positing similar philosophies, and voting for similar national policies, without reflecting as to where those small and seemingly justified-at-the-time actions led humanity in the end. We will take another human being, remove our feelings for the humanity in him, and destroy him as one would a mosquito, without a pang of conscience or a fleeting thought. In the end, our arrogance and forgetfulness of the past will make us like those who hated us if we are not vigilant over ourselves, and not just watchful over the character flaws of others. In an age of high speed coummunication and satellites we can, at the flick of a button, see our history unfold before us. That amazing capability should help us to know better than they did, yet it doesn't.

When I witness many Jews in America and Europe rise in support of outright fascism and corporatism, the invasions of foreign lands, the death penalty, oppose civil rights for some members of society, condone the inhumane treatment of prisoners of war, and a host of other notions once thought discarded by civilization as backward and unenlightened, I fear a new kind of fear. I fear that many will pledge allegiance to a flag and forget the humanity behind it, or pray to a god and forget the man praying next to them, and forget that time, which normally heals all wounds, also brings about 'historical amnesia' in some. I fear that we, the victims of time, have forgotten the real lessons of the Holocaust.

Forgetfulness is a double-edged sword. It heals one disease and creates yet another in its wake. Let us not forget that the liberties we wish for ourselves are the very same liberties and freedoms we must grant to others, even to those whose actions and ideas we find reprehensible or morally offensive. We can easily be duped into believing that there are ideas that possess humans, and we demonize the person based upon that ideal, never considering the possibility that they are merely humans holding ideals and not ideals holding humans. All of humanity is driven by the same needs, passions, and biological mechanisms. The core of who we really are, in spite of what we say or do, differs little from the Moslem, to the Jew, or to the Atheist.

Let us also be careful in what we are willing to agree with, because we may not always be sure what exactly it is that we are agreeing to. The unwillingness to look back will ultimately prevent our ability to see forward, and this lapse in reflection always leads to unintended and tragic consequences. In the end, that policy or law we thought so necessary for our immediate survival may be turned upon us and become a ‘Destroyer’ that makes none of the crucial distinctions necessary to permit freedom, life, and liberty for all equally.

“The tumult and the shouting dies;
The Captains and the Kings depart:
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice
A humble and a contrite heart.

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget – lest we forget! “

(Rudyard Kipling, from Recessional, 1897)

A Safe Place To Play

Somewhere in white bread America there is a father or grandfather sitting in his oversized, well decorated upper-class suburban home and wondering to himself why it is that inner city children are so much different that his own. He doesn’t understand why so many appear unmotivated, undisciplined, angry, sad, or end up running afoul of the law. He might be blaming a lack of parental oversight, the teachers, the poverty, the Democrats, the predominance of hip-hop culture among inner city communities, and even the children themselves. I don’t blame him for his misdiagnosis of the problem, because our great white grandfather has never peered beyond his carefully manicured front lawn long enough to get a clear picture of someone else’s reality.

I live in the city. During the spring and summer months, and sometimes into the autumn, I drive as little as possible, often making the 35 mile round trip back and forth from work on bicycle. I can take Outer Drive, which runs ‘as the crow flies’ from my front door to within two miles of my office, which is on the southern edge of the suburbs. When you travel by bicycle or on foot, your power of observation tends to increase exponentially simply because you’re moving slower and have more time to watch what’s going on around you. In my daily commute, which takes me right across the city, and not even through the worst parts of it, I bear a daily witness to those profound differences between suburban and city environments that the great white grandfather wouldn’t ever be able to spot from the window of his private jet, even if he bothered to look.

So you might be wondering at this point what brought on this particular ranting.

Typically, if there is a gathering of friends, relatives, or close family, I, being the childless ‘uncle’ and all-around fun guy to play with, am delegated the responsibility of chaperoning the various nieces, nephews, and children of friends to a local park to give mommy, daddy, and everyone else some quiet time away from the kids. This is a lot of fun for me as well, and I have no complaints about assuming this awesome responsibility. It was on one these recent expeditions, screaming and laughing kids in tow, that the realization hit me hard enough to make me cry. It’s not that I hadn’t noticed it before, but for some reason, the effect of this knowledge had not touched me so deeply until now.

The Sunday afternoon romp in the upper-class suburban park was something of a surreal experience for one accustomed to seeing cracked pavement, piles of dog excrement, discarded beer cans, and broken glass along the sides of the streets and parks that I pass on my way to and from work each day. There was none of the above-mentioned garbage anywhere to be found. Of the several play stations and jungle gyms available, there were no swings missing, no rusted slides, no bars bent out of shape, and plenty of new safety features to protect children from serious injury. There was something else this park had that the other s didn’t; there were children already there, laughing and running carefree. There were parents overseeing the reverie, but there was no sense of fear, or reluctance on anyone’s part to do anything other than have a good time. There was no worry over drug deals, bullies, thugs, prostitutes, or the child finding a used needle or broken bottle in the grass. There were the usual parental concerns of ‘don’t get too far ahead’ and ‘keep an eye on your sister’, but that was where the warnings ceased.

The primary and foremost factor in determining the developmental success or failure of a child is, in my opinion, a two-fold sense of safety and freedom. One cannot underestimate the power of feeling safe to play, to run, to think, or to grow. I remember running across open fields without a care in the world and the joy that brought me. Think about what effects the opposite must do to a child’s psyche, to know from early on that the world is unsafe, unclean, and unsuitable for the very things that define the meaning of childhood. The child can see the swing-set from his or her window, but it has no swings left on it, or swings that can’t be used for fear of what may be lurking behind them. A child remains locked in his or her home, glued to a computer game or television, because the playground, the place that makes a child a healthy risk-taking and imaginative child, is no longer playable.

I don’t know who is to blame for the degradation of city playgrounds and parks. Maybe I will find myself in agreement with the great white grandfather on some issues. Is it Vandalism? The lack of funding? Apathy? Crime? Poverty? All of the above? Perhaps. Yet, the fact remains that we have a serious problem with a simple solution. We can waste all the time we want later on prosecuting the guilty and forming the proper lynch mobs, but every minute we squander in not fixing the problem means that another day goes by where a child somewhere doesn’t have the simple freedom to play on the swings or see-saw. It becomes another day where the child’s ‘conversation’ about the world revolves around safety, when it should be carefree and open to new experience and ideas.

Lets give all our children somewhere safe to play.

A 'Hearty' Conversation

My good friend Patrick R. suffered a mild heart attack on Saturday morning at his suburban home. Patrick is only 40 years old, and according to most, way too young for that sort of thing to happen, in spite of his being borderline diabetic, drinking too much caffeine, and smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. I never bother Patrick when it comes to his health. Nagging him about health and money is his wife’s job, and I leave it to her to convince him as to what he needs to be doing. He worries more about others than he does himself, and pushes off his own health concerns one day later and another and another until this happens. A heart attack is a serious wake-up call, and I am sure that Patrick hears this one loud and clear.

Patrick woke up unexpectedly at 5:00 in the morning with recurring, severe heartburn, and then decided that it was time to go to the emergency room. He woke up his wife and said, “I’m going to drive myself to the hospital. If you want to come along, get dressed.” When I heard the story the first time, my shock was not over his attitude or even the heart attack, but rather the surprise at Patrick being awake at 5 am! In either case, one cannot accuse him of being melodramatic. Like the worrying and the nagging, I guess the drama is the wife’s job, too. She is a sweet person, but she operates on a different wavelength than her husband. Patrick and I share a sense of Stoicism that masks our fears in short sentences, jokes, and moments of seclusion. Perhaps that is why our blatant differences don’t hinder our friendship.

Seeing him in lying in hospital bed, with all sort of tubes and monitors attached to and through him, did not move me to sympathy or tears as I thought it might. I am not a complete asshole or totally insensitive to the sufferings of others, but I do put things in their perspective and since he was in a good medical facility and under excellent care, there was no reason for me to act out or worry needlessly. I most gladly delegate that role to his wife, who can do enough fretting and worrying for the lot of us even when things are going quite well. So far, Patrick is doing as well as can be expected. Some serious arterial blockage has been removed and he has many people around him for support. I should be so lucky to have so many people to care about me.

Patrick is former Baptist minister and is currently involved in a new program that offers new ways of thinking and doing for Pastors and others of strong Christian faith. As you probably must be aware by now, Patrick and I do not see eye to eye on many things. It is fortunate that he isn’t one of those Biblical Literalists or holy rollers that quote Scriptures or breathe Hell-Fire, and because of this pleasant fact, I have been able to glean a few good ideas from him during the course of our friendship. He has brought positive change to many people (and himself) over the years, and deserves credit for saving marriages, careers, and the families of those who seek his counsel.

Sometimes those of the religious bent who rely on metaphor or parable do get it right, though not always in the way they intend it. Patrick speaks a lot about “God’s Way vs. Man’s Way” in his course, and from time to time, he bounces his ideas off me to get my reaction or input. I get more from him than he does from me, I’m sure. One such abstraction or metaphor that I found very useful was that of life being a conversation, a concept not unlike the idea of social norms and education providing a script to live by. This ‘conversation’ takes place on all levels, but it is within the individual that the ‘conversation’ is processed. It comes down to finding what is meaningful to you, and focusing in upon that meaning to know whether or not it creates for you what you want or only mires you deeper in your habitual misery.

It is very similar to the idea of self-fulfilling prophecies. If I believe that life is going to be hard, and that everyone is out to get me, then everything I see and hear will do nothing but confirm that thinking, and my subsequent actions will bring those ‘realities’ to fruition. I have seen this more than enough times in my own experience to know it as a truism. Putting this phenomena in terms of a ‘conversation’, my relationship with the world I am involved, allows me to change the tone and tenor of my interactions, so much so, that life almost instantly changes along with it. I gain a new perspective by simply changing how I engage my reality. An old saying about honey, bees, and vinegar comes to mind.

This notion is basic common sense and no real epiphany at all. As the Yiddish expression goes “Tracht gut und vehrt zeyn gut.” That positive thinking brings positive results should come as no surprise to anyone. Everyone knows this without ever attending self-development seminars or earning psychology degrees. Yet, hearing it repeatedly, or even preaching its gospel, isn’t quite enough. One has to become open to its import, since even an obvious and practical truth can remain obscured by an overwhelming pre-existing social or emotional condition. We hold onto the ideas that hurt us because we are either unaware of the damage they cause, just plain used to them, or bound by an outside principle or influence that impedes our ability to break through our set patterns of behavior. It is normal for everyone to experience the suggestion to change in this way, even when one knows that the current ‘conversation’ is not producing the desired results. Sometimes the way an idea is conveyed becomes key to opening the psyche to it, helping a concept to break through deeply entrenched and stubborn barriers to its practical application.

Insanity is generally defined as ‘doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.’ Ignorance is the refusal to consider anything different from what one is accustomed to, from either stubbornness or pride. Society may declare me completely mad, but I will not ever allow myself to stoop to ignorance or the insanity that follows. My madness drives me to be different. Insanity compels one to remain exactly the same.

I ought to thank Patrick for helping me to ‘break through’ some more old patterns of thinking. He offered me nothing in the way of new knowledge, but he did, via a well-placed analogy, impel a willingness for me to finally implement the idea. This ‘conversation’ became yet another valuable instrument in a veritable workshop of tools for self-discovery and inner reflection.

Many thanks, best wishes, and a speedy recovery!

(However, don’t be expecting me to pray.)

“...man is continually revolting against an effect without, while all the time he is nourishing and preserving its cause in his heart.” (James Allen, from As A Man Thinketh, circa 1890)

“If any man can convince and show me that I do not think or act right, I will gladly change; for I seek truth, by which no man was ever injured. Only he who abides in error or ignorance comes to real harm.” (Aurelius 121-180 AD, from Meditations)