Sculpture by Isabel Miramontes (b. 1962). I don’t know the actual title, but I call it “The Helping Hand.” There are ugly things out there in the world, and this blog has certainly not been trying to prettify reality. But I also think it's wrong to ignore the goodness out there. Acts of kindness deserve celebration because they enlarge us and give us hope for humankind.*
GOD AND MOSES ARE KEEPING SECRETS - A poem for Parsha Vaera (Aliyah 1)
“I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob with [the name]
Almighty God, but [with] My name YHWH, I did not become known to them.”
If God walked amongst us,
what would we call him or her?
What name would we use if God
was sitting two bar stools away?
Who’s your friend? they’d ask
and we’d stutter like Moses
realizing we never knew.
What have we been calling
God this whole time,
when we cry out, when we
ask for things? Who are
you talking to we deserve
to be asked and, I think we
deserve to know the answer too.
I’m not a big fan of labels, but
I do like names.
I think it’s time we learned Yours.
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“How then will Pharaoh hearken to me,
seeing that I am of closed lips?”
You have to wonder with
God’s hidden name as his example
if Moses’ closed lips are just him
keeping secrets and not
a stutter after all? What isn’t Moses
prepared to tell the Pharaoh?
He smells like the Nile or the
details of future plagues have
already been written down.
I’d keep my lips closed too if
I had infinite frogs ready to go.
The best negotiators use their
words sparingly. Any deal a
gamble with what is truly available.
I say keep your lips closed and
your frogs close to your chest.
Your people will be crossing the sea
in no time.
~ Rick Lupert
Blake: Moses at the Burning Bush*
Parsha = a portion of the Torah read during a particular week.
My favorite lines:
I say keep your lips closed and
your frogs close to your chest.
And here the poem could end. I’d prefer this to the relatively trite and prosy last two lines.
*
Who’s your friend? they’d ask
and we’d stutter like Moses
realizing we never knew.
And then — this is brilliant — transposing the card-playing idiom for keeping secrets into keeping frogs close to one’s chest — referring of course to the plague of frogs. (So many people are no longer familiar with those references! The solution would be to teach the bible as mythology, and this is sometimes done in college classes that have somewhat evasive titles, e.g. “Mythological and biblical references in literature.”)
On a somewhat different note, the events in the second poem remind me of the problem that plagued me in childhood since my first religion lessons: how come god walks and talks and otherwise manifests himself to the ancient Israelites, but will not walk among us — will certainly not walk into a bar? The idea that you can’t see the face of god and live is inconsistent with the narratives in which various people do see god face to face.
I know I must have told this story in the blog before, possibly more than once. I wasn’t the only one puzzled by the current silence of god, given his talkative nature early on (think of Adam and Eve, Abraham, Moses — but there are other examples as well). I didn’t dare ask the nun about it, but one brave little boy did: “How come god used to talk to people in the bible, but he no longer talks to us?” The nun fell silent, and slowly smiled a sad smile. Slowly, thinking about each word, she replied, “The times were different then.”
(Or did she say, “People were different then”? I am no longer sure, but it comes down to the same thing: different times, different conditions, different people — people whose minds worked differently because the world was different then.)
That early on god had no trouble showing himself, doing things (even eating), and above all talking means not only that Yahweh had a body just as the Greek gods had bodies, but that there was no concept of no, we mustn’t have any direct, compelling evidence of god’s existence because “that would be knowledge and not faith” — and only faith is a virtue. The evidence must be so weak that you are free not to believe in god, and have to make the absurdist “leap of faith.”
Yet early Hebrew had no word for faith in the sense of religion. There was no separation of religion from the rest of reality — supernatural beings (let’s not forget angels and demons) were constantly at work. The altars flowed with blood because Yahweh, like all the other gods, demanded these literal offerings of animal protein.
Yet as soon as the Second Temple was destroyed, the sacrifices ended, and worship became centered on reading. Words, words, words — but the living voice gone long ago. A fascinating study of how god gradually becomes silent already in the course of the Tanakh is Richard Elliott Friedman’s The Disappearance of God. Friedman is a Hebrew scholar who did his own translations.
Here theists have found this answer: at first people were unsophisticated and helpless (“People were different then”). But as they started to gain more knowledge, god simply stepped aside and let them be on their own.
To quote Friedman:
~ What the recurrence of the phrase [Hester Panim — the Hiding of the Face] indicates is that the diminishing apparent presence of God was not only a literary-historical development in biblical narrative, but rather it was felt, consciously, acutely, by sensitive persons in the biblical world. In every occurrence the phrase reflects a condition in which the deity is understood to exist but not be available to humans, giving no visible signs of presence, leaving a human community to face their troubles on their own. ~
God’s face by MichelangeloAnd if that silence, that Hiding of the Face, has led to the Holocaust, among other evils, that’s just too bad. To show oneself, to say anything — that would be in conflict with freedom and independence, and those are apparently the highest values, regardless of how unkind they may appear in some circumstances. You could call it “tough love.”
Now, the pope doesn’t have any such scruples about violating freedom and independence when he allegedly speaks infallibly ex cathedra, and all Catholics are supposed to blindly obey. But, to return to Rick Lupert’s brilliant metaphor, popes are as shrewd as Moses and have learned to keep their frogs close to their chest, releasing a few when the time is right.
photo: Michael SimmsMary:
I always try to keep my frogs close to my chest!!!
PS. Reminds me of a Joan Osbourne song..”What if God was one of us? A stranger on the bus, trying to get home.”
Oriana:
Love the idea of god on the bus, rather than in a limo.
And note that rather than the imageless, nameless god, the modern trend (at least in poetry) has been to humanize god.
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I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been. V.
VIRGINIA WOOLF’S INCREDIBLY LOVING SUICIDE NOTE TO HER HUSBAND
“Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier 'til this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that—everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been. V.”
Oriana
January 25 marked Virginia Woolf’s birthday. It reminded me of the great affection her husband Leonard Woolf gave her — and she was profoundly grateful to him. This is perhaps the most loving suicide note ever written.
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ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI: TRADITION AND “THE NEWNESS OF THE DAY”
Agni Interviewer: We need the writing of the past; we hope that it infuses our own writing with its immortality.
AZ: Tradition is something we do every day: it’s a life of reading. You read poetry from Homer to Sappho and Archilochus, old Chinese poetry, whatever you can find. You find those ashes of old inspiration in your poems, and, in a more or less active way, you reflect on what is your response. But tradition for me also means poets like Milosz or Herbert, from the generation before me.
On the other hand, I always think that POETRY EXPRESSES THE NEWNESS OF THE DAY. If you were only here to continue tradition without existentially responding to the new day, I think it would be purely academic. It’s a very intricate combination of adhering to the voices of the past and somehow incorporating them, or dialoguing with them. But also there’s this feeling of newness — that every generation has some new word to say, because the world changes all the time.
(This interview goes back to 2004, and the link I have no longer works.)
Oriana:
Zagajewski’s best known formulation is that poetry needs to combine irony and ecstasy — that it holds the dramatic tension between these two, even in our age, which is more the age of irony. We get weary of poems that are 100% irony, just as we can’t endure too many poems that lack irony (Byron is a very interesting Romantic poet because he was a master of irony).
But I like Zagajewski’s ideas about tradition and the “newness of the day” very much as well. As usual, Zagajewski warns against “binary thinking”: we either cling to tradition or we try to be super-avant-garde. He likes works that contains the dramatic tension of expressing both.
Thinking about the beginning of modern poetry: Poetry really changed after WW1. It wasn't possible to romanticize trench warfare or mustard gas. A lot more ugliness became permissible in poetry, a lot more realism. Though I still say that “the task of poetry is not to debunk; it's to bunk” — to find and nurture the ecstatic elements in life — poeticizing a la Tennyson became just too old-fashioned. We can still appreciate the best of Tennyson and other Victorian poets, but the average Victorian poem has become pretty unendurable.
Krakow, first snowfall. Krakow is Zagajewski’s favorite city, ahead of Paris. *
“If we can’t learn to be kind to each other how will we ever learn to be kind to the most desperate parts of ourselves.” ~ Rupi Kaur
Oriana:
“The most desperate parts of ourselves” is a very striking phrase. I moves me toward self-compassion just through the choice of words.
Still, when I consider the whole statement, I think that in my experience it’s much easier to learn to be kind to others, to accept them and forgive their “only human” foibles, than it is to be equally kind and supportive to ourselves. In fact when therapists find that a person is full of self-condemnation, they may ask the patient to imagine what they would say to a friend who’s having the same difficulties. And right away the patient sees all kinds of “mitigating circumstances” rather than the friend’s inherent “badness.”
Alas, we have internalized the critical parents, teachers, toxic priests and nuns, cruel classmates, etc., and have become experts as self-punishment. It’s quite a journey to undo this damage, and it can take decades to stop seeing yourself as a bad, inferior, unlovable, undeserving person (or a permanently unlucky one, the one who “gets no respect,” etc). If you were raised in a particularly punitive way, it may take until the dawn of old age to grant yourself the same kind of respect and approval that you automatically grant to your friends.
Dali: Anthropomorphic Cabinet, 1936*
A quick detox:
MORE THAN 4,000 YEARS AGO, A DOG LEFT HIS (OR HER) FRONT PAW MARKS ON THIS CLAY BRICK WHILE IT WAS LYING OUT TO DRY.
The brick was used in the construction of the ziggurat of the moon god Nanna at the ancient Sumerian city of Ur.
The massive step pyramid measured 210 feet (64m) in length, 150 feet (46m) in width and over 100 feet (30m) in height. The height is speculative, as only the foundations of the Sumerian ziggurat have survived.
https://www.ancient.eu/image/197/great-ziggurat-of-ur/
THE PUSH-PULL OF DECISION MAKING, OR OUR NAUGHTY RIGHT HEMISPHERE
~ “It turns out that, like an angel and a devil sitting on opposite shoulders, the two sides of the brain engage in a tug of war. The right hemisphere pushes us toward risk and the left pulls us away from it. And while making risky decisions, we don’t just use the parts of our brains that handle reason and judgment. Our decision-making reaches deep into the brain to areas associated with emotion such as the amygdala.
First, the researchers had to work out how to estimate the bias that each individual brought to each decision. To do that they set up a gambling game on a computer. It included an unlimited deck of only five cards: 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10. One card was face-up (the participant’s), the other face-down (the computer’s). Participants had to bet ($5 or $20) on whether their card was higher. That’s easy with 2s and 4s (you’re likely to lose) and with 8s and 10s (you’re likely to win), but on 6s, when you are equally likely to win or lose, people do “a variety of weird stuff,” Sarma says. In addition to weighing risk and reward, each person’s internal bias comes into play. “How you feel when you gamble in a casino is based on past outcomes.” With a prediction of bias in hand, the researchers were able to compare it to the readings from the electrodes in the brain to ask, “what part of the brain is modulating and moving with or against this internal bias?”
This research advances our understanding of how decision-making is encoded in the brain and might refine therapeutic treatments for gambling addiction or for people with psychiatric and mental disorders such as Parkinson’s disease. Treatments like deep brain stimulation (DBS) already work by changing the brain patterns in Parkinson’s patients. This new kind of manipulation, should it be developed, would add treatment for impaired decision-making.
More controversially, says Sridevi Sarma, the senior author on the new paper, which was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “you can potentially control a person’s decisions by making them take more or less risk.” As an example, she points to military commanders who might want to increase the soldiers’ willingness to head into danger.
Obviously, the ethics of that would have to be debated. And the study led by Sarma and Pierre Sacré, who was a post-doctoral fellow in Sarma’s lab and is now at the University of Liège in Belgium, is not one that can be easily recreated. Its participants were ten epilepsy patients who had electrodes implanted in their brains in order to locate the origins of their seizures. (In severe cases, neurosurgeons operate to remove that brain tissue to stop seizures.) That set-up allowed Sarma and Sacre and their colleagues to track neural activity throughout the brain in real time, meaning milliseconds. Other techniques don’t allow such precision or such wide coverage of the brain.
They found that the brain uses what they call a “striking” push-pull phenomenon. “Right hemisphere is pushing you to take the bet, take the risk, and left hemisphere is pulling you away from that,” Sarma says. According to Sacre, “there’s no clear answer for why we see these lateralizations in different brain functions,” but they exist in other types of brain processing such as the instinct to approach or avoid. “This push-pull phenomenon seems to be evolutionary,” Sarma says.
It was already known that, on average, people take more or less risks if the left or right sides of their brains were stimulated. But until this study no one had tracked the way that bias shifted with each subsequent bet, i.e., trial by trial in the experiment.
There are plenty of limitations here. As noted, the study included only ten patients and they were all epileptic. Some critics worry that skewed the data, though Sarma and Sacre believe these patients are otherwise healthy and they controlled for some of potential problems. They knew, for instance, which parts of each person’s brain triggered seizures and did not include those regions in their analysis. But they also argue there is no other way at this point to capture these types of recordings since you cannot put electrodes in a human being’s brain unless it is clinically warranted.
In the future, Sarma and Sacre plan to explore whether non-invasive brain stimulation, such as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), would have the same effect. And now that they have identified the push-pull effect, they could explore it simply by rigging the card decks in their experiment—no stimulation required.
“This is just the tip of the icerberg,” says Sarma. “As soon as you understand how the brain governs behavior, then you can manipulate it.”
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/brain-waves/201901/risky-decisions-reflect-tug-war-in-the-brain
Every woman who's ever bought lipstick knows that push-pull. Crazy how agonizing it can feel. I wonder if it's the right hemisphere pushing for shameless crimson while the left one advises a muted pink.
Speaking of shameless crimson, desert sunsets apparently owe their drama to low humidity. Here is a recent sunset in Carefree, Arizona.
Photo: Charles Sherman
*
“Often, disagreement is a product of different life experiences, not differences in rationality.” ~ Jeremy Sherman
Oriana:
Travel abroad, and especially having lived abroad for a while, is one of those life-transforming experiences.
Also, having been raised in an enlightened vs fundamentalist religion -- though some manage to break away. There is a saying that half the Unitarians are former Catholics. That's true of my Unitarian Wisdom Circle. One of the things we share is our journey of healing toward self-acceptance.
Blood Moon, Seattle; Tim Urpman
*
THE PRO-NAZI RALLY AT MADISON SQUARE GARDEN, February 20, 1939
~ “Stop Jewish Domination of Christian Americans,” the banners cried out. “Wake Up America. Smash Jewish Communism,” others admonished, draping from the rafters above a packed, roaring crowd at New York City’s Madison Square Garden.
On Feb. 20, 1939, 22,000 members of the German American Bund, a pro-Nazi group, took over the venue that stars still consider a peak achievement if you can fill it up. That night, it was a full house for Bund leader Fritz Kuhn, who had become a household name as the “American Hitler. ”
Dozens of the Bund’s drum and bugle corps marched down the center aisle and mounted the stage, which featured a 30-foot-tall portrait of George Washington surrounded by American and Bund flags. Color guards bearing more Nazi flags followed behind.
Then 3,000 of the Bund’s version of Adolf Hitler’s SS protection squadron troops, the Ordnungsdienst — or OD for short — marched in dressed in SS-like uniforms of black pants, black shoes, gray shirts, Sam Browne military cross straps and swastika insignia.
“Sieg Heil!” the OD and the crowd shouted, with arms outstretched in a sea of Nazi salutes.
The Bund claimed 20,000 members and 100,000 sympathizers across the country at the time of the rally. Members were everyday people, from butchers and steelworkers to bakers and housewives. Many were among the 400,000 Germans who immigrated to the United States between 1919 and 1933, when the post-World War I German economy was in shambles.
The organization sponsored Nazi summer camps for families and children, the largest being Camp Siegfried in nearby Yaphank, N.Y., whose main thoroughfare was called Adolf Hitler Street.
The official flier advertising the Nazi rally displayed a swastika emblem over the words “True Americanism and George Washington Birthday Exercises. ”
Civic groups were outraged over the Bund equating Nazism with Americanism.
“The German American Bund wanted to identify as Americans and give the veneer that they were about America,” said Arnie Bernstein, author of “Swastika Nation: Fritz Kuhn and the Rise and Fall of the German-American Bund. ”
Meanwhile, inside, the rally reached its agitated peak as Bund leader Kuhn took the stage for the final speech of the night.
Heavyset with thick eyeglasses, “Fritz Kuhn was the most unlikely leader you could imagine,” Bernstein said. Kuhn previously worked as a chemist for Ford Motor Co., where he was fired for his anti-Semitic politicking, despite Henry Ford’s own anti-Semitism.
“If you ask what we are actively fighting for under our charter: First, a socially just, white, Gentile-ruled United States. Second, Gentile-controlled labor unions, free from Jewish Moscow-directed domination,” Kuhn told the crowd.
Kuhn then incited the crowd by referring to President Roosevelt as “Rosenfield” and Manhattan District Attorney Thomas Dewey as “Thomas ‘Jewey.’” The city’s half-Jewish/half-Catholic mayor became “Jew lumpen LaGuardia,” Bernstein writes in “Swastika Nation. ”
“In 1939, American Jewry was terrified that Nazism could happen in America,” Robert Rockaway, professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University said in an interview, noting that the Bund was using the Constitution and First Amendment to attack Jews.
Many of the rally’s speakers talked about patriotism and Americanism, which is the kind of language that can be abused by political groups, Bernstein said: “White nationalists are not shy about perverting what America really stands for. ”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2018/12/09/night-thousands-nazis-packed-madison-square-garden-rally-violence-erupted/?utm_term=.c75450b4cafb
Madison Square Garden, New York, February 20, 1939
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“Politically speaking, tribal nationalism always insists that its own people are surrounded by 'a world of enemies'—‘one against all’—and that a fundamental difference exists between this people and all others. It claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others, and denies theoretically the very possibility of a common humankind long before it is used to destroy the humanity of man.” ~ Hannah Arendt
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PERHAPS THE BEST AND MOST REVOLUTIONARY AMERICAN IDEA
THE IDEA THAT THE MANY, RATHER THAN JUST THE FEW, CAN AND SHOULD ENJOY LIFE — that the pursuit of happiness is an un-alienable right — strikes me as particularly American. Americans take it for granted, as self-evident — believe me, it is NOT self-evident except in the context of the secular (and liberal Protestant, and liberal-Jewish) worldview that accepts THIS life as important, that it’s not just a brief and miserable way station before the afterlife, the “true” life.
Coming from a masochistic Catholic background (“Suffering is good for you”; “God sends suffering to those he loves”; "The more you suffer in this life, the shorter the time in Purgatory"), I had great trouble with the notion of the pursuit of happiness. It took me a very long time to learn not to despise it, and finally to accept it for myself (though later I came to give priority to “pursue being useful”).
The most significant modern opponent of this idea is not so much the Catholic church, no longer a powerful cultural force. It is radical Islam, with its rejection of modernity and this-worldliness.
Francisco Goya: FlagellantsSELF-FLAGELLATION IN SHIA ISLAM
~ “Religion gone bad: Shia Muslims engage in gory mourning rituals such as self-flagellation and self-mutilation in celebration of Ashura, one of the holiest days in Shia Islam.
For Shias, Ashura commemorates the killing of Imam Hussein, a grandson of the prophet Muhammad, in 680 CE.
Shias constitute Islam’s second-largest denomination (about 10-15 percent of the world Muslim population), and consider Hussein to be the one true heir of Muhammad’s legacy.
A minority of Shias mark the holiday with bloody self-flagellation rituals. One such ritual is called “tatbeer,” participants cut their heads with swords and spears in mourning for the fallen Imam Hussein.
Another Shia self-flagellation ritual involves the use of a zanjeer (a chain with blades). Participants wear black and march through the streets chanting and hitting themselves in the chest with whips and chains to ritually punish their bodies.
Particularly disturbing is the participation of minors in the Ashura rituals of self-mutilation.
Ashura observances are carried out in countries with large Shia populations, including Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Lebanon, India, and Bahrain.
Through the bloody rituals, Shia Muslims mourn Hussein’s death and express regret for the fact that they were not present at the battle to fight and save Hussein and his family
Not all Shias condone the bloodletting ritual, and the practice has been condemned by some Shia leaders. Ashura blood drives are often organized as a substitute for the bloody and self-destructive spectacle.
Ashura is commemorated by Sunni Muslims (who refer to it as The Day of Atonement) as the day on which the Israelites were supposedly freed from the Pharaoh.” ~
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/progressivesecularhumanist/2014/11/shia-muslims-mark-holy-day-with-bloody-self-mutilation-nsfl/
“YOU HAVE TO RESPECT RELIGION” — REALLY?
The politically correct people may say, “Oh, but we must respect religion.” Really? There is no moral obligation to respect nonsense, no matter how many adherents the particular kind of nonsense happens to have. And there is certainly no obligation to respect psychopathology and cruel practices.
Of course I see the dual character of any major religion: the preaching of mercy and compassion and the corresponding bible or Koran verses are there, not just the vicious stuff about smiting the enemies and killing the infidels. The vengeful god and the kind one are supposed to be the same deity. One theory is that religion stems from the infant-mother bond: hence the longing for unconditional love and the fear of the all-powerful, judgmental, punishing parent.
Christianity has made a valiant effort to let go of the nastiness and keep the goodness. But the scaffolding of supernaturalism is wobbly and more and more out of touch with what we are discovering about the nature of reality (e.g. earthquakes are the result of the movement of tectonic plates, rather than divine punishment; never mind that whenever a natural disaster strikes, a televangelist will announce that this is punishment for gay marriage). And without supernaturalism, with the laws of nature seen as inviolable, is it still religion?
Call me naive, but I think the best sayings can be extracted from all religions and repackaged as ethics and philosophy of life.
But individual large religions (I don’t mean the Unitarians, say, or any other liberal Protestant denominations that at this point have only a tenuous connection with Christianity) — the sooner they are gone, the better. Imagine a world without suicide bombers eager for paradise. Imagine people understanding that they are already living in paradise, and that this magnificent garden needs loving care. The “better place” is right here — if we make it better. Plant a tree. Every tree is a tree of life.
Angel Oak in South Carolina; photo: Magda BognarFOUR MOOD-CHANGING MOVES
~ “There really is something to the mind-body-spirit connection and when all three are in alignment you’re going to feel better. This is the point, then, where spirituality and personal development become physical.
When we move with awareness and give attention to how we stand, sit, move during our days, we can change how we feel.
Here are four ways to do it.
Smile: Plenty of research, including one study from 1989 and another published in the journal Psychological Science last year proves that a smile – even a faky, contrived one – can actually induce happiness and reduce stress. So, even if you have to talk yourself into it, give yourself a grin or simply repeat the long “e” sound, as psychologist Robert Zajonc had participants do in that early study, to stretch out a smile, and you’ll feel better.
Give yourself a hug. Kristen Neff, renowned for her research into self-compassion suggests a hug as a way of coping with the stress of making a mistake. When we wrap our arms around, our arms or shoulders, our bodies release oxytocin which is causes us to feel more nurturing and less reactive.
Tilt your chin up. Look at the sky. Just look up. Lifting your chin up and letting your shoulders sit back improves mood and confidence in potentially difficult situations, according to Paula Niedenthal, a psychology professor, who has studied the link between posture and emotion. No surprise then, that people who keep their chins down and shoulders slumped generally don’t feel as positive.
Dance. Seriously. Just do it. Rock out by yourself in the living room, before the kids get home, or gently sway with your husband long after they are in bed. Scores of studies show that various dance forms decrease stress, improve focus and concentration, and yep, you guessed it, boost your mood.
So, next time you’re feeling blue, stressed, anxious, angry, or inadequate, shift your body, go for a walk, concoct a face-stretching smile, or change your posture and your mood may just follow will follow along.” ~
(Alas, I don’t have a link to this article, but I’d be willing to be it’s from Psychology Today.)
Oriana:
To these tips, I'd add a walk somewhere where there are trees. Clouds also do it for me. And, oddly enough, the fake smile (which doesn’t have to be social; a solitary fake smile feels wonderful).
Mary:
Well you kept some very special frogs there for the end, and who could resist those crazy smiles?? It certainly lifted my spirits!
Thinking about internalizing the damage done to us, becoming unforgiving and punishing toward ourselves and seeing ourselves as unworthy of happiness, love, or even kindness, it seems to me these attitudes become a matter of habit, a painful and negative state that is yet familiar, its thoughts and feelings dangerously seductive because they are so familiar. However bad, they feel like something we know and understand, they feel like home.
At times of crisis, especially encountering a situation like the cruel and abusive ones suffered in the past, there can be a sudden and overwhelming collapse into the darkest kind of self hatred and despair . . . you can see it happening and yet be unable to shake free of the old habits learned as a child. You may have the urge to abandon yourself instead of struggling, again, to recover, to accept yourself with the same kindness and forgiveness you allow to others.
I also think there is much to be said for the physical gestures that can do much to lift our moods. Just as the right and left sides of the brain engage in their push-pull dynamic (And I'm sure that's a great simplification) we are always body and mind both — there is no separation. The act of looking up does more than tilt the head, it refocuses the attention and changes the relation between self and world. And dancing, just imagine what that can do!! It's a whole conversation!
I've been having a few bad days myself lately, and observed my own tendency to that sudden collapse---to go from ok to suicidal thoughts in one jump...and have to shake myself hard out of that old habit of despair. To just, as you have said before, refuse it. I think those of us who have been on that dark path in the past have to pay close attention, be vigilant . . . probably forever.
And then I remember beauty, and joy, creativity and discovery, and all the potential for good in humanity. There’s simply too much wonder here I don't want to miss. Including our conversations, my dear Oriana!!
Oriana: “PRACTICE BEING STRONG”
Yes, so much of it is an enormous amount of past learning. For me one statement that delivered a healing insight was: “If you practice being strong, you will become strong. If you practice falling apart, you’ll become become better and better at falling apart.” This was in the book “Eat, Pray, Love,” of all places — “beach reading,” as a friend put it. It was a great piece of sheer luck — and I don’t tend to see myself as a lucky person, unless right after I do my “count your blessings” exercise.
Body and mind can’t be separated, and the “falling apart” — that ease with which we slip into suicidal despair even if the triggering stress is relatively mild if regarded separate from the cumulative life stress — has a huge physiological component. I think the best label for it is “overactive sympathetic system plus automatic negative thoughts.” It’s a mouthful, but for me a that’s the most accurate summary. It took me decades to arrive at this.
The sad part is that there isn’t enough life left for a more complete recovery. I am in a much, much better shape than in the past, but one bad night is enough to initiate a setback. That’s where awareness comes in. Knowing that one kind of stress (e.g. not having gotten enough sleep) makes me more vulnerable to overreacting to any extra stress is a reminder that I can choose to “practice being strong.”
Thus, if I find myself at the edge of a crying fit, I know I can step back and not have it. Yes, I’ve had a lot of practice in how to fall apart in an instant, but . . . somehow over the years I’ve also learned self-control. Maybe that comes from having grown up in an oppressed country where you had to keep silent and do a lot of pretending; or perhaps it’s my acting talent. Once in a while I meet someone without that self-control, and realize how far I’ve come in my journey toward emotional strength.
That others typically see us as strong women also says a lot. In public we don’t throw tantrums or begin to sob out of control and out of all proportion to the situation. And that shows that we are not controlled mainly by our wounds. Whatever neural pathways are involved in emotional self-control can indeed take over. Those pathways become more dominant as we “practice being strong.” The tricky part is not to forget this. But that too comes with practice.
Learning, practice, habit. Many wise people (the Buddha included) have said this in different ways over the ages: what happens is just part of the suffering. What comes later is just as important, or perhaps even more so: how we react to what happened. And we can learn to react differently and suffer less.
I have to confess that I could never master meditation (I’ve tried, but I'm just too restless). Nevertheless, I’ve learned to use deep breathing to calm down. I’ve learned to distract myself, knowing that thinking about a current stressor would be exaggerated negative garbage if there is too much adrenaline in me. Also: “This will pass.”
Different methods work for different people. It’s not that we don’t know many effective ways to quickly lift our mood. The big obstacle is the lack of motivation to be happy. The perversity of it puzzles me — is sadness more attractive just because it’s familiar, i.e. “home”? Or is it something like the minor mode in music, inherently more lyrical, while upbeat music can be irritating? Regardless, even in the absence of wanting to be happy, you and I know that giving in to debilitating sadness would mean missing too many good things in life — and we literally don’t have the time for that. And yes, those good things include our conversations.
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ending on beauty:
A freshness lives deep in me
which no one can take from me
not even I myself —
~ Gunmar Ekelöf
