Blog

I used to think these words chiseled into the Temple of Apollo in ancient Delphi are simplistic. Of course I know myself. I’ve been living with me my whole life. But it’s made me ask myself: do I believe in an image of myself that I’ve unconsciously created in the minds of others out of fear of rejection? And if I let go of this image, who’s left? I was shaped by others. All of us are. My father, who never thought enough of me to make me an intimate part of his life, was one. My Catholic upbringing and its traditions ground the lens of my worldview. A career in the corporate world broke my free-wheeling creativity the way you do a bucking young stallion. Today I’m still clay in the hands of movies, op-ed pieces, social media influencers, advertisers, chance comments by people whose approval I crave. So who am I? That’s the bad news. The good news is that I’m not alone in this quandary. Discovering you’re a stranger to your "real self" has been a persistent theme in literature, philosophy, and spirituality. Monk and mystic Thomas Merton packed his journals with his struggle to free himself of social masks, ego, self-doubt – even as he passed his days enveloped in the silence and solitude of the cloister. Long before Merton, Augustine of Hippo was a pioneer of the introspective autobiography. We can say his entire spiritual journey was a search for his true identity in relation to the transcendent. Etty Hillesum, a young Dutch Jewish writer who was murdered in Auschwitz in 1943, wrote in her diary: "The ultimate and highest aspiration is to strip oneself of everything petty and superficial and to become a completely transparent instrument." Carl Jung made the "real self" his life's work – to integrate the hidden parts of the psyche and discover his true self rather than the persona society invited. Søren Kierkegaard argued that most people live in a state of despair. They either refuse to be themselves, with all their inborn motives, vanities, and wants, or actively try to be someone else. Poet Rainer Maria Rilke advised us to “live the questions” instead of the packaged answers, trusting that the authentic self will emerge. Thoreau's little adventure at Walden Pond cut away cultural clutter to find the essential, aiming to meet his soul face-to-face without the interference of societal convention. Shall I go on? It’s a comfort to know I am not alone in this journey to the self. But it’s also daunting to realize the painful work ahead that awaits me. Now I know how Frodo felt taking his first, Hobbit-sized step toward the vast, dark realm of Mordor.

"Hovering as I snorkel is a metaphor for what makes the rest of life work."

Many years ago, when I worked on the Drama Desk of the New York Daily News , I attended a Broadway play titled “Stop the World, I Want to Get Off.” As a young man beginning his career, I didn’t understand what that title meant. Now I do. It’s a bot call Klara at my eye doctor’s practice that has me ready to jump ship. It “answered” the phone last week when I called to schedule an appointment. My first instinct when it asked how it could help me was to ask to speak to a human. But I knew that would only serve to solidify my developing identity as a crotchety old man. So I dealt with it until I got what I wanted, then hung up on him in mid-sentence. One isn’t compelled to be polite to a robot. Psychologists tell us our small daily interactions with, say, clerks, salespeople, and Uber drivers are healthy for our mental well-being. Now we are being stripped of even this inconsequential but healthful nicety. We are being unclothed every day from our dignity as a caring people. A war we didn’t ask for. Wholesale disruption of people’s lives from mass firings by political hacks. The elimination of a Medicare/Medicaid subsidy that next year will result in steeper out-of-pocket cost increases for seniors like me. This announced last week by a government appointee who has some eighteen real estate assets, with ten residential structures on them. “The Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head,” an itinerant preacher named Jesus once said. I don’t know what to do about it. Even my vote in November isn’t going to stop the creeping dissolution of our social fabric. Thomas Keating, the Trappist monastic abbot who developed the practice of Centering Prayer , advises us to stop resisting life’s foibles. If you’re sick and one physician after another can’t figure out what’s wrong with you, just accept the fact that you’re sick, he says. His suggestion strikes me as defeatist. Even un-American. But I’m not smart enough to devise a course of action better than simply putting it all in God’s hands. It’s either that or accept that we’re now living in Bizzarro World . "Warning" by British author Jenny Joseph is a poem famous for its tongue-in-cheek take on growing older: When I am an old woman I shall wear purple With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me, And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves And satin chairs, and say we've no money for butter. I shall sit down on the pavement when I'm tired And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells And run my stick along the public railings And make up for the sobriety of my youth . . . . It’s not exactly a prayer, and my youth was less than sober. But it just might serve as a sop to bring me down to earth after my next mind-numbing phone call with “Klara.” In the meantime, I’m going to Uber to the train station later so I can chat with the driver before he’s rendered obsolete by a driverless Tesla – owned by a trillionaire who delights in taking a chain saw to other people’s livelihoods. (Image thanks to The Front Porch by James Milson.)

In case this statistic slipped by you in our federal government’s firehose of facts and falsities, the feds value a human life at $ 10 million to $15 million. This is based on the Value of a Statistical Life ( VSL), which measures how much society is willing to pay to reduce the risk of a fatality. For example, if 100,000 people are each willing to pay $100 to eliminate a 1-in-100,000 chance of death, the collective VSL is $10 million. Federal agencies use VSL to perform cost-benefit analyses on safety, environmental, and transportation regulations. I looked up this information yesterday because tomorrow would have been my father’s birthday and, well, I was just curious about the many ways to ponder the value of his life and its impact on my own. My father’s ambition when he was graduated from Perth Amboy High School was to be an attorney, but he came of age in the wake of the Great Depression and he had to enter the workplace instead, as a laborer. By the time I came along, he had established his credentials. He could: · Drive a truck for the U.S. Army engineering corps · Hang wallpaper · Paint a house · Repair cars · Build furniture · Sew slipcovers for sofas and chairs, and curtains for windows · Build a doghouse · Put up a fence · Work as an ironworker in constructing whole buildings · Pass Civil Service exams to become a cop and then a sergeant · Tend bar · Dispatch anything from squad cars to taxicabs They used to call guys like him a “Jack of All Trades.” Today we call it lifelong learning. The National Center for Health Statistics tells us that men who reach 65 have an average 19.5 to 19.8 more years ahead of them (20.8 to 21 years for women). What are we going to do with all this newfound time? If you’re a lifelong learner – plenty, because you understand that learning is not a place, but a process whose endpoint is never-ending. Learning as we used to understand it occurred in institutions designed to deliver education. The informal learning that is lifelong is most often pursued outside those walls. A lot has been written about the benefits of lifelong learning: personal development, employment and earnings, economics, sense of wellbeing – even as a defense against dementia. Governments are promoting lifelong learning as a way to nurture competitiveness, innovation, and growth. Some governments see lifelong learning as contributing to social cohesion. But what about the value of a life? Does lifelong learning heighten the value of our lives? My father was deft at adding value to his life by using his hands to shape the physical environment around him. Lacking his manual aptitude, I’ve brought value to my life through my writing. I’ve tried to add to its value through continued learning. In my sixties, for example, I learned to swim, to snorkel, to sail, to operate two well-regarded bed-and-breakfasts. I’ve taught myself to cook well enough to serve paying guests. I published five books and some three dozen poems. I guide cancer patients in writing poems to ease the stress of their disease. I conduct day-long and weekend retreats and a bi-weekly Zoom workshop in writing healing poetry. Next month I join hospice to bring comforting poems to patients and their families. Mary Ann Evans, the acclaimed English novelist of the Victorian era who wrote under the pen name George Eliot, said it well: "It's never too late to be what you might have been."

An intense experience of the exceptional

A poem enables you to see your fear as something outside yourself

As I’ve mentioned in previous blog posts, I dreamed when I was a boy of someday traveling in space to other planets. It was the dawning of the space age, and my dream seemed quite within reach. During the past few weeks, my yearnings to have “slipped the surly bonds of Earth” were rekindled when I attended with my daughter the New York Philharmonic’s Star Wars concert, and then reading about the Euclid telescope’s astounding images of the Milky Way, marking a new age of discovery of thousands of planets outside our solar system. Goosebumps just writing that last sentence! But with my maturity comes this enlightenment: Life’s greatest wisdom is to know when the party’s over. Even if I had the financial wherewithal of a Musk or a Bezos, I am not going into space in my lifetime. Near the end of John's gospel, right after Peter has been forgiven for betraying Christ “three times before the cock crows,” Jesus tells him what old age looks like: “When you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will dress you and carry you where you do not wish to go.“ In Scripture, as in most spiritual writings, our purpose as humans is defined not so much about what we do – our output – as it is about our simple being – who we are. Paul writes to the Corinthians that prophecy will cease, tongues will be silenced, knowledge will pass away – and love alone will remain. He's describing what's left when everything a person can “do” has been stripped away. For a hospice patient, that's not an abstraction. It's their situation – described exactly. If our “life’s purpose” can be narrowed to being loved and loving in return – no longer producing, deciding, achieving – then the last years of a life are not a diminution of its meaning. They just might be its clearest mission statement. In my retirement from revenue-generating work, I find myself trying to unlearn my long-held conviction that a person's worth is bound up in “doing.” My present life isn’t being interrupted. It’s quietly being prepared for that stillness “not chosen” that Christ described. For the time of not-knowing. When “purpose” might be nothing more important than a held hand. Still, I can continue to dream of someday touching a star, can’t I? (Image: The Euclid telescope‘s look at the Galactic Bulge in the central area of the Milky Way. The Bulge is a vast, tightly packed structure filled mostly with old, cooler stars.)

With the arrival of the new hurricane season, here's an encore post from 2013

A couple of notions about death: 1) It’s natural and nothing much to be concerned about. 2) It’s a curse. Emily Dickinson, for example, pictured the Grim Reaper as a sort of Uber driver: Because I could not stop for Death— He kindly stopped for me— The Carriage held but just Ourselves— And Immortality. And Henry Scott Holland dismissed it entirely: Death is nothing at all. I have only slipped away to the next room. I am I and you are you. Whatever we were to each other, That, we still are. Dylan Thomas, on the other hand, couldn’t contain himself at the prospect of his father’s imminent passing: Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light. But one thing’s sure. We miss a loved one terribly after they die. That’s why there is no return to “normal” after a loved one departs. We are changed forever. The lessons we learn in grieving and mourning a death apply to all loss: · The loss of financial security or daily companionship following a death · Divorce or estrangement in relationships · Job loss · A bad health diagnosis · Moving away from a beloved home · The “empty nest” syndrome that affects parents · Expectations for loved ones, say, a drug-addicted child At a grief conference I attended last week, I learned a lot that I didn’t know about death and the subsequent bereavement, and I’d like to pass on to you a few of them. Conference leader Alan D. Wolfelt , a clinical psychologist, noted how society considers grief as an illness to be treated and cured. The faster the better. No, he argued. Grief is a normal and necessary process with needs that must be met as they arise and re-arise over time if a loss is to be integrated into our life: · Acknowledge the reality of the loss · Embrace the pain · Remember by name the person who died · Develop a new self-identity as a solo · Search for new meaning in your life · Accept the help of others He also pointed to the difference between grief and mourning: Grief is internal and must be expressed as mourning – grief gone public, as he put it. What is the path to healthy mourning? Dr.Wolfelt says mourners have a Bill of Rights that includes things like: · Experiencing your own unique grief, with its multitude of emotions, without being pressured to “get over it” · Talking about your grief, referring to the deceased by name, and making use of rituals · Acknowledging your physical and emotional limits · Treasuring good memories and accepting unwanted sad ones · Embracing your spirituality · Searching for meaning in your life as you move forward and become reconciled to the loss I have been invited to bring my healing poetry program to hospice, starting next month. It’s a welcome opportunity, but an intimidating one. There is so much to say about death, and yet – nothing. The wisest men and women through history have said all there may be to say. But I do know how to point to the most sensitive among us – poets, hoping these, who are most attuned to living, may help others find end-of-life peace. I think of the musician known as a symphony orchestra’s principal first violin, who carries the title of concertmaster. They rise just before the conductor takes the podium and conjure up a note, to which all the other members of the symphony tune their instruments. Perhaps their more important role: if the conductor's gesture is unclear, the other members of the orchestra look to how the concertmaster is playing in order for them to stay perfectly together. In times of death or bereavement, who is the concertmaster we look to, with whom our lives can resonate? Poets, perhaps? Because it’s vital that we move from grieving to mourning – the outward expression of grief – in order to reconcile and integrate our loss and live a life of new meaning. This is where healing poetry comes in. Writing a poem is a safe place to socialize our grief – to make it public. How? A poem is a witness — a refusal to let a loss be unseen, unspoken, or forgotten. Like this one by Marie Howe, an elegy for her brother John, who died of AIDS-related illness: What the Living Do Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there. And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we spoke of. It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through the open living-room windows because the heat’s on too high in here and I can’t turn it off. For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking, I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve, I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it. Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning. What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it. But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass, say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless: I am living. I remember you. (Image: Conductor Gustavo Dudamel and associate concertmaster Bing Wang of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.)