Mentalizing, Mindfulness, and the Drive for Evidence

 In reading about attachment theory, David Wallin's description of Peter Fonagy's work was intriguing, so I went down that rabbit hole. 

Fonagy developed Mentalization-Based Treatment (MBT) to improve emotional regulation, as distinct from Jon Kabat-Zinn's Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). Fonagy sees our mental development as relational, but in order to have empathy for others, we need awareness of our own feelings, which can be helped with mindfulness work. However, in looking at the evidence of efficacy of these separate modalities, I question the attempt, since Freud, to make psychology into a natural science. Each of the various ways to help are useful, but there's an element of the unknowable in the way when we treat them scientifically.

According to Wallin, Fonagy's focus was on developing the understanding of the mental states of others, which he calls mentalizing, to let us understand the depths of ourselves and others. For instance, it can help heal old wounds if we understand that dad's rejection of us might be due to his depression and not our behaviour as a child. Other people's reactions to us aren't just caused by us, but there are always multiple factors at play affecting how people behave. It seems very similar to Theory of Mind. He met Bowby in the 1980s, and studied adults' behaviour relative to their own descriptions of childhood attachment, and found, when comparing severely deprived to well-connected adults, that a weak attachment was correlated with a weak "reflective functioning" (the ability to understand behaviours in terms of their thoughts, feelings, and mental states). From this, he says psychotherapy should be the "effort to restore or kindle patients' capacity to mentalize," to simultaneously feel our feelings and reflect on their meaning. To help people develop mentalizing requires a relationship that mirrors and guides emotional responses.

Developing the Capacity for Rational Choices

"As the world falls around us, how must we brave its cruelties?" -- Furiosa 

Imprisoned climate activist, Roger Hallam, recently wrote about the necessity of expanding emotional well-being as we face bleak events happening around the world. While climate scientists try to "help people through the horrific information that they are being given," they also need a way to manage their emotional reactions. We can no longer afford to merely distract ourselves from the inner turmoil. Beyond climate, we could very well be entering into a period of much greater conflict at a time of even more viruses, some destructive to our food system. When the watering hole gets smaller, the animals look at one another differently.

To move forward with compassion, at a time when divide and conquer strategies have created polarization and infighting, seems to require an effort from each one of us.

Hallam writes,

"We might want to think about why saint-like people are enormously influential, even powerful. . . . They see the world as dependent upon the mind. . . . They are not enslaved by the world; their minds are intent, driven even, to change it. They do not see this as an end in itself."

Menakem's Somatic Therapy Approach to Anti-Racism Work

Resmaa Menakem's My Grandmother's Hands came highly recommended. The title refers to the effect that being enslaved had on his grandmother, and Menakem traces the violence of racism through the specific perspectives of people on either end of racial conflicts. Beyond just explaining how racism affects all of us in variable ways, he provides specific exercises for overcoming our past. The book contains some excellent and unique ideas about healing from trauma and responding to pain within the context of ongoing racial oppression, but it takes some liberties with explanations of neuroscience and might be better approached as philosophy.

Psychotherapy in General

I've previously written about healing advice from Gabor Maté focusing on trauma as the cause of all our ills, Viktor Frankl finding a purpose for himself in order to cope in a concentration camp and advocating for the courage to have an authentic experience of the self and world, Mark Solms reworking Freud to better understand the process of tracing emotional experiences to the past, and the use of Buddhism to stop seeking something outside ourselves in order to find slivers of peace between our thoughts. All of them, more or less, aim to get to something akin to this point:

"Once we can find the spaces between the cacophony of thought, in that tiny gap between trigger and reaction, we can reclaim our agency to decide how to act. When we focus on the nothingness instead of following our personal thoughts and feelings, then we’re no longer dragged along by the drama in our lives."

Menakem's book is no different in that respect. This quest has been repeated for thousands of years in various ways and shows up over and over because there's something to it. It works.

In current psychodynamic terms, we've developed maladaptive behaviour patterns that were established to meet some need at a time when we were too young or too overwhelmed to act otherwise. Now we need to become aware of behaviours that don't work for us, go back to find our error, and reintegrate it all. Menakem goes further than just our personal experiences to look at generational experiences, explaining that,

Seligman's Hope Circuit

Martin Seligman is famous for a learned helplessness study I wrote about a few years back:

In a famous experiment, dogs were put in a compartment and trained to jump a barrier when given an electric shock. After one or two tries, the dogs jumped the barrier immediately after being put in the compartment even when no shock was given. BUT some dogs were restrained the first time and not able to jump the barrier. They had to tolerate the shock without being able to escape. When they were unharnessed, they still didn't jump the barrier, but just stayed there, tolerating the pain.

On Anxiety

I just finished John Green's Turtles All the Way Down, which I read because he claimed it was his way of trying to put words around what it's like to live with profound anxiety, and then I saw this article asking "Why are more American teens than ever suffering from severe anxiety?". I was raised with most my sibs affected by some kind of mental illness or disorder, and now my children are in the same boat. Somehow, I've made it this far relatively unscathed by the ravages of anxiety, so I'm ever eager to really get my head around what it feels like from the inside.

Green's book is just what I was hoping for. There's nothing to read below the surface here, which might deny it any book awards, but it does an excellent job of giving us a clear and straightforward  first-hand glimpse of the inner thoughts that drive anxious behaviours. Like David Sedaris's Naked, a collection of hilarious personal essays about OCD, it can help the reader really get why anyone would do or think those things and then begin to empathize with that curious drive that all but obliterates their free will.

On the Absurdist Victory: All is Well

A while back I wrote about a video comparing Stoicism and Existentialism. The video also touched on different psychology principles developed from each philosophy. Stoicism is easily seen in CBT and REBT, which all start with the premise that when we're upset it's because of our perception of things, not the things in themselves, and we often have an irrational view. Through reality testing and viewing the situation in a detached way we can be less emotionally affected by anxiety around events. It's been very effective in reducing anxiety levels in a good 70-80% of patients.

Existential psychoanalysis took a different path:

"The basic thrust of existential psychoanalysis, if it aspires to be at all existential, must in turn be rooted in the sensibilities of existential philosophy. That sensibility may be characterized by two principal themes: a) all human knowledge is rooted in personal experience; b) the weight of experience is so exasperating that we seek to escape it through self-deception....Every one of us employs deceptions for the same reason. Whenever we're thwarted in our endeavors we feel disappointment and frustration. We may fear that we won't get our way by being honest and resort to guile and manipulation - the principal source of neurotic guilt....On a deeper level it entails the patient's willingness to plumb the depths of experience while accepting responsibility for whatever comes to light, for better or worse."

Instead of our view of externals provoking upset, tumults are from the struggle for people to accept the truth about themselves and recognize their various attempts to escape it. Instead of looking at individual daily triggers, existentialists look at that big one: We search for meaning and purpose in life, but the reality has to be faced - that there simply isn't any. We've been thrown here randomly, and it's up to each of us to make the best of things. The "curative power lay in the patient's capacity for honesty." Upsetting experiences are useful for taking us outside ourselves and possibly provoking a transformation of consciousness that leads to maturation. No pain, no gain. Suppression of experiences is the problem: not an inaccurate assessment, but a refusal to actually see what's there. We need to give voice to our darkest truths, no matter how ugly. From an early age, we devise pleasant fantasies to override potential traumas as slight as disappointment, and then we become anxious that there's something deep within that we don't really want to know. Self-deception and deception by others (as they might help us remain in denial) are part of every issue. We're all inherently devious and deceive one another as a matter of course. The solution is acknowledging our radical freedom, digging past the deceptions to find our authentic selves, and recognizing the absurdity of it all.

On Comparing Existentialism and Stoicism

This summer, I went on one camping trip with a book on Stoicism, then another camping trip with a book on Existentialism, and I was intrigued by the many similarities. Then I came across this video that has some overlap with what I had noticed. As they say in the video, Massimo Pigliucci (MP) on Stoicism and Skye Cleary (SC) on Existentialism, both are philosophies that offer a way to live instead of just a way to think about the world. I'm putting it all together here with quotes (names linked to sources) to sort it out for myself. I'm just thinking out loud here. This is too long for any normal person to want to read.

These are both philosophies that allow surveyors to pick and choose from variations on a theme as neither has one authoritative dude overriding all others, and, it would appear, few of the big guns cared to adopt either label anyway. For the Stoics, defining yourself as one is avoided because it's pretentious. In The Role Ethics of Epictetus, it's clarified that we are simultaneously different things, and how we play each role is more important than what our roles are. The roles are often not our choice, but how we do them are, i.e. whether or not we're a virtuous son, mother, teacher, or waiter (MP). For Existentialists, we can't be defined by the roles we take on because we're more than the mere facts about ourselves (SC), so labels become meaningless.

On Regret

I've taken many questionable risks in my life. I lean toward leading a life that's lived fully over a safe and secure existence. Most I bounced back from easily from typical childhood falling from trees when I've climbed too high to dropping out of high school and somehow ending up with a Masters. Sometimes it's gone extraordinarily well for me. When an elderly woman next door to me died, I went deep into debt to buy and flip her crumbling house only to find it packed with cash. People thought I was crazy for my efforts to save my school from the chopping block until it all worked, and I'm still there. People were adamant that I can't possibly hold my head high as a teacher and unwed mother back a few decades when premarital sex was shameful, but I ignored them all with the most delightful results. And when my third pregnancy was fraught with complications, and doctors strongly advised me to terminate because of a high risk of Edwards syndrome, I, still single, took a chance and have another healthy daughter to show for it. I've been very very lucky over the years.

But then there are the times that didn't go as well. That time I was convinced I was overinsured and cancelled the insurance on a property, then it promptly went up in flames. That time I got scared of my debt load and hastily sold the slightly charred land - 24 acres with 2000' of waterfront, then soon realized there's nothing else like it out there in my price range. And that time I was convinced by a couple doctors, in opposition to others doctors, equally educated, to get an auxiliary lymph node dissection (ALND), and only afterwards found out about, and succumbed to, the risks of lymphedema.

Like most people, I imagine, I have an easy time ignoring my luck and a really hard time coping when my decisions don't pan out as well. Regret is a bugger.

So I wrote to Stoic advice columnist, Massimo Pigliucci, explaining my surgery situation in very general terms so it could be applied to and/or understood by more people, and I made it sound worse than it is to get a response to the worst case scenario. In general I asked "How were the Stoics so able to get on top of these types of thoughts so well?"

On the Year that Kicked My Ass, and That Time My Ass Kicked Back

Well, it's starting to kick back, ever so slowly.

I went on another Wild Women adventure, this time to Georgian Bay to try my hand at kayaking for a change. I was with a whole new group of women, our ages spanning three decades and from a wide variety of professions and backgrounds (and photographic skills - all the pics here are from them). It's always a treat to be on the water surrounded by the giant slabs of rock and tall trees rooted in the tiniest crevices with people concerned for the health and well being of the water, air, and land. We wash on the ground well away from the lake, compost as we go, forgo campfires, and practice no-trace camping. Meetup groups aren't always as environmentally minded. The guides on the trips are exceptional, well practiced in both tripping and diplomacy, and the food is better than anything I typically eat at home.

Wearing the exact same clothes as last time!

On the last trip, I went in order to challenge myself to solo a canoe through the portages so I could travel alone. I've been on my own for almost a decade, and I'll need at least to be able to take the lead if I hope to ever get any of my not-so-canoe-y friends on board. In order to do the things I most enjoy, all by myself became a bit of a mantra.

And then this year of surgeries happened.

Total independence is no longer my goal - can no longer be my goal. I have to work towards working with others in order to get anywhere. This trip came just when I needed it as I teetered precariously on the brink of succumbing to self-pity. My dad, who also left me this year, always saw my quest for independence as a barrier and encouraged me to "let other people shine" by asking for help and sharing the load. I tried to asked for help, and for things forgotten, and for time for a break without feeling sheepish or ashamed of my blunders and inabilities. Interdependence is a hard one for me. And, through it all, I was still pushing myself, able to feel just enough muscle strain at the end of the day.

"Purely physical fatigue, provided it is not excessive, tends if anything to be a cause of happiness; it leads to sound sleep and a good appetite, and gives zest to the pleasures that are possible on holidays." ~ Bertrand Russell

Taking Comfort in Stoicism

When thing take a turn for the worst, no philosophy helps me like re-reading the writings of Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius.

I had a dream last night that I was at a bike show (about bicycles, not motorcycles), talking to a distance rider, when, after a long conversation, I noticed that his one arm ended just this side of the elbow. He had a prosthetic, but nothing fancy, just something to help him grip the handlebars. And I felt so sheepish for whining about my trivial issues.

What, then, is to be done? To make the best of what is in our power, and take the rest as it naturally happens. (Epictetus Discourses B I, Ch I)

We have to figure out what's in our power to control, then stop griping or trying to fix what's not in our power to change. It is what it is. So, right now, I can't change the fact that I had this surgery and that things went wrong. That's in the past where I exercise no control. But then we have to learn to affect what we can control with courage. I can control my behaviours: how well I do my painful stretches and care for my wonky arm, and I can certainly control my attitude, but most importantly, I can control my perception of things (which will, in turn, affect my attitude and behaviours).

Before I get to controlling perceptions, be aware the tricky part isn't actually changing how we see things, but that earlier bit: knowing what's in our power to control. Does it makes sense to rally against powerful interests in order to shift energy consumption in order to save the planet? Is saving our habitat actually within our control? Likewise, in this situation, does contacting my MPP about the problems with the current health care system, which I've done, actually do a hill of beans to change anything? It's harder than it looks to have the wisdom to know the when to accept our lot and when to have the courage to fight for change. We have to take a chance and fight for what's right, yet not hang on to the outcome, not have any expectations that our actions will see results in our lifetime.

A recent interview with contemporary Stoic author, Massimo Pigliucci, sums it up well:

We should very much try to change things for the better, that’s the whole point of the Stoic discipline of action, and that discipline is connected to the virtue of justice. But we should also be rational about it, and understand that sometimes things go our way, and at other times they don’t. We have varying degrees of influence over external events, but the only things truly under our control are our judgments and actions, for which we are morally responsible.

My disposition leans towards fighting anyway, so I'm more likely to need to be reminded to accept those things so obviously outside my limits. It is what it is.... It is what it is....

To change our perception of things, we just need to be grateful for what we have and remind ourselves of those worse off than us. Regularly imagine the worst thing possible happening, and consider how you could cope with it, and then we'll be ready for anything.

No prospect of hardship comes to me new or unexpected I anticipated it all and have rehearsed it in the privacy of my mind....And so a wise person gets used to future misfortunes, and what other people make bearable by long suffering he makes bearable by prolonged thinking. (Seneca Letters from a Stoic 76)

I'm very good at preparing for the worst when it comes to big things. I had a new will drawn up last September and showed my kids where to find all the important documents, just in case. But it's the minor annoyances of life that we sometimes overlook and allow to build up until we're in a tizzy.

When stretching is painful, and I note an ounce of self-pity because I haven't prepared myself for the unexpected pain, then a quick mental image of Franco playing Ralston in 127 Hours can do the trick to help me get over myself and recognize how minuscule my troubles really are - and how much much worse they could be.

We're also advised to remind ourselves that if this were happening to an acquaintance, we wouldn't be so affected by it, so it's silly to be affected by it when it happens to us.

For example, when our neighbor's boy breaks a cup, or the like, we are presently ready to say, "These things will happen." Be assured, then, that when your own cup likewise is broken, you ought to be affected just as when another's cup was broken. Apply this in like manner to greater things. Is the child or wife of another dead? There is no one who would not say, "This is a human accident." but if anyone's own child happens to die, it is presently, "Alas I how wretched am I!" But it should be remembered how we are affected in hearing the same thing concerning others. (Epictetus The Enchiridion 26)

I know if it happened to another, I'd think, "It's unfortunate and frustrating, but it's not the end of the world, for heaven's sake!" This too shall pass. Just thinking like this, a little each day, affects our attitude towards things, makes us less upset at minor annoyances. And that in turn affects our behaviours, making us far more patient and understanding with one another.

If we can affect our perception of things, then we're well on our way to want what we have and not want what we don't, and actually be content for a moment - that is, when we can remember all this!

He who fails to obtain the object of his desire is disappointed, and he who incurs the object of his aversion wretched. If, then, you confine your aversion to those objects only which are contrary to the natural use of your faculties, which you have in your own control, you will never incur anything to which you are averse. But if you are averse to sickness, or death, or poverty, you will be wretched. Remove aversion, then, from all things that are not in our control, and transfer it to things contrary to the nature of what is in our control. (Epictetus The Enchiridion 2)

The sooner we can accept that some pain and suffering is part of life, and that death is coming for all of us, the sooner we can get on with things and enjoy each day.

And then we can use these seemingly unfortunate events to a greater purpose by using them for self-improvement, like bombarding parliament with letters of concern about the state of our ER departments, or, more to the point, by acclimatizing ourselves to greater troubles. Look how much I can tolerate!

With every accident, ask yourself what abilities you have for making a proper use of it. ....If you are in pain, you will find fortitude. If you hear unpleasant language, you will find patience. And thus habituated, the appearances of things will not hurry you away along with them.  (Epictetus The Enchiridion 10)

Aurelius predated Nietzsche's, "What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger" somewhat with this bit:

Everything which happens either happens in such wise as thou art formed by nature to bear it, or as thou art not formed by nature to bear it. If, then, it happens to thee in such way as thou art formed by nature to bear it, do not complain, but bear it as thou art formed by nature to bear it. But if it happens in such wise as thou art not formed by nature to bear it, do not complain, for it will perish after it has consumed thee. (Meditations 10)

This won't consume me. I was formed by nature to bear it!

So, that one day when my daughter changed my dressings and the blood shot out from my side a little like this:

I was a little traumatized that we had to catch it all in the sink - not just woozy, but made quite afraid to take the bandages off again. But I'm still healthy and active, living and breathing and using my arm a little more every day. And, like my dream reminded me, some people don't even have two hands to work with. I'm very much one of the lucky ones!

Then again, I lieu of reading the Stoics, it helps just to keep this song in mind: 

On the Philosophy of Mr. Money Moustache

A friend pointed me towards this podcast in which Tim Ferriss interviews Mr. Money Moustache (MMM), a man who retired from work in his 30s to live on the interest from his investments and then got a significant following as a blogger.

The podcast describes the kind of life I've tried to live (except for that early retirement bit), and MMM talks about ideas I've been writing about for ages. I'm successful in actually following some parts of this lifestyle and horribly disappointing in others. Like me, he loves to build things, and I'm going to have his explanation for why he doesn't love travelling at the ready next time I'm asked why I don't travel: he gets his joy from creating, which isn't travel-friendly. Absolutely!

He hates cars as much as I do, and cautions, "You should never get a job that requires you to drive to it." Once I started a permanent job, I moved closer to it to cut my daily travel time down to a ten minute walk. People don't do things like that anymore. He thinks walking is the best medicine in the world. Tim adds, "We've evolved to be able to walk very long distances. Humans are better humans, less neurotic, when they walk a lot."

MMM's billboard of choice.

On Justified Worry

I’m going to be writing more personally for a bit. I have a lot to get off my chest.

Literally.

I’m getting a double mastectomy today and an oophorectomy for good measure (which sounds to me like something Willy Wonka might do), because I have all the fancy genes that make a human body a ticking time bomb. They're mutated genes, but I'm still waiting to discover my superpowers. My sister had cancer by 40, and my mom died of it at 69. The many specialists I’ve seen over the past six months have offered differing opinions on reconstructive surgery, but they all agree on one thing: my girly bits have got to go. Like, yesterday. The geneticist explained it to me like this: "Most women have a 1 in 10 chance of getting breast cancer. You have a 9 in 10 chance." So here I go.

I’ve been actively distancing myself from my breasts for weeks - ignoring them when I look in the mirror the way you can scan a packed room for a friend and not once meet the eyes of the enemies sitting front and center. They’re dead to me. They’ve served their purpose - to solicit for mates and feed my young - and now they’re going to kill me if I don’t get rid of them.

I have to get up in about an hour - yikes, half an hour! - to drink two cups of apple juice, then have a shower with minimal soap, and then I'm off to the hospital with my requisite surgical camisole and legal will. I imagine the trip playing out like the end of In Cold Blood, in that beautifully written scene when the two murderers walk to their execution and the one falters and collapses a bit from the terror of it all. I’m like that any time I walk onto a plane. And I’m going to feel like that walking down the long, rain-drenched street to the hospital, pre-dawn, with my children on either side of me holding me up and half dragging me there.

Oh for crying out loud. It’s just day surgery!

I’m nauseous with worry though. I’m a worrier at the best of times, so when something is actually worry-worthy, I do it justice. My shoulders and neck are painfully tight, and I’ve got a bit of a headache from the tension, but I can’t take anything for it. I’ve read the instruction booklet they gave me over and over, making sure I don’t miss any tiny detail that could cost me my life.

The thing of it is, is that I’m perfectly healthy right now, and I’m undergoing surgery to prevent getting cancer. So, if I die on the table, that would just be the worst! To die preventing myself from dying?? It’s like when a tiny woman driving a car has a minor fender bender that would have had little impact, but then the airbag deploys and breaks her neck. It’s the worst sort of irony when safety precautions end up being deadly.

So I better not die.

It’s funny how one worry will take over another one. It’s handy, really. I've been so terrified of the surgery that I've barely mentioned it to anyone. It makes me weak in the knees to say it out loud. But now that I have a bit of a cold, I’m terrified that it will be postponed, and all my exquisite and thorough lesson planning for the 33 classes I'm going to miss will be for nought. I've been hyperaware of anything remotely resembling congestion. I can't do that all again. This is the one major downfall of teaching: making explicit, in writing, every idea and explanation in your head for each class and every possible contingency plan just in case, and then worrying that something could still go wrong and you'll come back to a disaster that's your responsibility to fix. But at least thinking about nasal mucus is keeping me from thinking about the surgery! Planning a trip for Christmas is another way I’ve managed the anxiety. It helps focus my attention towards a much bigger fear of air travel, with a whole lot more to do to make it happen than just showing up for some blood work and trying to stay healthy. It just goes to show you, it's always something. There's no end to what we could be worrying about. And climate change will take us all out in the end anyway!

I try to get all Epicurean about it. It's not happening to me right this minute, and it's ridiculous to lament something that's not actually happening to us right now, amiright? It really does soothe away the mini-panic attacks that wash over me from time to time whenever the reality of it hits like a brick, when I start to vibrate with fear. Epicurus brings me back into the present. And then Epictetus guides the rest of the journey. He's my go-to guy when life sucks, except his bit on death being an end to suffering doesn't quite work here - I'm not currently suffering at all! But this surgery isn't necessarily a bad thing, he'd say. It's a great learning experience that will provide me with a fantastic story to tell later! I'm one of the rare few who gets to go through this incredible adventure. I won the golden ticket!!

And, of course, this too shall pass, amiright?!



Want to read even more about it? Check these out.

Day 2 - And on Recovery in All its Glory
Day 3 - One of the Lucky Few?
Day 4 - Just a Flesh Wound
Day 5 - Now I'm Trendy, Dammit!
Day 8 - Preventing Ovarian Cancer Program Logistics
Day 9 - On Character
Day 15 - On Missing the Girls
Day 17 - A Genius Kvetching Ring
Day 19 - Back to Work Boobless
Day 42 - And the Saga Continues
Day 60 - On Cancer Doulas

Cheers!

On Desires and Commodities

I've just been reading books and watching films lately. I'll write again soon. But check out this passage from The Obsolescence of Man by Gunther Anders, first published in 1956:

***

The mere fact that I had no car and therefore could be caught in flagrante not buying anything and, ultimately, of having no needs, was the cause in 1941 of the following embarrassing incident in California:

Diary

Yesterday, in the Los Angeles area, while I was walking along a highway, a police car pulled over in front of me with its siren wailing and blocked my path.

The policeman shouted at me: “Say, what’s the matter with your car?”

“My car?”, I asked him, not understanding what he was talking about.

“Sold her?”

I shook my head.

“At the shop for repairs?”

Once again I shook my head.

The policeman paused in thought, since it seemed to him to be impossible that there should be a third reason for not having a car. “Then why aren’t you driving it?”

“My car? But I don’t have a car.”

This simple piece of information also went right over his head.

To help him understand, I explained that I had never owned a car.

Now I really stuck my foot in it. A clear case of self-incrimination. The policeman stared at me with his mouth hanging open. “You never had a car?”

“Look, no”, I said, pondering his powers of comprehension. “That’s the boy.” And then I waved to him in a friendly and innocent way and attempted to resume my walk.

But he would have none of that. To the contrary. “Don’t force me, sonny,” he thought and pulled out his citation booklet, “don’t tell me any stories, please”. The pleasure of interrupting the dull boredom of his job with the capture of a vagrant almost gave him a friendly, innocent air. “And why haven’t you ever owned a car?”

I thought for a second about what I should not say in response. So instead of saying: “Because it never occurred to me to get a car”, I responded—and for added emphasis, I shrugged my shoulders and assumed a distracted look—“Because I never needed a car.”

This answer seemed to put him in a good mood. “Is that so?”, he then exclaimed, almost with enthusiasm. I sensed that I had committed a second, even worse mistake. “And why don’t you need a car, sonnyboy?”

Sonnyboy shrugged his shoulders, afraid. “Because I had more need of other things.”

“Such as?”

“Books.”

“Aha!”, the policeman said thoughtfully, and he repeated the word, “books”. Evidently he was now certain of his diagnosis. And then: “Don’t act the moron!”, which is how he made it clear to me that he had discovered that sonnyboy was a “highbrow who was faking imbecility” and that, in attempt to simulate an inability to understand that offers were orders, pretended to be an idiot. “We know your kind”, he thought, giving me a friendly poke in the chest. And then, with a sweeping gesture that indicated the distant horizons: “And where do you want to go?”

This was the question that I most feared, since I still had sixty-four kilometers of highway until San L; and once there, I had nowhere to go. If I had tried to define for him the absence of a goal for someone who is on the road, I would definitely have seemed like a vagrant. God knows where I would be sitting now if, at that very moment, L. had not arrived, truly like a deus in machina, if he had not pulled up alongside us with his imposing six-seat sedan, if he had not stopped suddenly and gestured to me, inviting me to get into his car, something that not only left the policeman flabbergasted, but also seriously challenged his philosophy.

“Don’t do it again!”, he snapped, as I got into our car.

What is it that I am not supposed to do again?

Evidently, I must not refrain from buying what is offered in the form of a command to everyone.

When in these offers you recognize the commandments of our time, one is no longer surprised that even those who cannot afford to do so also end up buying the commodities that are offered. And they do so because they are even less capable of affording not following orders; that is, not buying the commodities. And since when has the appeal to duty [Pflicht] respected those without resources? And since when has duty [Sollen] ever exempted the have-nots from its commands? Just as, according to Kant, one must comply with one’s duty even when, or especially when, it is contrary to one’s inclination, so today one has to comply even when it is contrary to one’s own “responsibility”. Especially today. In the same way, the mandates of the offers are categorical. And when they announce their must-have, to appeal to one’s own precarious situation of duty-and-responsibility would be pure sentimentalism.

Of course, this analogy is a philosophical exaggeration, but it nonetheless contains a kernel of truth, since it is no metaphor to truly claim that today there is hardly anything in the spiritual life of contemporary man that plays as fundamental a role as the difference between what one cannot afford and what cannot be afforded; and this difference furthermore becomes real in the form of a “battle”. If for the man of our time there is a characteristic conflict of duties, it is none other than the no-holds-barred, ferocious and exhausting battle that takes place in the hearts of customers and within the bosom of the family. True, “no-holds-barred, ferocious” and “exhausting”, because the fact that the object of the struggle can make us stupid and the battle itself could take place as a comical version of real conflicts, does not at all detract from its bitterness and must suffice as the fundamental conflict of a contemporary bourgeois tragedy.

As everyone knows, this tragedy usually ends with the victory of the “mandate of the offer”; that is, with the acquisition of the commodity. But this victory is dearly bought, since from that very moment the customer begins to experience the servile compulsion of paying in installments for the acquired object.

***

Anders goes on to explain how we become slaves to our things as we harbour a belief that if we don't use them regularly, then all that money and time spent working to get the object has gone to waste. So we use it even when we no longer get pleasure from it just to avoid wasting our hard-earned things. Which is nuts. And if we could just think a bit, we could rise above this mess of things.

It makes me think of one of my favourite lines of poetry, published the same year:

"What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?"

Anders comes to the same conclusion as Epicurus, Epictetus, Plato, Lao Tzu, Jesus, and many others: We can have greater pleasure in life if we reduce our desires for things instead of getting sucked into an endless battle to fulfill every desire. But it's not just about desire for commodities. We have strong desires for progress and perfection. We can't fall for that either. Life is messy, and we will always be flawed and ever unfinished. Epictetus in particular advised recognizing what's within our control and not bothering much about anything else. Reputation, honour, status are not within our control. It's just an illusion that if we work hard enough, we can get them. Once we can accept that fact, then we can let go of expectations and striving for something we might never achieve.

I don't see it as cut and dry as Epictetus does, however. To me, those things are just a greater gamble with a lower probability of success than what we can control with certainty. Instead of resigning myself to what's out of my control, I just get better at playing the odds. But imagine a life with fewer goals, with fewer expectations, like Anders' contentious walk to nowhere. That's not allowed in our age that glorifies progress at any cost.

I thought of this as I watched The End of the Tour followed by several interviews and speeches by Wallace.

And way down here, way below the fold, I've been thinking a lot about the "sudden deaths" of three male teachers from my board, ranging in age from 36 to 55. One at FHCI, one at my school, and one at SSS. All within a year. The absences of any evidence to the contrary leads me to believe they took their own lives. At our school, we were instructed to shut down that discussion out of respect for the family. And I don't understand that. So I'm whispering this here because it's begging to be cracked wide open.

ETA: And now a fourth, a female breaks the pattern a bit.  And now there's a fifth.

Our schools are all about working to reduce the stigma around mental health. Caz, my departed colleague, and I worked on a mural in honour of Clara Hughes' struggle with mental health.  But we're not to discuss his condition or speculate about possible contributing factors with an eye towards improving the odds for others. We're supposed to wade in the ambiguities of yet another 'sudden death.'

If all three were hit by a car, students and teachers would rally and petition to make the streets safer. If all three were victims of assault or cancer or lyme disease or any other single cause, we would join together to raise money and awareness to prevent similar deaths in future. But as it is, we sit silently, in anguish, trying hard to ignore the pattern of cases.

As teachers, we're afraid to get in trouble like never before, acting to avoid punitive measures rather than for the love of teaching. We have new mandates that are unclear and the dictates continue to waver with each administrator, yet teaching reviews can be labelled unsatisfactory and jobs lost if these fuzzy rules aren't followed accurately. It's a time of profound chaos leading to a general state of anomie. We have a professional organization that focuses on teacher error, from the mundane to the profane, and publishes them regularly with names and details in a magazine that we are obligated to fund, rather than discretely and respectfully working with teachers to resolve concerns and to restore professional relationships. One disgruntled student with a parent willing to go the distance can end a career.

And criticizing any of it can lead to termination. Shhhhh..... This is but a minor act of embarrassingly cowardly rebellion.

The reality right now is that keeping a job by working hard is no longer within our control. I've had more student complaints about me this year than in all the previous 24 years combined. Every time I've been supported by my administration, but the complainants are undeterred insisting they should be able to re-submit projects endlessly to get a mark that shows their best ability. There's a belief that we should mark work repeatedly until the end of term, and I will quit if I'm made to mark each piece of work several times over until they each have 100% in the course. The absurdity of the situation requires us to accept that we shouldn't expect to be able to retire in good standing regardless our dedication to the craft.

This is not to say that careers were a driving force in these deaths, but I imagine they were at least a contributing factor. We spend a third of our lives at work, and, for people like me, under the new conditions, it consumes a majority of waking hours. But these tragedies are also a piece of a new statistic that the suicide rate of middle age white males has risen by 40% in the last seven years.

Some think this increase is due to the expectation of the stoic male and the "gym culture" that has foisted unattainable goals on men. Others focus on a similar split between dual expectations of being strong and being vulnerable. Others look to the singleness of most of the men in the study, others on how coping skills fall apart with age, on alcohol use, and on our glorification of youth.  Some think it's simply a factor of the economic downturn as suicides peaked during the depression as well. And others note that it's highest in those without a high-school education.  Economic insecurity is certainly a stress too much to bare for some, but Durkheim's research found that suicide rates rise during positive changes as much as negative changes. "Even fortunate crises, the effect of which is abruptly to enhance a country's prosperity, affect suicide like economic disasters" (203).  Too much change that creates upheaval in a society affects the desire to take a quick exit. We are in a point of increasingly frequent and hurried disruptions, and we can't settle in. We can't feel secure in what we're doing to improve it before we have to change it.

The school board seems to recognize that it's causing some problems as evidenced by one perk of our new contract being a promise of no new initiatives for a year. We used to get a rush of changes at every provincial election, then those ideas would be overruled by the next government before they were ever fully implemented. Now it seems like new changes bombard us for the sake of change, as if they believe that constantly moving is the same as progressing.

Granted Epictetus would advise that the expectation that our colleagues will live full lives to their natural end is unreasonable to hold as it's not at all within our control. And yet...  An urge to act, to do something to prevent others' misery and loneliness and fear and desperation bubbles up uncontained and rudderless. Impotent.

What's a Mother to Do?

It's always harder to have something taken away than to never have it in the first place.  But still...

A local high school is removing a few dozen students from the school bus route because the board realized the kids are within official walking distance to the school - 3.2 km.  Families are upset because they can't afford the bus fare, their teenagers can't be expected to walk that far, and, during a couple weeks of December and January, the sun will be just about to rise when they embark on their morning trek.  One parent commented in The Record, "I will not make them walk. It is way too far."

Google maps estimates it takes the average person 35 minutes to walk 3K.  I can do it in less, and I'm really old, so I'm tipping that average to the one end.  Yet the parents of these healthy young men and women don't expect their kids to be able to make it in less than 45 minutes.

"It's a hell of a walk."

Some are concerned with safety in the dark since the walk passes an industrial park, but I'm not convinced sunrise is prime time for muggings.  And it's not really "after dark" when they'll be walking - implying late evening, but actually before dawn.  And only just - by minutes.  And I'm also not convinced industrial areas are in some way more dangerous than city streets.

Here's my old geezer story:  Back in the day, when I was in middle school (11-13 years old), we had to walk over 3K to school in the rain and snow and sleet, and NOBODY CARED!!  None of our parents rallied to have us bussed!  None of them felt remotely bad for our plight!  We trudged through adverse conditions for three whole kilometres in torrential downpours or baking sun, and not one of the parents in the area ever offered us a ride.  I clearly remember a blizzard one year: snow was almost waist high and yet our troubles did nary make dinner table headlines.  And I'm really short, so it was even higher on me!

"It'll build character," my dad told me.  "Walking is good for what ails ya," my ma agreed.  Seriously, they talked like that.  "Quit yer bellyachin' already. Count your lucky stars you don't have to walk twice as far just for a glass of water like some people do!"  We couldn't get air conditioning either.  "It'll prevent your body from acclimatizing to the heat."  Ya whatever, dad.  

So, maybe I'm just jealous that their complaints made front-page news, but I dare say we're raising a fussy lot.  In my day, in good stoic fashion, we were ever reminded of those less fortunate than ourselves.  And we learned to cope.  We learned to find the strength within to trudge through the depths, and we were all on time for school.  And some of us even learned to enjoy the daily ritual of losing ourselves in the rhythm of each step.

We've had it good for too long now.  We need headlines and posters and constant reminders of what real adversity looks like.  Because if we think this is bad, we might be in for a real shocker a few decades from now.    

2013 Ideas in Review

Facebook bombarded me with everyone's highlights of 2013 this morning, and I was struck with the urge people have to track the value of time spent by listing stuff they did.  It's all trips and big events.  When I consider all I had done this year, what came to mind first is a whole lot of sitting around.  I'm really good at that, and it's my favourite thing to do.

I sit around reading a writing and watching movies, but the highlight of my time sitting is always the kitchen table talks I have with whomever's at my table.  It's mainly the kids and I, and we often comment that we should set up a hidden camera and try to forget about it, because we are seriously funny people!  If we could capture our conversations for YouTube, we'd be rich!  But I also have friends that come and sit and drink and play music and tolerate my singing.

Like cutting Samson's hair, if you clean it, it loses its magic!

But in my time sitting, I also did a whole lot of fretting about the world (social justice and environmental erosion mainly), and about my work.  I'm going to consider a different approach to the world crap because what I've been doing is neither particularly useful nor enjoyable. Maybe tomorrow.

As for work, we started the year in strike action, and we ended it with some questionable micro-managing from the province. I'll say no more on that for the same reason I deleted most of my work posts:  apparently being perceived to be publicly complaining about the policies of my board or school can be grounds for termination, but I can complain about the Ministry of Ed documents all I like.  I understand this idea in principle - if I owned a small business and an employee tweeted negatively about it, I'd definitely call them out on it.  But, somehow this feels a little different.  And who's to say when my complains about ministry mandates are a bit too close to being about board mandates?  Nuff said.

Sitting around doesn't look like anything, but it's a lot.  When I was in university, writing essays at the kitchen table all day, my partner at the time, a tinner, would come home from work to find me in the exact same place as he left me.  As he peeled off his dirty work clothes, he'd often question how I could just do nothing all day long.  That I finished a 20-page essay didn't count.  And, 25 years later, that I wrote my thoughts on books and philosophers and political thinkers all year isn't fodder for facebook lists.  Thinking, talking, and writing about things just isn't share-worthy.

Which is a shame.

Is it because it's too commonplace or too uncommon?  Or because the ideas come and go without making it on snapchat?  Instead of listing the trips and events, wouldn't it be cool if people spent New Years Day considering all the new ideas they deduced or considered or solidified over the year?  I think it would make for a far more interesting bunch of facebook statuses to wake-up to at the very least.

Here's what I thought about mostly:

* It's amazing what we can do when we go for it balls-out even though we don't know what we're doing (I built a studio!).  But we all have limits. It's not the case that you can be or do anything you set your mind to do.  But, without trying you'll never know where your limits are.
* Bureaucracies suck the intelligence out of everything.
* Mainstream media is eroding body image and self-esteem, but we don't have to play with them.
* The planet's ability to continue to maintain life is so far gone, and so few care, it's likely unfixable.  As much as I abhor government intrusion in personal choices, I can't imagine what else could possibly turn this all around.
* Maybe we're screwed not because we're too greedy, but because we're also too compassionate.  Or maybe it's just greed as a species that we want every human in the world to live well (well enough that we don't have to see them suffer at least).
* Rape isn't going away nearly fast enough.  In fact, it feels like it's getting so much worse.  We still have a good, long fight on our hands on this one.
* Stoicism and Taoism are two of the best philosophies for coping with tragedies beyond our control.
* I still haven't been swayed from my agreement with Marxist economic strategies.  It's not about paying everyone the same, but ensuring nobody's being exploited.
* Art and music and dance and film (and cats) are phenomenal means of celebrating the world and distracting ourselves from its devastation.  I have unbridled enthusiasm for it all that won't be contained.  Even if someone points and laughs.
* Teaching is the best means to develop ideas (mainly by stealing them from the brilliant kids I teach).
* Cycling has to be safer if we actually want people to ditch the car at home, and working with the city sometimes actually gets us somewhere!
* We need some good role models - and fast.  Chomsky and Hedges and Monbiot and Suzuki are awesome, but they don't have the style or charm or something enough to sway the masses.  We need activists that can affect the people the way Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr did, because people will blindly follow someone who can sell them what seems like a good idea.  We have people in droves who do that for the oil industry, etc., but far too few on the other side.

As an exercise, it clarifies how mundane bare-bone ideas are!  And, unfortunately, as a facebook status or a tweet it would likely look something like this:

2013 was AWESOME!  I thought about the world and stuff!!  Going to be a hard one to top!  Happy New Years everybody!  

On John Stuart Mill, Free Speech, and Climate Change

I got caught up in a few arguments about climate change recently that just reinforced to me, that there’s still such a strong bashlash against the entire idea that we’re unlikely to move forward quickly enough to be effective.

Paper is trees!

My school board is fundraising for the Philippines, and I’m totally on board with it. But I commented publicly on the irony of sending each kid home with a piece of paper on the issue. That’s over 60,000 full pieces of paper or about 8 trees for something that will be crumpled at the bottom of a knapsack or tossed before it even makes it home.  We’re cutting down trees to make paper to ask people to help those affected by conditions exacerbated by the cutting down of trees. And there are other ways to get the word out like our websites and automatic phone callers. If we really want to use paper, the notices could at least be sent on half pages or on re-use-it paper (‘goos’ paper in some places).

Pretty straightforward and reasonable, right??

Not so fast. A colleague ridiculed me for quibbling about paper when people are struggling to cope with a “NATURAL” disaster. I responded with a quote from the IPCC linking extreme weather to climate change and a suggestion that we're negligent if we don't take responsibility for our small daily actions having an accumulative and disastrous effect elsewhere.  But I'm pretty sure it's all for nought.  Sigh.

But, as is often the case, a much more interesting conversation happened with my students.

Humans: Too Invasive or Too Compassionate to Survive

In my last post, and elsewhere over the years, I went all Agent Smith and suggested that humans are a virus that can't be contained. All other animals work within their environment to regulate their population.  As long as people don't mess things up by moving animals around (like bringing rabbits to Australia where they have no predators), animal populations decrease when food is scarce so their populations never reach overwhelming numbers.  Nature is amazing and everything can work so well if we let it.  But when human numbers rise, we just keep invading other places until we use up all the resources everywhere.  We're going to Mars now, for crying out loud!  It's just a matter of time before we kill off our host and die out ourselves.

But recent conversations in my class have me thinking of things from a different angle.

Maybe the problem isn't our invasiveness, but that we are too compassionate to allow people to just die the way those other, more callous animals do.  Because we have such big brains, and because we have mirror neurons that cause us to feel pain when we watch others suffer, we have found ways to help millions of people survive during famines.  And we can help sickly infants survive that wouldn't have stood a chance 20 years ago.  And we can keep elderly people going for a few more decades.  It's awesome!  Except now we're at seven billion people which might be too much for the earth to sustain.

A Stoic Resurgence

In reading a few other blogs lately, Stoicism has come up a few times, and I'm seeing it in a few books I've been reading lately too.  Maybe it'll stick this time.

In Robin Hanson's blog discussing why middle aged people are most pessimistic, I suggested that maybe it's a point in life where we know too much horrible crap happening in the world, and it's making us miserable.  And we're just before a point in which we've found a way to cope with the unending tragedies that are part of being alive.  Maybe my cohort will become happier in a stoic manner - once we get our heads around how little control we have over the world, accept that many of these problems aren't ours to solve, and develop a tranquility around it all.

Then stoicism came up again in arguments about the relationship to Cognitive Behaviour Therapy via Lieter Reports, a N.Y. Times article by Kathryn Schulz about self-help books' suggested dualism of selfhood.

On Gun Control and Coping with Death

I've been reading way too many articles about the Sandy Hook massacre followed by an unbelievable number of inane and hurtful comments:  "Cars kill more people than guns, and cars pollute too.  So we should ban cars before we ban guns."  "If God were allowed in the schools, He would have been there to protect the children."  "If we ban guns, then only criminals will have them, and we won't be able to protect ourselves!"

You get the idea.

Until a few days ago, it was legal to carry a concealed weapon in all but two areas of the U.S.  But then, by a two to one vote just last week, it was deemed unconstitutional to ban people from carrying a concealed weapon in Illinois.  Now the only place so restrained is Washington, D.C..  Curious.  But state to state, there are still different levels of restrictions on guns, and different types of guns that can be bought and sold, and, according to one study, that has a clear link to the safety of that state.

On the Ethics of Wealth

"There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living." - Thoreau

Tony Shin sent me this info-graphic and asked if I'd add it to my blog.   Of course I have a few things to say about the 1% first.

Paul Feldman did a study in the 80s with bagels being sold on each floor of an office building using an honesty jar and price list.  He tracked who paid the right price for the bagels.  The people in the lowest floor - the mail room - paid about 95%, but as they went up the floors, and up the corporate ladder, the sales were worse and worse.  The richest people paid the least.