"When we remember that we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained." Twain / "I write to keep from going mad from the contradictions I find among mankind - and to work some of these contradictions out for myself." Montaigne / "I write because I have found no other means of getting rid of my thoughts." Nietzsche / "Writing is an integral part of the process of understanding." Arendt / "Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers." Asimov.
CW: As the title suggests, there will be discussion of death and dying and some mention of suicide in this post.
I thought nothing of following up my last post on Irvin Yalom on the meaning of life with Yalom on the meaning of death, until I started writing here. The very reality of being a bit wary of broaching the subject reveals the strength of societal taboos against admitting that we’re all going to die. Until it’s staring us in the face, we delude ourselves into thinking we will get better and better, mentally and physically, despite that our brain starts to shrink in our 30s, and our joints and organs will start to give out not so long after. We work hard to keep death clean and sanitized so the reality doesn’t seep in too much, and we try to do all the right things to keep death at bay: exercise, various special diets, wearing masks to avoid viruses. We can fix some evidence of erosion with meds and surgeries, sometimes miraculously, but some people even hope to keep their brain going long after their body dies.
Eric Topal looked more closely at the numbers. There were "still 50,000 [official] Covid deaths in 2023. Heart disease and stroke are not declining. Small reduction in cancer deaths."
We like to think we've returned to normal, but Covid and climate change will become more and more of a challenge to ignore.
Biorisk consultant Conor Browne responded to a post about "this universally adopted phenomenon of people never mentioning the Covid word is really mind-blowing," with this comment:
"And also tells you exactly that Covid has not been normalised. Quite the opposite, in fact - if Covid truly had been normalised, the word would, by definition, not be taboo. Not mentioning the word tells me how much the disease is still considered exceptional. . . . No-one would think twice about saying, 'I had the flu a month ago,' but they're much less likely to say the same about Covid. Why? Because flu is normalised and Covid is not."
I think that's such a good point! It's so not normal that we can't even raise it as a possibility when we know people suddenly struggling to do tasks that used to be easy, or suddenly unable to get out of bed, or suddenly dying of heart attacks at a young age, which are all ascribed to some mystery, that can't possibly be figured out. It's similar to how not normal AIDS was that nobody talked about it for years until activists forced it into public awareness.
Tara Moriarty wrote a compelling thread a couple weeks ago. I've never teared up from reading stats before.
For anyone who doesn't know her, Moriarty's an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto, and she and a small team of experts voluntarily create Covid stats each fortnight, posted at Canadian Covid-19 Hazard Index, and she also offers a Covid conversation place every Tuesday and Thursday nights. Below, this is all from Tara's thread. It's long, but I wanted to include it all. She beautifully captures what it feels like to keep looking at it all:
"The percentage excess mortality for Canada from 2020-2022 for SPECIFIC CAUSES OF DEATH is now up on our excess mortality tracker.
Thanks to StatCan_eng
for the data.
I'll do a brief summary thread here.
You can view/download the analysis on p. 21 of tracker. We calculate age-specific mortality rates for each cause of death from 2015-2022, then compare each of 2020, 2021 and 2022 to the 2015-2019 mean.
Our page reports only on specific causes of death in 2020-2022 greater than the 2015-2019 mean +95%CI. The report also excludes some specific causes of death that account for less than 0.1% of total excess mortality over the 2020-2022 period. We're trying to focus on the biggest sources of excess mortality, although there are significant increases across age groups in deaths from diseases like syphilis and TB where the overall numbers of deaths are quite small (rightfully and thankfully). Finally, we can ONLY meaningfully interpret INCREASES in specific causes of death compared to 2015-2019.
Why? Because of 89,248 excess deaths in Canada from 2020-2022, specific causes of death are still not available for 29% of excess deaths. It's more than 36% for 2022, 17% for 2020... Finally, excess mortality for all years is still nudging up, but is still increasing significantly for 2022 with each month of reporting from StatsCan.
StatsCan carefully checks annual specific cause of death numbers they release. We have to wait till late 2024 for next issue.
I recently watched a few things, back to back, to distract me from the news.
One was openly apocalyptical, as so much is these days. Is it a trend, or is the output the same, but I just never gravitated to it so much?? I've also noticed a rise in interest in mushrooms, mosses, bones, and decay and all things dank and symbolically death-related. The trajectory feels like we moved from flower power in the 60s to a neon wave in the 80s, then all things plastic and shiny in 2000, and now we're into dark, wet rot.
The end times movie was Leave the World Behind. Some people on twitter thought it amazing and watched it a few times over, but I wasn't as impressed. I wasn't invested in whether or not any of the characters lived or died, but it was okay fare for a cold rainy afternoon.
How we see our lives and how we expect things to go for us is life or death right now, sanity or madness. This has been an emotionally exhausting week! Not knowing is difficult, and there's so much up in the air right now.
It reminds me of when I was first pregnant and past my due date. Every little spasm in my belly set off alarms. Now it's not my belly any more, but higher. A little tickle in the throat, a cough from the dust, a twinge in the chest all have me super hyper-focused on my body: Is it here?? Is it time??
We have to take precautions, absolutely. We're happy introverts in my home, comfortably hunkering down, but then necessary grocery shopping is like running across the trenches to deliver a message. Get in and out as fast as possible! Check down each aisle before turning a corner! Wash all the produce as soon as we get home from the store! Okay, apparently some of these precautions are ones other people have always taken. But miss wiping a corner of a box of cereal with a Lysol wipe, and it could mean the end of us. The cashier (Praise be!) might inadvertently cough as she bags the groceries, spraying us with invisible bullets. I'm not looking forward to the next trip. Hopefully we can make it two weeks with this load.
But once we're home and scrubbed clean yet again, we have to create an ideal little nest as much as possible, with music and baking and creating things and some good conversations. For those of us with the luxury of a job we can do from home, and the tremendous luxury of reasonably good company in the home, we have to imagine the weeks ahead of us as a respite from the noise of the world. Imagine the games and days on the porch or garden and the bike rides and just time to be lost in thought. Pay attention to the people who are sharing and helping like never before. We give our world the colour of our thoughts. If we start to worry about how long and how hard and how small the house is and every little irritation that's bound to arise, then we will have painted our days with jarring contrasts and muddy tones.
There are other precautions to take that people aren't discussing, like teaching the kids how to access emergency funds in case I succumb so they don't lose the house. What do you want done with your things? With your body? Garbage day is Tuesday. There have been a few of those conversations too.
During that first extended pregnancy, my midwives told me to enjoy the time. Everything's easier with the baby on the inside, they warned. I scoffed then too! How can I enjoy my time with this event looming over everything I do? Their advice holds as well today as it did way back then: eat well, sleep well, go for lots of long walks, and finish that book you've been meaning to read! It happens when it happens, and we all just hope everyone's healthy on the other side.
Before the baby was due, a few well-meaning friends warned me their deliveries took over 36 hours, so I prepared mentally for the long haul. Two weeks later, when the labour pains were finally real, I watched the clock through the breathing and paced myself. It ended after only 12 hours, which felt like nothing compared to what I was expecting. Tonight I told my kids to expect this to end in July, and maybe we'll be pleasantly surprised in May! We just have to get our heads around it all in the right kind of way to make these next few months manageable. This will be a marathon, not a sprint.
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!!
My dad passed away this week. He was older than the hills: 93 and a half years old. I’m not sad about his passing; he lived a long and fulfilling life. But I am troubled by how he went, and our expectations around grief. At his 90th birthday party, he was jovially talking with old friends and extended family. He lived a quiet life with his wife in a beautiful care facility. I once likened him to a cat, sleeping much of the day, and happy just to watch the world out his window. We don’t need to be doing things to be content. But the past few years haven’t done him any favours. He had a commanding presence that gradually shrunk until he disappeared into the ether, cremated a block from his residence.
A couple weeks ago he got pneumonia. He was verbal and lucid, but didn’t recognize anybody accurately. Last Sunday I visited, and he was no longer saying words. He could just make sounds. His mouth was slack-jawed, but he would grin reflexively and wide-mouthed from time to time, with the unselfconscious extended gaze of an infant. When we walked in the room, he was sideways on the bed (they're not allowed to use waist restraints), completely uncovered, and wearing only a diaper. His body was skin and bones, riddled with age spots and moles. As we tried to cover him, he kept throwing the blankets off his tiny body. His nurse said she tried to put a dressing gown on him, but he kept pulling at it, so she left it off.
It reminded me of being in labour. My body was working hard and heating up, and my instinct was to tie my hair back and strip down naked regardless friends and family coming and going, oblivious to typical standards of decency. My focus was surviving the ordeal of birthing. I wasn’t thinking at all of the baby I was about to have, but about my own ability to live through the process. My clothes were simply in the way, every fibre a distraction making coping with the task at hand all the more difficult.
And it reminded me of every Christmas and Thanksgiving of my childhood, when the house was so full of family milling about, and there were so many pots on the stove cooking that the windows would weep condensate. My dad would start carving the turkey in the kitchen, fully dressed, but by time he was digging the last bits off the carcass, he’d have stripped down to his boxers in fits of swearing and chasing all of us kids out of the kitchen. He couldn’t do things with his clothes getting in the way. A former student once astutely remarked on the new trend of falling asleep with phones in hand: “We’re too lazy to get ourselves to sleep.” Going to sleep is an effort. I wonder if dying is similar.
Or maybe he was just hot.
So there he was in bed, sideways with his legs partially over the edge, working, like he was struggling to get through it all. His toes were curled under and his legs bending and pushing frenetically, arms flailing, looking for something to grasp on to, like a baby thrashing and kicking but failing to have any useful effect on his surroundings. The movements didn’t stop when he was sat up and then was repositioned in bed. It’s hard to watch frustration. He looked confused and scared and agitated. My sister and I each held a hand to comfort him the way I was taught to hold a newborn’s hands during the first couple diaper changes to help them feel safe and secure. It seemed to help a bit, slowing the thrashing down and keeping him steady, but soon enough the nurse came in with more morphine. We waited with him until he was calm enough to fall into a light sleep, and loosen his death grip on us, then we stole away home.
Relief from the pain of bearing witness to his plight was much stronger than my sense of guilt and cowardliness. They crept in to show themselves later, after it was too late. It would have been nice to be with him when he passed, but nobody knew how long it would take. As it was, he left us the following night.
And I wondered at the possibility of the nurse giving him just that much more morphine to make this end a little sooner and with us in the room at his side. His days had tipped the balance into far greater pains than pleasures, with no hope for any improvement. Is there a purpose or meaning to be garnered from these last days? The morphine suppressed his coughing, and he was barely drinking or eating. He was essentially dying of suffocation and dehydration, and it’s lucky he had the means to do it with the best possible care so his pain was minimized. But does a natural death trump a peaceful one?
This might seem morbid, but I regret that I didn’t take photos of his body, so foreign to anyone raised in a world sanitized of death. But it would have felt objectifying and disrespectful. There were instructions in place to take his body to the hospital for cremation immediately, so I knew I wouldn’t have another chance to marvel at what becomes of us, to, at my leisure, stare prolonged in wonder at photos of his curled feet and aged-marked back, the skin hanging from his legs, and the twisted and contorted postures of his final days. As it is, I already can't quite remember what he looked like at the end. I also wanted to make a plaster casting of my mother's face when she passed at home, but my siblings don't see art as the useful path to healing that I find it to be. It can help mark that moment of transition from one form to another. It allows us to redefine the situation on our own terms and turns the chaos of being into a thing of beauty. Maybe I should leave instructions or permissions for my own children, all of whom have a creative bent.
I recently re-wrote my will because I’m taking a trip, and I’m always pretty sure I’ll die any time I get on a plane. I have a pull-the-plug clause, but, after seeing my dad, I asked about including instructions in case I’m mentally unfit or incapable of communicating but clearly languishing. My lawyer clarified that advance directives like that can’t be included in a will because, according to the new law, the patient must be mentally competent at the time of an assisted suicide to agree to it. I understand that it prevents people from terminating the lives of anyone against their wishes, but, in cases like this, I can’t see the point of a natural death.
I’m projecting my own preferences here, but I’d rather be surrounded by family at a predetermined time, allow my children to say goodbye and hold my hand while I’m given an injection, than to have my kids rush to visit one last time, one at a time, some of them too late, and know that I died alone essentially of dehydration or suffocation. I can’t see any way that it was beneficial for my father to continue struggling and suffering. Is there something to gain from seeing the end come naturally? Do we have something to learn from it? Or is it just our belief in life at any cost that maintains laws to keep suffering people alive? The only argument that I’d give some leeway to is one based on the family’s faith or tradition. For the atheists among us, it seems absolutely barbaric, and most of us wouldn’t let our pets die like that. But I really have no right to say anything. I was negligent in visiting since he first moved more than walking distance away.
I was never very close to my dad; I always found him difficult to be around. We’re both introverts who were awkward together once my mom was no longer around to carry the conversation along. Even before that, he spent much of his time in his basement study reading and playing music at ungodly hours of the day. I kept books on the register in my bedroom to muffle the sound of his trumpet playing or his opera records, cranked to ten, jolting me awake before the sun was quite up. My bedroom faced a forest, and I looked forward to waking with the sun filtering through the trees, not the pitch blackness of his pre-dawn rituals.
Unlike most family rifts, we agreed on every fundamental issue. He was very progressive for someone of his generation, and he held feminist principles even if he might never have used that word. He had a strong sense of equity and justice and was extraordinarily sensitive to the plight of others. When we were kids, he would sometimes walk into the TV room and then storm back out, revolted by the violence we took for entertainment. It didn’t stop me from enjoying those kinds of films, but it did make me question my choices. He made me think about a lot of things along the way. He was a brilliant man, and I greatly admired him, but largely from a distance. We didn’t talk much at any point in our lives together beyond sharing knowledge. Before the internet, he was my go to for translating the odd word from Greek, Latin, or German. As a kid, he let me break a thermometer and poke the mercury with a toothpick on a disposable plate, and he let me play with a soldering iron and his power tools with minimal supervision. I made a maze for my pet mice and an outhouse for my Barbie dolls. We spent the summers camping, and he told us the names of the plants and the types of rocks surrounding us, and he could name most of the stars in the sky, too. He admired the experiments I set up labelling rose petals coated with any liquid I could find in the house to determine the liquid with the best moisturizing properties. He was always there when there was something to teach. But that was as far as we ever got.
Truth be told, he was an ornery bugger. He was neither gentle nor patient. He wanted to spend his days reading and thinking and playing music, but he was surrounded by noisy children thwarting his efforts. His frustrations with us were duly noted. I added “irascible spirit” to his obituary to ensure we acknowledge the man he really was rather than mourn a glorified version of him. None of my siblings objected. It’s important to bury the right person. I’m so thankful to family members who did all the dirty work. I’m glad he was comfortable and cared for, and that although I largely ignored my responsibilities, my negligence had little impact on the quality of his life.
And then I didn’t mention anything to my friends or colleagues until yesterday. How weird is that? I found out about it at work Tuesday morning, and I wrote the first draft of his obituary at lunch, surrounded by colleagues who would have been very supportive. Because I'm not sad about it all, I was worried that people would misread my behaviour. There seems to be a narrow range of acceptable reactions to death.
I didn’t want to take any time off work because it’s always more work and stress than it’s worth. Taking three days off from teaching would have required a full evening of preparing, and another day afterwards of cleaning up and catching up. And I wouldn’t grieve any differently at home alone. It was in the forefront of the mind the whole time, but I wasn’t teary-eyed at all. I felt like since I wasn’t behaving in a grieving fashion, it might draw suspicions that I must be coldhearted. I’m not repressing emotions or distracting myself with work, and it’s not that I’m not affected, but sometimes it just doesn’t come out like it does for most people.
Times of trauma and tragedy bring out a lot of projecting. People look at someone going through a death of a loved one, and they overlap their own feelings and responses onto the freshly grieving. Any behaviour that doesn’t match their own expressions is sometimes suspect. People watch people’s reactions at these times and make assumptions about their inner life. That’ll happen in retrospect anyway, once someone reads about it in the paper and shares the news, but my silence on it got me almost a week to process without a battery of questions and concerns about my decision to be at work while I was most vulnerable.
It gave me time to steel myself for any possible onslaught of whispered accusations of heartlessness or aloofness, or of just plain being weird. If they think it must be a hard time, and you're as happy as ever, that disconnect begs for a label. Even the kindest people can sometimes fall into the trap of judging others. I needed private time to process. I needed a week to get my head around it all before I had people sharing their condolences and looking at me with sympathy, quickly followed by disdain. As soon as people know you’re going through something difficult, they pay more attention to you in a way that can be oppressive. Well-meaning people can feel intrusive sometimes, and I wasn’t ready to deal with that just yet.
And although I’m affected by it, it’s just not that sad to me. He had lived a really long, fulfilling life. This was a good death in that respect. I’m not beside myself weeping because it was long expected. I am still grieving a colleague who took his own life almost a year ago. That one haunts me, and I can't get over the guilt of not doing more; I'm sometimes ill with remorse. But my dad went when he should.
When my mother died, twenty years ago, we all expected him to go quickly after. They were a couple so united that it seemed impossible for one to live without the other. When students say that being raised with divorced parents makes it unlikely they’ll have a good marriage, I counter it that I was raised watching an intensely happy marriage, which totally ruined my chances at a relationship. Nothing could live up to that ideal. Yet after she died, he quickly re-married and moved and had a whole other life. Life's full of surprises like that.
So it goes.
So bring on the dancing girls! (My dad's common refrain after an especially good meal.)
How pivotal is that number? It seemed huge on the way in, and still lingers on the way out.
A year ago (way back here), I lived with my three kids, and now I just have one left at home. The house is quieter and cleaner, and I talk to the older two about as much thanks to texting. With one in the attic and the other in the basement, I admit we used to text each other within our home. I'm not really sure why I'm sheepish about it; it's damn handy. Now our face-to-face time is limited, so I think we pay more attention to one another when we're together. And they're still close enough to get me to hang pictures for them. This is definitely a time of life of changes for anyone with a family. Spending twenty-plus years with people who then move on can be a bit disorienting.
I've written some stuff this year, but not as much as I would have liked. Collaborating on a book was a great experience! I rarely get writerly feedback on articles or blogposts. I spent far too much time distracted by elections this year. I'm not sure how much they matter. There was scant time for a brief sigh of relief before I started questioning Trudeau's leadership. Notley seems owned by corporations, and I don't think JT's off leash either. I think over time I'll care less, but right now I still operate under the illusion that my letters and marches can possibly make a difference. It gives me something to do.
After years and years of begging friends to take up long-distance cycling with me, I finally got brave enough to go out on my own. I still haven't been hit by a car or attacked or stranded too far from home to walk. It's such a commonplace thing to say, but I really regret all the time I spent unsure and fearful. I regret all the bike trips I could have taken but didn't because I couldn't find someone willing to come with. One benefit of growing older is that people don't look down on me when I cycler slower than they expected. The expectations diminish to the point that getting out there at all gets you kudos.
I'm falling apart a bit. A year ago it was only my knees giving me grief. Now I've got arthritis in my toes and have been saved by orthotics. I miss walking in bare feet though. A few years back, I dislocated my pinky finger. Months later it still hurt, and my doctor said, "Yup, everything takes longer to heal now." The little aches and pains make me think of this...
My feminine bits are turning on me, and a few procedures will be in order. Nothing too frightening, but life-altering none-the-less. It kinda makes me wish I were married but only for utilitarian reasons, which isn't enough for me to regret never marrying. Drinking buddies aren't really up for hanging out during one boring, sober appointment after another. They have spouses and families to take care of and lives to live on a path that doesn't include me. Appointment buddies require someone who's gotten in a share of good times already, and who's had some prior care-taking give and take with you to establish the requisite temperament. It helps if they've seen you at your worst already, maybe even helped you out of your clothes on more auspicious occasions. I'm not ready to lean on my kids for that kind of care yet.
This too shall pass.
I always found it unsavoury when people suggested I need to find me a good man because I'll want someone to take care of me later. Practically speaking: men tend to die first, so I'd likely end up taking care of him. And morally speaking: yuck. That is to treat someone as a mere means to an end. Kant would shake his sickly old head at me, and I can't have that. It's not right to snag a partner just for financial gain or to have someone hang on your arm or to get laid or to get some hospice care. They have to have a draw that makes you want to do right by them, makes you want to be a better person for them, makes you want to share your life with them. Maybe my parents' idyllic marriage just ruined me for anyone. I feel like it's too late at this point, but life's full of surprises.
This has nothing to do with mid-life, but this year, I was struck cold by the number of colleagues and students we're losing to suicides. Possibly up to five educators in our board took their own lives in an 18-month period (see here after the passage). It took the death of seven indigenous teenagers in Thunder Bay within a ten-year period to spark a national inquest, but we're not talking about these local "sudden deaths" as if there could be any pattern. They're each seen as isolated events. Nobody's mentioned contagion effects or anomie or changing relationships in schools. Maybe it's just as well. But maybe we need a more personal inquest of our own. I'm not sure this one will go away quietly. I'm much more accepting of death than earlier in life, but these are different.
But actually most impactful this year, something that has changed my thinking and outlook profoundly, was being forced to teach Native Studies. I had no idea I was so ignorant. I didn't want to teach it because I knew so little. Now that I know, there's no turning away from it all. I'll be spending time over the next month developing easy-to-teach curriculum that could be incorporated in other specific class, and working on convincing other teachers to teach about all of Canada in any Canadian-linked courses. This shouldn't be a token course for a few interested kids; it should be general knowledge necessary to graduate high-school! I love that there's still so much to learn. It's easy to get settled in with our current level of knowledge, so it's important to shake that up a bit.
It's useful from time to time to be reminded of the gaps in my education, of the tenuous nature of our lives, of my strengths like a burgeoning courage and tenacity, and of my weaknesses.
Can children be existentialists? What I'm asking isn't so much whether or not it's possible, but should we allow it?
If I dare to claim to define some central ideas here, the part about living authentically and embracing the freedom that comes with taking responsibility for all our choices with no excuses, that side of it is, I believe, pretty useful for everyone. But what about the darker edges of the philosophy? Life is objectively meaningless, and, since being unceremoniously dropped here, we're each of us alone in our quest to find meaning for ourselves. Things don't all work out in the end somehow; wonderful people can suffer many tragedies, one right after another. Nobody's controlling the game to make sure the good are justly rewarded. It's all a crapshoot.... And then you die. And, according to some, getting your head around the finality of our existence is key to the authentic life.
Is that too harsh for the little ones?
At what age is it acceptable to have conversations with children about this topic? What if your children bring up a sense of dread and angst at the possibility of their own demise. Is it better to acknowledge death, foster illusions of permanence, or deflect the issue entirely? Which will have the least detrimental effect?
A friend's daughter is suffering some anxiety; she's a worrier. Maybe it's because she has a gene for rumination. Or maybe she's a typical bright, creative kid. One study, albeit with a very small sample size, found a link between intelligence and anxiety.
"Those with anxiety disorder tended to have higher IQ scores than healthy people, as well as higher levels of activity in regions of the brain that aid in communication between parts of the brain. These regions are thought to have contributed to the evolutionary success of humans. . . . High levels of anxiety can be disabling, and patients' worries are often irrational. But every so often there's a wild-card danger. Then, that excessive worry becomes highly adaptive. People who act on the signals of that wild-card danger are likely to preserve their lives and the lives of their offspring."
But another study with an enormous sample size found a strong link between creativity and mental illness:
They found that people working in creative fields, including dancers, photographers and authors, were 8% more likely to live with bipolar disorder. Writers were a staggering 121% more likely to suffer from the condition, and nearly 50% more likely to commit suicide than the general population. . . . Earlier studies on families have suggested that there could be an inherited trait that gives rise to both creativity and mental illness.*
It can be weirdly comforting to know that anxiety has links to positive traits, but more important than understanding why it starts, is to figure out what to do now. How do we help our children when they worry they'll run out of food or get hit by a meteorite or get hit by lightening or get conscripted into a war or get abducted on the way home from school? We feel helpless. We are helpless. The reality is we can't guarantee our children's security. We do our best to try, but there are no guarantees we'll be successful. Should we pretend there are? How much control can we really have over this - over their security and over their sense of security? It can help to believe we can fix everything for our kids, but I wonder if it's healthier to recognize how often we can't.
We really like to find patterns in the world, connections that make it all seem predictable. If everything works through a rational cause and effect system, then we can have a measure of control over the outcome. If we can observe the effects of different actions enough to see where the connections are, then we can behave in a way to provoke a specific outcome. But however we might look back at a sequence of events and connect the dots to try to understand how we got here, sorry to say, that only works in hindsight. Our lives are largely unpredictable. We live with a comforting illusion that we can control events, but then random acts steer us in a different direction.
Things are generally predictable, but not specifically, and that trips people up. Like Mlodinow explains in one of my favourite books, people are like molecules. Heat them up, and we can safely predict they'll all spread out, but we can't accurately predict the trajectory of any individual molecule. So we know that, generally, a university degree leads to a better job, but we can't know if your university degree will get you anywhere. This can be a little daunting, so we seek out other factors that caused the unexpected effect. We fight hard to grasp at an illusion of control over our lives, but, for better or worse, we encounter the absurdity of the the world. But if we can accept that some things just are and can't be controlled or fixed or prevented, it can actually make it easier to live through the random events that mark human existence.
I suggested to this friend that acknowledging death is the best course over pretending we can guarantee a long life or ignoring the heart of the concerns. He responded, "I'm not going to tell my 8-year-old that we're all going to die." And coming from that angle, my suggestion sounds crazy. And yet, after some time to consider the situation, I maintain my position because doesn't she already know that to be the case?
I asked my 11-year-old what she thinks about the idea of talking to kids about death and what she thinks about kids having lots of anxiety these days. She said,
"I think kids should know the truth instead of thinking that the whole world is a perfect place. Because it's not. We've got a lot of places that have a lot of problems right now. I worry about stuff that's going to happen, but I worry about it too soon."
I think she's hit on something important about worry - that it's often a concern when it's a matter of inappropriate timing. It makes more sense when it's right in front of us and very likely than when it's further away or less likely. Anxiety can give us an adrenaline rush that helps us stay up late to hit a deadline when we need it, but it's fruitless when it's too far in advance.
My concern here with an avoidance of existentialist thinking is that our culture's drive to protect children from anything remotely painful might be creating a society of people with lowered resilience who struggle to cope with the most minor setbacks, like students weeping over an essay because they can't think of a topic. This is a fairly recent phenomenon, or, at least, it's only recently that it is being openly displayed to teachers.
Maybe previously we were all ashamed of feeling anxious, so we hid it. If that's the case, then it's a positive that we're seeing more of it.
But I wonder if it's the case that, previously, our anxiety over having enough food or money or supports in the face of plenty and a general fear of losing everything we've worked for was met with "Yup you might. Get over it!" comments that convinced us to cut-off those thought instead of dwelling on them and talking about them and bringing our concerns to person after person who would share their deepest fears, thereby giving credence to our worry and further embedding the pathways in our brain that allow worry to flourish! Flippant reactions might have a similar effect as current CBT methods in which people might be told to stop negative thoughts by imagining a big red "X" over the negative idea, then replace them with alternative thoughts, and then those troubling ideas will eventually decrease in frequency and intensity. Flippant reactions to worry can have the same effect of "You're fine!" in response to a tumble on the playground instead of rushing in with peroxide and bandaids. We rush in an awful lot these days.
We've gone down a different road of listening to everyone's feelings to the point that now we have a generation of second-order anxiety: personal anxiety plus anxiety over our children's anxiety. Have we fostered discussions of our concerns to a point that they've become normalized and entrenched in our brains? We feel like we worry for good reason about our anxious children because sometimes anxiety can turn into something worse like self-mutilation or suicide ideation. And then then we worry that worrying about our children's anxiety might actually make it worse! I think it was easier for my parents to acknowledge the worst case scenarios because they were born in the '20s and lived through the depression and then WWII. They experienced the worst and survived. We've been too sheltered from real trauma in our generation's past to be able to acknowledge that it could be a very real part of our future and to just get on with things. We're here today, and we have food and shelter, and we haven't been hit by a meteorite, so do your homework already!
Worrying about what might happen (like a child's anxiety turning into something worse) helps us feel like we're doing something productive about something we might have little effect over. But it could just an illusion of productivity. The tricky business is figuring out when we can have an effect and when we can't. We might stand back as parents and watch our kids fight through various stages of depression and anxiety, trying one therapist or medication after another wondering if doing nothing would have been as effective. It's complicated. But when they're beginning to express some fears over things clearly outside our control, a brush-off might be the trick.
I can be a pretty intense worrier, and I actively work to decrease those thoughts. When I was growing up, I was terrified of the cold war. I was absolutely convinced we were all going to waste away from radiation poisoning if we weren't lucky enough to be hit directly. This cartoon didn't help. It's of a middle age couple slowly dying, yet in denial the entire time, desperately trying to look on the bright side: "I should put some skin lotion on these spots. They should soon clear up." No wonder I had nightmares. But we lived, and all that worry was for naught. It did nothing to affect nuclear disarmament. Nothing.
I recognize this might not work for everyone, but what helped me cope as a child and now, what I believe prevented a journey into deeper anxiety or spells of crying in front of teachers, was my mum's very Epicurean acknowledgement that, "We all have to die of something," as she'd light another cigarette. Epicurus explained that, of course we're going to die, but we're not dead now, and, when we're dead, we won't know about it anyway; therefore, it doesn't make sense to worry about death. My mum was the kind who required a bloody appendage stapled to any request to miss a day of school. She'd soften the blow by tacking on, "But it likely won't happen for a long time....But, then again, we never know!" It had the effect of making me very productive. If death could be around any corner, then maybe I should drag myself from the TV to seize the day. And it helped me see that we're all in this together, Kings and paupers alike.
Recognizing the randomness of our lives, and how little control we have over it all, and the reality that death is inevitable, can actually help us live a more satisfying existence. I didn't wait for a magical age to share this with my children, but aimed to answer questions and concerns as authentically as possible throughout their lives. It's not all bad news. The worst might happen tomorrow, but if you're alive and well today, then let's celebrate that fact.
This is a post about cycling further than ever before, but first, a bit about boredom:
"Boredom may lead you to anything. After all, boredom even sets one to sticking gold pins into people...one may choose what is contrary to one's own interest...one's own fancy, however wild it may be...desire what is injurious to himself, what is stupid, very stupid - simply in order to have the right to desire for himself even what is very stupid and not to be bound by an obligation to desire only what is rational...this caprice of ours....preserves for us what is most precious and most important - that is, our personality...the whole work of man seems really to consist in nothing but proving to himself continually that he is a man and not an organ stop." - Dostoevsky
"We are less bored than our ancestors were, but we are more afraid of boredom...A generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation of little men, of men unduly divorced from the slow processes of nature, of men in whom every vial impulse slowly withers, as though they were cut flowers in a vase." - Bertrand Russell
Some people assert their own will by choosing naturopathy over doctors to treat their cancer, or by quitting their satisfactory marriages and careers to seek out a new mid-life adventure. I hope to make slightly more reasonable choices or certainly less self-destructive ones. According to Dostoevsky, I'm sucked into the western ideals of individuality over community, of standing out, which can make us foolish. Melting into the crowd isn't an easy option. Being one with the universe is a task for later when I've figured out how to sit still. And for Russell, who hit puberty in Wales as the Russian was drawing his lasts breaths, being able to endure boredom is essential for happiness. Seeking out excitement to avoid boredom just makes our pleasures less easily felt. He warns,
"pleasures which are exciting and at the same time involve no physical exertion, such, for example, as the theatre, should occur very rarely...certain good things are not possible except where there is a certain degree of monotony."
In art, we'd call that degree of monotony an area of restraint necessary for the eye to relax. It's why some beautiful gardens have an expanse of grass. But mine doesn't. I lean towards chaos.
I get antsy when I don't have a project. The house can be a mess while I deliberate what new task to take on next. My backyard took over for a couple years, and I have ideas of an off-grid home a few years off, but then what now? For better or worse, I'm obsessed with doing, finishing, accomplishing.
So I set as a project to find the limits of my cycling abilities - or, more specifically, the limits of my lungs and heart and other organs and muscles in a body as old and untrained as mine. I'll tell you from the get-go that I failed. But I'll get to that.
Before an annual camping trip with neighbours, I considered having my packed rental car, complete with youngest child, driven by a fellow camper so I could cycle the 137 km to the site. The longest I had ever biked before was 60 km, and I wanted to see how far I could actually go in one trip. I didn't train or prepare in any useful way - that would take the challenge out of it. But having a driver coming up my rear helped because I could bail at any time. It was about seeing how far I could get, not about getting to the end. That was key to the entire adventure. That, and a cell phone to call for help if needed.
This was a decision fraught with a ridiculous amount of anxiety. I tried to keep Epicurus in mind as I was deluged with worries: If pain is not occurring right now, then it’s not bringing pain except for tumults created by imagination, right? I am bringing myself pain, which is ridiculous! So stop worrying about flat tires, swerving trucks, strong wind gusts tossing me into traffic, some crazy guy attacking a lone female, heat stroke, complete organ failure, random loss of appendages, the list goes on. And there's always the old standby concern that, if I leave the house for any significant duration it will burst into flames. From time to time I was struck with absolute terror at the though of being killed in traffic and picturing my children coping with my death. I'd have to actively "X" out the thought and replace it with a vision of biking without incident. Thanks CBT. The fact that many worries are unfounded doesn't seem to lessen their intensity. At all. I actively ignored the looming date, and second-guessed my choice of directions - later to be intensified by many geographical advisors after-the-fact "Why didn't you go this obviously better way?" serving to prove my instincts for direction weak.
So I said nothing to anyone about my hopes to attempt the journey until the last minute; I knew I would be easily swayed to give up before I started. I waited until two days before to ask a neighbour to drive and was almost deterred by her husband's concern about wind, and the night before, I told my kids and then immediately become openly worrisome and neurotic. It's like talking about it tapped the keg of concerns. And it was going to be a windy ride: 20 km/h headwinds until the final 30 k.
It's curious, in areas of insecurity, how much other people's attitudes can affect us. The support of that one comrade, and my son's insistence that, "of course you can do it" were paramount to my leaving the house that morning. I have lots of people in my life - I'm sure we all do - who tell me why I can't possibly do this or that. I ignore the lot of them most of the time, but physical exertion is a weak spot for me, so their voices loomed louder than usual and took some effort to drown out. Some told me I couldn't join a women's ride group because I'm too slow, and others refused admittance to a guy's casual riding group because I don't have the necessary equipment provided by mother nature. I'm not recognized as a cyclist. Even the physiotherapist helping with my aging knees questioned me about my regular trips to Bamburg, a local marker of a hilly 40 k loop from our city:
"Oh so you drive there and then bike around."
"No, I don't have a car."
"Oh, so you live near there."
"No, I live a block from here."
Awkward silence. I just don't look like someone who moves quickly.
So I bike alone.
Armed with a banana, some nuts and raisons, water, my phone and wallet, brand new lights on my bike, and quality bike shorts, I kissed my kids good-bye and set off before dawn hoping to beat the heat of the day. I played music in my head to keep me pumped - possibly a skill developed in only those raised in the pre-walkman era. This one kept my cadence up:
Some think it's nutty not to train formally before a big ride - as if we'll fall to pieces if we don't work towards our goals gradually, but there are too many times the fear of being unprepared stops us from action. We think we can't do this or that because we're not quite ready. Then we dilly dally about doing prep work forever and never actually getting to the thing we actually want to do. I channelled Laura Secord who didn't train for her marathon bushwacking experience. She just got out there and started running through fields and forests.
I didn't wear any fancy duds or pimp out my ride either. I did get a pair of good bike shorts because, since about 40, my butt fat has all gravitated around the corner to my belly - and, just my luck, just in time for a big booty to be in style too. Extra padding was necessary there, but then I just threw on a t-shirt and sandals and my stand-by helmet. And I thought of Marathon Man, and Dustin Hoffman copying Abebe Bikila's run without shoes. But Secord and Hoffman's character were running for their lives. I was creating a situation as if it were a necessity knowing full well it was a luxury. I had to convince myself of an importance for it in order to develop any motivation to go.
For me, the point of cycling is to go places. It's not to work out and live longer because we could die any minute. And it's not to work out to match the current beauty standard because we could be hated anyway regardless our quest for physical perfection. For me, it's all about getting off our fossil fuel addiction. If a middle age woman without any know-how can do over 130 k in a t-shirt and sandals, with a crappy bike, then maybe you can bike to work. Amiright?!
I was once told by a colleague that I could never be a department head because I don’t have a car, but people don't understand that we can get almost anywhere without a car. And we can bike dressed in our everyday clothes. Granted I still used a car to transport my camping gear and daughter, but with more of us cycling, we could definitely use fewer cars. We need to move under our own steam whenever we can.
The trip was also about finding my boundaries, but part of it was about getting over my fear of biking further from home alone – the fear of having an accident, but more a fear of boogie men out to attack me. People are mainly nice and helpful. There are some odd ducks, but the odds are in my favour. And, with the exception of a brief trek on a major highway, everyone moved over a lane to give me space. I was completely safe.
Part of the journey was because I turned 50. I'm in a hurry to do stuff because it gets a little clearer that any day could be my last. I'm still stuck on having a leave-behind, a legacy, even though I'm pretty convinced there won't be generations to come to remember any of this. With climate change, there’ll be no leave-behinds. Having kids or writing a book or erecting a statue will have no impact on future generations if there ARE no future generations because the planet has become largely uninhabitable by our species. This death is a final death.
But some thing can still make me feel like a kids again. When I listen to certain songs, I'm 17 again. And when I’m on my bike, I’m 10, riding to the corner store in my bathing suit with a nickel in my hand for a freezie.
Just beyond the half-way point, at 70 k in, my legs and lungs were fine, but my eyes started getting weirdly blurry, so I took that as a sign to re-fuel. I stopped briefly to stretch, eat, and drink. I just had 23 k to get to the next city where I could sit in a Tim's to wait for the car if I needed to.
I was surprised that it wasn't the hills that got me but the long flat parts where there wasn't anything to mark the passage of time. I watched this in my head as I pedalled:
The music and videos come to me of their own accord, but cycling distances alone takes me to that wonderful zoned-out place where I often come up with entire concepts I couldn't possibly find in my hectic kitchen. Like if it's a coincidence that Rex Harrison played mentor to Eliza Doolittle then later played Dr. Doolittle. Weird. It's a state that can't be as easily achieved with another cyclist there - if they try to have a conversation or if I feel pressure to keep up or have to wait at every turn. That modicum of attention somehow destroys access to the internal world.
And then there's the beauty of the scenery with light filtering through the trees, and the cows cheering me on up the hills. Montaigne said,
When I walk alone in a beautiful orchard, if my thoughts have been dwelling on extraneous incidents for some part of the time, for some other part I bring them back to the walk, to the orchard, to the sweetness of this solitude, and to me.
Prolonged activity allows time to get sufficiently bored to actually start paying attention to the details of the world. Those magnificent details!
But the trip was also about reaching a goal even if I didn't want it to be. My mom died in her 60s of cancer, and my sister got cancer in her 40s. I always expected to die young, and I've been ever impatient to finish things because I might be dead tomorrow. I update my will regularly and leave behind instructions in case I die whenever I leave for a trip. It's not the case that I'm living fearful of death, but that I'm living authentically recognizing that it’s right around the corner for all of us. My son sometimes asks me if I’m afraid to die, and I worry mainly, as a single mom, if they’ll all be okay without me – it’s been my primary worry for the past 21 years. Not just financially, but will they have someone to go to when they feel misunderstood by the world. But other than their future, I think I'm okay with it.
And the trip was also about sheer endurance. We need to suffer in order to grow. We need a bit of adversity in our lives - challenges, and since we've had it easy for so long in this time and place, we sometimes need to create personal challenges. Nietzsche wrote about wishing difficulty on others so they can find the strength to fight. It's not about training to cycle, but about training to get in there. Staying in there for that hill creates the means to stay in there to keep on about climate change and injustices and politics even when most people seem completely apathetic.
And then I saw the sign for the campsite and started singing:
And suddenly I was Rocky at the top of the steps, and Sarah Conner bein' badass in T2.
I felt completely fine at the end. I wasn't sore at all, but I was tired of doing the same thing for so long - almost 7 hours of riding plus a lunch break on top: that's a full work day!
I made it the whole way without being rescued, so I still haven't found my limit.
There will be time....
A hawk hanging out at our campsite.
***
It's curious... actually it's not at all curious... but I posted my bike trip from Runkeeper on Facebook, and I also updated my profile picture that was ten years old. The profile change got 12 times the likes as my journey. Being able to keep my casing reasonably smooth trumps actually being capable or useful. So if you want to impress others, stay skinny, smooth, and symmetrical. Doing stuff carries a more personal reward.
I've heard this before somewhere, but I can't find it to give due credit: Coping with climate change is like coping with being a passenger on the Titanic.
Some won't notice anything's amiss until they're well into the water.
Some will notice it's going down and decide we should continue playing until the bitter end.
Some will continue to insist it's unsinkable. Technology, leadership, something will swoop in to save the day. We mustn't worry ourselves too much.
Some will spend their energy insisting it's not their fault, so it's not their problem. They'll sit stubbornly still in their belief that they shouldn't have to do anything to change the situation even as they feel the ship shift.
But others will get to work, and try to get as many people on the lifeboats as possible and abandon the luxury ship they're on for a better chance at survival in a smaller vessel. It doesn't matter whose fault it is that it's sinking (past focus), nor that one day it might be fixable (future focus), but that right now people are in danger of great suffering.
And, although not a perfect fit, it reminded me of Tolstoy's choices of responses to the horrors of facing a meaningless death:
1. We can live a life of abject ignorance. This is the lowest choice for the cowards and the weak. These are the climate deniers.
2. We can recognize the hopelessness of the situation, but enjoy Earthly pleasures while we're here. These are the many I met on various dating sites I've since abandoned, whose primary interests are travelling and working out. It's Kierkegaard's aesthetic life.
3. We can recognize the meaninglessness of life, but cling to it anyway - afraid to die, but not living authentically either with a self-righteous focus on duty-driven ethical choices. It's a fearful attitude, but more honest than the first two. This is where Tolstoy claimed to be in A Confession, before his final epiphany and conversion.
4. We can recognize the futility of it all and commit suicide. Tolstoy saw this as a noble option. If it's all for nought, then it's weak to drag it out until it's taken from us as if we have no free will, no choice in the situation.
5. We can put our hands in a faith of some sort - and recognize that it's all larger than ourselves. This is where Tolstoy ends up at the end of The Death of Ivan Ilych. We give life meaning through a life spent living compassionately with others and for others, fearless of the end, fully in the present.
We have to keep working towards preventing the suffering of billions. Luckily, if working and helping others, and enjoying others is pleasurable, then it's easy to do. And living compassionately, Tolstoy makes clear, means pitying the people focused on things and appearances and social standing. I don't like the connotation of "pitying," but he ends up with a great love for people whom he formerly hated for their choices and attitude. I believe it's a position that looks at what we can do for others rather than one that sees only how others affect us. But it's a struggle for me to get there when the action of so many need to change in order for this all to work. The actions of so many affect our own survival. As Diamond notes the "impossibility of convincing First World citizens to lower their impact on the world," it's clear we're on a Titanic, and we can only do what we can while we slowly sink into the sea. It's not for us to fix it, but for us to try with ever an attitude of compassion while we work.
Mound of Sound has a post at Disaffected Lib about the likelihood of doubling GHG by 2100. If we don't do something very quickly and very intentionally, then, based on temperature projections from the 1970s on, we won't be able to live in this part of the world sixty years from now. Most of Canada and the U.S. will be basically uninhabitable - not to mention most of the world.
I commented there:
We're no longer at a point where we need contests or incentives to get people to recycle more. We need concrete restrictions - corporate and individual. I'm all for personal freedom, but not if it's costing us our lives. For instance, we could save millions of trees from being cut down each year if we just made disposable cups illegal, forcing people to remember their travel mug or go home un-caffinated. Fuck roll-up-the-rim! And that doesn't have to be a slippery slope to totalitarianism, like I'm sure some will suggest. It'll be a difficult road for politicians to face, but it'll be far worse for us all if they wimp out.
At the end of Luc Ferry's A Brief History of Thought or Learning to Live: A User's Manual (same thing), he suggests that we can get salvation and transcendence outside any religious belief system by being elevated through a singular love. The rest of the book is a chronology of philosophy epochs, and I might think more on that later, but I'm mainly interested in his own ideas about love saving the day.
Luc Ferry was the Minister of Education in France for a few years, and I looked him up to see how that went. A philosopher in government - how Platonic! I tried to find out what policies he implemented or proposed, but could only find scandals about him working at a university but never teaching and then refusing to refund his salary when they asked. Apparently his response to this was to sue accusers for libel. And then, to make his case about the importance of privacy, he told TV reporters about a former minister who sexually abused some children, and he refused to tell the public his name because personal privacy is that important (or maybe because libel laws are so strong suggesting they're a bad thing, but then why would he sue for libel himself?). Something like that.
I don't think personal privacy trumps the safety of children. Just sayin'. But from all the reports, I don't entirely understand his full intentions when he threw that out there on national television.
"If we keep doing what we are now doing, we are screwed. This we know now." - David Roberts
It's going up to 42 today! That's really hot. So far my house is a reasonable 28. I don't have A/C. I open the windows only when the temperature outside is cooler than inside; otherwise, I keep them closed. I keep all the lights off almost all the time, and I avoid cooking. These three things really help.
When we were kids and we whined for an air conditioner, my dad insisted that it was his duty as a good father to ensure we were raised to tolerate the temperature extremes of our part of the world so we could learn to adapt to them. If we were raised with air conditioning, his theory went, we'd grow up intolerant of the heat and then, he assured us, we'd be no good to anybody. We were allowed to have heat in the winter however (20 max) because even strong healthy people die of the cold, but if you're healthy and fit, you should be able to tolerate whatever heat waves Southern Ontario can deliver.
In Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, written in his mid-60s at the end of WWI as influenza killed one of his daughters, he tries to sort out why our lives generally suck even though we seem to be driven towards pleasures and away from pains.
What I love about Freud is that, like Montaigne, he’s just figuring. He doesn’t suggest that he knows all the answers; he’s just throwing out some ideas for consideration:
“We must hold ourselves in readiness to abandon the path we have followed for a time, if it should seem to lead to no good result….I am neither convinced myself, nor am I seeking to arouse conviction in others” (part VI).
Toby, at A Piece of Coffee, wrote an interesting post on Woody Allen and the meaning of life. In particular, he discusses Manhattan to talk about Allen's need for art and music to give his life meaning rather than Hannah and Her Sisters or Midnight in Paris which I recently gushed over. But, as he says, this is a common theme with many of Allen's films: the purpose of life is to enjoy the richness of it, the beauty of art, music, architecture, and people, "to be part of the experience" (HaHS).
Toby says of art, "We distract ourselves constantly, we refuse to think about the meaning of our existence, we skirt around the inevitable." I think art can be a huge distraction, both in the viewing and in the creating. But it can also be a means towards reflecting on and delving into the depths of the ultimate meaninglessness of our lives, particularly if we include writing as an art form. We can be both pragmatically distracted from death and immersed in it as we ponder the very subject enough to make the words that fit together to communicate our ideas. Eh?
I’ve seen a ton of excellent movies this summer, many new releases, but also some films I’ve missed over the years too. There are three in particular that affected me in such a way that I felt I was a slightly different person having seen them.
It all started with the first, Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, which has Owen Wilson about to get married to a mundane, superficial woman when he more or less finds a portal to the past, a place rife with passion for art and architecture and literature. When I left the theatre, the street looked different to me. The film reminded me to notice little things: how some old chairs were arranged on a porch, the slant of a roofline, initials scrawled on the corner of a brick. It reminded me of the importance of paying attention to aesthetics in our everyday life (further emphasized by this article yesterday). It also reiterates that we should never settle when it comes to marriage.
I cannot believe how deeply affected I am by the death of Jack Layton yesterday though I've never even met the man.
This is the time to take solace in philosophy, but it's hard. There's Epictetus' "death is nothing dreadful" path, but this isn't about my own fear of death, or death itself being a worry. It's about the death of this one specific man. It's not really about coping with death at all, but coping with loss, and not just of a person but the loss of hope that we've got riding on him.
