First Principles

When I started this blog I was looking for a tag line; an overarching sentiment that expressed what it was going to be about.  The line from U2's - One - said it all.  I do come here to find insight, to search, to look through the tracks being laid down in my brain.  Others could see this as more navel gazing but I felt as though I need to live my life as well as be the resident pathologist or forensic expert that resides within.  I have to be the one who goes in to play Jesus to the lepers in my brain.  There are many.

So...cleansing, detoxifying, purifying...these words are tempting.  The notion of deconstruction, a return to first principles and a building of something new, something beautiful, is tempting.

There isn't an iota of order in the way I live my life.  I don't live well.  I don't air things out often.  There are years of sediment, years of accretion of things.  Sure my slate is cleaner than most, perhaps I haven't even lived enough through it all.  But I probably need to break this slate and start afresh.  Either way, a deconstruction and a getting back to first principles is called for.  Or so I feel.

I headed on over to a retreat where we were going to be on a system cleansing raw food diet while we explored cleansing and purification possibilities in other areas of our lives.  I wanted to emerge from this experience scrubbed fresh, blinders removed, ready to go at the world in a reasonable and precise manner.  I wanted to reject this overwhelming notion of absurdity that shades everything, clouds every judgment in a fog through which I am finding it hard to emerge.

More on the retreat later.  Before I go there I need to take an archaeologist's look at what lies within.
***

There are many themes worth exploring in this bird's nest of a mind.  Even as I try to keep my thoughts linear and coherent they come unhinged, wanting to digress and bleed tendrils everywhere.  I'll be better off pinning them down as they appear.

There was a clearly marked point where things started unraveling for me at a rather fast clip.  I remember my amateurish attempt at poetry several years ago.  The sentiment I had tried to express then was of an eerie calm, eerie because it carried within it a hint of dread...a sense of hurtling toward a dreaded destination.  I have reached that destination now.

In 2010 I turned averse to everything my life was all about, starting with the job.  I found what I did at work absurd beyond description.  Perhaps my aversion became apparent in my work and I was the recipient of some harsh words from a boss.  I went on a vacation to India after this exchange.

I went with my parents.  I spent many hours telling them about my discontent.  I met my cousin's friend.  I saw the spark of fulfillment in her eyes.  I sensed a freedom in her soul.  I craved that.  But all cravings aside, I didn't know how to get to the same place where she was effortlessly present.  I still don't know.

I spent some time with my relatives in Indore.  My uncle and aunt. as welcoming and as cheerful as ever, their pain and their anxiety about their child's future never evident in their interactions with us.  I then felt ashamed at myself for my petty, almost nonsensical anxieties.

I visited a few temples while I was there.   I felt absolutely nothing in the presence of idols and thousands of other devotees.  I was ashamed at this lack of "shraddha".  I felt out of place, strangely attired, larger than others, more well-fed, uncomfortable, in pain and discomfort at being barefoot on the burning marble, brushing flies away, ignoring beggars.  I felt like Frankenstein.

I was out of place.  I am always out of place.  No matter where I am I feel as though I don't belong in this skin or on the firmament on which I find myself.

I returned from the trip determined to try and get more comfortable with myself.  I was determined to examine the roadblocks to this feeling of "fit" even as none of my clothes fit anymore after the sweets and other treats at every host's place in India.  Landing at EWR in a state of bloat didn't make fitting in any easier.

I returned to work where every absurdity was reinforced.  I was always angry,  always frustrated.  I was angry when cost-cutting eliminated the half-and-half I could use in my coffee, I was rabid when they took my local printer away.  I foamed at the mouth when the workload smacked of redundancy and illogic.

Several times during those months of ferment I came to the conclusion that I had to let go of expectations.  I couldn't expect any happiness from work, any happiness from my disordered home, any improvement in my financial condition, any deep connection with friends real or virtual.  There was a targeted, conscious effort at cultivating detachment.   A detachment that only made me feel less connected and less of a fit.  There were weeks of expectation-free success followed by several weeks of wallowing in dashed expectations that always managed to creep up again.  I was on a yo-yo diet of letting go of expectations.

The one expectation that always stood its stubborn ground, however, was the expectation I had from myself.  Somewhere along the line, through all these years of growing up, I'd convinced myself that I was capable of much more than I had achieved.  This notion is perhaps all in my head.  Maybe I am really only capable of what I have achieved so far.  It plagued me nonetheless.

Perhaps it started with my mom taking a picture of me by the statue of John Harvard, thinking I might end up at Harvard some day.  Perhaps all my friends and relatives who encouraged me when I sang or wrote were just being nice to me.  Perhaps I am not capable of excelling at all. These doubts never leave me.  They are like the little demons I must now fight.

But before these little demons emerged I did believe I could excel in the arts.  This belief was never supported by my inherently lazy temperament and so I drifted in and out of misery at wanting to be someone and then thinking it could never happen.

Through it all, I couldn't stand the tone of defeat in any of my friends.  If they ever felt they were slipping away into failure I would offer them words of encouragement and tell them that they needed to just get up and do it.  Sadly, I was never able to take my own advice.  I didn't think and I still don't think that advice would work for me.

I think fate tried to intervene toward the end of 2010.  I was on the phone with my husband one Sunday while he worked (or played?) in sunny California.  I asked him to say the word, to tell me I could quit.  I wanted him to tell me that I had the green signal (keeping in mind our precarious household finances) to walk into my boss's office and say, "I quit".  He laughed it away.  The next day, at work, I was summoned to the Human Resources offices and told that my job was being eliminated from  NYC and shipped out to Florida.  I wasn't offered a stint in Florida.  I was in shock.  It was almost as if the universe had acted on my behalf when I wasn't prepared to act.


I wasn't sad, I wasn't upset, I didn't even feel worried about our future even though I had every reason to worry.  The severance pay was going to last for a month.  The average job search these days is an 8-12 month long affair.  I should have been catatonic with rage and anxiety but I wasn't.  All I could think of, in that instant, was how I was talking about wanting to quit the day before and how the next day I had my answer.

Over the next three months I spent a lot of time with my daughter.  I tried to introduce into my life the things that I thought had gone missing.  We played together, read together, experimented with cooking, spent time at the bookstores, at the library, for the first time in my life I was a real mom...in the hours when she was home.

The hours when she was at school were strange.  They were spent refreshing contacts, sending résumés, learning that many of the contacts who could have helped me find a job were themselves jobless.   I exercised like a maniac, for hours, then I slumped down on the floor in a "shavasana" state for an equal length of time.  I read a few more chapters of my book after emerging from that state.  I then showered and got back to the task of searching for a job or exploring our bank statements for areas of cost cutting.  I laid off my own laundry and cleaning lady.  I ridiculed my search for a job because I was once again seeking the absurdity I so despised.

Two blank canvases, oil paints, brushes stared me in the face for all those months.  Never once did I pick them up.  My mind was such a blank I didn't know of a single thing I could express in paint.  I have always been excellent at copying things but did I really want to turn out more unoriginal art? I suppose the answer was no.  I practiced all my ragas, scales and études in violin, I tried writing.  But I don't think I have lived through a more uninspired phase.  I felt like an empty shell or a deactivated robot who only experienced motion or animation upon the return of her daughter from school.

Around that time I decided to start volunteering my time.  I answered several requests for volunteers and ended up with three organizations who wanted assistance sans remuneration.  They all did good work.  One was an institution for adults and children with developmental disabilities, the other was doing some work on diseases of the brain and the third was doing some wonderful work helping less fortunate people.

I ended up on my hands and knees putting together dreary employee manuals and filing invoices for the institution that helped kids with disabilities.  I had to photo copy hundreds of pages and then learn how to use a machine that bound pages in a spiral book.  A new skill learnt, a cause for celebration!  I laughed at the lines in the pages that asked paid employees to be nice and considerate to the volunteers.  Once again - absurdity underscored.  Even my volunteering yielded absurd results.

I tried to assist the other two organizations enhance their social media presence.  That was somewhat satisfying until I learnt of their fears and trepidations about having a vast social media presence; they weren't willing to post videos or photographs, they didn't know what to blog about, what they said on their sites had to be censored on many levels, they couldn't understand Twitter or Facebook or the essential why of it.

Before I could get them to understand it all a job came along.  Since the prospect of a year long stint at unemployment was starting to scare me and since I am only able to drag my heavy shackles around when I have some money coming in, I decided to stick an arm and a leg out of the poverty sack and go for a much downgraded job.  These people needed me to do all the things I had ever done at all my previous jobs, they just weren't going to pay me as much.  I decided that would be acceptable.

So I experienced unemployment, poverty, self-pity, joys of motherhood and amplified feelings of inadequacy all under the umbrella of absurdity in the space of three months.

Could I have started a writing project during the time I wasn't working? Could I have envisioned a better life in those moments of leisure and taken a first step towards it? Perhaps.  But something always keeps me glazed over, numb and inactive.  What hinted at being latent in the days of my youth has started feeling stale.

I've noticed a marked shift in my attitudes over the last several weeks.  A few things happened in the weeks leading up to my cleansing, purifying, detoxifying retreat.

I had visited my sister-in-law's home in NY.  While I was there I had pulled down the Carl Jung's "Memories, Dreams and Reflections" from my brother-in-law's bookshelf.  I was absorbed and fascinated by the book.  I couldn't finish reading it nor did I borrow it.  I probably just left it sitting there on his nightstand or some unusual place.

Back home I got deeply absorbed in another book.   I am still only halfway through it because reading time is in short supply these days.  This is Alex Ross's second book called "Listen To This".  It is about the history of music.  The theme of it is that all music we call classical now didn't use to be so.  It was perhaps considered licentious, was perhaps banned.  He talks about other things as well.

The chapter about "laments" was fascinating when he explained the concept of a ground bass line; when he talked about the studies that show that when people mourn, when they grieve, if they express this in sound it's always something close to the same four descending notes -A, G, F, E.  Many pieces of music incorporate this ground bass line also known as the "basso ostinato".  Beautiful music often gets woven around this ground bass - the constant.

When an idea hits home in this fashion, I often put the book face down as I think about all the other associations that get triggered.  I ponder, I contemplate, I dog-ear the page of the book at the bottom.  The reverse dog-ear tells me that there's something on a page I must revisit.

I was in this state of pondering when my brother-in-law emailed me to say that he had noticed I had been reading Carl Jung's book when I visited.  He told me he found what was within horrifying and reassuring.  He said C.G. Jung re-envisioned western religion and philosophy for him.  He also sent me a link to site that had listed Jung's Seven Sermons To The Dead  from his Red Book.

In Sermon I Jung says:

"Not your thinking, but your being, is distinctiveness. Therefore not after difference, as ye think it, must ye strive; but after your own being."

This and many other things he says in his sermons which can be found here reminded me of the Bhagavad Gita.

I am a non-religious person with a very limited understanding of the scriptures and wisdom of the religion into which I was born.  What I've gleaned through the tales my parents, my grandparents and those wonderful illustrated gems called "Amar Chitra Katha" are the bits that give me some succor in moments of confusion.

I've absorbed some fractional essence of what is being said in the Gita.  Arjuna was struggling with absurdity, with the notion of war with his near and dear loved ones and Krishna set him straight in conveying to him that he was doing exactly what he was supposed to be doing in this life.  He was fulfilling his karma.  Krishna revealed his all-encompassing monotheistic form, he talked about the inverted aswattha tree with its roots in the divine and the branches spreading in our world.  Carl Jung's vision of Abraxas jogged my memories and drew me straight back to whatever limited impressions I have of the Gita.

The absurdities in which my perceptions see me drowning are all just a part of this flow.  They are a part of this journey that will end somewhere.  I feel as though I lose my way a little bit every time I question it or react to it in ways that breed doubt and confusion.

By this time my thoughts have all converged into three points of a bookishly acquired harmony - Basso Ostinato, Abraxas, the notion of striving after YOUR OWN BEING and another thought - Nam Myoho Renge Kyo.

I have talked about the last one before in another post.  It is a very compelling picture for me, of the lotus flower, holding its own, flourishing in muddy waters, just like a ground bass that holds it's own as other music happens around it, my own being - a constant, my trials, vicissitudes all a constant as I see my journey in a new light, a journey of being in the world, of the world and finding a way to flourish.

If I was to pick up that canvas now I could probably create something of beauty that reflects these thoughts.  Perhaps the right medium would help the thoughts coalesce into a philosophy.  It hasn't happened yet, as you can see, but I feel as though I am on to something.
***

So we now return to the retreat. I went to a "Goddess Rejuvenation Retreat" in the Berkshire Mountains.  I didn't know what to expect.  I knew some of the people who were going to be there.  I liked them.  The first time I had met them I came away with the impression that they had a firm handle on living this thing called life to the fullest.  I was hoping that a cleansing, purifying, detoxifying retreat such as this would help my thoughts coalesce further.

I was looking forward to the solitary ride up to the Berkshire Mountains, absorbing the brilliant fall foliage while immersing myself in my music.  I wanted a break from thinking and wanted to relish a smooth ride up to the mountains without grasping at searches and thoughts or reliving past mistakes, failures or successes.

It was all going very well for me until this song called "Arziyan" came on.  About halfway into the song tears came, unbidden.  They were streaming down my face uncontrollably.  I didn't want to control them.  I relished being washed in them, they signaled a breakthrough of some sort.  I wasn't sure what it was but the lyrics that triggered the lachrymal response were about complete surrender.  In the last part of the song, throughout the song, but especially in the last part, there is the expression of a sentiment that in a prior life the poet strove for success and glory, had dreams and ambitions and went about it with a certain chin-up audacity that yielded scant results.  He didn't find fulfillment of any sort until he came forth in total surrender:

Sar utha ke maine to kitni khwahishein ki thin
Kitne khwab dekhe the kitni koshishein ki thin
Jab tu rubaru aaya nazrein na mila paya
Sar jhuka ke ik pal mein maine kya nahin paya

It was this message of humility that got to me and stayed with me as the song built to a climax.

By the time I pulled into the driveway of the retreat I felt washed clean.  I felt as if there was a lesson for me.  A lesson that hadn't sunk in in its entirety but was there for the taking; reaching for it was up to me.

There were many beautiful souls at the retreat.  That is a statement that isn't very likely to come from someone like me.  I feel as though the part of my life that I haven't lived in a self-absorbed manner, I've lived observing others.  I am a human camera.  I observe, I absorb, I collect impressions.  I go about it with the detachment of a collector.  I don't say things like "beautiful souls".  I am fascinated by my collection but I have seldom felt any emotional attachment.  That wasn't the case this time.

I studied the faces of the people I was meeting again and I saw some new ones.  I was stunned by the beauty in some, the radiance in the others.  I hugged people with genuine warmth.  I wanted to convey that I really liked them and that I was thankful to be in their presence.  There was a dog there, Daisy.  She felt like a bundle of love walking around the room, spreading warmth with every lick, every shake of her tail.  I haven't felt these emotions so deeply before and I don't understand why I haven't.  Where was I lost?  I felt every emotion coming up to the surface.

My daughter wasn't there with me.  I thought of her, I conjured up her face and I smiled.  Someone asked me why I was smiling and it was because I had suddenly felt as though I love her so much that my heart could burst.  She brings me so much happiness.  How could I ever feel angry or frustrated or in a state of ferment when she is around and being who she is?

As the weekend unfolded all the women got to know each other well.  We learnt of each other's hopes, dreams and deepest fears.  We learnt about our pasts our hopes for the future and we all probably spent a lot of our Sunday crying.

I remember feeling shaken to the core by some of the stories I heard.  Once again I was filled with shame at my seeking, striving, grasping, reaching, permanent anxiety when my life is relatively charmed.

In the last part of the retreat, our brilliantly intuitive host, L, gave each one of us an assignment.  We all had to do some role-playing and enact a scenario.  Each scenario was designed for maximum impact, maximum honesty and catharsis.  Mine required me to take on the role of a drunk woman who had lost all meaning in life.  I was required to select a few participants and recreate a bar scene where I walk in drunk and proceed to tell the bartender about my feelings on anger, desire, lust and confusion.  I was also required to flirt outrageously and act promiscuous with the guys (girls pretending to be guys) at the bar.

I was stunned when I received my assignment.  The part L wanted me to play was indeed me.  Or perhaps it was me from before my tear-washed journey to the retreat.  I generally find it all absurd in the extreme, I have been angry, I have been confused and about desire and lust the lesser said the better (or perhaps that's where the most needs to be said, don't know).  As for acting drunk, I haven't experienced a single drunk moment in my life.  I have never sought inebriation.  I have been asked why and have felt annoyed when people assume it may be for religious reasons.  That is not the case.  I haven't felt a desire to lose control.  I have always wanted to be in control of myself.  Perhaps L sensed that as well.  Perhaps total surrender and control don't go well together and pretending drunkenness may have been a way to send this message home.

I gave my assignment a lot of thought.  I read it several times and during my reading as I hit upon each note therein - anger (hit a key on the piano), confusion, lust, desire (play a triplet) - I felt as though I was on the verge of tears just leading up to my part.  I told the others, "I really don't need to act drunk to talk about these things.  I could write a book."  But when it was my turn I got into the role, I came into the bar singing a drunk song, I staggered, I hiccuped, I slumped forward, flirted with the "guys", danced and kept repeating how my life was all about putting little numbers in little boxes and how it was all so absurd.

I got through my assignment, I was told I made a wonderful fake drunk who danced really well.  E invited me to a dance party and I said, "Sure, just make sure you have my fake booze flowing".

But at the end of it I felt as though I had shut down inside.  That I hadn't really used the opportunity to share the things that tend to eat me up inside.  I felt like I had escaped and wasn't happy that I had.

In the very last bit, before we said our goodbyes, L, for fun, brought out these "goddess" cards.  The eighteen of us, shuffled the cards and picked one up.  Each one got a message that appealed to them.  Mine was loaded with irony.  It was the goddess Coventina and she said to me, "Your soul needs cleansing, detoxifying and purification."  I said to L, "What?? Wasn't this what the last three days were about? There's more?"

L said, "More? There's a lot more!"


I know there may be more, I am just surprised she knows this too.

Endless Mountain Zone

I know I won't remember the year 2011 at all when I am an old lady in a rocking chair, mentally traversing the same roads I travelled in my past.  It has been just such a year, uninspiring, uneventful with expectations lowered to the point of flatlining; no spikes up or down.  Which doesn't really make for a bad year or for unhappy times.  It just feels a bit like the stretch on Route 81, en route to all points north and slightly west, where the sign says, "Endless Mountain Zone", somewhere near Steamtown, Scranton, PA.  The area in question is endless enough even if it isn't quite mountainous.  The satellite radio loses its signal, the cell phone enters a dead zone.  All one can do is drive and hope that road hypnosis doesn't set in.
Yes, that's what 2011 feels like.  It's an year of feeling resigned.  It could have qualified as placid contentment if one was more mature, less restless and more enlightened.  A year of no plans, no expectations, no excitement.  A year of being resigned to a lowered salary and rising expenses, no vacations, not even
"staycations" because one has grown traffic averse in the extreme and somewhat conscious of gas expenses.
The things I used to enjoy in 2010 have receded into distant memory.  Reading, loading up all my electronic gadgets with music or books, lunch hour explorations of midtown, east side, finding something new and exciting every day, watching people in all their quirkiness of attire or mannerisms, their classic unconcern with what anyone thought or felt and every now and then an amazing glimspe of sartorial elegance.  Those who know me well, through what I wrote then, would also remember that I used to whine a lot.  I was always complaining about the bus, the train, the hours lost commuting and about the dull nature of a very routine job.  I did go on and on about that to anyone who would care to listen.  There is some truth to the grass being greener on the other side, it seems.
The truth is that I don't miss the old job and I don't miss losing four hours of my day each day... but I do miss New York City with all my heart.  For the last 15 years New York was an exciting second home.  I loved having a connection to a wonderful city that's really like no other.  A city that's more like a living, breathing organism pulsating with contagious and life-giving energy.  When I spent time there I was inspired and alive.  I had more days where I felt as though anything was possible, as though expectations never needed to be lowered to the point where they were a flat line.  The city embraced me, I returned the embrace and sensed a oneness.
Now the commute is an hour shorter, even if the hour is spent crawling at speeds that often make me wonder if I could get to work sooner if I walked! I sit there examining my aging face in the rearview mirror in the long spells when the car just doesn't move, each additional minute spent in traffic adding another line around my eyes or my lips, asking myself if this is how it's going to be from now on? There are no discernible crow's feet yet unless I squint a certain way but the grey hairs are certainly threatening to explode into the likeness of a powdered wig.  As the car lurches forward again the maudlin thoughts give way to a realization that these thoughts are bringing one down and that one needs to crank up the radio.  But then the radio plays something horrendous like, "She was a fast machine/she kept her motor clean..." seemingly for the fifth time in five listenings, reminding one that one's own "fast machine" is going nowhere in a hurry, it's just sitting there rusting.
That's when the iPhone comes out with it's voice recording feature.  Singing all the songs I know, I lurch forward some more.  And so the ride goes, all the way until we exit at a nondescript exit and into the parking lot of a nondescript building with no surrounding points of exploration, no lunch hour excursions.  No lunch buddies since everyone is either on a diet or working straight through lunch.  We saddle up for a day of intense, focused work, telling ourselves that this is what the Bhagwad Gita preaches.  Work, work, work, no expectations, no distractions, just an intense focus on one's work.  This time the cubicle at work has no personal affectations, no pictures, no collection of jackets, sweaters draped over the chair or shoes under the desk.  It's work in all its purity except when I take some time off to tell my virtual friends that Gladiators, cactii and creeds are the things on my mind.  They probably think I've lost it when they read something like that from me.  But my reference points are not entirely random.  I conjure up the image of Russell Crowe playing a gladiator in the movie "Gladiators".  His character has a family back home, he is enslaved and he just does what he is required to do as a gladiator, unemotionally and with immense detachment.  I think of the proud saguaros lining the Arizona landscape, self-sufficient in an arid climate, their inner resources intact and then I summon up the question of creed after having read, in an article about Clarence Darrow, that life is intolerable without a creed.  We all have a creed, we need one to get by.  What's mine, I wonder.
The evening drive is similar to the morning's drive.  Fiddling with the radio, listening to the phone recordings of one's own voice, making phone calls (handsfree, of course) wondering about dinner and whether the rest of the evening could be effectively parsed into the things that I need to do to tell myself that I am intelligent and alive and have interests that just won't quit, quitting them would be like quitting on myself, driving the flatline of life even lower if such a thing was possible.  So we practice our scales and études on the violin, we fire up the electronic tanpura and sing the longer notes, we do what needs to be done for dinner and then watch the family members disperse to their own separate spaces of the house.
Then it's just us - me and the bright screen in front of me...demanding...something.

The World As You Don't Know It

After my daily dose of news snippets I was thinking about how potentially massive change in how we live and how we see things, is evident in little bits of news.  In the last few days we heard about Katie Couric, Meredith Vieira and Matt Lauer all making the decision to leave network television.  Is it network fatigue or is it a realization that they could do so much more with a crack at personal branding?

 The Katie Couric Show, The Matt Lauer Show, these are all real possibilities and for these people, if they choose to go for these personal branding opportunities, success is more likely than not.  In a world where the distinction between varying degrees of celebrity is fast blurring, people like news anchors suffer the possibility of extinction and redundancy if they don't take some steps to underscore their ability to command an audience.

Along similar lines, not much of a digression at all, we hear about CNN ratings slipping because "Breaking News" doesn't bring in viewers anymore.  It has been several years since I tuned into a channel that brings breaking news because by the time they break the news it has already been broken by citizen journalists and microbloggers.  No sooner has an event happened that politico.com tells me all about it...within seconds of it happening.  

Then there are newspapers, the news about newspapers these days is about them finding ways to adapt.  There's the New York Times pay wall, they won't be giving it away anymore and there is no reason for them to do so.  They have enough equity in their name, enough followers of their brand of long form journalism, there are enough of us out there who would rather pay what NYT wants to charge than be deprived of reading what they have to say.  Most of the top newspapers - The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The LA Times - are all in the same boat and they need to ride this wave with a certain degree of panache and equanimity about the fast moving, shifting and often alarming quicksand nature of events in our times.

 USA Today, another major newspaper in the news today is debating whether they want to pay bonuses on the basis of "page views".  That's another example of a dawning realization that "what" is being written is about to take a backseat to "how many" read it and "who" wrote it.  Perhaps this was always true to some extent.  Success in media cannot be expected if the "what" ever got sacrificed in its entirety.  However, chances are, that something immensely readable could vanish without a trace if enough people haven't "liked" it, "shared" it, "recommended" it or ""Digg'd" it.

Sometimes one has to re-state the obvious, if only as a form of exclamation: the world is changing.  Say "Duh" if you want to, but it is.  We can nod as though we understand it is changing.  We can make it a topic of conversation at the cocktail hour and offer up our own examples of the ways in which it is changing: little children adept at treating smartphones as an extension of their developing brains or their fifth appendages, governments being toppled over because people feel more empowered than they ever have before, a YouTube video made by the mayor of a small town in north eastern Japan getting him an unprecedented wave of concern and real if not physical support, making him feel like he isn't alone in this tragic world, free and abundant open source applications digitizing people to their heart's content, people buying from each other instead of from big corporations and more...profit motive? What's that? It's en route to being passé when there are an unbelievable number of people who care more about the impact they are making; the magnitude of their impact, their crater-creation ability rather than dollars and cents, Julian Assange of Wikileaks fame would be such an example.

Julian Assange is a good segue into one final thought about our legal institutions.   A professor of law, who is memorable to me for his insistence on being called a doctor of jurisprudence, drummed into us the principle of stare decisis.  The principle whereby judges are expected to respect the precedents established by prior decisions.  He told us that our entire legal system is based on precedents.  Just think of lawyers quoting prior cases in every argument they make.

 What happens when precedents don't exist? If most of our lives will be led entangled in the world wide web of pleasure, pain and intrigue then won't all our crimes be committed in this same world?  Where would they find those precedents? They would set new precedents, wouldn't they?  Hard to imagine those ancient Supreme Court justices all up to speed on this, but I suppose they soon will be!  

In a few years this world will  be unrecognizably better for those of us who call ourselves optimists and who believe all change is good, who are not alarmed by it; the new-utopians some call us.  But it could be a very scary for the rest of us.

To plan or not to plan?

"Your destination has arrived," announced the GPS lady, talking to me through the speakers of my car.  She sounded confident and cheery as if she had steered me right, a self-congratulatory note of pride in her voice at a job well done.  Except that the said destination was not in my sights.  I was at the edge of a traffic circle, getting blinded by the angry headlights seen through the rearview mirror of my car, wondering what to do next.  Traffic circles aren't new things.  They are anachronisms.  So even if my GPS hasn't been updated since 2006 chances are the circle predates the GPS, new traffic circles just aren't being built and as such I shouldn't have been told that my destination was a traffic circle when I was really looking for an Arts Center in the New Jersey town of Watchung, a town I had never heard of before.
The planners would tell me life isn't as simple as just getting in your car and driving off without having mapped your route and convinced yourself that you couldn't possibly get lost.  They wouldn't be wrong.  Life really isn't as simple as just driving off in your car, armed with nothing but an outdated GPS, a bag of Doritos and oodles of senseless overconfidence.  But in this world of ours there are the ant types and the grasshopper types.  Ants with their super organized, super structured life, all work and no play, marching along, single file, carrying bits of food.  Grasshoppers...well...no idea what happens to them during their life cycle.  Do they have more fun doing all that hopping on the grass or are they miserable drones (no pun intended) drowning in the cluelessness of their next move? Who knows.  But they aren't known for planning and organization.  Somehow my life refuses to run a course similar to that of an ant's.
I know the merits of scheduling and mapping, of carrying around an agenda with all 365 days neatly marked, but that's where it stops - at this wide-eyed admiration. These excellent qualities are frozen within a beautiful diorama inside the glass walls of a museum.  I have stared at them in awe.  I have admired but have never been tempted to emulate.
Regrets? Yes.  Of late nothing but regrets and yet the leaf is stubborn and refuses to turn over despite the sticky fingers of fate trying their level best. Someone up there is licking those fat fingers with a vengeance, forcing the turning over.  I look around and I see how streamlined some lives are, how self-assured, how confident and I wonder if it was their incessant planning that got them there.  I want something like that for myself because, in retrospect, things appear to be falling apart with a degree of certainty.
So after being lost around a traffic circle, disoriented and disgusted with my inability to find a place, today I sat down and mapped my destination using MapQuest.  I looked for the Panera Bread in the town of Sparta and was told that it was at 25 Country Lane.  I printed out detailed turn by silly turn directions...get out of your front door...turn left to your car...go straight for a few yards...leave your driveway...etc. Then I got in my car and fired up the GPS.  This time I was not taking any chances.  If the GPS got me lost I would have the paper.  Off we went admiring the picturesque settings of Sussex county, the quaint bungalows and the large mansions, the farms, the hills and dales, pointing at this or that while our dear friend, the GPS lady, told us to bear right or bear left or go straight for eight miles.  So far the paper and the disembodied voice were in sync.
A few more twists and turns and there I was outside the largest mansion I had ever seen in New Jersey, set back inside a cul-de-sac, as the voice announced, "Your destination has arrived".  Panera Bread anyone? Nope.  Chances were that the folks who lived here would say, "Panera Who?" if we rang their doorbell. My destination, dear GPS lady, would never be a castle like home in this neighborhood, but I am flattered you thought I had arrived!
What did I do wrong this time? See, planning just doesn't sit well with the people who just aren't used to planning.  The paper from the Google Search and the GPS lady both wanted me to go ask some millionaires if their home was pulling double duty as a Panera Bread.
So I came home.  Told the people I was supposed to meet that I was sorry I couldn't make it but I was perpetually lost these days, that I probably couldn't find my way out from inside a paper bag I was inhabiting with a GPS woman telling me my destination had arrived.
So despite an awakening desire to plan, despite making my plans to plan, I am in a state of paralysis.  I sit there with my notebook, making lists, filling out my calendar, I pause to think, I lift my eyes up at the TV screen and I see some very calm and serene Japanese people pushing empty carts through empty supermarket aisles while the scrolling text at the bottom of the screen tells us of consecutive nuclear reactor meltdowns.  Some announcer talks about lunchtime in Sendai...people would have been thinking about a return to their work desks, about picking up their kids at school, about dinner plans and their own mini-universes within the larger one and at tea time their worlds as they knew it had ceased to exist. Plans washed away, slid under a mobile tectonic plate, crushed beyond recognition.
Can those who live in doll houses with matchstick walls, drive toy cars, sail toy ships and work in pretend jobs at pretend offices afford the luxury of a plan?

Fiction hasn't done it well, yet!

I read this blog in The Guardian today and agreed with the author in that I couldn't think of any fiction with a description of childbirth that sounded real to me.  The descriptions almost always were from the point of view of expectant fathers or midwives or someone in the story who was the only one around when a childbirth was imminent and had to direct the whole "warm water and lots of towels" operation.  No one ever writes about how it is for the woman giving birth.  And like Emily Cleaver says, women often tell her how wonderful it was and how one forgets the pain.
Well, not all of us forget the pain.  I can never forget that pain, nor will I forget the sense of accomplishment, the sense of having walked through fire and emerged stronger, gilt-edged and transformed forever.  I remember the first dull pain.  It felt as though someone was scooping out a small part of my insides with a spoon.  And then the pain subsided completely.  I walked around the hospital corridor waiting for the next one because they told me the pain would come again and would keep coming back with greater intensity.
And then it started.  The next one had me doubled over until it passed, as did the next one and the next one.  It went somewhat like this:
Pain...............Calm (play Solitaire)................Pain................Calm (more Solitaire)..............Pain.........Calm (a few moves of Solitaire).......Pain.....Calm....Pain...Calm...Pain...Calm (don't worry, the anesthesiologist is coming)..Pain..Pain..Pain..Help..someone help me..where are they..where are the anesthesiologists..they're late..Hubby says, "Where are those idiots!!" I say, "Stop it, shut up, HELP, HELP ME, SOMEONE PLEASE HELP ME!!" Nope...too far gone, no epidural possible...Pain.Pain.Pain.Pain.Pain.Pain.UNBELIEVABLE PAIN.  A sense of breaking apart and splitting in two.
And then somehow it was all over.  The baby was out.  I got a glimpse and then she was taken away to be cleaned and swaddled.  All the family members trooped out behind the nurse carrying her.  There was no one around me.
I was no longer the picture and was not yet the frame.  The spotlight had moved away with unquestionable finality.  Things would never be the same.  The lights, perhaps, would only hit me as slanting rays and with partial incandescence from now on.  I was just someone who appeared to be no one's concern at the moment. No wonder not much fiction about childbirth gets written from the perspective of the woman giving birth, she (an important part of the thing that was "she") ceases to exist, a new one takes her place.
Hubby was gone, the doctors were gone, the nurses were gone, the baby was gone, the TV was on and still showing the smoking rubble of the Twin Towers and I was all alone in a hospital room, listless on a gurney, staring at the ceiling to avoid staring at the television and wondering why I was so very cold.  I felt the bed shake with my shivers and my teeth chattered like they never had in the worst of winters.  This frightening state of solitude probably appeared more pronounced to me in that state.  Perhaps it lasted just a few short minutes.  But it felt like an eternity.  Eventually a nurse came in to do some things to me, sew things up, take out stuff that no longer belonged inside me and then asked me to rest and take a nap.  I asked to see my baby first.  They brought her in, I held her for awhile and then slept for several hours.
In the days that followed I felt as though I had moved.  As if my mind had sold its old familiar home under some kind of duress and now inhabited a place that would take some getting used to. Things didn't look as I remembered, things didn't work the same.  The mirror reflected a different person.
The times with the bundle of joy were immensely rewarding most of the times but often one just felt like food.  The bonding was instant on some levels and not so much on others.  There appeared to be a short-lived tug of war inside.  One that the baby finally won and continues to win day in and day out.

Employed at Will

Today I was putting together some employee handbooks for an organization where I am volunteering.  I read through all the standard employee handbook language as I copied each page and placed them in binders and gave in to nostalgia while conducting each mechanical action.  There was a time when I was a frequent recipient of these things (well, okay, not so long ago).
I read about the PTO (paid time off) policies, the sick leave policies, the code of conduct and the ominous phrase that reads, "employment at will".  I wondered if that language suggested that it wasn't slavery one was going for but employment at will, or whether it meant that an employer was employing you at will and could dispose of you at will as though you were the human equivalent of a plastic stirrer.  There was also a note about appreciating the altruism and nobility of volunteers and to ensure that they were treated with the utmost courtesy by all employees.  Can't say I had ever had an opportunity to read a passage like that.  My former places of employment didn't do things sans profit motive, so there were no altruistic volunteers for them.
There were notes about 401K plans, about the percentage of employer match...oh how the familiar terms played havoc with my bruised heart!  Perhaps those who request assistance from volunteers should be sensitive and not hand tasks such as the putting together of employee handbooks to people who are no longer employed, perhaps they should make like they are walking on eggshells around this rather sensitive group of people, don't you think? Sigh.  Of course I am being facetious, in case you were starting to take me seriously.
The people for whom I am doing this grunt work are quite incredulous at my desire to help them do this kind of stuff for them and they struggle to find ways to appreciate the help.  Today, as I stood there punching holes, making copies, stacking pages, binding and creating each book, I kept playing imaginary dialogues in my head.  I imagined them saying to me, "Thank you so much, you don't know how much this means to us. Wish there was something we could do for you. Can we wash your car, buy you lunch?"  To which I'd say, "No, perhaps you can just find a reason to hand me one of these babies", while waving one of the freshly minted handbooks at their chagrined and slightly guilty faces.
I am volunteering at a few other places where I am doing more cerebral rather than mechanical things.  The cerebral tasks don't send me into as bad a wallow as the mechanical ones do.  While doing the mechanical tasks I keep telling myself it's alright, I volunteered.  So what if I am just using my hands in carpally repetitive motions and not my mind, the cause is right, it can't hurt.  But there are days when all my pep talk to myself falls flat.
I finished my work early today and was ready to make my escape when they asked if I could also help with alphabetizing and filing some applications.  I hemmed and hawed this time.  I could have walked away and said that I had better things to do but I didn't do that.  I told them I would help but not for the next two days.  I said I would return after a couple of days and get it done.  They were pleased.  I don't know what it is that's motivating my actions.  Is it really a desire to be a proud owner of an employee handbook again or is it something else? Whatever it is, it makes me feel rather strange because I am doing a great job, a perfect job for these people and there is no incentive to be so perfect, so conscientious, so dedicated.  The strangeness I feel manifests itself in a either a sense of detachment and a need to just live through each moment, doing what each moment dictates or in a bout of nostalgia that can even be triggered by a pair of jeans I've owned forever.  I look at this pair of fly button jeans and think of how it has seen me through lean and weighty times - in the literal sense.  I remember wearing it during a trip to Vancouver or to Paris or Amsterdam and then I wonder if I'll ever feel affluent enough to give these jeans another whirl around the globe.
After my hard labor this morning I headed out to the grocery store.  I had been ordered to buy Ore-Ida Crinkle Cut Fries because that's what the little one wanted for an after school snack.  I shopped for a few other things while I was there.  Later as I plucked all the bags out of the cart before starting my walk to the car, I flashed back to my first few months in this country when I lived in Riverdale, MD, before I owned a car, when I used to have to walk to the grocery store three quarters of a mile away and then walk back with the heavy bags, their twisted up handles cutting into the skin of my fingers.  But just before I tell myself those times were not pleasant another thought crosses my mind and tells me that I had a paycheck coming in even then, a miserable $234.35 every week, but there was a paycheck.  I have never been unemployed in my adult life until now.
I did wish for it.  I wanted to see how it would feel.  There are days when I rejoice, when I love how the day stretches ahead of me, full of possibilities.  I cherish the hours I now spend with my daughter, doing things with her, cooking things for her, I love it all.  I willed this.  I have always got what I wanted when I've wanted it badly enough and I wanted this.  I wanted it with a growing sense of desperation over the last year.  So I have it now.  But the joy I feel at an entire day stretching out in front of me, a day where I don't have to visit Microsoft Excel for even a minute, vanishes as the sun sets and I realize I haven't done much to own it.  It has just been another day.

Pinky Promises, Cats in the Cradle etc.

I had picked up the 13 1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear while idling in the fiction aisles of my local Border's bookstore.  I read the back of it and thought it would be an interesting read for both me and my daughter.  I brought it home and handing it to her said we could read it together or take turns.   I told her I might read some pages while she was at school.  And that was our deal.  She started it last week and finished in about a week, reading some parts of it aloud to me.  I couldn't keep my part of the bargain.  I couldn't make the time, even in this current state of extreme leisure, to start reading the book.

Yesterday she sulked for hours because I hadn't started reading the book.

"Start reading it now!"

"No baby, I have other things to do, I can't right now."

"What do you have to do?"

"Stuff.  Stuff on the computer."

"What kind of stuff? Lexulous?"

"Well...that too, but I need to try and write something."

"I don't think you're going to write anything tonight.  Just read the book."

"No, not today, I'll start tomorrow."

I thought I had had the last word on the subject until I noticed that she was not talking to me anymore.  She was answering my random questions with monosyllables or shrugs.  I can't say I am ever immune to the feelings Harry Chapin generated in Cats in the Cradle and so I finally had to hug her and offer up the solemnity of a pinky promise.  A promise that can never be broken, come what may.  I promised that I would wake up on Sunday and start my day with two chapters in the 13 1/2 lives of Captain Bluebear.

So that's how I started my day today, with the first two chapters of Walter Moers - 13 1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear.  I read it while imagining the parts of it that made her chuckle as she was reading.  The book wasn't found in the kids' section of the store.  It's meant for an older audience and has some phrasing and some words that I am sure are not familiar to my nine year old.  But she raced right through it.  She loved it so much that she wants to see it made into a movie.

Captain Bluebear is a poor, lost, orphaned bear who grows from the size of a walnut to a gigantic bear and by his second life has acquired the invaluable skill of crying on demand.  He has elevated the act of crying to a performance in fine arts .  I could have gone on reading to see what other skills he acquires as his life progresses but I was dragged down by an insane fluttering of butterflies in my stomach.  I was paralyzed with anxiety, not into a state of immobility but into a state of meaningless mobility, I was pacing, worrying, picking things up, putting things aside, removing lint, straightening things that didn't need straightening, all in an effort to calm myself down.

I felt like a lost soul.  I haven't known what to do with myself for the last several weeks but I've tried doing some things.  I have made plans, I have cultivated detachment, sown the seeds of zero expectations and tried to welcome the blackness and bleakness of the cipher in which I find myself at present.  It has been a lot of work.  I have had to push my worries aside and deal with each problem as it presented itself.  But it was as if I suddenly didn't want to be so brave anymore.  I wanted to howl like Captain Bluebear who always found a strange sense of calm and detachment after every emotional enactment.

Well, I quieted the butterflies in time.  I showed her my bookmark at the beginning of Chapter 3.  I had kept my promise.  Now it was time for the other standing promise that every Sunday I take her to brunch at the International House of Pancakes, where she never orders pancakes - always chicken fingers and fries.

Now we're back home.  She's doing her thing and I am doing my nothing.