Author: bgarnish

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve listened to less music and more NPR. Not that I like music less, almost like I needed it less. When I think about it, most music is written to convey powerful emotions–usually love, hate, wanting, celebration. As my life settled into a caring marriage and raising a kid, I needed less belting out with the radio or nights dancing ’til I dropped. I did say needed, not wanted. I’ve heard people say ‘we don’t go out anymore now that we’re married, raising kids, etc. Is that really a change in how we get our needs met more than a change in what we want to do with free time?

And, then things changed…In grief I turned to music again. I looked for meaning, understanding, comfort in songs. I found some. I could listen to the Indigo Girls “In Love with Your Ghost” on repeat and just sob. Sometimes my daughter and I played songs for each other and inevitably we landed on one that drove us both into silence, remembering our missing spouse/parent. It hurt and it helped at the same time– shared experience, shared pain.

And then things changed again. M. Scott Peck describes cathexis in his best-known work, “The Road Less Traveled.” From memory, it is the chemical state we call “falling in love”. Our brains are bathed in dopamine and it makes us a little crazy. We don’t need food, sleep, anything except to be in the presence of the object of our cathexis.

I know it’s chemical. I’m not confused that though cathexis can lead to true cathartic love it is in fact, not that. It is a driving urge, ranging from a pleasant buzz to an almost uncontrollable intensity often without warning. Something that powerful certainly deserves respect, acknowledgement, and maybe even its own playlist.

I can’t tell you what should go in a cathexis playlist. With such heightened levels of, well, everything, what might have resonance for one would be like fingers on a chalkboard to another–a big, long chalkboard that makes them want to scream and tear out their hair and cry. As befits me, I have some KD Lang, some Sting, some newer stuff and, of course, that Paula Cole song from “The City of Angles” soundtrack. No, I’m not gonna tell you, you’ll have to go listen to it yourself.

So what? You say, and I get that. Yeah, its intense, and even crazy-making but it doesn’t last long and most people experience it a limited number of times in their life. Intellectually, I agree with you. But, in this current chemical high, its all I can think about. So, I’m gonna go put “Break My Heart” by Dua Lipa on repeat and try not to bounce off the walls until I see the object of my cathexis again.

After my spouse died, I discovered there is going through grief and getting through grief. They are two different paths. At moments they overlap but overall, they take their own course to similar looking, but I would say very different destinations.

Getting through grief is a common occurrence in the West. It is filled with familiar thoughts and phrases: ‘just keep yourself busy so you can’t think’ or ‘when you miss them, remember all the good times you had together’. It is a process full of filling up moments until the feelings of grief can be moderated. If getting through grief had a tagline it would be “I will survive”.

Going through grief seems the road less traveled though I have no scientific basis for my assumption. It requires being with the pain of the loss. A monumental task and, like eating an elephant, it can only be done in small bites. It means intentional moments in the depths of despair not always certain you can leave when you need to. Going through grief’s brand would be “Going to pieces without falling apart”.

In fact, going through grief can be interspersed with moments of getting through grief–especially if they are driven by others. I would imagine the opposite is true as well, but the driver is most likely internal and happening separate from others.

Getting through grief allows the notion of completing the journey and arriving in a place much like the world as it is today without the lost loved one. Going through grief demands accepting we will never be the same, we cannot be the same, the world is not the same because of the loss.

In times of great loss–war, famine, genocide, pandemic–our culture overemphasizes getting through. Perhaps we believe there is too much loss to process, too many people grappling with a new world view at the same time? But, as individuals, no matter the cause of the loss we must decide will we let this loss change us or will we work to integrate the loss into our current way of being? Said another way, will we walk the path of chewing through the magnitude of the loss and, like the hungry caterpillar be changed by the journey or will we be immovable in our view of the world?

Most often I’ve chosen to go through grief though I have my moments of denial, distraction, desertion of my journey. I don’t think I would want to be the same person after losing my partner. It is painful and it can be lonely, but I’d rather start anew then try to be the same without her.

When a local second-hand bookstore was closing last summer, I mentioned to my father I’d been eyeing a set of books on a shelf just inside the door called The Annals of America. I had no idea what they were but liked the way they looked–they reminded me of the hours I spent lost in our encyclopedia as a child. I thought there must be wonderful hours of aimless investigation, like a random Google search, taking me to knowledge as yet undiscovered. A few days later the 20 leather bound volumes showed up in my living room, another gift of knowledge from my father.

Fast-forward six months…last night for some reason I picked up a volume of The Annals of America and discovered they are a collection of  “speeches, essays, biographies, landmark court decisions, editorials, and more that bring history to life”.  The first volume I picked up was from the 1870s called Reconstructionist era. Interesting, I thought, but too depressing right now so I switched to the final volume in the series. Volume 20 was a little thinner than the rest since it was the last and the dialog was still in the making.

As I flipped through the pages I found an article that was originally published in the New York Times entitled “Paving Streets With His Life”. The first two paragraphs said this:

This is still a nation of immigrants.  Immigration, now as in the past, is a permanent fixture.   But the situation today requires a fresh look and critical analysis, since immigration has been on the rise precisely at a time of high unemployment.

Immigration has been increasingly associated with unemployment so simplistically as to imply that closing the doors on foreign labor will solve the unemployment problem.  On the contrary, both immigration and unemployment are established pillars of American socioeconomic life and are not merely the products of current economic trends.

What struck me was the publication date, November 6, 1976.  It seems immigration and its perceived relationship to unemployment for those of us already here, we’ll call them the ‘previously-migrated’ has been in the national dialog for a long time.  The controversy continues today much as it did forty years ago and may well have been the decisive factor in our presidential election.

The article goes on to say we accept sub-standard pay and treatment of immigrants as the cost of doing business in our economic system.  We know immigration, legally or illegally, is not new and in fact is a cornerstone of our economy.  Rather than spend our energy trying to stop immigration we need to focus on a different problem.  Maybe the  problem worth solving is creating a real possibility of upward mobility for everyone– previously-migrated and recently-immigrated alike.  A path that makes more room for living-wage workers while allowing adequate protections for those at the bottom of the income ladder.

Creating a path of upward mobility is akin to wealth redistribution.  And, as my son reminds me, no one wants to give up their place or their comfort for the future possibility of ‘better for all’. Instead, it is easier to rekindle an old argument that resonates with those seeing their ‘American Dream’ slip away.

 

 

It seems to me regret is wishing we had done something differently based on information we didn’t have at the time.

My son once ate 3 homemade buttermilk biscuits in rapid succession.  When I asked them how they tasted, he responded inaudibly.  When I asked again he muttered something I couldn’t understand.  On the third ask he said very clearly, “Regret. They taste like regret.”

Though a humorous example, he was basing his choice on the information he had at that moment (how full he was, how tasty the biscuits were, how many were left, how they might not taste as good tomorrow).  Once the choice was made, the deed done, he received new information which, by then, could not be used in the decision making process.  It reminds me of the definition of insanity, ‘doing the same thing and expecting different results.’

I imagine we all walk around with regrets…some big, some small.  But the feeling changes nothing.  The choice was already made.  We are trying to apply this moment’s knowledge to a previous moment.  Until time travel is possible, I don’t see that happening.  I imagine we would be better served trying to use the feeling to act in a way to right the regretted.  Or, we can embrace the emotional discomfort that often comes along with learning something and thereby, hopefully, avoid a future regret.

My nephew mentioned he was watching French films and writing up summaries to submit for extra credit in French class.  I started thinking about extra.  Where did it come from, what does it mean today? (I think I’ll have to do a whole other entry on how the meanings of words change over time.)

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary it comes from the Latin, “extraordinarius” meaning “out of the common order.”  That seems innocuous enough, lots of things could be out of the common order.  Today, we use it almost exclusively as a superlative–not just out of but above the common.  Extra is better.

Is it better?  When we go the extra mile for people, that’s likely a good thing.  But are we really getting something for nothing when we see “extra 25% free” on a shampoo bottle?  Is watching French films with English subtitles helping my nephew learn French?  What if he watches 100 films, can he get above full credit for the course?

Is working extra hard as good as getting extra sleep?  Do teachers relish the opportunity to grade extra credit assignments or is it just more work for them?  Does doing/going/giving extra lead to success, mitigate failure, have any bearing at all?

I’ve asked a couple of people about the feelings conjured by the word “extra”.  One said it depends on the circumstance, another said extra is just a fancy way to say sucking up and nobody likes a suck up.

I would love to hear what you think…I hope you’ll take an extra couple of minutes and share your thoughts.

Jeffy is a  basenji/chihauhau mix.   Basenji’s are a newer breed in the US.  They were originally African hunting dogs.

I took the picture below from our deck.   It turns out, Jeffy loves to fish.  It’s an odd activity for his combination of desert dogs.  But he loves it!  He can spend hours staring into the lake looking for fish.  As far as we know, he has never caught one but it doesn’t stop him from trying.

It got me thinking about effort and rewards…

In her book, Mindset:  The New Psychology of Success, Carol Dweck talks about 2 mindsets people have:

Fixed mindset – believing a skill, ability, etc. is something some are born with and others are not.

Growth mindset – believing that with effort there is always the possibility of improvement.

I confess I’ve lived much of my life in the fixed mindset.  Example: my 11th grade math teacher stopped class, walked over to me, and said,”your brother got this, your sister got this, why can’t you get it?”  I believed they were born with ‘math skills’ and I was not.  I gave up on math.  I sought a college that would not require me to take math, I changed majors to avoid statistics.  I didn’t have ‘math skills’ so why waste time on it?

After reading Mindset, it occurred to me the only thing preventing me from learning math is me.  Then I started to wonder, how many other things have I avoided or given up on because I didn’t think I had the talent?  We have heard it takes 10,000 hours to master something.  When I heard that I immediately thought, well, I don’t plan to devote 10,000 hours to anything so I guess I’ll just go with the talents I’ve got. It never occurred to me that if “mastery” takes 10,000 hours, what does 5 hours get me?  10?  100?

What ever I gain, what I lose is the ability to stay where I am–to rest on my laurels.  It’s opened my mind to possibilities for growth and improvement and removed an awful lot of excuses.

It’s kind of a rude awakening…if I want something badly enough, the only thing preventing me from getting it is me.  My willingness to make the effort.

So, I’ve picked up some books on Calculus.  I’ll let you know how it goes!

This is Jeffy.   He will likely figure prominently in my posts.  We rescued him in 2010 after hearing 6 million dogs  in California were abandoned as a result of the financial crisis.

Jeffy wakes up every day believing today is the best day ever! Why wouldn’t he?  It’s the only day he has. The only day we can experience.  The only time we have to do anything.  So let’s make the best of it!