Category Archives: Ahimsa

What you can tolerate will depend

We have different thresholds for what kind of treatment we can tolerate from others. One person’s tough, challenging, funny wise-ass is another person’s humorless abuser sometimes. It all depends on our personality, our experience, our other relationships and what we feel comfortable with.

To some people periodic displays of intense anger are fine, providing the person quickly calms down and becomes reasonable. It’s not hard to understand or identify with anger, we are all subject to it from time to time. We are able to tolerate different levels, displays and durations of anger, depending on the circumstances and our tolerances.

Pirkey Avot, the Ethics of the Fathers, is found in the back of many Jewish prayer books like the ones that are usually at the Bar and Bat Mitzvahs I’ve been forced to sit through over the years. So as the congregation is rising and being seated, (please rise, please be seated, please rise), and praying in unison, I am scanning Ethics of the Fathers, the whole short book is in there, after all of the prayer services. I used to read Pirkey Avot looking for little bits of eternal wisdom from ancient times. There’s one about anger I’ve been greatly influenced by. It describes the four kinds of temperaments with a beautiful, clean logic.

There are four kinds of temperaments when it comes to anger and peace.

One type of person is quick to anger but quick to be pacified. His loss is offset by his gain.

Another type is slow to anger but slow to be pacified. His virtue is offset by his deficit.

Another type is slow to anger and quick to forgive. This is a virtuous person.

The fourth temperament is quick to anger and slow to forgive. This type is evil.

I always thought the Father’s (whoever the hell they were) laid that out profoundly and indisputably. My cousin Eli was quick to anger, and I made him angry many times. But because he loved me he was also very quick to be placated and we would soon move on from the thing he was so angry about a minute before. It was a beautiful thing about our relationship.

My mother had the same kind of relationship with him before I did. She would fight with Eli hour after hour, day after day and when they said goodbye they hugged and kissed and had big smiles on their faces and couldn’t wait to do it all again soon. It was beautiful to see.

If Eli didn’t like you he had no qualms about making a face, turning away and closing a door on you, or, if needed, making a great display of his purple faced anger, which was terrifying to see. As a young man he had no hesitation to punch somebody in the face, if it came to it.

But in spite of his fierceness, his face deadly as a springing jaguar’s, teeth ready to bite, foam on his lips, his face purple, his white hair trembling on top of his head, neither my mother nor later I, ever backed down from his terrifying displays of dominance.

We would say “come on Eli, you have to be honest, if your daughter said that to you you would be pretty pissed off too.” And Eli would rage a bit more, give a few last groans and cries and flashes of teeth, but then he would say “fine, but I have to tell you what happened after that” and he’d continue until the next fight.

After a few fights it was time to go get dinner, take a long time-out, to talk about other things, eat and have coffee in peace and drive back to his place. Only once we were settled comfortably back in our chairs would we resume the fights, which would sometimes go on until late in the night. Every time I left Eli we hugged and kissed and agreed to talk soon and make plans for the next time.

Eli didn’t have that kind of relationship with any of his estranged children or grandchildren. Or really anybody besides my mother, that I knew of. I certainly didn’t have that relationship with my father or mother, I mean we fought all the time but there was none of that hugging and kissing and laughing at the end of it. I guess I was lucky to know somebody like Eli, who could be infuriating, and furious, but was at the same time very easy to get along with.

Strange are the blessings and curses of this life.

A happy, healthy, sweet 5783

The first day of 5783, the new Jewish year, dawns after a night of plentiful rain.   The garden is looking very lush after its long, refreshing drink.  Tomorrow we join a group of old friends for lunch and a walk to the river to symbolically throw away our sins, our bad thoughts, our hurtful deeds, the times we gave in to our baser impulses.  Thoughts percolate in my head as every year at this time, maybe more so today than most years.

Today is the first of the Ten Days of Repentance, a traditional time of introspection for Jews, a period when we are supposed to make amends, let go of hurt and anger and repay debts.  In my experience, few people have much use for introspection.  It’s not hard to understand why.  It makes people feel like shit to spend too much time thinking about their real motivations, confronting the demons that make them act with (justifiable) brutality toward others.  We would rather feel right, just and loving than wrong, unfair and punitive.  If you think I’m wrong, unfair and punitive I’ll show you who’s fucking wrong, unfair and punitive!

Some people pray at this time of year.  I’m with Ricky Gervais on this: pray, by all means, it’s fine, but do not cancel the chemotherapy.  Prayer is between you and God, if you have that kind of relationship, have a deep, prayerful talk with your Maker.  Not for me, though.  Prayer does nothing for me.  If I talk to God at all it’s as an equal, made in the All-Merciful’s image, as we all are.

The arrogance of humans can be seen in a hundred variations, in every direction.  If you are ashamed, crush whoever makes you feel ashamed.  If you have hurt somebody, it’s their fucking fault for being an asshole.  If you are caught in a criminal act, blame others, wail about being persecuted by ruthlessly unfair enemies.  

Religion can ordain certain actions, but it cannot cause a greater truth to enter the heart unless people allow it to.  We surrender our own will to a higher will and feel righteous doing so, some of us.  Others try to live a life of fairness, expecting no more of others than we ourselves are capable of.  Then we will have a war, where both sides fervently believe God has our backs during the righteous slaughter.  Pathetic earthlings.

Best to you all for a happy, healthy, sweet 5783.  May it be much better, in every way, than 5782.

Damaged souls

Both of my parents were damaged souls, as are my sister and I.  It is a struggle to do certain things, because of the damage.  To resist anger when we feel unfairly judged is hard for everybody, harder for me and it was harder still for my parents, whose struggle with intense frustration only ended when they died.   

My parents were severely damaged because when they were young, instead of a soft hand on them when they were hurt, they got harsh blows from a mother who was very damaged and physically aggressive when angry.   In the case of both of my grandmothers, I have no idea what damaged them.   They were beating their children long before their entire families were murdered by other damaged people, following the lead of a charismatic uber-damaged person who told them to destroy everyone like my family. 

Trauma is, sadly, a common part of our experience as humans, it is also part of our shared experience and history.  Lucky are those few who grow up without experiencing any trauma.   A girl can have a wonderful childhood, grow up to be a fairly happy young woman, and one day, minding her own business, fall victim to a vicious predator, which will traumatize her, no matter that her life has been so kind to her so far.  Her trust in strangers will be snatched from her forever, she will never walk alone down a street again without fear.   

Knowing that people who act like destructive assholes are acting out of their damage is little help, of course.  Being damaged confers no right to damage anyone else, but it is also sometimes irresistible, to someone in great pain, to inflict pain on somebody else.  I’m not just talking about whipping a baby in the face, breaking a sturdy wooden stick over a child’s ass or throwing them on the ground and kicking them over and over.  You can inflict exquisite pain merely by refusing to extend mercy when it is asked for.  The beauty of this form of sadism is its subtlety. 

“You assume my silence means I am refusing to extend mercy, because everything is about YOU.  I am very busy, I am thinking about a lot of other things, I have responsibilities and things I have to do every day, I have people who depend on me.  Unlike you, I do not enjoy the leisure to sit and brood, and write, and draw, and play the piano, and cook, and imagine, while doing so, that I live in a better, higher world where creativity for its own sake is of great value.  I live in the real world, and in that world you suck up your childish personal feelings, you forget about things you say ‘hurt’ you and you just move on like an adult, instead of being a pathetic, dependent, needy little worm. I am strong, you are weak, why would I surrender to you?”

Of course, you will seldom get this kind of detailed response unless you press someone for it.  Once you get the indignant summary of their total innocence, and your utter unworthiness, you will know the story in better detail.  The damage done to them made them ignore you when you needed understanding and sympathy.  That’s easy enough to follow, but what do you do then?

I wake up thinking about this quite often.   Friendships seldom last a lifetime, and when they begin to fray this is the kind of thing I wake up thinking about.  Why is it so hard for a friend to just acknowledge that it was wrong to do something that hurt me, wrong to tell people an untrue story about our respective roles in the death of our friendship?   

I consider the cycle: we are all sometimes hurt, develop defenses, get hurt again, build walls, try different strategies, get hurt again, fortify our fortifications.   I think the only way out of the cycle, if we care about the other person in the conflict, is extending the benefit of the doubt, having an honest exchange, reaching mutual understanding.  I also realize the vulnerability required in this process is impossibly threatening for some people.  Too painful for those who insist they are what they are, take it or leave it, nothing fundamental can change about them, plenty of people love and admire them and that it’s your problem if you need more than they are capable of giving you.  On one level this is absolutely true.  

My father, a man who stuck to that formulation of life, had deathbed regrets about living that way.  “I think now of how much richer my life would have been,” he said in that raspy dying man’s voice, “if I hadn’t seen the world as black and white, if I’d been able to see all the nuance, gradations and colors that are actually life…” Then he died.

Personally, I think making the effort not to die that way is important.   Different strokes for different folks, I suppose.  It is much easier to act like you’re not damaged than to live with the damage done to you and trying to heal it.   That there, to me, is one of the great tragedies of the human world. 

How to start to heal from trauma

Here in the home of the brave, the rugged, macho, eternally prevailing individual in a winner/loser culture where a real man will shoot you in the face to take what you have, as long as the law allows it, you might as well pack it in if you’re weak, or squeamish, or traumatized.

In playing the game as it is laid out here and trying to compete as though this culture of indifference, addiction and exploitation is “normal,” you can easily lose the thing that makes us humans in the best sense of the word — empathy. The quality that makes people rush into a fire to save a crying baby they never met.

Dr. Gabor Maté, who has made his life’s study the effects of trauma and various addictions, drugs, junk food, work, exercise, avoidance, danger, self-destruction, recently wrote a book called The Myth of Normal. Some of the craziest, most damaged and destructive people I’ve ever met have been obsessed with the idea that they are the most normal people in the world. They are so normal that they will kill you before they will ever look at their own behavior, their own pain, their own trauma. Maté quotes James Baldwin “not everything that’s faced can be healed, but nothing that’s not faced can be healed.”

You can hear an excellent interview with Gabor Maté here:

https://www.democracynow.org/2022/9/16/myth_normal_gabor_mate_trauma_mental

DR. GABOR MATÉ:  Well, the key here is trauma. Trauma is a psychological wound that people sustain. And I’m saying that in this society, most of us, because of the nature of the culture, the way we raise children, the way we have to relate to each other, the very values of a society are traumatizing for a lot of people, so that it’s false to say that some people are normal and others are abnormal. In fact, we’re all on a spectrum of woundedness, which has great impact on how we relate to each other and on our health.

And when you isolate people, atomize them, you make them feel guilty or weak for their illness, and tell them to get over their trauma, you’re just shaming them more, you’re isolating them more, and you’re entrenching them more in a traumatic imprint.

What people need is community, contact, compassion, safety. That’s what allows people to work through their traumas. And unfortunately, that’s not really available.

The human need to be heard

I was doing my laundry the other night, at around 2:00 a.m. when the place is empty and I can use as many dryers as I like to get done quickly. When I walked in a guy was engaged in animated conversation with the long time night porter at the laundromat, a very friendly guy from Mexico who speaks limited English. After getting my laundry in the washing machine I went to sit outside and enjoy the central air conditioning that abused Mother Nature has graciously provided in recent nights.

The talkative guy came out to smoke a cigarette. I made a comment about the smoking section and how in the old days you could smoke a cigarette wherever you wanted to. He turned to me full of an expectation that was palpable. He said “can I talk to you, man? I really need to talk to somebody,” and I nodded, told him it was fine.

He was in turmoil, his wife was about to leave him, because after four years clean and sober, he’d fallen off the wagon, having a few drinks on the third anniversary of his father’s death. He always used to drink with the old man on his birthday.

He told me about his life, and it turned out his wife was also in recovery as he put it. I said maybe that’s why she’s so freaked out about your falling off the wagon, she sees it as a threat to her sobriety, that the same thing could easily happen to her. He was amazed by this simple idea, it seemed the thought had never occurred to him.

His sponsor had told him recently that he needed to start reaching out to people, for their opinions, for their insights, for help. I told him his sponsor sounded like a smart person, that it’s good to get perspectives from people who don’t know you because they have nothing to gain, no axe to grind. I had nothing to gain and no axe grind, and even though he never let me actually finish a thought, he was clearly very relieved that somebody was listening to him carefully and taking the trouble to respond with some thought.

When our clothes were dry and we packed everything up to leave, he thanked me and we exchanged a strong handshake. I told him he was on the right path looking for insight, understanding, that it was a good sign that he was reaching out. I wished him luck and I told him I was confident that he’d be okay, because most people don’t even bother looking for insight in their lives and he had a big leg up on everybody like that.

The experience reminded me again of how important it is to be heard. One of the most effective ways to stomp the living heart out of a person is to subject them to complete silence. They can speak, they can lay their heart bare, but by not saying anything in return you can make it very clear to them that they’re fucking dead to you.

Life or death. When Death finally comes we have nothing to say to it except to go. During our life we can choose the way of life or the way of fucking death. Me, I’ll take life every time.

It hurts to know a friend is dying

I heard from the widow of a beautiful soul I knew for many years that my old friend Les has been struggling for the last few years against a rare and relentless form of cancer called liposarcoma.  He’d always been thin, but this cancer, which attacks fat cells, found plenty of places to grow large, aggressive tumors among major organs inside his body.  Since his cancer is rare, and research dollars are scarce, they don’t have many options to treat it. They remove chunks of him and keep him on chemotherapy, while paring down their predictions for his life expectancy.

His daughter graduates high school next year.  He told the oncologists he wanted to live to see her graduate college and they told him it was possible.  Then it was trying to keep him alive until she graduates high school next year.   Now it is any day, apparently. 

I hadn’t realized it had been so long since I spoke to him, I’d known nothing about his grim situation until a few weeks ago when I found out by chance.  Last I’d heard he’d had complete remission from a scary bout with prostate cancer a few years back.  We’d kept in touch over the years, but not that closely, and apparently not for a while before the pandemic lockdown.

I called today and a woman picked up Les’s phone.  It was his older sister, who told me her little buddy was in bad shape, emaciated and grey as a prisoner in Auschwitz.  Something the doctors told him recently had finished off his will to fight, she surmised.  Her little sister, who lives near Les, had called and told her that if she wanted to see him, she’d better get down there.  She arrived the other day.  

He sleeps most of the time, they installed a hospital bed and have hospice nurses to attend him at home.  He’d been falling, so now he’s pretty much confined to bed, except when he’s helped to the bathroom.   His sister, who I met once during a shiva call after their mother died, seemed glad to talk and we chatted for a few minutes.   She’d moved to Kansas City, which was nicer than she thought, her daughter had insisted she move to where they were.  She passed a Denny’s when she got near her brother’s place in Arizona and bought a shake they used to love back when they were kids in Brooklyn.  He hasn’t been eating, nothing, for days now — never a good sign.  She offered him a sip of the milkshake and “the little stinker drank 3/4 of it”, she reported happily. but nothing since.  

We talked about things, moving between little details of our lives and her brother’s misery and soon to end life.   I told her to send my love, and Sekhnet’s, to Les, since he seemed to be sleeping.  I told her I’d try him again soon.  She told me to hang on and tried to rouse him.  She persisted for a long while, repeating my name a few times, it seemed he was deep in sleep.

Then I heard sounds coming from Les that I have never heard come from a human being.  The sounds were like a series of strangled barks overflowing with emotion.   He was trying to speak, or was in distress, or both.  His sister told me calmly that she needed to call the nurse, she thought he had to go to the bathroom and she wasn’t strong enough to help him out of bed by herself.  I told her to take care of him, and herself, and that I’d call again in a few days.  

I’m still thinking about that sound Les was making.

Morbid thoughts

We’ve gone through a recent plague, a plague on all our houses, Death dashing merrily through the land (and still reaping a good harvest of souls even now).  The NY Times silently notes in today’s Coronavirus Tracker that there were 90,428 new cases in the US yesterday, 37,770 hospitalizations and 473 Covid-19 deaths. 

473 deaths, ladies and gentlemen, that’s like 80 mass shootings, yesterday.  That’s close to a month’s worth of daily US military veteran suicides, which Obama noted are about twenty per day (thank you for your, uh, service…).

Multiply that number, 473, by 7 and you get over 3,311 dead Americans this week. From Covid-19.

With death swirling around us, and threats of death in the news, riots if F POTUS gets what would be coming to any citizen who’d done any of a dozen things he’s done, it’s natural that the mind turns to morbid thoughts.   

I limp to the other room, wince my way down a flight of stairs to get my glasses, climb back up, jaw set like I’m scaling a cliff.   Fucking hell, hyalouronic acid, WTF?  On my nose, already a cratered battlefield of minor cancers removed, the tingling of a new basal cell.   Fucking hell.  Got to find a decent dermatologist, one who won’t push me into a chair, make a generous cut around an invisible basal cell and simply cauterize the edges of the excavation because he’s not being paid enough to do the much less scarring Mohs surgery that was approved.   The new glasses seem to be working OK, though once I have the cataracts removed, and my vision is once again correctable to 20/20, all bets are off.   Blood in the urine, nothing to get excited about, simple and gross hematuria, doesn’t happen that often, but a trip to the urologist is in the cards as we’re monitoring high PSA numbers.  That literal pain in the ass?  No idea, have to find a proctologist, the one I went to for my last colonoscopy has apparently retired since then.  

Funny thing, though, the relief I got from the burning anus, in the form of some kind of medicated suppositories, seems to have turned the hematuria bracingly painful one day.   One day after my urologist emailed “sure” to my question about whether I could take phenylephrine HCl 0.025%, which had a warning about consulting your urologist if you have an enlarged prostate and difficulty urinating (I didn’t have any difficulty when I consulted my longtime doctor).  I could not urinate. Needing to pee and being unable to gets your attention, for sure.  Then, a small, bloody trickle, it felt like I was trying to pass a kidney stone, a sweaty several hours drinking copious amounts of seltzer (counterintuitive that when you can’t piss you have to flood yourself with liquid, but true)  until I was able to pass a soft clot and have an ordinary piss, without cowering.    Can’t sit here much longer, at the moment.

Just another day in the life of someone my age.   Getting older is not for the squeamish, boys and girls, but also, when you consider the alternative, it is the best thing going.   And a reminder, while we are here, to keep on doing the very best we can for ourselves and the people we care about.

Storyline # 9

Four old friends share a vacation house for a few days. For reasons none of them understand, tensions continue to escalate. Each one unwittingly plays a part in this rising stress. By the third or fourth night, one, feeling provoked by another, reacts in fury. Later, another will lash out in anger.

People under stress get mad from time to time, especially among people they love, who, being safest, are easiest to take anger out on, which sometimes just happens. Hurt feelings heal, hopefully quickly but certainly over time, given patience, kindness and communication.

Injuries to esteem can be traumatic, especially if familiar from earlier life and prolonged. Their pain can threaten, even kill, old precious relationships.

Friends in the grave are no different from friends who are alive and of whom we no longer speak, their righteous hurt become intolerable to us. Except that it’s mainly the other living ones we sometimes can’t forgive.

Story time redux

My post Story time was not meant to imply that all stories about the past are equally true, or that stories — narratives largely about what is true and what is not — are whatever we claim they are, only that they feel more or less compelling to us based on how well they satisfy what we need.  Stories make us feel a certain way about ourselves, some sit comfortably, others are very hard to sit with.  We prefer the ones that confirm that we are right to feel and act the way we do.

You can’t argue about what somebody deeply feels, the feelings themselves are as real as anything else in this hall of mirrors we homo sapiens live in.   It may surprise you to learn that an old friend believes the story that you chose to viciously torture your closest friend and sadistically refused to let up until he cried uncle by giving you something you felt he was withholding from you.   Your surprise at this unexpectedly harsh portrayal may prevent you from calmly asking a reasonable follow-up question.  

Even an open-ended expression of confusion like “have you ever known me to act that way, in our long experience as friends?” may or may not give you the answer you seek, because once strong feelings are tied up in believing a story you were convinced of, by the sincere tears of someone else you love, the issues become very clear to you and such questions are seen as yet more Devil quoting scripture to evade all responsibility, all decency.   The fact will remain, whether it can be shown or not, that you are the kind of person who tortures your closest friends and then fights to the point of exhaustion, like Trump, to deny every count against you, reasonable or not.  If you feel your name was unfairly harmed, that’s your problem for acting so despicably and still insisting you did nothing wrong.

This is one reason a Jewish scholar called Chofetz Chayim wrote a long treatise on the importance of not harming others with malicious talk.  You may be hurt, you may be angry, you may be sorely tempted to prove that you are right in your very strong feelings — but tread carefully when letting loose an arrow that can puncture somebody else’s good name.   You cannot take that arrow back.  You have done permanent harm to somebody by, in your hurt,  expressing a one-sided view of their unworthiness to be trusted or loved.    Refraining from this kind of thing can be hard to do, especially when we are under stress, hence a shelf full of volumes by this sage on the subject of holding your tongue when angry at, or hurt by, someone lest you damage their good name in the community.

On the other hand, if someone has molested children, and successfully hidden this, and you are aware of it, you have a duty to warn the other parents and members of the community.   The prohibition about speaking ill does not apply to people who do unprovoked, terrible harm to others.   We all do harm to others, but most of it is subjective and very little of the harm we do is done deliberately.   Not everything harmful is subjective or accidental, of course.  Rape is not subjective, murder is not subjective, lying under oath is not subjective, these things may be disclosed to others who may be harmed.  In those cases, we have a duty to warn others.

In the ordinary run of things, the stories we tell are harmless enough most of the time.   We recall one detail another person has no recollection of, we talk about who has a better memory, we reminisce, we tell stories about the past that may or may not have happened exactly the way we tell them, but these shared stories bind us.   They become part of us, many of these stories, the ones that make impressions on us.  At the same time, we are bombarded by stories that make no sense in light of the facts, that rely on “alternative facts” and emotional buzzwords calculated to make people want to take our side against demonic enemies.

If you break a law, and law enforcement negotiates with your lawyers for a year, and then you partially comply with the law, and then a subpoena is sent for the rest of the unlawfully taken things, and you defy the subpoena, and in a quiet follow-up visit from authorities your lawyer signs a statement that everything unlawfully taken has been returned, and then a lawful search, conducted after a detailed showing that there are probably stolen items remaining with you, yields a truck full of unreturned items, proving that you have been lying all along (or, as the Grey Lady styles it “raising questions as to whether you have been fully forthcoming”), you may tell the same story this way:

Evil partisans just want my blood, they have been howling for it for a long, long time.  If they can do this to me, illegally raid and ransack my home on bogus “charges”, they can do it to anybody (who accidentally “steals” sensitive government documents) and they will do it, and much worse, to you and everyone you love. This will not stand and we have to show strength, force and resolve and fight like hell, with our beautiful Second Amendment, if necessary, because if we don’t fight like hell we’re not going to have a White Christian Nation any more.

In personal life, as in politics, the stories we tell will hit the mark or miss based on how compellingly they play to our emotions.  What is more compelling than a dear old friend, a very tough and private person, telling you, in great pain, that her mate, a strong and well-respected man, wept every night because the torture he was forced to undergo at the hands of his merciless “best friend” was so painful, so vicious, so unfair, so inhuman?  All because this “best friend” was hell-bent on being right, and getting what he needed, no matter the cost to others, and his monstrous will was twisted to the inhuman goal of forcing the poor guy to comply with his distorted version of the story.

Hard, very hard, to be a human living, and trying to be kind, in hard times.  If you need more examples, look in any direction.  Before any of us add the personal troubles we all have, the list of urgent threats we all face — ongoing, literally fascist take-over of our experiment in democracy, continued destruction of the habitat for all living things, a deadly pandemic we have “compromised” with anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers over (almost 500 Americans died of Covid-19 yesterday, c’est la vie), the normalization of lying and political violence in public life, amid systemic injustice, an epidemic of hopelessness, self-harm, murder and suicide, to name a few, are a very heavy load, before any personal worries enter the equation. The shared threats alone are quite enough to overwhelm the strongest among us.  Plus, none of us, alone, are really that strong. Our best hope is with others.

That’s why it is so destructive to spread a poisonous story about a friend in the small community of mutual friends. Take away a person’s good name and you take away their hope for any understanding, from anybody. Not something that’s easy to defend, except, of course, with a truly compelling story.