Category Archives: Ahimsa

More Framing

I have been corresponding with the widow of my recently departed friend.  It has been a small but tangible comfort to both of us.   I mentioned to a friend the role she seems to have played in reorganizing his friendships after they got married, helping to root out his long-time best friend and old friends like me.  I literally saw the man five or six times since his wedding close to 30 years ago.   It was not that I didn’t get along with the wife, I did, I remember her as gracious and hospitable the two times I visited them at home not long after their marriage.   That said, it seemed clear that she had other plans for his social life than getting to know and welcome his old friends.   This is not uncommon in married life, sadly enough.  My friend wrote back “she sounds like a real bitch.”  I wrote back “not anymore, if she ever was.”      

Shall I be angry, and sad, and lament all the music unplayed, the laughs unlaughed, the help I might have been able to give them during his long, terrible death?   Pointless, all of it.  There is plenty to be sad, angry and full of lamentation about, but how does it help anyone?   You know what helps?  Giving and taking comfort now.  It is all that remains to us that is useful and good after a rare disease mercilessly rips someone we love out of our lives.

Ahimsa is a struggle, no doubt about it

On the ahimsa front, it often seems like thankless work, except in looking back on how much worse it might have been without the attempt to stay mild.  

It is always better not to put the other person on the defensive.  Defensiveness makes a person prone to lash out, rattler-like, and catch you with a fang.  This, in turn, leads to the reflex to crush the serpent’s head, to their countermove, to your ass getting bitten again.  

So even if you kill the provoker, you need to get to the emergency room pronto, Tonto.  There is no winner in such a game, though it is played out countless times every minute around the world.

I am glad every time I’m able to avoid a confrontation with some asshole who desperately needs to have their ass kicked and their face shoved into it.  But it’s hard work, Brownie, for sure, and seems thankless much of the time.  It’s like water dripping and making an impression in stone, the progress imperceptible, except looking back over a long period of time.

That said, it may be the most valuable work we can do, for ourselves and for the world.

Cracked Vessels

We are sturdy and loyal, sometimes, and do each other great turns once in a while.   We are dependable, sometimes, when we are around, and attentive, and we can do a lot of good for each other with very little effort sometimes.   We will not always save your life at the moment you need it, necessarily, and we will die ourselves.  We do the best we can but we are cracked vessels.

An impatient, immature God, picking me up for some use, exclaims “cracked vessel!” and unhands me like I was a scalding hot tea cup with no handle, before I can burn the minor diety.

“You are a scalding hot tea cup with no handle,” Sekhnet pipes, like the constantly singing bird she is.    (“Oh, no,” thinks Sekhnet, “leave me out of your weird fantasy scape”)   I thnk of each one of them, each vessel I’d lift to my dry lips for a drink– cracked.  

Makes me love them no less, these old vessels, but at the same time it fills me with unspeakable sorrow.

A Question of Framing

Look at it this way: either she saved my life or almost fucking killed me.  Or both.  All a question of framing.

A friend had emailed me, just before we left snow covered NY heading for snow covered Boston for Melz’s funeral, urging us to be careful on the road.   I thought little of the warning at the time, seeing traffic on the Grand Central Parkway traveling at its normal speed and the service road dry, responded glibly that I’d ask the driver to keep it to 80 mph.
But, lo, only a few hours later, after a stop for lunch in a Connecticut diner, I had reason to ponder the prudence of his concerned comment  after S, at 80 mph and accelerating, hit a sheet of nicely camoflagued ice in the lane next to the HOV lane and did a donut next to said HOV lane on interstate 84, which is 5 lanes wide at that point, miraculously missing the white car in front of us as we swerved back into traffic, about a foot away as we went into the spin, we stopped for a nanosecond facing the oncoming traffic before S veered to miss one oncoming car, we swiveled again, maybe 180 degrees, somehow no horns blaring as this bullfight at 80 mph went on, no time for that, and then managed to lunge across the last two lanes of fast moving traffic to the shoulder.  Closest to death I’ve ever been.   Thank God none of the oncoming drivers were texting or studying their GPS screens at the time.  
 
S later told how her father, insane ex-Marine Murray, used to take S and her sister to frozen parking lots to practice over and over what to do when you accelerate and hit ice, how to get out of a skid, how to stay cool when you need to have every bit of focus on your survival.  He did this at least 10 times, til he was satisfied both girls could do it.  “We owe our lives to Murray,” I concluded.  There is no other explanation for how we survived.
 
On the way back I saw on southbound 84 that not only was it a miracle and testament to Murray’s effective training and S’s reflexes and instincts that we survived, and extreme good luck, the hand of Ha Shem, and Melz’s hand, but that S, in a hurry for no earthly reason, (we could arrive any time between 5 and 8 and she’d picked 5 to obsessively aim for– we arrived at 5:06), had been an insane idiot the moment before and, accelerating to illegally enter the HOV lane across an unmaintained lane (unmaintained because of double white lines and herringbones, under the thin coating of snow over a sheet of ice five miles long) at roughly 85 mph, had almost killed all of us.  
 
No wonder she was so shaken today and kept hugging me.  They left right after the burial, I drove back with other friends after the shiva call on Melz’s family.  It guess it must have dawned on her more and more overnight that it was not a case of “you saved my life. It’s a miracle!” as I had constantly been framing it, nearly as much as “you almost killed me on the way to a funeral, you fucking asshole!” which is probably a much more accurate assessment of what actually happened.  
It is all a question of framing, I suppose, and how much mercy we employ while putting things into frames.

Tucking Melz In

At the cemetery, which was called a burial park, and looked like a snow-covered golf course, we walked across the graves and their snow-covered plaques marking where the dead were buried — no headstones here — toward the rectangular cut out of earth where our friend’s pine coffin would be buried.   The day, which had been sunny and almost Springlike during the perfect funeral service, had turned grey and the temperature dropped at least 15 degrees.  Collars went up, hats were pulled down, gloves came out.

After shoveling some dirt to finish covering the pine top of Melz’s pine coffin, I spotted  a very successful friend of the deceased.  The young Melz had dreamed of being Fellini, and was in a way, he had a video company and directed and edited short films for business that I’m sure were artful.  He was a very talented  and tasteful guy.   Melz’s friend and colleague who waved to me as I turned from the grave must be talented too, he sold his first great idea for several million dollars, I learned recently.

He and his wife smiled as I made my way over to them.   We spoke briefly about the miraculous perfect game pitched by our mutual friend the rabbi as he sent off his best friend from childhood.   81 pitches, all strikes, 27 Ks.  Nobody has ever painted a masterpiece in fewer strokes, every color and gradation perfect, unforgettable and untouchable in its architecture and balance.

“If he dies before us, who’s going to do our funerals?” he asked, puckish and urgent. 

“Shit,” I said, “you’re right, we’d be fucked.”   Then in an inspiration as sudden as one of Melz’s ridiculous absurdities thrown into the conversation, I said, “wait, I’ve got it, and you’re just the man for the job.  We get Sokoll on tape doing our eulogies. We get final cut, so we can tweak him until it’s perfect… it’ll be great.  I’ll send you my eulogy right away so you can get to work.”

Later, when we presented our concerns, our friend the rabbi promised us he’d do his best to outlive us so he could do our funerals live.

“Let’s go tuck Melz in,” said his wife gently after a round of smiles.  

We walked over to the grave and continued shoveling, burying the pine box that contained the used up shell of the body that once housed our friend.  There was odd comfort in this tucking of Melz in, and I took some more of it, a second round of shoveling, trying to fill the rest of the hole.

Perspective

I am always stunned, though of course, I should’t be, at my age, at how a few facts on the ground can change one’s perspective.  A thought that gives real hope can be the catalyst.  An intelligent comment by a supportive person.  A satisfying conversation with an actual human being on the phone, taking the time to answer all of your questions and sell you the product you need, with a 45 day money back guarantee.  A piece of solid new information that ends the wondering, which can be as exhausting and unproductive as a tongue poking and probing a disquieting new hole in a molar.

If we are lucky enough to have another person in our life to provide a few of these things, when the impulse for most of us is to try (and fail) to solve the problem and then worry along with the worried party– and a hell of a party that is– we should feel truly blessed.  

I vow to always try to be that person who gives what is needed to others in need, though it’s a mighty hard vow to keep, I vow it again, to always try.

If we are lucky enough to remember how quickly and stunningly our perspective can be shifted, from fear and worry to hopefulness, we are lucky enough indeed.

No Surprise, Really

Yesterday, when the ten year-old began flashing several singles and getting other kids to chase him I put a soft hand on his arm and asked him to please not start acting like a hyena.  He laughed at this, naturally, and was for the most part unable to subdue his inner hyena.   I took him aside when we got upstairs and explained his importance, as the main editor of the animation, and how I needed him to focus and fix some badly cropped frames from the previous session.

He focused in spurts, while blasting the soundtrack over the tinny computer speakers.  I set him up with headphones, which momentarily decreased the ambient racket in the room.  Then, with the cans on, he got inspired and began screaming into the mic.   I was determined to record interviews with kids to use as part of a promo I am going to make today, come hell or high water.  

I took the first kid into an empty classroom across the hall where he answered some questions in a very clear and articulate manner.  The only improvement he could think of to the workshop would be less yelling.  He clarified that he meant the yelling of the children and, as if on cue, the loud barking of the hyena-boy, arguing with the other adult, in the hallway right outside the door.  “Case in point,” I said and the boy nodded.

I went into the hall and gestured for the angry kid to come in, to the relief of the adult who was trying to reason with him.  He came into the room howling about how much he hated her, how he was going to get her fired, etc.  I asked him to sit down and try to relax, I had other interviews to do and needed it to be quiet.  I began the interview with the next kid, his best friend.  As the interview progressed I saw it was hopeless, the interviewee insisted on answering in a series of funny/stupid voices and kept looking at his wild buddy to see if the funny voices were working.  The hyena rattled a box of pencils, muttering, trying not to be distracted from his misery. 

I asked him to stop, he couldn’t.   I moved the pencils away from him and told him I was going to interview him next, and he was fairly quiet for the remainder of the short, useless interview with his pal.

When the two of us were left in the room he was sulky.  “You said you would only interview me,” he insisted, out of the blue.   “Everybody says I’m not special,” he complained.  

“Nobody who knows you could say you’re not special,” I said.  “You’re one of a kind.  Don’t listen to anyone who says you’re not special.”

“My teacher told me again today that I’m not special,” he said.

“She probably meant not special in the sense of being treated differently from everyone else.  Special has different meanings, you know.  You’re quite special, and she knows it, but at the same time, she has to treat all her students the same way or people would start saying she was being unfair,” I said.

The interview didn’t go that well, but he was more subdued by the end.  “Did you crop those frames I asked you to fix?” I asked him as I took him back across the hall.

“Yes…” he said with annoyance.

I did another interview.  When I came back in he and his buddy, and another ten year old, were screaming with headphones on, some noise I later eliminated from the soundtrack.  I scrolled through the animation and found the second batch of frames I’d needed him to crop.

“Oh, I forgot those,” he admitted.

“When you’re done I want to show you that app I was telling you about,” I said and took a very articulate ten year-old across the hall to interview.  Her answers deserve a little promo film of their own.

By the time I got back I realized it was useless to try to interview anyone else.  I took the editor out in the hall, handed him his headphones and showed him an app on the iPad.  I spent no more than 40 seconds demonstrating how to create a drum track, bass part and melody line by moving a finger around the ingeniously designed screen.  The app is called Figure and it’s intuitive and a lot of fun.  I told him I was not 100% clear on how to use it with Audiobus, which I’d set up, and I left him to figure it out.  (He basically did, by the way.)

When it was time to go I went over to get him and said “nice program, huh?” and he seemed quite happy.  When I pulled the headphones out of the iPad, a full musical track was playing and I couldn’t easily shut it off.  It took me a moment to silence the orchestral chaos.

Then the usual struggle ensued to get the room cleaned up, and it eventually was, and the other adult left with half the group and I was putting the last few things away as first the editor and then his best friend asked for my help with their shoes.  The editor’s lace had come out of the eyelet, and there was no way to shove the frayed lace back through to tie his shoe.  Fortunately for him, he’d given this problem to a problem-solving adult who took a pair of tweezers out of his keychain Swiss Army Knife, managed to pull the lace through and tie it within a minute.  Then it was his friend, with knotted shoelaces on the boots he’d kicked off on entering the workshop.  Over my shoulder I asked the other stragglers to pick up this or that, tuck those chairs in, throw that in the garbage, please.

At 5:05 I put on my coat, my heavy pack, picked up my duffle bag and headed to the door.  I passed the candy wrapper I’d asked the editor to pick up.

“Why didn’t you pick up this wrapper like I asked you?”  I said, picking it up.

“I didn’t hear you, when did you ask me?” he said, distractedly.

“When you were ignoring me,” I said, to a round of bright smiles from the other three young stragglers.

And, of course, when I later heard the music track the kid had made, I was quite blown away.  Very restrained bit of playing, a lot of space between the drumbeats, the bass line and the odd, frenetic, poignant little melody.

Edit (exercise in using the fewest words)

Among the boys I grew up with, their oversized heads on necks like flower stalks, I was considered an athlete.  In their presence I never had occasion to fight, or act tough, though it was within me. 

In my early twenties I spent a couple of seasons in the Bay Area where I had a peripheral acquaintance named Joey.  Joey had a small white car, perhaps a convertible, and was ahead of his time with a vanity license plate.  The plate announced: JOE OUI.

We played touch football one day on a huge field of grass, two on two.  It was a close game, the teams evenly matched, and Joey and I ran full speed for hours going out for passes or trying to intercept passes meant for each other.  The cool afternoon turned to dusk and then into a chilly evening.  When it got too dark to see the passes, and our legs were burning with the cold and fatigue, we called it a day.   As we walked to the car, bone tired, Joey playfully launched himself into the air and tackled me from behind.  I did not take hitting the ground hard very well.

Joe Oui seemed shocked at how quickly he was on his back, an angry maniac on top of him, forearm pressed against his throat like a piece of wood.   The maniac’s eyes were merciless as Joey’s face changed color and panic began to show in his eyes.  In time, the maniac stood wearily and let him breathe again.   He clutched his throat and muttered something about a complete overreaction. 

I practice ahimsa now, but nothing about that story makes me feel sad.

TDD (Temper Dysregulation Disorder with Dysphoria)

At a luncheon recently I mentioned, intending to share my skepticism about the evolving DSM and its 5,000 new categories eligible for lucrative psycho-pharmaceutical medications, Angry Baby Syndrome.  I smirked as I brought up the newly minted diagnosis: Temper Dysregulation Disorder with Dysphoria, a proposed addition to the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), among other things the guide for what insurance will pay for by way of pharmaceuticals.  

One of the strangers at the table, a woman with some professional familiarity with these matters, immediately nodded knowingly.  “Yes, it’s a real condition, there are some babies who just start off angry,” she informed us and the conversation drifted quickly from where I was trying to steer it.  In truth, though I am opinionated, I had no real interest in steering this particular conversation, I was merely stroking one of my pet peeves– the madness and brutality of runaway capitalism.  I worked on my vegan lunch plate, smiling neutrally as I chewed, and let my mind drift in and out of the talk around me.

I’d read a great article, given to me by my friend the now retired judge, about the meteoric rise of mental illness diagnoses.  The article was a review of several books on the boom in psychopharmacology, I’ll find it for you.  A long review, but fascinating, well-written and worth a read.  Marcia Angell begins:

It seems that Americans are in the midst of a raging epidemic of mental illness, at least as judged by the increase in the numbers treated for it. The tally of those who are so disabled by mental disorders that they qualify for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) increased nearly two and a half times between 1987 and 2007—from one in 184 Americans to one in seventy-six. For children, the rise is even more startling—a thirty-five-fold increase in the same two decades.  Mental illness is now the leading cause of disability in children, well ahead of physical disabilities like cerebral palsy or Down syndrome, for which the federal programs were created.  

(click here to read the article)

I can’t help thinking of TDD, Angry Baby Syndrome, in the context of a story my parents told, and believed, until the end of their lives, a myth I always took pains to demythologize.  At ten weeks old I became red and rigid, my little fists clenched, with a look of rage on my face that no amount of concerned staring or direct questioning from my frightened parents could wipe away.  With great anxiety, they rushed me to the pediatrician.  The good doctor took one look at me, began to laugh and said: “this child is having a temper tantrum!  I’ve never seen it in a baby so young, but this is definitely one angry baby!”  I recall thinking “fuck you, doc.  I’ll live to laugh at your fucking anger some day, you articulate, quack prick.  Just wait until I can talk, assbite.”  By ten months old, according to my proud mother, I was talking, though neither at ten months nor at any time after that did I bother to track the cavalier pediatrician down.

The point of this story to me was always that rather than figure out why their child was so unhappy as to be having a temper tantrum, the two young parents took comfort from the quack’s diagnosis that the kid was just irrationally enraged.  The expert confirmed my parents’ fear that their baby was just one of those born pricks– adversarial, angry, vindictive, challenging, defiant, hating all authority.  Who knew a ten week old could have the worldview to make all these judgments?   I have to believe it helped set the course of my adversarial childhood, this expert’s glib diagnosis that did not extend past a relieved chuckle.  He concluded, essentially, that this baby suffered from nothing more than being an enraged little asshole.  Kind of funny, in a way, no?

I always thought a good doctor might have felt the kid’s little fists– said to the parents, “I’ll be damned, even though it’s August, feel how cold this little guy’s hands are… maybe he’s pissed off because nobody has made sure he’s warm enough.”  Indeed, my mother reported that I always immediately calmed down whenever she gave me a warm bath, but of course, it was impossible to carry around the baby bathtub full of warm water to bathe me whenever I started becoming irrationally enraged.  

But my point in writing this is not to wonder whether TDD with Dysphoria is not a perfectly good diagnosis (why not give a pill to a young child who is just an irrationally angry bastard all the time?) or to muse about whether or not that pediatrician 57 years ago did anyone any favors, or to belatedly defend my, admittedly, infantile behavior.   

I replaced a roll of toilet paper backwards just now.  I noticed it and calmly removed the roll, reversed it, snapped it back into place.  This struck me as a great moment.  The calm fixing of a minor problem was unaccompanied by any sort of snarl, curse word, smirk, clucking of the tongue.  I still fly into a Tourretic rage when I’m leaving the house in a hurry and my ear buds are violently yanked out of my ears as the cord whips around a doorknob, or the long horn bicycle handlebars.  Part of my rage is at the randomness, seeming cruelty and absolute regularity with which these little delaying things always seem to happen, as though the universe is giving me the finger when I most need its silent cooperation.  But with today’s toilet paper tragedy, I was happy to notice myself fixing a minor problem as calmly as the Buddha.  

I took a breath and thought about the progress I’ve made from that vicious little ten week old I once was, the raging TDD poster baby.  It made me think of my father’s terrible temper, and his insistence, until right before the end, when he smartly reversed himself, that people are what they are programmed to be, by genetics and upbringing.  He always dismissed as delusional the idea that one can consciously change this programming.  My dad’s reflex, when a mistake was made by himself or anyone else, was to become instantly enraged.  I spent decades being mad at myself when I did something careless, or stupid, things that earthlings do all the time.

Follow if you can: you are snipping the ends off string beans, nipping the stem off and a bit of the tip on the other end. In one bowl the prepped beans that will be steamed or sauteed, in another the ends you will be discarding.  One after another, bing, bing, bing, the stems into the little metal bowl, string beans into the strainer.  Then, bip! stem into the string beans, whole string bean into the bowl of ends.  One would expect, at most, a little smile and head shake, a plucking out of the stem, an extraction of the string bean, and quickly restoring them to their desired places.   It would be hard for many people to understand the reflex to a paroxysm of rage when the stem gets flipped into the wrong bowl, but it is there for some.

Did my father have his face whipped all through his early childhood, and the angry course of his life irremediably stamped on his little soul, because he had undiagnosed TDD?  Did his mother, an insane little bitch, as far as I can make out, suffer from untreated TDD?  Is the reflex to be enraged carried in the DNA?  If this reflex is then reinforced by infallible repetition, can the programming to react this way be undone by mere mindfulness and a desire to not react with rage to every frustration, no matter how minor?  

Let us not underestimate the practice of mindfulness, working in tandem with a strong enough desire to change a painful reflex.   I’ve been trying to apply this principle to my dealings with others, with some success.  I have remained fairly mild in situations that would have provoked me to major unmildness before.  Imagine my delight to find myself the recipient of this forgiving gentleness in the moment of realizing how maddeningly idiotic my placement of that roll of toilet paper had been.  Noticing these small, valuable steps is a great gift we can give ourselves.

Or, an old reflex suggests, the wishful thinking of a fucking idiot.  Though I think not, whatever my father or a respected doctor might have once said to the contrary.