The title above was one of the questions asked during a screening interview to evaluate my eligibility to participate in a research study about Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT).  The theory of CBT, as far as I can tell, is that once you become aware of thought patterns that keep you locked in undesirable situations you can begin to change the way you think about those situations and find solutions that seem impossible as long as you continue to think of things from that unhelpful cognitive point of view.

So the graduate student reads that question:  “is there anyone whose insight you value more than your own?”   These are posed as yes or no questions, so I answer with an unequivocal no.   I think of everyone I’ve ever met, what they understand of life, how they live, what their deepest values are and why they sometimes must put certain of those values aside in the onrushing exigencies of life, and my answer remains an unequivocal no.  

Thinking further, I imagine everyone I’ve ever met would likely answer the same way, given the yes or no format.  Unless one has a wise counselor in their life, a sage parent, a mentor who sees the big picture and restores perspective, a religious person connecting them to a meaningful philosophical viewpoint when they become perplexed.   I wonder if the question were posed “do you believe you know anyone smarter and more moral than you are?” if the answer would remain the same.

I muse in this fairly pointless way as the snow continues to fall outside and I wait until it’s done falling to shovel it up.  It’s either clear the sidewalk and driveway or cause tremendous additional stress to someone I love, who would be forced drive through hell to get where I already am and do it if I don’t.  It is the least I can do, and as I love doing the least I can do, it is a blessing to wait for the snow to finish falling so I can do that eventually.

If you had a camera in here, recording my steps around this crowded apartment, you would see the steps circling endlessly back to this chair with the excellent view of this computer screen.  To either side of the screen, and in front of the keyboard, drifting piles of beautifully colored ink drawings, like sand dunes seen through a prism.

“Why don’t you shut the computer off and just clear off the kitchen table?” a reasonable voice asks.

The camera would show me nodding, powering the machine down, stepping away from the computer, into the kitchen, looking at the table.  An hour’s work, one would estimate.  Put the blood pressure monitor somewhere, take away the power cord from the macBook, put away the cable for the iPod.   Remove the two wire book stands, collapsed and interlocking, lying interspersed with various small items, most of which, although they’ve been there for years, should be discarded.   Move away the cutting board, unplug the disconnected phone, put the unit in the electronics recycling bag.  

Then just go through that raft of papers, most of which can be thrown away or shredded after a glance. There is even a prize at the bottom of that Crackerjacks box, in addition to a clear work space to prepare food, eat a meal not propped on your lap.  Under those hillocks of papers, hopefully, is the card with the new return address of your old friend’s widow.  You’d like to write back to her, wouldn’t you?

But first, the steps lead back to the computer, power it on again, just a little sit here, see what’s doing, just a moment.  That snow storm, winter storm warning still in effect, what time is it now supposed to hit Queens and when do I need to leave here in order to shovel out from under it without being caught in it?  Etc.

This is all undeniably a bit freakish, and worrisome.  Just a moment’s pondering and I see it is just a fragment of a larger freak show all around.   We leave aside things like $81,000,000 paid to two psychologists to reverse engineer a torture program nobody seems very upset about.  Here there is a car going 75 mph on the interstate, accelerating onto a lane of hidden ice with the thought to go 80 in the HOV lane.  Here is a man issuing periodic and alarming reports from hell, describing a relentless monster wife and an unbearable life, now suffered for over twenty years.   There a man tells his longtime wife that their marriage has been over for a decade and shakes his head at her angry display of shock.   Here a man calls an old friend and complains that he is often seen as using the man, dragging him back into the weeds of bad old habits. He urges his recovering alcoholic friend to intervene, for the sake of his reputation, tell them it isn’t so, that he is a good friend, and then… by the way, if you don’t mind…. if I could prevail on you … do you still have that bottle of excellent single malt?   The examples are too numerous, the exceptions too few… it is all a gorgeous, swirling landscape of barely concealed madness.

There must be some kind of way out of here, said the joker to the thief.  I will just tap here a few seconds more and now …. if you will excuse me… I must be…. on my way.

“Don’t say ‘can’t’,” she said again.  “It’s not that you can’t do things, you can.  It’s that you don’t make yourself do them.”  

“A distinction without a difference,” he said.  

“No,” she said, “saying ‘I can’t’ means you’re incapable of doing them and it is far different from not making yourself do things you are clearly capable of.”  

“Is it really?” he said. “If I don’t do something I am clearly capable of, something I want to do, something it frustrates me not to be doing, doesn’t it mean, for all practical purposes, that I can’t do it?”  

“It means you won’t do it,” she said.  “It doesn’t mean you can’t”.

“The beggar says to the woman in the mink coat ‘please help me, I haven’ t eaten in three days’….” he said.

“And the woman says ‘force yourself”.   Yes, you are very witty, Shlomo, but better to use your energy for seriousness at the moment,” she said.  

“Energy?” he said.

The conversation was a circle, it moved like the hands on a clock that had long ago given up trying to keep time.  It would move in a circle and stop, sit in the dark, and when the light went on again, it would continue to pointlessly circle.

Our happiness, or unhappiness, we are often reminded, flows directly from how we view the world.  That glass– half full or half empty?  Life, full of cool, even miraculous, possibilities or a grim waiting room for inevitable depressing decline and death?

Of course, this kind of either-or thinking, so prevalent in our culture, can be as unproductive as it is simplistic.   It’s true we are better served taking pleasure from small things than being tormented by what Professor Bukowski astutely called “that swarm of trivialities that can kill quicker than cancer, and which are always there”.  But our lives here are complex and, at least for some of us, defy the kind of easy logic that tells us it’s better to look on the bright side than the dark side.   Better to be active and productive, solving problems as they arise, than paralyzed by shifting, hazily understood affective disorders.  These mood disorders, a quick check of the internet informs us, can not be detected by medical tests.

When I was a kid Batman was on TV, a colorful, campy live action version of the comic book.  Many episodes ended in a cliff-hanger, the Dynamic Duo trapped in a room with the water rising, the floor and ceiling slowly moving toward each other to crush them, the walls, spiked with swords, closing in.  Viewers were exhorted to tune in next time at the same bat time, same bat channel.

The walls closing in would begin the next episode, and just as things were a second from fatal, Batman’s ingenuity, gadgets, fearlessness and physical prowess would save the day.  They’d get out of the trap and go kick the bad guy’s ass. 

I struggled out into this frigid day with the image of the walls closing in.   The walls are not closing in.   Metaphors are one thing, the walls actually closing in are another.   I did a little research to see if the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy study was still going on at a local psychiatric institute.  I’d been given a doctor’s name and number yesterday, more than a month after I’d made several inquiries.  I called and haven’t heard back yet, so I did a bit more research about the study on-line.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is, and I couldn’t say it better myself:  a “structured, short-term, present-oriented psychotherapy for depression, directed toward solving current problems and modifying dysfunctional (inaccurate and/or unhelpful) thinking and behavior.”^[1]

I’d prefer this action oriented, insight based approach to the usual psycho-pharmaceutical one so often endorsed by well-paid, highly respected snake oil salesmen.   You can read a thorough review of the effectiveness and testing of these pills here.   Placebos, it has been demonstrated, are more than 80% as effective as the patent drugs for treating things like depression, dysthymia, anxiety disorder.   (Which reminds me, I have to stop putting off reordering my organic placebo– it always gives me a tiny jolt of hope when I take it every morning).

I read about the study and was suddenly stopped in my tracks.   The first step, after a psychological evaluation to determine your level of affective disorder, is to pop you head first into a long, claustrophobic metal tube, where amid frightful banging, your brain will be scanned to get an image of the “before” brain.

“Fuck that,” I found myself saying, shrugging out of my skin and preparing to hop on to my skeleton, waiting alertly on all fours, to gallop off screaming into the night.

Beware, if you think you have all the time in the world.  You are afforded a very small slice of all the time in the world, and before you can blink they are shedding tears for your passing and heading toward the buffet table.

My grandmother, long gone, used to watch a soap opera called “The Days of Our Lives”.  I remember the name because the opening featured an hour glass with the sands rushing down it.   “Like sands through the hour glass,” intoned a sonorous actor’s voice, “so are the days of our lives.”  The miracle of the internet lets you click here and hear it for yourself.

The nostalgic sound of that clip can bring tears to a sentimental eye.  My mother, for example, would probably sob to hear it, reminded of her mother, newly retired and quickly hooked on the afternoon melodrama, reminded of being 37 herself when the show first aired.  She’d be thinking this seemingly ten minutes after being 37, suddenly 78, a 21 year battle with endometrial cancer behind her and not much happiness ahead.  “So are the days of our lives,” would have socked her in the kishkas, the music would have twisted the fist.

Since we do not have all the time in the world, how do we justify time wasted?   The days we accomplish little or nothing?   We can take some solace in the paycheck we’ve earned, if we’re working, or in a job well done, if we do a job well.   In the things we’ve created, a family, a nice home, a business, nice craft items.  In the progress we’ve made toward becoming kinder and smarter people, if we have made such progress.  

Or we can brood and set variations of our brooding into type, watch them march across a computer screen, tinker with the tipsy words, arranging them this way and that until we’ve made them coherent enough, post them on the internet for a guy in Eastern Europe to read.  Yes, we can also do that, I suppose.