When kindness is appreciated, we are grateful. When kindness is scorned we show that sharper than a serpent’s tooth ingratitude, which also leaves behind a bad smell.
Category Archives: Gratitude
Food for thought
There are big differences between thoughtless insensitivity and cruelty. Thoughtlessness happens quite often, and it can be considered an accident when it does. Mindfulness is rare, we live in a world of clashing, competing distractions. Everyone is sometimes thoughtless. The best of us apologize when our thoughtlessness hurts somebody else.
Cruelty is planned to inflict pain. It is almost always done out of a sense of justice, but there is little justice in cruelty. Cruelty is dreamed up by people who suffer, and it leads to more suffering. Bad shit, cruelty.
Aspiration
When I state my desire to remain mild in the face of aggravation I express an aspiration. That I’m often able to remain mild is a source of happiness to me. When I am less than mild, I understand I need to do better. It is an ongoing aspiration, difficult but well worth cultivating.
I have to believe that as I master remaining mild fewer people will feel compelled to test my resolve. Like a yogi in the forest calmly regarding an approaching tiger. Except, that comparing those who provoke to approaching tigers is an insult to a great cat.
Where Do Ideas Come From?
Many ideas are floating through the air at any given time. People catch them and remark on them, causing someone else to comment, an article or book is written, a movie or TV segment made. There are ideas whose time has come, it is simply the right moment for these things to step into the world, raise a little sand. Ideas both beautiful and horrific enjoy their moment on the world stage, in the minds of the most curious and the most incurious.
Ideas can flutter like dust motes, cough out like particulate ash, make kids’ tongues pop out for a taste, like snowflakes. Free floating ideas can become projectiles and plunge down causing actual damage. There are a number of these ideas out there now, they are always there.
Other floating ideas take wing, as they say, and you can see them soaring. Like an idea Sugata Mitra had about the education of young people and the salubrious effect of an older person showing interest, and affection, and a sense of wonder about what the young person is learning.
A sense of wonder, there’s an idea we don’t appreciate every day.
Feedback
No less an authority on having his ass kissed than Pablo Picasso, on the subject of an artist working purely for love of creation, without any need for feedback or praise from anyone who might experience the work: a false idea.
But don’t take it from him. Imagine hitting a baseball further than you ever have before, admiring the arc of the ball, trotting around the bases trying to suppress a smile. The crowd is large, among them many people you know (your ‘cheering section’) but they are talking among themselves, when you scan the crowd they’re not even looking at the field, most staring at electronic devices, nobody has any reaction to your clout. Does it diminish the hit? Not at all. Diminish the moment? Completely, transformed from a great high to a significant bummer. “Let them show me their latest poem,” you think grimly as you step on home plate, “I’ll show them how it feels”.
But once in a while you not only connect solidly with the pitch, but you get a spontaneous shout of appreciation. Here’s one, moments after sending a couple of demo tracks trying to convince an ailing musician friend to buy a small, cheap USB keyboard:
Haha love it- amazon.com here I come!
Started new chemo yesterday, 3 days in a row has me sleeping in fits and starts… Back to sleep with those mimgus like bass lines swimming through my head, you made my day
(night) thnks for sending
meefs
That’s what I’m talkin’ about.
Playing together
If it’s music we’re talking about, the first thing is listening. Don’t do anything at first, listen to the beat. There are many places to put a note, a beat, an accent; against the beat, on the beat, next to the beat, slightly off the beat. The first thing though, is to feel the groove that is waiting to emerge from the beat.
The groove is not the beat, it’s all the stuff around it that makes the beat groove. Check it out. One note put in the exact place to make the head jerk forward slightly, or one of the hands to unconsciously, or consciously, flick an invisible, or visible, drumstick. It sets the groove in motion, wait for it… AH! oh, yeah, that’s what I’m talking about.
I think this is a wonderful metaphor for a good life and playing nicely with the people you meet. Before you can say something helpful you have to have heard what the person is really trying to say. Thinking back, many times I could have been more helpful if I’d listened better, and paused to listen to my own thoughts, before launching into a particular solo.
Genetic Predispostion to Laughs
My mother, maybe two weeks before she died, was in her bedroom when a hospice nurse, social worker and someone from a physical therapy place arrived to speak with her. The previous hospice had declined to give her physical therapy, not because they were mystified that she wasn’t dead already, not because it was pointless to give her the illusion that she was fighting to get stronger when death was days away, but on the grounds that she was too demented to remember the instructions of the physical therapist.
I was incensed, switched from incompetent, vicious Vitas (this conclusion about dementia was but one of their criminal bits of negligence) back to the other hospice, who’s name escapes me, and a day or two later these three arrived to assess my mother for physical therapy. I was in the kitchen when these three women went into the bedroom where my mother was resting on the bed. Within a minute I heard one of the women laughing, soon they were all cracking up. There were several peals of laughter. I have no idea what my mother was saying, but the effect was pretty dramatic.
“One thing for sure, your mother is not demented,” said the nurse coming out of the room with a big smile still on her face. They started physical therapy the next day, and she did pretty well that first session, but session two had to be postponed so she could be admitted to Hospice By The Sea to die a few days later.
I think about this because, while I’m not up against an imminent death sentence as my mother was, I am living a stressful enough existence these days, no income, escalating health insurance, a program that works amazingly but that I haven’t managed to monetize, recruit the people I need to turn it into a sustainable business, blah blah. There are days when I’m feeling quite desperate about things. I spend long stretches alone wondering what I was thinking.
Nonetheless, wake me from a sound sleep on one of these days, like my wasted, napping mother, and I will find my footing in the conversation pretty quickly. There will often be a chuckle or two, even though a moment before I may have been dreaming of my unfair and gratuitous execution.
Laughter is like medicine, it is medicine, there is nothing as good for you as a good laugh. At least that’s the way it feels to me, the dramatic reminder that in the midst of horror there is still a moment to lose yourself and your troubles in a roar that makes your heart leap and clears out everything else.
Cain’t Leave It Alone
Thought experiment. Imagine:
Your father was brilliant and had a wicked sense of humor. Your father was angry, and prone to panic attacks he could only calm by seizing control. Your father was always alert, and on the defensive, because he perceived the world as a dangerous zero sum game, stark black and white, only one could win, everybody else: dead.
Your father had good reason to feel hopeless most of the time. Mistreatment as an infant, we’ll leave it at that. Brain research suggests that first-hand traumatic violence before the age of three can change certain souls into violent psychopaths. It is all in the wiring of the brain, who is prone to become a serial killer or a Hitler, when he is violated mercilessly, or witnesses butchery, at a delicate age. Let’s assume your father was not a psychopath, but that he shared several of the psychopath’s most salient traits.
Your father was brilliant, smart and cunning. Although he felt helpless much of the time, he was adept at projecting an air of confidence and assurance. He did this with his great intelligence, his antennae finely tuned to whatever emotions were stirring in the room. He was expert at keeping people off balance, at controlling conversation.
Most often he would take control of the conversation in the manner of Socrates, by directing the talk through a series of ever narrowing questions. The answer to each would lead to the next link in the logical chain. He was leading his adversary inexorably to a steep cliff, and would soon have him poised at the precipice, neutralized, at his mercy.
Arthur Kinoy, famous lawyer and lifelong freedom fighter, once pointed out the brilliant legal reasoning in the Dred Scott decision. The Dred Scott case was one of the judicial last straws before the so-called Civil War. Kinoy was near the end, a brilliant version of Mr. Magoo, when I knew him. “Read Dred Scott,” he told us, “you won’t regret it. It’s a wonderful piece of legal legerdemain. It’s extremely well-written and every link of the logical chain is perfectly connected to the one before it. There’s not a single fuzzy moment of logic, actually; the conclusion is unassailable. The only problem is the premise, the premise, as we all know now, is complete bullshit.”
Although Kinoy did not say ‘bullshit’, he found an equally forceful way to denounce the racist premise of Dred Scott. As I told somebody the other day, I have a tin ear for quotations. But that was Kinoy’s supremely important point, an unassailable legal argument, one that cannot be attacked from any legal angle, can be constructed on a pile of shit.
Let’s assume for purposes of this decision that (insert pile of shit here). The structure that can be built on top of it can be a fortress all the armies in the world could not topple. In Dred Scott the premise was the Negro’s natural inferiority to the White man. This gave the White man a clear moral duty to protect the Negro. From there it was a quick 90 page march to the incontrovertible conclusion that although Dred Scott, an escaped slave, was living in a free state he must be returned to his former master under the Fugitive Slave Act that was constitutional for most of the first century of our great republic. Some people found this unappealable holding an outrage big enough to give their lives to overturn.
Anyway, I have a bike ride to take and no time to waste, you will forgive me if I plunge ahead to my point.
Imagine your father is like Antonin Scalia, brilliant, trenchant, sardonic; a master at crafting an eloquent legal justification for his actions. Your father asks your opinion of a current topic of debate. Your father challenges you to justify your opinion. As soon as you do, he seizes on one aspect of your answer and begins charging toward his inexorable conclusion. Then you will be challenged to choose one of two answers to the question he’s been driving toward, a question only tangentially related to the original inquiry.
In weighing your answer you will realize that both answers are traps. If your father has had a particularly rough day, he will conduct this march to your capitulation in a very harsh manner.
Afterwards, you will take the high road. You will allow that as he’s framed the question, of course, he is completely correct, there is no possible argument. You will point out that reasonable people could disagree about any of several key points foreclosed by his constant narrowing of the question. Then you will tell him directly that you were perplexed to be asked for your opinion and then disrespected and browbeaten into answering an extremely narrow, re-framed question. Email it off, go ahead, we’ll wait. You’ll have the reply in seconds, no doubt.
Thanks. Very interesting. I’ll think about your take on all this. I apologize that our talk got so contentious. You deserve a more specific reply to your comments, one which I hope to tackle when things ease up around here, More later..
And you will sigh, not more of this fucking shit. And you will fashion, but not send, your heavy hearted reply.
Thanks. Very interesting. I’ll think about your take on all this.
Note: He does not specify what is interesting or what parts of your take he will think about.
I apologize that our talk got so contentious.
Elegant, the way the passive voice was used. This is a technique law students are actually taught to employ. “If your client is guilty, whenever you must make any kind of admission, use the passive voice. Not ‘he killed Tom with a knife’ but ‘Tom was killed with a knife’. Not contradicting a fact in evidence, something you can’t do in a legal argument, just not stating outright that your boy was the one actually holding the knife when Tom was killed with the knife. You may not be denying it, but it’s as close as you can come to leaving the person who did it out of the equation.
You deserve a more specific reply to your comments, one which I hope to tackle when things ease up around here, More later.
This is actually a mischievous, hipper way of saying “More never”. It’s also a classy and gentle way to issue a challenge to the other party: try to whine about it after I frankly admitted that you deserve a reply. What do you want from me? This is clearly your problem, not mine.
The bit about I hope to tackle when things ease up around here is another beautiful construction. “I hope” is excellent, since it is an aspiration, the expression of a fond intention, something more noble than a promise but without the expectation built into giving your word. “Tackle” is great, because it confesses that the work involved in giving the deserved reply would be strenuous, something of a challenge.
But best of all is ‘when things ease up around here.’ An inspired echo of one of my father’s favorite lines, from his The Jokes That Killed Vaudeville collection. “Let me borrow $20, I’ll pay you back as soon as my brother straightens up.”
And pocketing the twenty the vaudevillian gets ready to wink at the audience, “my brother the hunchback!”
Wink!
Personal Manifesto — preview
From time to time, I’m told, it’s good to write a manifesto– a plan of action laying out the beliefs that animate it. I’m going to do that, if you watch this space you will see it soon. I hope you may even be inspired by it. But today I have only a few minutes. Somewhere I jotted a note the other day, I remember writing it down, and that it was a hook to a big part of the manifesto and my motivation. Let me dig it up.
“I don’t want to see stubborn, opinionated, pandering televised idiots having false debates about reality and the most pressing questions of the future– help create smart citizens.”
I’m doing it, B. I’ll get more into the details of this next time. There is one other matter and then I have to jump into the shower, get ready to go.
People, when they’re young, love to play. Without play, what does a young person have? Grim preparation for a life of unsatisfying drudgery. Seems pretty clear, when put that way, that children should be encouraged to make discoveries during play time. Got that one covered too. And older people, we need to keep playing too. You know what’s left if we don’t? You know what’s left.
Last point. You hear often from funny, successful people that feedback and support were key elements in their growth. I hear it loud and clear, even as I am put to the test, over and over, to prove that even without much feedback or support — if you have enough belief in what you are doing and in your creative power to do it — amazing things can still be done.
Now go forth and play, my friends.
Clean Livin’
My father, known for a dark sense of humor, would smilingly chirp “that’s what clean livin’ will do for you” when asked how he had accomplished whatever someone was remarking on. (Note harbinger of premeditated hereditary puckishness to follow.)
The accomplishment in this case is a successful pitch to take the animation workshop to a new group of kids, for a price much closer to sustainable for the program than what we’d been paid by the PTA of a NYC public school where I had the initial lab and the initial rats, the creative group of experimental young monkeys, the rolling auditions for the best grown-ups. In fact, 2.5 times more sustainable, by my back of the envelope calculations.
So though I’ve endured a few days of excessive stomach acid and general dyspepsia, I feel I’ve earned the right to chirp, in a calm echo of the old master of darkness “that’s what clean livin’ will do for you!”
gratuitousblahg 