Big Boys Don't Cry

When I pay attention I realize that I am (or have mostly been) trying to be tough. By tough I mean brave, fearless, courageous, gutsy, intrepid. Ringing in my ears are the commands to childhood: Big boy’s don’t cry, don’t be a scaredy-cat, don’t be a pussy, a wimp,. a spineless hon-yocker, yellow bellied coward, a gutless yahoo.

These orders come not just from adults, but from peers. Other boys take up the chant when there are no grown up men around. A skinned knee will cause your best friend in second grade to yell into your face, “don’t be a pussy!” or “Grow up, cry baby,” or “what’s the matter with you, you forkin’ faggot” or the more honest challenges: “Man-up,” “grow up,” “take it like a man.”

So, when I was very young, I figured out that it is vital for young boys to fake fearlessness. I did figure out how to be a fake. One key to fearlessness is the phrase, “keep a stiff upper lip.” You tighten your jaw, and tense up your lips. That will keep the lips from quivering. Stick your chest out and tighten the muscles in your neck, shoulder, and pectorals, along with the muscles around your eyes. If you can look fierce enough the tears near enough to the brim of your eyelids, can look like the steely gaze of a psychopathic killing machine. That Charles Manson glare looks menacing, but, at least in my case, it was a mask made out of my own face that hides my true, weak, cowardly nature. Next, you must clench your fists. This will make your observers think you are ready to fight, while hiding the fact that your fingers are trembling.

Bravery is being the only one who knows you're afraid.

~Franklin P. Jones

Bravery and toughness must be practiced. That is why you are dared to walk through a graveyard alone at midnight, sneaking into an abandoned and rumored haunted house. Sometimes the practice involves real risk. You can be dared to jump off a cliff into the river, or to swim across a lake, or to trespass on a rival gang’s territory, or to steal a car, or inject the brown liquid from a dirty spoon.

The Jackass videos are proof positive that men are insanely committed to showing the world that they are not afraid. The fact that some of our peers die taking stupid risks is necessary for these fearlessness practice sessions to work.

Unless these practice acts are known to be real risks then these un-risky risks prove nothing. Remember the scene in the now classic movie THE CHRISTMAS STORY where one kid is dared to stick his tongue to the freezing flagpole. As long as it was just a dare the boy being taunted still has an out, but once his is “double dog dared,” well, there is nothing left to do but stick your tongue out and lean toward the flagpole. These “double-dog dare you” acts, if they don’t kill you, teach you to act like you are brave.

In Tim O”Brien’s autobiographical novel, The Things They Carried there is a section where he writes about getting his draft notice. He contemplates fleeing to Canada. He is in a fishing boat, within a few yards of the Canadian boarder, and he wants to go, he wants to flee, but he doesn’t. He then states that he didn’t go to Vietnam because he was brave, but because he was too cowardly to go to Canada. He went to Vietnam because his cowardice prevented him from making the moral choice of not going off to a war he felt was immoral, unwarranted, and an unforgivable waste of American lives.

Some have been thought brave because they were afraid to run away.

~Thomas Fuller

The thing about practicing fearlessness is that eventually, over time, you can fool yourself into believing that you are actually NOT afraid of anything, even stuff that is illogical not to fear. Far too many men have paid a heavy price for standing up to our fears, and from viewing ourselves as actually, or at least potential heroes.

We become calloused to our own emotions. When I was 15 years old I taught myself to play the guitar. My guitar was cheap and the steel strings and the neck of the guitar were uncomfortably far apart. To make the chords required me to press hard and the wire cut into my finger tips and it didn’t take long before my fingertips were raw and eventually they were bleeding. Over time however, I developed calluses. The skin on my fingertips grew hard and thick, and the strings could no longer cut into my flesh, because my fingertips were as tough as shoe leather. My body’s ability to callus over where needed did eliminate my pain, but it also made it hard for me to pick up dimes. By not feeling pain, I gave up feeling anything at all. There is a similar gain and loss in pretending to be brave. By killing the body’s ability to react to fear, we end up losing our ability to react to all emotions.

I am a father, and the purest most unconditional love in my life is for my son Ryan. There is no one on this earth that I care more about than my grown up son, and yet, when he calls I find it almost impossible to talk to him. I grow tongue tied. I think so much that I have trouble sleeping, but when he calls, I can’t think what to say to him. I’m grunting answers to his questions and asking the most inane questions, and in my head I hear my own voice yelling at me, “Talk to him, stoop-o!” “Enjoy this chance to hear his voice.!” Gather every word he says and enjoy them now and revel in them later.”

After he has hung up, I sit around demanding an answer: What is wrong with me?

Answer? I have protected myself from pain and fear by stifling my own emotional life, and now, it’s like being forced to converse in Spanish when I have never learned Spanish. I don’t have the words of emotion, I don’t understand the rules of emotion, I have a thousand things to say to Ryan, and not one clue how to say anything.

I’m afraid I don’t like the consequences of my manly efforts. Macho, to my mind, is not Much-o.

Not Answers QUESTIONS!

“Do you not know that there comes a midnight hour when every one has to throw off his mask? Do you believe that life will always let itself be mocked? Do you think you can slip away a little before midnight in order to avoid this? Or are you not terrified by it? I have seen men in real life who so long deceived others that at last their true nature could not reveal itself;... In every man there is something which to a certain degree prevents him from becoming
perfectly transparent to himself; and this may be the case in so high a degree, he may be so inexplicably woven into relationships of life which extend far beyond himself that he almost cannot reveal himself. But he who cannot reveal himself cannot love, and he who cannot love is the most unhappy man of all.”
Soren Kierkegaard.

I read about this experiment done to a dog. The dog was placed in a divided box. There was a short wall that divided the box into two equal parts, but the outer walls were so tall that the dog could not jump out of the box, only from one side to the other.

The floor on each side of the box was wired so that the experimenter could electrify one side or the other with the flip of a switch.

The experiment when like this: the observer would flip the switch, the dog would be uncomfortably (but not fatally) electrocuted and the dog would jump over the short wall to the other side of the box to escape the electric shock. After the dog settled down and felt safe in the new side of the box, the observer would flip a different switch and electrify the floor on the side the dog has newly occupied.

This process would continue, and gradually the time between shocks was narrowed. What they found is that eventually the dog just stopped trying to escape the electric shock. The dog learned that no matter what he did he was going to get shocked. After this realization came to the dog the dog would just lay on the electrified floor and accept the electric shocks.

The study called this Learned Helplessness.

I feel like that dog. I have tried to improve my life, advocate for my own wants and needs, and to seek relief and escape pain, but after 59 years of this, I have learned that I am not going to be OK. I have learned that despite my efforts I am always going to be UNaccepted just as I am. I am incapable of being OK through my own efforts. I am made out of defective stuff.

For me, the journey into myself resembles a bug in the tub circling the drain. I go around, and then through and then down into the darkness, where I feel trapped in an illusion that was woven around me starting at birth, and the weavers never take a holiday.

The thing is, I just don’t think I can get answers until I know the content of the questions. Here are the questions I seek to answer:

What do I really want? [Not what I think I want, but what I really/actually
want.]

What brings me joy?

Why do I feel the way I do?

What are my fears?

Who has wounded me?

Whom have I injured?

How do I cope with regret?

Do I need to have enemies?

Do my needs make me selfish?

Is there anything wrong with being selfish?

How do I forgive?

Whom and what will I love?

Is it important for me to address issues of sexuality?

If sexuality is important, then how should I express my sexuality?

Do I have a right to occupy space in the world?

Do humans have “gifts”?

If humans have gifts then what are my gifts?

What have I sacrificed to win the approval of other people?

Have my sacrifices ever won the approval of other people?

What advantages or benefits do I enjoy by having the approval of other people?

What would have to happen for me to feel like I mattered, that I have value?

Are there things to which I have blinded myself?

Have I disowned my power?

Have I limited, or denied my potential?

Is there ever a time when it is OK to give up, to stop trying, to be resigned to my
circumstances?

Would seeking answers to these questions change my life, or change my attitudes towards my life in positive, beneficial ways?

SAY WHAT YOU THINK YOU MEAN!

It is oddly true that what I say is often opposite to what I actually feel. Fore example:

I’m not mad actually means I am mad, perhaps even livid.

It’s not the money, it’s the principal, means, It’s the money.

I don’t care, means I care. Often it can mean I care deeply.

You didn’t hurt my feelings, can mean, I am hurt and there will be no scar because this wound will never heal.

Whatever you want, means, I know that you don’t care about what I want.

Why do I do this word dance? I’m a really bad dancer. Why do I so often say exactly opposite of what I feel? Of course, there are times when I am out right lying. I admit it. If someone I care about wants to do something I don’t want to do, I will still go along, hide my preferences, disguise my disappointment, and I will say the thing that gives the other person permission to drag me off to some event I know I’m just going to hate. I will swallow my own preference and give permission for us to buy something I don’t want, to allow something I would disallow if it were up to me ONLY. Actually, there is no single reason for why I lie or why I lie to myself, or why I am so ignorant of my real feelings that my lie is actually a mistake of ignorance. Saying one thing and meaning the opposite is, for me, an extremely complicated question.

The answer, of course is as faceted as a Tiffany cut diamond, Very often, I don’t say what I feel because I don’t know what I feel. To some people a feeling hits them like an ice pick and they know exactly where they hurt. For me, however, feelings are more like punches received in a struggle. I have these dull aches and I am never able to be sure where they came from, or which blow caused this deep indistinct pain.

I just noticed as I write that all my references to feelings in the last
paragraph are feelings of pain, and negativity. Does that mean I have no
feelings of joy, and happiness, or does it instead mean that I am allowing
negative feelings to dominate my mind and I have discounted all pleasure and
contentment?

The point is, in relationships and therapy, it is just not always helpful for the questioner to say, “Just tell me what you want,” or “Just tell me what you are feeling,” or “Tell me what’s wrong."


To me, the thing that gives my life meaning is the fact that I think. Thinking is my favorite activity. But if my thought processes don’t know what I feel then how reliable are my thoughts? Actually, all of my thoughts are a tower built on a foundation of incomplete information.

I wonder if thinking is my enemy. I think myself into corners. I trust my thoughts and they are being churned out by a defective brain and a wounded history. I wrote this poem about falling overboard and being left alone in the sea. I imagine that my will to live sends me swimming toward a shore but not thinking that I could be wrong about which direction the location of the shore can be found.

Thinking by tex norman

I fall off a fishing boat
into the ocean
on a moonless night
and start swimming for shore.
I could be heading toward shore.
I could be swimming further
out to sea.
I’m thinking about the shore.
I haven’t considered the very
real possibility that I could be
heading in the wrong direction.
Is action thinking?
Should I have tread water awhile
and arrived at some theory
based upon known facts
that would have given me
a chance that I might actually
be heading in the right rather
than wrong direction?
Can instinctual action be called
thinking?
But I was thinking.
In unknowable situations
thinking and knowing have
little in common.
I can drown just as easily
heading in the right direction
as the wrong one.
It wouldn’t matter if I was
heading right if the distance was
greater than my ability to swim.
Things look so utterly,
hopeless and unknowable
that I am tempted
(we are all tempted) to say
why bother thinking at all.
It doesn’t guarantee success.
The instinctual action
is just as likely
to get you back to shore
as drown you. And yet I think.
I choose thinking.
I wonder what I’ll be thinking
about when I inhale some of the sea?

The Perfume Inside Me

There is a story from India about a deer who, one day noticed a very enticing smell. This smell was just tantalizing, beguiling, it was a mysterious and heavenly odor that blessed the very air it invaded. Somehow, in some mysterious, inexplicable way the deer knew that if only he could locate and possess the source of this wonderful smell, then he would be happy, fulfilled, and his entire life would make sense. This fragrance was so powerfully addictive that then and there the deer committed himself to searching for the sources of this cologne.

This odor-quest sent this deer to dry desert regions, icy mountain peaks, steaming rain forests, and along pristine beaches kissed by ocean waves. The smell seemed always very close, and yet, no matter where the deer searched the source always eluded him. As the deer neared the end of his life, exhausted, weary, and defeated the deer collapsed toppling into a ravine, and as he tumbled the point on one of his antlers pierced his belly. As the deer lay breathing his last few breaths he could tell that the wonder musky scent was coming from inside his own body. The deer died realizing that what he had searched for all his life was found inside of himself and had been there all along.

The point of this little parable is that we sense that there is something wonderful within our reach, if only we could identify it, and reach out and possess it. We may feel that our life is a riddle, and every riddle has a solution, but so far the riddle of our lives has remained a cruel conundrum. There is a book popular among the gospel prosperity preachers and their following sheep called, The Secret. The title is as enticing to us, as musk is to a young buck. I would imagine that all of us believe or at least once believed that there was some sort of secret, some answer, some key that would unlock the mystery of our lives, that would flip a switch and turn us on to a wonderful, joy filled life instead of this empty sack life we are forced to endure now.

I like the deer story. I like the point that says you can seek for something outside of yourself, and what you seek was inside of yourself the entire time. I like the story and the point but a neat story and a cleaver point do not necessarily equal THE TRUTH.

I grew up spending hundreds of hours listening to sermons and lecture-based Bible Study classes (those not in THE TRUE CHURCH might call these sessions Sunday School). By the sheer excess of exposure I grew to love stories that made hermeneutical points. Cleaver wording, and modern parables with cleaver twist endings were what delighted me at some point in my childhood. As I aged, grew jaded, bitter, sullen, and, yes perhaps even a little angry, I got a little split personality problem over stuff like this. Part of me still admires a good story or cleaver wording that seems true because how could anything so cleverly worded not be true? Another part of me is just suspicious, full of doubt, ready with a sneer and snide remark, and maybe even a little prejudice, a bit predisposed to doubt and reject.

There is a cleaver quote from the movie City of Angels that is both an example and insightful. The Death Angel Seth, played by Nick Cage says:

Some things are true

whether you believe

in them or not.

This line is both cleaver and true, but it doesn’t prove anything. Obviously you can doubt something that is true, but that does not mean that believing in metaphysics, God, Area 51, or Big Foot are true. The City of Angels quote is incomplete. The quote should go:

Some things are true whether you believe in them or not. Some things are false that you fervently believe are true. Some stuff you believe is true is actually, o' wow, true. The trick is knowing what is and is not true (or what is or is not false), but there is no chances that you will be able to distinguish lies and truths from one another perfectly, and every single time.

Because I write so much, and I rarely have an opinion that I keep to myself, I have had to come to terms with the uncertainties in my life. Here is how I approach most stuff I believe and doubt: I try to have the right positions on stuff, and I proclaim those positions and beliefs with vigor, and act as if I am absolutely sure I am right, and all the while I am urging my mind to stay open and flexible and to be willing to change my mind, to tweak, adjust my beliefs, or to toss everything out and start over.

Life is Too Short

Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways. ~Stephen Vincent Benét


Life is short. Even a long life is short.

Some people believe in an afterlife, or a life after this life. Often these people also believe that the next life is better than this present life. It is as if this life we have now is just to prepare us for the next one, or as if this life is our time to be assessed, evaluated, and the quality of our next life depends on how well we perform during this probationary life.

If you believe in an after life, you may also believe that your enjoyment and your needs just don’t matter so much, because things no matter how disappointing things are for you now, you get to go to a perfect place, where some higher power will be absolutely sure that this time, you’re going to have a great time. It doesn’t matter how common your life was, how belittled you were, how beat down, because things are going to be great in the next life.

In my mind it is a stupid idea. If you are wrong, if you have placed all your happy eggs in your Next Life Basket, and there is no next life, then you have wasted the one and only life you have.

I do, however, think that one can believe in God and a next life and still enjoy this present life. I just think most of us, thinking we have an eternal second chance will just not be as diligent about squeezing as much joy from this life as is possible.


Her is my new year’s resolution: and I never do this: I want to care about myself, and commit myself to squeezing all the joy possible out of the lemons of my life, and be willing to add enough sugar to taste the sweetness of each moment, each day. When faced with fun and unnecessary chores, like folding underware, I will opt for fun.

MicroMacro Me

There are two words that come into my mind from time to time, and around wave their long lanky limbs about wildly to draw my attention to themselves. Once one or both of these words have my attention they send my thinking off in a direction I’d rather not go, but do go. Those pestering words are Micro and Macro.

You can actually take college courses on Macro or Microeconomics. I, who have never successfully balanced a checkbook, never think about Microeconomics. Me discussing Macroeconomics is like being a one legged man in a butt kicking contest; it’s just a stupid idea. My mind is actually obsessed with the words Micro and Micro. Micro means small. Micro means you look at whatever you are looking at in maddening detail, that you obsess over minutia. A single strand of DNA is way too excessively big for a Micro thinking scientists. Micro scientists can easily spend a lifetime on a tiny gene, a little sliver of that DNA strand. Macro is the big view, the long view. Macro thinking looks at the whole system. Macro thinkers refuse to be thrown off track by some tiny little anomaly, they want the big picture, the gestalt (gestalt in this context means a symbolic configuration or pattern of elements so unified as a whole that its properties cannot be derived from a simple summation of its parts).

I obsess over my life in micro and my life in macro. I fixate over micro vs. macro living. I am consumed by micro vs. macro values. I consider whatever happens to be going in my life first in all its micro implications, and then I hold those same conclusions up beside its macro counterpart so I can see how things hold up.

It is like looking at life through a telescope. I look at my life through a telescope. I look first through the big end and see everything small, where even the closest objects look tiny. I look next through the small end and see everything in the macro.

To me, and maybe my wife and son, my life has some value, some significance. If I were to die today, at least two people would be upset. But in a hundred years, my life or my death means a little less than nothing. If you think of the worst thing that could possibly happen to you today, obviously you would be devastated, crushed by that horrible event, you would be left to group for something to hold on to, you would search for some moral compass to guide you or else you would not be able to go on with your life. Take that same event and view in the macro and those crushing, shattering, earth shaking events well may be left as historically interesting events, and more likely than not, unworthy of historical reflection.

Consider the assassination of President Kennedy, and President Garfield. Which is more significant to us, at this very moment? Most would say President Kennedy. I was in the 8th grade when the principal came on the PA system and informed the school that President Kennedy had been killed. Everything shut down. There was nothing on TV for three days but coverage of this single event. Today, that event that dominated every moment of every day for days, that event that turned an unpopular president into the most popular President, that event that may well have enabled President Johnson to pass Medicare and civil rights, and the direction and values of the United States turned on our national micro reaction to that event. Today, young people read about the assassination of Kennedy as a historical event. Often these students have teachers that were around when the assassination occurred, but it is more and more common that both the students and the teachers know the Kennedy assassination as a historical event. All of us (other than a few history buffs) take the assassination of James A. Garfield in the macro sense. We didn’t know Garfield. We may be affected by the assassination of Garfield, but if we are, we don’t realize it. Here we have the sudden, tragic murder of someone who well may have been the most powerful head of state on earth, and today , a mere 128 years later, that powerful man’s death means almost nothing to almost everyone. The death of a baker in Poughkeepsie, New York in July of 1881 is a million times less significant to us that what happened to Garfield.

The point is, that when you take the long view, when you stand back far enough, after enough time has passed the details drop away, and the significance of stuff that was vital, can become very, very insignificant.

This is what I do all the time with my own life. I obsess over the tiniest events in my day. I analyze my life in a minutia obsessive fanatical manner. I can journal for 6 pages over a bowel movement, I can write a 30 line poem about stubbing my toe. I get so caught up in my life, and trying to make sense of the seconds, that I miss the whole day. Then, I will, from time to time, step back, look at my life, and realize with a sinking certainty, that it just doesn’t matter; that I just don’t matter.

This micro/macro approach to my life has been both helpful, and astonishingly unhelpful. This thinking process that I do to make sense of my life, makes my life seem senseless, and senseless is not helpful if you have a tendency to be despondent.

I'm A Citizen of Wacko Town

If I were to admit to anger it would be over a week I spent in the Nut House.

My shrink doesn’t like me to use synonyms for the psych ward, but the internal annoyance I hold for that experience requires me to refer to that place in a derogatory and unflattering manner. Actually I have a whole list of disparaging euphemisms for that sad sack prison: Crisis stabilization unit is far too dignified for that place. Psych Ward is not politically correct, not when you consider how ugly and divisive politics is. So here is my growing list of offensive slang for THAT PLACE:

• The nut house,
• the booby hatch,
• bughouse,
• the funny farm,
• the laughing academy,
• the enchanted kingdom,
• the madhouse,
• the nut factory,
• the rubber room,
• the snake pit,
• the coo-coo’s nest,
• the moron motel,
• Club Crazy,
• imbecile boot camp,
• the Crazy House,
• the Happy Hotel,
• the Cracker Factory,
• Pee-Wee’s Fun House,
• the Calm Down Cottage,
• Brittany Spear’s Space,
• the Spook House,
• the romper room,
• loser’s palace, and
• the disorient express.

All you need to start an insane asylum is an empty room and the right type of people”

After my week at Goofyville (I need to add that one) I have this list of grievances:

I was pressured to “sign myself in.” How was that done? I was told that if I didn’t go voluntarily that the police would come and Baker Act me. I was lead to believe that if you were Baker Acted committed, that fact became part of your record and would show up on employment background checks.

I thought these places were reserved for people who were a threat to themselves or others. I had stopped taking my meds. I was depressed, hated my life, and I felt like, if I died that would be a relief, but I was not overtly trying to hurt myself. I was not doing something to kill myself; I was just stopping my meds. We have no problem when a cancer patient, in agony, decides to stop medical treatments that would prolong their life. They were not killing themselves, they were just letting nature take it’s course. In my mind that is what I was doing.

"The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape
finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."
Marcus Aurelius

Because they fear you might harm yourself, they do a search that includes spreading your butt cheeks so they can see if you have a box knife tucked into your rectum. Humiliation is not a great addition to depression.

I had sweat pants with a tie in the waist band, so I had to wear a hospital gown until my wife could go to the store and buy me some sweat pants with no string. I go in to this room full of alcoholics, bipolar depressants, despondent depressants, and one schizophrenic wearing two hospital gowns, one put on backwards to cover up my back side and the other the regular way to cover my front side. I looked all puffy and my bare legs advertized the fact that I haven’t worn shorts in full sunlight in about 8 years.

"Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage."
Ray Bradbury

There was a big room with one tiny TV mounted high so no one could grab it and use it as a weapon. The whackos voted on what they wanted to watch and that witch show called charmed was the favorite. They must have had some special Nut House Cable because that TV showed one Charmed episode after another. To this day, flipping by, if I click past a Charmed show I get this visceral sorrow, an instantaneous pity party and I get to relieve that week in 30 seconds or less and I’m left with an ache like someone had just played a game of flinch and punched me hard in my bad shoulder.

"We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the univese."
Johann von Goethe

They had crayons and children’s color pages to occupy the bored and no one was more bored than me. I wanted a pen to draw with, or at least a pencil. They did have those tiny miniature golf pencils, but they wouldn’t sharpen one so I could have a sharp line.

I was finally released after 7 days, ordered to stay home from work an additional week. When I finally got back on the job I was called in and told I had to go home and I could not come back to work without a letter from my psychiatrist saying I was ok to work. My shrink didn’t want me to do the job I was doing and refused to give me the letter. So now, not only was a humiliated, and imprisoned I also lost my job. I wasn’t fired. I was encouraged to resign for medical reasons. (I had a medical condition called whacky brain disease.)

If I was mad, who was I mad at? My shrink, my wife, my self and God.

Envision the Brain as a Basket

The sentence, "I can see that I am false,"
contains all you need for liberation.
~Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj.

Much, if not most, of what we think about ourselves is false.

. . . . the mind is neutral, equally capable of producing happiness or pain. It holds no preference for a cheerful expression over an angry one or vice verse. It is, however, true that the way the mind functions -- on either a limited or larger scale -- determines the way we live.
~Maitland.

When it comes to thinking, I envision my brain as a basket, in which I place thoughts. If I fill the basket with negative, self-hating thoughts, then I am going to be negative and hate myself. The counter to all this is to fill the mind with positive, self-esteeming thoughts.

Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.

~Philippians 4:8.

Think on these things that are positive. You don't have to feel positive to do this. In fact, at first, you will not feel positive, and I'm positive about that. You are considering the choice of positive thoughts verses negative thoughts because you are having "feeling related" problems. So naturally to begin this process you will feel like something greasy on a stick but you are purposely, and with determined persistence placing positive, good thoughts into your mind.

When we choose a fruit to eat, do we pick up the good mangoes or the rotten ones? It is the same in the mind. Learn to know which are the rotten thoughts and immediately turn from them to fill your basket with ripe beautiful mind state instead.

~Ajahn Chah

Valid, Validation, Validating, Invalid?

The concept, and act of Self-Validating could be important. If self-validation is important then it is important to understand what the term means. Valid, Validation, Validating, Invalid. What does the word valid mean?

When it comes to words, they rarely mean one thing only. When it comes to Valid (and all its forms) I come up with four different meanings of the word (there could be more, I’m just winging it here.)

Valid means Unexpired, as in:

“This is a valid passport.”
Valid means Justifiable, as in:

“That is a valid question”
Valid means Effective, as in:

“That standardized test is a valid measure of student performance.”

Valid means Logical, as in:

“That argument is perfectly valid.”

When I apply the concept of Valid to myself, I am saying, I suppose, that I’m OK. I haven’t expired, I have a justifiable right to exist, that I am effective, capable, and competent, and that my life makes sense.

These are, of course, all things I find it difficult to accept. That’s why the whole Self-Validation is so important. You know when you go to the doctor and the front desk person validates your parking, she puts a stamp on the little stub, or punches a hole in it, and she has officially declared that parking stub as valid. You don’t have the authority to validate your own parking stub.

But a Human Being is not a parking stub. We are Beings, and Beings have no need to be validated by someone else. Beings have the right, the ability, and the authority to validate ourselves.

The thing is, however, that it is easy to validate a parking stub, and it is sometimes almost impossible to validate one’s Self. Why is that?

Of course one could always fake validate yourself. You could say it, claim it, and tattoo it on your forehead, but unless you really believe you are valid, you will never actually feel valid. As it turns out, only the thoughts that seem legitimate, and genuine rather than tenuous will affect your attitudes, and ultimately your behaviors towards yourself.

So, as it turns out, unless I can proclaim myself to be a valid, genuine, fully legitimate Human Being I will continue to see myself as invalid, as a loser, I will kick my own butt, lambaste myself, and rather than feeling deserving of life, I will know in every fiber of body that God is wasting air on me. Who would have known it would take so much effort for me to be nice to myself?

Until I validate myself, nothing about me will ever be good enough.

Now I can easily identify the incidents and the perpetrators that assassinated my self-esteem, but knowing the names of all my tormentors does not undo the damage I have already experienced. If I were stabbed, identifying the knife will not eliminate the wound, and even after some healing, the scar will remain.

Most of my life I have been doing stuff and then looking around for approval. I need to be a valid human being, and I have looked for my validity in the praise and approval of other people. But no matter how much praise and approval I receive, it is never enough, because I can only feel valid, if I actually am valid, and if I am actually really and truly valid, then I’m valid regardless of the praise and approval of other people. In fact, if I am valid, then I will know I am valid even when I am criticized and condemned by others.

If I could figure out how to Validate my Self, if I could see my own worth and authenticate it, if I could accept and acknowledge my right to exist, if only I could say that I deserve to live, and that I am worthy, that I am valuable, and that I am deserving of all the love and gifts of life then I could stop working to earn a place in life, and instead just enjoy my life.

So far, I have not enjoyed much of my life. Perhaps the best argument for Self-validation is that without Self-validation, your life will be miserable. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, your validation is not supported by empirical evidence, nor can you be argued into validating yourself. Human validity is not awarded, or earned, it is taken.

There is an insurance story that may contribute to these matters. A woman comes in to an insurance office, sits down with an agent, and says, “I’m sorry, but I am going to have to drop my husbands life insurance policy.”

“Why?” asked the agent.

“I just can’t afford the payments. You see, my husband died a year ago, and I’ve been struggling to make ends meet now that I have to pay all my bills with just my meager salary. I have tried to keep up with the payments, but I just have to cut back somewhere.”

“Excuse me," said the agent. “Did you say that your husband died a year ago?”

“Yes, that’s right,” said the woman.

“Then you don’t have to pay us anything any more. In fact we have to pay you. Your husband had a very generous life insurance policy, and now that he has passed away, the policy requires us to pay you $1,750,000 dollars!”

The point of the story is this: The woman had $1,750,000, but she continued to struggle because she didn’t understand that she was wealthy. She had all this money, and yet she continued to struggling to pay when all she had to do was collect. When you validate your Self you stop paying premiums and just accept the riches of your life that have been available to you all along. Just say, “I am valid!” Name it, and claim it.

My Walter Mitty Mind by tex norman

Walter Mitty was sad,
in a funny way, and, like me,
Mitty lived in his mind
the one place where he could be
admired. The only place he
dared to admire himself,
but even then, he knew he
was only pretending
to admire himself.
How attractive it is
to be right
to be competent
to be self-validated
to be o’ so self assured.
The humor is in Mitty’s pitiful
willingness to be skilled,
knowledgeable, assured, poised
and positive in his fantasy.
We are supposed
to pity poor Mitty, but I admire his
un-admirable survival skills,
and wish when in my mind
I were toward myself half as kind.

Loss, Lost, Loser and Me

Getting lost has been part of my life all of my life. Of course, those two words have a long history with religion – especially the religious body into which I was born. If you sin, you are in a lost state. While the vivid picture of hell given to all members of THE TRUE CHURCH were scary as hell (pun intended) the word LOST was scary all by itself.

A large psychic void is left by a loss of faith. So many Catholics have tried so many things to replace it.
Phil Donahue

When you are lost, you are off kilter, you are discombobulated, confused, and at first you are just worried. Eventually your worries become desperation and fear. Most of us have never experienced the Biblical hell we heard about in church, but everyone has, at least once, been lost. We all know what if feels like to be lost, to not know where you are, to have missed the turn, to have no idea to get back to the place where you feel right.

Where did you lose your Faith? by tex norman

I'm thinking, "Hell,
if I knew that, well,
it wouldn't be lost, now would it?"
I think and almost say out loud, "I might
not have had it in the first place, in which case
you cannot lose what you never had."
Instead, I check the pockets of my pants,
the breast pocket of the shirt I wore
yesterday. Next I check that little foyer
table we keep near the front door, where
I've been known to dump stuff off there
as I return from a work weary day. "Could
be," you suggest, "that you have a hole in
your pocket. If it fell through a hole
it wouldn't be your fault, still,
finding it again, well, hell,
it could have fallen out anywhere."

I checked between the cushions
of the couch and the bedside table
next to my light, among my stack of books,
but nothing. I could've sworn I'd had it
in my hand, just the other day.

I'm tired of looking for it,
but look for it out of habit.
I wonder, if it is missed
like ice cream is missed by a dieter,
or is it missed like the ache
after the tooth has been pulled?

My wife is desperately afraid of getting lost when she has to drive some place. Kathie suffers from geographic-dyslexia. She has gotten lost going to or from some place she has been to and from a dozen times. And a wrong turn fills her with an illogical fear. It is almost as if she feels that if she is lost she will be lost forever.

I have never been geographically lost forever, but I have been bewildered for hours. I had a job as a Child Welfare case manager and part of that job was to get an address and go out and check on children and their families. Sometimes the addresses were in very unfamiliar and seldom traveled areas. In that job I was lost frequently.

The word LOST is also used in contests to me you lose the battle, or the game, or the competition. This makes the word LOST a very sad word indeed. It means you tried to do something and you failed. You tried, you made an effort, you struggled, you entered the fray, you competed, but your efforts were not good enough. You didn’t WIN, you LOST.

Accept loss forever.
Jack Kerouac

Here is a hint: Never take therapeutic advice from an alcoholic, drug addicted beat generation novelist.

If you fail to win often enough you will feel like a LOSER. Consider this advice from one of our more famous Presidential losers:

You must never be satisfied with losing. You must get angry, terribly angry, about losing. But the mark of the good loser is that he takes his anger out on himself and not his victorious opponents or on his teammates.
Richard M. Nixon

I can see the point Nixon was trying to make, but those of us who feel like eternal losers need no encouragement to beat ourselves up over every loss. Here is a hint: never take psychological advice from Richard Nixon.

Some quotes urge losers not to give up, to not quit, not surrender. The idea is that a loss should be the motivation to keep you trying, and if you keep trying you will eventually be a winner and not a loser. It is almost as if losing is temporary and lost implies permanency.


Sometimes what is lost is a good thing.

In two decades I've lost a total of 789 pounds.
I should be hanging from a charm bracelet.
Erma Bombeck

You’d think, once a guy was sliding into 60 years of age, he would have a life he can accept, he would be a person he could like, he would feel like a winner. Maybe he wouldn’t feel like a winner in the eyes of the world, but he would feel like a winner in the eyes of himself, and perhaps his family. If you are one of those unspectacular beings (and most of us are) then as you approach the end of your life, your world gets smaller, you have become familiar with the well traveled paths in your life, and you are never lost.

If not being lost is a reasonable expectation for most of us, then feeling lost is especially sad. Feeling like you need a GPS or a tracking device implanted just under the skin is not going to make a guy feel better.

And yet, I suppose you mourn the loss or the death of what you thought your life was, even if you find your life is better after. You mourn the future that you thought you'd planned.
Lynn Redgrave

DNA and Changeability

There is this guy, Patrick McGowan who believes he has evidence that childhood trauma actually changes the DNA. Mr. McGowan studied the brains of suicide victims, found indicators that child abuse actually modifies a gene called NR3C1. (It’s not the catchiest name for a gene is it). Apparently, the NR3C1 affects a person's ability to deal with stress. Scientist call these sorts of changes "epigenetic", and that word means that the gene's DNA sequence wasn't altered but it's structure was modified to make it less active and these MODIFICATIONS of the gene are often permanent.

The hypothalamus gland, the pituitary gland and the adrenal glands work together to shape your “nature.” Since glands ooze hormones and hormones make us feel stuff, or it makes body processes function properly then altering the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis alters our reactions to stressful situations, and it triggers a number of physiological changes that prime our bodies for action. The NR3C1 produces a protein called the glucocorticoid receptor, which sticks to a stress hormone called cortisol. Cortisol usually helps to deactivate those glands that make us all fight or flighty. Sometimes our body puts out these hormones, and we get upset, but if our brain figures out that the reaction is inappropriate, then your NR2C1 can turn off, or at least dial down the body’s reaction to stress. But if your NR3C1 is messed up, then you can’t properly deactivate those natural, but uncalled for reactions to stressful situations.

If you have a shortage of glucocorticoid receptors, your self-control goes out of control.

What does all this mean? Well, maybe it means that childhood trauma alters the way the body reacts to stress, which affects a person's mood, it has links to a risk of suicide, and it plays a role in mental disorders we experience later in life.

Mr. McGowan’s group of scientists did one experiment where they looked at 24 samples of brain tissue taken from autopsies of male suicide victims. I don’t know how they knew this, but they believed that half of those suicide people (12 of them) had been abused as children and the other 12 suicide victims had not been abused as children. In the next part of their study these scientists compared these 24 people to people who died from accidents, but had never been abused. In all cases they found that the activity of the NR3C1 gene was much lower in abuse victims who took their own lives, than in either of the other groups.

The implication is that childhood trauma changes this HPA trinity so that it can't turn itself down properly. These people then are constantly, continuously, unendingly on high-alert. If you had a bunch of childhood trauma you’ll be at a higher risk of anxiety, depression and suicide.

In other experiments the McGowan’s group found that it was possible, to actually change the HPA trinity in mice BEFORE they were born. This means that Mothers could affect the fates of their children even before they are born. If the mother was depressed or anxious during her third trimester it may change the child’s gene allowing these kiddos to be born with a vulnerability to depression.

So, if this is true, and IF my childhood had trauma, or IF my mother was stressed and depressed during the third trimester prior to my birth, then all my depression is NOT MY FAULT. This would mean that I was, in some sense, hardwired to be depressed. But what if that IS true? Am I suppose to just be depressed from now on because depression for me is as fixed as the color of my eyes? What am I suppose to do about my screwed up NR3C1?

Channel Your Anger or Be Depressed.

While I can get mad, and have gotten mad, and, in some sense, I am always mad, I am also deeply afraid of anger. I get very, very uncomfortable when people around me get angry. When I have displayed anger and gain some distance from the triggering event, I am shocked at myself, and often may order myself to not do that again.

What I need to do, I guess, is this: when I feel angry I should stop and ask myself these questions: Why am I angry? What is making me afraid? Will a display of anger change things for the better?

If you are ever afraid of anything, it is because you have a history where similar situations resulted in pain, disappointment, or profound loss. Most of the time, IF I feel angry, it is because I am afraid. If I stop and think, I can figure out what is making me afraid. I can often recall some childhood event in which my present fear and anger is rooted.

Because my therapist has suggested that getting in touch with my anger, and GIVING A VOICE to my emotional life may have some positive effect on me, I am trying to understand anger and what it might mean to GIVE VOICE to my anger.

The suggestion (to me) is that depression may be caused, at least in part, by suppressing anger. If you can’t express anger then people will run over you, take advantage of you, and this won’t mean there is no anger, it is just that the anger is inside my brain bouncing about like a hollow core bullet. The implication is this: channel your anger or be depressed.

A Krakatoa State of Mind

My therapist has been talking some about anger, and it has got me thinking about the topic, as well as my own relationship with anger.

There is a scripture I first heard in the King James Version of the Bible that says:


Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath Ephesians 4:26

Maybe you think the Bible is the word of God, and maybe you think it is a human document written by people about their faith thoughts, but either way, the phrase may contain some sort of truth. The truth is that there is a way to be angry that is positive, healthy, or enhancing to life, and there are sinful, or negative, hurtful way to be angry.

Anger bothers me. I don’t mean to imply that I am anger free, far from it. I am full of anger.

I wrote this Ransom Poem about anger. 1

A Krakatoa State of Mind by tex norman

I am erupting like Krakatoa.
My core is screaming.
There’s a battle raging, Angel,
and I am tired, so very tired.
I feel fine about this, morally,
fine about erupting to make my point.
And yes, I feel I’ve carried more than my share
for this lifetime.
My mama stabbed, scratched, stung,
gouged and tripped me, debunking my fears.
“Whoa! Are you going to catch
it now,”
my mad mama hissed.
I do not care.
I’m asking for permission to
duck, dodge, dart, or flee
this most unholy burden,
and render this volcano
I’ve been sitting on inactive
-- this a mound of black,
jagged, Vulcan glass.
I’ll sit this one out,
alone,
in a hard place
grown cold.

My therapist seems concerned about my suppression of anger.

Of course I know where I learned to suppress anger. As a child if I expressed anger, or displeasure, or disapproval, or a differing opinion, emotion, or leaked a hint of independent thought my parents would hit, slap, spank, belittle, or in some way unpleasantly punished me. Experience taught me that if I held my emotions in I avoided being crushed by parental disapproval. Actually, what I learned is that one way or another anger and emotion had to be crushed, thwarted, pressed down, squeezed, compressed, and that it hurt less if I did my own suppressing.

While there are those who subscribe to the ole, “squeaky wheel get’s the grease” philosophy, and while it does seem to work for some folks, it doesn’t have that same appeal to me.

I get angry about things, then go on and work.
Toni Morrison

In my past, a display of anger seldom ever ended well. Complaints, disagreements, arguments, nasty faces at close quarters, accomplishes little and often makes things worse.

Some might claim that venting your anger will make you feel better. To venting anger makes me feel worse. Hell, it doesn’t even have to be my anger. Being near an angry Venter is like standing too close to a dirty bomb – it contaminates you. “Venting” as a positive act got popular back in the 1960s, but remember a lot of pot and LSD was consumed in the 60s, so some of their thinking was barely thought out at all. yogi gurus and pop-psychology turned “Letting it all hang out” into a hippie, yuppie mantra. Venting promised to free the psyche of its pent up feelings, freeing the pent up was suppose to somehow lead to healing.

But suppressing anger is said to increase your blood pressure, allows depression to dig a trench in your MIND field, and it is bad, bad, really bad.

When I do let my anger show I have usually just hit my finger with a hammer, or broken something I was trying to repair, of had some sort of accident. In a short span of time I may lob and F bomb, and scold as harshly as possible, but the target is usually me. The YOU STUPID IDIOT my parents used to say has turned into I’M SUCH A STUPID F-ING LOSER!”

When they say depression is hatred turned inward they say right.

When people vent their anger my heart beats faster, I get that fight or flight feeling, but flight is preferred, and I am deeply uncomfortable. My therapist tells me there is something to add to fight or flight, and that’s the ole deer in the headlights freezing up. When my therapist said this it had the ring of truth. I could identify with that freeze up scenario. I don’t fight, and rarely can I withdraw, but I do freeze up. I stand there and wish I were somewhere else and wait for the earth to stop quaking.

Maybe it is bad to suppress. I don’t just suppress anger, but I suppress most of my emotions. I close up joy in a tin can. I put exuberance in a hermetically sealed bag. Love is hidden in a steel drum and encased in lead like it was kryptonite.

I’m like a big ole Caldara with a churning pool of magma deep inside, there is the potential for an eruption, but it can look dormant, and calm for the next thousand years. Maybe.

1. A Ransom Poem is created the same way they make kidnap demands in the movies. You read two or three prose works, you circle words and phrases that catch your attention, and then you arrange them on a page so that they make up something new. The new thing is what is called a Ransom Poem.

Anger

Whining is not only graceless, but can be dangerous. It can alert a brute that a victim is in the neighborhood.
-- Maya Angelou


My Monster by tex norman

What was I doing wrong?
I ask the taboo question.
I now wonder why.
I was a nerd in 1957,
I didn’t know the nuances
of Faulkner’s magic.
Thinking the same question,
finally, I got mad.
I was afraid to probe
my secret heart,
bloody and pulsating.
Anger shook the monster
off my shoulder,
to scuttle under the bed.
The monster growled.

My monster remains
in residence.
Slightly Amended Time
Slightly amended time
is offered,
shared,
scheduled,
collected to reuse, re-cycled.

Now we have the capability
of canning
dedication,
stuffing so many extras,
nurtured, fired up,
busy,
loose.
Don’t forget,
I have been lost
striving to be good.

The Key To Me

“…each of us holds the key to our own freedom…you are the gatekeeper of your own happiness.”

Angel Kyodo Williams

I read a book by Ms Kyodo Williams and I admired the book, but, as with all books, I have this habit of pulling out parts and worrying the meaning out of them. In this case I am wondering what the writer means.

If I hold the key to my own freedom wouldn’t I know that? A key unlocks stuff. There is the word Key as in the test answers. Teachers use a key to sore tests. The key in the case of teachers is a document that contains the correct answers to a test. There might be some way of applying the key definition as it applies to teachers, but mostly, I think the key here is like a piece of metal that, inserted into a lock will lift the appropriate spring levers that release a lock. If the lock and key image is correct, then once the lock is unlocked you are no longer restricted, you are no longer confined.

The second part of the Kyodo Williams quote says that we are the gatekeeper of our own happiness. I hear gatekeeper, but I think “prison guard.” What it seems like she is saying is that the person that keeps you imprisoned, the person that has the power to keep the gate closed or to open the gate, the guardian of your confinement is YOU.

In other words, if I feel imprisoned in misery, I need to recognize that I am the person keeping me confined with misery. I need to realize that I have the power to release myself to freedom and happiness.

If Ms. Kyodo Williams is right, I think she is only partly right. If I am the one keeping me locked in a cell with unhappiness, then yeah, logically, it would seem like that situation should not exist, yet it does exist.

Now why would this situation exist? Why would anyone confine themselves to a melancholy existence, when I have the power to release myself to a life of joy? What I’m thinking is that it is just not that simple. If I am the gatekeeper keeping myself locked up then there must be something causing me to do what it is illogical for me to do. Why would anyone be so restrictive and uncooperative with themselves?

I mean, really, if I have the power to allow myself to be happy, then why don’t I?

Obviously if I am in the position to free myself, and I won’t do it, there has to be some reason. There has got to be some cause. Perhaps it is some chemical imbalance, or post traumatic stress thing, or bipolar problem, or schizophrenia, or something along those lines.

Perhaps Ms Kyodo Williams is saying that we have the power to release ourselves from our self-imposed prison of sadness, we don’t realize it, and so we need to work on recognizing that we are the source of our own problems, and we are the solution to our own problems.

When Things Seem Always to go Wrong!

There are a whole bunch of rules and aphorisms that say what the cartoon says. Murphy’s Law says something like, “if anything can go wrong, it will.” There are just tons of related rules and maximums.

• If you drop a slice of toast is will always fall butter side down.

• If you perceive that there are four possible ways in which a procedure can go wrong, and circumvent these, then a fifth way, unprepared for, will promptly develop.

• If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something.

• Nature always sides with the hidden flaw.

• Left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse.

• If your advance is going well, you are walking into an ambush.

• Logic is a systematic method of coming to the wrong conclusion with confidence.

These sayings do not reflect my life, but they do feel like they represent your life. It occurred to me that these “glass half empty” type proverbs would not be common, and they would not resonate with so many people if many of us didn’t also identify with these dictums.

It just feels like a big ole dark cloud is following us around and it isn’t true. Well, it isn’t true most of the time. So why I feel this way? Why do so many of us feel this way?

Many troubles come to me, because these troublesome beliefs feel at home inside my head. That is, when a person's mind is full of thoughts of how rotten things are and how bad they are going, so the troubles say, "Hey, here's a place for us with all our friends where we can feel at home!"

Obviously the smart thing to do, the logical solution is to disinvite these negative thoughts. If your brain is full of thoughts about how things are NOT going to be OK, then jump up on a table, pull your hair, and shout: “Get out of my frikin’ head!”

There is another saying that is common among us Charlie Brown types. MISERY LOVES COMPANY. All my “I’m a loser” thoughts invite their pessimistic pals in until there is standing room only inside my head and each and every guest is a miserable ad man selling me on how great and wonderful my own flaws are.

Here is a truism that I need to take to heart: Misery attracts misery; joy attracts optimism. Aphrodite knows that I have tried to follow my own advice. Perhaps I haven’t tried hard enough. My hope is that with diligent practice that I will eventually disinvite the negative thoughts and greet lots of positive thoughts. We’ll see.

Decision-making and Me

Like it or not, life is made up of making decisions. I make decisions all day, every single day. I make decisions every waking moment of my life. We all do. I think, even in my dreams, I am making decisions.

Some people are sure, but it is never like that for me. I sometimes am sure about my decisions, and sometimes I have doubts, but inside, deep within the core of me, I am never absolutely sure. I have made decisions abruptly, and I have agonized over decisions for hours, and days, and in a couple of cases months. Careful deliberation doesn't seem to make my decisions better than the ones I make on a whim.

All decisions are made on insufficient evidence.
- Rita Mae Brown

Robert Frost wrote about decision-making in a poem that he called “Two Roads Diverged.” In stanza one Frost writes,

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could

I guess we could say that this person looking down the road as far as he could is actually gathering data. He was clearly trying to see as much into the future as possible hoping that was going to help him make a decision. MacBeth asked if some old ladies could look into the seeds of time and tell him which would grow and which would not. It is what we all want. Some of us agonize over decision making more than others.

In stanza three Frost writes,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

Lots and lots of time, when we make a decision we are stuck with the consequences.

When possible make the decisions now, even if action is in the future. A revised decision usually is better than one reached at the last moment.
- William B. Given

Confidence by tex norman

I hate confident people.
At least that’s what I think I think.
For when confident people speak
they sound sure, and they speak,
not just with confidence,
but with certainty, with an assurance
that we all find compellingly convincing.
There have been times when I have not
only been right, bur I’ve known
I was right and yet the confidently wrong
have managed to be wrong with such assurance
with such certitude, that I have been stunned
into silent stupidity and although I have been
actually right, I have felt very, very wrong.
The confident feel sure, positive, precise, right
and accurate, which is always better
than being actually, factually right.

How could it be better to feel right than to be right? It might be better to be right, but what I yearn for is that feeling of being right. I wish I could just feel OK. I wish I could just feel like I’m doing the right stuff, going the right direction, rejecting or accepting what needs to be rejected or accepted.

Obviously you can never know how things might have gone had you made some other decision. I’ve made choices, seen how the other choice turned out better, and kicked myself for my stupid decision, but I don’t know that even if I’d made that OTHER choice things could have gone very wrong for me.

I was once in a car crash and after I was fussing at myself, “Why couldn’t you have left 5 minutes earlier, or 5 minutes later? Then you’d have missed being run into by that Mustang.” Those recriminations were right, of course, I would have missed being rear-ended by the Mustang, but maybe leaving earlier, or later I would have been T-boned by a garbage truck.

Decision making is just what we do. I'm not sure how to feel better about this.

Raised Hands Hands Down

My hand hurts. It has been a couple of weeks since I fell and my hand still hurts. Actually it seems to be hurting worse. Maybe it is the cold. The part that hurts is one of the metacarpal bones, the one below my pinky finger. It is the end of the metacarpal closest to the wrist. I am so thankful it is my left hand, but I am amazed at how much I actually use the left hand.

I am thinking about my hand, and that leads to thinking about all hands. This leads, of course, to Googling the word hand. I found some interesting stuff:

1. One out of six disabling work injuries involve the fingers, most often due to the finger striking or being struck against a hard surface.

2. One fourth of athletic injuries involve the hand and wrist.

3. Children under the age of six are at the greatest risk for crushing or burning injuries of the hand.

4. fingers are special, because there are no muscles inside the fingers. The muscles which bend the finger joints are located in the palm and up in the mid forearm, and are connected to the finger bones by tendons, which pull on and move the fingers like the strings of a marionette.

5. The wrinkles on the back of the finger knuckles are actually dimples, and mark areas where the skin is attached to the tendon beneath the skin.

6. Finger joints only have wrinkles and creases if the joint moves. If a finger joint stops moving, the creases eventually flatten out.

7. One out of six of congenital anomalies recorded on birth statistics involve the upper extremities.

8. White children are four times more likely than black children to be born with webbed fingers.

9. Black children are ten times more likely than white children to be born with extra fingers.

10. Each hand contains (plus or minus... everyone is different, and everyone counts these things differently...)
o 29 major and minor bones (many people have a few more).
o 29 major joints.
o At least 123 named ligaments.
o 34 muscles which move the fingers and thumb:

17 in the palm of the hand, and

18 in the forearm.
o 48 named nerves: 3 major nerves.

24 named sensory branches.

21 named muscular branches.
o 30 named arteries and nearly as many smaller named branches.

11. The muscles which power the fingers are strong - strong enough for some people to climb vertical surfaces supporting their entire weight at times by a few fingertips. The muscles which accomplish this feat are stronger than you might imagine, for the biomechanics of the hand require that the force generated by the muscles which bend the fingertips must be at least four times the pressure which is produced at the fingertips.

12. The thumb is controlled by
o 9 individual muscles, which are controlled by
o all 3 major hand nerves and moves in such a complex fashion that there are 6 separate descriptive terms just for particular directions of movement of one thumb joint - the basal joint, at the base of the thumb.

13. Contrary to popular opinion, humans - homo sapiens - are not the only primates posessing opposable thumbs. Chimanzees and monkees can oppose the thumb to the index digit. What makes the human hand unique in the animal kingdom is the ability of the small and ring fingers to rotate across the palm to meet the thumb, owing to a unique flexibility of the carpometacarpal joints of these fingers, down in the middle of the palm. This is referred to as "ulnar opposition" and adds unparalleled grip, grasp, and torque capability to the human hand. This feature developed after the time of Lucy, a direct human ancestor, who lived about 3.2 million years ago.
14. Structurally, fingernails are modified hairs.

15. The skin on the palm side of the hand and fingers is unique for these reasons and more:
o No hair (the medical term is glabrous).
o Fingerprints.
o Usually neither color nor the ability to tan.
o Tough and durable, yet sensitive.
o Anchored down to the bones beneath through an intermediate layer of fascia. This arrangement keeps the skin of the palm from sliding around like a rubber glove when we use our hands to grip and twist.

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine. Ralph Waldo Emerson

I see the hand as a tool of my art. It is a tool of my mind as well. Without my hands I would have great difficulty in communicating, and it would be almost impossible to express the emotions and thoughts that define me to myself, and to those around me.

Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art. Leonardo da Vinci

Give Up Goals

Wanting to go
is not the same as having
some place to go.
To climb without a goal
is to climb forever.

You don’t have to convince me that goals are important. I know, it is impossible to succeed with a goal you don’t even have. But is there a point where you just stop with the lofty goals, that you give up on ever achieving big important things, and just accept life as it is? Is there a time when you exchanged you goal to be President, or an astronaut, or Pulitzer Prize winning poet, and instead have goals like: I would like a sandwich.

Seriously, I’m almost 60, I have two knee replacements, and a total shoulder replacement, and I weigh way too much. It would be absolutely insane for me to have a goal of being a fireman, or an astronaut. As you age, as things change me physically and permanently, I start shutting doors on past goals.

Perhaps I’m not actually giving up on my goals. It could be I’m just giving up on my wishes.

I’d like to have been a doctor. But not really. I hate math. I didn’t have the confidence to take chemistry. I don’t like being around whiny sick people. Oddly, I don’t have a problem being a whiny sick person. Actually, I guess I’m still right, because I don’t like myself when I’m whiny and sick.

Perhaps the question I’m worrying with is this: Do you get to a place in your life when you can dispense with making goals? I understand that when you feel stuck and have no idea what to do, that is the time to make some goals and to formulate a plan to implement your goals. But another thing I’m wondering is this: Is there ever a time in life when the goals you once had need to discarded (if you are to have a grasp on reality)?

Thought is the sculptor who can create the person you want to be. ~Henry David Thoreau

In the Thoreau quote you get the image that goals make you what you want to become.

Adults are always meeting little kids and 9 times out of 10 one of the questions the adult asks the kid is this: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I heard someone say that the reason adults ask little kids what they want to be when they grow up, is because the adults are looking for ideas.

I’ve been there all my life. I’ve never figured out what I wanted to be when I grew up. I’ve never actually created a grown up’s goal for anything.

It is more important to know where you are going than to get there quickly. Do not mistake activity for achievement. ~Mabel Newcomber

That is what I did! I mistook activity for achievement. I did
lots of stuff, I tried lots of things, but because I had no clearly defined
goal, I wasn’t going anywhere, I was just doing stuff.

At 59 and heading toward 60 it may be time to give up on the ole, what I want to be, stuff. Is it ever OK to just give up, and not bother with goals? At some point you realize you missed the boat, your ship has sailed, and the only goals left to make have to do with occupying yourself until there is no more self to occupy.

My True Church Hell

I was raised by judgemental people. It was part of us. Judgement was woven into the fabric of our lives. It starts off sort of making sense. If you believe the Bible is the book that reveals God to us, and if you believe it is important to know God, and to please God, then you get really interested in the Bible. The more you learn about God, from that book, the more you understand what you have to do to please God.

Of course, if you have to please God to be saved, then so does everyone else. If you believe that you have a strangle hold on the truth, then you know that everyone who behaves differently from you is NOT pleasing God, so you need to explain the error of their ways.

All of a sudden you are judging other people. Do this and you are lost, you go to hell, you will surely be flung into the outer most regions of the nether Stygian darkness where there is a lake of fire, and the worm is not consumed.

My people seemed to do this with ease. They were not troubled by the idea that God was very willing to torture people forever for things like, lusting in your heart, or singing hymns while also playing a musical instrument, or being baptized because you are saved instead of being baptized in order to be saved.

I knew I lied when I thought it would get me out of trouble, or allow me to escape a belting for my sin of failing a spelling test. I knew I looked at girls and they percolated my hormones. I would try not to, but sometimes I got so hot to trot that I would, well, pleasure myself. I knew all that stuff was sin, I was a sinner, so I was heading to hell with absolutely no chance of avoiding my fiery, torturous fate. There was only one way I could avoid hell and please my family and that was to be perfect. Perfection was the one and only thing I could never ever hope to be.

The very day I was baptized was the same day I knew I was hopelessly condemned. I was lain back into the water of our church’s baptistery. I rose from the water redeemed, righteous, and saved, a pleasing child of God. Then this girl was baptized after me. As the preacher pulled her up out of the water, I noticed the baptismal gown, a white gown, had plastered itself to her breasts, and while it wasn’t transparent, it was close to that. I could see the shadow and the perkiness of bosoms, and BAM! before I had even dried off from my own baptism I had committed the sin of lust in my heart, and I was lost.

I tried to be righteous. I tried to be perfect, and to judge other people with zeal and enthusiasm, but I just was not good at any of that. At some point, I just gave up. I was never going to be good enough for the TRUE CHURCH and I was never going to be good enough to be in my family. I gave up, but the habit of judging myself is a habit harder to break than cigarettes, or booze. I am depressed. In my mind, this goal of perfection has been pounded into my brain and etched on my DNA. I continue to examine my life, my thoughts, and my actions, and every imperfection I find becomes evidence that I am no damn good, I don’t deserve to live, and God is wasting air on me.