Columbus, Ohio USA
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Urban Philosophy
by Eric Anderson
Eric Anderson lives in Victorian Village. He digs deep, writes about urban topics, and relates them to our larger life experiences.
He can be reached at eric.anderson@mac.com
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SNOWLITUDE
January/February 2020 Issue
I hope it snows soon. I mean, really snows. When we first moved to this neighborhood many years ago, I made fun of a neighbor who was using a shovel to remove what I would call a “dusting” of snow from his sidewalk. This was the result of “flurries,” and in these situations I typically use a broom.
My neighbor overreacted, fighting against the snow instead of working with it. Snow rarely seeks a confrontation with me in the first place; instead it typically provides me with emotional and spiritual benefits, when present in the “proper” quantity and form. For the past several winters, we have managed to get at least a week or two of proper snow, providing for brief but satisfying annual rituals. I await this year’s accumulation with both anticipation and serenity. I wrote a poem on a powdery January night (around January 10th) a few years ago, and my current feelings are still reflected in its lines.Around January 10th
I pull the snow up to my chin
to tuck into winter
and sometimes I pull it all the way
over my head
so I can hide under it like the earth does
when it sleeps.Rest and sleep remind me of two of the best gifts that snow provides: an invitation to deeper contemplation and a superficial salve. Like the heavy brocade drapes in our living room, snow dampens sound. I experience a sense of solitude walking at night in the snow because the air is so silent. The snow breathes in the sounds of the highway and the city, and it never exhales. The crunch of my boots on the snow and my breath behind a wet wool scarf wrapped around my face becomes a prayer, a methodical meditation. Early the next morning, the repetitive scrape of my shovel on the sidewalk, set against the silence of the neighborhood, provides a winter mantra that unmoors my unconscious mind and sets it free to drift.
Like a thick coat of paint, snow covers the dirt, the leaves that I failed to rake, and the grocery bags, cigarette butts and dog poop that have frozen onto our tree lawn. Like most physical beauty, it exists only on the surface, thinly veiling the complexity of debris beneath it. The snow accomplishes this for us without being asked. But unlike dirt that I literally sweep under the edge of a rug when I don’t have time to get the dustpan, the snow becomes the pristine rug that voluntarily settles gently over the dirt. Like a balm, or a couple of chocolate bars, or a glass of Ardbeg in front of a wood fire, it allows me to forget work, renovation, laundry, and parenting for a while, and simply “be.” I believe that I am responsible for creating much of this loud, clanging life that surrounds me. When a change in orientation or perspective can whisk this away, I am reminded of the calm that I am inexplicably willing to relinquish in exchange for busy-ness.
This reminds me of a week I spent in silence at a monastery in Kentucky. When I arrived, I saw someone sitting serenely in a chair high on a hill outside the Abbey, and I thought that I’d like to sit there, but I didn’t want to be weird and plop down next to him. I waited, then went inside to my room. When I came out to look again, he was still up there. He was there again fifty minutes later, and I thought, “He doesn’t even have a book to read; he’s just sitting there!” I had trouble understanding how he could sit so still without anything to do. At this point in my weeklong retreat I was not consciously aware of the jabber jabber jabber of thoughts and conversations in my mind keeping me focused on “doing” and “thinking.” But after two days of silence and meditation, I found myself at the end of a long walk sitting in that same spot in the chair on the hill for well over an hour, effortlessly doing nothing but “being.” I realized in retrospect that my mind had quieted. At these rare times, I feel as though I simply “am.” My soul is at peace.
For me, snow can provide a shorter path to solitude and to being. At this moment, I could use it. I am writing this as the days slip toward Christmas and I struggle to manage all the moving parts of life. Our family has been in the process of finding our rhythm as my mother just moved into our home a few weeks ago. I flew to Wisconsin to coordinate her relocation, and then drove back to Ohio with her in early November. I still need to move many of her things inside from the garage. At the same time, our family is currently at Nationwide Children’s hospital with our daughter, who is recovering from brain surgery. In the flurry of preparations for everything, I haven’t had time to find gifts for anyone. And I need to fix my mom’s leaking bathroom faucet.
I hope it snows soon. I mean, really soon.
TRAVELS ON THE HEMINGWAY CAUSEWAY
November/December 2019 Issue
Over most of our time as a human species, our ability to generalize has enabled us to survive, and has made us great. We have been able to observe patterns of events and deduce outcomes correctly. It’s how we successfully hunted deer, canned tomatoes, and created Prozac. But it has made us cocky.
It brings to mind a Moleskine journal I’m giving to a friend of mine for Christmas this year. On the wrapper around any Moleskine, we find the message, “The legendary journal of Hemingway, Picasso, and Chatwin.” The implication is clear; buy this journal and you will write or draw like these famous people. It is an inference: the journal is the link between people and greatness. But this is an intentional obfuscation of correlation and causation. I unconsciously believe that in the future, Hemingway and I will both have journals filled with literary amazingness.
I recently experienced my own real-life examples of the correlation/causation myth. I use a burr grinder to prepare my coffee beans, and it’s plugged into the same wall outlet as my coffee maker. The grinding timer has no “off” switch, and a few days ago the beans were gone, but the grinder kept whirring away annoyingly. I reached behind the coffee pot to unplug the grinder, and sure enough, the grinder stopped. Later, when I tried to brew coffee, nothing happened. In my attempt to turn the grinder off, I had unplugged the coffee maker by mistake, but I had done so at the same instant that the grinding timer stopped, leading me to believe that the plug was connected to the grinder. When two events occur at the same time like this, I am inclined to believe that the events themselves are linked. Temporal relationship is an inference. The correlation of unplugging a cord and the grinder stopping implies a causal relationship. I believed erroneously that I caused the grinder to stop by pulling the power cord for the coffee maker.
Similarly, while drilling a pilot hole in a stud to hang a kitchen cabinet, I plunged the drill through the wall and instantaneously the lights in the adjacent dining room went out. Since I knew that I had stapled the wire for the 3-way dining room circuit on the stud, I was sure that I had drilled through the wire. I tore through the drywall to repair the wire, but found that I had completely missed it! I plodded through the other possible solutions, eventually discovering that the ridiculously simple answer was a bad switch. It coincidentally died when I drilled.
Our observational overconfidence is classically revealed in the example of the scarecrow. Scarecrows work, but not because they look like people, or because they flap around in the wind. They scare crows because they smell like us. But the correlated evidence also supports the former belief: Farmer Fred noticed that crows flew away when he walked into his cornfield, so he set out to mimic the experience. He picked out some old clothes, but didn’t bother to wash them before making them into a scarecrow, so his smell remained firmly on them. As the smell wore off, Fred assumed that the crows became accustomed to the appearance of the scarecrow. He made a new one, using a fresh set of clothes from the rag box, smelling like fresh Farmer Fred. The crows were scared, and so it appeared that the visual change made the difference. And in this way, we are duped all the time.
In 1504, Christopher Columbus was stranded on Jamaica. Abused by Columbus’s crew, the Jamaicans refused to share their provisions. Columbus knew about an upcoming lunar eclipse, so he cleverly claimed that God was angry about the provisions, and threatened to take away their moon. When they ignored him, and the punishment appeared on cue, they bought into the purported correlation, and begged for Columbus to ask God to return the moon.
We believe that we understand our world because our physical experience of the observable universe appears to support our explanations. But we forget that events can, by chance, occur subsequent to multiple possible “causes,” like smell, appearance, accidents, or the natural motion of celestial bodies. When I happen to observe one of these (e.g., appearance), I call it “the cause.” A correlation may suggest a causal relationship. It does not guarantee it. Still, the Hemingway Causeway is a tempting road.
IS HOMELESSNESS A HIGHER CALLING?
September/October 2019 Issue
On an October walk through Goodale Park with my children a few years ago, we came upon a homeless person’s belongings under a droopy tree’s branches. During one of his summer program visits to the park, my son had told his disbelieving suburban friends about people living under tree branches, and he spent some time educating them. Now we were able to examine some remains.
I wish I knew the truth about homelessness; for now, my assumptions drive most of my reactions. I know there are people who lose their jobs, can’t pay their mortgage, lose their home, can’t afford an apartment. Some experience mental illness and can’t afford treatment. Some stay at churches in the area. On the other hand, I also know there are people who ask for money and use it to buy a drink. Or two. One morning we found a homeless (and drunk) man in our back yard, hunched over his drained 12-pack, which became an opportunity for our kids to learn about this aspect of urban culture.
My children and I explored the tree home a bit, noticing a blanket, sleeping bag, magazines, etc. We talked about the guy who probably lived there, and where his belongings had come from.
When I think about the 300-gallon trash containers behind my house, and the jewels that I might find inside, I wonder, “Where do the homeless figure in all this?” After all, although I live in a very different world than the homeless, we share this unique nexus, the trash containers. We lift the lids on the same containers. The other link we have is the street intersection, but I don’t engage them there. The trash containers are all that we truly share. We do share them, and although the homeless might be pursuing needs in there, I merely glance opportunistically for wants.
After poking around under the tree for a few minutes, my daughter asked where he had moved. We talked about how cold it was now, and that he lost his privacy when the leaves fell off. What would it be like to lose our home every year? I wondered how many of the homeless choose it as a lifestyle.
I know someone (I’ll call him Doug) who has decided that he really likes being homeless, and living in homeless shelters. He quit his Public Accounting job and gave away everything he owned. A mutual friend was concerned that Doug had “lost it.” Her concern is loving and real – and Doug may very well have lost it! What’s really interesting (and maybe ridiculously obvious) is that I don’t first wonder if Doug has caught onto something that the rest of us missed. Doug’s choice threatens a lot of my choices, if I consider his choice to be legitimate. I’ve heard that homeless people often refuse our offers of “help” – they opt for elements that the homeless lifestyle provides. I think that I am more comfortable with those who are devastated by their homelessness. Doug may indeed have mental illness, but what does it say about me if I think it’s strange to give away all your material possessions and choose to live with the poor?
When we walked away from the tree, we immediately encountered a scraggly guy walking a dog. He seemed like a “fringe” character, a person I wouldn’t normally chat with. He had noticed us poking around under the tree, and he approached us, asking if anyone was still living there. “Nope, just remnants,” I replied, trying to avoid engaging with him. Then he surprised me. He said, “We don’t realize how lucky we’ve got it.” (“We”?) This “scraggly guy” had brought us together as “similar”; he allowed me to become part of his “we.” He didn’t see us as different; he viewed us as equally fortunate.
The homeless people ask for a few bucks for some food, and I respond to what I believe are their true intentions. I generally believe that they aren’t going to use the money for what they claim to. What would happen if I responded to their true needs? What would happen if I merely tried to discern their needs? What would happen if I reacted or responded simply with love? And what would that look like?
I HAD A HAND IN THIS
July/August 2019 Issue
The trash on top is safer. So when I open the lid of a 300-gallon container to discard a bag of waste, I glance opportunistically to see if there’s anything worth taking, but I never dig. Even when I see a consistent layer of good stuff on top, indicating that there is likely to be more of the same just inches below, I leave the lower layers undisturbed. At times I’ve convinced myself that I’m selflessly leaving the remainder for the professional homeless dumpster divers, but this is a lie.
My true reason for gleaning only the most providential trash is based on something less honorable: it is my fear of the unknown, completely illogical and based on no tangible evidence. I don’t imagine any particular bad experience (like grabbing hold of some dog feces or a dead squirrel, or severing tendons while reaching into a pile of broken glass). Far from it, I fear something vague and nameless that is impossible for me to imagine.
“The trash on top is safer” reflects a broadly applicable truth about the “unknown”: I feel most comfortable with whatever I can see most easily. The inverse is also true: I am disturbed by what I do not easily see (the unknown), sometimes with good reason. On a family trip to a South Carolina beach, I experienced both views. The first was, I think, a justified fear of the unknown. While wading about 50 feet from shore, just deep enough for the swelling waves to gently lift my toes off the sandy ocean floor, I occasionally got stung and bitten by critters that were swimming, invisible to me, in the silty, churning water below. Over the next few days while walking along the beach, it was revealing and a little unnerving to see dead crabs, jellyfish, stingrays, and even one baby shark that had washed up on the shore. Assuming that only a small percentage of the nearby population washes up to die on the shore, it seemed clear that the water must have been teeming with them while I was helplessly bobbing. Then my mind wandered and I wondered if there might be even more predatory species swimming around me that I had not yet seen washed up on the beach. Food for thought.
I also experienced my irrational fear of the unknown at the beach. My brother-in-law and I went to the beach at night to smoke cigars, and to walk out a bit into the nighttime surf. The cigar part of the plan worked out great, but I was surprised by my new reaction to the ocean. When I merely walked near the water (which now looked inky black), I was petrified, and couldn’t make my feet move closer. Certainly there could be no actual danger from this ankle-deep water. During the day, I mindlessly splashed through it. At night why was I so immobilized that I couldn’t even stick my foot in? The unknown of the ocean, exacerbated by the darkness, was, for me, irrationally immobilizing. I was sure that the Leviathan lurked just beyond the foam, and I imagined tentacles ready to reach for me from the advancing surf.
Dark and immobilizing elements of the unknown can be observed everywhere. For example, one of my college seniors should have completed her applications to graduate schools, but she just worried about it, frozen by an irrational fear of unfamiliar Ph.D. programs. Instead, she stayed in her current safe and familiar part-time job after graduation, even though she hates it. Other college seniors passively avoid the job search for essentially the same reason, deferring their inevitable search for full-time employment to sometime in the as-yet-nonexistent and thus ignorable future.In a similar but grim example, spouse abuse often involves an associated codependency that results in the abused partner remaining in a damaging relationship. They choose to stay in the known situation rather than risk the unknown of a different life, whatever that might look like. It’s irrational. Leaving a life-threatening situation would by necessity be an improvement. But the nameless unknown wields frightening power.
Just like with the trash, we find “the visible” to be safer. But on the other hand, the visible, knowable “surface” can also end up being less interesting. The surface or periphery is typically not as substantial as what we find on a deeper level. Consider such common phrases as “only skin deep,” “merely scratching the surface,” and “just a flesh wound”; these downplayed terms have been inspired by our shared experience of the superficial. On a very practical level, the superficial is not as crucial, either. Skin (although important) is not as immediately essential as internal organs, a beautiful face isn’t enough to counterbalance a caustic personality, and conversations about the weather, cars, and lawn care (although safe and convenient for filling otherwise awkward silence at a party) are not as deeply interesting as discussions of philosophical or theological beliefs.
The unknown, the deep, in addition to being more interesting and important, can be riskier. Analogous to the physical danger of broken glass and sharks, our emotional and intellectual depth leads us to a world that is much more complex and murky than the simplistic dualism of blindly held childhood beliefs. When I moved beyond the belief in the false dichotomy of right and wrong (believing that what my mother, or a religious leader, or a favorite book says is right, and other ideas are wrong), life became more interesting and more genuine, but also more complicated. It wasn’t as easy.
When I dig deeper, I risk the loss of innocence and ignorance (and the accompanying bliss). But ignorance comes with a bigger risk. I should probably dig deeper, but I want to be sure that I’m using the right tool, whether it’s a long, hooked stick or an open, inquisitive mind. As Socrates famously said, the unexamined trash can isn’t worth using.
TRUE COLORS
May/June 2019 Issue
My neighbor was recently cited by a Columbus code enforcement officer for peeling house paint. She naturally complained, pointing out all of the peeling paint on the homes of other neighbors who were not being cited. He ignored her as he finished writing her up. It reminded me of arguing with my mom when I was a child, seeking clemency from my own mistakes by pointing out my sister’s similar flaws. That never worked either. Nothing good ever came from challenging my mom, of course, but this recent neighborhood encounter immediately inspired me to look at my own house with new, critical, heartless eyes, like those of the code enforcement officer. Or, perhaps, like my mother.
Some time ago I painted my front porch beautifully, and it was only last month that I realized (twelve years later) that its condition had changed slowly over time. Just like my children, who gradually grow taller each day without my really noticing until suddenly I find that I’m looking up at them, or like several years ago when I ate a little too much fatty and sugary food each day until a year later I was surprised to see that I had developed a gut, my porch had, in front of my eyes, incrementally fallen into a state of disrepair. The bead board ceiling was soft in some places and separating in others, and paint was peeling due to a couple of leaks that I had let go too long. The paint on the porch pillars and spindles was cracking and chipping. Repairing and repainting my porch no longer seemed optional. This is when things became interesting for me.
Our family (and the Victorian Village Commission) settled on a shade of blue (indigo batik) for the ceiling and for some additional accents, but as I started to apply the paint, it didn’t look like the Sherwin-Williams paint chip. I was viewing it in the morning, and the sun was striking the front of the porch. Later on, I tried brushing the blue paint on some partially shaded scallops on the east side of a dormer and on the totally exposed west side of that same dormer. On each side, depending on the time of day, the color looked fabulous or questionable. Back on the porch in the early evening, the color looked ideal. Although I overwhelmingly liked the blue paint we settled on, I was struck by how many types of blue this seemed to be.
As we committed to this color and began applying the other paints, I observed even more color changes. The complementary burgundy paint looked plum in bright sun and brown in the shadows. The other color (rose velvet) looked like peach on the exposed exterior areas and salmon on the inside of the porch at that particular time of day. I was alternately exhausted and thrilled by the complexities and nuances of these metamorphoses And then suddenly I thought of Claude Monet, and I wondered if his experience was similar to mine as he created his “Series Paintings” in and near Giverny. I remember being told that Monet sometimes painted a new scene in a series every ten minutes because he saw that the changing sunlight profoundly altered the colors of his subjects. I recently saw this illustrated through his series of grainstacks paintings, which he completed at Clos Morin, west of Giverny. Monet wrote regarding the effect that he was recording on the canvases, “…the sun changes course from day to day, and the light does not fall in the same way.” Each one looks different from the others; we see through Monet’s eyes the striking difference that a few moments shift of sunlight can make in our perception.
And so I thought, Monet’s grainstacks near Giverny are just like my porch ceiling. The grainstacks and my porch ceiling both have surfaces that were exposed to light, interacted with it, and then reacted to that light in a way that affected its perception by my eyes. Their molecular structures reflected wavelengths that Monet and I interpreted as colors. And these “colors” depend completely on light for their existence. In the dark, of course, there is no color.
In the dark, without the sunlight, there exists the potential for color. At night, my blue porch ceiling looks black to me; without light it contains everything essential to all of the infinite shades of blue that it exhibited as the sun changed its position throughout the day, and its course from day to day. But in the dark it has nothing to interact with, nothing to be exposed to. In the midst of these color variations, this one aspect, the actual substance, is invisible to us, hidden from us. We never actually see the organic and chemical matter in the grain stalks and in the paint pigments. We only see the light that is reflected from them; we only see the result of their exposure to the light.
I believe that something like this exists in me, too: my Ego. This is the part of me that I identify with, and it is the part that other people think of when they use my name, and the part of me that is chattering away in my mind pretty much every conscious moment. Like my blue paint pigment, I rely on the “light” of interaction for my identity. I have memories of my exposure to various people, cultures, environments, events and ideas. My subsequent reactions comprise my idea of “who I am.” To my family, friends and co-workers, my name refers to their memories of my reactions, my “colors” that they have observed.
But we never actually observe the Ego itself. We think that we are aware of it, but we are clearly only aware of indicators and clues that emanate from it. Just like the grain and paint, we identify the Ego by its colorful reactions as it interacts with its surroundings. And just like my porch ceiling, it looks different depending on what it is exposed to. My Ego reacts to the students I work with in a different way than it reacts to my family, and so I “look” different to these two groups. The fact that colors look different under different light seems obvious to me. And yet, I call a can of paint, or a crayon, by only one name (like indigo batik, or burnt sienna). In the same way, I am called Eric in spite of the fact that I react or “reflect” differently to different groups of people. And still, my Ego remains invisible, hidden.
The relationship between the blue porch and the sun mirrors a truth in us, that our potential for identity or “color” also exists “in the dark,” in the absence of interaction. What “I” appear to be is really a collection of my reactions. I am just like the blue paint pigment on my porch, endowed with a substance that is experienced in a variety of ways, depending on who and what influences me. Therefore, I need to be careful who I expose my pigment to.
I HATE SQUIRRELS
March/April 2019 Issue
Squirrels are annoying. As a group, they behave like compulsive yard-salers, leaving their nuts everywhere like outdated yard sale signs that are still stapled to utility poles: frantically posted, then forgotten. On a personal level, squirrels thwarted my only two attempts to grow tomatoes. During the first summer our six plants started strong and tall, grew green tomatoes and ripened beautifully red, but then I watched as they were swiped, partially gnawed, and tossed carelessly aside. I imagined our urban squirrels strutting through our back yard in tiny leather jackets and shades, casually smoking while flippantly destroying our beloved crop.
Unwilling to re-experience failure on such an epic scale, the next year we only tried to grow one plant, and at the suggestion of a friend I put dried cow blood (don’t ask) around the base of the plant to ward them off. It made no difference; the squirrel gang returned. And it isn’t just the tomatoes. We’ve also planted flowers in pots, only to have them unearthed, chewed, and thrown to the side. I’ve tried pest repellent, but our adaptive squirrels seem to thrive on it, like irradiated cockroaches. During autumn, our sidewalks are covered with black walnut stains, our yard is full of holes, and our windowsills display an assortment of bread scraps and random fruit and vegetable chunks.
I think I have good reasons for hating squirrels, but I admit that “hate” is a strong word. I sometimes wonder if it’s fair to say that I am that extreme. I’m sure that squirrels provide some valuable service, like fresh meat for hawks and feral cats, but I have had trouble imagining any positive element they contribute to my own life.
My contempt reminds me of a phrase my mother often invoked when as a child I routinely announced my hatred for particular elementary school classmates. My mother would patiently inquire as to the specific nature of my hatred, and then she would invariably suggest that what I hated was actually the person’s behavior, not the person. At the time, I had difficulty appreciating her line of reasoning, and I still struggle with this evolved way of thinking. I suppose it’s remotely possible that I hate the digging and other destructive behavior of squirrels, and not the squirrels themselves. From a distance, I might be able to call them “cute.” And perhaps they enjoy rich interior lives of contemplative reflection.
If that’s true, then what might I actually hate? I could say that I hate evil, I hate war, and I hate murder. Those are embarrassingly safe choices, being by definition the antithesis of good. I hate getting popcorn hulls stuck in my teeth. I hate hangnails and canker sores. I hate throwing up. I hate when people chew gum with their mouths open. But I don’t hate popcorn, I don’t hate my body, and I don’t hate people (usually).
One of the problems related to love and hate – the problem of good and evil – is that while many of us believe that there are good people and evil people (although no one seems to think that they are one of the evil people), the reality is that we are all both good and evil. And it gets even more complicated; I believe that all of my actions are both good and evil. When I make my children practice piano, it is bad short-term (for all of us) and good long-term (we hope). When I sweep out the ceiling webs in my house, it’s good for our family and bad for the spiders. When I lure lawn slugs to drown themselves in bowls of beer, it’s good for our yard, but I waste perfectly good beer. Oh, and it’s bad for the slugs.
If I’m honest, the squirrels’ behaviors are both good and evil, too. Many new plants and trees grow from forgotten seeds and nuts. When squirrels pull my tomatoes down, other animals and bugs benefit from eating them too. I don’t think I’m ready to love squirrels, but maybe I’m ready to reconcile with them. My first art teacher caught them in cages, drowned them, and made paintbrushes out of their tails. A friend traps and transports them to the suburbs. My neighbor eats them. I believe that instead, I am destined for a much more amicable resistance.
I’ve heard that hatred is often linked to fear, and I believe it. I almost soiled myself last fall when I lifted the lid of a dumpster and a squirrel sprang out, flying just past my face. Perhaps my fear and hatred intertwine as they reveal an illusory pursuit of control in my life. As the Buddhists say, “We give energy to that which we resist.” My fighting against the squirrels is likely as misguided as the Pax Romana during the first two centuries of the Common Era. I should be able to seek peace within myself rather than peace through violent subjugation.
Instead of resisting the squirrels and fighting against them, perhaps my first step toward reconciliation should be to find a Third Way. Not fight or flight, but an action that takes a different direction.
This spring, I’m planting hot peppers.
WHO'S THAT INSIDE MY WALL?
January/February 2019 Issue
On early mornings a few years ago when Victorian Village was a little less refined, I often started the day by looking out the back window to make sure no one was sleeping in our yard. One particular day, as I peered from the dining room through the hazy dawn light, I instead saw what looked like an animal moving haltingly toward our house along the sidewalk. It was an animal. A small, but not tiny animal. As I stared at it, I automatically flipped through my mental Rolodex of possible images and settled uncomfortably on “sewer rat.”
I can thank my mom for that mental image. When I was twelve, our neighbors built a heated doghouse for their St. Bernard, Maggie. A family of rats took advantage of this gift by living under it during the colder months (in Wisconsin this spanned three of the four seasons). One morning the next spring, my mom was washing dishes in front of the kitchen window and asked me to come to the back door. We still had a layer of snow on the ground, but the grass was poking through in spots. One of Maggie’s rodent tenants was eating birdseed about twenty feet from our house in the back yard, and my mom thought this would be a good opportunity for me to see a Norway rat. It was creepy; unlike rabbits and even raccoons, I felt no urge to pet this outdoor animal. I was repulsed by it, but in a different way than I’m repulsed by possums. I gained an appreciation for the overuse of the word “scurried”; the rat looked furtive and innately guilty. It elicited in me a feeling of loathing, and it evoked a layer of fear, too. That early experience was helpful to me on this particular morning in Victorian Village.
The Victorian Village rat turned north on our sidewalk, then scurried toward our basement stairs where I lost sight of it. When I imagined the rat crawling down the steps into our basement, I jerked to attention and leaped down there, hoping that I would scare it (ideally without interaction). My teeth involuntarily clenched as I unlocked and threw open the door. Nothing was there. I wondered if it had run off down the sidewalk on my way downstairs. That was really a feeble hope, but I remained vaguely convinced of it. Until the next day.
I called the City of Columbus health department to let them know that rats were (well, okay, “a rat was”) wandering around outside the sewers, in case this was an indication of something awry in our section of the city fecal system. The person from the health department listened to me, but seemed unsurprised and unconcerned. Their “thanks for letting us know” sounded like the polite brush-off I give telemarketers who are on the wrong side of a political campaign.
Over the next couple of days it became clear that the rat had not run away down the sidewalk. It was in our house. I didn’t see it, but the clues were overwhelming: the gnawing noises, the chewed boxes and partially consumed pancake mix and pasta, and the poop, too large for mice, distributed widely around the kitchen.
The intrusion was worst while sitting with my two-year-old daughter, reading The Pokey Little Puppy in our back parlor. I heard what had to be an animal with some strength pushing things around in the pantry, and realized that it was the rat. My protective parental impulses engaged, and I had a new appreciation for the crib-and-rat scene in “Lady and the Tramp.” What might this rat do to my daughter? I felt violated, and sensed the real possibility of danger. Anxious and holding my breath, I walked to the pantry to confront the rat, but it had already dashed off to its hiding place.
Hearing the sounds of the rat rummaging while reading to my daughter launched me from denial into action. That evening I bought a rat trap and rat poison. I searched for and found a circular hole it had gnawed through an exposed 2x4 in our mostly-renovated first-floor bathroom. I searched outside and finally found the impossibly small gap between two exterior bricks where mortar had fallen out and the rat had undoubtedly crawled in. I set the trap where I had found the most poop. I poured poison through the gnawed hole, and nailed another 2x4 over it. I mixed new mortar and patched the hole outside. And I waited.
A few days later, after an encouraging period of silence and inactivity, we started to smell the distinctive musty and spicy odor of a decomposing animal. Since then, we’ve had a few other uninvited guests intrude and live for a while in our floors, ceilings and walls. A sign of success, I’ve grown to appreciate that smell.
UNEXPECTED PLEASURES
November/December 2018 Issue
Several years ago, during a well-deserved break from working in a special Kentucky school with youth whose other option was prison, my sister lived with me and my wife in our renovation project on Hubbard Avenue. This was a rich time in both expected and unexpected ways. A caregiver by nature, Karen deepened our conversations, helped us with renovation, cooked fabulous meals, and (perhaps most surprisingly influential for me), she taught me how to make bread.
Making the space and time to bake bread in the midst of our live-in renovation provided something unavailable in the rest of the house: a civilized oasis. That oasis in our home became a comforting space where we relaxed and talked, and where I learned much more about (and beyond) baking than I expected. Karen showed me, for example, that unresponsive dough can always be rescued – that I didn’t need to give up on it and throw it in the trash, like I used to do when making pizza dough. More than once I witnessed a dead blob of dough resurrected just minutes after we kneaded a fresh batch of yeast into it. It seemed like a miracle. Karen also taught me how to intuitively judge when dough was ready. During our first lesson, we took turns kneading, and we paused occasionally to lift and cradle the dough in our hands. Eventually during one of her turns, Karen handed the kneaded dough to me and said, “Feel it now. I can’t explain this, but when it’s ready, it feels like you’re holding a baby.” And it did.
Over the years, I just accepted that this weird “baby-thing” was true, and I didn’t try to explain it, because it worked. But I was talking with my mom recently, and during the course of our meandering conversation, I shared this story, and I wondered aloud about the mystery of dough feeling like a baby. She matter-of-factly said, “Of course it feels like a baby, Eric. It’s alive!” I had never considered that I might be able to sense life through my hands.
The process of bread-making has been deeply satisfying for me. It is about the essence of “process” itself (the acts of preparing, tending to, and caring for something as it develops), as much as it is about appreciating a yummy and satisfying product. It reminds me of the process of building fires in our fireplace: gathering materials, setting up the wood, starting the fire with one match and then nurturing the life of the growing blaze. The two activities often coincide in winter, with the fire providing enough warmth to make the dough rise in our otherwise frigid 1890 Queen Anne house. In another striking surprise for me, these activities have also revealed something deeply elemental about my personality.
My sister and I started with a basic bread recipe we found in my old copy of The Joy of Cooking, a book that accompanied me when I first moved away from our Wisconsin home and that I carried with me through several more moves. I still use this recipe today, adjusting it a bit, but mainly content to use guidelines that became familiar and comfortable. My wife has asked a few times if I might consider making a different kind of bread (perhaps rosemary olive?). I have thought about it, and have always gently declined. So I wondered, do I always lean toward the familiar comfort of habit? And if so, what does that mean? I’ve enjoyed tinkering with the amount of water I add. I’ve observed the difference in the resulting loaf when I changed how vigorously I stir the original glob. And I’ve explored the difference in the bread when I used Barley’s Russian Imperial Stout instead of water (incidentally, my best-tasting bread ever). But I really don’t alter things much. I prefer to work on perfecting. And these mini-modifications, versus a headlong dive into a maelstrom of bread books, remind me of similar behaviors in my life.
I like to vacation in the same familiar cabin, I enjoy the comfort of cooking a core set of family meals, I prefer going to restaurants that I know well, my day feels better when it begins with my standard ritual of morning activities, and my bicycling behavior falls into this territory, too. Many people prefer newness and variety, but I apparently do not. I enjoy riding my bicycle, and nearly all of my biking time is consumed with commuting to work and back from the Short North to Bexley. I enjoy lots about this almost-always-the-same trip, including the serenity and mind-wandering freedom that accompanies a familiar path, as well as the seasonal nuances along the trails, and timing my cadence to hit the green traffic lights along each habitual ride. My friend Rob, on the other hand, finds habit to be stifling, and has probably biked every piece of asphalt in Franklin and contiguous counties, scouring possible pathways for new adventures.
Apparently, this difference in our behaviors is due to a recently discovered gene, DRD4 (dopamine receptor gene D4). As Leonard Mlodinow writes in his book Elastic, “Some versions of the gene…endow people with a particularly high tendency to explore.” People like Rob “require more dopamine to get a rush in their day-to-day life…and seek a higher level of stimulation in order to achieve a satisfying [dopamine] level.”
I believe that this is about pain, and more specifically about pain management. For me, the idea of too much adventure results in a kind of pain because it bumps my brain up against my “dopamine ceiling.” I manage (reduce) that pain by focusing more on ritual and habit. Rob feels something lacking in the rituals and stifling habits of life, like biking on the same path, or baking the same kind of bread. He experiences that as a kind of pain too, and he can manage that pain through his adventurous exploring, which results in a satisfying level of dopamine.
To be fair, Mlodinow’s point is actually that Rob is more evolved than I am. Of course, the world needs both kinds of people. But it’s people like Rob who are the members of our species who pushed us out of Africa and across continents. And we can thank people like him for rosemary-olive bread, too.
All of these ideas came together for me during a recent visit to a friend who was at The James. I noticed a bakery as I walked along the labyrinthine journey to my destination. The name of the bakery (Au Bon Pain) brought back a distant memory from my high school foreign language class. As it turns out, the French word for bread is “pain.”
DELIBERATELY
September/October 2018 Issue
I remember a particular time as a 10-year-old when my mom told me I had to clean my bedroom immediately. She said this on other occasions too, but this time relatives were coming, and I had allowed my room to accumulate a mountain of debris (my floor had disappeared). She returned an hour or so later, surprised to find that I had made no progress whatsoever. When she asked why I had done nothing, I complained that the mess was too much for me; I couldn’t figure out where to start. Her answer to my immobilization reminds me now of Lao-Tzu (“a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”). Mom suggested that I begin by picking up one toy, book, or dust clump, ask myself “where does this go?”, and put (or throw) that one thing away. I tried, but I was disappointed; after moving a couple of things the rest of my job still felt overwhelming and insurmountable.
As I have grown up and grown older I’ve been immobilized by plenty of other tasks. Recently (when we moved to Victorian Village) it was the enormity of our 1890 Queen Anne house renovation that overwhelmed me and regularly left me with vast paralyzed swaths of time that were devoid of progress. I often got started on something, but then quit when the long-term outlook felt hopeless. It seemed as though I should be able to “do it all”, methodically and quickly. My work stagnated, much like my progress on cleaning my bedroom many years before. But then I met a neighbor, Rob, who taught me a different response to immobilization which turned out to be the key to successful house renovation. Rob’s advice was “Do at least one thing every day”. This might sound similar to my mom’s advice, but it is distinctly different. It’s not just “get started” or “incremental progress overcomes inertia”; instead it’s “steady incremental progress leads to achievement”, or perhaps in the words of a Rob-enlightened Lao-Tzu, “After that first single step, you need to keep on stepping”. The rest of the steps don’t happen automatically.
Over the years, even though I’ve resisted Rob’s wisdom more than I’d like to admit, I have successfully followed his principle often enough to know that it is good advice. And yet, my resulting accomplishments surprise me, especially when the “something” that I do every day is as simple as nailing up a piece of diamond lath, cutting a couple of studs to length, or painting one section of a wall. Remarkably, before I know it, I’ve achieved significant progress. Finishing the whole house seemed overwhelming, but when I remembered to take it in daily “Rob parts”, the situations that led to my immobilization became approachable.
This phenomenon isn’t limited to cleaning and renovating. The idea of writing an entire book or losing a significant amount of weight can also seem so daunting that no progress is ever made. Successful writers are disciplined; they dedicate specific writing time each day in order for creativity and clarity to emerge progressively, rather than trying to write in one non-stop binge. Similarly, we can’t lose 80 pounds over a weekend; fitness takes time, some progress every day.
And I’ve realized something even more surprising. When it comes to building and creating, I am in fact most effective when I limit myself to small increments of slow progress. Speed isn’t always a good thing. For example, paint and joint compound adhere better when applied in several thin coats, and studying a school subject leads to greater information retention when spread out over a longer period of time. I believe that my lethargy-induced incremental house achievements have actually resulted in a better renovation than if we had finished it quickly. Our insights developed over time while living in the space that we were renovating. When we dawdled prior to installing kitchen drywall, we saw the need to increase the number of can lights in the ceiling. When we lived for a while with makeshift cabinets and plywood countertops, we realized that the counters we had planned to use would have been too low for us. By living through extended processes we often discovered more practical and elegant solutions.
In addition, slow incremental growth results in the greatest strength, as evidenced by slow-growing oak and walnut trees (compared to sumac and willow). Growth in another family of strengths — social and cognitive abilities — results from longer time for development. Speed isn’t good. Squirrels (who seem to have only rudimentary reasoning ability) reach adulthood in 18 weeks, while dogs (who are much higher on the animal ladder) take up to two years to reach the same point, and bonobo primates (arguably more socially advanced than many of us) only become fully mature when they are between 14-16 years old. These “slow = good” truths are revealed in language, too. We’re told not to “rush into things”. “Haste makes waste.” “Rash” decisions are bad, and “well-reasoned” decisions are good. Something “thrown together” is poorly made.
So the slow and steady incremental path isn’t just “a way” to accomplish big projects; it’s usually the best way. Slow is good, and fast is bad. In addition to freeing us from immobilization, a commitment to slow, incremental progress leads to greater achievement, greater effectiveness, and greater strength.
And yet, I’m lured by the myths of the quick fix and rapid accomplishment. I am still tempted by “fast = good”, as if immobility is best resolved by speed and by hasty, hurried actions driven by my impatience and busy-ness. I can focus for limited periods of time on Rob’s Incremental Way, but I find it easy to be pulled away from the sanity of slowness in the same way that I can be jolted out of the calmness of focused meditation by a child’s cry or by a random thought about doughnuts.
Instead of patiently understanding the benefits of long-term profitability, I expect high returns every quarter from the investments in my portfolio. Instead of supportively suggesting that my co-worker take the necessary time to develop a high-quality training program for our student interns, I worry about urgent tasks that need her attention. I hear myself blurting out “how soon can you have that ready?” as I heed the call to rush, rush, rush. On some fundamentally unhealthy level, I still expect problems to be resolved immediately and quickly.
Moreover, I am guilty of this error in my own home. I fail to reinforce manners with my children for the necessary thirty days in a row, trying instead to teach them the nuances of politeness and etiquette over a single meal, and I unrealistically expect immediate and quick results when it comes to cleaning their rooms. Even though I know better, I still say, “hurry up!” when they appear to be taking too much time. I’m still growing in this area, and I’m working on my patience, but my maturation as an effective and strong parent appears to be a slow, incremental process. Ironically, it sounds like I’m on the path to success.
THE PRESENCE OF ABSENCE
July/August 2018 Issue
I saw a piece of trash on the ground last year at Disney World, though I can’t prove it. When I saw the unbelievable, out-of-place, crumpled up food wrapper on the paving stones, I quickly turned to get my wife’s attention so that she, too, could see this Disney impossibility. But as I pivoted back around to point it out, I saw that the trash had vanished and a plain door (which blended into the wall around it) was just clicking shut.
I believe that this was the work of one of the gnomes who live and work in the Disney underground, although certainly a great deal of this over-the-top pristine cleansing is also performed in a much more public way. At each of the theme parks I regularly saw Cast Members conspicuously sweeping microscopic bits of heinous dirt into dustpans and removing dangerous fingerprints from glass doors.
From both above and below, these Disney denizens omnisciently survey the entirety of The Magic Kingdom for any aberration in the perfection of “the guest experience,” silently guiding us with beguiling effectiveness through a magical experience that is devoid of conflict, concern, and crumpled wrappers. At Disney there is no dirt (literal or figurative), no debris, no “messy” situations, no negativity or unpleasantness. Everything is sweet and sanitized.
As an avowed Mickey Mouse skeptic, I initially resisted the temptation to accept this “Disney desire fulfillment” protocol [Want. Get. Repeat.]. I believed that I was immune to the efforts of the Empire. But beginning with their kind, calm, clockwork guidance at the airport and their apparently effortless whisking of us to the magic bus and our perfect rooms, my skepticism began to dissolve. Later on in the theme parks I would occasionally fear that something might intervene and cause anxiety, only to instead instantly forget that I had ever worried about anything, ever. I forgot that “worry” was even a concept. And in the end, the perfection of the experience reduced me to a beautifully grinning, blissful, accepting child.
I realized during our family visit that although our vacation was chock full of this goodness, there was something else behind the happiness that I experienced. This happiness at Disney was primarily about the absence of bad things. Happiness requires protection from unhappiness, or from undesirable influences. The presence of good, special elements (like a close friend, a fabulous haircut, or a dinner with the princesses in the Norwegian castle) is a necessary but insufficient condition for happiness. In other words, if bad elements (like a stone in your shoe, a hangnail, or a national tragedy) are present during an otherwise pleasant experience, you simply won’t be happy. So Disney accomplishes happiness partly through the removal of “negative influences.” And this points to an interesting surprise: those dirty aspects that Disney removes from our lives for the sake of happiness are essential elements for long-term, normal, healthy development.
For instance, it is ironically the absence of exposure to dirt’s microbes that weakens our immune systems and increases the probability of illnesses. We need to be introduced to the germs in dirt (ideally during childhood) so that our bodies can learn to react effectively to them later, resisting illness and disease. Without exposure to dirt our immune system lacks experience, and can mistakenly attack our beneficial cells, sometimes resulting in the development of autoimmune diseases. I fully realize that most of us stay at the Magic Kingdom for only about a week, so Disney is admittedly not the direct source of these illnesses and allergy problems. Instead it is we who engage in extended use of antimicrobial gels and sprays, irradiated food, and antibiotics, thereby encouraging this weakening process.
Moreover, the Disney experience was never meant to be an expectation for our larger lives. Walt never intended for us to want to live in endless perfect bliss after a visit to his theme park. But the desire to extend and expand the removal of life’s negative elements beyond dirt and germs to the broader panoply of “detrimental” conditions and situations is increasingly reflected in today’s parents. They strive to protect their children from any element that might disturb or upset them, and want to ensure a state of constant happiness in them. These parents are afraid to let their children encounter any “dirtiness” or unhappiness in life, whether physical, emotional, or social. They pick up after them, protect them from responsibility for their own events and plans, provide sanitary play areas for supervised play dates, laud all their children’s ideas and behaviors as wonderful, and provide sports trophies for every player on every team so that everyone is a winner and no one needs to endure the pain of loss. This happiness is the parents’ ostensible “gift” to their children.
Amazingly, when the children outgrow parent-supervised sports leagues the parental behavior remains the same, but the focus shifts. I have observed this protective behavior extending now to college and the entry-level workplace, where parents intervene and intrude to “help” their children. They even accompany their children to job fairs, and unbelievably have tried to assist them during employment interviews. It is almost beyond comprehension that they have called entry-level job supervisors when their children complained about being treated unfairly at work.
In the short-term the parents (and the children/students/employees) are seen as merely dysfunctional and strange. But the long-term problem is analogous to the child who has never been introduced to dirt and microbes. They ultimately become adults who can’t function in our society without parents to conveniently remove struggles before they can be experienced.
Happiness is appealing, but we need to experience the other side, the “yin,” to balance with the positive “yang.” Neither is good or bad; they are instead parts of the same whole. If this opposite is denied, we tilt out of balance and become physically ill, emotionally distraught, or otherwise unable to cope. It’s like the butterfly that must struggle as it emerges from the cocoon in order to complete its development so that its wings can fully form for fluttering.
Similarly, our own unpleasant struggles often appear in the form of necessary challenges to our beliefs. We must slog through the stages of cognitive development which ultimately allow us to soar intellectually higher as we move from our original dualism (belief in a simplistic black/white version of right and wrong), through multiplicity (anything goes), to relativism (truth, and right & wrong, are contextual). We become healthier individuals who are better equipped to navigate the complexities of our world when we personally engage in this difficult work.
We can’t protect everyone from everything, and we shouldn’t want to. On the other hand, we also shouldn’t be afraid of exposing our children to the magic of Disney, or to a weekend of doting and protective grandparents. We just need to be a bit wary of those who are diverting the “yin” for us; all that dirt, struggle and pain has to land somewhere.
CUTTING CORNERS
May/June 2018 Issue
My first two lawn mowers were rescued from suburban trash. They were reel-type mowers, the kind with no engine and no motor. They were found in Grove City, but they might have come from any suburb, where devices like these are decried as anathema to civilized life. The quality of these old mowers confronts today’s tacit acceptance of planned obsolescence and spits in the face of marginal effectiveness.
I had fancied the idea of reel-type mowers, both aesthetically and practically, since I first watched my grandpa mow when I was six years old, mesmerized by the “shushushushush” of the mower blades cutting the grass. When he let me try, I managed to budge the cast iron behemoth about seven inches while gripping the handle and lunging forward with every ounce of my 50-pound body. I dreamed of someday cutting his lawn with that mower. He made it look effortless and graceful, and the reel mower made the lawn look finely manicured. He carefully mowed each swath, back and forth, taking his time. And he never cut corners.
Reel mowers are more elegant than 2- or 4-cycle mowers, and easier to maintain. A few deft swipes with a metal file, and the blades are sharpened for the summer; that’s pretty much it. Engine mowers have more problems, just like all complex devices, but it seems to go beyond that. When I was a kid, it seemed like I was rolling one of our two engine mowers down the hill to George Bell’s repair shop every other week. Since I’m criticizing them, I should probably admit that these engines intimidate me. This fear started when I borrowed my dad’s spare mower for my engine repair mini-course in eighth grade and culminated when I ended up with several “extra” parts (and a non-functioning mower) upon reassembly.
I did not yet own a mower when we bought our first house, on Hubbard Avenue, which came with a lawn. Around the time of the closing, I talked with one of my students, Bill, about the mowing situation. Bill told me that he saw old reel mowers in the trash all the time around Grove City. I accepted his generous offer to provide surrogate dumpster-diving services, and sure enough, a few days later he appeared with a four-thousand-pound, rock-solid, cast-iron reel mower, circa 1890. It was a piece of art, flawlessly constructed, and after 100 years it was, not surprisingly, still in better shape than most new mowers. It only needed a new blade adjustment bolt. Two weeks later, Bill appeared with a second, more modern reel mower, probably from the 1950s. It also worked fine, but the older mower was my favorite, and I used it for almost four summers until the oak handle snapped in half as I tried to force it through a thick patch of zoysia grass. I saved its parts for my future lawn-mowing museum, and I switched to the second mower for everyday use. I’ve used that one ever since.
This mower extended my idyllic experience: listening to the rhythmic swishing scissor-slicing of the blades against the cutter bar and watching fistfuls of grass clippings tossed like continuous confetti at my feet. With this mower, my daughter mirrored my own childhood experience during the summer before she turned six. I was thrilled when she asked to mow the lawn with me. Remembering my frustration at the same age, I asked her to hold onto the handle while I pushed and walked behind her. While we pushed and turned and clipped, she squeaked as the grass clippings flew onto her: “They are sprinkling all over me – like it’s my birthday!”
Since then, I’ve been advocating for reel mowers, hoping that more people will start using them. Mark, a friend from Clintonville, recently borrowed mine so he could test-drive the reel-type before purchasing one. Mark immediately loved my mower and went to the hardware store the same day to buy one. When he brought it home and used it, he unfortunately discovered that in the intervening years the quality of reel mowers had dropped, in the same way that new homes never live up to the solid dimensional studs and joists, and the genuine wood trim in our Victorian homes. Like so many of today’s new things, his mower was marginally effective. It cut grass, but it was noisy; it clanged and scraped as the blades inconsistently hit the cutter bar. The mower was easy enough to maneuver, but it felt flimsy. When I took it for a spin I felt that I had to be careful, like when I’m trying not to tear aluminum foil as I’m wrapping it around a casserole dish. The manufacturer cut corners to save money.
This brought back memories of a time when I worked for a marginally effective bicycle and tricycle manufacturer. I remember when the engineers were instructed to work on cost-savings for the tricycles; management told them to determine precisely how much metal they could shave off the tubing without making the trikes so unstable that they wouldn’t last for the duration of the warranty period. They cut corners and ended up with tricycles that would avoid lawsuits but fell apart before they could be passed down to another generation. In contrast, my childhood tricycle stood strong in my parents’ garage even until a few years ago, when they finally gave it to a neighbor. Except for some wear on the pedals and tires, and my crappy paint job, it was in perfect condition. During this time, I learned to love the quality of old workmanship and lost my faith in the ability of manufacturers to make solid products. Worse, I realized that many didn’t even have the desire to try.
This probably shouldn’t surprise me since that approach to manufacturing even has an official name, “planned obsolescence.” I’ve resisted the idea that it’s easier and cheaper to replace our appliances than to fix them, but the universe is wearing me down. For example, our house on Hubbard included a 1970s harvest-gold refrigerator (which we painted). It ran so well that we took it with us when we moved to Dennison Avenue, and we eventually gave it to some friends after we renovated the kitchen at our new house and bought a new refrigerator. The old refrigerator is still working. The new one we bought died this February after 20 years, and I was told by the installation team that our 2018 refrigerator will probably last for only seven years.
But there is hope. Mark returned his sub-par reel-type mower and bought one made by the American Lawn Mower Company. I’m glad to report that it rivals my 1950s mower in silence and cutting quality, if not heft. Not all new products are poorly made. We don’t have to dive for vintage mowers in order to find good quality. At the same time, if I still had Bill’s phone number, I’d be tempted to ask him to keep an eye out for a stove — maybe something in a nice avocado green.
FECAL FENG SHUI
March/April 2018 Issue
Late last spring, while standing in our kitchen during a heavy rainstorm, my daughter looked at me and exclaimed, “who farted?!” For a moment, I regarded the accusation as I usually do; I prepared to deny that it was me. But something else happened instead.
You know how people say that just before you die, there’s a little movie of your life? Well, instead of that movie, I saw a little movie featuring several compressed hours of my life from 10 years ago, in the same house, during another heavy rainstorm. I remembered my surprise at learning that the city sewer, when overloaded by rain, can actually force human waste into my home. Other people’s waste. Lots of it. I relived this old scene from our basement, waited until the end of my movie, and then I threw myself down the stairs to see if my premonition was true.
Gurgling raw sewage was emerging from our three floor drains like brown magma. The city sewers heaved it onto my basement floor five inches deep near the main drain, tapering off as it spread uphill to cover half of our basement. Having just seen the movie, I remembered the steps for proper removal of human waste: 1) accept reality, and 2) shovel. I got right to work.
It was still raining outside, the kind of constant, relentless rain that is made more depressing when carrying buckets of raw waste and shit-sodden toilet paper. After the waters in the basement receded, I filled about eight joint compound buckets with the muck, and then realized that I had no place to put it. I’m not proud when I admit that I emptied them into the 300-gallon containers behind our house, but neither do I apologize for it. I can think of few situations more desperate than a basement full of my neighbors’ excrement.
But I wasn’t just desperate; I was infuriated. There is an intended, natural flow through our houses, and other people’s crap is not part of it. Groceries enter through the doors, are cooked and eaten, processed by our bodies, and flow down through the bathroom pipes to the basement and then exit to the sewer. This is fecal feng shui. Everything has a natural path, whether it’s a seed sprouting from the earth toward the sun, or gravity taking control after the flush of my toilet. In ancient China, elements of the home were positioned to avoid the cold Mongolian winds from the north and to take advantage of the southern sun. Applying this idea to energy (or “chi”) has led to what we now know as feng shui, and it involves decisions about arranging furniture and hanging appropriate art on particular walls.
Back in my basement, I sprayed remaining chunks into piles with a garden hose, swept and scooped, hosed it down one more time, and then a couple of days later mopped with bleach, and finally with Pine-Sol. (I serendipitously found an almost-new sponge mop in the neighbor’s trash during my first trip to the alley trash containers).
I finished sanitizing on the fifth day after the initial flood. On the next evening, our family prepared for our son’s academic awards event at school, amid another heavy rain. I should have remembered from the movie that there was now a “plug” of paper and other solids left from the sewer geyser, lodged in the butt of our yard line. This was causing a new (but similar) problem. I remembered it only when my daughter again offered an olfactory opinion. “Does anything smell weird to you?” she asked, just as we were getting ready to leave.
The frightening scene from six days earlier flowed into my mind’s eye, and I hurtled downstairs to find a less chunky, but more comprehensive, flood defiling my briefly pristine basement floor. I quickly donned my Wellies and splashed toward the quickly expanding shoreline. Frantically, I tossed newly endangered storage boxes filled with Christmas decorations, stuffed animals, and plumbing supplies on top of existing piles that reached nearly to the nine-foot-high joists.
Abandoning the basement, we raced to my son’s event. We arrived just in time for a power outage that turned the auditorium into a dark sauna, and we blindly listened as the awards were read by flashlight. When we returned home to our basement, our fecal frenzy continued until I disconnected a contributing downspout. The rainwater had been channeled from our roof into our yard sewer line, stopped at the city-created plug, and was instead forced (along with our own waste) backwards into our basement. The waters slowly receded, and I spent the rest of the evening into the early morning hours compulsively repeating my custodial duties from the previous week. The next day, two men from WaterWorks jetted our line and removed the plug. I hugged them.
I was relieved, but I am left with the uneasy feeling that I don’t have a strategy in place to avoid this in the future. While talking with a city employee, I learned that occasional crap geysers, although infrequent, are apparently normal. On top of that, with all the new developments in Victorian Village, there will soon be more neighbors living, and more toilets flushing, near my house. Just to be on the safe side of fecal feng shui, I hung a picture of Genghis Kahn on the plumbing stack at the north wall of my basement, in deference to the Mongols.
THE VERY IDEA
January/February 2018 Issue
Lying on our kitchen counter next to our back door is a pile of coupons and “to do” items, one of which is a generous Lindey’s gift card that I received for my birthday last June. I genuinely appreciate the gift, and my wife and I like the idea of going, but we haven’t gone, even though we’ve had the gift card for over six months. Since billions of dollars in gift cards go unredeemed each year, we’re in good company. Most of our gift cards and coupons end up getting thrown in the trash because they expire, releasing me from the pressure to use them. Apparently I just like the idea of getting them.
This concept of “liking the idea of something” runs deep in me. We bought a treadmill several years ago because we really liked the idea of improving our cardiovascular health, but today it is mainly used by our overweight cat; it shortens the distance he needs to jump to his elevated food bowl. We have used the treadmill for its intended purpose perhaps five times in the last 15 years. I still like the idea of using it for walking, but in practice, I don’t. People regularly join health clubs, often as part of a New Year’s resolution, but they join because they like the idea of a health club; they like the idea of being healthy. They don’t join because they actually want to do the work of getting healthy, or even because they plan to.
When I was in high school, I thought I wanted to take a cross-country bicycle trip, and I also thought I wanted to live on my own in the wilderness someday. I read books on the subjects, planned my route for the trip and for the location of my desolate wilderness cabin, and looked in catalogues for equipment I would need. But even worse than my treadmill experience, I never even took one overnight bicycling trip, and I never practiced cooking even one meal from plants I could have found in the woods near my childhood home. I also was (and am) way too squeamish to kill and gut animals. Still, there was something about these ideas that I liked, although I wouldn’t take even the first step to realize them. Was it too much work? Or did I just enjoy romanticizing and daydreaming?
Sometimes we do follow through, but we find that our actual experience isn’t as rich as our idea of the experience. A few years ago, a friend of ours got a pass to meet Harry Connick, Jr. back stage. She loved the idea of meeting him and talking with him, imagining the fabulous conversation they would have when he reached her in line. But when they met, she was dumbfounded and couldn’t think of anything to say. The idea of talking with him was much richer than the actual experience. Weekends have always been like this for me. All through school I liked Fridays more than Sundays, because I liked looking forward to the weekend. But it was more than that. I liked the idea of the weekend. The idea of the weekend, like a conversation with Harry Connick, Jr., is better than the actual event. The idea of the weekend is limitless, with infinite possibilities. It’s an ideal, while the actual weekend (or conversation) must conform to the unfortunate limits of reality.
I recall from one of my freshman college courses that Plato shed light on this concept of the “ideal” versus the “actual.” He called ideals a “universe of forms,” but we’re talking about the same concept: perfect aspects of things. I remember most clearly the idea of the perfect chair, of “chairness” which each of us holds in our mind if someone asks us to think of one. It doesn’t contain detailed sensory information; the image isn’t the kind that lends itself to our specifying the subtle shades of color in paisley upholstering, or counting the tacks holding hypothetical fabric to a frame. It is an idea, or an ideal. Real chairs can never reach the theoretical perfection of that idea of a chair, although each contains a piece of it. Likewise our actual experiences of a weekend or a health club membership are mere shadows of our ideas of what the experiences could be.
And what is our obligation if we know with certainty that an idea is better than the potential experience? During a recent lunch, a friend told me about her mom who has Alzheimer’s, and her dad who plans to take all three of them on a cruise. Her dad is planning this because every time a cruise commercial appears on TV, her mom leans forward in her living room chair and says, “I want that!” And so he feels that this is a wish that he can grant her. But it gets complicated. Her mom said the same thing a couple of years ago and they did go on a cruise, but she hated it. Of course, she doesn’t remember that. Sadly, she doesn’t even remember her most recent meal. My friend’s dad feels obligated, because he believes that this might make his wife happy. But he really knows it won’t. He knows that she likes the momentary idea of going on a cruise when it is presented in commercials, but that she won’t like the actual experience of a cruise. An aspect of this is true for his entire family; he likes the idea of taking his wife on the cruise (as a “good husband”), and my friend likes the idea of her family spending vacation time together, but no one will enjoy the actual experience of the cruise, since mom will be miserable.
I morbidly suggested to my friend that for everyone’s sake she Photoshop her mom into some pictures and tell her that they went on a cruise with her last week. Knowing that she will hate the actual cruise, might it be kinder to provide her with this enduring pleasant idea of a cruise? Her imagined idea of the cruise is ideal and is therefore more perfect than the reality of a cruise could ever be. And with Alzheimer’s, a photo can be a gift that keeps on giving.
In spite of my awareness of all this, I bought a salon spa treatment for my wife last Christmas. I like the idea of her taking that time to relax, and she likes the idea of doing something fun like this with one of her friends. Maybe we should just leave it at that. But my belief in the possibility of a positive experience and a lasting memory of relaxation and fun for her keeps me vigilant at the window of hope.
Perhaps my wife’s experience with her spa gift card will differ from our Lindey’s struggle, which involves one last paradoxical snag. I should probably just throw the gift card away, regardless of my genuinely liking the idea of dining there, but I don’t want to be responsible for permanently destroying the hope that we might go. Deep in my heart I know that we won’t go; it’s just too difficult to remember to use it. But I can’t justify dumping the card in the trash, because its existence keeps the guilt at arm’s length. I’ll continue to procrastinate, but unlike the clear success of this strategy with our other coupons, there will be no release this time from the pressure to use it; unfortunately this gift card has no expiration date.
YOU NEVER KNOW WHAT'S UNDER THE LID
November/December 2017 Issue
The flies should have been my first clue. A cloud of them puffed out from under the lid of the 300-gallon container as I barely eased it up, like they were giddy from a feast and starved for air at the same time. I cracked the lid open some more with the heel of my right hand, my left hand holding a Giant Eagle bag full of cat litter and breakfast debris. As I swung my bag into the trash can, I glimpsed something.
It was something that I wished I hadn’t seen. I can describe “what I saw” to you, but I can’t describe the feeling that accompanied it, because it has no words. It was a feeling that was experienced before my ego-mind could filter it. The feeling was, I believe, a glimpse of reality.
And so, this is what I have come to talk about. Pure experience. Unaltered reality. We are almost never able to experience this because in the infinitesimal moment between the actual raw experience of the Self and the experience that is perceived by the Conscious Mind, reality is cleverly altered by the Ego-Mind, which then produces our world of illusion. Our terms may differ, but regardless of our lexicon, most of our conscious waking life is obscured by a filter.
But sometimes it isn’t.
William James said that our normal waking consciousness is separated from other realities (“potential forms of consciousness”) by “the flimsiest of screens.” I believe that this flimsy screen can be drawn aside in two situations:
Limitation of Language – when our brain simply can’t translate an experience into English.
Some things are beyond words: a particular piece of art or a scene of such extraordinary beauty that you must simply take people to see it for themselves; a feeling of love so rich, full and nuanced that words would ruin the response. Using words would be like the Zen idea of “the finger pointing at the moon” instead of experiencing the moon itself.
Surprise – when our usually vigilant Ego-Mind is caught dozing for just a second.
It is, for example, the moment when I realize that I’m going to vomit. George Carlin says about the act of puking, “I don’t care about my shoes!” I would take that one more step and say, “I’m not even aware of my shoes.” When we are able to experience the raw feelings, we have taken shoes out of the equation. The cognition ends with the horrid pre-vomit thought, “I think I…” and then the vomit episode begins, obscuring everything else.
What I saw were thin, rigid, hairy animal legs. In that quick glance, just before I let go of the lid and it slammed down and I was speechless, I thought that they were deer legs. But upon further reflection, it really didn’t make sense that (1) a deer would be in Victorian Village, and (2) that an entire deer could fit in a 300-gallon trash container and leave lots more room for trash. The stiff legs were poking up through some other trash, so I didn’t see a body. I never expected to ever find a large dead animal in the trash. I reacted with a raw feeling that was part grisly, part shocked, part curious, and some other things I can’t identify. None of them does justice to the reality.
At this point, some questions might be emerging for you, as they did for a friend: Since I saw legs poking up from under additional trash, who before me came along to dump in their rubbish, and how did they react to the discovery (if at all)? Additionally, someone must have interred the beast in the first place. What thoughts must have accompanied that act? A good samaritan cleaning a sad sight from the alley? A furtive hit-and-run assailant tampering with evidence? A callous disposal of a family pet?
I’m glad you asked. I didn’t think of any of those questions until later. I had the pure experience, free from contemplation and questioning, totally in that moment. You’ve had a secondary experience, shaped and controlled by my words. I’m sorry. Or, you’re welcome.
I never know what’s under the lid. It could be a wordlessly beautiful piece of art, or it could be a sack of some child’s car puke. I’d like for this realization to provide my “300-gallon container relationships” with an air of expectancy. I’d like to approach each trip anticipating that I might have an occasion for a pure experience, or that I might experience a moment of reality. Ever since the legs, though, I’ve been more willing to settle for a slightly sullied version.
ALWAYS LEAVE THEM WANTING MORE
September/October 2017 Issue
This title is a phrase that was introduced to me as a child; I understood it to be a well-known guideline from the entertainment industry. More recently, it has reminded me of my carbohydrate addiction. If I start breakfast by pouring a bowl of cereal, I’d better just keep the box and the milk carton close by. I can’t seem to “fill up,” even on so-called healthy cereals; carbs always leave me wanting more. This is true of any addiction, whether it’s alcohol, chocolate, or Netflix. But this phrase also speaks more generally to a core tenet of consumerism that we embrace in this country: “make them want to buy more.” Corporate America has been very successful at convincing us that we want more of almost everything, whether it’s shoes, video games, or the latest phone.
Consumerism is about our desiring and craving, and this phrase reinforces what has been ingrained. But in some situations we might begin to ease ourselves in a new direction; in serendipitous moments we might choose to incline ourselves toward a different reaction – sharing. Unexpected discoveries are a special kind of gift that I have often demeaned by responding with greed. When I unexpectedly uncover interesting items, might I instead choose to respond in a way that speaks to my membership in a community?
I open the lid of a 300-gallon trash container to discard my bag of dog poop, and am surprised to see a new snow shovel waiting for me. But instead of being grateful for the gift, I wonder if there’s more in the next container. I get an extra bottle of pop from a vending machine, and instead of appreciating the satisfaction of sharing this with my friend, I try to shake loose a third bottle. I find a pair of 1928 OSU-Michigan tickets behind a fireplace mantel while I’m renovating, and instead of experiencing joy at my discovery, I want to find out what’s behind our other mantels.
When I have experienced these serendipitous gifts, I have rarely accepted them with gratitude. Not content to enjoy them, I have immediately been tempted by the possibility of “more,” and have misinterpreted each gift as a starting block for a familiar greedy sprint. As an American, I’m used to this; I grew up instinctively wanting more of everything.
In third grade, after I spotted a quarter on the playground revealed by the melting snow on my way home from school, I spent the remainder of my walk with my eyes firmly fixed on the ground in front of me, hoping for more. As it turned out, I didn’t find any more, and I also wasted every walk home for months with my head swinging and my eyes scanning the playground for change, instead of noticing the world around me.
When I was eleven years old, my grandfather gave me an arrowhead that he had found on a walk in a cornfield on his farm. Not content with the gift, I wanted to find more arrowheads, and I consumed much of my weeklong vacation wandering his fields in a fruitless pursuit of Native American artifacts.
These reactions were ironic, because prior to each unexpected discovery I was satisfied (with throwing trash, buying a drink, renovating, returning home, and vacationing). But something in my ego was not satisfied: “How many more quarters or arrowheads might I find?” Compelled by some force, I lost sight of grace-filled moments in exchange for the dubious possibility of “more.” I have heard that the gold rush affected people in the same way.
Sometimes my greed did lead to my finding more, but it never led me to find “enough.” For example, a few years ago we stayed with friends at their cottage on a remote part of Lake Michigan, and as we spent time walking along the beach, I chanced upon a patterned stone in the water. It was beautiful, and I found out that it was not uncommon to find these “Petoskey stones,” the state stone of Michigan, formed by the fossilization of coral. I was drawn to their interesting markings, and as we walked I found (and kept) one more, then spotted another one, and another, until my bag was bulging, and both hands were full. I felt that I needed to bring home every one of these amazing stones that I could find, although I couldn’t possibly use them all.
I should have been satisfied when I successfully found more, but I wasn’t. There is always more that could be mine. When I find one gift and want more, but fail, the craving perhaps understandably remains. But why is it that when I found plenty – more than I could ever use – I still wanted more? When this happens, I believe that there can be no end to my greed and craving. I will never be satisfied. I will never have “enough.”
Does anyone ever become truly satisfied with what they have? In our Western society it seems unlikely. But what about those who might have avoided the consumerism brainwashing? Do the professional dumpster divers, probing daily with their sticks, find “enough”? Living outside the maelstrom of mainstream consumerism, are they immune to the greed? Are they able to experience a more pure form of the serendipity of an unexpected gift? Given their overloaded shopping carts, barely able to move under the strain of the black garbage bags lashed to the sides, I think they suffer with the rest of us. Maybe it’s not consumerism after all; maybe it’s genetic. And maybe it follows an evolutionary path that is more ancient than we imagine. This desire for more may be even more broadly experienced by our mammalian cousins, as evidenced by the hoarding behavior of squirrels, who never consider how many stored nuts would be “enough,” and by the gorging of black bears, swallowing just one more berry before collapsing in their hibernal stupor.
Though this may be in our genetic code, it is amplified by our culture, and this worldview driven by a philosophy of scarcity is dangerous for the long-term survival of our species. The ability to gratefully accept serendipitous gifts requires a philosophy of abundance and thankfulness, and this could be the first step in a broader awareness that allows us to further evolve. Greed has never made us great. But grateful acceptance of unexpected gifts can allow us to participate in the balance of the universe, accepting each gift with the serenity that allows us to leave the next treasures for someone else, in spite of our desire for more.
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