Birthday Reflections

I'm 34 years old now. At once I feel incredibly powerful and incredibly weak. I feel powerful in that my lifetime persona, the odd combination of flaws and virtues that animate me, is fully formed. I know my role and it has depth. I am deeply enmeshed in fascinating casts of characters in my career, in the running world and in my family. I am treated as a valuable player in all of those realms, an equal among peers, a person with something definite to contribute.

But at the same time I feel the loss underneath it all that is constantly occurring- I see my oldest graduating from Kindergarten, I see the generation that taught me everything I know growing thinner and wrinklier even as I see the youth that will forever run through them flowing just as it always has, and I try to bury its beauty inside of me.

Everything that I have always striven for and at some level now attained is painfully obviously fleeting. This must be the feeling of mid-life-- a time when you are at the top of the bell curve, full of precisely the same amount of potential and kinetic energy, feeling collapsed into the same moment all of the past and future- like you are the Little Prince treading constantly against the spin of a tiny globe- forever keeping pace only to the precise moment in which you are, every moment, present.

Thinking Obliquely

I have been fortunate to have some formative professional experiences with creative thinkers who understand how to work with their subconscious minds in order to solve complex problems. I think it's possible to ape their behavior in order to achieve similar results, and so I think their stories are worth sharing. I refer to their analytical style as "thinking obliquely," for lack of a better term. 


My first encounter with this style of thinking was in the person of Jim Eiss, my boss of the last (gulp) 12 years. I've never met anyone who mulls things over more than he does, and it's the thing I love about him. It's why he is one of the most brilliant immigration attorneys. He is well aware of the fact that his subconscious brain contains a spark of genius and he knows how to work WITH it, even though he doesn't know how exactly it works. It's like a mysterious machine that he knows how to operate. So Jim gets a call from a client with a difficult case and he has the vague shape of a solution in his brain. He has a way of satisfying the client that he will figure out their case even though he hasn't nailed down the solution yet (another art form that will no doubt result in a future blog entry). Then his next step is to read absolutely everything he can find about the subject. Often he then comes to me to discuss it. We bounce the idea back and forth and flesh it out a little more. Then he sleeps on it. It's like he's sowed a seed and just has to wait for it to sprout. And then he doesn't talk about it until he's ready. He's like a grandma with something in the oven who magically knows when it's ready to come out. And then a day later, maybe 3 days later, maybe a week, he will just pop out some ingenious solution to the complex problem. 

My second encounter with the notion of oblique thinking was with this writing professor in law school, Janet Lindgren. She accepted me for an independent research project for a semester. I had decided to write proposed regulations on AC21 (an immigration law from 2001 that still hasn't been regulated to this day), and I was slogging my way through it for several weeks. About halfway through the semester she told me she thought that she was getting to the bottom of what my writing problem was and that she needed to approach it in another way, so she had me quit working on the regulations and asked me to bring in a brief I was working on at work. So I did. She helped me to rewrite that brief for a very difficult permanent resident application into one of the best things I'd ever written, and I think it was because of that that the client became a permanent resident. 

I thought that switching tracks at that point was rather odd, but she seemed to have a plan so I didn't question her methods. I intrigued by them, though, and after the fact tried to get her to explain why she'd diverted me into another project. (We did eventually get back to hammering out the regulations). Her only explanation was something about it being like needing to use her peripheral vision to hone in on what was right in front of her. She needed to see a completely different writing sample from me- something that would point in a different way at what was the flaw in my approach. In the end, she nailed it perfectly: she said I needed to take my hands off the reader's neck. It sounds so obvious and simple but it's revolutionized the way that I think and write. I never trusted the reader before that to understand the point I was making and so I would over-explain it to the point of insulting the reader.
Both Jim and Professor Lindgren have a similar approach to solving complex problems. They study the problem in depth, until they understand it inside and out, and then they back away from it and allow their subconscious minds to process it. They trust some part of themselves to work out the problem away from their conscious gaze. It's something I try to emulate. I think that just being aware that the brain is capable of functioning in this way can revolutionize one's approach to problem solving. 

Pythagorean Aesthetics

Your body is the shape of your habits
Like the shape in the sand
Is the picture of an ideal
In the mind of a man
Who believes in a universal order
That we shadow with our efforts
When we strive toward a perfection in form—

Each choice a conversation 

Between what is seen and unseen—

Each life an explication

Of a dream that’s half-forgotten by morning.

Glass House

The woman in the glass knows
She can never cast a stone
Because the one who holds her captive
Knows the name that breaks her bones.

The mirror brings together
The accuser and accused-
It is the prison glass that shields us
When we come to break the news.

The Knowledge We're Born With

You know you really love someone when you start to worry about their death, when you've imagined the death bed scene so many times that if it ever actually unfolds that way, it will almost be a comfort. I think we imagine these things because in a strange way, if we bring their death into the fabric of our lives, we think we'll be able to have something of their lives woven into the fabric of our lives after their death-- a trade of sorts, a way of saving a bit of today for a hopefully distant tomorrow. How strange it will be if I am the one in the death bed with those I love so well gathered around me. I hope that-- as backwards a desire as this sounds-- I get to outlive them all.

There was an old Irish lady named Eileen Hull, who lived down the street from me on Tindle Ave. She was in her 90s and she only had one close friend her age who hadn't died yet-- Betty, who lived a few doors down. They had both lived there since the 1950s. Eileen told me things about the history of the neighborhood- what it had been like before they built the entry ramp to the 400. She told me-- a few times, actually, because she repeated stories-- about how one of the houses on the street had to be moved on a truck bed down the street, and how they had hoisted the thing onto the truck with everything still inside of it and moved it to a brand new lot at the tail end of the street. She remembers sitting on her front porch and seeing the lampshade in the living room window moving back and forth as it trundled slowly along.

Eileen held so much history inside of her. When she told a story, it was always a *good* one- something vivid, and painted with the perfect details to set your imagination alight. She was life personified- so beautiful. I never even said goodbye to her when we moved. I still feel guilty about that.

I was the one who had to tell Eileen the horrible news that her old neighbor's daughter, Patsy, had passed away in her 50s of Lupus. Eileen had watched her grow up and they still wrote letters back and forth.

Eileen has lost more people in her old age than I've had the good fortune of ever knowing. And when she found out that Patsy had died, she doubled over in pain at the news. I'll never forget it. We were standing on the sidewalk in front of her house and she had her Scottish Terrier on a short leash. She was wearing a thin  house coat and slippers. Her leg skin was exposed and her leg skin looked like melted candle wax because of her Diabetes. Her hair was always freshly dyed some technicolor shade of orange. And the pain of the news bent her double. Eileen.

It only took her a minute to recover, and when she did, she told me that Patsy had sent her a packet of Forget-Me-Not seeds with her last letter, just before her death. Eileen remembered this because she always remembered the powerful details. I think that's why she lived so long, so that she could be the one left to tell all of the stories.

****

The stars that we promised to gaze on
Burned out long ago. The comets that plummet
Like childhood visions extinguish
The knowledge we're born with
That all we perceive is already gone.

Not even stars, we imagine the arc
Of the comet as part of the present,
Yet the phantoms of stars that seem fixed
In the heavens are older and further
And fade much more slowly, so slowly

That we and and our children shall pass
Long before we perceive their absence.

Just as every story has a beginning, a middle, and an ending, so does every love. But love has a way of collapsing time so that you experience all of these pieces in every moment. This is how love becomes full; when we feel its ending and its beginning in those seemingly infinite moments through the middle. Sometimes I think the Christian story of death and resurrection points toward this-- that we have to suffer the loss of what we love in order to see it-- that we can trade moments with the future, seeding the inevitability of love's ending through the fertile moments of the present against some future flowering. Or so I hope.

Emotional Focus

Pop psychology has given us all the awareness that we store memories with strong emotional content in a different and more powerful way than most memories. Our brains seem to shine a spotlight on moments that are packed with emotional content. By doing so, however, other portions of our experience are necessarily left in the dark.

A couple of winters ago, I was driving home from work on a busy country highway when a deer ran into my car. It was a buck. I remember seeing its antlers first as it came out of the brush. It cleared the lane of oncoming traffic to my left before attempting to leap over my car as it traveled at 45 miles per hour (ok, 50). I barely had time to step on the brakes, but it wasn't enough. I can still see with perfect clarity the image of his huge white belly with my headlights reflecting off of it. It was so bright and white. He crashed down onto the hood of my car and then ran away. I can also recall pulling over to the shoulder and watching the face of the driver behind me as he slowly drove by, with a look of shock on his face.

After I pulled over, I called the police to write up an accident report. When the cop showed up, he asked me which way the deer went, and I confidently responded that he had continued in his course, off to my right. Together, the cop and I searched under the pine trees in the yard with our flash lights. (There was actually a dead doe tied up under one of them, which was surprising, but she had been shot recently). As I tramped through the yard, looking for the deer so he could be put down, I went through the scene in my mind. I realized as I reviewed my memory that I had been so intently focused on my moment of impact with the deer, and the brief shuddering horror of colliding with it, that I did not actually have ANY memory of which way it ran. It was a huge blank in my memory. I just assumed that it continued in its course after I hit it. But for all I could remember, it was possible that it could have turned around and gone back across the street. I went and searched over there too, without explaining why to the cop. We never did find it.

I wonder how many important details we miss when we are focused on the events that are emotionally arousing; whether there are methods to mitigate this effect; and whether it would be healthy and/or helpful to use them. I also wonder where I can get a flashlight that works as well as the one that cop had.