Two Ways to Conjure up Being Human ... Maybe More

Most people who write to me do so at my e-mail address (hhcovitz@aol.com) and one, yesterday, wrote backdoor to me about how reading the Choices poem and other postings makes them sad ... " I was just reading your blog about the choices whether to pull the honeysuckle or feed the azelea and I felt so heavy and burdened." They went on to describe a sadness, too ... 'a heavy burden of sadness.'

I can say much in response but will start by admitting my sin.

...................    Confession: I am sad. As I recall, I've always welcomed waves of sadness.

..................     Disclaimer: I do not always experience sadness and it only rarely intrudes on my glee.

But let me go on .... I do go on and on ... new intransitive verb: to blather and blog.

On the Readers Right to Know ..... I take as a given that there are many ways to understand the condition of being a sentient and thinking two-legged type of the human type ... what it means to be a member of Clan Anthropos who still has the capacity to think complex thoughts and not to be controlled purely by their nose ... by their instincts. I once wrote that I never met a cur who required candle-light to get hot over any estrous bitch who might fortuitously pass into his territory. I think most of the views of being human accept that what drives us is different than what propels the other beasts.

So much for agreement. One of the areas of stark disagreement is between the relationship of feelings to each other (we're open, as are the beasts, to a range of feelings) and the relationship of feelings to thought. One such camp of thinkers sees the thought as father to the deed ... "change yiour thoughts and you'll change what you feel" is their mantra. The American Psychiatrists are now altering their manual of what we call what ails you ... they call it DSM ... this version? DSM-5. Many things will have changed but among the changes will be the inclusion of protracted mourning periods as a treatable illness.

Lemme tell you a story of the last fist-fight I was in. My secretary had lost her child, about 20 years younger than her older kids. For those of us Players in the Fourth Quarter, we have no trouble remembering when Leukemia was most typically a death sentence. Chemo, Bone Marrow ... none of it saved maybe 10 year old D. I was at the Mass before burial. The Priest admonished D's parents not to cry for he was, afterall, now with his Pater qui est in Caelum ... his heavenly Father. Afterwards, the priest cane up to me and introduced himself.

P: "You work with D's Mom?"
H: Yeah etc.
P: "Did you like what I told D's Mom and Dad?"
H: It was fine and heartfelt.
P: "No, my Son, you don't understand. I was asking whether you agreed with me."
H: Well, yes and no. I hope to help D's Mom to carry on ... one footfall after another. But my guess is that she may need to cry for several years.

Long story but within moments this representative of God thrrew a first punch at me ... and then a second. As a kind Soull from Brooklyn raised to respect the clergy, the first punch deserved, in my mind, a pass. But I was from Brooklyn and the second grazing one received an "eye for an Eye" ...

Now, I'm not suggesting that it was in differing with the Good Church Pastor of God that I decided it OK to put his drunken expostulating hulk on the ground. No. But differ I did.

Another prominent way of thinking is that it is the no-thought and unfelt-feeling that are Pops or Moms to the deed. In this other way of thinking, embraced feelings and thoughts don't typically get acted upon ... though many seem to fear them and that possibility. Many people that I've met fear that an expression of sadness will lead to depression ... to the absence of pleasure, the withdrawal from life, love and the pursuit of happiness.

What to say? I belong to those who take it as a given that if one welcomes a feeling, particularly the Big Two (sadness and glee), they wash over us like the cleanest wave on a sunny day at the beach. When each of my parents died, my grandparents, friends and teachers ... when my dogs have gone to guard in the World Beyond, and, even, when I recognize that the years are passing by at an apparently more rapid pace than I once thought they would ... and that those years are taking away some of what was ... from me? and from those I care for and about ... I welcome that wave of sadness just as I welcome the playful personna that would join my grandspawn who in some fantasy way connect me to the 7 foot carving in the back yard of Melmo the Magnificent. I welcome it to cleanse me and because fighting a wave typically takes people off their feet and knocks them on their asses.

Plato, Freud, and many others but especially 'me' (as I'm still here and writing) ... believe that the healthy life allows action based on feelings and thoughts, providing only that some energy is put into determining whether it is harmful or intrusive to the well-being of self and others ...

Final comment ... I do think sadness is a sign of a dis-eased human process, but only when it cannot be experienced in a peaceful melange with glee. Betimes, I can tell my glee and sadness apart ... like waves playing with each other ... at other times they, like the song says, "come together!"