Changes -- "Turn, Turn, Turn"

Changes? ... M's and my second child sent along this hyperlink loosely about the challenges of the changing of the generational guard ... a modern comedic version of the classical drawings of "The Passing of the Bough" (maybe Durer): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00LIsgWrKPs

Curious to receive this, today, just after waking and in my 'incoming mailbox.' I arose in the Geekdom of my own hypnopompic thoughts (those hallucinatory images and words that visit us as we move out of sleep states) wondering about New Years ... Chinese New Years (the Spring Festival), Muslim New Years (Hijri) and Julian Calendar New Years ... accompanied by foods, sparks of fireworks and champagnes. Tonight begins the Lunar New Year of the Jewish Calendar. It is called Rosh ha'Shannah. 1 out of 500 people (World Jewish fraction of population) may have some connection with this calendar, those who stay close to their people's holidays and rituals.

I've mentioned, before, my compulsive interest in words whose meanings fly just beneath our radar.

PaperMate Pens .... and .... EverSharp Pens ....

FrigidAires ... KleenEx ... Kitchen Aids

and many more words and brand names that we use and whose obvious meanings don't quite make it to our awareness.

And so I was puzzling ... the Biblical word Shannah or year arises from the same root-word as l'Shannos ... to change. And while I don't suspect folk 2000 years or more ago had calendars, there must've been an awareness of renewal in the ongoing change process that signifies the real and the living. I once had a public argument at a conference with a man who thought to explain 3 dimensionality from a growth out of lower dimensions by some kind of quantum magic; this was between us a truly Nerdish argument (rah-rah football types, Sorrority and Fraternity Siblings ... you can sign out, now ... it would be better for us both).

My position was different. For me, lower dimensions don't EXIST, any more than do higher ones, at least they will never be in our ken. To exist? to be Real? is to occupy 3-dimensions along an always moving dimension of change which we most typically call "time." The Real is what we encounter in Space-Time, in our 4-dimensional playground. Nothing else counts. Nothing else exists.

We continue changing in every moment, even if that process is punctuated by certain instances when we celebrate that change... Rosh ha'Shannah ... 'the head or new-beginning of Change.'

Maybe that's what's so difficult? Celebrating the change. In my office, I've watched many people try to stop the clock ... try to introduce fixed ways of dealing with the "Everchanging." When the God of Moses speaks to him from the Bush that Would Not Stop Burning, responding to Moses' request that God be named ... his God responds "I shall be as I shall be" ... "Look, Moe ... Sonny and Cher said it best: "And the beat goes on."

Yeah, yeah ... some changes are too quick. Cancer cells clone themselves too quickly for other cells to keep up. Our children and grandchildren go from getting their first tooth and taking their first step to making love with someone from another Space-Time locality and decide to emigrate and choose their own ways and to spawn on their own.

Slow down, Kid

Squawking: "Hey, guys, I'm not ready" ... doesn't do any good.

New Years, perhaps, are moments when we grasp the never-ending and always-changing character of the Real ... of Us ... of our Lives.

What is, my Dear Horatio, is only that which changes.

What stays the same has already died.

What is the Last Quarter? Well, truthfully, there is no last quarter ... the Bush keeps Burning, the Generations unfold, the Wars keep waging, and most of the time I feel blessed that when I reach across the bed in the middle of the night, the space-time traveller with whom I've shared those unfoldings, with whom I've experienced the Real in all its Gore and Glory, ... is still there rocketing in her stillness through Time-Space.

Hey, people who share beds:

The snores of that person next to you are the signals 

that the rocket's afterburners are still hot!

I think my favorite book is the 2800 year old pamphlet ... Ecclesiastes ... Kohelles ... The Congregant ... the guy who tries to find meaning in his meanderings but only finds the companionship and love that allows us to travel through these changes unalone.

As Porky Pig says:

That's It (that's all there is),  Folks!

(That's all she wrote!)

Typing and Types

As a youngster, I and many in my generation were drawn to the character sketches of Edwin Arlington Robinson ... relatively short poems describing folk he met around town ... maybe in a bar or an IGA store. "Miniver Cheevey child of scorn grew old as he assailed the Seasons ... he bemoaned that he was ever born and he had reasons." Robinson went on to further describe this man lost in fantasied history and in his bottles of whiskey. Simon and Grarfunkel put his Richard Cory to music ... a suicide who was known through town only as the bon vivant he presented to the townsfolk.

Character sketches? M and I were catching a bit of the News a few days ago ... must've been CNN or a related channel, as Dr. Sanjay Gupta was doing a piece. He visited a Northern European Yoga group that has specialized -- for I think they said 30 years -- in adding laughter to the stretches and poses of Yoga. I don't recall the details but there they were laughing. I wouldn't say that they were forcing the laughter, especially since it appeared that the more they laughed, the more natural and genuine it appeared to be.

I don't recall many details. I was watching GuntherDog move about on the couch and listened to him groan. It occurred to me that there really are personality types and that I was, in my head, dividing them up into laughers and groaners ... then I morphed into thinking about how I've previously divided humanity into those who emphasize gratitude for what is and those that bemoan what isn't and struggle with envies.

Sometime, this weekend, we (GuntherDog was home ... moaning, chances are -- he must come from a long line of Kentucky Kvetchers ... or maybe he got it from me) were driving in run down area of Philadelphia ... houses in disrepair ... some folk walking about appearing half(or more)-drunk. Oh! I just remembered how we ended up there; it relates to Last Quarter thinking. I had been excited to attend a talk ... it was just yesterday ... of a Southeast Asian Society of Psychiatrists talking about prejudices in the consultation room. M and I arrived ten minutes early for the 2-5 fete which promised to provide Indian and Iranian snacks, if history of previous meetings could be depended upon. We got buzzed in and explained why we were there. The three people at the desk looked perplexed.

"A meeting? I don't know if I saw an announcement of a meeting for today."

Long story; short version. We were 168 hours and ten minutes early. I was gladdened that I got the hour right and the good folk at the table let us get away without the $5 token for leaving Parking. I guess it was a Social Security discount ... Alms for the Old.

We left, quite amused by the vagaries of late middle aged memories and sauntered through the rundown area I mentioned seeking a way home. True, true. Old people get lost but M and I both had (well-placed) confidence that we'd make it home to find out where we hid our Ginkgo ... the same closet, perchance, in which we left our memory.

But that neighborhood? I'm reasonably confident that many -- most? -- of the residents of that area of Philadelphia are waking up, as I write, to go off to schools and jobs. Sunday afternoon while we were driving? Many -- most? -- were sitting down after church to have dinner with family. But many of the visible were walking the street in what appeared to be a fog. So, I asked myself, why isn't that me? When illness strikes, there are those who ask: "Why me?" For me, at this moment and many like it, it is closer to the minister's plea: "There but for the grace of God" or the dice "go you and I."

I suppose gratitude is an experience that precipitates from a recognition that my life's direction was and remains a crap-shoot and that I lucked out. Have I worked for the past 45 years? Well, yes, but that poor guy doing the Cheap Wine Stagger? he may have worked for 50.

I know this can't be the whole story, but gratitude and laughter -- whether constructed or absolutely expectable -- do seem to be related to our ability to accept the randomness of the Universe and to laugh ourselves into peeing in our pants at the fact that we didn't crap-out, entirely.


"GuntherDog ... c'mon ...
       give Daddy a laugh!"

                               "Hey, Dad ... Gimme a break,
                                 it's 5 AM, you're full of hooey
                                 and you forgot to feed me. Oh!
                                And by the way. You're a lucky
                                old dog for not getting lost on
                                the way home, yesterday"

Envy? Kids Call it "The Green Eyed Monster"

Kids call envy "The Green Eyed Monster." Maybe it would be better to call it "The SuperHero." I was blessed to receive an e-mail from SzH, a Last Quarter Interloper, that is, an email from one who lives in a faraway country, Hungary, and a further-away Quarter (I suspect Quarter II); it's the further-away Quarter that has me calling this lady an interloper.

ALL INTERLOPERS ARE WELCOME

WE NEED SOME YOUNG BLOOD

She was a friend of one of my mid-Third Quarter kids when he lived in Hungary and she reminded me that I had mentioned that I would turn, soon, to riffing on the distinctions between toxic envy and beneficent envy. Perchance, one of the choices in the 4th Q is between envying the 2nd and 3rd Q'ers or relying on them for capacities such as memory ... err ... and holding the door open. Reminds me ....

Years ago, I wrote a lengthy piece for a Student Handbook for a training institute that I directed. It was on Ethics. A colleague, an older psychiatrist whom I greatly admired complimented it but added that it would've been sufficient had I said that "an ethical healthcare practitioner does what they told their patient that they would do." Thank you, SzH, for trying to keep me ethical. The Last Quarter fatigue has both M, GuntherDog and I tired and groaning, sometimes forgetful. Maybe, just maybe, GuntherDog's groan is to remind me that he's got old-man problems, too.

Maybe I should begin with a component part of Beneficent Envy. I'm thinking of valuing and giving another credit. My own thinking about this matter maybe comes out of the writings of Theodore Reik, a psychoanalyst who loved many women and who wrote broadly about love. He reasoned that we love another when (not whenever, perhaps, but when) we recognize in them something that we wish we could have in ourselves but don't or can't or think we don't. Years ago, I wrote a piece about the envy I experience for M and her relationship to our spawn. I'll never be the Mama or the GrandMama, for that matter. There's no reason for me to seek to strip M of her title that her grown son bestowed upon her at her 50th some years ago: The Mommy.  I don't think I need to parse that expression and don't know that I can, but it describes a primal connection that doesn't make it into the mysterious connection between Father and Child. Goya portrayed a Savage God eating his children. Michelangelo recognizes the sufferer both on the cross and later draped over Mother in the Pieta and EveryBaby held by the Mommy of all the statues of Maria mit Kind.

The Romans said: Mater semper Certa ... you're always certain of who your Mother is ... but Pater semper Incertus? (or was that "insertus") ... who can be certain whether or not Daddy is who he (or Mommy) says he is?

Beneficent Envy is all over the place as you play and age in the Fourth Quarter. M and I see young Mothers -- with and without partners -- walking with their adoring babies in the supermarket and department stores of the before lunch World. Much of the time it's quite beautiful ... and enviable. Young people doing what we once  did ... saying the garsh-darn cutest things. What a gift it was when my youngest gave -- albeit askew -- blessing to her parents' relationship when she complained at 4 or 5 years, holding Cuddles-the-Bear: "Life isn't fair. You get to sleep with Mommy and I get to sleep with this silly old bear."

Beneficent envy gives, as it allows for or accompanies love. 

When one of my older kids was 16 ... 30+ years, ago, he was on the phone after school at 3. When I came out of my office at 350, he was on the phone. And at 450 and 550. Somewhere in that period of time, I was trying to figure out why I was so annoyed. I tried on a few possible reasons for my dis-ease.

He's blocking incoming calls ... Well, we had two lines.

He's costing us a lotta money ... Well, now, Howard: his girlfriend lives two blocks away.

He's not doing his homework .... Not that, either ... he never does his homework!

It wasn't until my last trek by the phone when I could -- smiling -- say:

Hey, Guy, I'm envious of you. You're 16, good-lookin', 

got lots of energy, have a cute young girlfriend and 

get to write your own schedule of responsibilities. 

I'm not 16, your Mom and I are both gettin' on in years, and 

I work. Yeah ... I'm envious of you, that's it.

His response was quick and telling. He kindly patted (maybe petted describes it better ... "Good Dog") me on the shoulder, said "thanks, Dad, that's nice to hear" and went back to talking to his Sweetie.

Beneficent envy doesn't take away or even seek to take away.

Toxic envy is thoroughly different. Toxic Envy seeks to take away and gives nothing in return. In the stories that grew up around the betimes contradictory account of the Garden of Eden in the Book of Genesis, a first Eve was conjured about by the commentaries. She was born an equal to Adam (from the Hebrew adamah ... earth ... as if he was named EarthMan) and asked to be thus considered. The male God excommunicates her, Lilith in these tales, from the Garden East of Eden. There, she sits casting spells over other women, especially pregnant women. The (male) writers of this mythology imagine her inducing miscarriages onto those carrying child.

Those suffering from toxic envy -- and suffer, they do -- have experienced loss and re-experience the feelings associated with that loss coupled with rage when another has what they've lost.

Toxic Envy seeks to take away and knows no love.

When ascendant, Toxic Envy moves to destroy all good and to require all that is painful. While that may sound exaggerated, one would be as hard-pressed to discover any pleasure in those who are dominated by this type of Envy as these sufferers are to allow any pleasures in others.

Beware of Lilliths  -- Be They Men or Women -- Young or Old.

Again ... maybe what allows the Last Quarter to be a Playground of Pleasures is the capacity for gratitude for both what is and what was ... even though what was may only be fully active and visible in those we are destined to leave behind. 

Dear SzH ... This is the best I can do, this morning ... 

"Climb every Mountain" & Carpe every Diem! 

HHC