Feed the Yang

I had begun to think of my life as something to avoid. It wasn’t that I was, or am, depressed; it’s just that I have tired so much of all the competition, everything is a struggle of everyone trying to win over someone else. Yet, every morning I would wake up and there it was. Unavoidable. There is, of course, the illusion of escape found in the depths of a good book, the tunnel of a good movie or TV show, my moments alone. But each and every time I would emerge and there was my life, waiting like the cool kid, leaning on the wall, sipping a soda looking at me over the top of its sunglasses as if to ask, “Wuzzup?” I sigh, shake my head at the “ineffable plan” and carry on. The kid isn’t bad, really, it just is. But with all its kind as a whole, that is where the ugliness thrives.

We imagine that life was once better. It wasn’t. It just… wasn’t. Our history is one of dark cognitive dissonance, of nonsensical juxtapositions of what we claim to be, and what we actually are. We, more specifically, are Americans, that special breed of exceptionalism in all things human, but in reality as a whole we are ugly and sordid. We are the ultimate social experiment, the wannabe melting pot that turns out to be a salad bowl with some weird fruit thrown in and something sticky at the bottom. We are the incarnation of humanity, all of its foibles, its sweetness and its rot. The magic was supposed to be that we were the ones who were going to make that okay, the beacon of humanity’s future. Despite ourselves we would agree to be better to and for one another, for all. We had a shining path illuminated for us provided by our revered Constitution and the ideals it represents, arguably the most ambitious and profound of human inventions, and though we stumbled, the Law, Justice, Equality of all peoples, no matter who or what, that was what gave us and the world faith in our better selves. But those struggles to be who we claimed to be, those terrible travesties and internecine battles, our dark and monstrous, shamefully hidden-in-the-closet history on human rights, these were the signs that we were no better than the earliest of our kind who functioned on base instincts trying to walk upright in physique and psyche. We failed to overcome our human nature. Our knuckles are calloused and abrased.

We break into two tribes, we Americans, but I imagine worldwide, one moving forward, excited, one looking back, afraid. We call these tribes Progressives and Conservatives. They are as real as mom’s apple pie. While other tribes have claimed exception, really they were and are variations of the same aria. They are not new tribes; our human nature has always been Yin and Yang, always dichotomous. Since the days of fire, stone, and caves, we have been those who felt safety was the thing, that staying in the cave, staying within our comfort zones, being afraid of what lie out there, feeling overwhelmingly powerless against our nature, and nature, taking succor in what was known, rather than what could be, and we have been those who sought to walk in the open, to walk to the other side through some darkness, to challenge the fear of claw and tooth, seeking better ways to live, love and become. These are literally Yin, and Yang.

The Yin function in environments of structure, control, dominance, and flowing through it all, fear. Fear is The Force. They operate on basal instinct, basal needs, fundamental and predictable, controllable. It’s as if the cortex never need be, notions are not tested by reason, in fact, reason jeopardizes belief, faith in dogma, order and control; it’s all brainstem, all the time. Throughout our entire history these have been the fear mongers, the Witch hunters, the Inquisitors, the controllers, the persuaders through emotion. Fear is their succor and gaslighting themselves and others maintains it. Fear gives them purpose, they exist to control their fears while, not ironically, stoking them, justifying them, and to make sure others share those fears. Safety is in group fear. They create monsters, reasons not to change, reasons not to leave the cave, or let anyone else in. They create magic and stories to assuage their fears, as they need to control their nature and the nature that surrounds them. They are afraid not just of nature out there, but of their own nature, often needing to make even their own body and its functions frightening, evil things. Their leaders are those who, for power and control, best sell the fear, uniting under shared fear. Life is staying alive. Since reason is not used to measure their world, they do not understand it, they fear it. Reason is to be feared as it illuminates fear, and without fear, the Yin is lost, and more afraid. The Dogma, the Mantra, that is where safety lived and fear held at bay. Fear is the Yin, the Yin is fear. Fear explains everything. Stay in the cave, don’t let anything in, repeat and never question the Dogma.

The Yang are the troublemakers. They are the wanderers. As toddlers they were found beyond the opening of the cave in wonder, only to be snatched back by a Yin. Always the Yin with the snatching... New is exciting, fear is a challenge, everything is a wondrous experience and the more the better. The Yang doesn’t need to understand, that may come and they seek it, but it does not slow them. They need to experience and enjoy. They die young, and often, but travel far and know much. They welcome the unknown and the unknowable, and seek to use reason, study and humanity to be better at exploring their ever better selves. Their leaders are thoughtful, reasoned, worldly, inclusive and as diverse as they are. They know the self is myriad, and that this is okay. Lack of understanding is not a reason to fear. They celebrate diversity no matter how uncomfortable because that leads to discovery and understanding, a better, more forward moving humanity. To move beyond the self they must be compassionate as they need compassion themselves to thrive, and that is the reason for life, to thrive. They appreciate the different for they recognize and revel in being different themselves. They seek chaos for its wonder, not its darkness, they find succor in letting go of what they “know” for what they can understand. These are our explorers, inventors, thinkers, writers, artists, our ruffians and scoundrels, all of the things that paint the better us! They are not fearless, but they are not fools. Reason enlightens, it propels, it empowers, it changes its mind, its way of thinking as it learns. Thought is their Force, an ever changing, ever wandering Diogenes.

But the Yin are not all joyless, the Yang not all happiness. Like all things, all is variation on the theme. But nevertheless, these paradigms serve, and they illuminate what, who and why we are today. We are, if nothing else, creatures of habit. Always, we struggle to leave the ways of the cave, and move into the light, all the while fighting off those who would snatch us back. World history, American history, Yin versus Yang. While certainly simplistic, it illuminates why we are who we are, and not who we want to be. Humanity’s base nature is Yin, our better nature is Yang. Yin keeps us alive, Yang give us reason to live.

The competition between our natures is destroying the beacon we could be to the world. From the moment we are born, Yin and Yang fight for our very souls, and these two wolves turmoil within tearing at the fabric of our psyche. Everything becomes a competition. Power and Control, in every single thing we do, say or act. Every relationship is governed by Power and Control, the Yin want it, the Yang are aggrieved of it.  As the Native American lore mythically shared, “The wolf who lives is the one you feed.”  Today, sadly, we are feeding the angry, hateful, Yin Wolf, and instead of keeping us alive, it will kill us all.

So I am tired, tired of reading, hearing, seeing the Yin versus the Yang. Tired of being snatched by the Yin, for I am Yang and I abhor their world of fear. I am tired of fear creating loathing, more fear, and death. I want fear to unite us, not to destroy it, but to explore and embrace it, to become a better us because with it. I want us to all understand we are all afraid, but that we should not be of one another. That will not always end well for us, but reason can protect. What we do with the fear differs if we feed the Yin or the Yang. Our better selves, our humanity, lies within leaving the Yin behind and making the Yang the human nature. Seek understanding rather than protection, seek progress rather than regression. Be willing to make mistakes when making someone else’s life better. Its not pie… there is more when we share. Feed the Yang.

An end to a means

The General spoke with kindness and concern to the young Captain.

"You manage with power, and control. Discipline and loyalty are fragile things, especially in times of war. You might want to explore leading and inspiring, lifting up instead of forcing down. Fear is no way to bring out the best in anyone. For in the end, if you continue in this way, you will have many wars, external, and internal, but few useful soldiers, and when you have lost, it will be for naught, for a people who do not deserve it, and you will have made it that way."

                                                                                ~  Hijikata

Practice who you want to be

Practice everyday, being the person you want to be. That is who shows up when you are most needed.

                                                                             ~ Hijikata

An ode to another year.

2018 was a year, this can be said with certainty. Good, bad, its just another year like every other, filled with our personal dramas, our successes, our failures, our wishes, our fears. We play better on Facebook, but really, our lives are pretty much just as muddy as everyone else's. For most of us our lives are essentially unchanged after this year, for some it was the end of time, emotionally, literally. For some, our lives have been lifted, for others it was darkness, but mostly we are where we were this time last year. Nothing we haven't seen or known of before. It happened, it is what it was. It has been said that with every recall, a memory changes, becoming different, no longer a representation of truth but believed as so nonetheless. Our realization of this year lived bears a shadow of the actuality, and in that the emotions of happiness are blunted, the memories of tragedy are sharpened, cutting deeper, wounding more, until enough change to the memory comes, and we no longer recognize it with the ferocity it once brought. This new year, simply a road marker, will of course be no different, for we are the same person, with the same issues, the same consciousness. This past year has consequences, but we are still us, only different.

2018 passed by, and it changed me, though that process has been a constant for me, but one theme plays out day after day. I am not the person I was born as. This past year, like all before it, had its good moments marred by bad ones. I grew as a person and a physician, but I also had parts of me hammered down, I lost parts I liked. I end this year a bit melancholy, grieving some. I enjoyed some success and the success of others, and I suffered loss, and the losses of others. Too often I watched people cast out, fired, divorced, abandoned, ignored, bullied, and I suffered my own similar trials. I saw people deserving and undeserving built up, and broken down. The end sum it seems, is one of loss. From our nation to ourselves, we are all diminished this year by the larger events of our times, casting an inescapable pallor over everything. It has been quite a year.

It has been forming in me for sometime, this idea, that life being what it is, we all just want to be protected from it. It all boils down to wanting to be accepted, being part of a whole, to feel the protection of membership, to be safe. It is what we focus on in myriad ways, struggling in the whirlpools of power and control. Sadly some don't understand this and ruin it for themselves, abusing jobs, people, and they fail at life. Some ruin it for others. I thought about what affected me the most, and it was watching myself and others feeling outside. I watched some struggle so hard to belong to this or that clique, and watched the Machiavellian gaming, fear, favoritism, psychopathy and bullying that form the dynamic of relationships, the balance of power and control that lies at the base of every human interaction no matter how big or small. I watched truth contorted, biases advocated, success mocked, weaknesses publicly shamed, first narratives claimed, more often than not these negative interactions, not so many positive ones. I watched and experienced poor leadership and poor followership damage good people, scar lives. I saw so few allowed in, too many kept out. It's a human thing, to gateway others, giving us some sense of self value by diminishing another rather than raising ourselves up, keeping them out. We are just animals with animal instincts. We expect so little of ourselves, allow so little for others. There is no place for human beings.

I have never felt like I belonged to anything or anyone, and now I just want to be left alone, the old curmudgeon. I share this not for sympathy, only at times does it sadden me. I share it as it informs my view of the world. I don't usually enjoy the company of others outside my family. Like all of us who work with others, I do long to feel like I belong at work, but my driven manner in medicine makes this impossible, and being the only clinician in the clinic isolates. It isolates too because I am a high example no one wants to make the effort to match, becoming a target to lower the bar of work expectations. Its a contradiction. Most people want to do a good job, work hard at it, but there are some for whom this is not enough and they need to bring others down. I expect much of others, a weakness, I know. I don't claim to be "all that", but I am all too often the best clinician in the room because I think getting it right matters, and I am self-devastating, often more than warranted, when I fail. In medicine such a claim is arrogance, it is a handhold against another to keep the competetive stakes manageable. That is as much a comment on the failure of others as of my own skill. I raise the bar and all too often, instead of rising up to meet it, I and others like me, are brought down. I have stood up only to be beat down. A friend who some years ago recognized this about me shared a pin with a paraphrase of Einstein's words, "Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds."   This is a part of me hammered off this year that I liked. I am now a fool taking refuge in silence. I am but an employee, I no longer wish to be a part of the change, to make things better, as Imonce felt was an obligation. To paraphrase E. M. Forster as a child, "I don't want to be brave. People hurt you when you are brave." Leave me alone, I will not be in charge of anyone or anything. But this is not a unique thing, I see this time and again in those around me. Workplaces, our communities, filled with oppressed wonderkind who have given up, all too Ayn Rand. Better people overcome, and if our livelihood did not hinge on it, we too could abandon caution. As it is, I find my voice muffled as I more and more hold my tongue (or my fingers), so as to keep my job, even when the issue is wholly unrelated. I am done struggling. I am just an employee and just want to be left alone to do my job. And sadly, so is everyone around me, some from their character, others from the daily trauma of the workplace. This is America, and I fear, the world, yesterday, today, tomorrow. Our greatness is cowed to others and we work towards a common mediocrity.

There is such beauty in this world. The tears of happiness of a loved one, hugs from true friends, head butts from a kitty, the sound of rain, a bird of prey in flight, the rush of wind across a field... All of us appreciate the beauty of these things. We appreciate belonging as a thing of beauty. We know the pain of being outside, the pain of the fear of not belonging, of not being safe, and once inside we are never quite sure, the pain persists. Knowing this I have to wonder how we can be so cruel. We weep at the compassion of others, and yet so easily deny our compassion to others. We hurt those who simply want to truly be with us, a gift we can so easily give. There doesn't have to be something in it for us, no Ferengi bargain, we get by giving. So give this beauty, let people be, include them all. That is where the joy of being alive lies: its not about you, it's about them.

2019 will be yet another year seeking to belong, for we all just want to matter, to feel safe, to be worthy of protection. We want to be able to rise and fall and know there is someone there to lift us and hold us, remind us we are among people who care, we are safe, we will be here tomorrow with our gifts and quirks. Be a protector, appreciate the palette that makes up the wonder of those around you. Make room for the eccentric. There is always someone smarter, better, richer, more gifted than you, and that makes you better, not less. Be compassionate of the seeker of belonging. Be a bettter human.

In the Scheme of Things

No man is an Iland, intire of itselfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Manor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee. 

MEDITATION XVII Devotions upon Emergent Occasions John Donne

~

“No Man is an Island”. The notion is that we are all an essential part of a Whole, that the loss of any one of us diminishes us all.  Time and again, through the recidivist folly of mankind we see this brought fully into the light, when we fail to recognize the Islands, and cast them into the sea to make ourselves larger. While aware that there is a Whole, we are wont to erode the beaches of others, thinking that we alone matter. It is our nature.

It comes in small, and it comes in large. It comes in the body politic wherever people gather, every single relationship a struggle for power and control. It requires no words, though they are often slung against reason as scythes, it can be a glance, an act, an attrition, “the silence of our friends”, “the words of our enemies”.  It is out of the mind of the workplace psychopath, friend to all, enemy to all, the one voted best in class while Machiavelli takes admiring notes. It is in the murmur of underlings who despise the good Prince for being smarter, more than they. It is in the eyes of the unaccomplished seeking station through intrigue or rhetoric to make themselves whole, to assuage their insecurities. It is the foggy bottom of kindness returned with disparagement, with the making of another into a less than, the bully and the stone. It is in claiming the narrative as one’s own. History is not writ large, but rather small and perennial as we lack imagination and use the same hammer to strike at everything we see as nail to build ourselves.  All of us have clods of ourselves shorn and tossed.

To the Island, however diminutive or expansive, complete or broken, being part of the Whole is the reason for the sea, that we can be part of it all, valued. How does this parcel come to belong, becoming an essential element of the Whole? Who ordains belonging? Who outcasts the wretched? When we work so hard and fearfully to gain union, why do we not miss a moment to wash away another who is clinging to our shore awash in those same fears? Is it human nature to stand on the necks, rather than the respected shoulders of those around us? Eyes wide with empathy and compassion when someone else lifts another, while in the next breath diminishing Sisyphus, placing our foot against the rolling stone as he reaches the top of the mountain as if it is our place. We are terrible beings capable of great things, stuck in the mud of our own oppressive nature for fear of being less than.

Take no solace in being aware of this. Be not of the character to shoot first, to gain the first narrative at all costs, to form the chess moves in mind as you plan three, four steps ahead of another for your gain and not theirs. See others taken off the board, tipped to the checkered square, being able to do nothing but adapt to their lessened place in the game in anger and frustration for having been leveraged. Have no wish to control another to grow, but rather to make your respectful and graceful path towards the Whole depending on others to do their heavy lifting as is their task, lifting when it is yours.  Whatever you do, it is important that you do it well. If we depend on you, we will make demands of you, and this does not make you less than, for yours are the shoulders that all of us depend on, just as ours are there for you. That you might feel less than is the chip on your shoulder, not ours. Do not project this fault of your character as a fault of our character. It makes you base. Be responsible for yourself, your success and failures are not always of your own making, but they are yours to endure with grace. If someone hurts you, be graceful, if you help another be humble. This is the mettle defines who we are, not that we are adept at intrigue.

The rising tide lifts all boats. That we cannot appreciate this is our weakness, for we fear that there is not just the success of others, there are our own failures. Our character is the piecemeal assemblage of our innate being, shaped, carved, burnished, into the person we are now. Those who grow will not be that person tomorrow, but whether we are better, or not, depends not just on us, but those around us, those other Islands who are the Whole. An Island is warmed by the sun and blue sky, and then the hurricane strips it bare, it is washed in rain and burned in fire, and yet it persists, changed, better or worse. Do not for a moment think that, if the others cannot stand your fierceness you should stand your ground, for by and large they will bring you down to make you equal; there is no room for the eccentric now, no place for the different, we all must pretend, act our part. How then does an Island move to surround themselves with those who recognize their unique colors, not as a threat but as a contribution to the palette? That… that is the mystery of life.  Finding it is the joy of life.

So, when the bell tolls for you, in your time and place, if you have done well, there will be so many who are better than you for your having been, and you are not one iota less for having known your place. Be at peace with that knowing that you helped someone else belong to the Whole. But know your place, and do your thing well.

“In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.”

~ Mahatma Gandhi

“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”

                                                            ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

The Sounds of Trouble and Sadness

Heartbroken.
She is probably abused at home,
Her children too,
And so she watches silently, passive,
In that way.
As the child commands her in word, action, inaction.
He is old enough to know.
Young enough not to.
We work through it together,
Giving when we can give,
Letting go when we cannot,
And we care for the child.
He remains defiant, though with me unsure,
He giggles as he defies, and I work with it.
In the end we are done, we all win.
I leave, faith that I have done well by them.
But then he refuses, curls into a ball, and feigns sleep,
Time goes by, and by, and by again,
She stands forlorn, saying nothing, doing nothing, tired.
The nurse sees them lingering, and tells the boy its time to go,
"I will carry you...", mom begs softly.
Nothing changes, he does not relent.
Time passes by, and by, and by again.
I wonder, and venture, and find him smiling asleep,
Lean in, whisper "Its time to go." He ignores.
I stroke his cheek and cajole with a determination he understands,
"You will listen to your mother because she loves you,
You will listen to me because I do too.
Its time to go. Sit up and walk.
Your mother cannot carry you.
She has carried you far too far already...".
I am, I think, her champion, her friend.
He slyly smiles, sits up, then slides towards the floor,
She catches him but he is too big.
Maybe all men leave her, I leave her, and it must injure.
Time again goes by, and by, and by again,
Mom suddenly charges out half carrying him,
He is a heavy, heavy, burden she must carry,
All hate and spittle, invective forth,
Coming apart down to her soul.
"How dare you, it is not your place!"
I abjure, seeing the pain but lost,
And she screams a circle of anger, hate and powerlessness, shame.
"I did what someone had to do, it was my place, perhaps not my time..."
But words she cannot hear, too far gone into her despair.
Time passes by, and by, and by again,
But she is relentless, and relentless still.
Suddenly she and they are gone in shocking silence.
Time goes by, and by, and by again.
Our day is done, we leave.
She awaits outside for me, and screams again,
Relentless and unrelenting.
Burning me in her hell,
follows me in her car, her words unrecognized.
Their pain cannot miss,
Her heartbreak pounds me,
And my heart cracks, knowing that it is not me she hates,
But me who will need to endure.
In this moment
She hates everything and I am here where everything is not,
And so she burns me,
And she will burn me again, and again,
Because I remind her that she is less than,
Though I know
She is not.
She has broken my heart,
For breaking hers...
And this
I must endure...
Fingers will point,
And words will refrain,
"How dare you! It was not your place!"
And I will endure,
Heartbroken.

On Being Human

There was the thought that something was amiss. In all of these years of struggle, they hadn’t really stopped to think, really, about what the struggle was to accomplish. They felt the angst of their turmoils, but denied feeling connected to any of it. It was as if all of this was somehow imagined, a product of someone else’s psyche, and that they were just living in it.

It hurts, when you do think about it, to know that all of this wasn’t really for anything at all. It just was. There was no purpose, just moving through a day together to the next. Waffling about in a sea of emotions and peculiarities that didn’t attach itself to anything real. Surely, there was context, surely the context wanted to move something, change something, but it was their insight that had limited their ability to succeed. They acutely lacked any.

These issues felt wrong, felt in need of a champion, seemed worth standing up for, taking a blow for. But in the end, if things changed at all, they changed in small increments, and sometimes would be later washed all away. A lot seemed to be intuitive; who would not want what is best for someone else? Curiously, a lot of people. A lot of powerful people, they need to control others for any number of reasons. it didn’t have to have a purpose either, this oppression, often frightening out of proportionally angry oppression. If there was a psyche involved, it was deeply scarred and took pleasure, purpose, in laying others out. Religion, money, power from others, all have been used to to control others for no other reason than to control others.

Silver spoon not so ironically in mouth, they feared someone who needed something terribly, might get it for nothing. The angst came from our wondering why this might bother anyone for any reason at all? What broiled within them that made them need to stand on another’s neck, whoever that someone might be, but no more vociferously so than for a person unlike them, in color, race, or thought. What sin was there, what moral code broken, in lifting someone up for no other reason than one should and could? What frightened them so much that they ran from fear to fear giving them all a common cause, that someone, somewhere, might rise above with the help of others? 

Impenetrable, this psyche. Reason through compassion cannot make way, for if it did, the entire house of cards would come crashing down, their entire reason d’être challenged and inward looking would bring catastrophe to the fragile psyche. Let it go. Let it go. Let go of the need to protect your ego, your position, and be human, be humane.

The struggle was purposeless, it seemed, mostly because those who care had no power over those who did not. Fear always wins using ways that have nothing to do with ending it, but rather oddly, using those that perpetuate it. Fear wins because there is nothing that it won’t do to perpetuate itself. Fear is unbridled power. Racketeering on a human race scale; create the fear, then create more to substantiate it, and use that fear to create barriers to allowing those fears to reach you all the while buttressing up those fears. That’s no way to get through life. And therein lies the struggle’s failure. There was no way in through those bigoted layers. Throwing ourselves against these walls accomplished nothing. You cannot reason with those fearful of imaginary things, or they would not exist at all in the first place.

Ayn Rand wrote of the distinguished elite hiding themselves away from the ungrateful masses, to punish them through absence and abstinence. Perhaps we should write of the masses leaving the ungrateful elite behind, and letting them fend for themselves? Let them go. Let them create their own bastions of fear, and brood within. We will instead go on living in a place where we all belong. All we all want is to feel safe and to belong where we are, to be moved and welcomed within our own skin, our own lives. Lets make that happen. Be reasonable. There is no place without pain, fear or annoyance, but learn to deal with life, let the snowflakes around you melt, be stoic and reasoning, and take no offense where there is no malice, being sure not to mistake ignorance for malice. No one owes us anything, and yet, we all owe each other everything. We owe each other humane compassion? Not even that; nothing is owed, all is freely given.

Be kind, be compassionate, give, lift others up for no other reason than they need a hand, give everyone a safe place where they belong. Demand nothing, just make it be. Stop crying over insult, stop with the trigger warning/safe space entitlement, and instead listen, learn keep and discard, and just be. This doesn’t mean we should allow travesty, but that instead we should avoid it. Stop struggling; we will never change them, never drill through the layers of fear and willful ignorance. Ask for what you need, give to those who need it, require nothing in return. Just be human in the best way that we can be.