Dancing Our Sorrow Away

When I was in College, the Jackson Browne album “Late for the Sky” was in heavy rotation on my apartment turntable. The album’s introspective songs had a certain appeal to a young man growing up and just starting to make his way in the world because they asked big questions about the purpose of life and how to think about all the tricky emotions that come with adulthood.

His song “For a Dancer” acknowledges one of the sad truths about life: that one day everyone and everything we love will be gone. Knowing this, Jackson sings that we owe it to those we love to make a joyful sound with our lives while we are here – and to do our best to spread seeds that will blossom long after we are gone.

Listen on Youtube to: Jackson Browne: “For a Dancer”

The final verse of the song reminds us that we all know people who have had a positive impact on our life (a teacher, coach, parent, friend) and who helped us to become who we are. Those people did great things for us, usually without knowing it. We are likewise called, Jackson sings, to have a positive impact on the lives we touch – even though we may never live to see the fruit of our labors.

Into a dancer you have grown
From a seed somebody else has thrown
Go on ahead and throw some seeds of your own
And somewhere between the time you arrive
And the time you go
May lie a reason you were alive
That you’ll never know

Jackson Browne “For a Dancer“

The song was written as a moving meditation on the death of Browne’s friend; who died in a fire at a young age. Browne explained that his friend was an interesting guy; a great dancer; a great tailor who would make his friend’s clothes; an ice skater who skated for the Ice Follies. “He was a Renaissance man and when I wrote him the song – I was trying to express the idea that your life is a dance”.

I like that image of our life as a dance and that we never know when it will be our last time on the stage. When I think of dancing, I think of being uninhibited, of letting my body react to the beat of the music, and of sharing a joyful personal moment with my dance partner.

When you are busy dancing, you are not worrying about your troubles, or the problems that that you will face tomorrow. Dancing is one of life’s rare human rituals; a moment of pure expression when you are able to forget about your ultimate fate and just focus on making a joyful noise.

A recent Youtube video created by the School of Life Company echoed a similar philosophy about the benefit of living life in the moment. The video was a commentary on the cultural expression “…rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic“, that is often used by people when they want to convey the futility or meaninglessness of a task.

Those familiar with the fate of the Titanic know that the hull was damaged and that the ship was destined to sink; so for the passengers on that ship to concern themselves with the position of the deck chairs is a failure on their part to recognize the true hopelessness of their situation.

Our life situation can become a little like passengers on a doomed liner. Our larger hopes in life have not come to fruition. We have come to see that our career won’t ever flourish; our relationships will always be less than ideal; we’ve passed our peak in terms of looks; our bodies begin to fall prey to ever more humiliating illnesses; society is becoming more dysfunctional than ever and political progress looks highly improbable.

It can start to feel like our ship is going down and that it would be silly trying to improve our condition, let alone find pleasure and distraction in our daily life. It would be to live in denial of the facts. Our instinct instead is to become pessimistic and gloomy about our ultimate end.

However, there is a crucial element which makes our predicament different from that of the passengers who lost their lives on the Titanic. Those passengers only had a few hours to contemplate their fate before the ship broke apart and sank into the icy waters of the North Atlantic. Our ship is going down too, but much more slowly. It’s as if the captain has let it be known that our ship is sinking and we can’t be rescued… but it will likely be a decade or more before we meet our final fate.

So, though we can’t be saved, though the end will be grim, we still have options as how to use our remaining time. We are involved in a catastrophe, but there are better and worse ways of passing the time and filling our days. Under those different circumstances, expending thought and effort on ‘rearranging the deck chairs‘ is no longer ridiculous at all, it becomes a logical step; one that can be turned into a higher calling.

When the larger hopes for our lives become impossible, we can learn to grow inventive around lesser, but still real, options for the time that remains. Keeping cheerful and engaged, in spite of everything, can bring some light through the dark storm clouds that you know are ahead.

Consider, for example, that you are on a very gradually sinking luxury liner in the early 20th century, you might every evening strive to put on a dinner jacket, dance the Foxtrot to the music of a string quartet, sing a cheerful song or settle into the ship’s library to read a good book – even as the water begins to pool at your ankles.

Or you might try to engage in a friendly game of shuffleboard on the slightly tilting deck; or decide to drop-in on a wild party in Steerage; help to comfort some despairing fellow travelers; or just try to have a deep and comforting conversation with a new friend – even though you can hear the sound of dishes smashing somewhere in a galley down below.

Of course your life would – from the big picture perspective – still remain a thorough disaster; but you might find that you were at least starting to enjoy yourself.

This kind of attitude and inventiveness is precisely what is need to help us cope with our state. Can we invest the days we have left with meaning even though everything is, overall, entirely dark? Our culture teaches us to focus on our big hopes, on how we can aim for everything going right. We crave a loving marriage, deeply satisfying and richly rewarding work, a stellar reputation, an ideal body and positive social change. What remains when those things are not attainable – when love will always be tricky, politics compromised, or the crowd hostile?

What is our equivalent to seeking the best spot for a deckchair on a sinking Ocean Liner? If marriage is far less blissful than we’d imagined, perhaps we can turn to friendship; if society won’t accord us the dignity we deserve, perhaps we can find a group of fellow outcasts; if our careers have irretrievably faltered, perhaps we can turn to new interests or hobbies; if political progress turns out to be perennially blocked and the news is always sour, we might absorb ourselves in nature or history.

In doing this, we would be turning to what our society might dismiss as Plan-B’s (what you do when you can’t do the things you really want to do). But there’s nothing wrong with that! It just may turn out that the secondary, lesser, lighter, reasons for living are, in fact, more substantial and enjoyable than we imagined.

And after a while we might come to think that they are what we should have been focused on all along – only it has taken a seeming disaster to get us to realize how central they should always have been.

My mother has always been a model to me of this kind of inventive thinking and an example of someone who has always been able to discover new things to do when she can no longer do the things she loves doing.

Now in her 94th year, she has good reasons to be gloomy about her present condition. Her ship has been slowly sinking over the last two decades. She is the last surviving member of her large, close knit, family; she lost her beloved husband after 66 years of marriage; she reads about the passing of friends and acquaintances almost every day in the obituaries; she has lived through several strokes and cardiac operations to place stents in her arteries; she struggles with gradual loss of hearing, eyesight, teeth and memory as well as the humiliating indignities of incontinence and lack of mobility that come with aging.

Despite these life difficulties, it is not in my mother’s nature to be gloomy. She laments what she has lost, yet she finds a reason to be optimistic about her situation and to be happy with the things that she can do. Here are some of the ways my mother has learned to stay cheerful, smiling and engaged in her diminished old age:

• She has learned to navigate an iPad so she can keep track of the Facebook lives of her eight children and dozens of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
• She has become a late-in life sports fan, following with anticipation the exploits of her favorite New England Patriots and Boston Red Sox teams.
• She volunteers for her Church prayer line ministry, spending time each day praying for those in her parish who are in most need.
• She visits her husband’s grave regularly to sit in contemplation and tend to the flowers and plants.
• She tries to include some form of bodily exercise every day. Short walks with her walker outside on nice days, elderly chair exercises, rubber band stretching exercises.
• She communicates with her smart speaker to listen to music or hear the news (even though she worries about Alexa eavesdropping on her conversations).
• She stays engaged by reading books and bingeing her favorite TV shows.
• She visits French Youtube language web sites so she can enjoy hearing and practicing the French language that she grew up speaking.
• She has become the project manager of her house, assigning her children work to do around the house that she has historically done in the past and overseeing it to make sure it is done to her standards.
• She takes short field trips with her children to places from her past and shares happy memories of the people and events that shaped her life.

I co-share caretaker duties with my siblings and I feel blessed to spend one or two days every week with my mother. It has been a privilege for me to watch how she accommodates the frailties of old age without sacrificing her spirit. She knows the end is near, but she is not afraid; and until the end comes she is determined to wake up with a reason for living – and make sure the deck chairs are properly arranged on the deck.

May we too always find a way to dance our sorrows away.

To err is human; to forgive Divine

In keeping with the spirit of the Holiday Season, at this time of year I look to post uplifting topics about hope and redemption. This year I would like to write a few words in praise of Bill Buckner.

For those of you unfamiliar with Bill Buckner, he was an All-Star Major League Baseball player and one of the game’s great underrated hitters. He finished seven seasons of a 22 year career with better than a .300 average, compiled 2715 hits (more than either Joe DiMaggio or Ted Williams) and won the 1980 American League batting title.

I happened to be at a Red Sox baseball game this summer with my wife when the Public Address announcer informed the crowd that Bill Buckner had passed away. The fans respectfully cheered while the team played a montage video of Bill on the center field scoreboard, but I was thinking how unfortunate it was that Bill would probably not be remembered for his career of excellent play, but instead for the one notable error he was unlucky enough to make on the world’s biggest stage.

The stage was Game 6 of the 1986 World Series, the Boston Red Sox against the New York Mets. The Red Sox were 1 out away from clinching the title when the Mets rallied from a two run deficit.

The 36 year old Buckner – hobbled by bum ankles and knees – was playing first base for Boston when Mookie Wilson hit a weak ground ball to him – a ball he would normally field successfully 99 times out of a 100. But in this instance the ball somehow eluded Buckner’s glove and bounced past him into the outfield. The Mets scored the winning run completing a stunning come from behind victory.

The Fateful Error

The deflated Red Sox went on to lose game 7 and frustrated Sox fans everywhere – who had been suffering from a championship drought since 1918 – made Buckner the scapegoat for the team’s failure. They focused on the error; forgetting all about Buckner’s key contributions to the team during Boston’s crucial September playoff run when he carried the team, batting a stellar .340 and hitting eight home runs.

Buckner’s error became one of the most infamous plays in baseball history. Replays of the error with announcer Vin Scully shouting “It gets through Buckner!” were played constantly on the television. The headlines in the Boston newspaper screamed “Buckner Boots Big Grounder“. He was the scourge of Boston sports for a lengthy period of time.

Buckner’s career and life changed in an instant. The fans and media piled on – branding him as the guy who missed the ground ball. Buckner received death threats and one reporter allegedly called Buckner’s wife to ask her if he was contemplating suicide. In the immediate aftermath of the heartbreaking error and painful loss, I too became part of the mob cursing the name of Bill Buckner.

The taunting reminders of that muffed grounder battered Buckner so relentlessly that he eventually chose to relocate away from the rage in New England to an isolated ranch in Idaho where he could find some peace. His family, he said, “didn’t like to see how people were treating me.“

The magazine editor William Falk met Buckner ten years after the 1986 series and he remembers Buckner stiffening when he introduced himself as a reporter from New York. He could still glimpse the old hurt in Buckner’s eyes which quickly became hard and challenging. He was glad to see the reporter go.

Why was Buckner alone assigned the blame when so many others contributed as much or more to the Red Sox defeat? Buckner’s miscue marked the unkindest bounce of fate, a most improbable error sustained by a good and admired man at the worst possible moment.

As a man of faith Bill must have wondered what God had wrought – to have to live out his life being defined by the worst five seconds he ever experienced. His wife said a lesser man would have crumbled under the things that he had to endure.

Gradually Buckner learned to live with his mistake and even come to laugh at it. He wondered if it was part of some mysterious plan that could somehow be used as a life lesson for others experiencing misfortune in their life. Buckner said, “I was a little bitter over it for a long time, because I didn’t think I deserved it, … but then I’ve had a lot of people call me and thank me for giving them directions to make it through — and that’s a good thing.”

I read recently that there are at least three things it is good to forget. First is past accomplishments because out of success too often comes complacency and contentment that lull the mind. Second, it is good to forget our hurts because if we just dwell on our bitterness we will accomplish little. Finally, it is good to forget our failures because all of us make mistakes and sometimes we do not succeed even when we’ve worked hard and given something our best shot.

With time comes wisdom, compassion and perspective. Many Red Sox fans eventually came to realize how unfairly they had treated Bill Buckner. In recent years sportswriters began publishing articles about how the Boston fans had finally come to forgive him – especially after the team finally broke the 86 year championship drought by capturing World Series titles in 2004 and 2007.

In my opinion Bill Buckner never needed to seek forgiveness. He didn’t do anything wrong. He didn’t purposely miss the ball. He was trying his very best. Errors like that happen every day in baseball… and in life. It is those of us who treated Bill so uncharitably for so many years who should ask for forgiveness.

In 2008, 22 years after the fateful error, the Red Sox invited Bill Buckner back to Fenway Park for the celebration of the 2007 Championship. When he walked out to the mound to throw out the game’s ceremonial first pitch, the players and fans gave him a moving two minute standing ovation. Buckner’s eyes grew wet with tears. I remember watching the scene with tears in my eyes too – hoping that Bill had found it in his heart to forgive us.

Red Sox Fans Cheer Buckner’s Return, 2008

“Glad I came“, said Buckner after the game, “I really had to forgive, not the fans of Boston, per se, but I would have to say in my heart I had to forgive the media. For what they put me and my family through. So, you know, I’ve done that and I’m over that.”

Terry Francona, former Red Sox manager who was visiting the park that day said “I thought it was kind of a healing moment, it seemed, for a lot of people and for him, I hope”.

Bill Buckner died at the age of 69 after a long battle with Lewy body dementia – another cruel twist of fate that crippled the once great athlete with cognitive and movement problems. But he accepted it with grace.

On learning the news of Bill Buckner’s death Red Sox principal owner John Henry said: “We are proud that Bill Buckner wore a Red Sox jersey during the course of a terrific career that spanned more than two decades. His life was defined by perseverance, resilience, and an insatiable will to win. Those are the traits for which he will be most remembered.”

Mookie Wilson, the Mets baseball player who hit the fateful ground ball back in 1986, wrote: “I was saddened to hear about Bill’s death. He was a good teammate and a solid family man. We had developed a friendship that lasted well over 30 years. I felt badly for some of the things he went through. Bill was a great great baseball player whose legacy should not be defined by one play.”

Here’s wishing you all the generosity and goodwill of the Christmas season – may we all have the strength, resilience and perseverence of Bill Buckner when things in life don’t go our way and may we never forget that heavenly maxim “To err is human; to forgive, Divine“.

Kiss me, I’m 21% Irish…

For Father’s Day this year, I received an interesting gift from my step-daughter – an ancestry testing service that analyzes genetic markers in a person’s DNA to determine the likely geographical origins and heritage of their ancestors. All I had to do was spit into a tube and mail the sample to the lab. Two weeks later, a report of my genetic analysis was available for me to view online.

The science behind Genetics is complex and can be hard to grasp for the average person. In school we learned that all life is made up of cells and that inside those cells long strands of DNA molecules are compacted into thread-like structures called chromosomes. Human cells have 46 chromosomes, 23 inherited from the mother and 23 inherited from the father.

Image courtesy of National Cancer Institute

Located on the chromosomes are genes. Genes are molecules that act like instruction manuals in our body. Each cell in our body contains over 20,000 genes. Working together, these genes describe specific biological codes that determine which traits we inherit from our parents (like eye-color, nose shape, height and even behavior) .

Scientists tell us that the genetic code that are part of the DNA and RNA molecules inside all living organisms contains compelling evidence of the shared ancestry of all living things. Higher life forms evolved to develop new genes that support different body plans and types of nutrition –  but even so, complex organisms still retain many of the same genes from their primitive past.

Prior to having my DNA tested, my understanding of my ancestry did not go back very far. I knew only that my maternal grandparents were farmers who had emigrated from Canada to the United States in the early 1900’s and that my father believed his ancestors emigrated to America from Wales sometime in the 18th century.

I admit to a slight feeling of trepidation as I dropped my sample into the mailbox. I wondered what the possible side-effects of exposing the secrets of my genetic past could be – and how it might be risky to pull up rocks from time gone by when you can not be sure what may crawl out to bite you. Thinking about the words of the philosopher Edmund Burke who wrote: “People will not look forward to posterity, who never looked backward to their ancestors“, I pushed any concerns aside and mailed my sample.

Luckily, the results of my look backward in time were mostly in line with what I expected to find and only revealed a few surprises that made for interesting conversations with my family. According to the lab report, the DNA in my saliva had this to say about me:

• My most recent ancestors all came from the European region.
• I am 41.1% British & Irish, descended from Celtic, Saxon, and Viking ancestors. I most likely had a great-grandparent who was 100% British & Irish. This came as welcome news to my lovely lass Kathleen who was happy to learn that I shared some of her Irish heritage.
• I am 38.7% French and German, descended from ancient Alpine-Celtic and Germanic populations that inhabit an area extending from the Netherlands to Austria. I most likely had a great-grandparent, born between  1870 and 1930, who was 100% French & German.
• I am 3.8% Scandinavian, descended from the people of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Iceland. I most likely had a third, fourth, fifth, sixth or seventh-great grandparent who was 100% Scandinavian and born between 1690 and 1810.
• My maternal line stems from the genetic branch T2a which traces back to a woman who lived nearly 17,000 years ago in the Middle East. Her descendants spread over the millennia from its birthplace in the Middle East to northeastern Africa and throughout Europe, riding waves of migration that followed the end of the Ice Age and the origin of agriculture. 1 in every 490 people share this common ancestor.
• My paternal line stems from a genetic branch called R-M269, one of the most prolific paternal lineages across western Eurasia. R-M269 arose roughly 10,000 years ago, as the people of the Fertile Crescent domesticated plants and animals for the first time.
• King Louis XVI and I have a common paternal ancestor who lived 10,000 years ago.
• Jesse James and I have a common maternal ancestor that lived 19,500 years ago.
• 244 Neanderthal variants (4% of my total) were detected in my DNA. This information will come in handy for those times when I try to explain to my wife the reasons behind my sometimes boorish behavior. Neanderthals were ancient humans who interbred with modern humans before becoming extinct 40,000 years ago. Fortunately, I have inherited a known Neanderthal variant associated with having less back hair.

The results that surprised me the most were the revelations of my Irish, German and Scandinavian heritage (which I was not aware of), my ancient ancestral connection to King Louis the XVI and Jesse James and the existence of Neanderthal variants in my DNA.

Those revelations were interesting, but surprisingly, the two biggest things I took away from this ancestry research activity are that: 1) more things unite us than divide us; 2) genetics is not destiny.

There are more things that unite us than divide us

Throughout history, humans have consistently focused on the ways that we are different. People have been categorized, judged and assigned value based on the color of their skin, their physical attributes and their culture.

But when you look at people through the lens of genetics, all humans basically belong to the same family.  Our bodies have 3 billion genetic building blocks that make us who we are; yet only a tiny amount are unique to us, which makes all humans about 99.9% genetically similar.

To put this into perspective, physicist Riccardo Sabatini pointed out in his TED talk that a printed version of your entire genetic code would occupy some 262,000 pages, or 175 large books. Of those pages, just about 500 would be unique to us. The genetic book of any two people plucked at random off the street would contain the same paragraphs and chapters, arranged in the same order. Each book would tell more or less the same story. But one book might contain a typo on one page that the other lacks or may use a different spelling for some words.

We’re mostly just all the same. But instead of embracing our genetic similarities, we cling to small visible differences as symbols of what makes us unique. How silly it is for us to carry racist or prejudiced beliefs that some people are somehow born superior to others.

An observation made by the character Susan Ward in the novel I am currently reading (“Angle of Repose” by William Stegner) points out how people can benefit when they keep an open mind, accept others and embrace diversity. Susan was raised as an elite intellectual in high class New York society. She went out to the Wild West after the Civil War to join her engineer husband who was surveying the Western lands. In an 1884 letter to her friend back east, Susan Ward wrote this about the Chinese cook they employed in their camp:

“When I first moved out here the sight of a Chinese made me positively shudder, and yet I think we now all love this smiling little ivory man. He is one of us; I believe he looks upon us as his family. Is it not queer, and both desolating and comforting, how, with all associations broken, one forms new ones, as a broken bone thickens in healing.”

Humans also share a remarkable amount of genetic similarities with all living things. This is because large chunks of our genome perform similar functions across the animal kingdom.

All life on Earth is related and shares a common ancestor. We are about 99 percent the same as our closest animal relatives, the chimpanzees. Humans, mice and many other animals shared a common ancestor some 80 million years ago; and humans and plants share many common genetic traits associated with growth, sexual reproduction, respiration and the need for water, oxygen, and other chemicals.

Knowing that all life is related in this way gives us reason why we ought to be respectful of life in all its forms.

Genetics is not destiny

The second thing I take away from this activity is that Genetics is not destiny. I understand that our genetic makeup has a big influence on how we develop and behave; and that “mistakes” that occur during genetic replication will hurt some people (by causing disabilities and diseases) and help others by increasing longevity. In a universe of blind justice there is no satisfactory explanation as to why certain people inherit “good” or “bad” genetic traits.

Beyond genetics though, our destiny is influenced in large part by the environment we were raised in and the choices that we make. It is possible to overcome unfavorable genetic natures if, while we are growing up, we are nurtured in a safe and supportive environment with access to adequate nutrition, education, and health care and we have respectful role models and mentors to help guide our steps .

Psychologists have long debated this “Nature vs Nuture” question. Some argue that nature is the greatest determining factor while others argue that nurture is more important in determining how we will turn out. Most now agree that it is a combination of both.

Knowing that all humans share 99.9% of their genetic code, it makes sense to me that the differences between people are more related to their environment than their genetics. Everybody’s genes are basically the same, but we are all have different experiences in how we were raised which can have positive or negative effects on our brain development.

It is comforting for me to think that we have a chance to change kids for the better simply by treating them better. That is something that we can each control – we can always strive to continue making improvements in our behavior and our society’s treatment of children; but we can’t change the genes we were born with.

The reason I initially undertook this genetic testing activity is because I was interested to know who I was and where my ancestors originated. In truth, the information I learned hasn’t really enlightened me that much about who I am or what path I should take in life.

What I really learned is that the most we can say about DNA is that it governs a person’s potential strengths and potential destiny. However, we mustn’t allow ourselves to be chained to blind fate or ruled by our genes. We must remember that despite our genes all of us have free will and can choose the type of life we want to live.