One of the year’s pleasant surprises for New England baseball fans everywhere was the Boston Red Sox winning of the 2021 American League East Division Series. It was supposed to be a rebuilding year for the home team and none of the baseball experts predicted them to be in a position to compete for a playoff spot this season.
The 2021 Red Sox team was a scrappy and likable bunch of players, fighting until the last out and often coming from behind to win games. They were underdogs all year but managed to squeak into a wildcard playoff position; where they then proceeded to defeat their arch-rival New York Yankees, and odds-on favorites Tampa Bay Rays – before finally losing in the championship series to the Houston Astros.
A lot of the credit for the team’s successful season was given to their young manager, Alex Cora. Alex had previously coached the Red Sox and was praised for leading the team to the World Series Championship in 2018. He was suspended by Major League Baseball for the entire 2020 season, however, when it was discovered that he participated in a scheme to steal the opposing team’s pitching signals back in 2017 when he was working as a bench coach for the Houston Astros.
Trying to steal your opponents signs is a tradition as old as baseball because it can give batters a significant advantage when they know which type of pitch is coming (Fastball, Curveball, Sinker, Breaking Ball, Splitter, etc.). Stealing signs is not against the rules as long as the players manage to decipher the signals using personnel that are on the field.
The most common way teams try to steal signs is for a runner on base to peek in and study the hand signals the catcher sends to his pitcher prior to every pitch and then relay the sign to his teammate standing in the batting box. If a team does not disguise their signals effectively or change them up occasionally, then the opposing team is usually able to decode them.
What made the sign-stealing scheme devised by the Houston Astros and Alex Cora against the rules is that their efforts made use of on-field technology. They used a dedicated camera in the center field stands of their home stadium that was focused directly on the opposing team’s catcher. The video was sent to a monitor near the Houston dugout where Houston players could examine it and quickly decode the signs being sent to the pitcher. Various methods were then used to communicate the decoded pitch signs to the batter, including hand signals, whistling and banging on a trash can. Alex Cora even received the stolen sign information on the smartwatch he was wearing.
Condemnation was swift when the scheme was first revealed to the public in 2019 by a traded Houston pitcher. The whole Houston Astros team was immediately branded as cheaters and the World Series championship Houston won in 2017 came to be seen as illegitimate, tarnished forever by the cheating scandal. Major League Baseball conducted a retroactive investigation in 2019 and punished all the managers it found participated in the scheme with a one year suspension.
This included Alex Cora, who had moved on to manager of the Boston Red Sox and led them to the 2018 World Series Championship. Cora paid a high price for his decision to participate in the cheating scheme. The once proud man lost his job, his sterling reputation, his dignity, and the respect of his friends, family and colleagues. He spent a year exiled away from the game he loved while he watched the media attack his character and his young children suffer because of his sullied reputation.
Despite the harsh judgement, Cora never complained. He sincerely apologized for his actions, admitted his fault in the sign stealing scheme, acknowledged that what he did was unfair to the teams they played against and accepted his punishment as well deserved. It was clear he truly felt remorse for his role in the whole affair.
I found myself becoming emotional while watching Alex Cora lovingly embrace his young 14 year old daughter Camilla in the immediate aftermath of the Red Sox victory over the Rays in the Division Series. A postgame reporter asked Alex what that moment meant to him after serving a year of suspension. Here is the video clip of that special moment courtesy of the MLB Network (along with a transcript of his remarks about his family):
“I’m happy for my family. I put them in such a tough spot last year and for them to be able to enjoy it is very gratifying, I’m very very happy for them. She [Camilla] suffered a lot and it was my fault, and sometimes we make bad decisions, and I made a horrible decision in baseball and I paid the price. But what really hurt me was for them to suffer because of my mistakes. And for her to enjoy this is very gratifying.
Alex Cora, Postgame interview, 2021 ALDS
So many people today are afraid to say they are sorry or admit they have done something wrong. They view apologizing as a sign of weakness and surrender; therefore their egos prevent them from owning up to their mistakes or attempting to repair and heal the hurt they have caused.
Still other people never develop the moral compass or sense of compassion and empathy that is necessary to understand how their actions negatively affect others. They feel entitled, believing that the world revolves around them – and they are so used to thinking about themselves that they have no capacity to think about anyone else.
That is why it was so refreshing to watch how Alex Cora handled the fall out from the cheating scandal. Here was a rare example of an authentic apology, one where Alex confessed remorse for his mistake, admitted that it was wrong, fully cooperated with the investigators, accepted his punishment and attempted to make amends with those who were most hurt.
I can’t help but contrast Alex Cora’s apology with one recently made by the quarterback of the Green Bay Packers, Aaron Rodgers. Aaron was widely criticized when it was discovered that he lied to reporters at a press conference when he told them he had been fully “immunized” against the COVID-19 virus. The truth that he had never received a vaccination was only revealed after he became infected with COVID and was forced to go into NFL quarantine protocols.
Rather than apologizing for lying to reporters and his failure to follow mandated COVID-19 safety protocols, Rodgers first tried to explain that when he said he was immunized he meant he had taken some (ineffective) home treatment and he didn’t actually say that he was vaccinated. He inferred that the reporters were to blame because they assumed immunized meant vaccinated.
When that explanation was roundly ridiculed, Rogers tried again by issuing a statement saying that some people might have felt misled by his comments and that he takes full responsibility for the misleading comments.
Notice in this example of a fake apology Rogers never says he is sorry for putting people at risk and he never says he regrets what he did. He apologizes only to those who “felt misled,” as if it was just their feeling, and not his own actions, that were to blame. The reality is that people felt misled because Rodgers misled them.
Rodgers elaborated further, explaining that he believed strongly in body autonomy and that he wasn’t up-front with people because he didn’t want to acquiesce to a “woke culture” or a “crazed group of individuals” who harass those who choose not to get vaccinated. With this explanation, Rodgers again shifts the blame for his wrongdoing. It is not his fault that he lied and exposed others to potential risk, – it is the fault of a group of crazy people and the toxic culture.
After this explanation was also criticized, Aaron Rodgers just refused to talk anymore about the subject. This was probably his wisest decision since bad apologies that blame the victims usually make things worse than saying nothing at all.
Looking in someone’s eyes and offering a sincere apology is not easy. Many people, like Aaron Rodgers, attempt to get by with with fake apologies which seek to avoid responsibility by making excuses, shifting blame, downplaying what was done, invalidating the hurt person, or trying to move on prematurely.
By contrast, Psychologists say that authentic apologies have most or all of the following elements:
It is freely offered without conditions or minimizing of what was done
It conveys that the person apologizing understands and cares about the hurt person’s experience and feelings
It conveys remorse
It offers a commitment to avoid repeating the hurtful behavior
It offers to make amends or provide restitution if appropriate
During my lifetime I have given more than my share of ineffective apologies, but it is a life skill that I’m still working to improve because it is impossible for any of us to go through life without hurting someone. As Bob Dylan once sang: “I hurt easy, I just don’t show it; you can hurt someone and not even know it“. We are all human and in the daily course of our existence, no matter how hard we try, there are going to be moments ahead when we are guilty of hurting people. During those moments of our life, we should try, like Alex Cora, to put aside our egos and summon the humility and dignity that is required to repair the damaged relationship and make it stronger.
A good apology is like an offering or a gift that has a supernatural power to heal. The Catholic faith believes that admitting to our faults and seeking reconciliation with God and our neighbors is so important that they have established it as one of the Church’s seven sacred sacraments. The practice of Confession and forgiveness are referred to as a healing sacrament, one in which a spiritual power is believed to be transmitted through channels of divine grace.
During this season of thanks giving and gift giving, may you too come to experience the holy and redemptive power of the Sacrament of Sorry that is just waiting for all of us who seek it out sincerely.
If I could go back in time, one of the things I would tell my younger self is not to worry so much about what other people think about him or inflate the importance he thinks small events will have on his future.
Because sometimes, especially when we are young, we become our own worst enemies when we inhabit a distorted world where we imagine that everybody we see is judging our every move and we worry that people will gossip about us behind our backs (or worse embarrass us on social media!) if we happen to do something outside of culturally accepted norms.
These worries can be harmful if they cause us to withdraw and lead a cautious life. Instead of living in the moment and boldly taking on new and interesting challenges, we play it safe and stop taking chances because we are frightened how people will view us if we make a mistake.
We think that if we don’t make a good impression, then we will be ridiculed or ignored, forever limiting our opportunities to succeed in the future. Constantly worrying about what others think about us can lead to anxiety and even depression, but even worse, it prevents us from achieving our full potential.
What I would tell my younger self is that the truth is, in most cases, that other people are not thinking about you! They are too wrapped up thinking about themselves and their own life to waste time thinking about or remembering anything that we do (good or bad). I laugh when I look back now at all of the small things that seemed so big to me when I was young and I realize I assigned them way more importance in my mind than they deserved.
When I was in school, I remember being paralyzed with fear at the thought of public speaking . In Junior High, the Principle asked me to get up at an Assembly and introduce an act in front of the whole school. I practiced the introduction over and over and thought I had it memorized; but when the lights came up and I was facing the entire Assembly, I completely blanked, muttered something incomprehensible, and stumbled backstage.
I was mortified and walked around for the rest of the week with my eyes downcast, imagining that all my classmates were talking about me and my embarrassing performance. That episode left a mental scar that stayed with me throughout high school. I would have anxiety whenever I was asked to speak in front of an audience. My mind kept imagining another disaster – and even when I managed to get through a speaking assignment without a major mistake – my thoughts kept focusing on how I should have done better.
I didn’t start to feel comfortable speaking in public until I went to College and attended a Speech class that exposed me to methods for dealing with anxiety and the practice of focusing on positive outcomes rather than the fear of failing. That young boy who feared public speaking would never have believed that his older self would someday speak to an audience of hundreds at engineering conferences, participate as a Lector in his church community, happily officiate weddings for friends and family and deliver eulogies to honor the deceased.
I’m sure nobody but me thinks back to that moment in 1973 when I flubbed my speech in front of the school assembly; and my worst fears about being ridiculed by my classmates never happened. My friends joked with me saying they were glad the Principal hadn’t asked them to do the introduction and the rest of my classmates quickly forgot the incident as they were too occupied concentrating on all the events and drama happening in their own life.
That moment and other traumatic events in my life, like failing my first driving test or watching the Red Sox choke away the World Series to the New York Mets in 1986 have taught me an important life lesson that is best summarized by an expression coined by the great Charlie Chaplin:
“Nothing is forever in this world, even your problems”
Charlie Chaplin
Charlie Chaplin from the film “Modern Times”
Chaplin was no stranger to problems. His childhood in London was one of poverty and hardship, as his alcoholic father was absent and abusive and his mother was committed to a mental asylum when he was 14. He was sent to live in a workhouse twice before the age of nine. Reminiscing upon his childhood, Chaplin wrote “I was hardly aware of a crisis because we lived in a continual crisis; and, being a boy, I dismissed our troubles with gracious forgetfulness“.
Despite these less than ideal childhood circumstances, Chaplin managed to start performing in music halls and working as a stage actor and comedian, where he developed his Tramp persona. He was scouted by the film industry and moved to America where he began appearing in comedies starting in 1914. Within four years he became one of the best known figures in the world.
Troubles found their way into Chaplin’s life again in the 1940s when a number of controversies led to a rapid decline in his popularity. He was accused of communist sympathies, and some members of the press and public found his involvement in a paternity suit, and marriages to much younger women, scandalous. A politically motivated FBI investigation against him was opened by J. Edgar Hoover which forced Chaplin to leave the United States in disgrace and settle in Switzerland.
Chaplin eventually overcame these problems as well. He married the daughter of playwright Eugene O’Neil when he was 54 and lived happily with her and their 8 children until he died at the age of 88. During this time he was awarded honorary degrees from many prestigious universities and was finally invited back to America in 1972 when he was given a [12 minute standing ovation] at the Academy Awards for “the incalculable effect he has had in making motion pictures the art form of this century“. Charlie Chaplain continues to be held in high regard today, with his movies The Gold Rush, City Lights, Modern Times, and The Great Dictator often ranked on lists of the greatest films of all time.
I think about Charlie Chaplin’s wise observation that nothing lasts forever in this world when I encounter problems in my life that seem as if they are insurmountable. I try not to worry so much about what other people are thinking and remind myself that life will go on, problems will eventually fade, and other people’s opinions can not defeat me or define my future as long as I remain productive and engaged in positive pursuits. It gives me hope to believe that all suffering eventually ends.
There is one final point that is important for us all to consider; which is that just as troubles do not last forever, neither do the good times. This is an unfortunate corollary to Chaplin’s idea that often goes without saying. Sometimes we take the good times for granted and fail to fully appreciate our good fortune.
So, I hope that when things are going well in your life, you find time to slow down, live in the moment and acknowledge your blessings, because the good times become all the sweeter when you realize that they will not last.
One of the things I enjoy about my blogging hobby is that it leads me to discover authors who are writing thoughtful blogs on interesting subjects. I recently came across one such blog entry written by Maria Popova who was reviewing a book by Katherine May titled Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times.
In her book, May writes about her experience living through a deep and disquieting period that she describes as one of the “winters of her life”. The thing about the blog that caught my attention was the author’s perspective that life is like the seasons, constantly changing throughout our lifetimes.
We are in the habit of imagining our lives to be linear, a long march from birth to death in which we mass our powers, only to surrender them again, all the while slowly losing our youthful beauty. This is a brutal untruth. Life meanders like a path through the woods. We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again.
Excerpts from Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May
Our culture leads us to believe that life progresses along a linear scale from helplessness towards ever-increasing flourishing, but in reality life is like the seasons, operating in a cyclical fashion, with many periods of ups and downs. Imagining life to operate only in a linear fashion can be harmful when people start to falsely believe that something is wrong with their life if it does not get progressively better as they get older or when they need to take detours along the way.
If we accept that our lives are more cyclical, with periods containing many Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter seasons of the spirit, then we can become better equipped to understand that there will periods of happiness and sadness throughout our life – as well as periods of strength and fragility.
When you start thinking about periods of your life as seasons, you come to realize that people live through many winters in their lifetime – some mild, some severe – and that it is possible, like the trees, to emerge from those winters not only undiminished but ready for new growth.
It is reassuring to think that our winter seasons do not need to be fallow and unproductive and that they can be a productive period when we are given the time and space we need to go on growing. Albert Camus wrote “In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer”. If we garden the winters of the soul with care, we can set in place seeds that will bloom into future summers of strength.
Katherine May makes the observation that trees enter a waiting phase during winter where the tree has everything it needs to make it through severe weather:
“Its fallen leaves are mulching the forest floor, and its roots are drawing up the extra winter moisture, providing a firm anchor against seasonal storms. Its ripe cones and nuts are providing essential food in this scarce time for mice and squirrels, and its bark is hosting hibernating insects and providing a source of nourishment for hungry deer. It is far from dead. It is in fact the life and soul of the wood. It’s just getting on with it quietly. It will not burst into life in the spring. It will just put on a new coat and face the world again.“
We all need to take an example from the trees and approach the winter seasons of our life in a similar way. Retreat, face our our sadness, let go of the things in our life that are no longer bearing fruit, be nourished by the strong roots of our personal friends and communities and get ready to face the world again.
The winter seasons of our life are usually characterized by sadness that is triggered when we experience loss of one kind or another. Those of us who have lived through winters know that there are self-punishing ways to be sad, and self-healing ways to be sad. The key to skillful wintering is to learn the difference between the two so that we are stronger when the season begins to turn – just like the branches of a tree during the depths of winter are covered in tiny dormant buds that will spring to life when the weather turns.
Since we are all certain to encounter winter seasons during our life, May concludes with a warning against judging people when they are down on their luck and experiencing misfortune. It is better she writes to encourage empathy, compassion and understanding for those that we find suffering:
Here is another truth about wintering: you’ll find wisdom in your winter, and once it’s over, it’s your responsibility to pass it on. And in return, it’s our responsibility to listen to those who have wintered before us. It’s an exchange of gifts in which nobody loses out.
This may involve the breaking of a lifelong habit, one passed down carefully through generations: that of looking at other people’s misfortunes and feeling certain that they brought them upon themselves in a way that you never would. This isn’t just an unkind attitude. It does us harm, because it keeps us from learning that disasters do indeed happen and how we can adapt when they do. It stops us from reaching out to those who are suffering. And when our own disaster comes, it forces us into a humiliated retreat, as we try to hunt down mistakes that we never made in the first place or wrongheaded attitudes that we never held. Either that, or we become certain that there must be someone out there we can blame.
Watching winter and really listening to its messages, we learn that effect is often disproportionate to cause; that tiny mistakes can lead to huge disasters; that life is often bloody unfair, but it carries on happening with or without our consent. We learn to look more kindly on other people’s crises, because they are so often portents of our own future.
This is good advice for the next time you find the seasons changing in your life. Do not despair – remember that every season can be profitable for our growth and survival. I have lived long enough to know that we can experience winter seasons during the blush of our youth and that it is possible for spring and summer seasons to joyfully populate the twilight of our years.
There is no telling when good things or terrible things will happen to us and we cannot know the entire meaning of it all, but we can know that life can be beautiful even in the darkest of seasons. So rejoice during all your seasons under the sun and remember that all our emotions and actions, both negative and positive, have important meaning and we become more majestic when we learn from them all.
When the American poet and essayist Louise Glück was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal“; I was intrigued to learn more about her.
I was not familiar with Glück or her work even though she had published 13 books of well-received poetry over a 52 year span, served as Poet Laureate of the United States in 2003 and was the recipient of numerous literary awards – including the the Pulitzer Prize, the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Bollingen Prize.
While looking into Glück’s background, I learned that she was born in New York City in 1943 and raised on Long Island. Glück’s mother was of Russian Jewish descent and her father’s parents were Hungarian Jews who emigrated to the United States and ran a grocery store in New York.
Glück’s father had an ambition to become a writer, but went into business with his brother-in-law and achieved success when they invented the X-Acto knife. Glück’s mother was a graduate of Wellesley College. In her childhood, her parents taught Louise Greek Mythology and classic stories such as the life of Joan of Arc – themes of which she would mine in many of her later poems.
She began to write poetry at an early age, but as a teenager and young adult Glück struggled with anorexia. She described the illness as the result of an effort to assert her independence from her mother and as a way for her to come to terms with the illness and death of an of an elder sister.
During the fall of her senior year she was taken out of high school to focus on her rehabilitation. She spent the next seven years in psychoanalytic therapy which she credited with helping her learn how to think and overcome her anorexia. During this time period she attended classes at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University and worked part time as a secretary – which she said did not suit her temperamentally.
Glück has been married twice, both marriages ending in divorce, and has one son. She currently lives in Cambridge Massachusetts and is an adjunct professor at Yale University.
While the subjects of Glück’s poems are wide and varied, scholars have identified the most common themes in her work as trauma, death, loss, suffering, failed relationships, and attempts at healing and renewal.
The scholar Daniel Morris observed that even a Glück poem that uses traditionally happy imagery still “suggests the author’s awareness of mortality, of the loss of innocence“. The writer Linda Rodriguez noted that “Her poetry explores the intimate drama of family tragedies resonating through the generations and the relationship between human beings and their creator.”
Glück utilizes her focus on trauma as a gateway to a greater appreciation of life says Carol Malone, writing for the Best American Poetry 2020 book, and uses her acceptance of mortality as a way to become a more fully realized human being.
I listened to a 2012 Academy of Achievementinterview with Louise Glück that I found very thoughtful. When asked why she still writes, Gluck responded:
“Because I feel alive when I’m doing it and much less alive when I’m not doing it. I write to discover meaning… It’s much less about who I am than the idea that nothing should be wasted. Also, writing is a kind of revenge against circumstance too. Bad luck, loss, pain; if you make something out of it then you are no longer bested by the events.”
It’s that kind of thinking, I believe, that allows Glück to be brutally honest in her poetry. She is not writing for her audience per se, but for herself. To make herself feel more alive, to make sense of her experiences and to wrestle even the negative circumstances of her life into something positive.
Later in the interview, when she is asked how she feels about the accolades and awards she has received for her work, she responds:
“They are nice and make life more comfortable. But what I want is not capable of being had in my lifetime. I want to live after I die, in that ancient way, and there will be no knowing until that happens – no matter how many blue ribbons I have attached to my corpse.”
There is a maturity and wisdom in her recognition of the vanity of earthly awards, and of their ultimate meaningless in the face of eternity. It will remain a mystery what the afterlife has in store for Louise Glück, but, I like to think that it is certain she will continue to live on through the striking poems she leaves behind.
One such striking poem I came across while browsing through her Collected Works 1962-2012 is titled New World:
New World Poem by Elizabeth Gluck
This poem made me think about my general reluctance to wander far from home – and how my preference to focus more on the interior life than the exterior life may have contributed to “holding down” my more exuberant life companions.
Because my engineering and marketing career necessitated frequent travel, I came to realize early on that travel is overrated. It seemed to me the best part of most journeys is that moment when you finally return to the comforts of home.
I am not alone in this sentiment. It was Blaise Pascal’s opinion that all human evil comes from man’s inability to sit still in his room; and Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his book Self-Reliance: “Travelling is a fool’s paradise, our first journey’s discover to us the indifference of places… Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home”.
Reading this poem reminded me that it is important for me to temper my preference for the quiet and contemplative life with a spirit of adventure as well – because I don’t want to be the lead strapped to the ankles of my beloved family or the wet blanket that prevents them from experiencing adventures that contribute to making life memorable and interesting.
Life is a balance and being a recluse can blind you to all that the world has to offer. Also, what good does it do to be floating free if there is no one to share it with?
Today, Louise Gluck lives in Cambridge MA but she has spoken in the past about falling in love with the state of Vermont when she first moved there in 1971 to begin teaching at Goddard College. She credits the move as being instrumental in helping her get past her writer’s block.
Tragically, a fire destroyed her Vermont house in 1980 resulting in the loss of all her possessions. After the fire, Louise reluctantly moved from the state where she felt so much at home.
When the reporters asked her what she intended to do with the $1.1 million dollar award money that came with winning the Nobel Prize, it made me smile when she said she was thinking of buying a house in Vermont.
Enjoy Vermont Ms Gluck – I hope you feel very alive there and maybe I will be lucky enough to bump into you someday during my New World travels to that magical Green Mountain state to visit with my beloved family connections.
I recently facilitated a memorial service for my mother’s sister who lived to the goodly age of 100. My Aunt Jeannette Marie was a loving daughter, mother to 6 children, a grandmother, great grandmother and wife to two husbands.
The Last Photo of my Mother with her Sister
She was one of those people who would light up and make you feel good whenever you were in her presence. She always had a good word for everybody and even though she suffered tragedy in her life – her first dying in a train accident when he was just 24 – it was not in her nature to complain, choosing instead to focus on her many blessings.
With her sister’s passing, my mother, at 91 years old, became the last surviving person of that close 10 member family clan she grew up with. My mother was close to her sister and loved her dearly so it is natural that she is experiencing feelings of sadness, loss and grief. Especially because she no longer has anyone in her life who she can talk to about the “old days” and all the good and bad times they went through together as a family.
To begin the memorial service, I asked my wife to recite the poem ‘Tis a Fearful Thing’ that is believed to have been written by a Jewish Rabbi sometime in the 11th century. It is a moving poem about the intersection of grief and faith and love and it is often shared by Hospice teams with the families of those who are grieving a loved one who is nearing death.
‘Tis a Fearful Thing
‘Tis a fearful thing to love what death can touch. A fearful thing to love, to hope, to dream, to be – to be, And oh, to lose. A thing for fools, this, And a holy thing, a holy thing to love. For your life has lived in me, your laugh once lifted me, your word was gift to me. To remember this brings painful joy. ‘Tis a human thing, love, a holy thing, to love what death has touched.
One of the Five Remembrances that Buddhists contemplate during their meditation practices is this one:
I will be separated and parted from everyone and everything that is dear to me
Anyone who lives long enough knows the pangs of sadness that come with loss. From the moment we are born and bond with our parents, grandparents and siblings; fall in love; marry; have children of our own—we are destined to endure the pain of losing someone we love—over and over again. My mother, at this point in her life, has had to say painful goodbyes to her husband, parents and 7 of her siblings, not to mention many close friends.
It’s enough to make you think that life is just an elaborate setup for suffering. But somehow we still manage to choose life. We choose to make friends, marry, bring new life into the world. We lose a spouse or partner and we decide to give our hearts to a new companion, opening ourselves up to more eventual sorrow. Are we in denial to think that death will not touch this new love too?
Why do conscious and highly intelligent beings make themselves vulnerable to the eventual pain and sorrow that comes with losing the one you love. Is love really something for fools? Is it not insanity to do the same thing over and over again and expect a different result?
What is it that makes us choose to invest in love and life? The poem teaches us that it all comes down to love – because it is ‘a holy thing to love.’ Love, life, death and love again is what it means to be human.
The poem’s closing words reflect a profound truth that speaks to the resilience of the human spirit and the best character traits of the human species:
It is a human thing, love a holy thing, to love what death has touched.
Love survives death. Death destroys the body but it does not touch love—or erase love. The body is impermanent but Love is eternal. We somehow know at the deepest level that life is about love. It may be that our divine purpose is to love, no matter how painful the loss of a loved one will be, and to send that love out into the heavens.
We choose to deeply love someone because we believe and trust that it will always keep us connected. Love becomes the unbreakable tether between those of us “here” and those who have passed on. It is knowing this that enables us to overcome our fear of the certainty of death and separation.
To love deeply is holy. Holy. Love keeps us connected to the Creator of all Beings, to all of those we have loved and all those to come. Even though my mother is sad when she thinks about all the loved ones in her life who death has touched, she still feels a holy connection with them which helps season her grief with painful joy and a spiritual component of hope that leads her to believe she will be reunited with them someday in the afterlife.
Let us embrace that love which is not severed by death. Painful, fearful, a thing for fools? Perhaps. Perhaps for some, at first. But it is also a holy thing… A holy thing to love.
I mentioned in a previous blog about the serendipity of finding interesting or compelling books at the book swap shed of my little town’s Transfer Station. I recently finished reading a book that I happened to find there called The Grace of Great Things – Creativity and Innovation.
The author, Robert Grudin, a former professor of English at the University of Oregon, described the book as a study in creativity and innovation. The title refers to the words a monk is said to have spoken to the young child Michel Colombe (before he became a famous sculptor) as the monk observed the child forgetting to eat because carving things in wood seemed more important to him:
“Work, little one, look all you can, the steeple of St. Paul and the beautiful work of the Compagnons. Look, love God, and the grace of great things will be given to you.”
Even though I do not consider myself a particularly creative person, especially in the area of the arts, the study of creativity holds some interest for me because I have had a tendency throughout my personal and professional life to seek out innovative solutions to problems I encounter. My training in engineering and the sciences taught me to step back and look at a problem from all perspectives – and to devise solutions that are not always obvious or biased by traditional thinking.
Of all the kinds of joy in this life, none perhaps is as pure as the kind experienced when sudden insight leads to the discovery of an elegant solution to a vexing problem. I have felt this satisfaction often in my professional life while creating software applications to solve our customer’s problems and while patenting new test methods that made finding electrical defects on Electronic Printed Circuit Boards faster and safer.
The word inspiration originally meant a breath of divinity, and it seems appropriate that it is used to describe that moment when a creative solution flashes into your consciousness. To be inspired feels like a divine event – something that seems to come from beyond as the mind surrenders to a force outside its control.
Gruden’s study documented the characteristics and particular habits that creative people share and that lead to original thinking and bold ideas. Those looking to become more inventive should practice the following mental habits and attitudes that Gruden writes are most congenial to inspiration:
Passion for Work – People are often advised to find a job that they love and it appears that those who do are usually the most creative. Creativity blossoms when you fully identify with your work and see it as an expression of your character.
People who love their job, derive pleasure from it and like the border collie are happiest when they are working and have a job to do. Their passion for work inhabits the full volume of their mind and persists during leisure hours and even during their sleep. In the creative life there is no distinction between leisure and work. Creative people belong to their work, and their commitment is rewarded with unexpected discovery.
Love of the Problematic – People who spend their lives ignoring and denying problems rarely become inspired. Conversely, the minds of creative people instinctively love tackling problems and discovering solutions. Creative people are sometimes seen as troublemakers because they upset the status quo by exposing problems that have been ignored.
Thomas Edison would instruct his engineers to observe closely and pay attention to things that did not totally fit. When he saw the slightest flaws with a proposed solution he would send them back to the drawing board with the instructions “there is a better way – find it“.
Love of Beauty – Moments of creativity, when inspiration leads to the discovery of an elegant solution to a problem one has worked on so passionately are rare.
Innovative people see great beauty in these moments when they come and they strive to capture the same feeling of beauty in all the other areas of their life.
A Sense of Wholeness – Creative people are good at looking at the big picture. When examining a problem, they are able to deconstruct the individual elements that form an object and see how the various parts are interconnected.
This quality opens up perspectives that allow them to visualize the true identity of a problem and it encourages their minds to explore new thought patterns and see potential discontinuities and anomalies that others don’t.
Boldness and a Sense of Openness – A willingness to follow good ideas despite their forbidding strangeness takes courage. Creative people do not fear ideas and are willing to ignore prior assumptions and walk on the edge of chaos; opening themselves to bold new ideas even at the risk of looking ridiculous.
Innocence and Playfulness – Inventive people have a way of looking at each new project as a blank slate – unbiased by tradition and what has come before. They are like inquisitive babies trying to make sense of an item without known purpose or use.
They do not put limits on solutions (like people whose only tool is a hammer want to define define all problems as a nail) and they are happy to travel down unexpected paths (like a cook who turns a failed mousse into a successful chocolate topping).
Suffering – It is not obvious, but inspiration is related to suffering. Creative people often have to suffer through failure of experiments, the refutation of hypotheses, the trashing of one’s own findings, dead-ends, disapproval and rejection.
Even the process of achieving professional credentials is usually full of pain (endless study, practice, humiliation by teachers, competition with peers, the sting of criticism and the fear of inadequacy). Inspiration is impossible without groaning effort, without the painful winning of skill, and hard-earned expertise.
Pain has always functioned as a stimulus to material progress. It was fear pain, and grief that helped drive the great medical and social advances that exponentially increased the length of the human lifetime.
Individuals who spend their lives in the persistent avoidance of pain are not likely to amount to much. When pain and suffering is duly faced and endured, like exercise, it builds the endurance and humility that make us amenable to inspiration.
Remembrance – Many noted revolutionaries and innovators claim that their ideas were not new. They explain that they were simply maintaining continuity with the past and restoring old ideas that had been corrupted or forgotten.
Creative people utilize their remembrance of the past to invent new applications that incorporate old ideas – they are adept at rediscovering something that was always true and adapting it to a new application.
Liberty – The essence of inventiveness lies in recognizing that the world is capable of innumerable configurations. Those who have lived long and paid attention know not only that things can change – but also that it is a law of nature that they must change.
Successful people anticipate how things are changing or will change in the future and work within a system that gives them the freedom and liberty to advocate solutions that will best meet those changing needs.
People living in autocratic and rigid systems of governance do not advance as fast as those living in a free and democratic system because the barriers those societies set in place do not empower their citizens to pursue their ideas to their full potential.
When looked at together, these identified habits and attitudes map out an environment that makes the mind fertile for creativity and the growth of inspiration – planting a virtual garden for the inquiring mind to wander. For most people, visits to this garden are rare, only occurring by chance and surprise.
That is the case for me. I recognize in myself many of the qualities and characteristics that Gruden associates with creative people and I have been fortunate to experience the thrill and satisfaction that comes from discovering innovative test methods and software applications during my long work career.
But those were high points in a career that also included plenty of low points, times when the enemies of discovery (depression, complacency and laziness) took root in me. Those were unproductive times in my life because people who are lazy or just trying to get by seldom make important contributions.
I am finding that just because I am retired now doesn’t mean I need to stop striving to be creative. The habits of creative people identified by Gruden are not limited to the workplace. I find these same habits of creativity can be applied while I am fishing, while I am working on household projects, while I am coding fun software programs for my grandsons to play and even while performing my volunteering activities teaching children and serving on the school board.
It is important to mention, amidst all this praise about the delights of inspiration, that creativity does not always confine itself to happy subjects or result in happy outcomes. History, unfortunately, is filled with examples of tragic visions and genius put to use in the service of malice. Knowing that creativity can be put to dangerous applications gives us an obligation to always be on the lookout for it and to speak out against it when we see it employed in harmful ways.
In the end though I believe there is a major connection between ethics and creativity. The great majority of inventions and innovations throughout the ages have been driven by a desire to make the world a better place. That 15th century monk was on to something profoundly relevant when he linked the word grace, and the pattern of moral strengths that it suggests, as the foundation of major creative achievement.
May you practice the habits of creative thinking to free your mind and to make your life and our world a better place… so that the grace of great things will be given to you too.
Buddhism is a 2500 year old religion referred to as the philosophy of awakening. Up until a hundred years ago, Buddhism was mainly an Asian philosophy but it has increasingly gained adherents in Europe and America and today it has approximately 300 million followers world-wide.
A trio of events have recently occurred by happenstance to bring the practice of Buddhism to my attention and it has led me to dig deeper into the merits of this ancient teaching and philosophy.
The first event was my participation in an online course on Mindfulness Meditation that focused on Buddhist techniques for training the mind to detach from unhelpful thoughts that can control us.
The second event was my reading of the classic Jack Kerouac novels “On the Road” and “Dharma Bums” which demonstrated how Kerouac blended the Roman Catholic faith of his youth with the free spirited Buddhist teachings being practiced by his friends to create an interesting spiritual amalgam that greatly influenced the peace loving Beat Generation.
The final event was my reading of the book “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind“; in which the author, Professor Yuval Harari, argued that the move away from polytheistic religions towards monotheistic religions (like Christianity and Islam) had an overall negative impact on the course of human history.
Harari writes that real religious troubles began for humans with the rise of monotheism:
“Monotheists have tended to be far more fanatical and missionary than polytheists. A religion that recognizes the legitimacy of other faiths implies either that its god is not the supreme power of the universe, or that it received from God just part of the universal truth. Since monotheists have usually believed that they are in possession of the entire message of the one and only God, they have been compelled to discredit all other religions. Over the last two millennia, monotheists repeatedly tried to strengthen their hand by violently exterminating all competition.”
Harari believes that Buddhism and other enlightened eastern religions have been more beneficial to the human species because their teachings are characterized by their disregard for gods and because they do not require the acceptance of a Supreme Being to explain the origins and workings of the universe.
Buddhism is human-centered, rather than god-centered, and teaches that we must look within – not without – to find perfection and understanding. No one saves us but ourselves. Each human being has the capacity to purify the mind, develop infinite love and compassion and perfect understanding. Buddhism shifts attention from the heavens to the heart and encourages practitioners to find solutions to their problems through self-understanding.
Buddhists do not think that other religions are wrong. In fact, all religions share many common beliefs: among them that mankind’s present state is unsatisfactory, that a change of attitude and behavior is needed if the human situation is to improve and that the path to fulfillment includes love, kindness, patience, generosity and social responsibility. It is only when believers narrowly cling to their one way of seeing things that religious intolerance, pride and self-righteousness can arise.
The first pillar of Buddhist teaching, referred to as the First Noble Truth, is that life is suffering. To live, you must suffer. It is impossible to live without experiencing some kind of suffering. We have to endure physical suffering like sickness, injury, tiredness, old age and eventually death and we have to endure psychological suffering like loneliness, frustration, fear, embarrassment, disappointment and anger.
Acknowledging that to live is to experience physical and psychological suffering is so true and obvious a statement that it cannot be denied. Unlike most religions whose central concept is a myth, or a belief that is difficult or impossible to verify, Buddhism starts with an irrefutable fact, a thing that everybody knows, that all have experienced and that all are striving to overcome. Buddhism gets right to the core of every individual human being’s concern – suffering and how to avoid it.
The Second Noble Truth of Buddhism is that all suffering is caused by craving. When we crave something but are unable to get it, we feel frustrated. When we expect someone to live up to our expectations and they do not, we feel let down and disappointed. When we want others to like us and they don’t, we feel hurt.
Even when we want something and are able to get it, it does not often lead to happiness because either we lose interest in it or we begin to fear that something will happen that causes us to lose it. Stated simply, the Second Noble Truth teaches that suffering results from wanting what you don’t have and having what you don’t want. This wanting and worrying deprives us of contentment and happiness.
It is remarkable that Socrates, even though he held polytheistic views, and lived before Buddhism was established, came to the same conclusions regarding the root cause of suffering in his writings:
“If you don’t get what you want, you suffer; if you get what you don’t want, you suffer; even when you get exactly what you want, you still suffer because you can’t hold on to it forever. Your mind is your predicament. It wants to be free of change. Free of pain, free of the obligations of life and death. But change is law and no amount of pretending will alter that reality.”
The Third Noble Truth explains how suffering can be overcome and how true happiness and contentment can be achieved. It involves developing a reflective mind in order to let go of delusions and to ponder things objectively without forming an opinion on whether they are good, bad, useful or useless. By training the mind to reject, relinquish and renounce the bottomless pit of our cravings, suffering can be gradually lessened and eliminated.
When we give up useless craving and learn to enjoy each day, without restless wanting, the experiences that life offers us, patiently enduring the problems that life involves without fear, hatred and anger, then we become happy and free. It is only then that we begin to live fully. When we are no longer obsessed with satisfying our own selfish wants, we are free from suffering and we have time to enjoy the present as it is. We achieve what the Buddhists call Nirvana.
My limited look into the Buddhist faith and practices have been beneficial and thought provoking. I would recommend others to look into it as well because from my point of view its practices have been good for the world, it is praised by the wise and many have observed that when it is practiced it leads to happiness.
One factor in my consideration of Buddhism that was important to me is that I could not identify any practices of the Buddhists that would be incompatible with my Catholic faith. In fact, the two religions seem to reinforce one another and I can see how Jack Kerouac was able to harmonize Catholicism with Buddhism without becoming conflicted. He considered Jesus and Buddha spiritual brothers.
I believe in a higher power because I have personally felt a God presence guiding my steps throughout life, but I also believe in the capacity of the human mind to positively control our thoughts and actions. We all could benefit from the ancient wisdom found in both traditions.
This month’s blog will be brief because I have not had much time for contemplation or reflecting on the examined life. My former employee has commissioned me to work on a software project with a tight deadline that has occupied most of my waking and sleeping thoughts.
I must admit, though, that it has been a good experience to get my hands busy coding and my mind devising algorithms again. I’m happy that it is all coming back to me after 14 months away. There is something to be said about the restorative benefits the mind and spirit derives from doing productive and useful work.
However, one of the things that I have sacrificed over the last few weeks in order to get this work done is meditation. I started practicing meditation a couple of years ago and recently took an online class on Mindfulness Meditation that helped expand the practice for me.
The Quaker community characterized Meditation as “going inside to greet the light“, and my time spent going inside has helped me to better live in the moment, to see events and situations as transitory in nature and to let go of the things that typically bothered me in the past.
One of the meditation exercises in the Buddhist tradition is called the “Five Remembrances“. It calls for contemplating the five statements shown below during the meditation session:
The Five Remembrances
1. I am subject to aging; aging is unavoidable
2. I am subject to illness; illness is unavoidable
3. I am subject to death; death is unavoidable
4. I will be parted from everyone and everything that is dear to me; there is no way to escape being separated from them
5. Whatever I do, for good or for ill, that I will reap
I find that meditating on these five remembrances is a very grounding experience for me. It brings to the forefront things like the impermanence of life that most people tend to block out of their daily consciousness – and it helps me to consider that all my actions will live on in some way and have ripple effects in the world.
Some people believe that meditating on these subjects is too gloomy and depressing, but for me the practice leads me away from denial towards acceptance, increases my gratitude and appreciation for the life I have been given, and teaches me about the freeing power of detachment and generosity. It helps me to look at the world with new eyes, be fully present with my loved ones and make sure they know how special they are to me.
Once the reality of impermanence is accepted, you begin to realize that time spent struggling and fighting against unavoidable events are causes of suffering – and only letting go allows you fully celebrate every moment of life. After all, the problem is not that things change, but that we try to live as if they don’t.
Here’s hoping that you find the light inside of you…
While attending mass on Father’s Day at our Catholic parish I noticed frenzied activity occurring in one of the pews near the front of the church. An elderly woman had passed out during the service and it wasn’t long before a crew of veteran EMT professionals arrived at the church to care for the poor woman.
The attending priest temporarily stopped the service and asked the community to pray in silence while the EMTs tended to her. I was struck while praying for the woman that she was stricken on the church’s feast day of Corpus Christi – a day where the Gospel reading for the mass includes these comforting words:
“I am the resurrection and the life. The person who believes in me, even though he dies, will live. Indeed, everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.” John 11:25-26
As they wheeled the gurney holding the unconscious woman away, I wondered to myself who would take her place in the pew next Sunday if she did not recover. It is something I increasingly ask myself as I witness the gradual decline in attendance at church and the disproportionately higher numbers of older worshipers attending mass relative to the number of young families.
A 2014 Pew Forum survey on church attendance confirms what I have been witnessing with my own eyes over the last 30 years.
One-third (31%) of Americans report being raised in a Catholic household, but only about one in five (21%) Americans currently identify as Catholic (and only 15% of young adults aged 18-29)
For every new Catholic convert, more than six Catholics leave the church (nearly 13 percent of all Americans now describe themselves as “former Catholics.”)
The median age of Catholics attending mass has increased to 49 years old
The fastest growing religious segment is the unaffiliated – those who do not claim to belong to any religion. They now comprise about 23 percent of the total population, and an even larger 39% of young adults
A small segment of the unaffiliated were labeled “rejectionists” by the survey; these are people who do not practice religion and who agree with the statement “religion is not personally important in my life and as a whole religion does more harm than good in society.”
A larger portion of the unaffiliated portray themselves instead as “seekers“; people who acknowledge the virtue of religion yet claim they are “spiritual but not religious“. The survey concluded that “The bulk of the unaffiliated are not carrying on faith traditions or seeking different types of spiritual activity. Most don’t give a lot of thought to religion and God in general”.
It is not surprising that many young people are not attracted to the Catholic religion given the patriarchal and hierarchical organization of the church, the publicity surrounding the clergy sexual abuse scandal and the negative religious treatment of gay and lesbian people.
To be honest, there have been periods of time in my own life when disillusionment with Church policies and the pressing concerns and desires that comprise daily living resulted in me drifting away from the church and becoming a non-practicing Catholic.
After these brief times away, however, I always found myself returning back to the church when I realized that the other things I was pursuing in my life did not bring me the spiritual satisfaction that my soul was seeking and that it received from belonging to a Church community. In my experience, religious faith benefits the soul as education benefits the mind.
Albert Schweitzer, the famed theologian, philosopher, physician and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize once wrote; “If your soul has no Sunday, it becomes an orphan“. I understand the sentiment he was expressing because I did not feel right when I stopped practicing my Catholic faith. I felt like something was missing, like an orphan without a home.
With the general decline in Church attendance, how will future generations learn the moral lessons that the church instilled in me from an early age? Lessons like those below that have guided my steps and provided me with a strong foundation for my journey.
God loves us and the purpose of our existence is to know, love, and serve Him
All people have dignity and worth
We are called to be compassionate to society’s poorest and most vulnerable
God is merciful and forgiving – we should be too
Look for the best in people and do not judge them
Marriage is not just a legal agreement, it is a holy sacrament
The virtues of humility, generosity, self-restraint, patience, kindness and diligence can overcome the sins of pride, greed, immorality, envy, over-indulgence, anger, and laziness
Great value can come from adversity and suffering
Death is not the end
These to me are the important lessons that I learned from being raised in the Catholic faith tradition and it is the people who live according to these teachings that are the true treasures of the Catholic church.
There are other ways to learn these life lessons outside of the church. I know this is true because some of the finest people I know did not grow up in a religious household and do not belong to a religious community – yet they are still a beacon of light and goodness.
I do not know how these remarkable people came to be the way they are, but it makes me hopeful to think that basic moral values are an integral part of the human spirit and that our hearts will be restless until we seek them out and find a way to give them a home either inside or outside an established religious community.
So, regardless of whether you are religious, non-religious, spiritual, or skeptic; my prayer for all of you is that you find what your soul is seeking – a good home.
I recently completed watching the brilliant science fiction themed television series Black Mirror on Netflix. The episodes were chilling and had me wondering how society will manage to maintain its humanity and compassion in the face of ever-increasing advances in technology.
All of the Black Mirror episodes deal with life in the near future – showing us the potential impact and unintended consequences that new technologies could inflict on our society if they are misused. The series name “Black Mirror” is a reference to the ubiquitous black screen surfaces that stare back at us while we fixate on our smartphone, tablet, television and personal digital assistant devices.
Each episode in the series is independent of the others and can be viewed in any order, similar to the iconic Twilight Zone television series created by Rod Serling. Black Mirror episodes differ however in that they are longer, darker and more focused on contemporary themes related to unease about our modern world.
The show’s creator Charlie Brooker said he wanted Black Mirror to focus on the side effects of technology and highlight the areas between delight and discomfort where it resides. The show touches on important ideas – the false way we sometimes present ourselves online, our growing addiction to virtual lives and even a touching exploration of grief.
Below is a brief synopsis of each of the episodes in the series along with a list of the important issues they raise about how technology could be used in the future:
National Anthem – A beloved princess and a member of the British royal family is kidnapped and held hostage. Her freedom is guaranteed on one condition: The prime minister must have sex with a pig, live on national television.
This episode highlights the increasingly tenuous grasp governments have controlling the information they want to disseminate to the public because of the uncontrollable power of social media, viral videos and internet leaks. Other issues raised are rules for how to effectively deal with terrorists who target celebrities, how all political decisions are being driven using real time popularity polling data and the difficulty of being a responsible journalist in the age of instant communication.
Fifteen Million Merits – Set in a bleak future, where most of society must cycle on exercise bikes to power their surroundings and earn currency called “Merits” that can be used to buy food from vending machines or watch shows from giant television screens. The only way out of being a caged rat on an exercise wheel is to trade-in your merits to enter the talent game show “Hot Shots” (similar to X-Factor) where the winners can escape by choosing to become part of the national entertainment industrial complex – or the attractive ones can choose, under the influence of a drug called ‘compliance milk’, to become stars on one of the national porn channels.
This episode raises the potential danger of technology being used by governments and industries to enslave the people and highlights society’s trend toward glorifying the false and superficial at the expense of the real.
The Entire History of You – Shows a society where most people have computerized ‘grains’ implanted in their skulls recording everything they do – allowing them to play back their memories in front of their eyes or on a screen for all to see. We watch a marriage unravel as a husband forces his wife to play back scenes from her past.
This episode explores the effect body camera technology and memories uploaded to the cloud could have on relationships when it becomes impossible to keep secrets anymore.
Be Right Back – As a woman mourns the sudden death of her boyfriend in a car accident, she learns of a company employing artificial intelligence that can create a hauntingly accurate replica of him, first as a phone app, then as an actual body using synthetic flesh; his personality and likeness created from the output of all his social media communications, emails and everything he ever tweeted or instant messaged or filmed himself doing on the internet.
This episode exposes the limits of artificial intelligence in replacing the human spirit and raises the question about what should happen to our online ‘presence’ after we are gone.
White Bear – As punishment for a horrific crime, a woman must relive the same nightmare every day (and go through a painful memory wiping process at the end of each day). She is forced to navigate a brutal, merciless world, filled with horrifying imagery, before an audience who pays to secretly watch her suffer.
This episode shows the tendency in society to dress up the humiliation and punishment of others in the name of entertainment and wonders if it is possible to sympathize with someone whose crime was unforgivable.
The Waldo Moment – The comedian behind a blue cartoon bear named Waldo comically interviews politicians and other authority figures – making fun of their hypocrisy and the corrupt political system. As a joke his producer decides to have Waldo run for election to become the town’s member of Parliament. The joke begins to take on unexpected proportions as Waldo’s popularity begins to gain traction with the public.
This episode comes close to reflecting the reality of recent elections across the world that feature cartoon-like anti-establishment candidates who try to win elections by appealing to disaffected voters using social media channels to spread populist messages that play to the fears of the populace and divide the voting public.
White Christmas – Three interconnected stories show a “communication facilitator” who applies psychological based technology in the not too distant future to help desperate men pickup girls, train newly created artificial intelligence slaves and manipulate criminals to confess guilt to crimes that they have committed.
This episode imagines the chilling ways technology could be used in the future against the cracks of human weakness and how such an uncaring world would destroy any possibility of mercy and peace for its citizens.
Nosedive – Paints a picture of a world where all people are judged by their social media rating. Society’s status and benefits accrue to the members that have the highest rating, transforming every encounter with others into an exercise in false playacting, as disclosing your true emotions could negatively affect your “score” – which all people can see instantly by wearing special contact lenses.
This episode warns about the danger of a society becoming overly obsessed with their social media ratings and how developing technology can drive humanity to indulge in its shallowest impulses. It is a little eerie as we can see China experimenting today with using social media ratings as a means to control and encourage good behavior of the people.
Playtest – We witness a video game company testing games using new technology which allows the program to have access to the user’s brain – as well as the deepest and darkest fears of their minds.
This episode shows how the arms race between video game manufacturers to develop ever more realistic and adrenaline producing products could have deadly consequences to those who become exposed to them.
Shut Up and Dance – A hacker who has compromising electronic evidence on a group of guilt-ridden online users blackmails them into performing a series of increasingly dangerous crimes to avoid having their secrets exposed.
This episode exploits one of the most pervasive nightmares of the modern age: what if someone’s watching you at your most vulnerable? And what if they have it all on videotape?
San Junipero – The minds of the dead or near dying have an option to live alternative versions of their younger selves forever in a simulated reality of their choosing.
This episode shows the hopeful ways that technology could be used in a humane way to ease the passing of those nearing end of life – merciful palliative care designed for no greater goal than easing the suffering of others. But does that mean we would lose the value that comes from accepting that suffering is an essential part of existence?
Men Against Fire – When a future society determines that its soldiers on the front line have difficulty hunting and exterminating the enemy because they look too much like them, they invent new technology that when implanted into their soldiers makes the enemy appear as vile, horrific mutants called “roaches”.
This episode raises the concern about how technology could be misused over time to perfect state-sponsored murder, strip people deemed “undesirables” of their humanity and turn soldiers into remorseless killing machines.
Hated in the Nation – The collapse of the bee colonies forces the government to create hundreds of thousands of mechanical bee drones whose purpose is to help pollinate the country’s crops. Unknown to the populace, the military includes cameras in the bee drones so they can be used secretly to help the national security agencies spy on suspected criminals. A hacker manages to gain control of the bee army and turns them into killing machines that first target hated public figures – before revealing that the ultimate target is all the people spouting hate speech on the Internet and thinking they can hide behind online anonymity.
This episode shows one scenario where the technology that is designed to protect us instead turns against us and how the pressure of hate speech from anonymous online forums can have bad consequences.
Collectively these stories paint a grim picture of technology running amok and bringing out the worst in human nature. It’s a perspective that technology is a trap and is going to change us all for the worse. After all, we are the race that built the atomic bomb and Albert Einstein, the man whose genius helped to make it a reality, expressed his own concern when he wrote:
“It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity”
But I do not see technology as the enemy. I spent my entire adult career in the high technology field, inventing technologies that manufacturers could use to test their circuit board electronics and ensure that they were defect free and reliable. I was on the front lines during the birth of the personal computer, the world wide web, cell phones and smart phones, cloud-based computing and self-driving vehicles. I have witnessed up close the positive impacts these technologies have had on our society.
Technology is not inherently evil, but just like anything else it can be misused and abused if we are not careful to regulate how it can be used in a way that protects people from getting hurt. Robert Pirsig, the author of Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance captured this sentiment when he wrote:
“What’s wrong with technology is that it’s not connected in any real way with matters of the spirit and of the heart. And so it does blind, ugly things. Humans are needed to put the brakes on it”.
So, I encourage you all to watch the Black Mirror shows and then go out and do you own part to help put the brakes on technology use that crosses the line.
Wilfred Thesinger was a British explorer, photographer and travel writer who wrote several books in the 1950’s and 60’s about his experience living with the desert peoples of Arabia. He was once interviewed by the famous naturalist David Attenborough, who asked him if he thought the hardship and suffering of the desert peoples instilled in them a sense of nobility.
Thesiger responded:
“I think the harder the life, the finer the person, yes, and I certainly felt this way about the Bedu [desert peoples]. When I went there, I felt that the difficulty was going to be living up physically to the hardships of their life. But, on the contrary, it was the difficulty of meeting their high standards: their generosity, their patience, their loyalty, their courage and all these things. And they had a quality of nobility. In the desert I found a freedom unattainable in civilization; a life unhampered by possessions’…. I shall always remember how I was humbled by those illiterate herdsmen who possessed, in so much greater measure than I, generosity and courage, endurance, patience and lighthearted gallantry.”
Salim bin Ghabaisha, seated on a camel
Thesinger’s observation is something that I too have noticed during my life’s interactions with other people. In general, it seems that those who come from humble beginnings and who suffer hardships while growing up, have the personal qualities that I have come to admire most – qualities of self-reliance, resilience, gratitude, empathy and humility.
My mother’s parents were poor immigrant farmers who moved from Canada to the United States in the early 1900’s. She was the seventh of eight children and she had to quit school after the 8th grade so that she could help out with the farm work. I remember her telling stories about hard times when her Mother would not eat because there wasn’t enough food to go around and how they would dig through the winter snow under the Apple trees to see if there might be some frozen apples left on the ground that they could eat.
Yet my mother became a remarkable woman with a big heart that was full of life, love, and intelligence. I often wonder how far she would have gone and how different her life would have been if she were allowed to finish her education and capitalize on all her gifts. Like her mother, she too raised a family of eight children, experiencing hardship at times without complaint; instead thanking God every day for a loving husband, healthy children, food on the table and a roof over their heads.
I consider it a blessing that I came from this large lower middle-class family. My father had to work two jobs at times to make ends meet and so my mother could stay home with the kids. I worked from the time I was 10 in various part time jobs and learned from an early age the value of a work ethic and delayed gratification. I was content with the used clothes and toys that were handed down to me by my brothers and sisters.
I have the sense that children of privilege often grow up with qualities that are less admirable – qualities like arrogance, self-importance, selfishness, pride and feelings of entitlement. It must be a particularly difficult task for powerful and wealthy parents to raise happy and well-adjusted children and I give credit to wealthy parents like Bill and Melinda Gates, who came from humble beginnings, made it on their own, and have decided to leave their considerable fortune to their charitable foundation rather than their children.
Even though my upbringing was poor in material things, it was rich with love and affection. My parents treated each of their children with dignity and respect. Some children are not so fortunate and are raised under conditions where they are not loved, respected or treated with dignity. Instead they are treated like property whose lives the parents or caretakers can control and abuse as they see fit. Being raised under these conditions must be very difficult and I wonder how it is possible to overcome that type of hardship and turn into a fine person.
Many do not overcome it – but a remarkable few somehow find a way to use their negative childhood experiences as a catalyst for building a positive new life. There are precious people in my life who were physically and verbally abused as children and were raised in a controlling environment that did not nourish their individuality or self-esteem. Yet somehow, through the grace of God, they escaped their family dysfunction and developed into generous, loving, supportive, and kind people.
When I ask them how they managed such a miraculous feat they tell me about a grandmother; or an aunt; or a sibling; or a teacher that was a light to them in the darkness of their life and who threw them a lifeline at those times when they needed it most. These good people helped them to understand that they could be better than their parents and instilled in them the determination to succeed despite their difficult childhood.
Reflecting on this makes me realize that each of us has opportunities in our life to be a beacon of light to someone going through hard times and we ought to be on the lookout for those going through hardship that need us to throw them a lifeline. If we all did that who knows how many more children could overcome their broken families and go on to lead successful lives.
So, if you have had a hard life, be grateful – that probably means you are a fine person. And if you have led a life of privilege, try to use whatever power and influence you have collected to make life a little better for those that are less fortunate. You just might, like Wilfred Helsiger, discover a freedom that is unobtainable when life is focused only on the self and material possessions.
me. It brings to the forefront things like the impermanence of life that most people tend to block out of their daily consciousness – and it helps me to consider that all my actions will live on in some way and have ripple effects in the world.
Words to Live By... 