Annals of a Type B Guru

Jan 1, 2020

Happy New Year, Readers! Happy 2020.

It may not be hard to remember to write 2020. It flies off the fingers easily. Twenty-twenty. 20-20. Let’s hope the whole year is easy. Let’s hope, as my friend A said, that when it comes time to vote, everyone has 20/20 vision this year. Let’s hope that we can all apply a little clear-eyed hindsight to our future visions.

This blog post is not going to lay out any resolutions. Nor is it going to contain a recap of the highs and lows of last year. I am annoyed at myself for posting less often than I want to, and there are many reasons for this. Father in hospital being a big one over the last month. The high school student performing in the All-State Symphony and filling out college applications being another. Grading the end of semester papers a third. Those are excuses, however. I realize part of why I haven’t been blogging as often as I used to is that I am suffering from perfectionism. Or at least my Type B personality version of perfection. In short, I want everything I put out there for you, Readers, to be pithy, or at least witty. Maybe I am letting perfect be the enemy of good, as the saying goes.

Or perhaps perfection is too lofty a term. As I mentioned, I am a Type B personality, and we Type Bs are not known for perfectionism (and certainly not for perfection). That’s the stuff of the Type As. Type Bs are likely to make a quilt, for example, that ends up with one strip that is an inch longer than all the others. This would never happen to a Type A. So then Type B has to rejigger the strip, maybe rip out a quilt block and trim it or turn it or something. You know, adapt it and make it work better. By the way, this quilt is another reason I haven’t been blogging as often as I like. But, still it’s another excuse.

Even if perfection isn’t my aim, better is the enemy of good, as writer Amy Halloran (https://amyhalloran.net/)  put it at our holiday gathering of local writers. Better can be the enemy of good, too. Because even if you’re wise enough to know perfection is impossible, better is always possible. I truly believe in better. My life has been all about being better. Sometimes, however, good is best. Sometimes good is better than better. Apportioning effort is also necessary for survival, even for success.

While walking the dog the other year, I was listening to a Gil Fronsdal podcast called “Caring for Yourself and Caring for Others.” The other year. Yesterday, to be exact. Yesteryear, one might even say. He was discussing a Buddhist sutra that talks about how to be happy. One way to care for yourself is to live ethically—abide by the precepts like Do No Harm, (is that the Buddhist precept, or is that a medical precept? Who knows, I am tired. Last night was New Years Eve and it was a late night.)  Another aspect of happiness is that caring for others develops your own happiness. The idea is that by developing kindness towards others, you make yourself happy. This taps the philosophical question whether altruism is really altruistic if it makes the do-gooder feel good. According to Buddhist philosophy, the overlap between altruism and happiness is natural and inevitable. There doesn’t have to be a separation between the two. Just because altruism makes you feel better doesn’t mean it’s not altruism.

Gil Fronsdal mentioned during this talk that at some point in the Buddha's life, he had about 60 enlightened followers. It struck me that I would never imagine that I could be capital-E Enlightened. Yet the Buddha had 60 guys who were enlightened during his life. Perhaps he was just that good at teaching. But that is not the point. The point is, I had a thought. I thought, what if I am enlightened? I mean, think about it. I’ve been meditating off and on for twenty years. I’ve had lots of therapy. I’m introspective and I’m planning to become a therapist (I.e., to help people deal with their emotions and life challenges). What if I am enlightened? How would that make things different? Consider that enlightenment is often described as coming in a flash, an epiphany. Which means enlightenment might not be a permanent state, existing off on an astral plane, unbothered by anything human, being just a floating protoplasm of wisdom, tantalizing mere mortals who want to to tap that.

What would it mean if I were enlightened? Maybe enlightenment just means something simpler and more down-to-earth. Maybe this is it, that’s all there is, that’s all she wrote. Maybe enlightenment means that I know I have ups and downs and arounds of emotions, that I don’t like some of those emotions and wished they would go away and that I could be this amazing, placid, font of light and whatnot. Wisdom. Love. Positive energy. Peace. Meanwhile, at the same time that I wish to be that avatar of goodness, I’m embarrassed to say so, and that’s just the way it is to be me.  Maybe enlightenment is going about the daily rounds understanding that sometimes you’re up, sometimes down, and that it’s always changing. That love is sometimes encrusted under resentment, or tucked away from harsh feelings, or even hidden from your own view.

And that it’s exactly the same way for everyone. So, cut them some slack. Or at least have empathy, even if you cannot excuse their behavior (not right action) or their nasty words (not right speech).

Isn’t all this just a way to say maybe it’s okay to say I’m okay as I am. I don’t have to be other than what I am, my imperfect self, my wabi-sabi self, my kintsugi self. Maybe there is no better than that. Maybe good is better.

Maybe enlightenment is that moment you understand something important —an epiphany, possibly an ineffable one—and then it slips away. Maybe the slipping away part is part of the enlightenment, too. You know it’s coming at moments, in flashes, or phases. And other times you’re just a bitch driving a car and flipping off an old lady who’s driving too slowly in the left hand lane.
                                                               
                                                                       ***

Here's a final thought for the new year. since I am supposed to dispense advice and tips on how to live successfully.  As Jon Kabat Zinn writes in Full Catastrophe Living, “As long as you’re breathing, more is going right for you than wrong.” Or something like that.

How to Podium - A Person Wants to Be Helpful

This week finds me more focused than last. Right at this moment I have something in my contact lens making my eye uncomfortable and I am irritated by it and am imaging removing it and replacing it with a new one. A new lens, not a new eye, I hasten to say. This will make me feel better, and see better, which is good because I have to pick up the 9th grader from her rehearsal in an hour. Being able to see when driving is good.

See how much of what I'm thinking about at this moment involves the future? Apparently, this is status normalus for humans. This is what I've learned from a recent article in the failing New York Times Sunday Review.*  I have a beef with the title of this article by Martin Seligman, big name in Positive Psychology, and science journalist John Tierney, "We Aren’t Built to Live in the Moment". While the article is fascinating, and is, I suppose, a way of bringing a new field of psychology to the attention of the general public, the title is, frankly, misleading. I wouldn't go so far as to call it click bait, but it is annoying. However, I will get to that. I suppose it was meant to catch the attention, since living in the moment via mindfulness is all the rage these days.

But the meat of this piece is that Seligman believes, “What best distinguishes our species” is our ability to “contemplate the future.” Rather than obsess over the past, people more often think about what might happen, a.k.a., the future. According to Seligman, anxiety and depression spring from having “a bleak view of the future.” Not from past traumas nor how they feel about what is happening at present.

A study of about five hundred adult Chicagoans yielded a lot of information cited in this piece. Using some kind of device, mayhap a phone, the study “pinged” these people multiple times a day and asked them to “record their thoughts and moods.” Turned out that thoughts of the future were three times more common than thoughts of the past. Also, participants reported being happier and less stressed when they were making plans. While they did report concerns about what could go wrong, they were twice as likely to be thinking about what they hoped would happen.

So prospection is our thang. We should rename our species homo prospectus, says Seligman. Although we don't want to think too far in the future, apparently, because only one measly percent of thoughts of those Windy City residents were about death, and most of those were not about their own deaths, they were about other people dying....

Anyway, prospective psychology has ramifications for studying treatments for depression, memory, and emotions. Since anxiety and depression are linked to the tendency to “over-predict failure and rejection,” and become “paralyzed by exaggerated self-doubt,” new therapies are trying to train patients to envision positive outcomes and to look at future risks realistically.

Two other intriguing developments Seligman and Tierney mention are that in brain imaging, the areas of the brain that light up while subjects are remembering are the same areas that light up when they are imagining something. The takeaway is that memory is fluid, and one of the explanations is that memory helps us consider future scenarios. The second interesting conclusion is that emotions exist to help us do this more rapidly and successfully.

So, Readers, the question is, what does this have to do with me? And of course with you - of course. After all, the cornerstone of my blog is the assumption that if it has to do with me, it may well be something to which you can also relate, and therefore this blog is actually helpful in some way. Because a person wants to be helpful in some way, usually. A person likes that.

Although I hope you don’t relate as readily as I to the bits about over-predicting failure and rejection and exaggerated self-doubt.

To be helpful, let me point out that one major takeaway— a  word I’ve now used twice in this piece of writing, when one use of takeaway is perhaps too many — is positive thinking helps in planning and achieving goals. We already knew that, didn't we? But, and here Seligman and Tierney underscore good old Heidi Grant Halvorson, PhD, if you’re pessimistic, just envisioning getting something you want is not enough. I've touched on this topic before. What you need to do is be realistic about the negatives. Pessimists find this reassuring, since they’re not just being blindly Pollyanna-ish about the future. That, according to a pessimist, is akin to daring the Universe to just shit on you.

Pardon the crassness. My children dislike my crassness. And I apologize for it.

But my point is that a pessimist is just not going to be able to convince herself that she’s going to succeed at the thing she wants to succeed at by simply envisioning it. You know, just imagining herself “podiuming” at the next Olympics, as the snow boarders like to say, is not going to be sufficient for a pessimist. A pessimist is going to have to imagine the practical impediments, also known as obstacles, to her achievement. This will accomplish two things, one magical, and one not. First, it will convince her that she’s not taking the Universe for granted by imagining an easy triumph, thus inviting the Universe’s wrath. This is magical thinking and thus seems irrational, but makes perfect sense to some people, such as me. Second, and more important, this strategy leads to an understanding of the steps she needs to take towards this ultimate goal. The term for this is mental contrasting. It’s the opposite of magical thinking, but it does produce results.

Now, back to the title of this piece. I’m sure Seligman and Tierney didn’t pick it, so I’m not going to blame them. However, it is misleading. It seems to indicate that mindfulness is unhelpful, because focusing on the present is not what we are wired to do. Let me point out that the study that helped determine the conclusions described in this article involved something called “pinging”. I hope it wasn't painful, but I can't say. Okay, I can. I know exactly what pinging is, but I'm being quirky and humorous. Anyway, persons were pinged throughout their days, and then, when pinged, these persons noted what they were thinking and feeling at those moments when they were pinged. Those persons, therefore, were practicing mindfulness. They were taking a moment to notice what was happening in the present. Simple as that. That’s mindfulness. As Jon Kabat Zinn says, mindfulness is awareness, and awareness is a form of intelligence different than thought. It was their mindfulness that allowed these subjects to inform the researchers what was going on in their brains. And it would be mindfulness that would allow those anxious and depressed personages to break their bad thought patterns about the future. They have to recognize the negative thought and replace it with a positive one. That’s called, in Buddhism, setting an intention. Intentions are future-looking. They are seeds of possibility. And setting intentions is one of the elements of meditation.  We want to create a better future for ourselves, even the pessimists among us who are scared they can’t. So, living in the moment is actually one of the better things we can do for ourselves.

So, let’s set an intention. I’m gonna, Readers. My intention is to be generous and truthful. I’d love to know yours.

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* https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/19/opinion/sunday/why-the-future-is-always-on-your-mind.html?partner=rss&emc=rss