Tag Archives: will

The Story of My Life, Simply Told

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I am increasingly fascinated with the realization that I am just a blob of protoplasm, frantically scurrying about on this chunk of cosmic granite with a bunch of other blobs.  In some sense I am part of an ant hill, a simple ant drone going about my daily life thinking that I am separate and distinct from all the other ants, oblivious to the fact that I’m not in the least.  To use another metaphor I, too, am just a single letter in an alphabet…quite often upside down…gradually finding the humility to accept my meager status in this cosmic adventure.

I began this sojourn very simply, just a simple gleam in my daddy’s eye which shortly thereafter took root in my dear momma’s body and soul.  There the magic of life came into play, designing me to go far beyond the pulsating quiver of energy I might have been without this “grand design.”  Thanks to Her wisdom, I “chose” to unfold meaningfully, and contriving arms and legs, a head, a torso and…oh my Lord…genitalia! And, pretty close to an “essence” of this, I found myself with a tiny “will” that is today, nearly seven decades later, still whirly-gigging my way through something I eventually learned to call “life.” I just looked up the term “whirly-gig,” btw, and found the urban dictionary describing it as “an unspecified object that has some sort of rotational point.”  That’s me!!!

I wish I could have discovered this ignominy earlier in life, allowing me to just “whirly-gig” to my hearts to delight rather than being a slave to this “rotational point” that I was.  Hey, I might have occasionally just kicked my heels and screamed with delight, seeing this world as “puppies and flowers all over the place.”It is delightful to look around me this morning, watching the news, chatting with my wife and canine son, Petey and watching this bitter-cold New Mexican Saturday unfold under a marvelous sunny sky.  My wife and Petey too are but “blobs”; but then the whole world is composed of these pulsating sacks of energy, these “meat suits” that we usually take to be who we are.  Wouldn’t it be nice if humankind could find this humility and embrace the notion that we are all in this “thing” together and could get along if we wanted to?

AFTER THOUGHT—The alphabet point was an illusion to Kierkegaard who also felt he was an outside—“I feel like a letter turned upside down in an alphabet.”

Macbeth’s “Distempered Cause” and Donald Trump

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Shakespeare must have been an impulse ridden young man for his characters often wrestle with the issue of self-control, best illustrated with his description of Macbeth being unable to “buckle his distempered cause within the belt of rule.”  This image is that of a corpulent man trying unsuccessfully to fasten a buckle around his protruding belly.  It brings to my mind, the corpulent Oliver Hardy, of “Laurel and Hardy” comedy team from the early 20th century, comically attempting to fasten his belt.  Shakespeare presented Macbeth as deeply flawed, not merely in attitude and behavior, but deep down in the heart in the depths of his “cause,” or heart/will.  Macbeth’s inability to control his impulses, leading to murderous intent, stemmed from something that had gone awry deeply in his soul.  He was, to borrow a description from Ranier Rilke, “The toy of some great pain.”

This Shakespearean observation of Macbeth has been on my mind often recently as I’ve watched Donald Trump unravel before our eyes and watch his Republican Party stand by haplessly, not having had the courage in their own collective heart to intervene when they could have.  Trump presents such a vivid picture of psychopathology and it has been amusing, and sad, to watch his cohorts attempt at various times in the past year to rein him in.  But when one’s “cause” is so deeply “distempered” or diseased, there is no reining it in.

Trump is still living out of what we clinicians call “the terrible two’s” when the world is one’s oyster.  Usually one’s familial and social context will provide limits so that the child will come to see that the world is not his to exploit for his own ends, but is a domain that requires cooperation.  And surrendering to this external demand is excruciating to a nascent ego but most of us manage to endure the pain,  learning to appreciate the value of trading immediate gratification for the deferred variety.  Trump’s family indulged him, and so did his political “family” early in this campaign.  One of his 16 competitors in the primary season, Senator Lindsey Graham, noted onetime in retrospect, “We all cowered in the corner of the stage” before Trump’s onslaught of bullying behavior.  The “willfulness” that Trump demonstrates has made him wealthy but at the expense of a lot of people.  A strong-willed person, with just a modicum of self-restraint, can be very successful in about any area of life.  Will, or the exercise thereof, is very important but it can lead to one’s downfall.

Shakespeare is probably one of the most wonderful discoveries of my life.  He knew the human heart and vividly illustrated its beauty and its foibles in his plays and sonnets.  And it is very revealing that until my mid-thirties, I could not understand him and actually loathed him!  His wisdom fell on deaf ears.  At that point in my life I was only beginning to emerge from the darkness of “having ears to hear, but hearing not; having eyes to see but seeing not.”