Conversation re: flu

So, this morning I arrived at the Wheatland bright and early to help peel spuds for a catered dinner later today. There were the two main caterers, Ruby and Helen, and Helen's husband John. John already had the potatoes in the sink, had quite a few peeled, so I donned an apron and joined him, with a peeler I brought with me from home, originally purchased at IKEA in Vancouver. It's a great peeler, sharper than most of the ones I've tested at the Wheatland.

Anyway, I asked Ruby how things were going for her. "I'm not going to get that flu shot," she announced, which made me think that she had been thinking about it that very moment. Which one? I asked. "H1N1" she replied. Oh. How come? I asked. "Because I don't think I need it. By the time we get the vaccine here, the flu will have come and gone anyway," she replied. "I'll get the seasonal flu shot though," she added. She continued ripping up several heads of iceberg lettuce for the large salad she was building in an enormous clear plastic rectangular tub, enough to feed 60.

"That's interesting," I remarked as I fished a gigantic potato, a good three pounds, up out of muddy sink water, a potato that still had half a farmer's field stuck to its side, which I set out to remove before trying to peel it. "I came to exactly the opposite strategy after thinking about the whole business. I'm willing to become part of 'herd immunity' for H1N1, because, well, while seasonal flu does kill people, it's usually the really weak and sick that die from it, whereas H1N1 is picking off healthy people, kids. I'm more interested in not being a breeding ground for something that kills healthy people than I am in not being a breeding ground for something that is mostly not dangerous for healthy people." I managed to chop up the three-pounder into about 6 large chunks, each of which I could peel more easily with my small hands and wicked sharp peeler from IKEA.

Ruby replied, "But those people who die from H1N1 must have a weak immune system."

"Actually... my understanding is that they don't, that the virus actually provokes their immune system into over-reacting, and it's their own immune system response that does them in."

Silence. Then, "How are those potatoes coming along?"

"Good. How many pots-full will we need?"

"We'll need about two and a half small pots full, but we'll cook them all in just the big pot. There are only 60 people coming to this. It's not like a regular supper with a hundred and 20 where we need the big pot full and two small pots as well."

"OK then, I think we'll have enough with these four big potatoes we have left to peel here."

Long pause.

Then Ruby said, "I don't know.. I think I'll just go with what the doctor said. He said he thought that by the time the vaccine got here, the flu would have already come and gone anyway.."

I waited an appropriate length of time, then said, "Well... I was thinking about that 1918 flu. I think it arrived in waves. I think it can go away for a bit then come back again... I wouldn't want to be someone who worked for the Center for Disease Control, tracking viruses and whatnot, trying to figure out how to advise as I tried to understand what was happening around the country.. That 1918 flu took out a huge chunk of the population. In those days there were only 2 billion people on the planet, and the flu took out 50 million, something like that.. that's a big percent of the population, and there were no shots for it, no Center for Disease Control, nothing. People died like flies in those days from all sorts of things, but for sure that flu made a big impression..... Do we have enough potatoes peeled now, do you think?"

"Yup. That should do it. Let's go have coffee."

The Red Albatross

Finally, the red Persian rug is gone. I took one last picture of it today, lying in a semi-rolled up heap in the middle of my living room, just prior to the arrival of two men who carted it away, off to the Wheatland Center, where it will either live on the floor of the puzzle room, or else be raffled off as a fund-raiser, a more recent idea Helen, the administrator, hatched. Either way, I'm glad it's gone from my life where it had become a burden, and will have a new life with someone (or someones) else, who will give it a nice home and enjoy it. Plus, if the Wheatland makes a goodly sum of $ out of it, all the better.

Sure is nice to have it gone. A weight feels as though it has lifted. Bye-bye rug, hello more simplicity.

Writing

Mo at Neurophilosophy Twittered a link to a blog called Inside Higher Education: Career Advice, about writing a dissertation, by Peg Boyle Single. It seems she has a book out.

The column is also full of good advice about writing in general. Part 1, A Regular Writing Routine, is a layout of the mechanics. Write whenever you have a chance.

"Motivation in writing comes from prewriting, prewriting, prewriting. Motivation occurs when you have done the necessary planning steps so that when you sit down to write prose, you have had time to subconsciously play around with the ideas and you only have to retrieve and type down the ideas, not to think them up. Motivation occurs when you have a very detailed long outline, filled in with citeable notes, by your desk that guides your writing."

Part 2 is What the Research Says. The first item recommended is to develop "deliberate practice."

"So what is deliberate practice? It is not inherently fun nor is it intrinsically rewarding. It is work. Deliberate practice is effortful practice with full concentration and includes a mechanism by which the results of the practice can be evaluated and improved upon in future sessions. Often a coach or master teacher oversees the deliberate practice, chooses individualized training tasks, and evaluates the results of the training. Experts more often engage in deliberate practice during the morning; research has supported that we have the greatest capacity for sustained, engaged and demanding cognitive activity during the morning. Research has also supported the many anecdotal accounts that four hours is the length of time that deliberate practice can be sustained."

It sounds like training for anything sounds. Start with twenty minutes a day and build up to 4 hours/day. Neuroplasticity will develop the brain. Pattern recognition is enhanced, etc.

"Novice writers tend to focus on the word or the sentence as the unit of creation or as the unit of analysis. Expert writers focus on the whole and on the paragraph as the smallest unit of creation or analysis."

Please, if you want to be a writer, read the entire posts carefully, especially if you have to write something academic. I can attest to how hard it is and how easily one can be chewed and spat out. My first and only (academic) paper so far was a disaster, swiftly rejected by the one and only journal I sent it to. I could not figure out what it was reviewers wanted - if it was a failure merely of style, or if I was simply inept at delivering written content, or if they hated the content itself. I'm still baffled. I could definitely have used this advice a year ago.

I can hardly wait for the next two columns in the 4-part series. Thank you Peg. Thank you Mo.

Selves and selves and selves

By happy fluke a friend, Jon Newman, posted a thread on SomaSimple about Sandeep Gautman's blog, The Mouse Trap, and links to several posts about the many selves we each carry around. I was delighted to learn that someone has bothered to study their existence, hypothesize their functions - I don't have to do it all by myself (haha, lame joke).

Listed below are the particular posts Jon found, and thought were compelling enough to bring onto a physical therapy board. They are compelling, because even when we are tootling along in a well-integrated, functioning state, working for a living providing services to health consumers, etc etc., we are dealing with psyches which might seem glued together on the outside but which might feel shattered to pieces on the inside. I've preferred to see this shatteredness as merely kaleidoscopic, interesting and even lovely, but I can appreciate that a sudden plunge into the depths of self/selves might feel shattering to people at first exposure to it. It was that way for me at first, too.

Anyway, for those interested:
1. Development of Infant Consciousness
2. Splitting of the self: "me" and "I"
3. Five kinds of self/self/knowledge

I had no idea there was a field called Philosophical Psychology, with its own journal, but there is. Someone named Ulric Neisser wrote a paper way back in 1988 and delineated Five kinds of Self-Knowledge. In his blog, Gautman has outlined them:

•The ecological self is the self as perceived with respect to the physical environment: I am the person here in this place, engaged in this particular activity.
•The interpersonal self, which appears from earliest infancy just as the ecological self does, is specified by species-specific signals of emotional rapport and communication: I am the person who is engaged, here, in this particular human interchange.
•The extended self is based primarily on our personal memories and anticipations: I am the person who had certain specific experiences, who regularly engages in certain specific and familiar routines.
• The private self appears when children first notice that some of their experiences are not directly shared with other people: I am, in principle, the only person who can feel this unique and particular pain.
• The conceptual self or ’self-concept’ draws its meaning from the network of assumptions and theories in which it is embedded, just as all other concepts do. Some of those theories concern social roles (husband, professor, American), some postulate more or less hypothetical internal entities (the soul, the unconscious mind, mental energy, the brain, the liver), and some establish socially significant dimensions of difference (intelligence, attractiveness, wealth). There is a remarkable variety in what people believe about themselves, and not all of it is true.

No mention in there of the over-extended self.. which women end up becoming a lot of the time.. I think (with my private self) the over-extended self may house a bunch of the subselves which can cause trouble. Perhaps it depends on the sort of "specific and familiar routines" in which one engages. I think it's the one our "role" is housed within. Of all of them, it's the one that changed itself right under my nose, and seems like is busy plotting a coup with my conceptual self these days.

Also, no mention that I can find of how each of the discretely labelled selves experiences time passing. I have a hunch that a key to re-integrating them is to get them all back on the same clock again somehow.

As an aside, recently neuroscientists found brain cells that keep track of time with extreme precision in macaque monkeys. Everything gets a time stamp. See MIT news story, A Head of Time.

If the brain is an oscillator, predictor and simulator, I can see how easily one's sense of self/selves can develop a few timing problems and need "tune-ups" on occasion.

Looking after me

Once in awhile, a little, formerly struggling part of myself surfaces and breathes, then disappears again for ever-lengthening periods of time. It surfaced this morning, and we took a look at our life together. I found I could understand and look at life from its perspective better than I could before.

It is the anxious part. It's the part of me I fought to stay married to, the part I turned my whole physical existence upside down and inside out to accommodate. I didn't blame it when it threatened to explode - I listened, stayed connected, tried to understand, then analyzed, and then acted. I thought things through while in Hawaii. I related to this part of me.

I do happen to view my "self" as a committee comprised of different characters, a choir of different voices, a community of selves apart from the one I normally inhabit as "me." I'm not sure this is pathological, although it might seem a bit odd. I have always seen my"self" this way, as a group of individual proclivities and interests, some of which can interfere with others at times. I've always seen my "self" as a collective comprised of "selves" of different ages and capacities and likes and dislikes and abilities and inclinations. I do feel like I have to actively integrate all of it ongoingly, most of the time, and need a lot of alone time to deal with it. I do sometimes resent the disproportionate amount of time this seems to take me, compared to how easily others seem to hold them "selves" together, but usually don't allow it to particularly bother me.. I just plug along with whatever I've got going on at the time. I do wonder about aging, how this process will be affected. Will it get easier or harder? Maybe every person feels like a whole tribe on the inside. Maybe others have brains that do this integrating effortlessly and non-consciously (it seems that way from the outside, at least..). Maybe this is way more information than anyone else needs to know about what goes on in my particular head.

Whatever the case, back to the anxiety "self":
It poked itself into my conscious awareness today, to announce that it feels better now, thank you. It noted that it is Hallowe'en today, which means that it's nearly November, a time when life would normally be dark and rainy and foggy, that it would ordinarily be fixated on the weathercaster's daily announcement of time of sunrise and sunset, would be poking me frequently, as daylight shortened and darktime lengthened. It noted that here, in the new place, in the 'land of living skies', the land of planetary hemisphere-size sky, it could care less, pointing out that it has paid almost no attention whatsoever to weather reports. It doesn't care anymore. It has more light and that's all it ever wanted, so thanks. It doesn't feel it needs to intrude on me anymore about light level issues. I agreed. The thank you was mutual. Both of us love the fact that we do not have to re-set the clock, now or forever more, if we don't want to. Saskatchewan very sensibly did away with this noxious stress-producing, imposed from without, jet-lag producing practice many decades ago. Such a relief.

Meanwhile, there are other internal fires to fight... The part I normally regard as the working part of me is still healing from the rippage away of what was once ordinary existence, and sets of daily habits. It has yet to find a new rhythm in life that is as productive as life used to be, but slowly it feels better and better. It knows that the only way to get through the rest of this year will be to get through the rest of this year, doing little more than attending to each moment as a suspended entity, experiencing life as a crawl by.

The part that had been longing for a sabbatical now has one, but experiences time as whipping by too fast to be enjoyed. It's the part which, if I allow, thinks it needs markers, things to weigh time down, to slow it down. Material objects and bought items, "stuff", money-wasting burdensome symbols of ownership, permanence. I've put a stop to most of that. It will have to find some other way to express itself. I cannot even buy a book right now - the wounds of having had to scuttle almost my whole library are still too fresh. I am firmly convinced that, on the whole, simplicity is preferable, but the acquisitive "self" is having a few issues with me over that. So, I might take it out today to purchase some winter boots, get it a flu shot, buy a bottle of aspirin to feed it, one per day, so it feels provided for and I will have simultaneously reduced the statistical probability of this "self" giving us both/all of "us" a stroke.

What I once felt was a somewhat budding and growing intellect is dormant for the time being. I'm still tending it, but it is ignoring "me" at the moment - it seems to need to compost for now. I hope it springs back to life someday. I see no reason why it won't. It's time for engine maintenance, is all.

Addicted to information?

Scientific American has this little item: The Chemistry of Information Addiction: A new experiment reveals why we always want to know the answer

Dopamine reward pathways appear to be involved. This ties in with Robert Burton's ideas in his book, On Being Certain. Certainty becomes a rewarded cognitive behaviour, and voilá, becomes an end in itself.

Excerpt:

QUOTE
"It has long been thought that there are two levels of decision-making: a conscious level taking place in the cerebral cortex and an unconscious level in the basal ganglia. The story is not so simple, he says, because these two systems are connected via the midbrain dopamine neurons. Perhaps future work will reveal how our conscious and unconscious decisions are influencing one another, all due to this very busy population of dopamine neurons.

It’s often remarked that “ignorance is bliss.” However, when you look at ignorance from the perspective of the brain a very different picture emerges. Our brains, and the brains of other animals, have evolved to find information rewarding. In fact, not knowing is stressful, which is why we strive to decrease that uncertainty whenever possible. We want the information and we want it now!"

So here's a thought, based on something else I read today, Scientists Locate Literacy In The Brain With The Help of Former Colombian Guerrillas, which I think ties in.

(Why they kept referring to the subjects as Guerrillas, instead of referring to them as formerly-illiterate subjects learning to read, I'll never know. Of that I am quite certain.)

Anyway, language is intrinsic. Children left to themselves soon figure out some sort of "language" in which they will be able to communicate. Even deaf children. Such made-up languages will have grammar, structure, meaning, etc.

Reading, on the other hand, is tuition-intensive learned behaviour. It changes the brain. Excerpt:

"Previously, it was thought that the angular gyrus recognised the shapes of words prior to finding their sounds and meanings. In fact, the researchers showed that the angular gyrus is not directly involved in translating visual words into their sounds and meanings. Instead, it supports this process by providing predictions of what the brain is expecting to see."

In lots of other posts here I've taken a close look at this idea, that the brain is a simulator, plays a predictive role based on previous experience. It is the standard science-based working model of the brain.

My thought is, "making stuff up" to satisfy information hungry and addicted pathways, would likely represent the default human capacity.

Science and learning to think scientifically, like acquiring literacy, requires much more input and effort, initially.

However, the acquired skill is self-rewarding, in the same way as reading is.

Reading has become the norm. Like reading, science must be taught, conveyed, and ultimately learned. It's a transmission of "information" between two people, a teacher and a learner, like any sort of information exchange is but more formal - the people are in roles. Effort expended to either learn or teach is considerable.

Something is wrong with how science is taught these days. Perhaps teaching science as a "tool" seems boring and laborious to a child or teen. Perhaps the teachers themselves find it boring to teach science, or can't quite see the point of trying to pound science into what seem like thick heads.

Does anyone else think science could or should be reframed as an exciting, cognitive, future self-rewarding behaviour?

I will lay odds that if teachers took on their task of teaching science as enthusiastically as they take on teaching basic reading, fueled by the same motive, soon there would be a leap forward in percent of population able to steadily access their own information-seeking/gathering reward pathways. New habits of thinking would emerge. Culture would change. There would be no more need in life to support institutions that "make stuff up" just so they can feel they can help people get by - everyone would be interested in investigating the truth as closely as scientifically possible.

Additional Reading:
1. Harriet Hall's review of On Being Certain
2. Ginger Campbell's BrainScience Podcast and shownotes about the book, Episode 42
3. Ginger Campbell's BrainScience Podcast and shownotes, interview with the author, Episode 43.

Weather

It's excellent novel stimuli to this brain that houses me.
Brain food.
Today, outside my window, a blizzard! a real, honest-to-goodness prairie blizzard! ...rages.
Maybe it's the exciting descriptors that pull me so much into this situation, back to living in a little prairie city that has nothing much to distinguish itself.. where any architecture the least bit interesting dates back to the 40's, or 30's.. 20's..

No matter - the weather is wild, the weather is fresh, the weather is waking my brain back up. I do not fully understand why I feel like a coma survivor - I just know that I feel something waking up in here. I'm going to go walk around a little bit out there.

First snow

I feel like a kid again. Just for this feeling, it was worth moving back to Sask. Snow fell last night and this morning, not much - just a skiff, but it feels good. I can feel my sympathetic system stirring after a long long time of not having been stimulated kinesthetically in this way, expecting to have to struggle just a bit. The light levels are strong. So the accommodation reflex of the parasympathetic system of the pupils is back in charge, telling the sympathetic system to not dilate pupils. What a kick this is, light-wise. My brain likes this.

Carl Sagan and Stephan Hawking Duet

Life and jigsaw puzzles

What the heck.
I am back to add my thoughts on this after all.

.........

How life is like a jigsaw puzzle

1. You are born without knowing how to do one.

2. Your job is to complete your puzzle before you die.

Symbolism

Every piece represents another person in your life. Each piece is equally precious, uses equal space, and will be important in some way to the final result. Keep this in mind. Always.

Overview

Your job will be to figure out all the relationships appropriately, guide the pieces to their spots. To do this it will be necessary to develop your powers of discernment and perception. You must learn to see things from different focal lengths.

Practical tips

1. Be sure you have adequate lighting. Sufficient table space. Take care to not drop pieces on the floor where they could become lost or dragged off by the cat.

2. Build the boundary first. It will save you loads of time and angst, and possibly regret.

3. Be gentle with the pieces. They will have to be handled many many times by you, and by others who do the puzzle. Don't create unnecessary wear and tear on anything.

4. Always work from easiest to hardest. You'll gain confidence and experience that way.

5. Go ahead and group your pieces by color, by shape, by orientation. This is not equivalent to political or economic discrimination, this is just you sorting things out for yourself privately in your own personal life. You ARE allowed to have a personal opinion on your own life. On your own puzzle pieces. From your own perspective. On absolutely every issue/aspect. In fact it's a requirement if you are to become a thinking person.

6. Keep the boundary between a) your own discernment and b) unfair social discrimination, clear, clean and separate, and refuse to tolerate any unfair institutionalized structured discriminatory practices in outer life. (See "Symbolism," above.)

7. Take your time grouping the pieces, laying them out carefully. You can do this any way you want. It will save you time in the long run. And you've got lots of time. A life time.

Along the way

1. You'll naturally be drawn to some pieces more than other pieces. Don't worry about it. Just remember that you'll need every piece eventually. Consult the 'big picture' frequently.

2. When you get stuck, you'll finally start to widen your visual field, and will notice some little humble piece that you had totally overlooked because it just never stood out for you. This is natural. Don't worry about it. It will be exactly the right piece for that spot where you tried some other piece umpteen times already and it just wouldn't fit.

3. You'll get a nice burst of pleasure out of each tiny victory. Savour the pleasure.

4. When you get frustrated, work on a different part of the puzzle, or else just go do something else for awhile and come back later. Your refreshed retinal receptors will see details they couldn't when your eyes were tired.

5. Invite others to help you if you wish. If you'd rather do it all by yourself, that's OK too. Your choice.

6. You will have a chance to enjoy, sense, experience and integrate all the instinctive emotions that came for free when we were born. You'll experience everything from the slog of repetitive drudgery and continuous frustration to the thrill of the hunt and the sense of triumph. The glue that holds all this together and keeps everything moving along on track is hope. Hope is really all we have for motivational fuel. Nurture hope. One day your puzzle will be complete.

Down a long grey road

Here is a picture of what I've been working on lately.
It took a weekend. One thousand pieces. As I worked I thought about all the ways jigsaw pieces are like people and putting jigsaws together is like life, but then I googled "life is like a jigsaw puzzle" and found that since jillions of others have arrived at similar conclusions, I would refrain from boring anyone with same-old.

Let me just say that the puzzle matched my mood - a long grey road to nowhere except into the future in a grey world which, although it had beauty, was cold. It was a hard puzzle for being
a) monochromatic
b) no straight lines anywhere

I got it done. I got my mood externalized, defined.


I felt more in control after, but still felt pretty monochromatic, bleak, difficult, etc. on the inside. Current blahness stems from the fact that the organizational part of me is very burnt out from the prep for the move, the move itself, and is finally taking a break from life. Also, I recognize how depressed I've been, and have suppressed, for years, thanks to low light levels. (At least that's what I choose to pin blame onto. It's all Vancouver's fault.)

My self-therapy job right now is to stop being concerned about the fact that I can't seem to make much of a plan, or study, or work on my projects, or be social, and just let large chunks of my brain take their time coming back to normal. Meanwhile I occupy myself these days going to the gym, Lu's Train Station. It has the vibe my brain seems to need right now - life is material, so push against it. Very physical. Nothing to distract.
.........

However! .....
Yesterday I cheered up pretty good and I want to share why - someone posted links to Hans Rosling TED talks. I got into them and found myself entranced. This guy, a Swede, a medical doctor, statistician, professor of global health at the university which has a committee which peruses the annual candidates for Nobel prizes in medical physiology, a co-founder of Doctors Without Borders, has managed to create the means by which anyone who cares to can look at data collected painstakingly over decades by the UN, on the economic and health of many many countries, and compare them visually. His system is called Gapminder. He designed the visuals to be colorful, fully manipulable bubbles with size comparable to population, which rise to the left when health improves and which rise to the right when economics improve. It's the most lovely way I've ever seen, to look at statistical data.

In a number of TED talks, he explains his system and uses statistics to show how the world has improved in the last couple centuries. His enthusiasm for this adventure and his optimism based on his datasets is completely infectious. I felt oddly buoyed up by all this. It's good that someone out there, so clearly brilliant and beyond kidding anyone, sees the world in this way. It just plain makes me feel better about the planet and about the people on it and about my own being here. It's not like there aren't still lots of problems out there but I can see how breaking them up into little bits gives a better overall picture.

Here are all his TED talks I could find. Each are about 20 minutes.
1. 2006: Hans Rosling shows the best stats you've ever seen
2. 2007: Hans Rosling's new insights on poverty
3. 2009: Hans Rosling: Let my dataset change your mindset

If your outlook on life happens to be underwater and you need to breath some life back into yourself, the hour it takes to watch all three is well worth it.

Valuing the inner life

I'm in one of those periods when everything feels like swimming through peanut butter. There is no motivation and no energy to do anything even when there is some motivation. I'm truly in the swamp of myself at the moment.

On the outside things are settled safely - still in visual upheaval, with a dresser half made all over the living room floor, and the red rug I brought from Vancouver (now a rolled-up red albatross also lying on the floor of the living room, because only too late did I realize it really is too large for the room and doesn't suit it anyway). But I don't care right now. I sit on the roll while I build the dresser from a kit. I step over it to open the balcony door. I am careful not to lose screws or screwdriver or hammer in its folds. I don't care how long it lies there because I'm sucked down into the muck at the moment. I'm the engineer, off my own train, having to build more track out front before I can get life moving again. My attention has been sucked down into someplace I can barely apprehend. For now.

I don't care about any of this actually. It feels fine, or perhaps I'm just kidding myself about that.. I don't know. All I know is that I'm in the nadir place again. I've been here before, at least three times in my life. I recognize the territory. I recognize that I'm depressed. I saw this coming and arranged outer life to accommodate it, rather than let it crash me into a ditch. I've acquired a useful illusion of control. I can anticipate my own crashes and prepare appropriate landing places.

Furthermore I know what I have to do. I went out yesterday and found a gym about 6 blocks away, right beside a beautiful indoor swimming pool. I plan to join it. I have absolutely nothing else I have to do with my body, because I'm not working at the moment. I can work with it, as opposed to using it to work. It is now about 35 pounds lighter than it used to be, and I want it to feel stronger; I want it to sustain me better. I want to work with what's left of it. I do want to feel "better." Physically. I don't feel bad, physically. But I also know I can feel "better," physically. Regular exercise is a mood-enhancer. I've used it on and off over the years like other people use drugs. It works for me.

I have never wanted to do exercise in anything more than bouts, a few weeks or months at a time, and only when necessary. I've always been afraid of dependency. Worse, I've seen how exercise addicts tend to ruin their own bodies through excessive dependence on strenuous behaviour to feel "good." They turn exercise into a religion, feeling guilty when they don't do it, instead of using it carefully as a medicine, and only when necessary, to feel "better."

On the way back, I dropped in at the Wheatland Center, for the first time under my own steam. I headed immediately for the jigsaw puzzle room. Instantly my brain wove this room into a self-construct for therapy. My jigsaw therapy room.

I worked for a little while on the puzzle that was out yesterday - a snow scene with deer, lots of deep blue colours. While I puttered finding pieces with bits of antlers on them, I chatted with a few of the seniors there. A woman named Helen works there everyday, is the caterer as well as the main administrator/treasurer. She rents the place out for events, and takes care of organizing the monthly dinners. I agreed to help out with the one at the end of this month, a turkey dinner. I am to arrive at 9 AM and help with potato-peeling, etc., leave for awhile, come back in the afternoon and set out desserts. After she left to go do some banking, I met her husband, whose health has declined. He walked in heavily, and we introduced ourselves to each other. He went to sit by the window, told me about his experience having to let go of one of his favorite past times, bridge. He has acquired a speech difficulty which creates pauses that are too long to be able to feel comfortable holding his own in a bridge game. He's had some surgeries which he didn't tell me about but which his wife had mentioned before he came into the room, and about which I didn't ask for detail. He chatted randomly about himself, how he feels his life closing in around him, how he was going along just fine, then suddenly his health seemed to collapse on him all at once. He said to me, "When you have your health and everything is going along fine, like how you are now, you just don't know what it's like when it's gone." I found exactly the piece that I needed to finish both a blue hill in the distance and a chunk of deer butt, put in in its spot in the jigsaw. "Well.. I guess sooner or later we all get to find out what that feels like." I replied cautiously. He seemed satisfied with that.

I started doing jigsaw puzzles a few years ago because I find them soothing, relaxing, refreshing on some deep brain level or other. They help me disperse inner fog. They help me re-establish, at least temporarily, some illusory sense of control, or order. Moving here to Weyburn and being able to access this jigsaw puzzle room freely will be perfect. There is no system (I don't know where I got that idea from - maybe my brain just made that up). You can borrow as many puzzles as you want, take them home, do them, bring them back. No one asks you to sign them in or out. Marvelous. All social interaction here, with the seniors, is a sea of personal and interpersonal trust. I love that.

I've changed my whole outside context, quit work, moved home, moved away from the outer fog - now I can start tackling this inner fog. Jigsaws will help me kill time while my brain gets itself back up on the track.

I plan to pick up this book, the Red Book, by Carl Jung, as soon as it makes it onto the shelves. Here is an article about it in NYT. The Holy Grail of the Unconscious, by Sara Corbett. Caution - it's a really long article.

I am going to read about Jung's adventures while inside his nadirs. Maybe it will be full of useful travel tips.

Silvery bright skies

New pictures.

The large clouds topped with light look like big soft boats, viewed from below, sailing along in some sort of sky flotilla. Living on the prairie is quite a lot like living on the floor of a sea of air in continuous motion.









Even on a cloudy steel-grey day, the sky is bright and silvery, with movement and form and edges and brightness.














I really appreciate how even when the sky is cloudy here, it's still exciting, different all the time, never in the same mood twice. And no matter what the day has been, the sunset is always beautiful.

Whole new take

So, here it is, Labour Day 2009, and I live in Weyburn, Sask. instead of Vancouver BC.
I can't get groceries today, as the main food store is closed on a holiday, and on Sundays is open only between noon and 5PM. But I don't care about minor inconveniences, because I feel new stirrings. New old stirrings, rather. Old sensations but with new brain cells.

In Vancouver, it would likely rain or be cloudy. Here, it rained in the night and is cloudy today. So, what is the difference? The difference is, I can feel crispiness in the air, here, that I could never have felt living in soggy water-logged Vancouver. I feel anticipatory autumnal crispiness in my blood, in my brain. It feels good.

I wouldn't feel this good, physically, emotionally, if I were living in Vancouver. There, I would feel a sense of doom, of winter descending, a sapping away of vitality. Here, I feel as though I have energy. Of course, not having to go out to work to support a life that feels like it erodes faster than it can be shored up, is helping - I can't discount the side effects of having the luxury to laze around, relatively guilt-free. Also the expectation pathways are heavily primed with the serious intention that moving has pumped them full of, so one cannot discount placebo response either.

As a response to being here, now, and liking it, and in anticipation of feeling more alive this coming winter instead of more dead, I am taking on learning about the consciousness system of the brain. I will post about this here and in the Neurotonics blog as time goes by. So far I've closely studied Chapter 10 from Mayo Clinic Medical Neurosciences 5th Ed., one of the best organized texts I've ever had the pleasure of learning from. I made extensive notes and will be layering in information from other books and texts.

I will luxuriously wallow in the information, enjoy the feel of my brain sponging it all into itself. Then I will try to make sense of it - my sense of it. Then I will try to write about it.

My new writing room

I made my dream come true. I moved, have a new, uncluttered, more zen-like existence. Here is a picture of my little writing room.

























Here is a picture of the view out the window, from where I sit. The light comes in from my left. There's nothing beautiful or captivating about the view. It's a humble view, a humble house below, an alley.. but the big green tree is nice, and I especially love that I can see over it!

Does depression have an upside?

Maybe it does!

Check out Depression's Evolutionary Roots, a SciAm article.

Maybe depression and introversion are connected somehow. I'm quite "happy" to be introverted if it will help me avoid being or becoming depressed.

Settling in

Weyburn has been "home" for over a month now, and I've been in my own place for two weeks. Yesterday a desk I ordered finally arrived, a $149.00 special from the Brick, made in China, espresso in color, with a keyboard drawer. This morning I managed to put it together, working entirely from pictures that gave me no clue as to which way the boards should face, the way Ikea does.. but somehow I got it all together, with only once having to take apart the box which holds the drawers, as I had screwed it together entirely wrong first time round. Whatever. At least I have a desk again, one that I do not hate too much; it lacks a hole for cords to slide through/hide in, and the keyboard drawer doesn't slide particularly easily, but getting it together and functional makes me feel like finally I can relax out of moving mode and get busy again.

Slowly I'm getting used to this place that is so leisurely and devoid of stressful excitement that I'm reminded of swimming through molasses. At other (younger) ages, this would have made me scream with boredom and a sense of life passing me by, me not able to participate in it. Now, I feel it's the perfect speed for me to regather my wits and soften up around the edges once again.

Last night was the monthly dinner at the Wheatland Centre, Weyburn's drop-in centre for seniors. At the age of 58, I'm a kid there, but I was invited to join ($20 for a year's membership) so that I can participate in all the exciting events that go one there, like the monthly dinner. If you are not a member it costs $10. If you have a membership, it costs $8. I guess saving $2 each month will pay for the membership before the year is out.

It's a fairly large building, for Weyburn, one story but with several large rooms that can accomodate many people - one hundred twelve people sat at three long tables last night with some room to spare. Nice efficient systems are in place so that lines for food are orderly and swiftly flowing. The food itself is in another room on 3 more long tables, with room for 6 lines of hungry seniors to pile their plates. Last night's menu included roast beef with horse radish, mashed potatoes and gravy, some slightly overcooked vegetables, salad, and saskatoon crisp with a dollop of dream whip. I'm looking forward to the turkey feast at the end of next month. Now that I'm a member I was warned that I may be called upon to help the ladies with various food catering events. Okeydokey. I guess I'll get to know more people that way.

Why I finally joined, really, is because there is an entire room devoted to jigsaw puzzles. A whole room. With a big table and good lighting. And in the corner, stacks and stacks of 1000- piece jigsaw puzzles, hundreds of puzzles I've not yet put together. My aunt and I turn out to both be jigsaw puzzle lovers. She and I snuck away from the table as soon as we dared last night, after the meal, and headed off to the puzzle room to work on the puzzle that happened to be out. We got some pieces together before the meal started, too. The puzzles can be signed out by members, three at once. I can see myself busy writing all morning, then puzzling away in the afternoons while listening to CBC radio.

There are other rooms there - one huge pool room with four large tables. Apparently there are card sharks who attend the Wheatland regularly, and games are scheduled several times a week. Several people have mentioned this to me. Seems it's the "single ladies" who are the most dedicated card players. I'm clearly a "single lady" so I suppose it's out of kindness they are pointing me toward the peer group they most see me fitting into. However, I have never been attracted to card playing.


At least once weekly, a bus picks up seniors either at the Wheatland or else in the mall parking lot, to whisk people off to casinos dotting the prairies. My mother usually goes on these junkets and often wins some money. Mostly she gets her free lunch (included in the excursion) and has fun.

Now that I have a new nest to settle into, I'll be looking out the window lots of evenings and seeing lots of sky scenes, like the one I have added to this post. I confess to having photo-shopped the moon to make it look bigger in the picture, more the size it seems in real life to vision centers in the brain. Otherwise, the color and everything else is the way the camera saw it.

Controversy in British Pain Society: PT president ousted

Protests as physio ousted as British Pain Society president.

BPS = British Pain Society

BMJ= British Medical Journal

NICE = National Institute for Clinical Excellence

Here is NICE outraged by ousting of BPS President in the BMJ, dated July 23.

"We write to express our outrage at the British Pain Society’s vote to force their President, Professor Paul Watson, out of office because some members disagreed with a recommendation in NICE’s recent guideline on low back pain which he helped develop.

The BPS’s sustained campaign against this highly respected pain management and rehabilitation expert is professional victimisation of the very worst kind. That it has now culminated in the BPS forcing an exemplary expert out of office, is shameful.

All NICE guidelines are developed by independent clinical and patient experts who give up their time and expertise, over a two year period, to produce robust, evidence-based guidance. It is totally unacceptable for guideline developers to be singled out in this way and have their professional integrity called into question, simply because some groups don’t like a robust, evidence-based recommendation that has been developed by a group of independent experts.

The guideline developers’ only aim is to help improve the care and treatment of people with specific conditions by highlighting gold standard approaches based on the available evidence. The BPS is clearly admitting that they do not accept evidence-based medicine. Moreover, the Society’s actions fly in the face of the comment made in a recent High Court judgement. At a judicial review of NICE’s chronic fatigue syndrome guideline in March this year, at which the judge dismissed the claims in their entirety, he particularly highlighted the importance of health experts to be able to express their opinions without fear of retribution.

The BPS has acted dishonourably in making their own President a scapegoat for the fact that some of its members refuse to accept that there is not the scientific evidence to support their interventions. It is a sad day for freedom of experts to express views, for evidence-based medicine, and for the ideals of the medical profession.

Yours faithfully,

Sir Michael Rawlins, Professor Peter Littlejohns"

It's worth reading through all the letters in the BMJ link. Rarely are PTs involved in public politics and turf battles at levels such as this. The story involves a PT and it involves pain, so I find it all very interesting. There appears to have been somewhat of a coup by an organized group of doctors concerned over supposedly evidence-based guidelines which might have affected their own livelihoods, or at least what they consider to be their turf...

I find it all a bit bewildering at the moment, as I only learned about it this morning. But I'm curious and plan to read through it all again.

Weyburn Skyscape

This was the view from my new 4th floor balcony this morning, at dawn. This is what I came back here for. This is what I was homesick for.  

I confess, I'm not getting a lot done these days. I feel lazy. All I want to do is drink in views like this, enjoy the infinite focal length out all my windows here. 

If not now, when? 

The rooftop in the bottom right corner is the condo building where my mother lives. 

Home at last

I'm sitting in my new living room, on a new couch, looking out a new patio door at a new scene.
From this fourth floor level, the scene is a cloudless blue morning sky above rooftops. The rooftops come up to the top of the railing, and above that... endless infinite blueblueblue.

My view is west, so I get reflected light in the morning. In the afternoon/evening I get lots of direct sun, then a sunset. Every day. So pleased about it.

Looking around there is still a lot to be done to make the place more livable, but it's coming together quite well - slowlyish, putteringly, the way I like to do householdy stuff. Contemplatively. It's my zen, and there's no rush. It's a process. Do I mind the mess and clutter? Yes I do. Am I making progress? Yes I am. At exactly the right speed for me.

And I take lots of rests and breaks and do plenty of out-the-window gazing. This is why I moved, so I could have a focal length that goes all the way to infinity. It will take a little while to get there, so I have lots and lots of time.

I'm liking this whole living in utter silence thing I've got here, too. I can't hear any of my neighbours, as the building is concrete. I don't have to actively filter out my mom's country and western music, or her soap operas, or her football games, or chatter about whatever. I can think here. At least I hope I'll be able to think here. That's the plan.

Blogger is acting weird

I can't blog from my iMac at the moment, because everything I type turns to squares as soon as I type a period. None of the other places I visit or post at seem to be affected. This MacAir laptop seems to be working OK for blogging, so I'll have to blog with it.

Update: It must be Firefox - I'm using Safari now, and it's fine. No boxes.

A welcome time-out

My mother climbed on a bus today, with her cousin (the one whose garage is currently holding my stuff in storage), to go off on one of her regular casino excursions. Earlier this morning she got up and showered and dressed. When she goes out, she always looks well put together. Anything she puts on always matches, and she always puts on a watch from her vast collection of watches to match her clothing. My mom and Joan Rivers, two watch queens. Before she left, she pulled my attention away from my computer to comment on how great she looked, how summery her shirt was, and seek my confirmation of her visual congruence. "Uh huh. Looks nice" I said.

Such a relief to have her be out for the whole day. My inner space can expand outward once more to envelop its surrounds. Mostly it doesn't care what those surrounds are, as long as they are unpopulated by other humans. The only thing still noisy and interruptive around here at the moment is the clock my Uncle Peter built and gave to her as a gift. A Dutch immigrant to Canada long ago, my Uncle Peter is now gone but managed to live a long and healthy life. He married my dad's sister, the youngest in a family of nine living siblings, the second-youngest of which was my own dad. My dad and aunt were from a dirtfarm family, born between world wars, the tail end of a succession of children made to toe stiff lines by parents who were sternly religious in a Calvinistic sort of way. Dour. No fun allowed. Lots of work. So many older siblings. No particular personal attention. Lots of physical punishment. Lots of churchy activity.

My dad rebelled by learning to play music on a violin. He would sneak away and go for music lessons from his high school teacher who lived a few miles away. If he came home after 10 PM he could expect a good thrashing from the stern patriarch of the family, my grandpa Carl, who brooked not even a slight hint of disobedience. From anyone. My dad grew up stunted in many ways from this lovely upbringing he had. I think he was likely chronically depressed from birth, but faked his way through life, mostly adequately. He got away with being stoic and quiet, because when he lived, that is what men were supposed to be anyway.

My Aunt Ella, the one who married Uncle Peter the Dutchman (so handy with tools and able to build anything out of anything), was the closest to my dad in age and close observer of his treatment by his father. On the day of my dad's funeral, when I asked her how she had felt when her own father had died, she disclosed that she had felt quite fine, was glad to see him gone, that he had been a real tyrant. It was then I found out, for the first time, that all my dad's life, pretty much, as a child, he'd been especially singled out to be physically abused by his father.

The things you don't learn about your own family by attending funerals, when everyone's guard has been lowered, or else breached, by grief.

My Aunt Ella, unlike my dad, has been an endlessly cheery person, extroverted enough to keep up with my mother. In fact they are quite good friends, these two old women. Aunt Ella's rebellion was to cut her hair and wear a bit of make-up. Both of which were taboo in her family of origin, and both of which were adopted by only one other female sibling out of five.

Anyway, Uncle Peter came along and managed to charm the old patriarch, Carl, with an old-fashioned approach - asking for Ella's hand in marriage from her father, maybe even before he asked her. Uncle Peter cracked, then translated into English, coded messages during the war for the Allied forces. He was highly mechanical, understanding heavy equipment well enough to be able to maintain a whole isolated prairie power station, himself, for decades, employed by the province. In his spare time he built things, useful items, from scratch and from kits.

The clock he gave my mom is one of his many constructed contributions to the world. It doesn't run on time anymore, as he is no longer around to maintain it periodically, but it still sounds nice, chimes out the hours abut 10 minutes before the actual hour. A clock like that is nothing I'd ever have in my own place, as I would find it too intrusive, but my mom likes it because she liked Uncle Peter a lot, and because she likes noise. She's extroverted. Noise feeds her brain. Her brain organizes itself around externalities whereas mine organizes itself around the still place in dead center of its own quiet world, inside its own inner space. Which, when I live alone, I can easily find and orient to. Living with my mom, not so much.

Temperamentally I am more like my dad was, although outwardly I'm like a carbon copy of my mother. She is a "field-marshall" type, in the Myers-Briggs sense. Me, I'm more an INFJ. What I find irritating is her need, compulsion really, to organize every breath I draw, in advance, as though I was still 3 years old. She always has. It has taken me a very long time and a lot of space between her and me for me to find a good boundary to erect between my life and her version of it. Staying in her spare room for three weeks has been quite a test for that boundary - it's still holding but I can hardly wait to move into that place of my own on Saturday, and I'm so happy to have this day - this precious day, to myself. Well almost, except for the clock sounding, reminding me every 15 minutes that this is not my space.

My new place

Somehow events transpired to permit a barely 5-year-old, two bedroom condo, gently used, to fall straight into my lap, for a very very good price. I didn't hesitate, not even for a moment. I bought it as fast as I could. It will be perfect. It faces west, is on the fourth floor, plenty of sky (sunsets) to watch. I move in just a week, out of my mom's spare room.

It's been interesting, living with my mom, age 85 and still going strong. I do not feel as invaded by her anymore, have more patience with her, can see all sorts of similarities we have. However, she's extroverted and I'm introverted. Right there is the origin of most of the issues I've ever experienced in our relationship. She talks almost non-stop about everything, including topics as diverse as who might belong to the truck parked outside to making gingerbread cookies to the best way to make Saskatoon crisp, has the soap opera going on TV while the country music is still playing in the kitchen, wears dual hearing aids but still doesn't hear very well. I don't hear all that well myself, and am used to living in a completely quiet environment. So we are joking about having to yell everything at each other twice.

She endlessly ruminates aloud, I figure, to keep her own brain organized. She drives too - a nice fancy new car ("not a Cadillac, but the next thing to" she commented), even if her destination is only two blocks. "My car needs the exercise!" she declares. I realize she needs to keep driving or she might lose the ability to do so. She carefully parks in the underground, not letting her shiny car bump into anything. She wants to drive me around Weyburn, which is a real pain, because I like to walk, am used to walking everywhere, kilometers a day, and here the downtown core is a mere six blocks in diameter, and we are living right on the circumference. Yes, I'll be glad to move out. Again.

The last time I moved out I was just seventeen, and it was to go to university. This time, I'm pushing sixty, but I remember exactly how I felt over 40 years ago. What a gift, to be able to revisit that ground.

I will be living just down the block from her, on the same block actually, but on the other side of the street. We can see each others' balconies from our own. I can keep an eye on her without having to be directly in her space. She can phone me everyday to let me know how she's doing, and I can write my brains out while looking at ferocious prairie skies. At least that's the plan. For now.

Somewhat unfortunately, the weather here isn't how I remembered it. This year south Sask. weather has been cloudy and cool, more like Vancouver weather. The good thing, though, is that the sky is so big there is still lots of light even with thick cloud cover. Yesterday we were out shopping at Canadian Tire, where I bought four new bookcases and some new clothes (in Weyburn, Mark's Work Wearhouse and Canadian Tire are under the same roof). As we walked back out - to the car - we noticed that there were patches of blue opening up. Mom remarked, "My Aunt Hattie used to say, if there was enough blue to mend a Dutchman's pants, the sky would clear." And there was. And it did.

Small bits of progress

So, by now I've been inside several of these little charming-looking on the outside, cottagey homes, and have seen how how ramshackle the walls and ceilings, how flimsy the windows, how old the furnaces and scary the basements, how dangerous the stairs down into them, how buckled up and damp and cracked and upheavaled the floors and basement walls are, how desperately people tried to reinforce them. Hmmnn.. don't think so.

On the bright side, I got my big computer up and running (so much faster than the laptop), and will have tethered internet installed this afternoon, with my mother's consent. I was so glad to find out it had been tough enough to survive the trip to Weyburn riding on the floor by the front seat, clad only in a couple taped-on recycled grocery bags, with lots of stuff pressing against it and a lot of bumpy fast driving.

I will be able to get a lot more of my regular stuff done now, plus I'll be able to preview properties way easier.

July 27/09 - first day of the rest of this life

I am sleeping these days - deep deep deep, lots of decompressing dreams. Many hours of dreamless sleep too. I think my brain is beginning to catch up to itself. All this going to bed at 9 and not waking up until 6, then sleeping for a couple more hours in the afternoon has got to be a good thing. Seriously - I had no clue how exhausted I really was. Getting that rental van back on Saturday was the final task related to Vancouver. Now I feel fully suspended between lives.

Today, there will be a small bit of banking, and the fun stuff of going house shopping will begin. I might just buy a little house to live in, with a little yard. Weyburn is so incredibly safe I doubt I'll be in any danger. All my mom's friends are in their 70's, 80's, and they all seem to have a nice little cottagy house to live in, unmolested, with a little garden to keep them outside and active, growing fresh things that they cook and share with each other. They are doing great.. seem to be aging well and healthily in spite of bitter winters. Such great models for an almost-60 year old.

Made it.

Cleaned the last surface, threw out the last bit of trash, moved out the last bit of important computer gear, disguised as luggage, and put it in the front seat. There was only enough room for me left in there. I locked the door for the last time and pushed the key back inside under the door.

At 10:30 PM, got in the van and started it. Couldn't find the lights. Thought, well, they probably come on automatically. Let's just go. Drove out along the highway which was well enough lit. When I got further out in the country, I realized I didn't have lights. Stopped the van, opened the door, looked around, saw the lights, was ecstatic to see that when I turned the headlights on the dash lights dimmed - they had been annoyingly bright.

I got to Weyburn in two days with that first burst on Tuesday night, which had got me all the way to Merritt BC, well into the land of cowboys, sage and C&W music before I was too tired to drive. As I got closer to Sask I relaxed more and more. I could feel years of accumulated big city stress with all its attendant inner tension, drift off. The stress level went down in direct proportion to increase of blue-dome sky, lowering of the horizon, widening of the space around me, increase in highway visibility and speed limit.

Arrived in Weyburn yesterday afternoon. Today, opened a new account, monies are transferring, modem has been mailed back to the internet company, and at 2 PM (in about a half hour) I have a new set of two guys and a moving dolly organized to help me unload the truck in my mom's cousin's garage. It's all good. Tomorrow I drive the van to the airport in Regina, and get rid of another headache, take the bus back to Weyburn, look for a place to live.

Today in the Credit Union I was struck at how clean, civil and safe it felt. The public washrooms were actually public, and clean and no needles or broken crack pipes. The floors were spotless. The place was quiet. Lone tellers worked at isolated desks around corners from each other, completely relaxed. Clearly there is no problem of urban density/expensive square footage/repeated hold-ups here.

There is no graffiti anywhere to be seen. I even looked at a few nice little houses for sale within walking distance, two or three blocks, of "downtown", which is all of 6 square blocks. Yup, I'm going to like living here. There are even green trees here. But they aren't a shaggy dark overwhelming jungle, towering over the buildings, they are short and cheery. Big city amenities in a small safe town.

Tonight, tonight, won't be just any night

I just got back home with the van, and words cannot express how relieved I felt to learn that it's a Dodge Caravan with seats that disappear under the floor, and a bit more length than I was expecting. This is great - I can relax, all my worldly belongings should fit without any problem, big and bulky though the bags may be.

The phone has already been disconnected. I shall have to leave a note taped to the enterphone downstairs for the movers, but that's a small detail. Not that small details aren't important. Just that a big huge detail I was stressing over no longer exists and I can feel endogenous opioids. Life is good.

The final weekend

I can feel the end of life as I've known it for over 25 years. No matter how I've longed for this and worked hard to get here to this shift point, as I'm poised over the intersection between the life I've grown accustomed to and the life I will move into, I feel poignancy. I can't help it. It's inevitable.

As one moves through life, one must, gracefully as possible, continue to move one's life along consciously, through time, at the same time, and at about the same speed, in a mirroring fashion. The former happens anyway, completely non-consciously. The latter involves conscious reconnaissance, taking new bearings, re-navigating, making new maps of new shorelines.

A life, consciously lived, seems to involve putting things away and into the past, no matter how much one might have enjoyed one's interaction with them, and moving along willingly, consciously making room for new. This happens all the way along anyway. It happens biologically in the womb, as the developing egg leaves behind its egg "shell," its zona pellucida, it's first ever "blankie." Later the fetus has to leave behind its placenta, its second "blankie." Later, it involves letting go of toys, actual tattered blankets perhaps, stages of childhood, various levels of interactions with one's parents. Later still, it involves letting go of outgrown social roles, various constructs of self, beliefs one may have once entertained or even clung to fiercely, places, and people. It involves being left behind by those who die. Finally, it involves letting go of life itself, oneself, saying goodbye to that too. As gracefully and honestly and openly and with as few regrets as possible. All the "blankies" one ever projected solace onto. I totally get the idea in Buddhism about attachment/detachment. It's the main key to becoming and remaining contented, no matter what else might be going on.

I'm learning that the less material I have to deal with, actual "things" that take up time and consideration, the better my brain seems to be working and the more time and peaceful leisure I have for things like being on Facebook, exploring attachment on another level, practicing making a "group" and a "page" and "friending" people. It's all good. Then I'll be detached from that too, for a few days, as I wend my way through the mountains driving a loaded minivan, back to the land of nearly perpetual sunshine and big blue sky. That will feel good too, in its own way.

Aloft

I still have a week to go, living in a mostly empty condo, everything timed so that the TV and couch (my two remaining luxuries in life) will go out the door next weekend or on Monday, leaving me a whole day to put the finishing touches on packing, spackling, floor washing. I want to leave this place impeccable, and impeccably.

I still felt saddled by some large things I could barely move by myself, an old dresser and a bookcase, and few small tables, one lamp. I called 1-800-GOT-JUNK, made an appointment to have them come on Monday the 20th, just in case. However, meanwhile I managed to shove the two big pieces out into the hall, and put up a notice that they were free for the taking. This morning I was delighted to see they had been taken. Which means, I can cancel GOT-JUNK.

This is a big lift. It feels as if an updraft just caught my wings and I'm soaring effortlessly. The best part is, I still have an entire week to enjoy the feeling of being lifted effortlessly up out of the rut I had made, with all its "stuff," and grok, really grok this sense of freedom, memorize it, neuroplasticize it deeply into the chemistry set of my brain, so that I never forget how it feels to be light and carefree and effortless, letting the universe support my feeling playful.

The mental molt part is over. When the last big bookcase disappeared from the hallway, so did the last itchy spot in my sense of self.

The best part? We haven't even got to that yet! The best part is that I'm still here floating freely in Vancouver in my familiar surroundings for another whole week, able to still love them in this incredibly detached fashion, unbound by them, relishing my own anticipation of the week that is to come, the nice clean zen feel of it, the space of it reflected by the emptiness of my rooms, the carefreeness. THIS is the holiday feeling I need in the middle of my marrow. At last. This is how freedom is supposed to feel. It feels great!

A week from now, I will have to enact the actual move: from the high soaring place, from floating effortlessly on the updraft, I shall have to peer at the landing place, begin the descent: I shall have to take the sky train over to the train station where the mini-van waits to be picked up, deal with paperwork, drive it to my place, coordinate with the two guys I hired to load it, hope that it will contain everything satisfactorily, then actually drive myself and what's left of my life and stuff through the mountains to the flat land, where the sky is big and the sun shines almost all the time, every day. It will take two days to arrive, to touch down, start a new life cycle. Figure out, all over again, what I want to be when I grow up.

Mini-vans

The day before yesterday I chanced to look across the street to see a parked mini-van. I was a bit shocked at how small it was. I think I had been thinking of those big hippy vans from the 70's, perhaps, but with more windows. I started to get a queasy feeling in conjunction with a thought that maybe I wouldn't have enough room in the mini-van for the cubic footage of what I think I want to take with me.

This feeling built over the course of the day.

Yesterday I paid a visit to the company I'll be renting from, and one of the agents kindly allowed me to take a look inside a typical size mini-van, practice folding the seats down etc. It helped a lot. It is more apparent now that I, the basket queen, will have to let go of even more stuff.

Alrighty then. Chuckchuckchuck.

The silent auction continued

Yesterday evening a neighbour phoned and asked if she could bring her friend over to see some of the furniture I tried to auction off a week ago. I said sure. They came, they saw, they bought. The oak buffet, hutch, a large mirror, a carved wooden chest, and a table lamp have now found new homes. I sold them cheap.
Benefit to them: they get them way cheaper than I did.
Benefit to me: I get a little something, and do not have to pay to have them removed.

After giving the matter some serious albeit spattered attention, I decided yesterday to hire a couple guys and a dolly for an hour to come and load my van for me. It just makes good sense. I don't want to start a long road trip in a sitting position after having used my back in a manner repetitive and effortful. That's a recipe for back pain, which I do not need. It's not just the umpteen bags of heavy books I've packed and stacked, it's the heavy rug, 10x13, that I've decided to take with me since it's too big for anyone's space and therefore they do not want to buy it. I can't even lift let alone move that beautiful thing by myself. No way. So, in that I have to hire someone for that one item anyway, and pay them for an hour, I might as well keep them busy for an hour. If I'm organized, I can leverage their muscle power and get the whole job done.

This phase of the move is like second wind to a runner. It seems way easier than could have been imagined.

Friday

I was going to title this post "Friday Friday," but decided double naming days of the week was getting a bit old. It started because that Mommas and Papas song, Monday Monday, kept going through my head.

The weather here has been very very good. Beautiful even. It's as though Vancouver is giving me a lovely send-off. I must say, I really appreciate it. I can feel my energy improving, and my mood. I can hardly wait to go back to living in a place, where, although I was never any PollyAnna, how I felt or functioned was never weather-related. It was probably more age-related.

A strong image of myself came to me this week, a sense that when I moved here 25 years ago, it was as though a bow started to be slowly drawn back, and I was the arrow. I didn't feel it at all, all this becoming aimed at something. In fact I felt quite aimless much of the time. I could feel something sliding by however, and assumed it was merely time. It was the string of the bow, softly scraping me.

About a year ago, I started a bunch of activity that was new. Now I see it was the arrow-me, fully drawn back. Lots of tension. Unable to sense any movement. Having to create some. Get ready for something. Something that felt like it could be big. Huge restlessness.

Meanwhile, even as tension was buildingbuildingbuilding inside, outside, life proceeded calmly, containedly. I lost weight, got rid of a big albatross of a car, most uncharacteristically took a vacation. This past year has been all about me the arrow feeling pulled all the way back against the bow, then being held still by a Samurai, pointed toward a target. It's been about me knowing I was about to be launched at a target, trying to see what the target was. Is. It's me.

Now, from here, I can see that I have been the bow all along, as well as the arrow. It was not pleasant, or comfortable, it didn't feel good, it was painful at times, but it was also hopeful, occasionally exciting, and ultimately, necessary. Now, from here, I can see I'm the Samurai too. I don't have to let go until I feel one with the arrow-me, the bow-me, the target-me.

This is a calm time. The city is lovely. The weather is at the top of its game. I feel still on the inside, not especially busy on the outside. I'm getting caught up to myself. Things are coming together even as they are being pulled apart. I'm packing, organizing, deconstructing the life I allowed to build too big with stuff because I never thought I'd ever move again.

I'm letting go of the dream red velvet couch I enjoyed for 12 years, to a woman who has always dreamed of owning and enjoying a red velvet couch. She also bought my dream round oak pedestal dining table with lion claw feet, and I know that she and her partner will fill their home with many happy dinner parties. She bought my set of off-white dishes that will never scratch or chip because they're made of some amazingly hard substance. I was in it for the long haul, and loved these treasures for how they seemed to confer permanence and stability and quality. Now they will confer all that to her.

People are coming over to pick up the things they bought at the auction. I'm filling up the Chinese plaid plastic bags with the stuff I'm taking. I get tired so I take a nap. There's nowhere else I have to go, nothing else I have to do. I can pack in a manner truly luxurious, emptying out of existence anything that no longer serves my particular life, and keeping anything I want or really require. I can deal with the feelings that come up unexpectedly, as they arise. I can consider them fully, instead of setting them aside or pushing them away because of having too much outside life to deal with. I get it. I really get it now, how this is the best way to live a conscious life. Have lots of time and space around each thought, each feeling. Have lots of space, period.

Soon the arrow will fly.

Wednesday Wednesday

Happy Canada Day.

To celebrate Canada Day I did more coffee drinking, interneting, arranging with people for them to come by and take away their new treasures (my old ones, recycled). I got $225 today for household things, a framed print, a leather chair with ottoman, a table and rug. Not bad. I also hauled out 6 more loads of books and left them for whoever. (My book-lady neighbour did not respond to my note left taped to her door, and I've lost her phone number.)

I loaded up eight more large trash bags full of this and that for the Canadian Diabetes Association to pick up, in about a week. I carefully organized and packed a couple of those cheap strong plaid plastic bags, for moving.

I feel a lift under the wings. It feels like things have accelerated slightly. The apartment is emptying out, no books visible, pictures down, bare walls showing, floor space opening up. Empty bookcases. I feel so much more detached from all this than I did in February, when I had to dredge up the energy to start the process. Now, it feels like I'm nearly there.

Did I do anything special for Canada Day? No... not yet. My participation/connection to the rest of the human primate troop I belong to, now celebrating, is watching the festivities on TV. Later I'll be able to hear the boom of the fireworks outside over the water, whether I want to or not. Yay - happy birthday, Canada, my home and native land.

Monday monday

So, this is the start of the first week of the rest of my life.
So far, I've had a shower, some coffee, and spent the entire morning online.

Yesterday, I held a silent auction/ living-room sale/ house-cooling party at my house. It did very well - netted a lot more dough than an ordinary street sale would have. Wine was involved, and snacks, so that probably helped.

I managed to sell a few large pieces of furniture. Bidding wars did not take off like wild-fire, but I got reasonable bids/amounts of money for the couch, TV, table and chairs, bookcases.. no bites for the hutch or buffet. Oh well. The amount of money that did come in will pay for the removal of stuff that did not sell. Break even for sure and then some.

I am doing very well in the patience/detaching process, feel very even keel about it all. Am organized enough to feel that even as my material possession volume shrinks, it shrinks in a planned enough way that I will not be having to do without anything important.

On another front, that of hiring a vehicle to move me and my remaining bits of stuff, mostly heavy books, I learned that having a continuously paid-off credit card facilitates renting a car. I tried renting one on my own, but found that most rental companies do not rent outside the provincial border or beyond two. It's as though the world ends at the Alberta border. And these are supposedly national companies. I found myself talking to agents situated in the U.S. somewhere, even if the company I was calling was a .ca company. I found this amusing mixed with slightly shocking mixed with discombobulating.

Anyway - long story shorter - I finally called my credit card company to register change of address and learned that they would not only handle the car rental process, but that I had a bunch of points saved up that I had never even known about or used. OK. So, the credit card company (VanCity Visa) rented me a minivan, and applied the points. It took them no time at all. I think the takeaway point from this is that car rental agencies and credit card companies likely know and trust each other extremely well, and that if the credit card company says I'm a good risk, then the car rental company provides steep discounts. The vehicle rental cost, points aside, will be about half what I'd have had to have paid if I rented under my own recognizance. Live and learn.

Another tip for people transporting books, especially middleaged women who do not want to break their backs or gouge their arms: don't bother with cardboard boxes. Splurge and buy a bunch of those really cheap plaid plastic bags made in China. The zippers are crap and will break immediately, but the bags are completely weightless and incredibly strong. It's a lot easier to carry heavy loads in sturdy flexible containers with handles, and the arms down by the sides. Besides they are reuseable forever and fold to practically nothing for storing.

Final day at work

Final day of treating people, anyway.
It's not going to be my final day at work, however.. The workplace still has hooks in me - I still have ownership and therefore responsibility for the business itself. It's ironic that the part of the work I enjoy most is going to be the part I have to let go of first. Oh well. Such is life.

Tomorrow will be the first day of my new life.

I am wondering how that will feel.

My new life is going to cohere around deconstructing "precept"-ual fantasy wherever I find it. When I look back, I can see I've been headed in this direction for a very very long time already. One day, tomorrow perhaps, I'll wake up and see that it has become so.

Selling the practice

This is a very complex bunch of business, this whole 'selling a practice' thing. First of all, it isn't cut and dried like real estate. It's a lot more conceptual. It's also a lot more creative. One has to weigh and assign value to intangibles. As a result, there are no "agents" one can hire to shepherd the process. I'm nearly on my own. So, there are categories to consider.

"Hard assets" are the easiest category to deal with. I already have a list from last year when I divided myself from my practice, turned the "practice" into a "business" then sold the "business" the assets of the former "practice."

There is the little matter of 'location and venue'. I really have got myself into a peachy situation, in that there is no serious PT competition for miles, and in that I am ensconced in the only medically zoned building in the neighbourhood, with a handy sink, an elevator, wheelchair accessible office/bathroom, some free parking, climate control, nice blackout blinds that can open at the top or bottom. I have outlasted all competition that dared to set up. This has to be worth a few shekels to somebody.

There is the little matter of having found 'fabulous people' to work alongside of. These people come with the practice, namely a good well-trained PT who can't afford to buy the practice but who will gladly work there, a great receptionist/office-organizer person, a gracious and quiet roommate (half the rent) with her own practice which consists mostly of listening to people as they self-regulate in a sound-proof room. The landlord is in the office right beside ours. He is entirely accessible and unhesitatingly deals with any issue to do with the building, as he is also an occupant.

There is the not so small issue of a 'wide client base' gathered up over 15 years, about 20% of which is brand new every month, self-referred or referred by each other. These are people who expect to and are willing to pay cash. Cash! A fair bit of cash, too, in exchange for 3 or 4 visits to a person who will provide them with a reasonable, plausible, science-based construct to explain their pain to them, who will provide their brains with novel sensory-discriminative input in the form of manual therapy, seasoned with exquisite regard for their sensibilities and delivered in a carefully boundaried manner, and who will support their efforts to learn how to downregulate pain in all manners non-pharmacological. This is a well-trained client base. It comes with the practice. How does one put a price tag on something like this? I'm given to understand that some would pay mega to get their hands on a client list like this. I just hope I can "sell" this base to a person who will look after these people as carefully as I have attempted to.

Wish me luck.

I really hope I can sell it and disconnect completely from Vancouver. However, if I can't sell it in time to the right person at the right price, I may just hang onto it myself, try to run Sherwood PT from afar by granting somebody here in town power of attorney, learn how to run the bank account from Sask., let it continue to generate profit for me at a distance. I mean, if it is as good as I say it is, why would I even want to sell it? I could let it continue support me, and I don't have to be around much. As long as the headache factor is less than the profit factor, I would be fine, I think. As long as the tie doesn't bind too uncomfortably, I'm sort of OK with the idea of retaining a connection of 'owner' of a physiotherapy 'business'.

If I were a real entrepreneur, which I am not and do not have the energy to be at this stage of life, I could set up a string of clinics across Canada, all boutique-like in their service, but strategically innovative, in that each would take on a section of demographic in every city where the rent is reasonable, location is central, cash payment is expected, the client base grows itself through word-of-mouth only, and profitability comes from well-delivered hands-on service minus any hype or pseudoscience, and from keeping overhead down, way down. Bare bones delivery of science-based care for lasting relief of persisting pain, aimed at reducing overall pain suffering, one person at a time. No electrodes and no gym equipment. A clean space, fresh laundry in plain sight, nice freshly showered person with clean warm hands who knows how to use them and has a stripped down idea of why manual treatment is helpful to living human anti-gravity suit nervous systems and their embedded "I"-illusions, willing to answer each question fully from a pain perspective.

Letting go

I have been stressed out all week, fighting a bug which put me in bed all day Monday, made me cough (and have to wear a face mask) Tuesday, went into a lull Wed and Thur and came back with a vengeance Friday, putting me into bed directly after another face mask wearing day at work.

Adding to the stress of meeting immediate obligations while feeling sick has been the stress of trying to hold together a condo deal at the Weyburn end of this time of transition. It all climaxed in this same week, in the form of a time-sensitive binder full of complex legal documentation that I was required to read through, then initial off as having read and understood, and return.

I hit my own wall. I looked at page one, and realized that I was too stressed (too sick maybe) to be able to make any sense out of the written material. Which of course means that I'm too stressed to actually know if I do, truly, understand it, agree to it, and can sign off that I do.

When I get stressed, I get mad. How dare that real estate agent load me down with such a herculean task the very week I'm sick and have enough to do, trying to keep mere ordinary life on the rails? How dare she not be there to reply to my email or pick up the phone? (Seriously, someone who ignores one of each from me, AND a phone call from my notary... , well... , just what should one think? Just where should one place her on the sliding scale of slackdom?)

When I get mad, I get decisive. So I phoned my mother this morning, whose money represents the deposit on this condo in Weyburn, and is refundable up to the end of June. I told her my misgivings, told her how stressed I was getting about it, and that I wanted her to go get her cheque back and let the deal fall apart.

As I spoke, I could feel clarity reemerge into the dim dark recesses. I could feel certainty return. It's all relative of course; it might seem odd that letting go of something that's nearly in the bag would be less stressful than seeing it through, yet, that's how it is. I feel way more relaxed with the zen of Not Knowing, than I am with the stress of trying to pull something together that seems difficult and for which I find vanishingly small support to accomplish, but would result in a sure address to forward my mail to.

Instead, I'll just get my mail forwarded to my mother's address, until I have one of my own.

The stress level is down palpably. I'm breathing easier and I can focus on what's in front of me instead of feeling obliged to try to advance stick-handle what lies ahead.

When I leave Vancouver it will be like driving into the void. I won't have any preconceptions of where I'll be living, because I'll have no idea where it will be, for sure. I'll be more relaxed, with no time pressure on me about getting money transferred by a certain date. I'll be able to just leisurely open a new account, and have money sent from the old to the new, the old ones closed. So much easier.

Huge blue

I spent the entire past weekend in Calgary, at our national physiotherapy congress, some of which was keenly interesting to me, most of which wasn't, but it's all OK, because while I was there I got an email from my real estate agent saying that the subjects had been removed. Firm sale. I'm nearly outta here.

Meanwhile, I had this lovely view from my Calgary hotel room. What a sky. What a sky. My little digital camera could only capture a fraction of the expanse that was available.

When I returned to Vancouver, I again was reminded about why I am leaving it behind. Even though the weather is lovely right now, the summer and high temperatures merely bring another sort of "lid" to live under - the lid of haze and smog. Again, not enough clear blue light can get through to satisfy my requirements. Too hibernate-y feeling, even in late spring with high temperatures and long long days. I get it now. I really get it. I'm so glad I decided to bolt while I still have a chance, and before becoming too mired in by life and in no position to be able to bolt.

I have more details to deal with, like selling my practice and getting rid of the remainder of my stuff, renting a mini-van and loading my chosen books, computer gear, and a red rug I've decided to keep into it, but these are just details and lucky for me, my landlord is also a notary. He has agreed to help me out. Lucky lucky me.

Sold

It's all over. Almost. Will be, once all the subject-to's are gone, by May 29th. Then I will be officially in transition, not just preparing to be in transition.

I'm pretty satisfied with the sale. I got nearly as much as I was asking, and the buyers were people who knew what they liked and moved decisively, didn't burn a lot of fuel dithering around wasting everybody's time and patience. They came/ they saw/they bought, all in the space of a single day.

Hurray.

It looks like I'll be able to go where photons shine all year round, about mid-July. If I'm careful with money, I'll be able to afford a longed-for, self-assembled "sabbatical," during which I can rest one part of my brain (the treating part, which is so automatic it will never forget how) while I work on developing the conceptualizing, writing part. I plan to write furiously while I have the opportunity. Maybe less blogging, more actual book-writing.

Might have an offer

I just heard from my real estate agent - he says a realtor called him, wants to set up a meeting tomorrow afternoon to present an offer. How exciting!

A Friday work afternoon in May

This afternoon I had three new patients in a row, all very senior, a rare event - usually I treat people 20-ish to 60-ish..

Lady number one, age 85, recently hospitalized for food poisoning, a week ago. Had a cataract removed just on Tuesday. Said that she developed sharp pain in her neck and shoulders while being hospitalized for the food poisoning, that it was better but not gone, and didn't want to delay the cataract surgery because she didn't want to have to wait for the next available slot. So she toughed through it and turned up in my clinic, brought in by her daughter who I treated a decade ago. She definitely couldn't move her head on her neck much. She had never had any treatment ever before from anyone. Her husband had died 4 years prior, and she had moved overseas to Canada to move in with her daughter. Tough lady.

So, I worked carefully with her, and in the end she could move quite a lot better on one side but still had pain on the other, so I added a few pieces of stretchy tape, made sure the tape was holding her skin comfortably so she could move less painfully, showed her daughter how to remove them after a few days.

Lady number two was about the same age and had stumbled - although she had not fallen, she had sprained her ankle. She was wearing a brace on it, and limping. She had been to the PT her doctor had sent her to, but found she didn't like electrodes or ultrasound or the heat pack. She said her ankle had felt worse after. We had a provincial election here on Tuesday, and where she had gone to vote, a scrutineer had given her one of my business cards. She made an appointment and here she was.

She had lost her husband less than a year ago - they had been married nearly 60 years. She still could hardly believe he was gone. She was a treat to treat. Her nervous system responded extremely well to hands-on work, and by the end of the hour the swelling was way down and she had full range. When she got up she could walk normally. I asked her to leave the brace off. She hugged me. Twice. Might be back to have her fingers worked on.

The third new patient was an elderly man with pancreatic cancer, which had been diagnosed a year ago and treated with chemo. He looked really good. Thin but good color. He had pain in his belly. His son, who had been in for treatment for a few different problems, had made the appointment. I had been really clear on the phone that there were certain sorts of pain, like cancer pain, that my attempts wouldn't be able to help, but that if there were other kinds of pain as well, perhaps what I am able to offer could help with that. When he came in, I had the same conversation with the dad. As it turned out he had old shoulder injuries from sports, and very restricted shoulder range on both sides, so I took that on. I worked on skin (dorsal cutaneous nerve roots) along both sides of his spine, the sides of the trunk (lateral cutaneous nerves of the torso), the shoulder blades (many different nerves at different levels), and the front fold of the armpits (intercostobrachial nerves and supraclavicular branches of the superficial cervical plexus). Both arms were able to raise up all the way after. He still had the belly pain, of course. I reiterated that I didn't think what I did could help that, that the patches were his best bet. He said he was thinking of having acupuncture, that they offered it at the cancer clinic. I said I thought whatever they offered at the cancer clinic, under supervision, should be OK. We all shook hands and he and his wife left.

Quite the day, with three brand new elderlies all in a row. Elderly people make me go all soft and tender. They always have. Not sure why. They are living heroes to me.

I treated an old woman once shortly after I graduated. She was in her nineties, was being hospitalized for something I can't recall. Her hands bothered her a great deal. They were gnarled and thick-knuckled. She said, "Look at these hands. They are ruined. Whatever you do, don't use cold water to wash your vegetables. I used cold water all my life, and look what happened to my hands! Use warm water. It doesn't matter - you're just going to cook the vegetables anyway!"

I took her advice. I've never done anything under cold water that couldn't be done in warm.

Another 95 year old I worked with scoffed at herself one day about being a "dried-up old prune." I objected immediately. I pointed out that prunes were nothing but plums which had grown more condensed and had concentrated their sweetness. She was a poet. She got that in a deep place. I think she thought better of herself after that.

Once when I was in my mid-twenties, I was in a medical building for one reason or another, and caught one of those glimpses that lands like a snapshot, glued in the brain forever. An elderly man came off the elevator. He was short, but pulled himself up to his full height, as fully as he could. He was dressed impeccably, hat, jacket, tie. Shined shoes. For whatever reason, I suddenly saw him as living poetry, and my throat caught in that moment with the poignancy and beauty of it all. A life nearly all lived out. Fully. Upright. Dignified.

Still waiting

Still nothing. Still no offers on my condo..

I'm still in the transition zone therefore, feeling a bit bored, a bit restless. I decided to go where I had never gone before and put a few ideas out onto a taxonomy thread at IASP.

In a recent conversation about possibly renaming the syndrome currently known as fibromyalgia, a poster (MD) wrote:

">"Whatever we call tenderness in 11 of 18 spots with associated cognitive dysfunction is bound to be confusing unless there is an examination based on an agreed methodology (which currently doesn't exist) to identify specific muscles (40 % of tender points are thought to be TrPs in some studies and treatable with injections) that are the source of some or all of the patient's pain in distinction to CNS dysregulation."

I replied:

"Here is a thought (harboured for a long time) about the tenderness detection method used to arrive at a diagnosis of fibromyalgia: Please bear with me while I explain:

With all due respect, it seems to me, that unless the clinicians who originated this way of determining 'muscle' tenderness first physically removed the skin and its attached subcutis, then tested for tenderness, then placed the skin back on again, the idea that they actually found tender points in 'muscles' might be (dare I say) erroneous.

Cutis/subcutis is very thick, in case anyone doesn't remember. It contains a great deal of physiological tubing (nerves and vasculature and smooth muscle), sensitive structure and function, most or all of which is regulated by the sympathetic NS and efferent function of sensory nerves. Skin is closely read by the brain, and by the S1 sensory cortex, in full awareness by the non-anesthetized, non-hypnotized patients being tested for point tenderness.

I would like to propose, therefore, that tenderness in skin itself and its attached layers will always be a confounding variable to finding and being able to assert that point tenderness is from something wrong in muscle tissue. I'd say chances are rather high that some structure located within cutis/subcutis itself is what feels "tender" - a cutaneous nerve perhaps.

I'm speculating - however, I think my speculation is likely more accurate than the supposition that somehow one can locate tender points in muscles, by:
1. conceptually subtracting skin as though it did not exist, or was not sensitive, or didn't count;
2. forgetting that cutis/subcutis can be a good inch thick and is full of sensory neural structure, or that palpable hardness can't develop and then disappear within C/subC itself;
3. forgetting that a dense tough layer of fascia (hard to palpate through) surrounds and contains and separates 'muscles' from one another;
4. assuming the patient's brain/nervous system (already stressed and producing pain output) wouldn't read skin input first and regard exteroceptive pressure as something it needed to defend its organism from by making the patient flinch;

... all of which I think should be factored in long before the clinician/examiner assumes he or she has found a TrP in somatic 'muscle' tissue.

I respectfully submit that one should not rule out anything one has not already considered.

Diane Jacobs PT"

Maybe I am getting a bit ornery these days, or as a result of aging, or as I prefer to think about it, ripening while still on the vine, but I'm not going to sit back and stay quiet anymore about anything, anywhere.

As talk-show host Ellen is fond of saying, "ANY-way..."

Nothing yet

There have been 13 showings, and another open house is scheduled for Saturday. No one has put in an offer yet, but that's OK - it's only been two weeks. Could be any minute.

My income tax is ready - the part that I can get ready that is to say. The bookkeeper is working on the rest.

This leaves me in a weird, unfamiliar zone - it's the transitional zone. After so much hard physical work and planning and executive decision making and lugging and tossing, I live carefully in a pristine apartment in which I am careful to mop up my own traces every day. No sock is left on the floor, no toothbrush allowed to sit on the sink.


What this means is that I feel like I can't start any new projects, which in turn feels like I'm living in a mental waiting room. I am so ready to move forward geographically speaking, but am still stuck in Vancouver. At least the weather doesn't suck much right now.

Ready for the next lap

I'm a big fan of built-ins. They add enormous square footage, especially in bedrooms. Plus, the bed does not have to be perfectly made - one can just push the bed up out of sight and get rid of more visual clutter.

I had a cat once upon a time. Getting wall beds installed neatly solved the problem of cat hair/hair balls on the bed. The cat received her own cozy cat bed to snooze in.

I have two of these. They are very well-behaved beds. They stay at any angle I put them at. I can lift them with a single finger.











I hope whoever buys this place will want to keep these - they are "attached," so technically they have to be offered as part of the condo, as do all the built-ins.

This afternoon there will be a private "showing." It seems a bit strange, the idea that people I do not know will be examining my private living space in detail.. but I realize that's just an inner introvert adjusting herself to reality. The reality is, I've got to move and leave this whole part of the world, including my part, behind. Unfortunately, I can't just unzip my condo and take it with me to a brighter part of the country the way I'd like to.

Last night I had a brief talk with a woman who provided me with a little list of the sort of documentation I will need and must prepare in advance of selling my practice. It's tax time right about now, so no time to breathe - it's time to move my attention away from my personal space and figure out how to extract myself from the public one I built. Meanwhile, by pure fluke, suddenly my treatment list has swollen back up to full. I do not know where the energy to treat all these people is going to come from, as I am sleeping rather restlessly, but I am certainly glad that the awful winter work slump seems over along with the arrival of warm spring weather. A lively bustling practice should be easier to sell than a half dead one, especially with Adrienne close at hand.

The first lap

Wednesday last week represented a milestone in my race to live under brighter skies. Finally, I had chucked out enough books and furniture and clothes and small household items to see the back of every closet, the bottom of every drawer, the surface of every shelf. Finally, I had cleaned out enough cupboards, vacuumed up enough dust, washed enough surfaces and painted enough walls, windowsills and baseboards. Finally, all the blinds were repaired/cleaned, and new Roman blinds covered the venetian ones (something I had never quite gotten around to before). It was time to list.

And list I did. My place is now officially for sale. Hurray. Now, all I have to do is be a fastidious Zen housekeeper and keep things well-enough organized that the place can be shown anytime (once I squirrel the twenty-year-old stained coffee-maker out of sight, hide the dirty dishes in the dishwasher, put the toothbrush in the drawer, and generally remove my own "living" traces from the place).

The place looked nice yesterday for its first Open House - I even added flowers. It's not a showcase, but it's attractive, fresh, clean, shiny, all the things that attract buyers, hopefully some buyers are enough attracted by the lowish price to want to bite. The realtor said that 8 parties, including three agents with buyers, had visited in under 2 hours. After he left two more groups of people, residents in the building, came by to look. One group was a young couple with a baby about 2 years old, who at the moment have a one-bedroom.

I think this bodes well - already 10 groups of traffic through a place that's been listed for only four days.

From the waterfall to the desert

I know that I'll feel more like me again, in Weyburn, with its sunny days and semiarid climate. I was thinking this morning that at the moment I feel like one of these giant over watered coastal coniferous trees, top-heavy and ponderous. They grow huge, but have hardly any root system. They do not need roots, because roots are something a tree sends down to find water. When water is plentiful, successful trees just don't bother. However, when a big wind blows they fall right over.

By contrast, prairie trees are sort of scritchy and shrubby and short. The wind blows all the time, so the wild ones mostly just manage to cling to the least windy sides of coulees and ravines, and often appear tilted. But they have huge and extensive root systems. They are stubbornly alive - they clutch the earth with everything they have, hold the soil together, seek out every last drop of water no matter how deep they have to dig, and are very very hard to blow over, or even pull out with heavy equipment. I'm by nature and up-bringing much more a prairie tree than I am a coastal tree.

It will certainly be novel stimuli to re-learn to view a rain as a welcome relief from sun, instead of how it is now, the complete opposite.

Everything is moving fast at the Weyburn end - my mother located a condo for sale in her building, which will be perfect. Knowing her, I doubt she'll let anyone else have even a fighting chance at it.

Oozing toward the move

The process of decluttering seems endless, but progress has definitely been made. I now have three empty and mostly cleaned up rooms, awaiting painting. I have thrown out massive volumes of accumulated life detritus. The Canadian Diabetes Association's Clothesline pickup service must be liking me these days. We have dated regularly for more than a month. They have carted off more than a dozen, perhaps as many as twenty huge trash bags filled with what were once treasures and may well be for someone else, "clothing and small household items."

In the end, no one wanted to buy my edited furniture within the time frame I had for selling it, so I had it hauled away. It worked out better this way - I had one potential "buyer" come by to see an antique drop leaf desk I'd been using as a phone center, but it turned out she was not interested in "buying" at all - she already had a condo full of furniture and enjoyed going to strangers' homes just to stare at their belongings. This creeped me (an introvert) out so much that I decided to circle my wagons and simply jettison.

And what a difference a few days can make.

Up until Monday, I was still thinking I'd be moving to Barrie, Ontario.

I phoned my mother, age 85 and holding, on her birthday on Tuesday. A church-going Catholic, she has always considered herself to have been especially lucky to have been born on St. Patrick's Day (no matter that she's not Irish, but is a mainly Polish-French mixture). I've mentioned her before, here. About her being Catholic, she might be the only Catholic woman on the planet who has exhibited apparent life-long immunity to what is supposedly universal catholic guilt.

Anyway, I made one of my obligatory phone calls to her on her birthday and found myself asking her what she thought of the idea of me moving to the city she's living in; Weyburn, Saskatchewan.

Clearly the idea has been rolling around in my undermind for a long time. So it finally emerged.

There is background to this: a low hum of discontent all my life with our relationship, a "breakup" with her about 20 years ago, no resolution but a definite truce.. probably all falling under ordinary Mother/Daughter life-long tension. Anyway, I consider myself a grown-up now, and she doesn't seem nearly as big or scary or mean or unfair as she used to when I was a child stuck on a farm with her as my only companion.

My needs are simple. I need time to write, a sunny window, mornings that are clear instead of cloudy, a place where I can live clutter-free in every sense, cheaply, without necessarily having to go out to work just to support a business in order to have it support me back. I need an external environment that feels safe, unlike Vancouver these days with it's gangland shootings at the current rate of about one per day.

Weyburn is this funny little city in the southern part of Saskatchewan where you can see nothing for miles and miles except ... miles and miles. Oh, and a huge upside down bowl of transparent blue sky filled with sunshine most of the year. I must not forget to mention the extraordinary skyscape available to one's photon-starved eyeballs in southern Sask.

It has been the crucible for a few prominent Canadians - Tommy Douglas, former premier of the province and architect of Canada's health care system, and W.O. Mitchell, beloved and famous Canadian humorist and author. I met both of them personally at various times. Tommy Douglas visited our home when I was a child. My father, who rarely got excited about anything, loved this man and his vision, and would have taken a bullet for him. I met W.O. Mitchell later in life, at a dinner party in the home of his nephew. I remember that no one else in the room (about 10 people altogether, maybe) could get a word in edgewise, but that no one seemed to mind. He went on at considerable length about the enormous size of earthworms in Calgary.

Weyburn is also somewhat famous for being the location of a huge mental hospital. In the 1950's it was a scary place where someone we knew worked, I think as an orderly; for some reason our family was friendly with this man, Ab Ruler, and his family. One time he took us all up a shady treed laneway to the "mental hospital" and showed us around a little. We even watched a movie there, The Ten Commandments. The hospital was able to house 900 patients, a capacity equal to a tenth of the entire population of the city, a size that seems very disproportionate to the actual incidence of mental illness in the general population, then and now. It must have represented a collection center for all mental illness patients in Western Canada east of the mountains, and a source of income for many people during the desperate dust-bowl 1930's. LSD experiments were conducted there, in the 50's, 60's... It seems the place was closed as late as 1971.

Anyway, back to the phone call.

I found these words tumbling out of my mouth: "What do you think of the idea of me moving to Weyburn, Mom?" followed quickly thereafter by "I don't want to live with you."

She was taken aback a bit, but very quickly found her footing and sounded delighted with the idea. She started planning immediately. There were condos for sale up the street. She knew a real estate agent I could contact. She knew a spa in town, maybe they'd like to hire me if I wanted to work. The new current under the surface, a swift clear current of feeling, one I can ride until it's over, is that I'm the Oldest Daughter, and can help her remain independent, something she cares desperately about, until it's time for her to make an exit. This current feels congruent with the gravitational pull I have anyway of moving further east, back out from under the cloud, fog, rain and grey dreariness of the Wet Coast.

So, it looks like some day soon I'll be living in a small city, pop. 10,000 and holding, with average age that I think must be older than middle-aged, a speed limit of 40 km. Back to the roots. Arriving "home," just a bit burnt out, with nothing but myself, a laptop, a couple of flash drives, a few special books, in a position (I hope) to be able to take a year off, soak up sun and do what I need to do next.

Progress toward "impeccablization"

Yesterday I managed to get a lot done: I figured out how to post to Craig's list and supplied some pictures to it of furniture I have to clear out in order to attractively "stage" my "home" for a quick and favourable sale. I started cleaning off a large mirrored door I once painted to match the wall, in order to make the hallway not look like such a long tunnel. I still like the shortened look more, but realize the home buyer might not enjoy the prospect of de-painting the mirror some day. Anything to leave no trace of me behind...

I "swabbed the deck" - meaning, I physically hauled several large flower and plant pots and balcony furniture down to the dumpster (from where people eventually made them their own), and washed the railing and floor. It's an extensive balcony, wrapping all the way around a corner.

I think it's been at least 6 years since I've touched that balcony. I used to like to keep a garden on it, sit out amidst the flowers on a plastic chair beside a plastic table, sipping a coffee in the morning and watching bees do their thing, carve out and maintain a peaceful urban oasis. One day I found a package of cigarettes out there. It appeared that someone who had no business on my balcony had climbed up to hang out, enjoy my second-floor garden, or maybe try to break in, had become interrupted, and left abruptly without actually smoking. The cigarettes were a mystery, in that neither I nor the roommate I had at the time smoked. Whoever it was (and it could not have been anyone who belonged on my balcony, in my urban oasis), the experience managed to put me off gardening entirely. From that point on the garden was never restored. I never enjoyed hanging out on the balcony anymore, knowing that it was too exposed, too vulnerable to feel like my private refuge.

Mold grows amazingly well in this climate, and there was no shortage of it, clinging impossibly to even shiny painted surfaces. It was a bit of a dirty mess, but nothing that several pails of warm water with bleach, a scrub brush, and some springtime energy couldn't handle. Now it's spotless and I feel victorious over that part of my tiny world.

Being very active all day like this is certainly easier than it would have been a year ago, when I weighed 25 pounds more.

Adrienne and my cranky leg

I think I lucked out at Sherwood Physiotherapy... a few weeks ago someone dropped by and left off a resumé. Once in awhile people leave resumés, usually for a reception job, but this one was from a PT. I checked it over and liked what I saw. New grad but a mature thirty-two years of age, already through one career as a professional dancer, experience with sports injuries, has already done a research project.

It seemed curious that she would pick my practice to apply to, so I gave her a call to find out more. We decided to meet so I could show her the clinic, then go for coffee. Turns out she wanted to work from my space in order to be convenient for all the dancers that live in the 'hood, where yoga and dance studios are everywhere. She had done her homework, had moved into the neighbourhood three weeks earlier, and decided to aim for employment at my place, which is the only PT clinic for blocks and blocks.

To call it a "clinic" is a bit presumptuous of me... It's more like a room in a nice office suite. A non-PT practitioner also has a practice in that suite, who I get along with quite well. Our practices have no overlap, other than we share the cost of a receptionist. My practice is one-on-one, carefully teasing the pain out of people while accompanying them for one or a few sessions.

It was dreadfully slow in Feb, so there was nothing for her to pick up, but this week is going better. She will take over my normal Wednesday off. See patients. Help pay some of the overhead.

We have been busy getting some promo material together, chatting about pain, treatment... I loaned her some books, the treatment manual I developed. Today she tried out some manual therapy on me.

Well, all I've got to say is the woman has hands on her that are like butter. My cranky right leg (which has been cranky for over 50 years) very much liked what she did to it. It's still working with what she was able to get it to let go of. It feels like it has little happy faces mixed with 7-up bubbles running through its vessels instead of blood. Walking home it felt like it was looser, stronger, longer and didn't get as tired as the left leg did, so I know my S1 cortex must have neuroplasticized a fair bit.

My cranky leg/ankle foot stems from a sprain at age 5. Age 5. I vaguely remember that it hurt for what felt like months. It was never handled, never cared for, never treated.

Lucky for me, I have the right mix of receptors or something, because it never gave rise to CRPS or fibromyalgia or anything. Most of the time it hasn't "hurt", exactly. It just felt shrunken and tight, like the antigravity suit was a bit too tight in the leg zone. No amount of yoga ever helped. Nothing I learned to do (to or with it, on my own) in over 50 years, almost 40 of which was spent being a PT, helped. OMPT certainly didn't help - in fact it made it hurt a lot for awhile. I saw a massage therapist who helped the pain, but my sense of it feeling "wrong" remained. I figured out a lot of my imaginative tape techniques by using my own leg to practice on.

This is all a big lead up to what happened today. I had let Adrienne watch me treat a few people, with their permission of course.. so today she wanted to practice a tarsal tunnel treatment, and knee treatment. Long story short, the work she did felt remarkable, and still does; all the Barrett Dorko characteristics of correction (fondly referred to as C's of C) - warmth, softening, effortless(!) movement (quite a bit of that - twitching, pulsing etc.), surprise (I've not had those sorts of results from other practitioners who've worked on me) - developed during the session. It was like my leg had been waiting for this for a very long time and was more than ready to have its nerves treated instead of its bones and muscles and joints.

So, I'm sold on Adrienne. So's my leg. Here's a little write-up about her that I attached to my website. I feel really good about the prospect, when the time comes, of leaving my practice, and all the people who've come to it for 15 years, in her very, very good hands.

More about making progress

So, today was a serious book day. I spent all morning sifting the remaining 25% of the total, which took hours. I was able to list a few more. I have 144 listed, 5 purchased and off the list.

The entire process feels like molting. Molting is something that often comes as a surprise to a human primate, because we have no fur, really.. yet, most animals molt, and I think we do too, although more in a symbolic, non-conscious way perhaps. I tried to explain this recently to someone.

Apparently even primates molt, so I don't see why it would be outside the world of symbolic or even otherwise non-conscious expression of the human neuromatrix. I think another metaphor would be ripened compost - if it can't decompose any more, it either needs to support growth (die to itself while helping transform something into something else -birthing) or else it needs more scraps to take apart (feeding). If it doesn't move somehow, back into a flow, it is a waste of perfectly good nature. Human lives are long but still all too short to be wasted on regret or stasis. That's how I've always lived the one I've got, at least. A molt: when one's life no longer fits one comfortably, time to move it to a new sleeping nest. It's the human primate way.

Molting seems to be a not-very-enjoyable process for everyone who does it. Insects are at their most vulnerable as they push themselves out of their cocoons. Snakes have to strip themselves out of their own skins by first slashing their face skin on a rock. Birds look absolutely awful when they are partly molted. Dogs shed. Cats shed. Monkeys molt. It's a price critters have to pay. They don't look attractive while molting, and they must feel quite itchy and preoccupied. This all feels familiar to me on a mental level just now.

Last night, while in a wound-up, sleepless state, brought on no doubt by being preoccupied with trying to hold it together on the surface while feeling like everything is falling apart inside, and writing about it, sort of.. I wrote, regarding the mountain of books, "No one wants them - I can't even give them away.

Ha. What a difference a day makes.

I had noticed that whenever I put out a few loads of books they did seem to vanish fast. I accepted that. The neighbourhood is full of dumpster divers patrolling at all hours of the day and night, looking for anything they might be able to sell. This morning I took out a few bags full, went back in, came back out with a bag of garbage not five minutes later. Much to my surprise I found a car parked with its doors open, and a woman and two teenage girls merrily chattering and rapidly scooping up the books, putting them into the car. "Good" I said. "Someone is taking the books." She was about 40, very smiley and merry. "Oh yes, I've been finding piles of books here every day for the last three days. I've been coming over to rescue them! I love books! My mother loves books! I just live over there.." and she gestured across the alley.

So, it turns out that she's lived across the alley from me, a single mom raising her daughters, for years, since before I ever moved into my place. I told her I had a whole pile more and that she was welcome to them. Together we lugged the books over to her place and stacked them on the floor. About 6 round trips with my two plastic baskets and two cloth shopping bags for her. She was ecstatic. She was planning to go to massage school now that her children were nearly launched into life. Many of my discards were books she wanted but would have had a hard time affording, perhaps. Plus, she knows people who know people who can sell them for 50 cents each, or whatever, to raise money for battered women's projects, at used-clothing stores, etc. So hey, letting go of this burden is a good thing that benefits this very nice, nurturing woman and her social network, and helps feed her dream of being a self-sustaining body worker person in some community in the interior some day. It's all good.

A woman I know commented to me recently that I was good at manifesting. I said, "Well, I don't believe in that. But I do believe that situations do emerge, which require resolution, and that resolution of situations is a natural phenomenon." "Oh," she said.

Making progress

The story of this month of February was the story of climbing back up out of winter, fighting off inertia, figuring out how to start a seller account on Amazon and plowing through my biggest problem first - what feels like thousands of books, but which only add up to.. well, maybe one thousand. Which is still a lot of books to deal with.

I soon found out that I couldn't become a seller on Amazon.com. As a Canadian I do not have that privilege. I'm restricted to Amazon.ca. Okie-doakie. As I started to list I realized there was absolutely no point in listing any book for anything less than $20. It costs nearly that much to mail a book somewhere. One has to buy mailing boxes or padded envelopes, some bubble wrap to keep the book safe, etc. Postage varies according to how heavy or big the book is, but rarely will come in under $10.

I learned some things fast - like that I was going to have to face the fact that it would be necessary to toss out most of them. No one wants them - I can't even give them away. Unbelievable. This took some getting used to. I'm ordinarily a resilient person, but these books were my friends, lovingly collected over at least a decade, most of them read or at least scanned, all of them worth another go, some of them worth a great deal more time spent lingering lovingly over their content. It created great disquiet, having to get started on the painful job of deconstructing my library collection. I never expected I'd ever move again as long as I lived, you see. I thought it was safe to start letting things like books accumulate. I had no idea I'd become seasonally affectively disordered to the point of being E-ffectively disordered as well. And realizing the situation and that I had to escape it.

I keep thinking maybe this is what it's like to be old and facing demise. One has a lifetime of treasured moments that one simply cannot share with anyone anymore. One has lost one's ability to do so. Maybe one's life has gone up in a house fire, along with all the pictures. Maybe one loses one's own mind, and the memories have deleted themselves. Maybe everyone in one's particular circle, including family members, is horribly killed in a war or something, and one finds oneself alone in the world. Now, picture yourself having to be the one to deliberately destroy these relationships, be the agent of one's own severance away from the minds of so many others, be the bad guy. Every time I picked up a book, checked it out to see if it was worth any money on Amazon, then put it onto the Keep, Sell, or Toss pile, I felt like I was killing or saving or selling another of my own friends. Only about 1 book in 10 is worth any money, therefore worth listing. I am keeping only about one book in 40. (This is the grief talking.)

It wasn't all bad though - what a happy surprise to learn that a single ortho text I had (and had absolutely no attachment to) was unavailable except for a few listed as "used-good condition", for around $600. I laughed out loud! I listed mine for $100 (I have no idea what I had paid for it new) and it was snapped up within hours. A really old (decades old) joint physiology text I lugged around through several moves sold - I'll be sending it off tomorrow. It's Vol 2 - Vol 1 and 3 are still for sale.

There are other surprises. Some books I bought for 4 or 5 dollars used are worth much much more these days. Alrighty then. They are listed. I started this venture a week ago, and have sent off 5 books so far, made about $200. A side benefit is that I stared a special account for this and have learned to do online banking now. (I feel so modern. It's the pride talking.)

Every day I haul out the less fortunate to the back alley, two bags full. I have two nifty bright colored shopping baskets I bought long ago on a trip to Central America. They are made out of some absolutely indestructible plastic woven into bright stripes and have sturdy handles. I use them for recycle containers usually, but now they are for hauling books I must discard. I still have three large stacks of books to go through, each one as tall as my waist. I've managed to get rid of two half height bookcases about a yard wide. My neighbour snapped them up to hold shoes in her hallway. I'm about three-quarters through the book mountain. (This is the relief talking.)

This whole chapter of life is very much about relief mixed in with regret. It makes me realize that in fact, it is entirely within the capacity of the human system to be able to feel two conflicting emotions, fully, at once, and stretch oneself enough to be able to contain both, and find whatever it takes inside to plow along, move forward anyway. Even if it feels like swimming through quicksand. One simply says to oneself, You can do this. It won't be much longer. Think how much easier life will be once you live in a sunny climate again.

So, by now if you've been reading along, you may be thinking, strange woman, bonded to her books instead of to a family or to other people. Well, in fact, I think I must have seen this whole parting thing and the pain it brings, way in advance, long before I ever experienced any of the joy bonding to others supposedly brings, while still a child. Generally, I've seen that the parting part of intimately relating seems to last a lot longer and be a lot less pleasant than the joining and developing part. At least in my experience. Therefore I have always had a cautious heart - never let it get too attached to any person. Enjoyed friends but never got overly attached. But books - books and cats - those were different stories entirely. I have been very incautious about bonding to both. Both are still capable of breaking my heart, right to this day, when the inevitable parting comes. Perhaps one day I will learn to not be so attached to them either.

My fantasy is to move completely unencumbered by "stuff." Have everything on my computer contained in a couple flash drives. Move into a new space with lots of windows and never again accumulate. Bare walls, bare floor. Painted plain white.

Truth is more like I'll still have boxes of stuff to move. But it will be like the old days when I was a student - just a few boxes: some changes of clothing, some kitchen stuff, some personal things, photos, and maybe 4 boxes of books, the laptop. But no furniture. Sleep on the floor for awhile. Buy a new desk top computer at the other end. Read books online instead. Live light.

Other bits of progress: I have a real estate agent at the other end, and one at this end. I have a good reliable fix-it guy to handle minor repairs here, to help me get my place impeccable-ized. A young woman walked into my PT life and wants to work in my place. I might have even found a buyer for the practice, although it will take a good thorough investigation first. I would take these things as "signs" that I'm on the right track, if I believed in such things. It doesn't seem to help me sleep soundly at night, every night, however. Plenty of tossing and turning and that upheavaled feeling. I swear it feels worse at this age than it used to, way back a couple decades ago.

Humans, the neotenous primate

Deric at Mindblog posted about this essay by Alison Gopnik titled Never-ending childhood.

Excerpts:

"people will have to learn more and more. The best way to make it happen is to extend the period when we learn the most — childhood."

"We may remain children forever — or at least for much longer."

"Humans already have a longer period of protected immaturity — a longer childhood — than any other species. Across species, a long childhood is correlated with an evolutionary strategy that depends on flexibility, intelligence and learning."

"Children get to learn freely about their particular environment without worrying about their own survival — caregivers look after that."

Well, ideally anyway... I think it's debatable. Lots of children all over the world now wander in streets having to be self-sufficient far too young. They get "old" far sooner than they should have to. Meanwhile, "chidren" elsewhere live and grow up to and through sexual maturity in socially reinforced and rewarded bubble zones of childhood and postadolescent protection, until they reach middle age.

The essay ends with,

"When we are all babies for ever, who will be the parents? When we're all children who will be the grown-ups?"

Exactly. Who indeed.

Exceptionalism of the American kind

Human primate life is equal parts bio/psycho/social. Ordinarily I look at the bio part; sometimes the psycho aspect is interesting, but only very rarely (for this introvert) does the big-wide-world social matrix interest me enough to write something on it. This week, the Obama-thon had everyone, even me, glued to a TV set.

The Obama inauguration has come and gone leaving a very big wake. Ripples will come off that event for a long time. Probably nothing since the death of Princess Di has managed to rivet people's attention worldwide to such a single sustained focus for a couple whole days.
.....................

So, I heard Obama talk about American exceptionalism, and wondered what it was. I read a bit about it (including this), and have tried to figure out what its implications are.

As a Canadian, I see the US culture, its political construct, its way of organizing itself as a human primate troop, its behaviour and its impact, against a whole backdrop of older, tamer, more restrictive, certainly more ubiquitous, settled, and staid political systems, such as monarchy, or even dictatorship, where things settled into more less stable layers a long time ago. Boring, right? On the surface, the insistence on democracy sounds very very good, very refreshing. (I think 200+ years is a mere blink in social, human primate troop time.)

To me the term suggests pride in deliberate disinhibition of human potential, deliberately facilitated by a "human primate troop" (societal) political structure which accelerates movement between strata both laterally and vertically, horizontally and diagonally. It has always seemed to me that the "American Way" is self-congratulatory on its success at having developed a system that managed to un-lid human creativity, ingenuity, efficiency, adaptability, and effervescence. That is something everyone of every culture, country, age and color, is immediately addicted to. It's a manifestation of "people" power, and everyone wants to wear its symbols, eat the candy.

I watched Obama test the political part of the US electoral system, from the lowest P4 level deep down, on up to the pinnacle of the system, and prove it works - after all, he did go from being a potentially laid-back Hawaiian kid of a single mom, to being president of the US, in under 50 years. He proved that the idea that "anyone can become president" isn't just a myth - he figured out the trick! He studied, took apart the political machine, analyzed it, and was able to convince a majority that he is willing to and can put it all back together again, in working order. This says something about him, his choices, how he was raised, for sure, but it also says a lot about a system that anyone, REALLY, not just theoretically, can learn to manipulate, leverage to advantage.

He must be the world's most successful extrovert. He represents the people of the entire planet. He still smokes. That's got to make the tobacco lobby happy. Clearly he can think and plot. Read and write. Make great speeches. And look good.
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The dark side I see in American exceptionalism is this: It may have created its own demise from the beginning, due directly to having deliberately laid in political dis-inhibition, permitting social "upward causation" instead of functioning as social inhibition, keeping a lid on things, the way other political systems do.

I think this memeplex (which had never really existed, prior, at a nation level, start to finish), emerged as a raging cachectic economic fireball which started out small, 200 odd years ago, but which is now consuming everything, including everyone everywhere who was ever mesmerized by the spectacle of a country that gets-things-done no matter how much it might cost, whose business is business, whose might has rested on seeing how fast it can transform "nature" (which it calls "resources") into another second artificial circulation system of other stuff/money that isn't alive and is therefore hard for nature to take apart again. Runaway growth. Poking holes in the planet as fast as possible to extract oil as fast as possible. Using up nature. It all set an unfortunate example for the rest of the peoples on the planet, and they copied. (Damn those human primate mirror neurons.)

If Obama can manage to turn something like this around, green up US citizenry, grow the country a bit of a conscience, help it find some smooth way to stop acting like a reckless teenager banging the whole planet around, every human on the planet will be grateful to him. He won't be just another poser filling a job slot, he'll have been for real.

The Game he'll have to play, the thing that will keep all eyes riveted on him, is to stay suspended in mid-air (like this picture of him effortlessly playing basketball), so that no one spots his "tell", so that no one will know to the very last millisecond which way he is going to come down or which part will touch down first.

Mesmerize by continuous motion coupled with frequent reflection outward of attractive toothy grin, calm inner state, deliver all news (including the bad) in even soothing sedate studied tones, leave no stone unturned (take the oath twice just to make sure), report any progress, and obstacles, cheer on human creativity, ingenuity, efficiency, adaptability, and effervescence, but bend it toward solving social problems instead of making more of them through allowing the American memeplex to go unchecked with a social kind of "downward causation" - i.e., encouraging the sole objective of making more stuff/money => and fighting wars all over the place to maintain access to resources => to make stuff/money... etc.etc.

I'm so glad, if the perhaps overly optimistic US economic system had to fall apart some day, that it fell apart while Bush was still in office. The timing couldn't have been better, really, in that no one will ever be able to blame that on Obama. The political system may also collapse some day, but while it's still functional I'm glad that Obama is the one who has taken it on. It's as though he has volunteered to be the engineer on a freight train which has experienced sudden loss of brakes and is hurtling downhill. Maybe he can figure out how to steer it safely, maybe repair the brakes before it's too late... wishful thinking. The train looks like it's going to crash, but maybe he can save most of the passengers. At least he seems to care about them...

I say all this as someone from a more staid, less fast-moving, monarchist, pseudo- (by US standards) democracy slightly to the north of the US., with lots of resources, fewer people, which has never been in any great hurry to use them up completely as fast as possible. The pace is slower - we like to wait for nature to grow back a bit before we cut it down again..

Our head of state, Michaelle Jean, is a black first generation Haitian refugee, who (as far as I know) doesn't smoke. She was appointed to represent the queen.


Mostly she gets to travel and look good and attend tea parties, but if political trouble brews, as it did here last fall, she flies home, turns to page 57, section D paragraph 3, point viii, (or wherever) and does what's written in the traditional rulebook. Simple.
We have a protocol for everything, you see, and it saves everyone lots of stress, let's everyone get back to their respective tea parties.

The politicians of Canada are decidedly not noted for any creativity, ingenuity, efficiency, adaptability, and effervescence. They show up (usually) and (usually) keep things rolling along, but Canuck citizens are not required to participate in government in anything like the way US citizens are all expected to contribute. (I was amazed that the US ballots are several pages long, that each person who votes has to become familiar with every issue and its implications, that nothing much happens until and unless ordinary citizens haul themselves out to become informed about then vote on each item. Here, we, the Canuck citizens, hire politicians to do all that. We have all adopted our own versions of the "downward causation" tea party memeplex, instead, I suppose.)

I do not see that the citizens of the US have gotten much for their trouble so far. I see that, so far, the "democracy" they continue to have to pour effort and personal sacrifice into hasn't looked after them yet. Maybe it will start soon.

I also see that US citizens finally spotted someone who made them stop feeling tired and burnt out. Who has made them feel like maybe they can stop feeling oppressed, or like they maybe won't have to fight each other and the government for each and every scrap they have coming to them. Someone who might actually stop trying to hoover up all the remaining resources on the entire planet, and who might listen to them for a change, might try to re-route a few organized efforts their way to make ordinary lives a bit easier, less expensive, who might even help lighten the load on the whole planet for a change, make everything less expensive. Who might see "people" as integral bits of the earth, and the earth as the only place we all can ever "live." Who might see that it's time to stop acting like there's no tomorrow, now that there might not actually be much of a "tomorrow"...

Maybe even change the meaning of "exceptionalism" so that it more accurately reflects what US people are really all about, a very hard-working, self-democratized human primate troop, so we all get to see what kind of global conduct and capacity to carry responsibility they've really been training themselves for two centuries or thereabouts to have, and how they see what's going on/going down.

Can an entire human troop (the people of the US) lead all the other slower troops (every other country)? Can the supposedly less politically blind lead the presumably more blind? Out of a dangerous chasm it led everyone/everything into in the first place? Perhaps just by using up the planet faster than it could replenish itself?

I guess we'll all find out one day, in retrospect, if this is so. Maybe Obama will be able to arrange that. Meanwhile, I will continue to watch him, listen to him. I felt included in his address, because he included everybody, everywhere, and mentioned non-believers alongside other groups specified. It's a nice warm fuzzy to have one of one's primary groups be recognized, by name, by the newest politically alpha human primate of the entire world's human primate troop.

Additional reading:
1. Getting there from here (Atul Gawande on health care reform, New Yorker Jan 26/09)
2. Path dependence - definitions
3. Compatibilism from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
4. "If the world were a village of 1000 people"
5. American Exceptionalism - A Double Edged Sword (Lipset)
6. On America's Double Standard: The good and bad faces of exceptionalism by Harold Hongju Koh (2004)

Insular Winter Wallowing

I've been interested in the insular cortex for a long time now, thanks to Deric Bownd's Mindblog having introduced me to this brain part, and also the posts over there about Sandra Blakeslee's book, The Body has a Mind of its Own, about brain maps. Sandra Blakeslee follows the research of A.D.Craig, who studies the insula from the perspective of its relationship to ascending nociception. Awareness of what's going on on the inside of one's physicality and of oneself (whatever self is), is called interoception. The brain is continuously interocepting, and one can merely tune in if one wants. In my work, I teach people to become aware of their physicality, while mostly leaving it up to them to hook their new ability to perceive their physicality up to them"selves."

Deric Bownds has a new post, How do you feel - now? The anterior insula and human awareness, which describes a new Craig paper by the same name. The paper is in Nature Neuroscience Reviews. It's full of interesting ideas; like the hub of a bicycle wheel, spokes go everywhere from this paper. I haven't yet even begun to digest it, but might blog more about various spokes later.

Meanwhile, I found an old article, Flesh made Soul, by Sandra Blakeslee, on interoception and spirituality, which I found very interesting on re-read. (Here is a link to her articles page. You have to find Flesh made Soul, about fourth down the list at this time.) She talks about interoception and wonders if it has anything to do with spiritual feelings. She is an atheist, which I find reassuring.

I have been wallowing in my own insular cortices (one on each side and they do different things) for many weeks, and will continue to wallow into the indistinct future. Posts might be sparse for a little while as I sort through the prospect of pulling up an entire life that I had thought was finally settled, and moving on to a sunnier place. I will be back, but not right away, probably.

Vancouver photon levels

Pictures were taken today, at about 2 PM. Note the low light levels and black and white/colorlessness overall. Things could be worse, photon-wise, there could be no snow at all. At least with snow, photons bounce around some.
I don't know why I'm still living here. I do know I can't for very many more years.

"Can I be ill and happy?"

A PT friend sent me a link to an article called Can I be ill and happy? about a book he is reading, Illness: Cry of the Flesh, by Havi Carel, a philosopher, also the author of the article.

A review of the book found on the sales page says (abbreviated):

"This book is a tremendous achievement, as well as being a very moving personal document. It is a philosophical meditation on the nature of and social meaning illness, disease and death. It discusses philosophical and psychological literature, Epicurus, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. But it is also a personal memoir, it is about Carel's experience of being diagnosed with a life-threatening illness, about what that meant for her presence in the world, about how she appeared in the eyes of others, and how she felt she appeared. It is about the encounter with medical professionals and their detached and external perspective on another's catastrophe; it is about the varied reactions of friends, some of whom couldn't maintain friendship. It is about how to confront the fact that all your assumptions about how your life is going to go: career, relationships, family, old age, can just be taken away. Carel was diagnosed with lymphangioleiomyomatosis (LAM), a rare disease that affects young women, and for which the progosis is about 10 years from the onset of symptoms. The sufferer experiences a progressive decline in lung-function over that time. Life may be extended by a heart-lung transplant, but that's, obviously, a difficult business. .... She uses Merleau-Ponty's ideas about embodied subjectivity throughout the book to explore what illness is like for the sick person and how powers and abilities that are invisible to and taken for granted by the well person become all too manifest to the sick (or disabled or ageing) person. All the time, she is constantly moving backwards and forwards between this theoretical discussion and the fact of her own experience: the first onset of symptoms, "denial", diagnosis, treatment, the foreclosure of plans, projects, possibilities. The phenomenology of social situations gets explored too: how people react, their sensitivities and insensitivities, callous reactions, stupid injunctions from ignorant people to try faddish diets of exercise routines."

Another review.
Excerpt:

"The book seamlessly blends philosophical writings in illness (mainly those of Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger) with phenomenology to privilege the first-person experience of illness. It begins with a discussion of what is meant by the phenomenology of illness, and by the end of the first chapter it is clear why Carel chose to adopt a phenomenological approach. We learn more about how the illness affects her on a personal basis, rather than a simple statistical charting of her decreasing lung function.

Next, Carel examines the social world of illness. She suggests that rather than viewing illness through either the first or third person (depending on your relationship to it), it should be managed through what Buber calls the I-Thou encounter, of one person genuinely encountering another. Using this approach to illness, Carel argues that the principal exchange between doctors and patients should be more empathetic and compassionate, rather than based on the "objective" method most commonly associated with Western approaches to health and illness.

Later chapters examine death and what Carel terms "health within illness". Here, the philosophical discussion centres on Heidegger's characterisation of human existence as "being able to be". Carel asks whether ageing and illness means coming to terms with being unable to be. Given that somebody might be ill, does being ill mean that he or she is unable to have a good life?"

Definitely looks like it would be worth a read. Looks like it will contain all sorts of extractable information useful to anyone embedded in a humanantigravitysuit complete with lifespan, whether short or long, coded into it.

Sensory awareness

So, I've been noticing my skin and how it feels since I got back. Well, all along really, but one thing I realize is how much more I am aware of it. I expect that my brain had become quite bored with 18 years of sameness and craved some new kinesthetic input.

Differences:

1. I became quite used to wearing light loose clothing (and not much of it) in Hawaii. The big difference is footwear. I absolutely hated the idea, two mornings ago, of putting on socks and shoes for the trip home on the plane. I thought about wearing flipflops until the last second, in the boarding lounge, but decided that would require too much effort, so put the flipflops in the luggage and donned the socks and shoes. But guess what I saw in the lounge? At least two people had worn flipflops from their condos, and were sitting in the boarding lounge digging out and putting on their socks and shoes. The first idea would have been the better one, and socially facilitated to boot.
2. Since I've been back, my feet, which have become reacquainted with the joys of perfect shoeless bareness and freedom and complete warmth, have been allowed to go without slippers. When they get cold, I can "feel" it, and they are put into slippers. I'm just more aware of my feet, period. They feel good!
3. My skin still feels warm from having had a taste of sunshine and direct radiation on it, in all the parts that had some. Back mostly. My back still feels deliciously warm, in the zone where it became tanned.
4. I feel better inside myself, whatever self is: my working hypothesis is that by stimulating the skin nerve endings with climatic warmth, and light, not just the ones in the eye-balls, there is a new congruence or even maybe reacquaintance of the visual sensory cortex with the kinesthetic sensory cortex, and some neuroplasticity has occurred, neuroplasticity of the most overdue sort. The thing is, I had gotten very very very far away from sunbathing. For so many reasons:

• Skin cancer. I don't care as much anymore about this, as I've gotten old enough that I imagine I will outlive the chances of it starting up then killing me.
• Having aged and fattened and become more shy about degree of body coverage. In Hawaii no one, and I mean no one, cares, or at least there is little or no gawking. The whole culture of the place is that the body is exactly where you live and operate from and it does not matter what it looks like. The culture there is not a snob, in other words.
• Here in Vancouver, even when it's hot out, it's such a rare event that most people are not in the habit of lying around in the sun. So the opportunities that do exist are missed, except I suppose for those with their own pool in their own yard to lie beside. Not a fact of life for most, so most everyone stays covered. Plus... it's always cool here, even on hot days, because as soon as you go in the shade or a cloud goes across, bam, it's immediately cold enough to be comfortable in ordinary cool-weather clothing and footwear. Poor brains! In cold climates they miss out on a lot of sensory integration! And then this behaviour gets reinforced by culture.
  
• I feel I reconnected to the sensory self I was as a child, with complete bodily freedom, few clothes and no shoes. More neuroplasticity there, through the arrow of time.

One little detail I forgot, a brilliant sensory cap to the entire vacation, was the big rainbow over the airport. It seemed to last for a very long time, at least an hour. As the plane took off it was visible out one of the windows in my line of sight. Nice send-off Hawaii - thanks for that.

Luck

Back home again. Lots of snow here. The plane landed about midnight. There were no cabs. Lucky for me, after schlepping my three bags about a quarter mile outside the airport, I saw a cabbie sitting, waiting.. I approached him, learned he was waiting to pick up his daughter. He was a nice guy and took pity on me - he and his daughter took me to my place anyway, and he kept us entertained with stories about all the novelty involved with driving in heavy snow.

It seems the city literally ground to a halt. Everyone's holiday plans went awry. No one could travel in or out of the city, which was buried under two feet of snow delivered by sideways winds. The airport could only operate one runway. Taxi drivers who lived in areas that got socked in couldn't get out to go to work, so they just laid low. No grocery deliveries could be made. Nothing moved for days.

Meanwhile, I was carefree in Maui with little or no attachment to the holiday part of the season, and therefore no plans ruined, having a mytai Christmas eve with the other carefree grey-haired people under a roofed area under a tropical rain, letting rum internally massage my spirit into something a bit brighter. Lucky me.

Last night's flight coincided with a lull in the weather such that there was only a two hour delay instead of a two day delay. Lucky me again. I came into my peaceful apartment last night, about 1:30 AM, tried to not wake up any neighbours, felt my familiar surroundings around me once again, noted that all seemed well, that my neighbour had very kindly piled my mail neatly, had watered the plant, and had made the place look lived in, in exchange for the promise of a couple boxes of those decadent chocolate macadamia nuts. Lucky me yet again for having a wonderful neighbour. Hello place - how strangely familiar yet novel, both at the same time.

This morning I checked to see what damage had been inflicted on the diet plan - only one pound gained, in spite of a steady diet of chocolate macadamia nuts, eggs benedict and mytais. Not bad I think. And it's been very easy to climb right back onto the former plan again today. Yet more luck.

I walked to the grocery store this morning, about a half kilometer there and another back. I loved the coolness of the air - just as much as I loved the warmth in Maui. It isn't cold out - I mean, no need for hat or mitts, just cool against a face that is still warm from direct sun. The sky, while not blue, is definitely letting sun through in some places. Way less bird song. No wind. No roar of surf. Very hushed, bright, peaceful. "Bright" is a new adjective - snow makes a huge difference to the overall photon level. I could even see my shadow, rare in these foggy dark edgeless parts.. lucky lucky lucky.

Yes, I think it will be possible to get through this winter in pretty good shape for a change. I feel an inner congruence that I haven't sensed in a long long time. Luck, my old friend, welcome back into my life. More snow is expected, and no complete melt until February. Sounds crazy, I realize, but I sincerely hope that's true.

Last day

In a few more hours I will be sitting in Kahului airport waiting for my Westjet flight to begin. Then I'll wait several more hours inside the airplane waiting for it to land. That's going to be my life today. Other days are usually better. I must say, the last three weeks have been mostly splendid, from a nature/climate/weather point of view.

Here is what awaits me at the other end, from one of today's weathercams. Of course, it will be night time instead of daylight.

I'm interested in learning if I succumb to SAD this winter or if spending a whole pile of cash to get outside this physical fogbank will have helped me avoid the inner one.

Bye bye Hawaii. Mahalo for all the lovely warm sunny days, wavy palm trees, birds, flowers, photon showers and purple ocean gazing. Thanks for letting me experience several warm salty surf splashes and immersions. Thanks for the modest tan I'll have for at least a week after I get back. It's been a good slice.

Surf's up

December 25, 2008

Happy everything to everyone.

Exercising permeable boundaries

Living for a few weeks in Maui has exposed my northern-acclimated brain to many new novel stimuli, one of which is the phenomenon of continuously open-to-the-outside glass slat windows. At first when the curtains billowed I would check to see if I had left the balcony door open, but no, it was closed, securely locked. In fact at first I didn't even realize there were banks of open slat windows along each side of the wall behind the drapes, that in fact one whole end of the condo was completely glass.

This makes for a bit of an adjustment, to constant fresh air and to continuous noise. The fresh air, I must admit, is very nice. Since the temperature is the same indoors and out, no problem. The noise took a bit more getting used to - not that people around here are noisy, with the exception, perhaps, of children having a marvelous time in the pool right outside - but I was not used to hearing every song from every bird, or every rustle of every bush as the breeze blows through. It's quite wonderful in many ways.

Fortunately, there is little or no crime here. I do keep the place locked, out of habit, and to minimize my own endogenous stress level, but I am very grateful that there is little to no exogenously caused stress around here. A very peaceful place indeed.

It occurred to me that I have yet to see any cats wandering around. I expect this goes a long way toward explaining why there are so many birds and why they all walk around as though they own the place. Truth is, they do.


I'm going to be a little sad to have to go back home on Saturday. I feel like I finally have arrived, not in Maui but to myself. Thanks in large part to Maui. Aloha, self. Peace.

A touristy day in Lahaina, Maui Part III: my salute to the Hawai'ian flag

Ever since I got here I've seen lots of flags - Canadian, American, a blue one which I have yet to learn about, and one I learned about today, the Hawai'ian flag. Here is the history of the overthrow of the Hawai'ian monarchy by the US, from the point of view of the Hawai'ian indigenous people. In 1898, the Hawai'ian flag was lowered in a ceremony conducted by Arthur Waal, the postmaster, and a US flag was put up, right in the courtyard of Lahaina, where the banyan tree imported by the missionaries lives. In 1998, Hawai'ian pride rose, and the flag was resurrected at a ceremony marking the hundredth anniversary of its displacement.

This link depicts the flag's design and what is represented by it. This Wikipedia link mentions that

"The flag of Hawaii (Hawaiian: Ka Hae Hawaiʻi) is the official standard symbolizing Hawaii as a U.S. state, as it previously had as a kingdom, protectorate, republic, and territory. It is the only state flag of the United States to have been flown under so many various forms of government and the only to feature the Union Flag of the United Kingdom, a relic of the period Hawaii considered itself a British protectorate (1794–1843)."

At the museum today, I saw the original, the one that had been taken down in 1898, by the postmaster of the day, Arthur Waal. I've included my little photo of it, framed and in the museum in Lahaina.

The story that goes with its return made my eyes wet, and still does, even now, hours and hours later.





First, we have the reluctant postmaster, ordered by his country to do some dominating behaviour to do with exchanging flags. So, he does. As graciously as possible.



He writes about the event in a way that suggests he was of very mixed feelings about the whole idea. He describes the solemnity of the Hawai'ian people as they see their flag come down. He feels for them. Here is a piece he wrote about it, after the fact. (Hopefully the picture will enlarge if you click on it, so you can read his words.

Long story short, he takes their flag back to California with him, and looks after it. Presumably he dies at some point, and his son is given the job of looking after it. Perhaps the son, Arthur Waal Jr., is in a clutter-busting mood one day, or perhaps he gets wind of Hawai'ian Pride starting up... in any event, he contacts the appropriate authorities, and offers them back their flag, the original.

Fast forward to 2002. New ceremony. A Hawai'ian woman, possibly a relative of the old royal family, in any case, a Kupuna, an esteemed elder, Pua Lindsey, makes a speech, is given the flag back, and in the process of accepting the flag, tenderly puts a lei on it, and thanks Mr. Waal for having taken such good care of it all this time.



The lei is no ordinary lei - it is a luxurious beautiful stunning lei, about an inch and a half thick, constructed entirely of soft golden feathers. Here is the picture of that, to the left.

If you click on the picture you will be able to see a larger version (I hope), and will be able to read it and go all mushy like I did.

There is something about someone laying a soft infinitely gorgeous feather lei "gently" on a tattered flag - the original flag that came down when their sovereignty, their nationhood, was rudely yanked away merely to smooth out business bumps - the kindness with which the flag (if not the sovereignty it symbolizes at least the physical object itself) was restored by this man, this son who may have noted his father's sense of helplessness, perhaps even sense of guilt, who enacts a ceremony that likely gave him as much personal peace of mind as it evidently gave this gracious group of people who received it back so lovingly... there is something about this gentle action toward a physical object that symbolizes a nation and its betrayal, at the same time, that reconciles opposites somehow, that is a forgiveness and a redemption.

Something about this event makes me feel something, powerfully and fully, gives me goose bumps, makes me think that members of the human race, in spite of its many warts, can do some really beautiful things for one another. It all has to do with that word, "gentle," which seems synonymous with "noble" somehow. Which is more noble?
1. To give back something that never was yours to begin with? Um... no... it is kind, but not noble.
2. To accept that stolen object and all the betrayal it represents, back, in a very gracious way? With a simple, gentle action that simultaneously forgives the representative of the wrong-doers, forgives those ancestors who were duped, demonstrates loving regard for everything once attached to the original meaning of the object? But that lets go of the past? That lays "nature" (symbolized by a beautiful splendid lei) on top of an artifact of a civilization that once was? Without animosity? Yes. In my mind, this is "noble."

"Gentle" is how I've striven to learn to do my hands-on work and have succeeded. It's how the weather is here (mostly). It's how the flowers are here. It's something that ties in with how that child danced at the luau. It's something that was once cultivated as a desirable trait in people. I think I feel nostalgic for it, and would like to see the human race get back to valuing it again. There is something tremendously powerful and for today, at least, in my mind, interchangeable about "gentleness" and "nobleness" that has been buried deep beneath "might is right" for way too long.

A touristy day in Lahaina, Maui Part II: Monster of the plant world

The apparently famous banyan tree in Lahaina was remarkable. My pictures of it did not do it justice - did not show it in true character, but I have a link here to a picture someone put up a few years ago, that shows it quite effectively. Bear in mind, a few years ago. It's a monster tree. It looks scary to me - like a giant monster, a ginormous octopus or something, growing ever larger, eagerly reaching out its tentacles to take over Maui completely some day if suddenly one day all the people were to disappear and there were no one there to keep it pruned.. an explosion in slow biological motion. Check out the lateral branch pattern, that would just keep going if people didn't keep it pruned. If one of those dangling bits touches earth, it grows into a new trunk. It is a roof over the entire park, the size of a small city block. If no one cut those back continuously, pretty soon the "tree" would be an impenetrable thicket. May there always be gardeners on Maui and may they keep that thing under control until the end of time.

Under the picture appears this explanation:

"The famous Banyan Tree located in courthouse square in the center of Lahaina was brought to Maui from India when the tree was a mere eight-feet tall. It was planted to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the establishment of Lahaina's first Christian mission. It has become the central point of town under which you'll find meetings, craft shows, entertainment and almost anything else you can imagine. The tree now reaches a height of about 50 feet and extends over 200 feet from side to side."

Here is a wikipedia link re: the "strangler fig" or banyan tree. Some reasons I can see for it becoming popular, even revered, are:

1. presumably it provides figs of some hopefully edible kind,
   
2. it would likely provide fast-growing and endless supplies of firewood for cooking,
3. it would provide shade and habitat for innumerable creatures.
   

Disadvantages would include choking out other kinds of vegetation.

A touristy day in Lahaina, Maui Part I

Today I had some energy to waste - such a luxury. I decided to be adventuresome and take the bus to Lahaina to see the Banyan tree. I saw it, and saw a great deal more as well (more about it later).

Took lots of pictures but most of them are pretty much a big yawn. Found a museum in the "Old Courthouse" that had one room devoted to the whaling industry, and taking photos was not prohibited, so I took shots of this and that. There was plenty of rusted out whaling and sailing paraphenalia there, and framed photos of how the blubber was removed from whales then cooked ... all kind of saddening, so I moved along. On one wall was an actual flipper or something, from a whale. (There was no explanatory sign that I could find.)

I was somewhat surprised to learn whales had hair on their flippers. I mean, I realize they are mammals, but I thought they did not do hair. They don't do hair the way seals do fur. It made me wonder if dolphins have hair.

Hair increases mechanoreception. It must make whales (at least this species, which I think are humpback) more sensitive to both their own movement and the movement of the environment against them. I've attached a picture of the whale part with hair.

Solstice Greetings V

At dawn today the surf was this beautiful lavender color again, while the sea itself was a burnished turquoise color.

Time to go make some more Vitamin D now, while the sun is still over the pool. What I like to do is let the sun pierce my eyelids, just for short little periods - it feels so good. Then when I put my hands over my eyes, I can see colors inside them (visual cortex waking up, or else just ectopic firing) that I never see in Vancouver - deep indigos and violets and cobalt blues. Even deep greens, although there are lots of those in Vancouver, so they don't seem as novel.

Solstice Greetings IV

Today has been the clearest my brain has been in ages. I mean ages. It might have had something to do with yesterday's sun bath, the first (nearly) all over sunbath I've had since I was a young adult. I went down by the pool, just below my balcony here. (If you imagine looking up one floor to the right, that's my room.)

I did not burn my skin, I just allowed it to make some Vitamin D for me in places it ordinarily can't. It turned slightly pink, which means I think it got busy.

Solstice Greetings III

Meanwhile, the downtown Barrie Cam shows me this wintery, sparkley, clear-skied scene, after a shortish but sunny day. I have decided I must plot my escape from Vancouver as soon as I can reasonably do so.

Solstice Greetings II

All day I've been checking into Vancouver's weathercam, and seeing nothing but this. It's that deep edgeless fog that Vancouver isn't but should be so famous for. The kind that stays around all winter, usually, not right on the ground like this, but just above the tops of the buildings. The kind I've been oppressed by for 18 years, and started to notice feeling oppressed by in about the last ten. Finally got tired of putting up with, last winter.

I know the cam takes a new picture every 60 seconds, and at some point the link will look all deceptively gorgeous for a few days, so I copied the image I've been seeing all day, this day, Solstice Day 2008, and jpeged it for posterity.

Solstice Greetings

Here is the sky at dawn today, here in Maui. Is that not the most gorgeous purple sky with a waning moon in it that you've ever seen at dawn?

Well, it has been for me.

Thoughts on Solstice Eve on Life's Absurdities

It all feels a bit absurd, yet completely if absurdly correct and corrective to be comfy and photonically stimulated in Maui at a time of the year when I'm normally incapable of much because of SAD. My brain feels like it will never get enough light.

The absurdity of lights wrapped around the trunks of palm trees, as in the picture to the left, taken at dawn yesterday, is counterbalanced by the thought of how absurd it would be to be languishing in Vancouver yet again right now, during this nadir of the wheel of the year, incapable of accomplishing anything much, forced into retreat because of the hubbub that occurs around "celebrating" the season, forced into idleness because of not being capable of stringing very many thoughts together in any case.. That's one kind of idleness, which feels like uncomfortable, dreadful, involuntary, forced idleness. Here, I'm actively trying to squeeze in as much "nothingness" as I possibly can. It's a completely different way to frame idleness, I'm learning..

Everything, no matter where one is this time of year, feels absurd, I suppose... It's 3 PM here and I'm drinking my first coffee of the day, in shirt sleeves and bare feet, outside on the balcony, enjoying my skinny little laptop (the only thing about me that is). The coffee is left over from yesterday. I've learned to make a potful, pour off a fresh cup, and let the rest get cold in the fridge, then drink it cold, mixed with half milk. Then drink it whenever I like.

But I'm learning to like actively adopting this kind of idleness as opposed to feeling out of synch with the other kind. Here, cultivating idleness is a fine art. People say hi, make polite but minimal chitchat (my favorite kind), as they make a slow beeline for the nearest deck chair to just sit, look, watch, rest, doze in the light. Everyone remains a stranger. No one wants to know your business or how you plan to spend Christmas or where you are going and who you'll be with, or what you plan to eat. No one here could care less about any of that stuff. Everyone is here to get away from their lives and entanglement in others' lives.

New arrivals are easy to spot. They seem edgy and anxious and too chatty. They have not yet learned to slow down so that the clock moves faster than they do. I've been here two weeks now, and my inner clock has slowed down to the point where I get asked on the street for directions to this place or that. I must look like I've been here forever or something. I can't possibly look like I know...

Right now in the pool down below my balcony is a new arrival from some land of -17C. He is around 40, I guess, somewhat heavy, and is burping, loudly and repeatedly. Perhaps the water is pressing his diaphragm upward. He is relaxing.

Life is absurd no matter where one is, or how far one is inside of or out of one's own element, but at least here it is pretty, colorful, warm, sunny, the air is extremely comfortable, there is no change of temperature from inside to outside to endure, the surf is endlessly reassuring, rhythmic, beautiful, and the different colors of ocean are a feast for the visual cortex. It's a really absurd and delightful way to get around, get through SAD, to get over what feels more and more like an ever-enlarging psychological hump at the end of every year.

A recurring image I have, that gets more intense the longer I live in Vancouver, is of myself, spread eagled onto a wheel of the year which looks like a wheel of fortune - the wheel spins and I spin with it, and every December my head goes FWAP! against the flexible brake. Don't know when the wheel will stop completely, but sure don't like those fwaps. Want to minimize them, change the picture somehow.

I have a link to a webcam of Barrie, Ontario, a place I'm considering moving to, perhaps, one of the several possibilities that exist and tumble over each other in the back of my mind as it sifts and sorts and tries to plan a way to gracefully age with more photons to enjoy meanwhile. It is at 44 degrees latitude and is under a wide blue sky, which seems more attractive for winter months, despite the snow, than Vancouver. At the moment of course, it can't compete with where I am just now. But I will look at Barrie every day, and continue to let my brain mull it over. Moving to Barrie seems less absurd in many ways than does remaining in Vancouver and needing to eject to Maui on a yearly basis. Although it wouldn't be that bad a life to stay in Vancouver and come here every winter, and although everyone around me in this place does exactly that, every year (there are people here who have been coming here regularly for 25, 35 years), there are drawbacks which seem absurd.

Advantages of moving to Barrie
1. minimize the carbon footprint by reducing the overall number of trips needed to get away to get photons,
2. increase the overall photon level year round, perhaps permitting my brain to fully recover from SAD in a few years,
3. expose my physicality to a bit more rigor by acclimating to differing temperatures throughout the year, similar to what I experienced growing up and to age 33.
4. don't have to move to Maui, become American, and give up the Canadian health system.

Dawn Day 14

Sigh.

Lavender and lace.

I loved the lavender color of the water today at dawn.

Day thirteen

I found a new path today. The potholes in the rock are about 8 inches across. According to a nearby sign, they are ancient depressions that were used by indigenous peoples to grind taro.

It is really hard to take a shot that really, really shows the color of the water. This is the best one of the bunch, relatively untouched. I didn't crop it. It contains the greens and purples found in the water here, but the picture cannot convey the intensity, not quite. The sky color is quite true. It is almost but not quite turquoise.

The water was very clear today. I saw a sea turtle come up for air, three times, about every 15 minutes.

The weather has improved hugely from last week. This little photo is from this morning's visit to the beach.

Gecko invasion

What this not very good photo, taken by me, flat on the floor on my front, using an ordinary Canon powershot digital camera, at close range in bad lighting, depicts, is a tiny gecko trapped under an ordinary highball glass, with a card stock brochure for the luau slid beneath it, in preparation for it being carted outside and dropped onto the top of the closest bush from my balcony.

It looked much cuter once there was solid glass between me and it. Prior to that, my brain was convinced that it was a hungry young dinosaur sizing me up as a food source that would last possibly for months.

We do not have geckos in Vancouver. I have seen them before, in other countries, on other trips, but not for decades, never without other people around, and never in my own personal habitat. Rarely have I had such a startling opportunity to witness my own physicality respond so abruptly to a perceived boundary issue brought on by something so tiny. I might not have even noticed it at all, in that it was a beige gecko scooting over a beige rug, but my eye caught movement and I saw it before it saw me.

There was a moment of instinctive horrified recoil. I could not help but feel it, feel it driving me toward panic, making me respond, do something, anything, to alleviate the sense of absolute wrongness my brain felt/caused me to feel, with a pounding heart and fast breathing, the entire sympathetic nervous system rush of adrenaline-driven/fight/flight response.

It seems ridiculous in retrospect, I mean c'mon, it was just a gecko (a baby to boot!) that wandered in .. as far as I know, they don't bite, besides it was tiny, probably more scared of me than I was of it - I've dealt with mice, large spiders, wasps, and calmly - this was a much smaller deal.

But in that moment, I felt freaked out.

There are two aspects that were important, in retrospect:
First, there was certain lack of prior exposure, lack of graded exposure to the phenomenon. Maybe if I lived in Australia or somewhere I'd think nothing of a harmless gecko running around in the living room.

Second, there was a boundary issue.
My brain had already moved into this condo. The brain that runs my life had already decided that the walls of the condo were the safe container within which it could relax, and had incorporated the space into itself, as "itself." (See Sandra Blakeslee, The Body has a Mind of its Own, for more about this.) However, I'm not really at home. Not really. And I think my brain might have decided on some much deeper level of context, that because it's actually on someone else's turf at the moment, maybe it didn't really have the right to be here, and might have to fight harder on behalf of its organism, should any sort of threat arise.

So, my brain over-reacted, and lucky me had a chance to see it in full threat mode for a few minutes, experience fully the anxiety and dread and disgust and sense of immediacy and need to act and pounding heart and shudder. It seems to have been a full-on primate reaction - I especially hated how the gecko moved - it darted in spurts, which made me want to get my bare toes away from the floor.

It was certainly instructive to experience my conscious attention dealing with my brain, tending it, telling it everything was going to be fine, figuring out what to do, hatching a plan (the same one I use for wasps in Vancouver that fly in through open unscreened windows), interacting with the gecko a bit to learn more about its true level of threat, in order to re-regulate the fear factor, going online to let friends know what I was dealing with and ask advice, also a primate reaction (seeking solace and virtual social grooming from members of my "troop"), and eventually improvising with a glass from the cupboard and the only stiff-enough paper I could find in the whole place to slide under it - carefully, slowly, gently, taking care to not hurt its tiny legs. I could see it looking at me - I could imagine its own teeny heart pounding and teeny brain reacting - suddenly a huge giant monster was in charge of its existence.

I took it out to the balcony and unceremoniously tossed it out of the glass onto the top of a bush, peering closely, making sure that its little sticky gecko feet had not managed to adhere to any surface I still had in my hands, or plan B would have been enacted - those objects would have been tossed as well.

Today I feel much better for having the whole episode behind me. And I'm going to deliberately ignore the fact it even happened, trust that my eyes will be on the ball, on their own, scanning their surroundings for danger of any sort, reacting appropriately if a tad strongly, keeping me safe so I can continue enjoying my stay, continuing to maintain the convenient and polite and in this situation, necessary fiction that the "I" I like to think is in charge is something other than the brain that gives rise to the illusion of "me."

Vacation timeshare pitch III

This is the front of the hotel. It's a massive thing filled with fake waterfalls and splendid viewing points.

But I must speak a bit about the sales discussion. I was met by someone named Kevin, who is originally from Boston and moved to Hawaii a couple decades ago. He has been in sales all his life. The "closer" was Nancy. Nancy was recovering from a hand fracture, had a cast - I expressed interest in her injury, so she told me about how her high heel had caught on a stair and she had slipped down three steps, was stopped by a landing, landed on a left knee and a right hand, all while carrying a glass of water in her left hand which, much to her annoyance, in the moment of falling she was determined to not spill. She said she managed to end up with half the water still in the glass. (I love stories like this.)

Anyway, I learned all about the "product," (actually about 5 products all packaged together), and what a great thing it was to spend the rest of one's life paying about 40,000 dollars US, plus another $1000 or so maintenance fees, for the privilege of indulging a travel bug four times a year in many different locations all over the globe in luxury. If I bought in Maui, I would become everyone's best friend and they would all want to trade with me so they could stay in Maui for a week while I stayed somewhere else for up to four weeks, for only a few hundred dollars a week. After about two hours of this, I finally got to see the suite, and we took one of those scary little glass-walled elevators up. Kevin was nice enough to let me take pictures from the balcony.

When it was time for the "close," I let them know that although I really appreciated the opportunity to learn all about their product, and it all sounded very nice, and I really was enjoying the photons here in Maui, that I wasn't interested in purchasing a time share. They wanted to know why. So I explained that although I was here and having the time of my life, I really did view a Hawaiian vacation as sort of more of a once in a lifetime indulgence, not a way of life. They looked at me as if I were from another planet somewhere.. how could I resist? I said that, really, truth was, I was more interested in reducing my carbon footprint.

The jaws dropped. They didn't get it. Nancy said, "But that plane is going to take off whether you are on it or not." "Yes," I said, "I realize that, but the more people who decide not to take planes the fewer planes there will need to be sucking holes in the ozone and contributing to global warming.." .... had they heard about global warming...?

They had, but they just couldn't connect it to anything they had to sell. Nancy and Kevin looked at each other. Kevin asked her, how do we respond? And Nancy looked at Kevin, then at me, and said, "This is the first time anyone has ever used a "carbon footprint" objection. We haven't been taught how to counter this objection."

After that, it was pretty clear the party was over, and it was time for winding it up. After one more little survey, I left and met Ben the Phillipino cabbie who I had arranged to meet at 2. Perfect timing - there he was.

On the way home he asked me how the meeting had gone, and I told him I didn't buy a timeshare. I said that although I loved being in Maui, and that I realized tourism was the main economy, that my being here was a one-time trip and that if I really wanted to be here forever I would just move here, like he had, not fly back and forth all the time, hurting the ozone. I said I thought the lifestyle was wasteful, that I doubted it benefited the local people much other than provide some jobs cleaning up condos and pools and maintaining buildings, that most of the profit probably went to the company. He didn't offer me his opinion - perhaps he didn't have one, perhaps he didn't feel comfortable expressing it if he did.

Anyway, we left it at that.

Vacation timeshare pitch II

Here are a couple other pictures of the view from the suite. It was taken from the wrap-around balcony. Pretty nice. Those are people down on the beach, not ants.

Vacation timeshare pitch

Today was payback for the lovely free luau I enjoyed two nights ago - it was time to go and listen to someone try to sell me a time share. I went to the appointment that had been scheduled, at the Ka'anapali Beach Resort, just a short way from where I'm staying.

It was a huge place with a gigantic amoebae-shaped pool and a long beach with a reef, which made the surf very gentle. The pool was ringed by dozens and dozens of pink lounge chairs. Check out the picture. I took this today from the tour suite on the eleventh floor. It reminds me of a cell, with a membrane, the gaps between the chairs like receptor sites.

Luau3

This little red-haired Hawaiian girl in the pink dress is named Maleia. She is a hula student. She hula-ed her way through the entire song, Tiny Bubbles.

She was a treat. My mirror neurons went into a frenzy. I think that is what is supposed to happen when people watch hula. It's interpretive. There are certain moves that reflect certain ideas, just as with sign language. Seeing this little girl dance was the highlight for me of the whole luau. She had incredible grace, and a fierce kind of eye contact with the crowd, and when she danced, she projected meaning out all over the room.

All the dancing was "good" but much of it seemed routine. This... child was dancing in a way that seemed intense and projective. I could feel her, I could get what the dance was about, what the deeper level of meaning of the song was, or at least I felt I could in that moment. She made my eyes wet, and I do not think it was entirely the fault of the evening's second mytai, or that I was just being schmaltzy, or merely that she was as cute as a button. I don't think I'll ever feel jaded about that song Tiny Bubbles the way I had been, ever again. She was a novel stimulus who managed to help my brain thoroughly refresh its auditory and visual cortex.

Luau 2

As you can see I sat quite close to center stage, quite remarkable in that there were 400 people attending. For $15 extra dollars one could purchase VIP seating.

(I almost never would do anything like decide on the spur of the moment that I deserve to be treated like a VIP. But I'm on a vacation, and have been feeling somewhat self-indulgent.)

On stage, the mistress of ceremonies is teaching a few hula moves to all those in the audience who were interested in going up to learn them.

Luau

I know, I know. How touristy of me to not only attend a luau but to post the iconic photo of a dancer wearing a coconut bra.

Thing is, I got to go for free, so who wouldn't? I mean, I'm not crazy, I'm here to have fun, and this was a chance to go have some that didn't cost much, apart from the cost of a taxi. I was offered a ticket in exchange for promising I'd go on a tour of condo property (no obligation), a promotional deal. OK, I can go on somebody's tour. I likely will not be buying a condo here anytime soon, but I can go on a tour so that someone can meet a quota and earn a living trying to flog one to me.

And the luau was fabulous.

Kona Storm

Today, the beach has an entirely different feel. Note the absence of people, other than yours truly taking the picture. Note the absence of footprints other than mine. It's a somewhat creepy but on the whole very cool feeling to have an entire, highly sought vacation beach, all to oneself. Why?

Because it's raining buckets, and everyone else is inside. The waves are disappointingly flat. So there is not much out there to enjoy at the moment. Except just being there by oneself, and pretending (briefly) the beach is all one's own.

To the right is another picture I took last night, of the moon over the beach. I realize how cliche it looks, but honestly, it's not my fault that pretty much everything looks absolutely gorgeous, so much so that just about any idle snapshot could be a calendar photo.

Ocean at dusk

The ocean has quite a different feel to it at dusk. The waves seemed more powerful or something. Probably just my imagination.

I sure am starting to like this ocean. I hung out beside it for what I thought was a half hour or so... just laid in the warm sand, watching little kids running into and getting tossed back up by the surf. When I came back up I realized 2 hours had passed without my inner clock even noticing. The surf is mesmerizing - exogenously applied meditation.

Day 6

There are some little spots along the road to the (other) grocery store about two blocks from the condo where I'm staying that are undeveloped and sort of left to themselves. I found this little tableau just aching to have a picture taken of it. It appears to be some sort of old abandoned farm implement under a gorgeous bougainvillea bush.

Scary road in Maui

I made an outing to the grocery store, about a kilometer away along a two-lane street, narrow and winding, lots of traffic ignoring the speed limit and no sidewalks, barely a path.

On foot.

And who says I never live dangerously? This is about enough excitement for one day here in paradise.

This is the exact same tree, however, the sky behind it looked more like a typical Vancouver morning this morning. Oh well.. the sky has brightened since.

Photon Therapy

So, here I am in paradise. I've got literally nothing to gripe about here in this idyllic-seeming place, my usual life seems a long way away right now. I'm in a little well-appointed condo in a land where the sun is up almost at least 10 hours a day, and we're talking UP! not masked behind massive cloud cover. It gets hot here. How novel.

This picture is one I took from the balcony at dawn yesterday.

I can feel my brain lightening as the days pass. I have three weeks to decompress fully from 18 years of being/feeling buried in Vancouver winters.

The internet connection had me concerned at first, but out here on the balcony it works great, and all is well.

The light at the end of the tunnel

A cousin in Ontario just sent this:

"The following is a Public Service Announcement:

Due to the recent economic crisis,
stock market crash,
bank failures,
budget cuts,
rising unemployment,
Government Turmoil
unstable world conditions,
outsourcing of business to foreign lands,
the hysterical cost of insurance, electricity, petroleum, housing,
and taxes of all kinds,
the Light at the End of the Tunnel has been turned off.

We apologize for the inconvenience."

Somewhat poignant, given that our governor general shut down Canadian parliament today. I guess this makes us a one-party dictatorship until the system reboots in six weeks, instead of the three-party European-style coalition democracy that was theoretically possible until just this morning. Hopefully the system CAN reboot in six weeks. No one likes living in political limbo.

My old friend, Sleep! Welcome back!

One thing that has improved remarkably and quickly with this temporary removal of the work traces (and may assist the mood disorder just as much as I anticipate the photons will) is a new (well, familiar from long ago) sleeping pattern. I literally had no idea how deprived of sleep I had become. I thought I got lots, enough to get by at least, but usually I awoke in the night and was a bit fitful - just assumed it was from being middleaged, getting older, etc. - often needed a 20-30 minute nap during the day, thought this was probably normal too...

The last two nights have been unbelievable - unbroken, nine-hour long chains of smooth transitions from one sleep state to the next, lots of dreaming, none that I remember vividly, but I do remember dream states... no waking up to visit the bathroom, no waking up at ALL!

I'd forgotten what a pleasure just sleeping for hours and hours on end can be. My brain seems to have lost no time at all getting back to itself in this regard - I'm feeling like a teenager again in some ways. I really am starting to see the whole point of taking extended vacations and leaving the cares and woes of the world behind. I feel a lot less angsty/guilty (which in retrospect was just a stupid unnecessary culturally installed reflex), and am regaining confidence in my ability to actively help my system regulate itself. Things now feel like they are unfolding as they should, which means the dopaminergic pathways must have fluffed themselves up a bit better. Good grief, what next? actual superfluous physical energy maybe? Some of that would sure be nice. :-D

First day of "vacation"

I'm officially not at work now, as of yesterday at 4:45 PM. And I officially do not have to return until January 5th, in the afternoon. (L-o-n-g-.........-e-x-h-a-l-e.)

Part of me feels, oddly, very upset by the prospect of all this idleness. Clearly I seem to have, overall, lost touch with my inner irresponsible child parts.

It will be a first real break (longer than three weeks) from work in over 14 years. It will be the first time I will have been out from under the Dark Grey December Sky Lid of the temperate rain forest in 18 years. The part that feels upset is undergoing a taste of Freedom Vertigo, is all. It's a minor cognitive tilt-a-whirl that I'm sure will pass, once I get to Maui and experience immersion in high photon density. Maybe even before then.

I'm thinking I'll get some time to contemplate what I'd like to be when I grow up (a job that is never really over), how to safely disengage from the life I've constructed here and move on, hopefully to a more sunny location, and some kind of reasonable time frame to conduct this transition, make it gentle on everyone including me.

Does the economy worry me? A little.. so it's a good thing that I have never really worried a whole lot about stuff over which I have no control, like the value of money. When the opportunity to move smoothly presents itself, I will do so in a heartbeat, even if I lose money in the process.

If I were really concerned about money, I'd never spend any, and I'd not have become a PT in the first place, because you never get rich doing human primate social grooming. At best, you make a comfortable living doing honest work that's meaningful in the moment, involves helping others, and does no harm. I can do that anywhere. It's one of the things that attracted me to PT in the first place. Who needs more than that out of life? Really?

Speaking of doing no harm, I received yet another missive from my good friend and correspondent, "anonymous," who regaled me yet again on the blogpost I wrote concerning Sandy Nette and her lawsuit. See Alberta woman with chiropractic stroke sues bigtime. Sorry anonymous, I am not going to publish your comment. Surely you can read, and have already read this part:

"Since I put this blogpost up I've received a couple comments from one or two readers, both named "anonymous." I did not allow their comments to appear. They are glaringly pro-neck-manipulation, and I think the pro-neck-manipulators have already had far too much leeway in the realm of swaying public opinion to give them any sort of platform, however buried, obscure and humble this blog may be.

It's because of:
1. chiro training in a rationalized (as opposed to rational), deliberately propagated, bizarre belief system, combined with
2. a cultivated and honed persuasive attitude,
3. which appears aimed at propagating reckless enactment of a type of human physical social grooming (high-neck-manipulation) which is irrelevant and unnecessary in the first place,
4. against all common sense AND scientific investigation,
5. for the sole purpose of making $,

... that this woman became tetraplegic.

I have too much respect for the human nervous system to ever condone manipulation of its high-neck housing; therefore, "anonymous," I consider my prevention of your promotion of it on my blog, a positive choice - an action (however tiny) against letting myself and this blog be a vector for further perpetuation of your particular memeplex. And I happen to think it's an accumulation of tiny actions that count in life."

I suspect that my dear friend anonymous constructed his straw man argument in Word and is simply surfing his way around with the help of google, and like a crazed harpy (even though probably male), is dropping his load everywhere he can. I'm sure I've already read the exact same prose many other times, in many places.. anyway, no need for me to allow it here. I get to set editorial policy in my own blog, anon. Tough darts, but that's how it's gonna be. Try popping this delightful bubblewrap instead.

See? I just guided someone from a harmful activity over into an enjoyable and harmless one. That's part of what I help people figure out how to do in my work.

Another part is helping people figure out how to do what they want to do without having to endure pain while doing it. The last but not least part is teaching people about pain, and engaging with their physical nervous system to relieve it while they and their nervous system simultaneously learn how not to have it. Do I treat necks? Yes, of course I do. Do they improve? Yes of course they do. Do I pop them? Never. See?

Really, I do love my work. But also, really, I do need this trip to a Land of Photons, and I need it now. I want a big blue-dome sky over me and gorgeous glinting light ricocheting around, vigorously bouncing off surfaces of everything instead of feebly allowing itself to be sucked straight into them. I want vibrant color all round, color that here would seem garish but there will seem blanched in the vibrancy of ambient blue-sky light. I want to see light bending off water and water that looks blueblueblue, not this dark green black stuff that we call "the ocean" here where I live, that up close reminds me of wrinkled, liquid trash bags rippling slightly in the breeze, weakly fwapping at the shoreline, sucking away sand, depositing dead cold darkgreenbrown slimey seaweed. I want sharp contrast, not fuzzy edges. I want black shadow, not a dull grey haze. I want light that hurts my eyes, burrows directly into my brain, forces me to wear shades to protect my peepers from sheer sizzle. I want to be dazzled by direct light, not fooled by artificial street lights tossed haphazardly upward from puddles on the street, not placeboed by a sun lamp with which, frankly speaking, the honeymoon was over long ago. Let there be light. Real light. Honest. Sun. Light. Puhleeze.

Update Nov.30
My friend "anonymous" has written to me again. This time, he said he agreed that avoiding neck manipulation was a good idea (which is a step forward), but said I was off the mark on chiro education. Come on Anon, get over yourself. Perhaps your chiro school was (relatively) wonderful, but I have it on quite good authority that there is no particular standard amongst U.S. chiro schools. So don't presume to speak on behalf of all chiro. Go read Chirotalk, where I get all my info about chiro from ex-chiros who are fighting their way back to sanity, who engage true believers in hilarious discussions. It was you who drank the chiro koolaid, not me - I see no reason to change my overall opinion of chiropractic.

"Money as Debt"

In that there seems to be a dark blanket of seasonal affective disorder that lies heavily over the economy these days, people might be interested in watching an educational doc. film (made in BC) about the topic of "money" and how it is mostly a concept, not anything real. In fact it's practically an illusion, kept in focus only by the illusion that there's lots of it and that it's OK to borrow as much as you need for whatever reason you want.

The people who actually are invested in keeping this illusion all fluffy, fail when too many people, too simultaneously, want what they think is theirs and ask for a balance sheet. Oops, turns out we don't have as much money as it looked like there was on paper..

It's a very interesting documentary. No wonder the "economy" is in such trouble. It's been running on almost empty for what? Decades. All I can say is that I'm happy I own my own (paid-off) place, I do not have debt, my life style is quite simple, and I'm not forced to retire, ever, if I don't want to. (As long as health holds out. And about that, I'm grateful to live in Canada.)

Here is the movie: Money as Debt.

Barry Beyerstein on Pseudoscience and other related matters

I've been neglecting both blogs I'm involved in, lately... One part of me feels like it's been spinning its wheels in the mental mud of descending seasonal affective disorder, while another part has become rather fascinated with active digestion and absorption of Berry Beyerstein's wonderful 50 page exposition, Distinguishing Science from Pseudoscience. I wrote several posts on SomaSimple on the topic, and compiled them into a single "digest" to try to keep life simple.

Important gleanings I took from this relatively short and cursory foray into the topic, are as follows:


1. BELIEF FIELDS and RESEARCH FIELDS:

From Mario Bunge: rather than dividing cognitive domains into sciences and non-sciences, we might divide them into "belief fields" and "research fields."

Belief fields include "religions, political ideologies, pseudosciences and pseudotechnologies, as well as any mystical system that believes that enlightenment can be gained through revealed truth rather than painstaking examination."

"The primary attribute of belief fields is that, for their devotees, evidence is personal and subjective. I.e., they advocate using emotional criteria to distinguish truth from falsehood. Belief fields hold private feelings and hunches to be reasonable grounds for certainty—or, as New Age writers put it, “You create your own reality.”"

Research fields "can include disciplines not typically thought of as scientific, as long as their practitioners are committed to gathering objective data to support their positions."

"evidence in research fields is interpersonal. That is, it can be compared by disputants, according to open and objective criteria. It is sometimes said that objectivity is merely inter-subjectivity. I.e., an “objective” consensus is reached by comparing various individuals’ perceptions with each other and against agreed-upon external standards."

2. THE ROCK BOTTOM SCIENCE "BASICS"

Contravene any of these and you are skating on thin ice too close to open water.
They are:
1. The inverse square law
2. Laws of Thermodynamics (e.g. the Law of Entropy)
3. Laws of Conservation of Energy, Momentum, etc.
4. Injunctions against reverse causality ("Time's Arrow")
5. One or more of C.D. Broad's "Basic Limiting Principles"
6. Data of modern Neuroscience, psychology, and psychophysiology

"Many pseudosciences claim extraordinary precision, power, or yields, well beyond those achievable by conventional scientists (and often by means of secret proprietary processes, formulas, or equipment)." Chiropractic springs to mind. PT often isn't very far behind however.. and many PTs seem to admire the marketing employed by chiropractors as if it were something to be aspired to instead of either ignored or pointing a finger at.

My favorite is number 6., ignoring the nervous system, a serious error my profession and the PT people in it make all the time, trying to pretend it isn't there, that it doesn't "sense", trying to work around it in order to make life simple for themselves, working from "models" (such as a joint biomechanical model) that refuses to take the nervous system into account at all - even the physical 72 kilometers of it weaving throughout the "body" referred to in "the literature" as "nerves"(!). This is so rampant that there are even PT university profs using the biomechanical model as their teaching platform who have the audacity to declare that pain doesn't exist and isn't our business as PTs. Ahem, I beg to differ, strenuously.

Broad's "Basic Limiting Principles" are listed here.

The world felt safe to exhale last night.

This blog is usually, mostly, about the physicality and practicality of living in a human antigravity suit, or treating it. Normally I have nothing to say about politics or any of the other myriad ways we human primates amuse ourselves by creating drama for these social constructions we call selves... but I will make an exception to say something about last night's US election.

It was all anyone could talk about today at work, and I work in Canada, not the US.. My ex-pat U.S. patients were especially pleased. I must say, so was I. It was a riveting process - maybe the last time any world event involving a single individual captured everyone's attention simultaneously was when Princess Diana died and the world stopped en masse to watch, mourn, say goodbye. Check out this headlines link. Check electoral vote, VoteFromAbroad for analysis.

Last night it happened again, and the world sat riveted as one, only this time people danced joyously in the streets and today it feels like the global community is one giant human primate troop determined to pull together to help each other and the world. McCain had to act a bit sad in order to resonate properly with his supporters, but to me he sounded a bit relieved to be able to let go of his impossible effort. His speech was so good I wondered if he hadn't maybe been working on it for the whole month prior.

One thing is for sure - no more will a person who wants to take on US presidency have to first, by default, be a white alpha male human primate. Obama has crashed that perception and the whole world is very happy about it. In fact, it seems to me that the world can barely wait to start cooperating with him, this new brown face that represents not just a new image of the US in the world, but much of the world itself. Massive and nearly palpable placebo effect, response.

Gobama. Thumbs up.

Catch-up

I've been neglecting this blog lately - apologies to anyone who might be following it. I'm busy with this and that, and get less enthusiastic usually as the sky darkens with winter's approach. This winter, however, I'm going to go to Hawaii for three weeks, so that should help. I am given to believe that there are a few more than just a couple dozen photons per cubic meter over there. I'm looking forward to becoming a human solar panel. I, who can't usually remember any pop songs that date from after around 1978, have lately been struggling to keep Sheryl Crowe's song,
"I'm gonna soak up the sun" from viraling itself throughout my brain.

On other matters, I want to introduce a new blog (new to me) which you will see listed under PT blogs in the menu to the right, but which is actually by an occupational therapist in New Zealand, called Healthskills. (It is also attached to Neurotonics, the other blog I'm involved in.) It's a lively blog full of great info for health practitioners who deal primarily with persisting pain.

One last thing - the Canadian dollar has avalanched down, and is now worth a good 22 or 23% less than it was just a few weeks ago - so our Virtual Symposium on Pain, blogged about here, is now quite a deal for anyone living outside Canada! I checked about registration, and learned that registration will stay open during the first week of November. All are welcome to attend and learn.

Unfoldment of a zebrafish

Mo at Neurophilosophy has a new post containing movies of the embryologic development of a zebrafish, with links to the site they come from. Great find Mo, thanks.

I love the spherical expansion, then that sudden whoosh into something that has two sides to it.

This is how vertebrate embryology is studied, and humans are vertebrates, so it's how we unfold too.

I'm a secret parkour admirer

Checked out Eric Robertson's PT blog this morning and found this post: Safe Falling. Don't you just love culture-based hyper-regulated technological solutions for prevention of potential injury of all our un- and undereducated contact with gravity and environment?

I like watching people move at high velocities and escaping unscathed - I enjoy watching figure skating, So You Think You Can Dance? (now in Canada too), and parkour. I'm definitely not anyone who would actively participate - now or at any time in my personal trajectory through life - rather I'm an appreciative voyeur. I love having my mirror neurons jazzed with incredible high-velocity human movement, and revel in the fact that it's possible without consequence (much of the time at least.. there are probably collisions with buildings or hands stabbed by glass or other mishaps, but not in these videos).

This parkour phenomenon is non-institutional, maybe anti-establishment even. It's unregulated, free, wild, eccentric, thoroughly primate. Looks like only boys perform parkour so far, if internet videos are any indication. One of my favorites, and one of the oldest I've found, is called russian climbing. Note the lack of any protective equipment. It would just be in the way, obviously..

It blows me away to think of the depth and quality of graded exposure that must have gone into developing all this physical capacity, the associated balance and equilibrium mechanisms that accompany it, and the frank conditioning.

Here is an example from France, which is credited with being the birthplace of this form of human primate display.

The other effect it has on me is the creepy one of feeling that I must always remember to lock my doors and windows no matter what floor I may happen to live on. Guys who can do this are like spiders - they could crawl in anywhere thieving their way through life.

Happy people and unhappy people

I recently had an opportunity to think long and hard about an observation that some people seem to be just naturally happy while others seem to be (just as naturally) unhappy.

The "Happies" find life relatively effortless, and other than minor speed bumps and hurdles everyone has occasionally, seem to capably move on and move smoothly. The "Unhappies" seem to go along ok for awhile, then inexplicably, any joy they may have found in a given activity seems to collapse and drain away all by itself, quite suddenly and for no apparent reason, leaving them floundering, frustrated, exhausted, unmotivated and burnt-out. Everyone can catch glimpses of what it's like to be the other, and can even inhabit each other's shoes, learn from each other's responses, but I think there is likely a default experiential bottom to selfhood which is either mostly one or the other, at a genetic level. And after a lot of life has passed by, one is required to suck up one's relation to life and come out of the closet as authentic, warts and all, even if one is (gulp) an Unhappy.

I am quite aware that I was born an "Unhappy." Luckily, I recognized it early on and was able to construct a life that could accommodate this quirk, spot it in others, ignore it most of the time, and keep going in spite of it.

If life could be compared to modes of transportation, the Happies would be like captains of their own sailboats. Their trip through life has ups and downs but is mostly broad and flat and smooth, few obstacles, good leverage, small energies needed, good control over response to one's environment, lots of opportunity to stargaze, a three-sixty view, a telescope through which to assess potential beaches/shorelines/rocks and either avoid danger, or maybe deliberately court it, testing their own control. Stiff headwind? Adjust sails and tack. Whitecaps? Adjust sails and lean. Keep sailing, keep moving. One must watch for obvious dangers but there is no inner inertia to be overcome. The Happies are the ones that mainstream culture becomes modeled after, which can make the Unhappies or Less-Happies feel even less congruent, inside, and delay their authentication/integration process.

A transportation metaphor for an Unhappy, I think, would be an engineer on a train that has to climb a mountain over a lifetime. Not only does the engineer have to move that train against gravity, he or she has only so much track to work with. The big stall periods are when the engineer (the nonconscious) has to stop the train, go back and rip up all the track that has been traveled, go ahead and lay it all down again in front of the train, get back on the train, drive it forward as far as it can/will go until the cycle must be repeated.

With any luck, and with sufficient insight, an Unhappy can learn to live with this luck of the draw, can learn to not be in any hurry, to stick as much as possible to the least steep grades, not be disoriented by switchbacks, to even, some day, be able to lay track and keep moving all at the same time, even attach sails to the train and learn to work them to advantage. Eventually the long stalls decrease in length. The Unhappies can treasure the small but genuine hope that if and when they ever get to the top, the view will probably be astounding, and they'll maybe even be able to share it with the Happies, and their life will have counted for something, been worth the sturm und drang und struggle after all. Plus they can remember that a sailboat will never make it up a mountain, nor carry as much cargo.

"Arthroscopic knee surgery does little for arthritis pain"

This just was broadcast on local BC news:
Popular surgery does little for arthritis pain.

Gee, I could have predicted that.. but it's nice that there's been a big study to provide support for the idea, and it's commendable that MDs can now withdraw this vain attempt at helping people with knee pain by poking around inside it.

Excerpt:

"Each patient received physical therapy and anti-inflammatory medications such as ibuprofen or acetaminophen. Eighty-six patients also received arthroscopic surgery.

The researchers found that all of the study subjects had similar improvements in joint pain, stiffness and function.

However, the patients who had surgery did not experience any additional benefits... doctors say the pain can be managed through exercise, regular physiotherapy and anti-inflammatory drugs."

Here is a link to a review of the article: Arthroscopic Knee Surgery- No Better than Placebo?; A Healthy Lifestyle Prevents Stroke, by Robert A Wascher MD.

This is just plain funny

Check out the thread on Chirotalk called The Chiro Zone.

Brain as Composter X

I don't know why, but my blogpost series always seem to end up as a series of 10 to 12. It seems to take that many for me to get complete thoughts expressed. Maybe it's the price I have to pay for having an old but still pretty busy undermind.

Anyway, this will be the wrap-up post to the Brain as Composter series. I promised I would tie in Burton's excellent book, and I will. First though, I want to summarize thoughts that occurred to me over the course of writing this series.

1. I'm not as thrilled with Dan Hemenway's article on permaculture as I was once upon a time. I think he feng shui-ed it a bit to make it pretty, and I fell for the prettiness as well as the content. I still like the content, but can see the prettiness of the packaging as a separate "meme" which I don't like as much. One has to learn to spot when one's mind is being manipulated by meme-packaging.

2. I also examined my own responses to Guy Claxton's Hare Brain Tortoise Mind book. I can see how in the decade since that book was written, my own ideas have changed - I categorize things differently than a decade ago. I feel like the book's content may even be supportive of an anti-scientific stance in the way it equates science with non-thinking - a stance known as PoMo. While I can nod at some of it, love to see ballooned pomposity pricked as much as anyone, love and use the word "deconstruct" all the time about almost everything, I do not agree with the PoMo attitude that "science" is just another "mindset" to be deconstructed. To further the farming metaphor, the pomo attitude toward science is equivalent to saying that topsoil is just another kind of dirt, no different, no better, no worse. I completely, vehemently disagree.

The products of science are one thing, and yes, they may become conceptual shorthand enabling successive generations of science-seekers and builders to move along more quickly.. however (and this is a big however) the process of scientific thinking is anything but D-mode. It takes ages (relatively speaking) to get something conceptualized, a test formulated, an experiment completed, a study written, and after that, wait for peer-review and eventual publication. Once published, this still doesn't mean that something can be called "science" - instead it might just be what Harriet Hall calls "tooth fairy science" - data have been generated about whether it's better to put the tooth in a facial tissue or in a baggie - with no question or discussion about whether or not tooth fairies exist in the first place.

So... I think, at this stage of the game I'm starting to know the difference. I hope.

Anyway, I still like the metaphor of the unconscious mind as the compost bin, and I do still like the idea of our brains being a natural system - without them there would be no consciousness to worry about. Without compost there is no topsoil. Without fertile topsoil nothing can grow, at least not for long. The process of composting takes care of breaking ideas back down into components, which when recombined, will support active growth once again, in a cyclical manner. Science is the end product, the sweet smelling wheat in the bin of human accomplishment. Science not only provides the seeds, it is the seeds that can be plowed back into future generations of underminds to grow future ideas.

At the very least, science can offer up things that we can feel reasonably certain ABOUT.. which I think Burton would agree is different from what he is talking about when he refers to the "feeling of knowing" being an emotion and the pleasurable sensation of "certainty" not being a reliable indicator of truth. Yes, it "feels" preferable to the "feeling" of cognitive dissonance, however, it behooves all of us to learn to tolerate feelings of uncertainty as we do other feelings of discomfort. Perhaps the more we learn to search into our niggles of various sorts, not only will we become more tolerant of them (and of other peoples' too, by extension), but the more "mindful" we will end up in the end. By mindful, I mean, capable of holding paradox and puzzle in our mind and letting them have sufficient time to compost themselves into resolution.

Here is a list of posts that have comprised this series:
1. Is certainty a dopameme? (May 6/08)
2. BrainScience Podcast #42: "On Being Certain" (July 25, 2008)
3. "On Being Certain": Ginger Campbell interviews the author, Robert Burton MD (Aug 13/08)
4. Brain as Composter (Aug 14/08)
5. Brain as Composter II (Aug 16/08)
6. Brain as Composter III (Aug 17/08)
7. Brain as Composter IV (Aug 18/08)
8. Brain as Composter V (Aug 22/08)
9. Brain as Composter VI (Aug 23/08)
10. Brain as Composter VII (Aug 24/08)
11. Brain as Composter VIII (Aug 26/08)
12. Brain as Composter IX (Aug 28/08)

Brain as Composter IX

In Brain as Composter VIII I outlined the various ways Claxton thinks about the fast extroverted thinking he calls D-mode thinking. I disagree that scientific thinking lines up with D-mode thinking as much as he tries to assert, which is my only criticism. I do not think D-mode and undermind types of thinking have to live as separated as Claxton suggests, or that they have to forever be antithetical. They can marry, enjoy a long and fruitful partnership through life, albeit with a few misunderstandings along the way probably.

Now, I want to bring out Claxton's treatment of what he calls the "undermind," (in his book Hare Brain Tortoise Mind) and what I'd like to rename, the "Composter."

1. from p. 7:

"Modern Western culture has so neglected the intelligent unconscious - the undermind, (...) that we no longer know that we have it, do not remember what it is for, and so cannot find it when we need it. We do not think of the unconscious as a valuable resource, but (if we think of it at all) as a wild and unruly 'thing' that threatens our reason and control, and lives in the dangerous Freudian dungeon of the mind. Instead, we give exclusive credence to conscious, deliberate purposeful thinking - d-mode."

Well, maybe not always. I think it might depend on how large one's association cortex is and how well it's myelinated..

2. from p. 37:

"The undermind is acquiring knowledge of which consciousness is unaware, and by which it is unchanged, and using it to influence the way people behave. Consequently a schism develops between what people think they know (about themselves), and the information that is consciously driving their perceptions and reactions. The views that they espouse about themselves, we might say,become at odds with the ones that their behavior in fact embodies."

I would like to say, I think it probably operates this way whether or not we are conscious of it, but we CAN develop a relationship with and have conscious input into it if we understand why it's there and what it requires. Also, as Burton points out, one cannot trust the feelings that come out of it, like the feeling of being certain. One must test ideas outwardly and scientifically to ensure their objectivity, validity, reliability.. how they stack up against the rest of the natural world. Good fence-keeping.

3. p. 75:

"Sometimes ..resonating of data and experience - perception and cognition - happens quickly. (...) Very often though, when the predicament is more intricate, the undermind needs to be left to its own devices for awhile, and then the need for patience - the ability to tolerate uncertainty, to stay with the feeling of not-knowing for a while, to stand aside and let a mental process that can neither be observed nor directed take its course - becomes all important. Someone who cannot abide uncertainty is therefore unable to provide the womb that creative intuition needs...creativity is enhanced when people are forced to slow down.. the willingness to think slowly.. makes possible broader cognitions, more abstract thinking.. and consequently greater flexibility."

This section seems to find echo in Burton's new book very well.

4. p. 13:

"The 'slow ways of knowing' are, in general, those that lack any or all of the characteristics of d-mode. They spend time on uncovering what may lie behind a particular question. They do not rush into conceptualization, but are content to explore more fully into the situation itself before deciding what to make of it. They like to stay close to the particular. They are tolerant of information that is faint, fleeting, ephemeral, marginal, or ambiguous; they like to dwell on details which do not 'fit' or immediately make sense. They are relaxed, leisurely and playful; willing to explore without knowing what they are looking for. They see ignorance and confusion as the ground from which understanding may spring. They use the rich, allusive media of imagination, myth and dream. They are receptive rather than proactive. They are happy to relinquish the sense of control over directions that the mind spontaneously takes. And they are prepared to take seriously ideas that come 'out of the blue', without any ready-made train of rational thought to justify them... The undermind is the key resource on which slow knowing draws, so we need new metaphors and images for the relationship between conscious and unconscious which escape the polarization to which both Descartes and Freud, from their different sides, subscribed. Only in the light of new models of the mind will we see the possibility and the point of more patient, receptive ways of knowing, and be able to cultivate - and tolerate - the conditions which they require."

I like how this ties back once again into the ideas of permaculture and working with nature instead of against it. Again, is this not the same way compost forms? I do not, however, see any difficulty with being "receptive" and "proactive" both at the same time. Surely they are NOT mutually exclusive. Surely as compost forms, the insects and microorganisms that are developing it, the thermodynamicism of a bin, are highly proactive... but the bin itself is receptive, isn't it?

5. p. 116:

"The undermind is a layer of activity within the human psyche that is richer and more subtle than consciousness. It can register and respond to events which..do not become conscious. We have at our disposal a shimmering database full of pre-conceptual information, much of which is turned down by consciousness as being too contentious or unreliable. Conscious awareness decides what it will accept as valid - and thereby misses dissonant patterns and subtler nuances. While in d-mode, consciousness tends to present to us a world that is somewhat cautious and conventional. Sometimes this is appropriate, but if we get stuck there and lose the key to the twilight world that subserves it, we mothball valuable ways of knowing which can find sense and weave meaning out of a collection of the faintest threads and scraps... one way of expressing this disparity between conscious and unconscious is in terms of two thresholds, a lower one, above which the undermind becomes active, and a higher one, above which information enters consciousness. The closer together these two points are, the more 'in touch' with the unconscious we are, and the more complete is our conscious awareness of what is happening across all the mental realms. The further apart they are, the more our conscious perception is impoverished. This quantitative notion of thresholds is rather crude, but it enables us to formulate an important question; what it it that determines how near or how far apart the two thresholds are? More generally, is the relationship between conscious and unconscious forms of awareness a dynamic one, subject to change, and if so, what forces control it? (...) Perhaps it is specifically things that are threatening that cause the conscious threshold to shoot up."

Well.. don't be a key-loser then. (There follows pages of info on studies to do with 'perceptual defence', amnesiacs who can 'remember,' the effects of "self-consciousness", effects of hypnosis, measurable visual perception by anger, blindsight, that all generally point to the idea that pressure, stress, being threatened or over-eager, lead to coarsening of perception and to narrower less functional minds.)

7. p. 203:

"..it is all the more significant that cognitive science is currently drawing our attention to the curious fact that we have forgotten how our minds work. As we have seen, the modern mind has a distorted image of itself that leads it to neglect some of its own most valuable learning capacities. We now know that the brain is built to linger as well as to rush, and that slow knowing sometimes leads to better answers. We know that knowledge makes itself known through sensations, images, feelings, and inklings, as well as through clear conscious thoughts. Experiments tell us that just interacting with complex situations without trying to figure them out can deliver a quality of understanding that defies reason and articulation. Other studies have shown that confusion may be a vital precursor to the discovery of a good idea. To be able to meet the uncertain challenges of the contemporary world, we need to heed the message of this research and to expand our repertoire of ways of learning and knowing to reclaim the full gamut of cognitive possibilities. This will not be easy, for the grip of d-mode on late twentieth century culture is strong.."

It is not entirely D-mode's fault - lazy "farming methods" perhaps.

8. from the last chapter, undermind and wisdom:

"..slow ways of knowing will not deliver their delicate produce when the mind is in a hurry. In a state of continual urgency and harassment, the brain-mind's activity is condemned to follow its familiar channels. Only when it is meandering can it spread and puddle, gently finding out such uncharted fissures and runnels as may exist. Yet thinking slowly, paradoxically, does not have to take a long time. It is a knack that can be acquired and practiced. The mind needs to be given time; but its ingenuity also depends on the cultivation of a disposition to take one's time, as much as there is. One can learn to access and use these other ways of knowing more fluently. One might even suggest that managers - and their workforces - might try meditation; though, as a preliminary they would need to understand what that means and how it helps."

My italics. I love this passage and the imagery it evokes.

More to come, a tie-in with the Burton book.

Brain as Composter VIII

Re Brain as Composter VII:

What follows in this post will be a (long) series of points that summarize attributes of what Claxton calls "D-mode" intelligence:

1. D-mode is much more interested in finding answers and solutions than in examining the questions. (Is the 'primary instrument of technopoly', is primarily concerned with problem-solving, treats any unwanted or inconvenient condition in life as if it were a 'fault' in need of fixing.)

2. D-mode treats perception as unproblematic. (It assumes the way it sees the situation is the way it is.)

3. D-mode sees conscious articulate understanding as the essential basis for action, and thought as the e