That's a Fail

I think this was an expression of Austin's favorite high school teacher. He was a big UT Austin fan, and when  (my son) Austin said he wanted to go to A&M, that was his reply!

"That's a Fail" as it applies to my life: Struggling with feelings of failure that come and go, as I watch my children veer off in strange directions that I swear I never sent them. Not sure if they have any moral character to speak of, not sure what they will do in their lives. They spend far too much time on video games and computers. They are teenage boys, taking too many risks for my comfort. Austin withdrew from two classes last semester and wasn't even classified a full-time student. (Still pulled out B's in intermediate science classes, could have done better but was more interested in having a full social life)

The only label I have completely embraced in life is that of "mother." Not that I was ever a particularly good one! If I could only have one official title, besides sentient being, I guess it would be that one. That was my most important task in life. In my mind, anyhow. It was my starring role in this drama, my life.

I still try to love my children, first and foremost, no matter what I may think of them at any given moment; to love, before judgment, before discipline, before anything else gets in the way.

This breath prayer has become my favorite these days: "Holy Mary, Mother of God." The mercy, grace and compassion, and the beauty and lyrical quality of these few words, are soothing to me.

I must let go of preconceived notions or pre-judgments of my children. They are growing into and becoming, all the time. We all are growing into ourselves and becoming, and it's easy to forget that and stick people into boxes instead. Particularly children and adolescents do not remain the same.

Odd, how my own identity is so tied up in that of my children. That is why I feel my universe shifting, scattering, shattering. It's not a pleasant sensation. Maybe it would have been better to have more children! Less appalling if one was a dud, could focus on the rest of them.

My "Companions in Christ" group met again after what seemed like a long hiatus (the last time was end of tax season, when I couldn't go anyhow). We discussed vocation, which has always been a cursed word to me, and wound up with a meditation on the burning bush. (The idea being that Moses was introduced to his Godly calling, saving God's people in Egypt, via that encounter.)

What burning bushes had we encountered in our lives, we were asked. I'm still sorting out the answers to that one. Maybe most of us don't ever see any -- this would be due to our own blindness, not to the absence of miracles or the absence of the divine presence!

The burning bushes that sprang to my mind from my life were of a different sort entirely than Moses's. They even surprised me because they seemed completely banal, yet they changed the direction of my life forever. The two I wrote were, first, the birth and raising of my children; and, second, taking care of my father for roughly a year and a half. Of course, other events were also of great significance -- marrying Dwaine -- maybe they did not transform me as completely, and that's why they did not make the list.

These experiences are near-universal, but hardly the stuff of epic Biblical narratives, or at least it seems that way. Also, they don't extend beyond my own personal family to larger human concerns.

Because I first took care of my children, I could care for the children of others. Because I first helped my father, I have so much more understanding of helping someone who is older and living with a chronic illness. Other experiences paved the way to these. My mother-in-law lived with us for a short time when she had terminal cancer.

Once again, in my Companions class I felt inadequate, and that feeling of failure loomed large. To think that my grand "burning bushes" did not even extend outside my immediate family! In our class, we have amazing people who have done great things in their lives and are examples of lives of service. The pastor and his wife. Several teachers, one of whom went off to a wilderness camp with troubled boys and helped them at great personal sacrifice (and was beat up while there). A woman who has been a pillar of the church and has served in every way imaginable there. Then there's me. (Can't even raise my own children right, yadda yadda)

Another depressing item in my life is that I am still processing the death of my father. Tax season was so busy that grief had to wait, it seems. The sadness kind of all swirls together till I can't remember what I am crying about anymore. It comes and goes.

This is what has been on my mind since I've had time to think of these things. If you read all the way, thanks for "listening."

Lance Armstrong and our heroes

Did we really all believe, once the facts came to light, that everyone else was doping -- but not Lance Armstrong? Do we demand that level of inhumanity of our heroes?

Apparently, we do. Maybe the culture of doping that has pervaded a number of sports will have trouble surviving, now that it has come to light. But let's not pretend to be shocked about it. I'm not sure why it is front-page news. Like the extramarital affairs of our statesmen (and mostly they are men), these failures are indications that no one has yet attained perfection on this planet. Not even our most treasured heroes.

In my book, Lance Armstrong is still a great man.

Prayer, and the rest of life

Reading "Open Mind, Open Heart" by Thomas Keating about centering prayer. As a joke (but also because they knew I'd enjoy it), my family also got me a book called "Open Heart, Open Mind" by a Tibetan Buddhist lama, a Rinpoche. Now I can't keep the titles of the two straight!

To foster my relationship with Dwaine, I am going to try to give him a backrub/massage more often. They say that touch is an important way for couples to stay intimate, and he does love massages. I love exercise, and now that I am entering the busy tax season, I won't have much time to go to the gym, so I have to get creative about such things. Giving a massage can be a good upper-body workout. (In the interest of modesty, I won't mention the other things couples can do together that involve touch and a good workout.)

I love the grand gestures, the big achievements that some people make in life. I just haven't had any such things happening in my little mundane corner of the world. I am trying to take to heart Mother Theresa's famous saying, "We can do no great things, only small things with great love."

I do think that attitude and belief are more important than I've suspected. A good attitude is the cornerstone of a life well lived.

Can you tell I'm tired? I wanted to come here anyway, but I'm dragging.

I am finding centering prayer to be more important in my life now, as much as exercise. I do believe that we are all part of a large super-organism, and I can extend my feelings somewhat and reach out into the universe while in this prayer. The prayer is meant to go deeper than our thoughts, as mystics believe that God cannot be directly accessed simply with the thinking mind, and is impossible to fully comprehend except in glimmers during our lifetime.

We had a family crisis earlier this week -- a fight, involving our college-age son, resulting in his being away from home (he still lives at home) overnight.

Fortunately for all of us, Austin came back home the next evening. He walked in, hugged me and his dad, and apologized to us both in a very sincere and touching way. I can never decide if Austin is becoming a fine young man, or if he's a really great politician (a bit of both, I suspect). He really has a flair for arranging circumstances in the most self-flattering of ways. I admit, it will take him far in life! It's a great combination of native talent, intelligence, some hard work (enough to get him all A's his first college semester!! Yay!), humor, and BS, all cleverly worked in the mix. You almost don't mind the fabrications, because there's so much else there to admire. Reminds me of Bill Clinton! (Lance Armstrong, anyone?)

Recently, we discovered that Austin's trombone was missing (the one he stopped playing midway through his senior year of high school, so in December 2011). I suspected right away what might have happened, but texted him to see if my hunch was correct. Here's how that went:

"Where's your trombone?"

"What trombone?"

(I explain, THE trombone, the only one we have, that he played throughout middle school and high school, etc. etc. The trombone, as a musical instrument, is no wallflower. It sticks out, literally. It takes up a noticeable amount of space. Yet Austin is implying a trombone could just -- I don't know, wander off? Get lost?)

His next text after this interchange is, "It was sold."
Notice the succinct, third-person approach here. Austin is reporting this in the most impersonal way possible,  as an immutable, long-ago fact, hoping I don't pick up on the fact that neither my husband or I were involved in or knew anything about this sale.

Turns out Austin, ever the entrepreneur (and then some), sold the trombone we purchased for him for some quick cash, which like all other cash once in his possession, was quickly spent. I do wonder if he has some other business enterprises on the side of which we are not aware; it's quite possible. Always, I carry a little nightmare image of a day the authorities come calling ...

On the whole, I think both my boys will turn into fine young men (THINK POSITIVE). Andrew was completely unfazed by the huge family drama, which by the way, hardly ever happens here. He said, Oh Mom, that happens in every family. In fact, Andrew happened to be at a friend's house not long ago and witnessed a huge fight between his friend and his friend's dad, likely along the same lines as our fight. Luckily, no one warned me that the teenage years would be so rough! Kind of like childbirth -- don't tell me, there's nothing I can do to avoid it anyway, so I don't want to know until I have to experience it myself.

Going under

I was under a brief anesthesia this morning to undergo an upper endoscopy (sure enough, I have esophagitis and really should be taking those PPI medicines I love to hate; and, yes, I will start taking them again).

When I came up out of it, I was crying about losing Dad. The nurse explained that going under brings out whatever emotions are there and they rise to the surface. I think it was therapeutic to have free -- unrestrained -- access to that part of me that is grieving and allow it to express itself. It's hard to do that in the midst of ordinary life.

I had a sad dream last night that also came to mind when I woke up from the anesthesia. We had another funeral for Mom. She was in some kind of public accident that attracted a lot of attention, so there were all these people wandering around and at her funeral, which made it harder. Almost like we had to have the funeral for them, because it was expected. I was trying to get a glimpse of her in the casket, from a distance -- it had been so long since I'd seen her. Later, she was on display wearing a wedding gown and lying, as if unconscious, arms splayed, upon some propped-up, satin-covered area near the altar. This was sort of a symbolic representation of Mom, fuzzy on the details except for what she was wearing. She was much younger, pretty, I guess she would have looked more like me and my sister than her older self.

Chris Parma escorted me in and was talking with me, and had his arm around me, and at some point it dawned on me how odd it was that I wasn't sitting with Dwaine. So we went together over to Dwaine, and he and Chris started chatting and laughing, making small talk, and I was wondering how they could do that in the middle of a funeral! (How do people keep on living normal lives even in the midst of all this grief and loss?)

I went into the audience, where my sister was sitting, wearing some orange-ish dredlocks and a hippie-ish outfit. (I didn't see my kids or her husband in this dream.) We embraced, crying together, and she was still sick, because this had just happened, and she is right now recovering from the flu! When I touched her, she was hot with fever. Yet she had to fly down, just 7 weeks or so after Dad had died, to do it all over again for this funeral. I felt so bad for her.

Certainly, Dad's death has brought up everything from the time of Mom's passing away in 1999. It's fresh again, as well. Like we are saying goodbye to both parents at once. That is what grief does. It's timeless.

My spiritual guide says that our grief accumulates if it hasn't been expressed well, and gets worse or more difficult to cope with if it hasn't been handled from past losses. However, I feel like I was so much better prepared for Dad's death, in a spiritual sense, than for Mom's. With Dad, I saw it coming long ago. I guess that is the gift that a chronic illness brings, is a little bit of perspective on mortality. You can never really be prepared for the death of a loved one, but you can see the signs when they have been so sick and you can start to take it into your reality, a little bit, that they won't be around forever.

For me, Mom's passing was so terrible. It rocked my world for about a year, and I think I suffered PTSD because of seeing her dying in an awful way in the ICU. But all that trouble and pain made it so much more bearable, the second time. I could almost see this as a natural process, this human lifecycle, though it is really hard to bring that kind of awareness to the deathbed. Just as Dad, Cynthia, and I were there when Mom passed, even more of us were there for Dad's passing -- Cynthia and I, both our husbands, and Han, Dad's wife. Even the pastor from their Chinese Methodist Church came in, just after the nurse had removed the ventilator, at a crucial moment to pray with us all. I received that as a great blessing in a time of crisis.

My husband just came in and told me that I shouldn't be blogging the same day I was under anesthesia! Beforehand, the nurses and anesthesiologist and I were joking about where the cutoff lies for acceptable and unacceptable activities. No driving or operating heavy machinery -- one nurse interjected that she always tells patients, no horseback or motorcycle riding, either! I asked if I could go work out afterwards (in jest, believe me), and one nurse said it would be OK, whereupon the other nurse started arguing -- why wouldn't working out be just as hazardous as the banned activities? Just to be safe, I went home and took a long nap, instead.

Obviously, no legal decisions right after anesthesia ("don't sign any paperwork") and according to my husband, no ranting and raving on my blog! Oh, well. It's better than the patient who ordered vast quantities of Chinese food to be delivered to his house, when left alone by his unsuspecting wife! Or the nurse who told me he was doing some online transactions while on some "good" meds, and you know the screen where it says, only hit this button once to complete the transaction? Well, it really means that! He had so many duplicate charges that he had to cancel later. So, we're good here. Signing off as just a little loopy today --

Life, as I know it

It would be easier, I think, if I came here more often and posted just a small amount. But prepare for another brain dump! Or would it be more accurate to say soul dump?

My view of life, and death, was again confirmed by a new NDE (Near-Death Experience) book I read called "Proof of Heaven" by a neurosurgeon, Dr. Eben Alexander. By the way, Austin got this book for me for Christmas. I had requested "The Life of Pi," and he forgot which book and got this one instead. (A coincidence, in which God chooses to remain anonymous, as my friend Karen says. Or as Carl Jung would say, there are no coincidences, after all.)

Alexander's experience follows the quantum physics line that we are all interconnected with the entire universe, and are not separate beings at all. Our lives, as we perceive them, are illusory. Like a really gripping movie, we forget that this life is not "reality." Founders of great religions and philosophers have struggled to put this concept into human language and stuff it into the constrictions of human biology-based thought.

One of my newer practices is centering prayer, which involves no intentional thinking at all, but simply being in the presence of the creator. It seems that thoughts, after all, do get in the way of deeper understanding.

Alexander spoke of coming back and having to don his mortal frame once again, and realizing just how confining it is -- the 5 senses, the dull brain, obscuring the brilliance, the love, and simultaneous awareness he experienced outside of those boundaries.

And yet, I have trouble letting go of the dual nature of reality, or binding it together. Having seen my father drawing his last breaths, it's so hard to reconcile physical death with this greater spiritual realm. It is a struggle. I believe, help my unbelief!

Alexander struggled with reconciling his scientific skepticism with this newfound vision of reality. Unfortunately, science has become so self-important that it seems to have forgotten that it is limited -- crippled, really -- by the fact that every observation must be filtered through the perceptions of the scientists. As quantum physics shows, the observer cannot be disentangled from the observed phenomenon, and influences its outcome. Science has become the new religion in western society, the new dogma that everyone must believe or be wrong.

By the way, Alexander eschews all religious dogma. God ("Om" is the sound he recalls for God, a suspiciously Buddhist-sounding intonation!) is so far beyond the human boundaries of religion. And it's silly, isn't it, to try to appropriate God as the special savior of just one type of human being -- the Jews, or those who claim Jesus as their savior, etc. What about all the rest of creation?

I relate to Alexander's worldview, as someone who was skeptical of those things that could not be empirically explained and who was not a practitioner of any religion.

Here's another philosophical issue to ponder: belief vs. reality. It doesn't matter what I, or anyone else, believes, does it? What matters is reality. Do our beliefs influence our reality, then? In that case, our beliefs could matter -- a lot. Today, Austin showed me an article on the holographic nature of our perceived reality. It hypothesized (I think) that our attitudes influence our reality, which isn't so "real" as we would think. Our thoughts weave into our reality and become our outcomes, according to this little mind-blowing bit of pseudo-science. Possible.

"Right to life"

This phrase started spinning in my mind this afternoon, driving home from work. What was the fragile stream of thoughts that brought it up? Thinking is such a fleeting activity! Especially good thoughts -- they alight for a moment, like a shy forest creature, then they bound away. The bad thoughts, on the other hand, the worries that keep me up at night or memories of petty conflicts -- those linger! (I'm getting better at telling them to get lost, though!)

I was remembering my best friend's dad, who died of Lou Gehrig's disease, surely one of the crueler ways to die. The mind stays intact while the body disintegrates and stops functioning. Eventually, the person cannot swallow or eat unaided anymore. This man, Paul, and his whole family, were pillars of Christian faith. His daughter led me to the church, where I remain today. But the end of his life was a great struggle for Paul. He wrote a letter about it, which his family distributed to friends and family when he died. He said that where he was going, we all must go, but he did not go there willingly. He was kicking and screaming the whole way to the end!

So it seems that whether or not we are people of faith does not necessarily change how we face death. There was Henri Nouwen, who had a near-death experience and an encounter with his Lord and savior, and did not want to come back to life, the great vale of tears, ever again! But there are many people like Paul, who cling to life until the last breath is drawn.

The attitude of the faithful toward the plight of Terry Schiavo always confused me. If deeply religious people believe that we go to heaven when we die, why would they want someone to remain here in the lowest condition, force-fed, possibly against her will? The crux of the matter in that case was that no one knew the will of Terry herself, just what her family desired. Different family members wanted different things, and we all got to watch the drama unfold in our living rooms.

The religious right have a "culture of life" they want to promote to give everyone the "right to life." I dispute that we ever have a right to life. If that's true, why do so many people die young? What happened to their rights? Someone trampled them! Was it God, or Satan, or some merely secular force at work? Some die before ever being born, some in the process of birth, others soon after, and on and on.

There is no right to life if you are living here on earth. It's a ludicrous idea. People in African countries have even less right to life than the rest of us, apparently, given the younger average age at which they die. Having a "right" to anything is a particularly human concept, I think, not helpful but clinging to the illusion of control (as Buddhists would say, the root of all suffering). Life is never a right. It's a precious and fleeting gift, and there is no guarantee that you will have it for any particular length of time.

I wish that the outrage directed at abortions could also be directed against the atrocities that full-grown people commit against one another all the time. If an unborn child is deserving of that much respect and attention, what about people out of the womb? I don't like to think that some people may be using the emotional attachments that babies command to manipulate people's emotions, and their beliefs, and their vote. And what about all the causes of a shortened life that we could control or end -- malaria, AIDS, poverty, disease, violence, lack of access to clean water and food? While we sit in relative luxury in the U.S., most of us hoarding our money and other resources, people are dying around the world. These are our brothers and sisters. What are we doing about it? I don't have the answers. I'm as guilty as anyone else of having my blinders on, so I can continue doing the things that are comfortable for me in my little insulated box that I call a life.

Honestly, I don't sit down with the intention of ending up here, but I always seem to get to this big question -- it's the BIG one, honey! -- why so much suffering? Why can't we end it?

On change, again

I've got two "Great Courses" lectures I have been listening to. One on Buddhism (what else?) and the other on Communications. The second topic is addressed in a more scholarly way than I had expected, talking about our subjective unconscious mind vs. our conscious mind and a number of experiments that help shed light on the way we perceive and communicate with others.

The Communications lecturer spoke briefly about self-fulfilling prophecies in the context of other people living up (or down) to our expectations of them. Here's a link to Professor Dalton Kehoe if you are interested.

Self-fulfilling prophecies are especially at work with our own children. The conscious and subconscious expectations we place on our children helps determine who they become, so watch out for them. That's not the whole story with children, by a long shot. I think that who children already are (even at birth) is the biggest determinant of who they become, and that is completely outside the control of parents.

It's easy to see the effect of our expectations on our interactions with adults, as well. If we act abrupt and condescending, we receive a much different reaction than if we greet another person in warm, positive ways. Look at the way that old grudges just never die, both between people and groups. It's because people treat one another in the same ways and anticipate the same problems and conflicts, year after year.

I notice the way we box other people in to the "schema" (mental preconception) we have formed and don't allow them to change over time. I guess it is the way our brain avoids hard work, but it's beneath the level of intelligence and compassion that we are capable of. Think of someone you dislike intensely, and the way you view that person. Do you leave room for that person to grow and change in significant ways? Do you look for that kind of change in others, anyone at all?

I think one of the most inspiring messages of Clint Eastwood's "Gran Torino" (which we watched last night again -- Andrew picking it out and seeing it for the first time) is that people can change in dramatic ways, at any age. Look at Eastwood's character, a bitter old racist who is transformed by the end of the movie. How realistic is that? Yes, it's a legitimate question. I think that the people who change are the ones who first, believe they can; and second, work very hard at it. It can take years -- but it also can happen in a moment of decision. (I think of Thomas Merton's decision to become a monk. He had the sudden conviction that he should become one, though he did have to go through his own spiritual desert to get there.)

Too many people receive the message from our society (parents, teachers, authority figures, their spouses, etc.), that they will never change. Period.

One of the freedoms that the Buddhist philosophy conveys is impermanence, the knowledge that nothing stays the same and everything changes. Rather than being a threatening message, this can also be an invitation to enjoy the adventure of life! Our lives and even our selves are a flowing river, constantly in motion. This moment is precious because it is fleeting. Pay attention to it!