Sorrow is catching up with me. I am leaving tomorrow for a two-week trip to the mainland to visit the west coast family contingent: Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, and LA. The first three will be okay. Damon is the LA stop. I have never visited Damon without Mike. Everywhere else I go, including home, I can pretend he is out or traveling.
I slept alone frequently when he was alive. There were years where he was away during the week and came home on weekends. He worked in Albany for a couple of years while our home was in Brooklyn. When he got his second Ph.D., he was in Washington D.C. from Monday through Thursday during the school seminars. Then he commuted between Columbus, Ohio, and Princeton, NJ, his first year working at the seminary in case his contract wasn’t renewed after the first year.
I’m noticing that only certain people whose expressions of sympathy touch me and others that don’t. I don’t know what this is about.
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Musings;
What does it mean to not think of ourselves? I see it as impossible. We always consider ourselves whether we want to or not. It’s just the way I feel thinking about Mike. I rarely think of him; I’m always thinking of him. He’s part of who I am. If that’s how it is with him, how can it be less with myself? While we are always focused on ourselves, we are usually focused on something outside of ourselves too. In our relationship with the environment, I see ourselves at the center of concentric circles. How many concentric circles depends upon us. The inner rings represent what we are familiar with, and the outer rings that are open for the unfamiliar.
The innermost rings are only us if there is such a thing, which I doubt. Maybe we can say those innermost rings are basic physical survival of only ourselves. But the rings just outside of that center ring, which includes people and objects, which are not immediately related to our survival, become part of what we consider ourselves: our homes, our jobs, our spouses, our children, our religions, etc., etc. The survival of those things become linked to our survival. In primitive times that survival was literal physical survival. These days we consider this more part of ego survival. The problem is confusing ego survival with actual physical survival. Not to minimize the importance of the ego; it’s just not equivalent to physical survival. Our reptilian brain, however, does not always know the difference.
Our attention is like a spotlight. We can focus it on any of the concentrate circles. Sometimes, things demand our attention, but we are always rooted in that center circle. We love getting out of ourselves and being part of something else. This is a basic human need.
Unfortunately, our need to be part of something large than ourselves does not always produce beneficial results; it can be either good, neutral, or downright bad. The good is when we can see ourselves as connected to other humans. In this day and age, the criteria would be all humans because we live in a global world. When our brains were developed, it would have been our tribe and not some other tribe. Loyalty. On the other hand, we can focus on a baby in need and, particularly if it is our baby, be prepared to sacrifice any form of comfort and even life itself. This is considered a good manifestation of our need to be part of and service something outside of ourselves.
When Mike was in the hospital for five weeks before he died, I was focused mostly on him. I loved being focused on him. I didn’t think of myself as making a sacrifice or suffering in any way. He grabbed all my attention. It was my blood pressure spike, which told me that it was even stressful.
Neutral activities are equivalent to going to a rock concert. Our senses are drowned in sound and sight; the responses of those around us impact us, carried away by the shared focus. We are all part of the same thing. Boy, what a thrill. I am at this moment listening to a string quartet. These players are experiencing a more controlled form of this surrender to something greater than each individual. (I would classify their experience as morally neutral. I anticipate some would take issue with me.) They are not just playing the notes in front of them; they listen carefully to each other. Their attention is on their actions and the actions of the other players. Perfect harmony, literally. This type of union is considered higher than attending a rock concert or listening to a concert by this very same quartet because the participants are active rather than passive. They are not merely swept away by sight and sound, blinded, and deafened to anything else; they choose attentiveness.
Unfortunately, this need to be part of something greater than ourselves can also go wrong. In an anthropology class, I learned that the word for humans was initially the same as the tribe name; they were synonymous. Therefore, anyone not of the tribe was not human.
I have heard or read recently, sorry, don’t know where that oxytocin is released, not only when we love our own, but when we attack those who are not our own, particularly in the company of our own. We’re seeing this a lot now. Our need to be part of something greater than ourselves can indeed go horribly wrong.
How much we focus on an outer ring rather than an inner ring depends on how stimulating it is, how important it is to us (i.e., Mike to me), or how much attention we can bring to it (i.e., the quartet). It can be very stimulating because it is demanding our attention, i.e., baby. Now a baby, particularly our own, while something separate from us, is also something that is part of us, close to the center of our sense of self. A baby demands that we focus our attention on it and not on our center, but it is impossible to do it to the exclusion of our center. We either love caring for the baby or hate it, sometimes both in the same day. However, that baby is also very much part of our sense of self.
Other things can demand our attention, which are unfamiliar, not part of our sense of self in an immediate sense. These can take up a lot of brain energy to process. Some err on the side of the familiar and some err on the side of the novel. These experiences get our focus off that center, but it need not be healthy, good for us, or society at large. It certainly doesn’t have to be altruistic. Is addiction of any sort an unselfish act? The escape from ‘self,’ those center rings, is not always good for us. Illegal drugs will do it; escapism of any sort: travel, extreme sports, changing partners, changing foods.
Too much ‘self’ and too much ‘not-self’ can both be a problem. Both are ways of escaping burdens of the human condition. And then, there is always the irony of focusing on a false self in which we spend our time denying who and what we are. That takes so much energy.
Again, I refer to our evolutionary background. The familiar was our group, as familiar as any group of people can be. The unfamiliar was the changing environment. Those folks did not have climate-controlled environments with food delivered to their doors. Every minute was fraught with danger, the unexpected, the novel.
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