When I surfaced to pee at one point during the night, I experienced a sudden mood shift. It was as if a shade, which pulled up instead of down, suddenly dropped to reveal this state of mind. It wasn't good. My first response was to run away. I applied Buddhist meditation: I released anything bad about my hatred for the mood and kept anything positive or anything I still needed. I usually also do the opposite: releasing anything negative about my love for the mood, etc. I didn't have to do that this time. Doing the first produced an immediate change. The hate dissolved, and all I felt was curiosity. I first defined the feeling as sadness. No, that didn't quite feel right. I then tried despair—that fit.
I can imagine people reading this thinking despair sounds like the right state of mind in response to today's world. But no, this is much older. This is a familiar feeling that I have known forever. I don't know if it needs a trigger. Nor do I know its origin. I do know that releasing my hatred for the feeling took off some of the pressure. I fell back to sleep.
At 5 am, I was wide awake, excited about an insight I had. I figured out a possible reason why J. didn't understand why it would be easier to find a soccer ball in a bathtub filled with dark water if there were four of them rather than one. As I wrote this, I didn't know what he was thinking. I would find out in today's session.
Okay, I asked him if it would be easier to find 'a soccer ball' in dark water if there was one if there were four. If he interpreted 'a soccer ball' as a specific one, he would be right; it would be more challenging to pick a specific one out of the four. If he interpreted 'a' to mean any one of the four, he would be wrong. Interpreting the meaning of 'a' is more complicated than I ever imagined.
Mathematically and grammatically, the definition is clear-cut. However, as we use it in the course of daily conversation, not so much. J's mother might say to J's father, "Hon, pick up a quart of milk and a loaf of bread when you go to the store." The store does not stock just one brand of milk, no less one brand of bread, and then one type of bread under that brand. J's father knows exactly what J's mother means when she says, "a quart of milk and a loaf of bread." There is a specific brand of milk, and a particular type of milk, whole versus skimmed; there is a specific brand and possibility type of bread, white, whole wheat, multi-grained, etc. This information is understood; it doesn't have to be repeated. Mathematically, you might say the set has been implicitly defined. It is still 'a quart of milk and a loaf of bread' because it is anyone within the predefined set. It doesn't have to be the third from the right on the top shelf.
Also, J. would have had lessons in probability. In those lessons, different colored balls are placed in a container. Students have to estimate the probability of blindly grabbing a blue ball versus a red one based on the proportion of each in the container. I only completed 4,000 steps on my morning walk. I was too anxious to get home and write up what I discovered about the meaning of 'a."
Elsa went ballistic in yoga this morning. She went charging from person to person. Her behavior was captivating; Yvette's three dogs joined in. They must have figured something interesting was going on. I suspect that Elsa was just delighted to learn that yoga was back again after class was canceled on Saturday because Yvette had to take B. to the ER.
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