Mondays with Alan: The Real You

Mondays With Alan: Death

Our Universe Gets Smaller

The Kepler Project, launched in 2009, has discovered 2,299 planets (and counting). I love this graphic view of what has been found. We have started to learn how to look at our vast universe to discover just how much is still out there to discover.

Click here for more. For more about the creator of the video, check out Alex Harrison Parker.

Worlds: The Kepler Planet Candidates from Alex Parker on Vimeo.

Demons of Sixth Grade: Red Circles of Incineration

Image from National Geographic

I grew up fearing a demon. I wasn't alone. Many of us learned, whether in school or through the news, that this demon was out to get us. The demon was different than us. They didn't believe the same as we did. They wanted to hurt us, hurt us so much that they had these horrible weapons pointed in our direction. The demon was called the United Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

A specter of nuclear war hovered right outside my young mind. I didn't know why the USSR was the demon. No one ever took the time to actually teach me anything at all about the USSR. I just knew I was supposed to be scared. I also knew that I wasn't supposed to like "those" people.

My knowledge of the USSR? Minimal. Really none. My eighth grade history teacher, known for coming to class in a Elizabethan period outfit, skipped the lesson on the Soviet Union to "punish" us. He was mad, for some reason now faded from my memory, and refused to teach us. "This will be important stuff to you some day," the teacher said. "You'll be sorry you didn't get the lesson. We'll sit here in silence today."

Yeah. My public school wasn't the most progressive experience. I've come a long way from Center Junior High School. Hopefully they too have come a long way.

We have new demons to fear now. The process, however, is still the same. The xenophobia and ignorance is still the same. Children raised in the world since the World Trade Center came down have been taught by fearful adults to enact xenophobic fears toward people in Muslim countries--and people of the Muslim faith who are our neighbors in our own country.

The cycle continues. Someday a new demon will rise and replace our fear of Muslim people. When we turn our eyes away from the Muslim world they too, might turn their eyes away from us. They'll grow fearful of another demon as shall we. 

We seem to be unable to find our way out of this cycle of fearing that which is different. 

You can find this same xenophobia in the movie Trinity and Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie. Narrated by William Shatner, Trinity offers up stunning visual imagery of the destructiveness of the weaponry. It provides an engrossing and terrifying spectacle of destruction. The movie fails to question why the bomb was really developed. Maybe the horror is enough. The demon unleashed from the atom speaks for itself.

I wish the documentary moved beyond "othering" those outside of the United States. The same tired old xenophobia is laced through the movie. The bomb was developed, as suggested in the movie, to end a terrible war with Japan. It also makes allusions to needed to protect ourselves against the danger of another more ominous other, the Soviet Union. The most haunting image of all was at the end of the documentary. Horses raced onto a mock battle field, faces and eyes covered with gas masks. Riding the horses were similarly masked human soldiers. When the mask was removed we saw the rise of a new other--the Chinese tested their own nuclear bomb.

The horrifying cycle continues. German. Japanese. Soviet. Chinese. Muslim. We can't seem to find a way to see the other as part of ourselves. 

Click here to watch the movie. 

We hardly ever talk about nuclear war now. Now we fear terrorist acts. Dirty bombs, suitcase sized nuclear destruction, or biological warfare. Destruction can come in an envelope loaded with anthrax, or as demonstrated yesterday in Aurora Colorado, can come while sitting in a movie theater. These are the new staples of fearful living.

When I was in sixth grade people were afraid of nuclear war. People were terrified. I was terrified. I remembered that terror last night when I watched the documentary

Man would unleash the destructive power of the demon locked within the very fabric of matter and plunge the world into the atomic age.

My sixth grade teacher Mr. Joe Smith, taught me about this demon within the walls of my classroom at Zellers Elementary School. He'd just come back from a workshop on teaching children about nuclear war. He put a map up on the board. Our school was ground zero. He drew circles around the school. The first circle represented the area that would be totally incinerated. Another circle represented total destruction. Some rubble might remain but every living thing would perish. The circles continued. Everything I knew was destroyed. Incinerated. Burned. Dead from radiation.

I had a vague notion about the people who had these terrible weapons pointed at my school. I didn't know why. Mr. Smith hadn't been taught to teach us about that. The cycle of fearing the other was passed on to me. No reason to know anything about the other (as then, of course, they would no longer be the other).

I was terrified. Maybe for the first time in my life.

I did something when I got home. I went home and sent away for a list of addresses of potential pen pals. I wanted to learn about those people who had weapons pointed at my school. I also sent away for information from organizations like SANE and FREEZE. I was far too young to actually volunteer to do anything, but I felt like I needed to do something. These bombs were pointed at my school and going to burn me up. They were going to burn  my family up, and everyone else, too.

I did not fully understand why I took these steps. I hadn't really thought about any of this until today. Looking back, it was the beginning of my superpower as a psychologist--a superpower that I wouldn't fully understand until decades later when I was working on my doctoral degree.

It was all there when I was sitting in my sixth grade classroom. With a red circle of incineration drawn over my head, I was launched on a path toward learning about connection. There under the fear of nuclear incineration, I found the need to make the other part of me, and to let the other make me part of them.

Can you make yourself vulnerable enough to find yourself in the other?

We too have lived

After my walking tour of the abandoned Medfield State Asylum property yesterday, I set out looking for the cemetery where many of the people who called the hospital home were buried. If you blink while driving along Route 27 you'll miss this sign that is obscured by greenery.

From the opening of the hospital in 1896 until the influenza epidemic of 1918, patients who died while in the care of the hospital were buried in one large anonymous grave at the Vine Lake Cemetery. Deaths were not uncommon at the asylum. The first annual report of the institution stated that 24 patients died in the first five months of operation.

From 1918 through 1988, the hospital buried patients in their own four acre cemetery. This is the cemetery that I visited yesterday. It is fitting, somehow, that the cemetery is difficult to find. The people buried here disappeared with a blink of the eye from the view of society. All that remained of their lives were fist sized stone grave markers engraved with a number. The person's catalogue number, the only memory of who they were, are in some cases erased from the erosion of water and wind. 

In other cases, the number remains but the records of who they were were long since lost. People--mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, children of someone where banished from the view of society and left in the care of the state. All the remains of these individuals is a number etched in stone.

In 2005 a group of citizens including a troop of dedicated boy scouts. cleaned the cemetery, scoured public records, and raised funds to place gravestones in the cemetery that remembers the names of those who were erased from time. Many--though not all--of the lives of those forgotten are now remembered.

A newspaper article quotes a former hospital volunteer who said "I was surprised by the lack of respect shown to these people. It was almost like warehousing, it made it smooth and quick. It was to keep things anonymous. A lot of people felt the mentally ill people are not as important in life or death. It was a combination of factors, perhaps because they were considered less important than others in society."

I'm left to wonder the stories of these people lost to the cemetery. I wonder about the lives they lost and the families that have forgotten them. I also, at least in the case of Elvine Kiwisaun, wonder about the families that do remember them.

As I walked through the cemetery I thought about the collective importance of people like Fred Colson. Dead at aged 18. Perhaps he was considered insane for a developmental disability, masturbation, or hearing voices. Fred, and all the named and unnamed people lost to this cemetery, remind me the importance of witnessing and resisting any effort to devalue, repress, and forget the power of the human experience--normal or not, sublime or distasteful.

It isn't as if these forgotten lives were a thing of the distant past. The staff of the Medfield hosptial were reducing people to numbers in this cemetery as last as 1988. Here on the right, is among the last of the patients at the then called Medfield State Hospital that were forgotten and lost until 2005.

Spend a moment today thinking about what you aren't looking at. Turn your attention to the things you avoid. Look at what you think you cannot look at. We owe it to people like Number 650, Fred Colson, Robert Smith, and Elvine Kiwisaun. We owe it to ourselves.

The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom

A haunting and important reminder of the importance of fully inhabiting each moment. The film clip below, from a documentary called The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom, uses a disaster to remind us all of "the ephemeral nature of life and the healing power of Japan's most beloved flower."


The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom Trailer from Tsunami Blossom on Vimeo.

"Even when the flower falls, we love it. That's the heart of the Japanese person. Flowers dying is not a sad thing."

Existential Therapy Meets the Irreverent Psychologist

Imagine the following two stories which are basically true.

The patient asked, "What happens if my plane breaks up over the ocean and crashes?"

"Well then I suppose you'll die," responded the irreverent psychologist.

"Well now that's comforting. Aren't you supposed to say something comforting, something to make me feel better. I feel that we've lost a little safety here."

"You'd feel even less safe if your plane breaks up over the ocean and your last thought before you died is that I lied."

"Thanks a whole hell of a lot, Doc."

"Anytime."
____

I was in Palm Springs getting ready to venture out into the desert  to look at the early spring flowers that were blanketing the landscape. I distinctly remember looking into the mirror. That lump on my forehead. I can't really pretend like it's not there anymore. I can't really explain it away by saying that it's just the natural contour of my head. I can't explain it away by saying that I'm just a lumpy sort of guy.

I know what a lump means. It doesn't mean something good. I know what it means when people avoid thinking about their lumps: they are avoiding something that is too scary to contemplate. They are avoiding something that is too unimaginable. They are avoiding death.

I couldn't avoid it. I couldn't be that person.

I returned from the desert and made an appointment with my doctor. "Hmmm. It's a lump," he said. "Great help you are doctor," I responded. X-Rays, CAT scans, MRIs, and bone scans followed.

For one full week I sat with my lump. I sat with my fear of death. I was not yet even done with my doctorate and I might have bone cancer. I  might have brain cancer. I might be dead before I finished my doctorate.

I head back to the doctor to talk about my head. "Not cancer," he said. "Stop shaking."

I'll save you from the medical gibberish, but I had a bizarre condition most commonly seen in cats. I needed to see a neurosurgeon. I needed to have a portion of my cranium removed and replaced with titanium. I would be just fine, though a little more thick headed. I was hoping I could attach notes to my head with a magnet but apparently that doesn't work. I know this because I tired. Twice.
____

Viktor Frankl, Irv Yalom, and a raft of others have taught me that we should not avoid thinking about death.  In fact, that we should think about the finite amount of time we have every now and again. When we turn off our defenses and tools of avoidance we become closely connected with a single unalterable fact: we all have the same destination and that destination is death.

On a good day I don't find this destination particularly sad or scary. I find it liberating. I find it enlivening.
____

"You know exactly what I mean. You know that I hope that if your plane is crashing apart, your final moments are filled with connection, and presence, and knowledge. That is the best we can do. That is the only thing we can do. We're all heading full tilt to that destination of death. How are you going to get there? Hasn't that been exactly what our work together has been about?"

How are you going to get there?