Awaiting the Day's Challenges

Monday, January 28, 2013

The Tyranny of Reaction


When you aren’t run by reactions, you see things more clearly, and there is usually only one, possibly two courses of action that are actually viable. Freedom from the tyranny of reaction leads to a way of experiencing life that leaves you with little else to do but take the direction that life offers you in each moment.
- Ken McLeod, “Freedom and Choice”

Each morning I go seeking some guidance. The source can be the Bible, a tract or an e-mail delivered right to me. Sometimes, just sometimes, the piece hits the mark.

Tonight I am going to a very challenging meeting. I will have a copy of Robert’s Rules under my arm. My hope is that I can stay taciturn and aware. My additional hope is that the options are clear.

Why Worry?

Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?


Matthew 6:25-27


As I sat on my mat today I thought this very thought, can I add a day to my life by worry? Can I change anything by worry? The answer is no. I can be aware. I can be rational. I can observe the reality. Then I can opt for the path that is appropriate. However anxiety will not bring me health nor will it put money in my pocket.


I do not know what time is allotted to me. I do not know what fate is allotted to me. What I do know is that I have to live in the present and to make this moment one that counts. Clear my mind old man. Get focused and get moving. Live today. Live this moment and be of this moment.


I am sorry I have not written in a couple of days. Meetings, health, anxiety, all these things impact on what time I have to set things down on paper. Last night the school board meeting went late. Yesterday I was fielding phone calls about the meeting from the time I got up until I went to the meeting. The day before I just felt like crap. What does this all mean in the greater context? Probably nothing. It is time today to just live.

Tell Me a Story Please

My early life was spent surrounded by a large family.  Every week we gathered at my grandmother’s home and had a meal with 30 or so people present.  The older people and some of the younger ones had a gift for storytelling.  It was not the kind of storytelling you get from standup where after a slight build up the comedian inserts a four letter word and everyone with their glazed looks laugh.  

It was the kind of story telling where the person relating the tale showed something of what they were.  The tale might be true or a damn lie or confabulation but it was like listening to a tale that Gabriel Garcia Marquez might write.  I loved it and it became part of me.  Methinks that if you actually have read some of the tales on this blog you get that I was touched by the story telling bug.

There are some places left out there where this kind of story telling still exists.  Two that stand out for me are the Moth Radio Hour on NPR and the Vinyl Café on CBC.  I only discovered the Vinyl Café this morning.  I heard the narrator tell a long story about breaking friend out of hospital for a cup of coffee.  I was laughing heartily before the narrative was over.  If you want to hear that one, go to this link and start it at about the half way mark.

http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/podcasts/vinylcafe_20130126_51631.mp3

 

If you just want to explore the real treasure that is the Vinyl Café go here.

http://www.cbc.ca/vinylcafe/

Roadway

http://youtu.be/8Bm2yBf1tfA

I heard the song from this link listening to a Canadian program on the radio. It needed a place to be on the blog. The image the image of the moon rising over the highway as we are returning from the hockey game couldn't stand just by itself. I therefore decided to tie the link to the image. Enjoy

The Cold Waiting Night

Mortality is a tricky issue to address intellectually. Me, I was raised a Baptist and after life’s end there is either reward or punishment. Fred Armisen in Easy A kind of nailed it down well with his presentation.








Thinking about mortality, with religion telling you that there will be winners and losers in the afterlife, is really kind of off-putting. And I was told about hell from such a young age. A lake of burning fire awaits those who don’t personally accept Jesus Christ into their lives as their personal savior. And you know what burns most in hell it is the part you sin with. (Open pant’s fly and fan widely at this point).



At the end of high school I was so afraid of death and the chance that my parents would die unexpectedly that I became kind of dysfunctional. Okay the wake and bake regimen might have played a part but I mean I would be lying awake at night thinking, “There is no fucking way out of this. I AM GOING TO DIE!!!!” I would be sweating widely if I was sober.



When I was 17 one of my childhood friends died at his own hand. It wasn’t what started this focus but it was kindling that stoked the fire. He left this world at 17 without experiencing much of anything. WTF?







I remember asking my father if he believed in what that taught at church. He didn’t give me what you would call a straight answer. He told me that there was a great deal of good that you would learn in listening to Sunday sermons. He told me it was important to be in that pew. What he said next was curious. I can’t remember the exact phrase but the crux was that did he believe everything was exactly the way they said it was well to that the answer was no.



What I did to address my fear was I thought very proactive. My first term at university I took a course in metaphysics and epistemology. I knew I was in the right place when one of the varied text books was entitled “Writings on Death and Dying”. Professor Wilkinson who had some form of palsy and who wore a beret would smoke as he lectured. With his good hand he would make notes about the Greeks and Heidegger and each eighty minute session would spin off into the kind of thing Pinto did looking at his fingernail in Animal House.



The hours surrounded by my peers talking about life and knowledge and meaning really helped. It calmed me. In a way it was like attending a tent meeting. What do I mean by that? I mean we all had come seeking some answers and the fact that we all had those questions was in a way a comforting answer in itself.



In the end I came to a conclusion. Because death was a universal something none of us escapes we must therefore approach it just like so many things we have no choice about and we must face subject to grudging acceptance. It was something that by heredity we were bound to like each one of forebears. I put the fear away into a box for a long, long time.



At 56 I am at a point of considering outcomes as opposed to future possibilities. The box I put away that philosophy class is still sitting on my shelf. It looms larger now than it did at 30, 40 and even 50. While the concept of hell still bothers me the question of meaning bothers me more.



In a universe that is billions upon billions of years old and comprised of billions and billions of stars and planets and even more dark matter that we can’t even measure right what has it all meant for me, for any of us. I think I have to come back to Iris to explain it all to me and send me off to bed tonight.

Please Get Real and Face Your Addiction, Really.

Alcohol leaves human bodies at a relatively standard rate. For a normal man (I know that is an oxymoron) the rate is about .015 an hour. For women the rate is slightly higher nearing .020 per hour. A person with serious alcohol dependency issue may have a rate approaching .030 per hour.


While not immutable these rates are pretty damn on the mark. Studies have shown that even using a 95% solution of alcohol will not produce positive breath alcohol readings past 19 minutes duration if the solution is an oral only contact. Cheese sandwiches and pizza don’t give readings that start at .033 BAC and drop to .006 over and hour and a thirty three. With woman’s expulsion rate of .020 these readings are the textbook demonstration of alcohol leaving the body.


Still the people I see swear the breath testing machine is wrong and that they aren’t drinking alcohol despite this reading coming at the start of a day following a holiday. As I challenge them about this set of facts they get louder. It is as if they think yelling is somehow going to make the empiric evidence somehow less real. Arggh.


You can lie to me about what you believe, about what is in your heart, about your motivations and about anything subjective. Bottom line I am relatively soft on challenging these lies. I am willing to give you the benefit of a doubt But you cannot lie about what science is telling me you did six times over 11 months when you tried to start your car because the data is clear you had alcohol in your system. At some point you have to get honest and deal with your addiction.

Really, that is what you remember?

Last night after much urging Primus brought home his hockey team’s program. As I sat and read it so many things ran through my mind. A great deal of what I saw there showed me how far he had come and how far he has to go.

He is a true hockey player however. His favorite memory of all the hockey he has played was this, “The fight at the end of spring league two years ago when the team got into a brawl in the tunnel after I was ejected.” No wonder his favorite player was listed as Gordie Howe.

Alien Life Form on Ice

Sunday, January 20, 2013

A long time ago if you had told me how much time I would be spending on the road staying at mostly mediocre motels and hanging out at hockey rinks waiting for Primus’s games to begin I would have laughed at you.  Being a hockey parent was never in my life plan.  

Thinking back on it Hell, it wasn’t in my life plan to be a parent.  Due to medical conditions my beloved wife and I never anticipated children, funny how the cosmos, or the Divine, or God or fate intervenes and rewrites your plan.  The shifting order of reality happens again and again.  We may need some reason to believe, but I kind of think simple acceptance in the way of the Zen masters works for me.  My life has become has become what it was always meant to become.

Some years in hockey have been good and some years have been awful.  There were moments of joy and moments of pain that stretched my temper and patience to the breaking point. Still all in all I don’t think I would trade in all the bad morning coffee, the hometown referees, the slow service for groups of forty for anything.  There is something about being with people who are trying to find a common point to unify around that is very, very special.  

There are little things you get from these experiences.  Debt is one of them but don’t even go there. Connection with some damn nice people is another and it way outweighs the impecunious life it has caused me. For example over the past day I have sat and talked to an optometrist, a contractor and a software engineer about their respective life arcs and their dreams for their children. They believe and they have hopes that what will follow for their children will be good.  Each of these parents I have spoken with has had passion; these aren’t people with a laissez faire attitude about life plans.  

The other thing I see is kids being kids and at the same time building connections that will follow them for the rest of their lives.  They may not know it but somewhere they will impact each others’ lives again. Somewhere one of them will stand up for another of them in a tight sport, or bail them out, or give them a reference and it will make a difference in their life. It may be casual or planned moment but they know they are stand up guys working for that common purpose to win. They have knowledge of each other and they trust each other. They will remember the foibles and limitations but they will remember that fought and worked together to be the best they could be.

My son is the alien among them.  This is not his planet but he has learned to talk the language.  He has mastered most of the lexicon of sports metaphors, the palette of appropriate glances and supportive words to offer in tough situations and hell he even makes eye contact with his team mates.  He wants to go out to lunch with them.  He wants to play ministicks with them untill 2 a.m.  He even worked himself into a dice game with some of the parents. 

I don’t know why we stuck with it, but the reward has been great.  Breathing bad air at the rink, driving through ice and snow and like I said drinking bad coffee has led to something positive and wonderful for Mom, Dad and the all American alien child. If your child is neurotypical I have no hesitation urging you to spend the dollars and get him or her into the mix at the rink.  Hockey is both physical and spiritual and it is damn fun to watch.  

If your child like mine is on the spectrum, hockey isn’t as easy a choice.  For some ASD kids it will work and for others it won’t.  Still I would urge you if you child has Aspergers or has the words “high functioning” somewhat floating about them that you consider organized sports.  Be it soccer or baseball or hockey start it early.  Be patient and be ready to intervene with knowledgeable commentary to coaches on how to best approach your child and his or her communication and behavioral patterns. Be ready to offer guidance to other parents on how to explain to their children the issues and suggestions (when you are asked for them) on what to tell their children to expect from your child. 

It sounds weird but what I guess I am saying is that for us, hockey is therapy, hockey is life, hockey is connection to a regular world and it has worked.  Every ASD kid is different but we kind of have to make our strategies up as we go along based on what works.  I am a believer in integration with involved parenting in organized sports.  It ain’t always easy, but as I sit here at what will probably be our last road tournament on the road I am having some misty eyed moments.

Piety?

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

I didn’t write a piece for the blog yesterday. The why is simple I got caught up with the waste of time that is Facebook.  Online I posted a picture of my writing space and then tagged all the weird stuff that occupies my desk.  Stupid reason not to write, but it is the real one.  

Tonight as I was lying on my bed I began to think about Spinoza.  Weird, eh?  Mostly I was thinking about the Marrano community of Spain.  Marranos were the new Christians that arose at the time of the Spanish Inquisition.  In order not to be burned at the stake or tortured Jews would outwardly convert to Christianity, i.e. new Christians.  From best I can tell the term Marrano was derogatory and was applied to these converts by the established church hierarchy.  One text indicates term itself may be a bastardization of the word pig, the animal the Jews would not eat.  There conversions were viewed however with great suspicion with older established members of the Christian community.

I remembered reading about Spinoza being part of the descendents of this group.  One anecdote that has always remained with me is how confused things living as a closeted Jew/new Christian could get.  Where a Marrano would enter a cathedral a prayer would be said. The prayer was basically an Aramaic recitation that everything in the church was an abomination and anathema.  It concluded with a statement that the one God remained king.  The funny thing was that as the generations of a new Christian family remained in the church some and then often all of the private conduct of traditional Jewish customs and ceremony that were initially secretly carried out in their homes would disappear. Over the years, the decades and the generations many Marrano families actually become devout Christians.  

But still the family members recited the Aramaic sayings on their way into church that disavowed everything they were about to do in there.  They no longer knew the meaning but it was tradition. One writer indicated that some of these prayers were still recited with reverence by devout Catholics on the Iberian Peninsula into the early part of the last century.  

Struck me as kind of odd and I have on a number of occasions wondered about the meta issues involved.  Denying the God you are going to worship with true faith by the use of a prayer concocted based on your family’s ancient forced conversion seems pretty odd.  Does the act of offering the prayer negate your piety?  Does it mean that you are still Jewish?  I don’t have any answers but this is the kind of stuff I wonder about as I look at my Tibetan prayer flags that hang above my various Bibles and Christian prayer books.

I Remember the Preacher

Tuesday, January 15, 2013

When I was young and sitting in the back rows of that Baptist Church I would occassionally catch bits of a sermon or a passage from the Book.  Little things have stuck with me, like don't take it apart it you don't have a good shot at being able to reassemble it.  Most of Deutoronomy stuck with me because the sexual stuff was pretty darn interesting.  But one passage always caught my attention.  Maybe it was because of the Byrds version of it that had flooded the airways when I was young.


There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens:

a time to be born and a time to die,

a time to plant and a time to uproot,

a time to kill and a time to heal,

a time to tear down and a time to build,

a time to weep and a time to laugh,

a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,

a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,

a time to search and a time to give up,

a time to keep and a time to throw away,

a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,

a time to love and a time to hate,

a time for war and a time for peace.


What do workers gain from their toil? I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live. That each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil—this is the gift of God. I know that everything God does will endure forever; nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it.

Ecclesiastes 3 (partial)


Last night I gave my oldest son a piece of advice. It went something like this. When I was your age my parent’s asked me not to so something. I thought I knew the world better than they did. In the end I ignored there advice and was expelled from high school. As you know through good fortune I was re-instated. I am asking you to be mindful. There will be a cost if you aren’t. Every bone in your body is going to want to do what you want to do and nothing else, but use that ultra rational mind you have and figure out what is at stake.

We will see what happens. The world is circle filled with repeating seasons. I have seen my share. My hope is that maybe this young one won’t have to repeat my mistakes.

Adversity

Adversity's Blessing

When empathy spontaneously arises, we sense the power of love as a blessing revealed by adversity. How embarrassing it is to see how preoccupied we have been with our own petty concerns! Seeing how affection stirs people to acts of selflessness inspires us to extend ourselves as well. With loving-kindness we see the needs of others and respond.

 

- Judith L. Lief, "Welcome to the Real World"

Monday, January 14, 2013


Over the past several days I have spent hours engaged in the Machiavellian business of my local school board. A school is slated to close and every possible reason by those impacted is being thrown out in an attempt to stop the event. Racism, classism, lack of transparency and the list goes on.


Whenever someone’s ox is being gored they respond. I am empathetic to their concerns; I would not want my neighborhood school to close either. Much of what is driving the decision is out of the school board’s hands. Our funding comes from the State not from our local taxes. Oh we can build buildings but the State provides us the money to populate those buildings with teachers, desks, computers and books. Each year that number has gone down for over a decade.


I don’t begrudge the opponents of the school closing their indignation and anger. But other than expressing empathy I don’t know how it can be made right for them in a responsible manner long term. They are not the only school population in the district.


That phrase in the above quote, “With loving-kindness we see the needs of others and respond,” hangs in my mind. What to do? I guess I will try and start by expressing my affection for the school, its teachers and its students. Where I go from there is an open question.

Puck

Our Common Enemy

If we can begin to consider hatred as the enemy, as your and my enemy, then we can begin to transform our anger into compassion. That will be how we can take advantage of an unfortunate and tragic situation.

- Nawang Gehlek Rimpoche, "The Real Enemy"

The above quote suits what I am currently writing quite well.  I view hatred as a more aggressive form of ignorance and I (and my family and my son in particular) have been fighting ignorance for years.  Some of the ignorance was on our part.  Some of the ignorance was on the part of people who should have known better.  Still if by writing I can give someone, anyone a tool with which to fight ignorance I have carried out a moral act.

Today, well actually yesterday, I began writing a piece on what it means to have a son who is on the autism spectrum make a high school varsity sports team.  Next weekend we (the team and the parents) are travelling to a multi-day hockey tournament. For my part I am savoring my son’s riding on the team bus as a varsity player as a senior. 

What spurred me to write about this is something I have noticed over time, the lack of recognition of ordinary people addressing very difficult issues. I always see pieces in the local news media about the athlete of the week who has overcome a broken home, a childhood illness or who has always excelled reaching for the stars in academia or sports and who through sheer force of will has never stumbled.  One time in a thousand you will see a cloying piece that usually drips with pity about a team that includes on their roster the amputee or the kid from Somalia that has no idea where his family is.  You don’t get stories about kids with autism striving to be part of a team and then making the team.

There are a couple of reasons for dearth of autistic kids on high school sports teams.  Kids with autism have difficulty negotiating the very specific social norms and cues that varsity athletes operate under. Normally you aren’t even in the race to make the team if you don’t the code and the language.  Secondly many autistic kids do not care about teams; it isn’t what they focus on. It will come as no surprise to anyone that the literature implies there is a high degree of self focus and often a lack of empathy for others in autistic youth.  Third, autistic kids can be clumsy.  My son broke his nose twice before he was five because his brain and his body did not communicate to tell him to put you arms out when you trip forward so as not to hit your face.

While it is a long shot making a high school team is possible if the right circumstances exist for a person on the autism spectrum. There is a website that lists the following as some positive characteristics of Aspergers/High Functioning Autism.

1. Attention to detail – sometimes with painstaking perfection.

 2. Focus and diligence – has an ability to focus on tasks for a long period of time without needing supervision or incentive is legendary.

3. Higher fluid intelligence – scientists in Japan have recently discovered that Aspergers kids have a higher “fluid intelligence” than non-Aspergers kids. Fluid intelligence is the ability to find meaning in confusion and solve new problems. It is the ability to draw inferences and understand the relationships of various concepts, independent of acquired knowledge. Experts say that those with Aspergers have a higher than average general IQ as well.

4. Honesty – the value of being able to say “the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes.”

5. Independent, unique thinking – people with Aspergers tend to spend a lot of time alone and will likely have developed their own unique thoughts as opposed to a ‘herd’ mentality.

6. Internal motivation – as opposed to being motivated by praise, money, bills or acceptance. This ensures a job done with conscience, with personal pride.

7. Logic over emotion – although people with Aspergers are very emotional at times, they spend so much time ‘computing’ in our minds that they get quite good at it. They can be very logical in their approach to problem-solving.

8. Visual, three-dimensional thinking – some with Aspergers are very visual in their thought processes, which lends itself to countless useful and creative applications.

The site where I got this list seems pretty good.  There are many sites but I am not a plagiarist and this is the one I used so here is their link. http://www.myaspergerschild.com/2011/01/list-of-aspergers-characteristics.html

 

From the moment my son put skates on the first time at about 4 ½ years old he wanted to skate fast and hard.  He had that internal motivation.  Something about speeding around a rink made him come alive.  You could see his eyes flash when he headed out to do laps.  He surged he went full bore he just rocketing around that oval.

We initially tried figure skating. However the cost versus benefit (physicality, team activity, camaraderie with other families) tipped us toward hockey after about 18 months of ice skating shows.  From the time he put on pads he loved hockey.  For the first few years he was horrible at it.  As I said autism spectrum kids can be pretty damn clumsy.  But he was focused.  He listened to what his coaches said.  He was diligent and did the drills as he was directed.

Primus struggled with the locker room interactions.  Over the years there have been fights both with other teams on the ice and with his own team members in the locker room. Undiagnosed as autism spectrum until seventh grade there were a couple of coaches who treated him like a pariah because he was different. Hey I didn’t know what to tell them.  It was only when my wife was reviewing a request for research on the increasing prevalence of autism in teen boys that she looked up the symptoms and saw our son described to a tee right there on the all knowing interweb.

But Primus stuck with it and he stuck with his core teammates, a group that as a whole got shafted any number of times by our local league and by organized hockey in Michigan.  (That is a whole other story but the abuse built camaraderie and a sense of black humor). But there were league representatives and coaches who embodied the spirit of amateur athletics who made sure my son got his shifts on the ice and that he got help in developing his skills.  It wasn’t an easy road but it has been a rewarding road. Diligence, attention to detail, single mindedness and the internal motivation to make the high school team they have all lead to this year.

When I started the actual piece I keep finding myself going back to cues that I missed because I didn’t have an idea that autism was anything other than what I had seen in movies or books.  You know the images children locked in their own silent world.  As I went back to events at preschool, at 2^nd grade and throughout the years I became emotional because of trained professionals who must have known but did not speak up.  If they knew then they were worse than negligent, their behaviors could easily be called malpractice.  

What started as a three page piece will probably end up being twenty.  But I will write it and I will post it here. Count small victories and share them that is what I say.