Just a Fond Memory

It is evening.  This afternoon I finished my classes at one of my client companies, ending my normal nine to 10 hours of classes and traveling.  I was tired and, as it has been every day, my back and hip were hurting.

With my stupid, embarrassing cane in my right hand and my overloaded backpack over my left shoulder, I hobbled like a penguin for 10 minutes to the bus stop and waited for my usual marshrutka.  It arrived but was so full that people were practically busting out the doors.  There was no chance to get on that one, so I had to stand and wait.  After a few minutes, another bus came by, and it was almost as full as the first one.  This one did not stop as close to my home as the first, but it was better than nothing, so I got on board.

There was no place to sit, even for a guy with a cane.  And I probably would have refused a seat anyway as long as there were women standing, but it was still maddening to see young guys sitting and pretending not to notice anyone else.  It was cramped and hot, and my back hurt trying to keep myself steady throughout the jolting stops and starts of the bus.  After about five minutes I reached my stop and – thankfully – got off the bus.

I walked across a small square dominated by a massive statue of a Soviet soldier from the Great Patriotic War (World War II), then I made my way along the local main street to my home.  Across the street from the statue is a complex of shops and behind that an open market.  It’s a busy place.  

As I walked, I took note of all around me: lots of people going this way and that, noisy buses, car alarms going off at the slightest sound, jerk drivers honking at any other car or pedestrian who dared to make them drive close to the speed limit, someone throwing an empty bottle on the sidewalk, some children screaming, some parents screaming, several plops of dog crap left by irresponsible dog owners, masses of city pigeons (flying rats), and of course, the ever-present chain smokers.

Then another image flashed in my mind.  It was a memory of coming home to my forest house in Bailey, Colorado – a tiny settlement in the foothills southwest of Denver.  On a similar summer day I would escape the hustle and bustle of the city, the heavy traffic and the unruly drivers – not go home to them.  Driving home, I would sit in the comfortable privacy of my truck, enjoying nice music.  

As I got further from the city, the traffic would get better, and the scenery would be as strikingly beautiful as the scenery I now face is strikingly dull.  The last few miles before the turnoff to my county road always made me feel the palpable transition from a guy who works in the city to a simple country boy.  And the five miles of country road, through Deer Creek Valley, were always a special treat.

Then another mile of dirt road and I reached my house, which was at the end of the development, the most private place.  I would pull into my driveway, back my truck down to the house, turn off the engine, open the door and step out into – quiet. 

Peaceful, solemn quiet.  There might be a bit of breeze making the soft, green aspen leaves quiver and offer an enchanting “welcome home” to me.  A few birds might be singing, or off in the distance there could be the “caw” of a raven.  There might even be a few mule deer or elk around the house.  But otherwise, it was just quiet… beautiful, beautiful quiet.

I would open the door to be greeted by a sleepy little black cat, Tia, who was ready to go outside and check her queendom.  After putting my things down, I might grab a bottle of water, or maybe a beer, and join her.  I’d sit on the porch and just look out at the beauty of the trees all around me and listen to the, well… the quiet.  Sometimes Tia would encourage me to go for a walk with her into the woods.

It was always so peaceful to come home to that place.  It was my escape from the rest of the world, my way of restoring sanity.  It was the most wonderful place I have ever lived, and I often think of it when the stress of my life in this foreign city gets to be a little too much.

And as I remembered how much I loved coming home to my mountain paradise, I asked myself why I gave it up to come and live in Kharkov.  Why on Earth did I throw that away?  Why did I sacrifice that, as well as a pretty good job, good health benefits (which I could certainly use now), and everything else to live this existence that I have here. 

They say that everything in your life is the result of the choices you make.  And I believe this is true.  This is why I often look back and question decisions like leaving my home in Bailey.  What could have possessed me to make such a choice?

And honestly, I don’t have an answer.  It seems like madness.  Sometimes I think I must be paying some kind of monstrous karmic debt.

In the past two months, I have suffered a deep emotional disappointment, had almost all my savings and my sense of security stolen from me, and seen my ability to walk normally and without pain spirited away yet again.  I am deeply discouraged and sad, and more and more I find myself thinking back to my mountain home and wondering why I ever left it.

If I am, in fact, paying a karmic debt, I wonder what I did that was so bad that I should have to pay such a heavy penalty for such a long time.  I have not been perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but have my sins been so deep as to deserve this?

There are lots of other nice, positive sayings that I am quite good at telling others when they are down.  “Everything happens for a reason.”  “There are no mistakes.”  “It is darkest before the dawn.”  But at times like this, when I try to tell them to myself or when I hear them from others, they just sound like empty platitudes.  I can’t take them in and make them work for me. 

In a few hours, I’ll go to bed.  I’ll put in my earplugs, turn on a fan to create a few hours of white noise, and then I will sleep.  And in my dreams, I’ll look forward to returning to a place where I have peaceful solitude, where the beauty of nature is everywhere… a place I never should have left. 

It seems like this is all I have left.

Blissfully Ignorant?

"Is a man better off not knowing that his wife or girlfriend is seeing another man behind his back?  If the government is doing something to us secretly, like placing some sterilization agent in our drinking water, aren't we better off not knowing about it and just blissfully going about our daily business?"

There is a famous saying that ignorance is bliss – if you are not aware of something bad, it can’t make you unhappy.  I guess this is basically true, unless you are the sort to obsess about the negative possibilities in the absence of evidence to the positive contrary.

But still, most of us find it more comfortable to not think about possible bad outcomes and prefer to either hear good news or nothing at all.

I got to thinking about this as I have been contemplating the MRI scan I have scheduled for this morning.  I am going to get a complete and detailed scan of my spine and hip joints.  It is long overdue, and I really do need to know what is wrong so that I can get the proper treatment. 

But I am worried.  What if the news is bad?

I’ve had occasional pain in my lower back for about 15 years, and it has gotten worse in the last three years or so.  But the pain in my hips has been happening since last October and became almost crippling on the left side back in January.  A general consultation with a chiropractor in Colorado, along with my own research, suggested that it was sciatica: a pinching or inflammation of the sciatic nerve.  Even after a chiropractor here in Kharkiv got the pain mostly under control, the underlying discomfort continued – on both sides.  I have not been really pain-free for close to a year.

Recently, the right hip decided to flare up.  It’s not been as painful as the January surprise that ruined my trip to the USSA, but it’s bad enough and my walking mechanics are messed up.  This has been the motivation to get the MRI.  Absent good imagery, it has not been possible to know for certain whether the problem is actually in the hip or somewhere in the lower spine.

But while I want to know the underlying problem, I am also afraid to find out.  I have a fear that there might be an untreatable degeneration of bone or other tissue in my hip joints, perhaps related to arthritis or something.  What I want from the MRI is good news, something treatable.  What I don’t want to know is any bad news.  So I have trepidation about the scan.

Similarly, I have been going along for quite a while preferring not to know too many details about what is going on around my heart.  I had a couple of stents inserted back in 2005, and I’ve occasionally worried about more problems cropping up… perhaps even more than just “problems.”

Last week I went in for a cardiac checkup, and I got good reports.  My EKG was perfect, and an ultrasound scan detected nothing to be concerned about.  But I am not fully convinced.  Maybe this is a case of obsessing on the unknown potential negative – something I think I have been doing ever since I got the stents.

It occurred to me that, if the MRI goes well on my back, I might want to go back and get a detailed heart scan.  But, then again, I might become aware of something that would shatter my blissful ignorance.

And, really, I could really use some good, old-fashioned “bliss” these days.

Isn’t it Better to Not Know?

There are so many situations in life in which people are unaware of something bad happening around them, and they go on with their lives unconcerned.  These can be individual, personal things that would wreck the happiness of a particular person if he or she found out, or they can be big secrets that could affect the lives of hundreds, thousands or even millions of people.

Very often we say that we are better off not knowing.  But I’m not sure.

Is a man better off not knowing that his wife or girlfriend is seeing another man behind his back?  If she is slick enough to cheat without getting caught, and he is none the wiser, maybe it’s better for him to not know.  Sure, others might know, and they might laugh at him secretly for his ignorance.  But his “bliss” has not been disturbed. 

The fact is, unfortunately, that very few cheaters are so clever, or their husbands or wives so blind, that they don’t at least get a sense of what is happening eventually.  And the anguish of suspecting is exceeded only by the bitterness of discovering the betrayal.  Bliss gone!

And if the government is doing something to us secretly, like placing some sterilization agent in our drinking water (as a member of the Obamshevik administration famously suggested), are we better off not knowing about it and just blissfully going about our business? 

Wouldn’t we have been happier if we had NOT known that the USSA government was secretly checking our phone records, reading our emails, and checking what Web sites we visited?  Edward Snowden may have felt that we should know about these things, but the guy really messed up a lot of people’s bliss.

So in many ways a good case can be made for just being blissfully unaware of the truth.

Protecting Others

This seems to be especially true when we try to protect those we care about from the emotional impact of knowing the “unhappy truth.”  We often go to great lengths to protect our children from knowing too much about the dark side of life so that they can enjoy the naivete of childhood and just “being kids.”

We know that eventually we have to warn our kids about the dangers that lurk for them in the world, but we try to put it off for as long as we can.  We hope they never have to learn about death, but we know that eventually a grandparent or someone else will pass to the other side, and the subject will have to be broached.  Still, we feel that the longer they can go on just playing happily and not knowing about bad things, the better off they will be.

Similarly, we often try to keep bad news from the adults we love.  A man who is worried about losing his job might try to keep the troubles and his fears to himself and not share them with his wife, less they make her worry too.  He hopes that the problem can be solved without her ever having to know.  These days, a working woman might do the same with her husband.

And so often we try to hide serious illnesses or other problems from those we love because we don’t want their bliss to be diminished through worry about us.  When an aged parent is very ill and a doctor tells us that the end is around the corner, we often try to shield the parent from that knowledge, encourage him or her to hold on and get better, and believe that he or she will close out life a little happier if there is still some hope.

Not for Me

With the exception of trying to preserve the aura of a beautiful world for our youngest children, I don’t believe that ignorance is bliss.  I certainly prefer to know the truth, even if it is an unhappy truth.  And I am especially sensitive to finding out after the fact that I have been lied to – even if the other person thought it was for my benefit.

It is better, in my opinion, to know as much as possible, even if it is not pleasant.  Certainly, I want to be happy, even “blissful.”  But I don’t want that at the expense of being uninformed or, even worse, ignorant.  Ultimately, my happiness is my own choice, and I prefer to make informed choices.

So, in a few hours I will be off to my MRI session.  It’s time to become informed.

Writer's Shock... er, I mean Block

Back in December, I wrote a post called “Odds and Ends.”  Basically, it was a collection of a few short pieces that had no relation to each other.  There wasn’t much sense in the post, and I did it only because I could not come up with anything good or insightful to write.  The “Odds and Ends” piece was an attempt to get something out – anything – and break my stagnation, my writer’s block.

And here I am again with the same malady: writer’s block – except that this time if feels more like a shock than a block.  I just can’t seem to get myself going, to get the wheels greased, to get the juices flowing, to… well, you get the idea.  I have been creatively stifled since early June.  It’s like I’ve been in a kind of deep shock.  Sure, I wrote a piece about the heart attacks of Andrew Breitbart and James Gandolfini, as well as a rambling piece of garbage about denying reality.  But they were, in my opinion, substandard – just an attempt to get something into the blog, even if it wasn’t what I really wanted to say.

But that's the problem; since at least early June, I haven't known what I want to say.  I have at least five or six posts that I started and have not been able to finish.  And don't EVEN ask me about my book!  I am not sure why, but it most likely has to do with my mental state for the past six weeks.  It's not been good, and it's hard to be at your creative best when your mind seems to be in survival mode.

Almost two weeks ago, I suffered the ignominy of a burglary in my apartment.  A few days later, I tried to write about it, to get my emotions into words.  But I couldn’t finish it.  And I’ve had a few other things that I’ve started since early June, but either I haven’t been able to finish them, or I’ve looked at what I wrote and recoiled with disgust I had written.  There is often value in writing what you feel, in order to purge your emotions, but just as often the result is not for sharing and perhaps better suited for burning.

The past six weeks have been one of the worst periods, personally, in memory.  The burglary, and the fallout from it, has been the most obvious “bad event,” but not the worst.  The hardest thing about the burglary, after the initial shock, has been the process of analyzing who could have been responsible, considering the logical suspicions of the police against my own emotional resistance to believing it, trying to find the right course to get the necessary information to either validate the police notion or support my own belief, and trying to find clues that reinforce the scenario I DO believe is true.  In some of this I have failed, miserably, but in the latter I think there is hope.

And on top of it all, the sciatic nerve problem has returned.  This just hasn’t been my summer, it seems.

I find myself alternating between self-pity and being on the verge of just throwing in the towel on the one hand, and seeing this as a test of will and a challenge to keep myself positive and moving forward in the face of calamity on the other.  Often I really ask myself why I am here in Ukraine and what I am doing with my life – always with no good answer.  But then I recover from that morass and see it all as a situation I must have created in order to grow and realize something important about myself and about life – perhaps something to be shared… when I figure it out.

Recently, I wrote the following short piece on VKontakte:

Life is not always "peachy." Bad things sometimes happen to good people. We don't always get what we want, we have disappointments, we get hurt. But life goes on, and you have a choice whether to go on with it, or let yourself wallow in misery and die slowly inside.

No matter how deep the hurt or disappointment, you HAVE to put it aside, regain your positive attitude, and move on to bigger and better things. Some time later, when we look back at the time of that particular bad thing, we often find that something better came of it - there was a GOOD REASON why that disappointment had to happen - but we can only realize this if we orient our thinking this way!

As Clint Eastwood said in his movie, "The Outlaw Josey Wales," "Dying is no way to make a living." Whatever the bad thing is, it's better to put it aside, find your smile, and get on with the business of living!

So, it’s a conscious effort to get on with the business of living.  I find myself being more careful about my self-talk.  That is a big deal.  And I am finally taking some steps to spend less time sitting at the computer, endlessly digesting news from the Internet.  That is also a big deal.  My bike is cleaned up and ready to be ridden – as soon as I get the hip fixed – and I have taken the first positive steps to start lifting again, slowly.

Recently I FINALLY started doing morning pages as suggested in Julia Cameron’s book, The Artist’s Way.  As I expected, getting started is terrible, but I think it’s an important thing for me to do if I ever want to realize my potential as a writer in the short time I have left.  So I am forcing myself to do it.

These are some good beginnings, but only time will tell if I am able to keep momentum and turn them into changed behaviors that stick.  And only time will tell if I can add some of the other changes I need to make.  But I choose to believe that I can and I will. 

Still, however, I am creatively and emotionally blocked right now.  I can see it and I can feel it.  I have become colder than I have ever been.  It seems necessary for now, and to be honest, I think this change is serving me well.  I just hope I don’t become too accustomed to it, because I don’t think it’s for the best in the long term.  But as with other things, I guess time will tell.

So... this is, really, another crap post.  When you are creatively blocked, I guess you write stuff like this.  It’s all that can squeeze past the stone that is wedged into the creativity conduit.  But maybe it’s enough to start the process of breaking the stone and washing away the pieces… in time.

A Final Thought

I mean, seriously… how in the world is Eric Holder still the Attorney General of the USSA?  Oh, yeah… it’s the USSA.

Developing a Tolerance to Reality

It’s an axiom of the human condition: the more you do or experience something, the more you become used to it.  We speak of being able to tolerate things better, even become resistant to them, as they become more and more a regular part of our lives.

Medical science has taught us that our bodies become tolerant to various germs and bugs after they’ve made us sick.  Often, once we’ve had a particular malady, we become fully resistant to it for the rest of our lives.  We may breath in or ingest the pathogen, but our bodies just sort of say, “Oh, you again?  You can’t hurt me anymore.  Go infect someone else.”  And the bug just slinks harmlessly away. 

Similarly, we speak of how people who drink a lot develops a high tolerance to alcohol.  At first, one beer or a little wine will give them a good buzz, and it doesn’t take much to get them wasted.  But over time, they have to drink more and more just to get the desired effect.  The same is true with most illegal drugs.

And tolerance to physical pain is legendary in history.  Many warrior cultures put their recruits through hellish ordeals in order to develop their tolerance to pain.  At first, they probably cry like babies, but the more pain they are forced to endure, the more resistant they become to its debilitating effects. 

In time, they become perfect warriors who can carry the fight despite broken bones, serious wounds or even the loss of a limb.  Their pain is still there – they’ve just become so used to it that they don’t react to it anymore.  These are the scariest – and the most effective – fighting machines.

We can still see this today in the “play with pain” cultures of many of our sports, like hockey and football.  Guys who sit out with anything less than a broken leg or gaping holes in their chests are derided as wusses.

But it’s not just physical pain that we can learn to tolerate.  We can become increasingly resistant to the effects of emotional pain as well.  When we experience heartache early in life, it feels like the whole world is coming to an end.  But it doesn’t end.  And we begin to realize this. 

As the years go by and we accumulate a succession of heartaches, we find that they affect us less and less until, finally, we hardly flinch.  We expect it, we’re ready for it, and after a brief bout of disappointment, we get over it and move on.

I can’t say that this is a good thing, really.  I mean, the fact that we can take heartache so much more easily just means that we lose our ability to really invest ourselves deeply in our relationships.  I guess it’s just the price we pay to have that kind of emotional self-protection, to grow that thick skin of pain resistance.

It occurred to me recently that perhaps we can also develop a tolerance for, or resistance to, reality.  That is, the more we look at a reality we don’t really like, the more we begin to ignore it in favor or an idea that is more pleasing.  Eventually, the “real” reality has less and less effect on us as our “preferred” reality takes center stage.  We can dispatch that unwanted reality with any of a hundred arrows from our quiver of rationalizations.

Perhaps this is the basis of self-deception.  When reality is unpleasant enough, or even hurts enough, we build up a callous to it.  Or, like the antibodies our systems produce to fight off viruses and other pathogens, our minds develop something like “antirealities” to protect us from the ravages of those attacking realities.

Our “antirealities” are the ideas and beliefs our minds create to give us a nicer alternative to what we don’t like.  In time, we buy in to the nicer alternatives and become almost fully resistant to those nasty reality bugs.  We feel safe and secure in the protection of our pleasant mental alternatives – our “antirealities.”

Maybe this is all the garbage of a rambling mind.  Or maybe there is something to it.