Onward and Upward

“The man may teach by doing, and not otherwise. If he can

communicate himself he can teach, but not by words. 

He teaches who gives and he learns who receives.”

-        Emerson

It was 5:00PM on Monday afternoon.  He had just topped off his day seeing patients by lifting weights, as was his custom.   He said, “I’m in Los Angeles seeing patients tomorrow and will be back by 4:30PM.  I’ll give you a call.”  This is the way it always was…We saw each other every day, for the most part knew each other’s schedule, but he would end the day by asking me what I had planned for the next day, and let me know what was on the schedule for him.

Just before we parted, we quietly reminded one another how much we appreciated finally working together.  We did this from time to time, the way it is important for friends to express how much they mean to one another, even though they know it in their hearts - words do have meaning. He slipped the strap of his bag over the left shoulder and gently limped to the door – a residual gait the result of a stroke he had almost completely recovered from eight months earlier.  He turned and said, with a twinkle in his eye, what he always said, “Onward and Upward!”

His name was Vert.  Vert Mooney – now there is a name.  Son of Voigt and Naomi originally from Pittsburgh….an orthopedist, the quietest of men, and hardest working person I had ever labored with.  While he was trained in the elite institutions of the Eastern establishment, if you didn’t know what he did for a living, it would be impossible to guess – his affect was that of the most common of folk.

He and I had known each other for better than 20 years, and had collaborated on any number of projects.  We often talked about actually working together, but somehow the stars didn’t align themselves until the spring of 2008.

Come West My Friend

I got a call in February of that year.  It was that familiar voice, you know the kind…the voice you have heard so many times you can’t count, but never tire of.  The voice accompanied so often by affirmation and character – when you hear it, it’s like putting on those favorite tennis shoes that fit like they had been custom made; the voice that expresses earned respect, love, meaning – the feeling almost always unrelated to the content of the conversation…yeah, you know ‘the voice.’

“Ted, this is Vert.” – as if he needed to take those few seconds to identify himself.  He had lost his research coordinator and asked if I might be interested in taking that position.  “Time’s slipping away from us, if we don’t do it now, we may not get it done at all.”  So in June, on the cusp of my sixty-first year, I moved to San Diego, California to be with my friend, my colleague and one of the great human beings I have known.

Habit and Character

If habit leads to character and character to destiny, that would define Vert.  When he was home, he was up every morning before five.  By five, it was a pot of tea by his side and newspaper in hand.  By six, he had devoured both and was off to the shower to get ready for the day.  At 6:25 it was breakfast with Ruth his wife; 6:40 in the car and at his desk by 7AM.  In his 78^th year, this was his routine day in and day out. 

 His workdays were filled with patients, independent case reviews and writing –Vert surely could write.  As a young man, he had taken to the written word.  It served him well in later years, and would make him one of the most prolific orthopedic surgeons that ever lived.  He published hundreds of scientific papers, wrote book chapters, edited textbooks and added an autobiography to the mix…Yes indeed, Vert could write… His writing would lead to speaking engagements and visiting professor invitations all over the planet.

Emerson said, “…do your work…” and dare to do what you can do best.  Doing what you do best…easy to say, but in a world where most of us are confronted with much distraction and the way we appear, rather than the quality of what we do, it is sometimes hard to find what it is that we do best…this was not a problem for my friend Vert.

While his work ethic was impressive, and what he wrote meaningful to the profession he had chosen, it was his example in life that drew me so strongly.  He had a willingness to listen to anything, whether he agreed with it or not; his ready mind to reflect what he did know with the forward possibilities of what yet lay ahead.

What we say or what we do?

There is a great Stephen Sondheim lyric in the Musical “Into the Woods”

Careful the things you say
Children will listen
Careful the things you do
Children will see and learn
Children may not obey, but children will listen
Children will look to you for which way to turn
To learn what to be
Careful before you say "Listen to me"

While these lines are true of children, they are equally true for adults.  We look for consistency; we look for examples of strength and faith, and it is here we are inspired to be better tomorrow than we have been today.

What we do is so much more informative than what we say, for it is in the doing we build faith, learn of character, understand perseverance, find our mentors, develop self-respect and in the end, slowly get a better understanding of who we are.  When what we say matches what we do, that's when it really counts.

Tuesday afternoon the call came…it was not the 4:30PM call I expected.  It was 1:30PM, and it wasn’t him calling to say he was home so we could once again arrange for the day that lay ahead, as was so often the case.   This call was not about tomorrow, but rather a notification of his unexpected death in a car crash, on his way home from seeing patients in Los Angeles.   

"Just before we parted, we quietly reminded one another how much we appreciated finally working together.  We did this from time to time, the way it is important for friends to express how much they mean to one another, even though they know it in their hearts - words do have meaning."  I was then and am now grateful for that gentle exchange - It would be our last....

It was the most common of ends, in this fast paced world, for the most uncommon of men.  He was absolutely right... “Time’s slipping away from us, if we don’t do it now, we may not get it done at all.”  Coming to California by faith, love and a deep respect – even at this time in life – made all the difference in the world.

Thanks my friend…

  

“Onward and upward!”

- ted

Every day begins again

“Begin at the beginning and go on till

you come to the end: then stop.”

King to the White Rabbit
Carrol, L.Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

It’s all about communication isn’t it?  Finding ways to share our world, that is the world (mind) in which we live, with the worlds of others.  Communication is the basis for expressing and receiving meaning in life.

Let’s begin with the alphabet.  It allows us to communicate by the written word.  In the English language it starts with the letter ‘a’ and ends 25 letters later with ‘z’.  Twenty-six individual letters leading to words…words to sentences…sentences to paragraphs…paragraphs to essays, stories, books, manuscripts and the list goes on.  

It is awe-inspiring to consider the sheer volume of written material based on these simple, seemingly meaningless letters.  Yet through the mixing and matching of them, commerce has developed, countries formed, hearts made to soar and minds to imagine the unimaginable.

For the teller of tales, there is the drive to express ideas, convey the story and communicate the notion.  The reader becomes, in a sense, the voyeur who slips deftly, both into the story as well as the mind (world) of the author.

There was a time when all that existed was in oral tradition. The spoken word carried the message to the ear of the hearer.  Stories of the valiant fell from the lips of the gifted tellers, to the ears of the fortunate who heard them.  These were passed from mind to mind, generation to generation, taking on new life, and enrichment as they traveled through the years.  Some say oral traditions have existed for 50 to 100 thousand years!

Around 6 thousand years ago, an area known as the Fertile Crescent in the region of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, (general area of Iraq today), pictures began to emerge…orderly pictures – or pictographs – that could be used consistently to express ideas without the presence of the originator of the words.  From these formative efforts, came written language(s).

Written language constructed of sentences typically has a subject and some action related to that subject.  Life is a little bit like this.

The sentence of life...

Each of us is a story of sorts, made up of a spiritual alphabet – for lack of a better term.  In the mixing pot of life, we all have a similar foundation from which we emerge.  Like letters of the alphabet, we have basic characteristics such as wisdom, peace, understanding, faith, curiosity, joy, anger, gentleness, envy, greed, and this list goes on.  This is the world in which we live.

To carry the metaphor… life is composed of nouns and verbs.  We are beings, the central focus in the sentence of our lives – the noun.   That, of course is not enough, for we – the noun – must have a verb, we must act, for there is little doubt that without action, there is not much life - life rewards action.

The unique mixing and matching of these spiritual elements, as it were, create the distinctive individual we are.  It is awe-inspiring to see the innumerable mixtures of personalities that emerge from the spiritual alphabet from which we are created.

What is the story?

We then become the teller of the tale – the tale of our lives.  We tell it every time we meet or interact with someone.  The great thing about it, however, is that we actually can consciously and deliberately write the tale the way we want it to be.

If we recognize and understand we have control over the sentences we write in our lives – that is to say the way we use the spiritual alphabet we have been given – the clearer and more focused our lives become. 

Cultivate our curiosity and it will be stronger, exercise our understanding and it will grow, nurture our kindness and it will excel.  We can also starve our anger and watch it dissipate; re-channel our frustration and watch it whither; change focus from our envy and watch it dissolve.  This doesn’t mean pretending these characteristics are not there, but actively choosing to engage something else in their place - where we put their heart, is what we will become...for better or worse.  It is in our control.

Choose this day!

We are all authors and storytellers.  The story of our lives is yet untold, every minute of every day we have the opportunity to choose the things we want to write in the book of our life.  What has been written in the past, may inform the present, but absolutely DOES NOT have to predict what the next event will be.  The next chapter will be determined by the choices we make right now, at this moment in time.

Setting a plan regarding the way we want the lives we live in our world (mind) is up to us and nobody else.  We do not have to simply be a bystander and or a victim of our thoughts and feelings. 

Go to the blackboard today and begin to write what you want that story to be.

 
- ted

Who is the Lucky One?

 But I tell you, a cat needs a name that's particular, 

A name that's peculiar, and more dignified, 

Else how can he keep up his tail perpendicular, 

Or spread out his whiskers, or cherish his pride?  

- TS Eliot ‘The naming of Cats’

We call her Leah because she was lucky! 


You see in the Old Testament, there were a couple of sisters…Leah and Rachel.  Jacob was a fellow who loved Rachel, so he made a deal with Laban, her father, for her hand.  The deal? He would work seven years for Laban and in return get Rachel for his wife  - now that is love! 

The day finally came and the marriage occurred, unfortunately for Jacob, when he awoke in the morning he found it was Leah by his side, NOT Rachel who he loved.  When confronting Laban, he was told that Leah was the older sister and needed a husband.  Jacob ended up working another seven years for Rachel, but the point here is that Leah was lucky.  She was lucky to get a husband, lucky to have children, and by her luck, she became part of the matriarchy of the house of Israel.

I mentioned "We call her Leah, because she was lucky!"  This is because we have a Leah in our household too - that would be Leah the cat.  She too was lucky because she found us, or rather we found her.  Her mother was a female of questionable character and had a somewhat loose living arrangement with our next-door neighbors.  The mother was an outdoorser, a mouser with a generalized independent flair both in character and apparently her occasional choice in male cats, meaning in the words of Crosby, Nash, Stills and Young, “If you can’t be with the one you love…” well, you know the rest – okay, if you are under the age of 50 the line ends, “…love the one you’re with.”  

Leah was so tiny, when we got her; she fit in the palm of my hand – so tiny that she could hide either in or behind my shoes.  A calico, and as is often the case in kittens, her eyes were disproportionately large for her face and body.  This is almost 12 years ago by now, and she has grown to her full nine pounds.  

 

Three cats reside in our home, but there is only one who attends much to me.  That would be Leah.  Early in the mornings, she wakes me by climbing on me.  It doesn’t matter in what position I am lying, she waits until I roll over on to my back, dancing like one of those loggers who stay atop a spinning log in the water.  Once on my back, she settles down with a gentle purr.

This, of course in her world, is simply foreplay for breakfast, you know – the tease.  She has some clock in her head that says, “Okay that’s enough.  Now that I have your loving attention – let’s eat!”  Some people say a person has only so many heartbeats in their lifetime.  Leah seems to have a certain allotment of purring breaths before it’s time to woo me to get her breakfast. 

If I feed her and then head back to bed for a few moments – an infrequent event – she will return to my chest, lie down and purr some more, with a satisfied and relaxed posture that says, “Now isn’t this better on a full stomach?”

There is something primal and exceedingly satisfying about lying tummy-to-tummy, chest-to-chest, heart-to-heart and breath-to-breath in the darkened and early morning hours.  There is something comforting about lying there with a creature in who is no malice.  There is something energizing about sharing a moment without words that satisfies both creatures in whatever ways they individually imagine it.

This morning was one of those times.  As we quietly lay tummy to tummy – me reading, she digesting and purring – we found a moment of contentment that these words fail to adequately express, and I was taken by the warmest and gentlest of thoughts that I was the ‘lucky one.’

 
- ted

No one thinks...

For what [is] your life? It is even a

vapour, that appeareth for a little time,

and then vanisheth away James 4:14 – the Bible

“Jesus Christ, this kid is dying!’  Not the words a person is interested in hearing, particularly if they happen to be ‘the kid.’

It was two AM in Vung Tau, the Republic of Vietnam – 1969.  I was working the night shift alone as a radar air traffic controller and napping in our small portable radar unit.  The radios were on, in case an aircraft called in. 

Unbeknownst to me a small centipede had crawled up under my tee-shirt.  Unfortunately, it was poisonous and bit the inside of my arm while I slept.  I didn’t realize it was there, but the bite woke me up.  My left arm was numb as often happens when you lie on your side, so I shook it out.  The numbness did not go away and I began to feel sick.   A call into base operations sent a couple of my co-workers to pick me up and take me to the medical facility – a large sectioned off tent.  By time I arrived, the little creature still under my shirt had bitten me twice more.  Over the next twenty minutes or so, lying on an observation cot, my breathing became a little shallower and pupils began to constrict.  The medics decided to wake the on call doc, who felt I should be given an injection of epinephrine (adrenaline) used for situations of developing shock. 

The problem? He gave me more than he should have.  Within a breath, I was in full body convulsions.  The doctor dropped the syringe and exclaimed those disconcerting words, “Jesus Christ, this kid is dying!”  Everything seemed paradoxically to go into slow motion.  He ordered the two guys who had brought me in to hold down my legs, one of the medics to lie across my chest, and the second medic to get a spring syringe of atropine.  He injected the medication into my stomach, and I slowly began to calm down. 

All of this took place in seconds, but I clearly remember thinking as if it were yesterday, “Well, what a non-heroic way to die…I wonder what mom and dad will think…Damn, I didn’t get to say good-bye or tell them how much I really loved them.”  A centipede just didn’t seem to be very meaningful way to exit planet earth – and so far from home.  As it turns out, I was in the hospital for several days with a splitting headache, and survived.

The point of this story is not the preceding event, as attention getting as it was, but rather the impact that it had on the rest of my life.  I realized two things from this unexpected pebble dropped into the liquid chemistry of my mind:

One – you can put things in your body over which you have no control – so be very careful about that, and

Two – life is extremely fragile and can be snatched away in no time...completely unpredictably.

It is the second thing I learned that had the biggest effect.  When you are young, and particularly when you are a young man in this culture, there is a sense of invulnerability – an almost inherent underlying belief you are indestructible.  This event changed that perception in an instant, forever altering my view of life, and as it has played out, the way I interact with others.

Nobody getting up in the morning, with the exception of the condemned or terminally ill, thinks this will be their last day; no child going to school in the morning thinks someone will come into their classroom and take their life before the morning ends; no one getting into their car to head home thinks their life will end within the hour; no person heading to a grocery store to do a little shopping and maybe visit their representative thinks their life will end in the next few minutes or seconds; no one thinks they will never see their mother or father or sister or brother or son or daughter again as the day begins – because, well “…no one thinks the unthinkable….”

Yet this is the uncontrollable nature and randomness of life.  There are NO GUARANTEES. 

This brush with mortality led to a sea change in the way I looked at life and the lives of those around me.  It led to a life-long habit of taking small moments to thank people for their service – colleagues, secretaries, the janitor, the waitress, friends, and my family.  It led to a life-long habit of looking for ways to compliment people on their work, no matter what their job.  It led to a life-long habit of encouraging people in moments of personal struggle.  It led to a life-long habit of thanking people for having made a difference in my life, and led to a life long habit of telling people I love that I love and admire them.

The last item is not always easily said nor is it easily understood.  This is where words so often do not work  well.  Once you have told someone you love them, the meaning is often left to the understanding of the hearer, rather than that of the sayer.  If it is not clear, it can lead to misunderstanding….and surely there are times when I have not had the words to express an understanding.  The rewards, however, usually, outweigh the risks.  In my life, and I hope in yours, the rewards have almost always been worth the risks.

Some people say this falls under the heading of doing, “…random acts of kindness…” I reject the former and embrace the latter...these acts should never be random, but deliberate and with gratitude, because “…no one thinks the unthinkable…”

 
- ted

Be and not seem

Go to the ant,…consider her ways, and be wise – Proverbs 6:6

How we invest our time has everything to do with our quality of life.  The things we think about and do, prepare us for the next unknown adventure.  The way we invest our time helps us move forward in life.

A pertinent question might be: What do we want out of life?  Another: How do we translate our desire into reality?  On the surface, when asked the first question people might say a new car, home, opportunities to travel and the like.  But looking a little deeper, most say they would just like to be happy…a little less tension and friction in their lives.  Many of us live our lives through the entertainment of books, television, movies and other time passing events.  Unfortunately, living passive lives bring us only temporary satisfaction, time passes and before we know it, life has slipped by.  The writer of proverbs says:

 A little extra sleep, a little more slumber,
      a little folding of the hands to rest—
 then poverty will pounce on you like a bandit;
      scarcity will attack you like an armed robber. – Proverbs 6:9-11

Most of us don’t know we can gain the things we desire; that we can take charge, and have some control over how the quality of our lives unfolds – we simply show up each day and take whatever comes.  This DOES NOT have to be the case.

Translating desire into action is the key, and developing positive habits goes a long way toward achieving our goal. Marcus Aurelius puts it this way:

“Early in the morning, when you are reluctant in your laziness to get up, let this thought be at hand: I am rising to do the work of a human being..." - Marcus Aurelius: Meditations

One good way to help us begin to feel change is to think about others.  Taking time to appreciate other people and have empathy for them, elevates our mood and can increase the quality of our lives.

The scripture says it is better to give than receive.  This isn’t just advice to help create a more harmonious culture; it is insight into the basic truth that we grow and gain satisfaction when we give of ourselves…our time, our energy, our gifts, our skills or our spirit on a consistent daily basis.  This is one of the great paradoxes of life…by giving with an open heart – no strings attached – we, ourselves actually receive and grow.  The good news is that we can cultivate this in our daily lives, and it is surprising how little it takes. 

Try this experiment for the next month.  Write five of the following items down on paper and put them on your bathroom mirror – this will keep them in front of you on a daily basis.  Look for an opportunity to exercise each of them every day for one month.  See what effect they have on your life.

1.     Gratitude: When you get up in the morning and put your feet on the floor, do it one foot at a time and say quietly out loud, “Thank you”…First foot touching, “Thank” – second foot touching, “you.”   

a.     Do this every a day.

2.     Kindness:  At work, the store, with a neighbor or friend - say a kind word and smile. 

a.     Try to do this five times in the day

3.     Empathy: Look for someone in your life that is struggling, and let them know they are in your thoughts.

a.     Actively look for the opportunity

4.     Compliment: Tell someone they look nice in their choice of clothing, cut of hair, loss of weight.

a.     Do this at least twice a day

5.     Appreciate: Let someone know you appreciate them – their spirit, the work they do, their friendliness or their wisdom in life.

a.     As often as possible

6.     Thanks: Tell someone they have done a good job – maybe a waitress, bus driver, colleague, husband, wife, significant other.

a.     As often as possible

7.     Smile: Smile at people when you see them or greet them.

a.      do this as often as you can

8.     Engage: Ask someone about their lives or interests or work.  People love to speak about things important to them, and it is surprising what you can learn.

a.     Look for the opportunity

9.     Help: look for opportunities to help someone that could use it.

10. Do the unexpected:  Return too much change at the store, pick something up that a person dropped, open a door for someone, take someone for coffee or lunch.

- ted

Seek for Immortality?

“These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist for God today. There is no time to them.”
- R.W. Emerson

 In the folklore of human literature, the idea of a fountain of youth has found its way into the imaginative minds and pens of writers of all kinds.  Water from this fountain was said to restore youth and vigor, permitting one to live eternally.  In the mythology of the Americas, it was said Florida contained such a spring, and as the story goes, the unrelenting object of the Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon. The idea?  Somehow living forever is something to be desired.

Consider, however, what it might mean be eternal – to live forever in this world.  How much would be accomplished?  What would the incentive be to finish a project? It could always be done later.  Immortality might just be a recipe for failure rather than success.  The knowledge that tomorrow would be just as good as today, might be just exactly the mechanism by which nothing got done.

Yet, we all seek immortality – to be remembered – in some way.  This does not mean our temporal existence is meaningless, but rather a dressing room, as it were, in preparation for a next stage.  

How we find or conceive of it in more than an abstract way is the centerpiece of this idea of ‘no time.’  For surely, once the path is found, the journey is much less painfully difficult.

Immortality has everything to do with ‘no time.’  It is a way of expressing in a single word the ‘end game’ of our human experience.  Endgame might be the wrong word – how about the end of our earthly journey.   Spiritual writings describe better lives ahead once this earthly body is shed…better?  For some, clinging to a positive forecast from the storms of this world, helps keep hope alive.  For others, there is an unknowing, yet undercurrent sense of more to come. These teachings tell us there are things that need to be done, in order to find the elusiveness of eternity. They suggest bringing oneself to a more quiet and peaceful place through prayer or meditation, causes greater enlightenment.

Allegory of the Cave

In Dante’s Divine Comedy – Paradiso is an example of the transcendent journey toward immortality, as are the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, C.S. Lewis and others.  One example is Socrates’ allegory of the Cave (Plato – The Republic, Book Seven).

Plato asks the reader to consider what it would be like if a person were from birth in a den under the ground...chained in a position where he/she could not move and could see only what was directly in front of them – a blank wall like a movie screen.  Imagine a fire, or some light source behind them.  Between them and the fire behind, different objects pass, casting shadows on the wall.

There would be no way to discern the source of the shadow, no way to understand these were just images of something else being reflected.  Further consider there to be an echo in the chamber, so that any thing spoken from behind would seem to come from the shadows themselves.  The shadowed reality their complete world!

Now imagine being released from this position, turning and seeing everything thought to be reality, merely a reflection of something else.  What a shock!  What they thought true was not! The light of the fire would be overwhelming. 

Further suppose, once having accommodated to the light of the fire, they made their way up and out of the cave into the open world.  What a further shock! This light would be even more overwhelming…so dazzling they would be unable to see clearly until their eyes became accustomed to this new world…the moon, the stars, the heavens and finally the sun itself, no longer the dimness of the fire, nor the reflections on the wall – BUT life as a truth.

Plato argues this would cause person to reflect on those still in chains in the cave and realize all of the things important to them - understanding, status, desires for honors and glories were meaningless.  In addition, returning to the cave, would be found a dark and black experience.  Rather than being embraced, this person would be considered an enemy of those still in chains.  In trying to release another from the chains, they would not be honored, but condemned, in peril of their very life.

Plato says this allegory is one of intellectual enlightenment - that in the world of knowledge, true good is the last to appear in its true form and can only be seen with effort.

The way we live our lives; the openness we have for spiritual and intellectual growth, the struggle to understand, allows access to a doorway through which we all desire to pass – the beginning, one might say, of a transcendent and eternal life…toward the ultimate ‘no time.’

 

- ted