Sunday Musings on a Rainy Day…8/25/2024
1 Phone. On holiday, pretending to live in a time when there were no phones. WSJ Katie Roiphe
I’d like to give this a try, although I’m not sure that I can devote a month to the effort as is suggested by Ms. Roiphe. At least not at the moment. Still…
2 Still. “There’s a difference between being still and doing nothing.” The Karate Kid
Would it be easier to be still without access to your phone? Or looking at the other side of the coin, can one escape the notion that randomly scrolling is in some way doing something?
This quote found its way into “musings…” several years ago. I’m still working on being good at being still.
3 Rain. It is raining in the precise little sliver of geography I presently occupy. According to the weather reports (acquired from my laptop, not my phone, thank you very much) it is going to continue to rain for another hour or so. At least on my immediate surroundings.
It looks as though it’s fairly dry above the lake some 10 or so miles north.
No real reason to bring this up. Contrary to the song, rainy days and Sundays don’t really get me down as long as I’m not alone on either for too very long. Alone in the rain on a Sunday? Sounds like a song waiting to be written.
4 Viewpoint. In the mid-’90’s one of my colleagues taught T’ai chi in a series of classes offered to folks who had some connection to one of the local hospitals where we were both on staff. Viewpoint #1: turns out we were both former “hard-style” martial artists who’d left the fighting stuff behind for various reasons and thought that T’ai Chi would fill the void. Michael is 10-ish years older than I am and had reached the point of action 10-ish years sooner. All the better and fortunate for me because I could learn from him in comfort.
Over the ensuing 30 or so years our friendship has waxed and waned as our slightly different life stages and medical lives flowed toward and away from each other. Likewise, we spent more and then less time together in our T’ai Chi practices. As my dive into CrossFit went ever deeper I drifted away from T’ai Chi. Michael stepped in with a couple of refresher sessions. My CrossFit practice was enhanced by my reintroduction of T’ai Chi.
Came a time around 2018 when my left hip rebelled to the point where everything hurt, including the gentle movements of T’ai Chi. Sadly, the ensuing 6 years of so were so engulfed with the ebb and flow of pre-hab/surgery/re-hab, my physical viewpoint so tightly focused on the necessary aspects of recovering whatever was possible after two surgeries and the overwhelming need to re-build large-muscle strength, that I find that I can no longer remember the T’ai Chi form. So long in the building of the memory, muscle and otherwise, at 64 it is naught but shadows in mind and muscle.
I miss it.
In T’ai Chi, specifically classic Yang style T’ai Chi, it looks as if I have found a building block as I seek to construct the next phase of life. Interestingly, I discovered that a very specific issue of viewpoint has created a challenge that will need to be overcome before I can even begin to address the twin peaks of muscle and memory I will need to summit to re-gain the sequences of the practice: I learned by standing behind my teacher, and by placing myself in the middle of the group when privileged to have company. All of the videos and all of the diagrams in print are shown from the front view, looking at an instructor facing the camera.
In order to regain something old that I’ve lost I will need to learn how to look for it in a totally new way.
5 Sixth Sense. “It’s about perhaps the most frightening thing of all–not being able to communicate to people that you care about.” Haley Joel Osmet, on what he felt was the ultimate theme of the movie The Sixth Sense. Gentle warning: I don’t really know where this is going, so if you haven’t seen the movie there may be a spoiler ahead.
Those of you whose parents have died know exactly what Mr. Osmet is talking about. While I didn’t necessarily think of talking with my Dad each day after he passed away in 2015, now that my Mom is gone I think about what I would like to talk about with each of them every day. Funny, huh? For decades after med school I would chat with one or both of them at least a couple times each week. Lest you feel this declaration is a push for some type of beatification, each of my siblings called my folks 5 or more times each week. We all agree that not being able to talk with them at all is the harder part of no longer having them here. Each morning when I park my car at the office I look at the path I wore through the grove of pine trees between my office and my Mom’s final home.
A path I no longer have need to travel.
Death, while certainly the most certain of causes, is hardly the only reason why we might be unable to communicate with someone we care about. You might, for instance, have a family member who is in the military and is deployed someplace where they can neither reach nor be reached. Friendships, as I’ve written, fall prey to distance and time; more of either can change the calculus, even if one friend still has the will to make the math work. Of course, if one has had an abusive childhood of any kind, especially if the abuse has extended into your adult life, ceasing to communicate with the abusing agent might be the difference between happiness and ongoing despair.
If memory serves, the essential thread that runs through The Sixth Sense is the effort being made by Bruce Willis’ character to talk with his wife. Throughout the film we wonder why. Absent time or distance or abuse, or death, of course, one not only fears the inability to communicate with someone they care about, but like Willis in the movie, one’s fear is amplified by a parallel quest to understand the barrier to communication. One thinks of something like shunning among the Amish and similar communities or situations. Willfully severing the ties of family and community in response to some transgression for the purpose of punishment.
It’s as if you’ve been sentenced to a kind solitary confinement while you are surrounded by the rest of humanity.
Owing to the geography of Beth’s upbringing in Pennsylvania I have some knowledge of the cultures and the mores of “Plain Folk”. I’ve always found shunning, the willful imposition of estrangement from family and friends, to be an unsolvable puzzle. Even the more general term estrangement contains conceptualization that suggests both a puzzle (the word “strange” is contained therein) and something truly awful (it literally means to turn someone into a stranger). A fatwa not on a life itself, but on acknowledging the person living. Is a shunning a life sentence? Is there some sort of restitution, some penance of a kind that would end the institutionalized estrangement? I never learned enough to know.
In the end it’s really quite a profound insight that such a moving film is ultimately about the fear of no longer being able to communicate with a loved one. Especially given that the insight comes from a 30-something’s recollection of how he felt as a 10 year old. Did his character fear the same loss? What did young Haley Joel call upon in his life to so convincingly portray that fear? And what of Bruce Willis? What did his character feel when his ultimate fear became reality? What did Willis call upon in his portrayal?
When through discretion, distance, or death he learned that he could no longer communicate his love?
I’ll see you next week…
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