Sandpiper ( seeing the mystical
light )
I discovered it a few years ago on one of my annual
visits back to the East Coast. It was sitting quietly on top of an old dresser,
up in the attic of my Aunt Mildred's house on the
Silver, with red and black trim, and a red plastic
handle. I had given it more of a customized look by spelling out the name
"STEVE" in large gold decal letters, running diagonally across the
front. As a final artistic touch, I had added two, maroon and white, stickers
of flying roller skates from The Fordham Skating Palace. The winged skates suggested
a much greater skating speed than I had ever managed to reach, and stickers of
ripped pants, creative falls, and floor burns would probably have been a little
closer to truth.
Luckily for me, I had no professional
ambitions as a roller skater. It was just something I did for fun on Saturday
afternoons. Even with that, I'm actually a little surprised that I stuck with
it for as long as I did, since, obviously it wasn't my thing. Even after years
of practice, I was still never able to develop anything much in the way of a
skating repertoire. My greatest accomplishment, in fact, probably came when I
mastered the art of skating backwards tentatively. I probably looked about as relaxed and flexible as Frankenstein did when he
got off the table for the very first time and was asked to skate backwards.
Part of the problem was that I could never really develop the knack of glancing
over my shoulder to be able to see where I was going. As a result, I found
myself constantly bracing for a fall. I was always afraid of being surprised by
a stray piece of chewing gum or a sticky puddle of Coke, and both were pretty
realistic possibilities at The Fordham Skating Palace.
Although I didn't really appreciate it at the time,
learning how to skate backwards probably helped me to learn some really
valuable lessons about life. First and foremost, of course, I learned never to
throw gum on wooden floors, and, as a rule of life, this has always
served me well. More importantly, I learned a little
something about hurtling myself backwards into the
great unknown, and this would
prove to be excellent training for my later work as a
psychotherapist. As a matter of fact, it almost qualified as my job
description.
Putting aside my flashbacks for the moment, I,
excitedly, unlatched the cover and looked inside. The box was filled with
stacks of old love letters from my cousin Carol to her future husband, Perry.
More importantly, however, the lining was still in remarkably good shape, so,
without giving it much thought, I automatically dumped the letters into a
cardboard box.
As I stood
there, insensitively going about my work, I couldn't help being struck by the
timing of it all. Only just recently I had been feeling a strong need for some
tangible links with my past, and now, suddenly, out of the blue, my old metal
skate box turns up. And, here was something that was, finally, light enough for
me to carry back on the plane. My first bookcase and desk could stay behind in
And the skate box was actually in pretty good
shape, all things considered. A little scratched and rusted around the edges
maybe, but hey, who wasn't? I was even beginning to feel a little scratched and
rusted myself. Since l969 I had been working as a psychologist for the
"Fighting Aztecs" of
Sometimes, particularly during the peak seasons for
human agitation, life would start to look like an endless series of crises, and
our office would start to take on the look of an emergency room for the
human spirit. And
things would usually come in bunches for our clients too. Somehow you just knew
that after their relationship went
belly-up, that they'd also be having some car trouble in
the very near future.
Although most of the time I found the work to be
generally fulfilling, sometimes it could really get to me. Like the cop on the
beat, or the air traffic controller up in the tower, we all knew that we were
paying a price for doing our particular kind of work, we could feel it taking it's physical and emotional toll. But we were hooked on it.
Cops need robbers, and, apparently, counselors thrive on clients with problems.
But, sometimes, when things would really start to
build-up, I'd really start to wonder where the upside of this business had
gone. It could then become a constant challenge just to keep your perspective,
and not drown in a sea of negativity. Part of the problem for us, of course,
was that there was a major imbalance in terms of what our clients were
bringing-in to talk about. There was a tremendous negative surplus of
confusion, despair, and anxiety, and little in the way of celebration or
positive ritual to balance things off. In some ways, we were almost like
clergymen who only got to do funerals, and never any weddings.
Since my students were usually depressed, they
rarely popped-in to tell me how great they were feeling about themselves or
about how wonderful life could really be. In truth, many of my clients actually
felt constantly shortchanged by life. All too often their rewards felt like
punishments, and their punishments felt like rewards. It was an easy mistake to
make, and one that I was personally very familiar with. Even with all that, I
sometimes found myself wishing that we could change the name of our counseling
center to "Our Lady Of Perpetual
Disappointment."
But, sometimes it was really hard not to get down.
These were troublesome times, and rapid change and painful upheaval seemed to
be everywhere. From the global level to
the more personal or human level, nobody seemed immune. Even my old metal skate
box had to go through a few rough times. Since its liberation from my Aunt
Mildred's attic, it had actually been forced to go through a rather difficult
mid-life career change of its own. It was now working as a door stop in our old
Spanish house on
It now stands quietly in our den, holding-open a double-glazed
French door which leads out to our second-story redwood deck. The large
L-shaped deck affords a beautiful view of rolling hills, tree tops, and
colorful drought-resistant plants, while a slatted overhang provides some
welcome relief from the
The whole scene gives us the welcome illusion of
country living, even if it might, technically, be more like the suburbs. But
there are no sidewalks here, only some narrow winding roads, and we don't have
sewers yet, just septic systems. There's even a little wildlife to be found
that you wouldn't necessarily associate with a suburban habitat. We have plenty
of birds, everything from hummingbirds to hawks, and there's no shortage of
lizards either. In some sort of low-budget Darwinian festival, the slowest of
them are systematically weeded-out by the cats who stalk them around our yard.
And, the cats are kind of amazing in their own right. Somehow, through some
unexplained, mysterious process, they are able to intuitively sense that we
humans love to receive decapitated lizards as presents.
And there's a lot of other action around the
neighborhood. Some of our neighbors raise bees, and we seem to be raising ants,
although not intentionally. During the
hot, dry, Santa Anas they
invade our house in their desperate search for water. Seeing
giant black swaths moving into my kitchen propels me into a desperate search of
my own -
a search for Diazanon spray. It goes against my nature to
have to resort to chemical warfare, but these ants don't seem to want to play
it any other way. Sometimes I try leaving them a little drinking water outside
the house, but it never seems to work.
Even if the whole scene might be somewhat of an
illusion, it's still a very attractive and comforting one to us. There's been a
steady stream of people just like us who have also been discovering "
So, at least for the time being, we still had a
little space and serenity, and we appreciated it. My wife, and I had both come
from humble beginnings as apartment dwellers in the
Early Memories
The story actually begins only a few short blocks
from the very same
In many ways the
Although we didn't get to see any cats stalking
lizards, the view from 2401 still had its own share of action and high drama.
There were stickball games, squealing brakes, people screaming, sirens blaring,
and the constant backdrop of horns, traffic, and trains. It was an environment
of concrete, metal, and noise. There was little in the way of softness, an aloe
would not have survived.
I spent a lot of time looking-out on this festival
of sight and sound; contemplating it all. I remember being impressed, almost
astonished, at how everyone was getting-on with the business of life; how they
all seemed to know just what to do. Under the circumstances, they seemed to
have a surprisingly clear sense of purpose. Like drones in the hive of life,
all the players seemed to know their roles. They all seemed to know the ropes
and the routines.
But, as for me, I remember feeling very perplexed
about the whole thing. I just didn't really get it, and a growing uneasiness
seemed to be settling-in rather early in life. Almost as soon as I could think,
I probably began to question it all. How come they all know what to do with
themselves? How do they know what this is all about? Instead of sitting in my
high chair, and quietly eating my mashed carrots, I, apparently, thought it was
important to reflect-on the death-denying quality of much of contemporary
American life.
Other than
being an incredibly deep, and existentially-savvy
newborn, like most babies, I think I also must have been cute. I remember my
extreme self-consciousness when people would make a fuss over me, and how very
ill at ease I felt from all the kvelling and cheek-pinching. Flashbulbs
going-off in my eyes startled me. I felt a little like King Kong - dragged into
the city, taken far away from my natural habitat, and gawked-at by strangers on
the other side of the bars. Some thirty years later I came to realize just how
true this really was, and just how much I still wanted to go home.
I had a small collection of stuffed animals in my
room, and, for a while, I had some glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling.
Although I never had a dog or cat in our apartment, at any given time I might
be playing host to fish, turtles, parakeets, or even rabbits. Depending on the
year, there might also be anything from marbles and baseball cards to stamp
collections and chemistry sets. Most of the stock got regularly rotated, but
sporting goods and musical instruments were usually in there somewhere.
Like most kids in those days, I also went through
my cowboy and Indian stage. The Lone Ranger was one my biggest heroes, and I tried to be just like him, even if they didn't
allow horses into our apartment building. I loved the fact that he wore a mask,
and did good deeds anonymously. And I loved how he would be heading-off into
the sunset just as the townspeople were looking at the silver bullet, and
trying to figure out just who that masked man was, anyway.
My favorite Indian was Straight Arrow.
He could usually be found on the cardboard cards separating the layers of
Nabisco Shredded Wheat. Straight Arrow always seemed to know amazing things
about how to survive in the wilderness, and he could travel through the forest
without making a sound. Even if he was walking on dry leaves, nobody could hear
him coming. When I would try this myself, it sounded like I was walking on
boxes of shredded wheat with microphones in my shoes. Straight Arrow was also
the ultimate wilderness handyman. With only a few twigs and rocks he would,
somehow, be able to construct an entire Indian village and feed it for a year.
I envied his
uncanny ability to
find wooden sticks that were just the right length, and had notches in
just the right places.
Straight Arrow may also have been the one who
inspired us to get into archery. My friends and loved to go into the woods and
shoot our bows and arrows. And once there, we didn't always bother to use
traditional targets either. Sometimes when we were a little bored we might
shoot an arrow into the air, straight-up, directly above our heads. It would
completely disappear into the sky so we'd have to stay alert and try to spot it
before it pierced our skulls or blinded us. It sure was a great way to get the
old adrenaline going, and was probably great preparation for the hazards of
dating.
There was really so much for us to do growing-up in
Converse Allstars were my favorite sneakers. One of
the regular highlights of my childhood came when we would head over to the
local sporting goods store on the Grand Concourse to buy a new pair of
Allstars. We had a choice of white or black in canvas or canvas. For that
customized look you could add a pair of colored laces, and there was sometimes
tremendous anguish on deciding on a color.
The white Allstars looked a lot better, but it was
pretty hard to keep them that way. It was always open-season on any new pair of
white footwear, so, if you chose them, you'd have to be constantly on your
guard. The biggest targets, of course, were any new pair of white bucks. Show up in some and
be prepared to run for your life if you didn't want them covered with black
stomp-marks. In those days they even sold little bags of rub-on chalk powder to
hide the marks and blemishes on your wounded bucks, and they sold a lot of
them.
But, even if your friends did try to step all over
them, it was still nice to get a new pair of sneakers or shoes. I, actually,
felt very lucky just to have them. These
days it seems to take a lot more than that to do the trick. It's not like we
were feeling poor or deprived in any major way. We actually thought of
ourselves as middle-class in those days, much as we still do now. But in those
days we would compare ourselves to the less fortunate ones, on the bottom of
the scale. And, compared to the people in Harlem or
Now, of course, I can still manage to feel deprived
even while owning three cars and living in a mini-hacienda. Now, for some
reason, I tend to envy people who can travel at will, even though I really
don't enjoy traveling all that much, and, at the moment, there's no place in particular that I
really want to go. I guess it was a lot nicer, and a lot cheaper, when all it
took was a new pair of sneakers to make your day. It appears as though the
secrets of human satisfaction are still a bit elusive to most of us. No matter
what we have, somehow, we always seem to want more.
But, I digress. Turning back to the Converse
Allstars for a minute, once we got them we didn't just sit around worrying
about getting them scuffed-up or dirty. We used them, and we used them for just
about every kind of sport imaginable. .
As younger kids, we'd usually start-out with your
basic rubber ball, the classic pink "Spaldeen", and we'd get a
surprising amount of mileage out of it. It could be used in your room, in the
hallways of your apartment building, out on the sidewalks, stoops and curbs in
front of your house, and down by the handball courts, schoolyard and parks. We
played everything with it from "hit the penny" to stoopball and
stickball.
My baseball
interests died in junior high school, I remember the exact day. My friend Victor
and I had gone up to the school yard to hit a baseball around. I lofted a fly
ball out to him, and he pretended, I thought, to lose it in the sun. Always the
joker, Victor dropped to the ground grabbing his face. After a minute I
realized he wasn't joking, and that he had actually caught the ball with his
nose which was now broken and rapidly losing a lot of blood.
After Victor's nose healed we decided to stick with
bike riding for a while. We enjoyed taking day trips on our 3-speed English
Racers. In the morning we'd buy a roast beef hero from the local German
delicatessen, and head North into
Sometimes we'd get up early and take a ride up to
the cemetery in Tarreytown, the scene of "The Legend of Sleepy
Hollow." We'd ride up and down through the cemetery, and try to terrify
each other with sightings of the Headless Horseman. And it didn't, actually,
take all that much to terrify us. We were already quite paranoid about being
unwelcome visitors from the
But, let's face it, if you had to associate one
sport with
I practiced constantly, and the game, eventually,
became the major focus for my energies, and a great outlet for blowing-off a
little steam. At a simple level, the game gave me a much-welcomed feeling that
I was actually good at something; that I had a special skill that I could call
my own. I, also, grew to love the artistic or creative dimension of the game that involved
things like intuition and teamwork. Over time, this facet of the game became
totally intriguing to me.
Although basketball may have been a
great game, it wasn't always easy getting a court, particularly when you were
younger and smaller. If I got there early enough, or if the weather was
miserable enough, I might get lucky and find a free basket to practice on. But,
once the bigger kids came out, your basketball career would have to be put on
hold for a while. They usually kicked you right off the court without even
thinking twice about it. You and your basketball were a minor annoyance to
them, and they, basically, just treated you like you didn't exist. They'd just
begin playing, and assume that you would be clearing-out momentarily. Depending
on their mood, of course, they might also just fling your ball over the fence
into heavy traffic. It was really nothing personal, just a little jungle
etiquette in action. Every once in a while,
though, you might get lucky. If they were short-handed enough, they might,
actually, let you play with them until one of the elite arrived. It was always
a good idea to try to make the most of the opportunity.
Years later, after moving out to San Diego, I could
never quite get used to seeing all those beautiful schoolyards with all those
empty basketball courts. Perfect weather but no basketball
players. And, nobody seemed to be having all that much fun either, in
basketball or in anything else. All the sports in suburbia seemed to be organized
into leagues by adults who wore high white socks, and emphasized things like
healthy competition and sportsmanship. To me, it’s always seemed like this
adult-organizational overlay took the fun right out of it.
Besides basketball, music was my other main outlet
as I was growing up. I studied the accordion for a number of years and became
fairly proficient at it. This would have been great if I had been living in
Not wanting to live as a social leper, I quickly
switched to the guitar, and took lessons from a fellow named Ronnie Lee, A.K.A.
Ronald Leventhal. He was a terrific guitarist and an excellent teacher, but
after a year or two I was getting tired of playing the pop and classical pieces
that he had been teaching me. So I bought a solid-body electric,
and spent countless hours playing along with records and tapes in my room. I
spent a lot of time playing along with people like Buddy Holly, The Everly
Brothers, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis.
Speaking of Rock and Roll, some of my greatest
boyhood memories came in catching some of those classic acts at the early rock
and roll shows put on by Alan Freed and Murray the K. My friends and I would
get up in the middle of the night, and hop a subway into
Speaking of
tensions and conflicts, sometimes it was hard not to notice some of the other
ones that always seemed to be simmering just below the surface. Just growing-up
watching the local news in
At the neighborhood level, these conflicts and
tensions were often aggravated by bullies or other key players, who had been
significantly tweaked by life. Some of them had a somewhat perverted sense of
curiosity. One kid in my high school was experimenting with tossing burning
objects from his roof when he accidentally set a little old lady on fire.
Gravity had already been discovered, so I'm really not sure what he was trying
to prove. I’m pretty sure that he never experienced any legal consequences for
this act, but he did come out of it with a great nickname - "The Torch."
In
And then there were others who managed
to draw a crowd even if it really took a bit of doing. Occasionally, it might
even come in the form of suicide. Once, while we were on our way to school one
morning, we came upon the police just as they had finished placing blankets
around a major intersection under the tracks of an elevated train. We were
afraid to find-out what was happening, but, as it turned out, the blankets were
all covering the widely scattered parts of an unfortunate soul who had just
been splattered by a train. Even more horrifying was my experience as a young
child while I was waiting for a subway train with my mother. As people
inched-up to position themselves for the doors, the man next to me did a sudden
swan dive into heavy metal and steel wheels.
Not everything was that dramatic, of course, but
even the little stuff tended to add up. There seemed to be no shortage of
people hassling you over one thing or another.
Dr. Brown
Luckily, however, everything wasn't always this
grim and tense.
One of my earliest
Plenty of local color could be found at
the neighborhood delicatessen. You could
hardly find a bad one, and most would probably qualify as state of the art.
Pastrami on club with mustard and coleslaw was always my favorite, topped-off
with a Dr. Brown's Cream Soda and a knish. The waiters, with their black shoes
and smartly contrasting white socks always added nicely to the ambiance. The
rest of the outfit consisted of a small hand towel draped over the arm, and a
very unthrilled look on the face. If any of these waiters had ever said
something like, "Have a nice day," you'd wonder if they had a fever.
And, speaking of unthrilled looks, I was no
stranger to giving them myself. Like many others, I too had my share of
unglamorous jobs, and was probably a lot less gracious in them than the average
deli waiter. For a while I had an after-school job as a stock boy in the local
Daitch supermarket. For a while, at least, it was kind of exciting to actually
be getting a behind the scenes look at any type of operation, but, before too
long, unloading boxes of dairy products and canned goods started to lose some
of its intrigue. On the other hand, it was good to get a feel for what those
kinds of jobs were actually like. People also needed to pay their dues, and the
Daitch job certainly helped me to appreciate why people were always telling you
to stay in school and get a good job.
Although people who know me find it very hard to
believe, I also worked for a time down at Lord and Taylor's in
The View From the Stand
My longest-running part-time job was at my
grandparents’ newsstand. It was just like the ones you saw in the movies, the only difference was that we didn't give out a
lot of tips to private detectives. Grandpa Herman, my mother's father, was able
to get the stand because he was blind, and my Grandma Sarah was there most of
the time to help him. For a while their stand was located at a bus stop in a
tunnel under
After a number of years in the tunnel, they,
eventually, were able to move to another stand which was up at street level in some
daylight and fresher air. The new stand was located at the end of the elevated
line at
Although the green wooden stand
sheltered us from the rain and snow, it could still get damp and bitter-cold
inside. And it wasn't easy making change or rolling pennies while you were
trying to keep your hands warm with fingerless gloves. You had to be fast with
your calculations, and fast with your fingers too, and
frozen fingers weren't always that nimble. The commuters, in particular, were
always in a tremendous hurry. They would all let-off the bus at the same time, and descend on the
stand in a giant shock wave, attacking us with their pennies. They'd grab their
papers, and want their change before they even handed us the money.
There were a few other tensions as well. We might
be huddled around the heater and suddenly hear the loud screeching of brakes
from a truck which was obviously going to crash into us and cripple us for
life. While we braced for the impact, a voice would scream out,
"News!" And, only then would we realize that it was only the Daily
News delivery truck which was already speeding-off into the distance on its
never-ending mission of terror. But, although our lives may have been spared
this time, we still had to bolt-out the door, and rescue the newly bundles of
newspaper from the slush out by the curb. It didn't take long for newspapers to
become water-logged, and our customers weren't really into paper mache.
The attacks of the killer delivery trucks were
almost unrelenting, and they were always tremendously unsettling. Being on the receiving end had to be the polar opposite of quietly
enjoying tea in a Japanese teahouse. But things, somehow, have a way of
evening out. For many years my father, who handled used trucks and truck parts,
made a lot of money junking old Daily News delivery trucks. The quicker these
drivers could destroy them, the better it was for us.
Also helping-out at the stand was Louie, the old
Macedonian, who was
about sixteen hundred years my senior, and looked a lot like an
aging Kojak. He spoke with a thick Macedonian accent
that must have sounded very much like Alexander the Great's,
whom, I'm sure, Louie must have known personally. An incredibly hearty fellow
with the strength of a much younger man, Louie wouldn't take anything from anybody.
If someone short-changed him a penny, he might leap-up from behind the counter
and chase after the guy, running up hundreds of stairs while screaming,
"Stop, stop you bestit!"
The stand
would quiet down dramatically when it wasn't the rush hour, and during those
slack times, working at the stand gave me a great opportunity to catch-up on my
reading. We carried just about every newspaper and magazine in town, and
eventually there'd be enough time to get to most of them. The stand also
provided an incredible observation point for people-watching. And the variety
pack of life that passed before us ran the entire gamut, in terms of wealth,
achievement, and personality refinement.
For some strange reason, I found myself
becoming particularly intrigued with the successful-looking one's who came down
from
As embarrassing as it may sound, I found
myself becoming almost totally obsessed with this London Fog - New York Times
combination. I sensed that there was
something terribly significant hidden in this, but the link continued to elude
me. And then one day it suddenly dawned on me that I had accidentally broken
the code. Somehow, I had managed to stumble upon the two secret qualifying
events that would automatically guarantee your admission into the world of
success. I wasn't quite sure where they
held the tests, but I became firmly convinced that all they had to do was to
show their London Fog, complete the eight compulsory one-handed maneuvers with
The New York Times, and they would then be set for life. They could then go on to meet all the right
people, travel in all of the right circles, and be able to walk into places
like The New York Athletic Club with total confidence.
When I
wasn't uncovering the secret life of the
Other signs of personal and interpersonal neglect
could also be seen around the bar. One that really stuck vividly in my mind was
the sight of a young father who, on his way to the park with his kids, just
stopped in for a quick beer with the guys. He wound-up spending a few hours
drinking and socializing while his kids were running out of ways to kill time
in the nearby luncheonettes. How many times, I wondered, could this guy
come-out and give them some change for a cone or some Italian ices? Of course
they shouldn't have any doubts as to how special and loved they really were! It
was trauma in the making, and future generations of bartenders, mistresses, and
therapists would be hearing all about it.
Just to make things even more confusing
for me, everyone who passed by the stand wasn't neglectful, abusive or even
depressing. There were a lot of other people who were friendly, considerate,
and basically very nice. Many of them were just on
their way over to Van Cortlandt Park, and had nothing
more shady in mind than a tree. As I pieced things together, it was beginning
to look like people were capable of just about anything, from the very worst to
the very best, and with all of these apparent contradictions it made it tough
to reach any firm conclusions about the human race.
Van Cortlandt Park itself
had just about everything you could want, including a golf course, a lake with
row boats, a stadium and track, handball and basketball courts, and acres and
acres of grassy fields. During the winter, they'd even convert one of the
fairways into a small ski slope, and there was always something incongruous
about seeing people getting-off the subway with their skis and poles.
With vivid images of a broken bone poking through
one of my pants' legs, I never took advantage of the ski slope, but I did play
the golf course at Van Cortlandt whenever I got the
chance. It was usually pretty empty during the week, so playing a quick nine
holes before or after school wasn't all that difficult. And, it was cheap too.
In those days we could buy a golf permit each year, and play on public courses
all around the city for just a token fee.
Of course, you had to remember that this was still
De Witt C.
De
The whole atmosphere at
But, despite some of the animal antics, De Witt
Clinton really wasn't such a bad place to go to school. Although it was easy to forget, many of the
other city schools were, in fact, even rougher, and the education at
As for me, I had been practicing like crazy ever
since I had taken-up the game in grade school, so in my sophomore year I
decided to go- out for the team. But, height, among other things, was a bit of
a problem. A few years later a growth spurt would bring me up to 6'2", but
in my sophomore year of high school I was a lot closer to 5'2". I was
every coach's dream - slow, white, and short. I was the kind of kid that
announcers liked to refer to as an "intelligent" player, meaning that
I had all of the necessary physical tools to become an owner.
The
The coach probably had the best talent in the city
to choose from, but I still managed to feel rejected and ripped-off when he
didn't want me. My ego was crushed as my dreams of glory vanished in five
short, humbling minutes. But, I was surprisingly resilient, and quickly
regained my perspective. Realistically, I had to admit that I came up a little
short in size and ability, and the coach had, actually, made the right
decision.
If I couldn't be Mr. Basketball I
decided that I might as well fall-back on my second glamour career - sports
reporting. Like most of my friends, I followed the world of sports very
closely, reading the sports section in The Post every afternoon, and listening
faithfully to Howard Cosell on the radio. Following in these traditions, my
friend Stuart and I, long since reunited after our forced separation in front
of The Garden, teamed up as cub reporters for the Clinton News. We wound-up
covering football and basketball, but, unfortunately, we found ourselves forced
to write in a style that may have been journalistically correct, but was also
incredibly sterile and uncreative. I guess we were supposed to come-up with something
that looked like a news release on one of the major wire services, and, we
routinely did just that. Eventually, we perfected our journalistic talents to
the point where we were able to make an exciting game sound dull.
But the
glamour of traveling with the team and being part of the De Witt Clinton sports
scene really made it all worthwhile. There were many treasured moments for us,
both home and away. Football games were always the most exciting, probably
because they always had the greatest potential for a large-scale riot. For show
and tell, our students would sometimes see who could come back with the largest
knifed-off piece of an opposing school's jacket.
Basketball games had a similar potential for
volatility, but they were contained in a much smaller area. So, for the
reporter or spectator, it became a question of personal preference. Would you
rather get crushed to death on a football field, or have your head smashed-in
in a gymnasium? Sometimes it was hard to
decide.
On the
whole, Stu and I came to prefer the gym. The games
were great, and the team had more than its share of interesting characters. The
relationship between the players and the coach was also pretty interesting, and
it gave us a lot to not write about. At that particular time in
But, every so often, the coach would get fed-up
with the lack of respect he was getting from his players, and he'd try to take
more of a strong-handed approach with his team. On one memorable occasion,
Charlie, one of his star players had shown-up late for the game, and the coach
had finally had it with Charlie's irritating habits. This time, he decided, he was, finally,
going to put his foot down, and show them who was really the boss. So, just
before game time, the coach announced to the team that he was benching Charlie
for the entire game for disciplinary reasons. The team responded with - "Charlie don't play, we
don't play man!" Charlie played.
The team probably wondered why the coach
was making such a big deal out of it. Maybe Charlie wasn't your classic
scholar/athlete, but why single him out? Sure, he could be a little irresponsible at
times, or perhaps even menacing, but he also had his arrogant and pugnacious
side as well. Sometimes, in fact, when
he would get tired of picking-on people, Charlie enjoyed throwing liquor
bottles out of moving trains, and he wasn't always that particular about
whether or not the windows were open either. His aptitude tests may have shown
that he had terrific potential as a felon, but, while he was with us at
Their team was composed of sensitive and talented
kids who were kind of like the kids from "Fame''. Unfortunately for them,
our team was kind of like the kids from
But, it was even worse than we had expected. We
rolled over Music and Art unmercifully, scoring almost at will, and pouring it
on in every possible way. It was always nice to see your team win, but this was
starting to get embarrassing. Music and Art had a one-armed center who wasn't having a particularly good game. In my opinion,
he was showing tremendous courage just by wearing a shirt with no sleeves, and
trying to play basketball with only one arm. But, instead of respecting this
guy's guttiness, our center held his only arm or hand whenever he could get
away with it. As a result, he found himself constantly off-balance and reeling
wildly out of control. From the press box it was a bit like watching someone
trying to row a boat with only one oar. Apparently sports didn't always build
such great character.
Another journalistic highpoint came when we were
covering an away game at
Terrified, and
very much fearing for our lives, we made it to the gym and showed our press
cards to a rather unfriendly-looking group of brothers who were guarding the
entrance. Somehow we had the feeling that they would be rooting for Boys High.
Even though we were the only two white guys in the vicinity, race wasn't really
the most important factor. In truth, just being from
As I remember it, the dialogue went something like
this:
-“What you want man?”
-“Er, gulp, Clinton News.
Here to cover the game? Here's our, our press cards?”
(I know that these are statements, but they came out sounding a lot like
questions)
-“Your momma!”
-“Ahh. Excuse
us I think we must, must have the wrong entrance.”
The highpoint in our journalistic careers probably
came in covering
the city championships at
The Garden itself had its own mystique, filled with
powerful images of basketball history and heroism. The old wooden floor had
soaked-up the sweat and footprints of all the great ones, and it now radiated
an awesome presence of its own. And, for
Stu and I, our fantasies
were in overdrive. Maybe, we wondered, it really wasn't all that farfetched
after all. Maybe we really could become like
But in our
hearts we knew that this particular dream would be ending shortly. We viewed
journalism as a highly-prized and glamorous field, but one in which jobs only
went to the very cream of the crop. And, neither of us could picture ourselves
in that kind of select company. So the time was ripe to come up with a more
realistic back-up plan. Stu decided to become a
lawyer, but, as for me, I had no idea what I really wanted to do with myself.
Sensing this lack of direction, my mother thought
it would be a good idea to have me tested. So she hired a psychologist who came
over to our apartment and administered some psychological tests. He gave me an
interest test and some aptitude tests, but the one that I remember most vividly
was the intelligence test. As I was taking it, I remember becoming completely
intrigued with the whole procedure, from the stopwatch that he was using to the
test itself. I was particularly fascinated by the jig saw pieces that you were
supposed to make into the shape of a hand, and the cartoons that needed to be
placed in the proper sequence for them to tell a story.
I thought it was absolutely amazing that he could
tell all about a person in just a few hours simply by using these tools. I, on
the other hand, didn't have the foggiest idea about why anyone did anything,
even after I had talked with them for years! From what I could tell, this stuff
was really pretty cool.
When we went over the results from my interest
test, I remember him telling me that my scores on the social service
occupations were a bit low. Actually, my scores fell kind of
half-way between Grizzly Adams and Sonny Liston.
I was your basic hermit who could become belligerent if pushed. It wasn't,
exactly, the profile of your classic "people person". According to the psychologist, the results
suggested that I might not want to rush into an occupation that involved a lot
of personal contact with other people. It sounded good so far.
He also expressed some concern about my generally
negative attitude towards others. People, he told me, weren't as bad or as
untrustworthy as I thought they were, and he hoped that someday I could learn
to give people more of a chance. I thought it was a nice, well-meaning
sentiment, but I wondered where this guy had actually grown-up.
Even though the test results didn't
really matter all that much to me, it turned out to be a great idea to have me
tested. The most important thing about the whole experience for me was that it
had introduced me to one very interesting occupation. Someday, I thought, maybe
I too could get a stopwatch, and find out what makes people tick. Now, of
course, I realize that I would have been a lot better-off going into watch
repair and trying to find out what made watches tick.
But, even with some of his questionable advice, the
psychologist had still managed to hook me on his profession. When it came time
to fill-in our intended occupations for our senior yearbooks I found myself
filling-in: Psychologist. It had a nice ring to it. I wanted to understand the
secrets of the human mind; I wanted to be all-knowing. And this would be the
path for me to take.
The Rest of the Family
My Grandma Anna lived on the other side of the
Grandma Anna
always seemed very old to me, and always talked like she was on her last legs.
Every time we visited her, she would express tremendous amazement and gratitude
that she had actually lived to see us one more time. After about twenty or
thirty years of this, I finally began to take it with a grain of salt. It was,
after all, a pretty long time to be lingering at death's door. Constantly
defying her own actuarial predictions, she, actually, managed to hang-on for
another forty years or so. And, not only did she live through years of bonus
visits with me, but, eventually, I even brought my own children to visit with
her as well.
It may have been a long time to linger at death's
door, but Grandma Anna could still be pretty convincing. If I was debating
whether or not I should pay her a visit, I'd always picture her as postponing
her own death so we could see each other one more time.
Once, before we got married, Marianne and I were trying
to decide if we should go over there for a visit. It was during a
record-setting cold snap, and the wind-chill factor must have been horrifying.
People were being warned to stay home, if at all possible, for their own
safety. But, after thinking it through, we decided that we had better not risk
staying home. We didn't know how many more visits would be possible, and the
subsequent guilt might be too much for us to bear. As we pulled-up to her
apartment building we were stunned to see Grandma Anna venturing-out into the
bitter cold on her way to a card game. She was startled to see us.
Grandma Anna spent her final years in an old age
home in the
It was very hard to believe that this stage of life
was positive or meaningful in any possible way. It was hard to feel good about
it. The whole process of aging and death seemed like a painful and rather
absurd conclusion to one's life, and if this was the grand finale, it made life
even more questionable than ever. To cap it off, the whole thing also seemed to
place a tremendous financial and emotional burden on the children, and a lot of
the children were senior citizens themselves at that point.
For Grandma Anna, the quality of her life had
deteriorated to such an extent that living had become a curse. Of course, she
had been expressing that opinion for the past forty years, but now she seemed
to mean it more than usual. And who was to say that she wasn't right?
Ironically, she lived to the age of ninety nine.
Thankfully, not all of our visits to the relatives
were as depressing as a trip to the home. Usually they were a lot more
enjoyable, even if we had to fight the traffic on The Garden State to get
there.
My mother's sister, Mildred, and her family lived
in the town of
My Uncle David was a Chiropodist. His office was
downstairs near the front entrance to the house. He smoked cigars, and always
seemed to be in a hurry. He was no stranger to bunions, corns, and calluses.
Quite often he was making a quick run down to the candy store to grab a racing
form, but most of the time he was rushing around trying to make the daily
double at
Once he got out to the track he would race around
checking frantically with his cronies, looking for a hot tip from one of the
trainers. My father, who also liked the horses, would usually go along with him
to the track, but would usually try to sit somewhere else. Uncle David got so
worked-up that he made my father nervous.
Back at the house, we non-horseplayers might be
enjoying ourselves playing a little croquet or maybe just having a catch.
Sometimes we'd shoot a few baskets out in the back yard where a hoop and some
wooden boards had been nailed to one of the big trees. We didn't have a net,
so, after each shot, the ball would usually land on one of the roots and
bounce-off unpredictably in one of ten different directions.
The backyards in the neighborhood were open. No
fences were there to separate them, just some scattered, but permeable hedges.
Many of the houses had large front porches, and they were still used on warm
summer evenings. People seemed a little friendlier in those days,
and a lot less concerned with their own privacy and space.
The boardwalk and the beach weren't too far from
the house, and we'd get over there whenever we could. I loved the smell of the
salt ocean air, and the aroma of grilled hot dogs, corn on the cob, candy
apples, and salt water taffy. You could also detect an undercurrent of rotting
fish, garbage, and creosote drying on the pilings and boards, but it all seemed
to blend together into one very sweet smell.
I loved the penny arcades in
My father Joe, and his
twin brother Rubby (pronounced Ruby) were born in
Uncle Rubby and his family settled in
Sometimes it boggles my mind when I compare Rubby's working environment with his twin brother's. While my uncle was working with Einstein and
other notables my father was lucky if he could find any reliable help to junk
trucks in his yard. And the men that he did have weren't all that sophisticated
or scholarly either. They ate sausage and pepper hero sandwiches, and had dirt
under their fingernails which probably never came out. Many of them had a
minimal knowledge of etiquette and/or English, and they would not have fit-in
very well over at the faculty lounge.
My uncle would sometimes take me over to the lab
and show me the cyclotron in operation. I had the feeling that he actually knew
how it worked. As for me, I was in way over my head, and barely knew what an
atom really was, even after reading all those scientific comic books put-out by
General Electric. Sometimes, while we were over at the lab, my uncle would even
do a little glass blowing. He'd make silly little animals out of glass tubes,
and I found that almost as impressive as being able to operate a cyclotron.
The Princeton campus was quite impressive in its
own right, particularly to a kid from the
Although they started-off in some modest faculty
housing, my aunt and uncle later settled into a beautiful custom home,
overlooking a pond. In the winter, the pond would freeze, and ice skaters would
glide by their picture window. The whole scene was in such striking contrast to
my environment back in the Bronx, that it, literally, seemed like another world
to me, and it was a world in which I, obviously, didn't fit-in. Princeton was
my only point of reference as far as higher education was concerned, so I had a
lot of trouble even picturing myself as a college graduate.
My aunt and uncle
had two daughters. Lissy was the eldest. In the mid 60's she married an ex-Whiz
Kid with a Ph.D. in the Philosophy of Science. It contrasted nicely with her own Ph.D. in Linguistics. Clearly they were a couple of
academic heavy hitters. Frannie, the younger sister, now lives about a mile
from us in another part of
Why Is
This Night?
Almost all of our trips out to
Somehow, through all of this, we were supposed to
feel thankful about being redeemed from slavery in ancient
Looking back at it, I realize that part of what was
coming-up for me during those marathon seders were
some of my basic, underlying feelings about being Jewish in the first place.
Apparently, I had some very mixed feelings about the whole thing, and,
apparently, they also liked to come-out and visit me every Pesach.
Although, on the one hand, I was proud that we Jews
were such high-achievers, and, usually, very honest and ethical in our everyday
affairs, we could also be capable of embarrassing displays of materialistic
excess, and an ethnocentrism that bordered on the obnoxious. There seemed to be
some sort of an ill-defined, yet strongly persistent attitude among us that we
were special or better in some way than other people, and this attitude didn't
sit very well with me at all. Certainly, it didn't mesh nicely with the belief
that all people were created equal. On the other hand, these philosophical
differences probably weren't the key elements in all of this for me.
At the heart of the matter was my extreme
sensitivity towards anything that might possibly make us stand-out as
different. And, like with a lot of other
things, there were probably some pretty good reasons for it. Certainly, there
were a number of critical incidents along the way that shaped some of my basic
beliefs and attitudes about being Jewish, and, if nothing else, a lot of this
learning seemed to have started relatively early in life.
One of the first things that I came to learn about
our people was that we were, for the most part, made-up of bright, motivated,
hard-working, and very, very successful individuals. Word had it that we had
particularly good heads for business and science, and this seemed to be the
case.
And, if that weren't already enough, apparently, we
had even been given an impeccable sense of taste when it came to matters of
culture and style. I remember when my parents brought me into
His reactions, of course, didn't put too much
pressure on me, other than calling into question the very legitimacy of my
authentic Jewish heritage. Was this kid adopted, or what? How could he possibly
like a suit like that? To the salesman, it seemed, we were, obviously, the
special ones, who had been chosen because of our monopoly on good taste. To me,
of course, this was a terribly offensive attitude, embarrassing to Jew and
gentile alike. And, not only that, if this belief was right,
and we did have a monopoly on good taste, how would this salesman be able to
explain my wardrobe to the world. To this day, it stands as a silent
witness to the blatant falsity of the belief in this high sense of Jewish
style.
Of course, when you talk about major
culprits in shaping some of our negative attitudes about being Jewish, the
subject of
Of course, your parents and other family members
wouldn't necessarily be joining you there. They had other important things to
do. The whole thing made for a nice double message - Your Jewish heritage is
vitally important, but you really didn't have to take it very seriously. As a
matter of fact, when you become an adult you won't have to do any of this
anymore.
So, apparently, one of the most desirable freedoms
that came along with adulthood was this freedom to not have to do things that
were a drag. It may not have been one hundred percent true, but it sure seemed
like none of the adults that I knew about were taking any Jewish classes or
going to services, except maybe on Yom Kippur. If this was such a precious
heritage, why didn't adults seem to practice it? Understandably, it was pretty
hard not to be suspicious or resentful.
So, for the time being, you had to put-up with it,
and it could be pretty uninspiring. For starters, we weren't always glad to be
there, and, to be sure, we weren't always eager to learn. We were tired at the
end of the day from the regular torture that we were getting in public school,
and this was even worse. Instead of getting a chance to get out and play, we
had to sit-through even more brain-washing, and it was a lot less interesting
than what we had been learning in school.
As for me, I was sent to a number of different Hebrew
Schools over the years, and, for the sake of variety, I found myself
alternating between spacing-out and acting-out. My clearest memory,
is of writing and doodling in those funny little blue notebooks that they give
you, but, other than that, I remember surprisingly little about the whole
experience. I do, remember spending countless hours learning the Hebrew
alphabet, and maybe a few things about some of the holidays, but that was,
probably, about it. I guess there was also that story about the coat of many
colors, but I don't think it made that much of an impression. Joseph may have
been thrown into a pit by his brothers, but, as far as I was concerned, there
were much worse things happening in
Finally, at the age of twelve, in one of my prouder
moments I decided to stop being a hypocrite. Why, I figured, should I study all
this stuff just to have a Bar Mitzvah? If that was only going to commemorate my
last visit to a synagogue for a while, why not get it over with? Why should I accept
savings bonds, cash, and fountain pens just for not showing-up. It seemed a lot more honest to just pull the
plug on the whole thing, and drop-out. My parents were pretty accepting about
it, and I felt that it showed a little personal integrity on my part.
Far beyond
There were some other significant images as well,
images of people who were facing much bigger problems than Joseph in the pit or
Steven in the pits at
well before the era of wide-spread television news,
they used to show black and white newsreels to let people know what was
happening out in the rest of the world. I remember well the early pictures from
the concentration camps - the ovens, the gas chambers, the uniforms, the piles
of corpses, and the looks on the eyes of the living dead. It was all so
overwhelming what had happened to them, and, at some level, I think we needed
to disidentify with them. They were the Jews of
Europe, we told ourselves, but we were different. Sure, we felt bad for them, but
still we were different. After all, it had happened to them, not to us.
Years later, when I was working as a busboy up at
Circle Camp, groups of Holocaust survivors would occasionally show-up for a
weekend in the country. They seemed very Jewish-looking to us, not suave or
cool in any way. They still had their camp numbers tattooed on their arms. We
felt nervous and awkward just being around them.
Even though we were quite unaware of it, I think
that at some level we must have blamed them for what had happened to them.
Their differentness, we probably told ourselves, must
have been a big part of the problem. We wished that they would dress better, or
somehow be able to act more American. In retrospect, we were much too immature
to be able to handle what had happened to them. We gave them pitifully little
respect.
Yichh and Kichh
As long as I'm writing about Circle Camp, I might
as well backtrack a bit to my days as a camper at nearby
Circle Camp and the adjacent
When I first arrived at camp I remember being
instantly traumatized by all this Yiddish writing that was all over the place.
What kind of a camp was I being sent to?
As I later found out, there were, actually, some
good explanations for
the signs having been written in Yiddish. Years earlier, the
resort had been put together by immigrants, who, even if they weren't
particularly religious, still valued the cultural aspects of Jewish life. It
was a culture in which they were quite comfortable, and, they wanted to
perpetuate it. Even the type of entertainment that they would bring-in would
reflect this.
If they brought-in a comedian, and you
didn't know Yiddish, you'd find yourself
following a joke for a few minutes, straining to catch most of it, and
then be left utterly mystified as all the old timers in the audience were
suddenly laughing their heads-off all around you. All you'd be able to catch of
the punchline would be something that sounded like "yichh"
or "kichh." To pronounce it correctly you
had to bring-up a little phlegm.
At more of a practical level, many of these
old-timers were also unable to read English, so the Yiddish signs helped them
tremendously. A lot of them didn't read the regular newspapers, and, instead,
read the Daily Forward or "The Fuvitz" as they called it in their
thick Eastern European accents. The Fuvitz was written in Yiddish and printed
in a pale brown ink, which, when combined with the strange-looking alphabet,
really gave me the creeps. To top-it-all-off, they read it from right to left
and from back to front. Clark
Every Friday night it was "Shabbos", and we would wear our
white shorts and shirts instead of our blue ones. They never, actually, told us
just what exactly Shabbos was, or why it might have been important. As a matter
of fact, everything seemed about the same as any other night except that we
dressed in white, and usually ate roast chicken for dinner. I found the whole
thing pretty irritating, and couldn't, for the life of me, figure out why they
were making such a semi big deal out of nothing. It seemed like they were only
doing it to humor some of the old timers, and that didn't really seem like a
good enough reason. I liked my blue
shorts better, and I resented having to dress-up in a costume.
Other than having some problems with the Yiddish
signs and some of the strange customs, summers at camp were, for the most part,
enjoyable ones for me. I made a lot of friends, and we all had a great time
participating in sports and other activities. They kept us hopping, with
everything from racing in war canoes to making plastic lanyards in arts and
crafts. After a while, I was even able to stop feeling like I wanted to go home
whenever I would see a copy of The Fuvitz.
When I got a little older, I worked for a few years
on the adult side of the resort. I started-out as a boatboy, looking after the
rowboats and giving an occasional rowing lesson. The tips were lousy, but I got
a great tan. The following summer I moved up to the dining room where I worked
as a busboy. The tips were a lot better,
and the main problem was, probably, the exhaustion that came from trying to
burn the candle at both ends. We were strongly encouraged to mingle with the
guests and participate with them in volleyball games and other activities. It
was a bit unusual, but they didn't treat the help like they were social lepers
like they did in some of the other resorts in the Catskills. As
a matter of fact. the help was probably treated
better than a lot of the guests. Anyone who was working there usually had to
have some connections to get the job in the first place, so a guest ran the
risk of provoking the wrath of someone in the organizational power structure if
he didn't tip your son the waiter handsomely.
Socially it was great to have so many friends, and to be around so many
eligible people of the opposite sex. It was a matchmaker's paradise, and many a
couple got their start at Circle Camp. The relationships and friendships would
often continue well beyond the summer, and would carry-over into our lives down
in the city. As a result, I wound-up dating girls from places like Forest Hills
and the outer reaches of
Speaking of brides, I would be remiss in not
mention something about Jewish weddings, since they could, certainly, color
your thinking about Jewish customs and rituals. For starters, I can safely say
that If I had been uncomfortable with the displays of
materialistic excess at some of the Bar Mitzvahs, this was just child's play
when compared to a wedding. The parents putting on these lavish productions
always seemed to be trying to outdo each other. It became an ever-escalating
spiral, a bit like the cold war, except that the weapons were hor d'ouvres
instead of missiles. Suffice it to say, there was usually enough food. The
leftovers could, probably, have kept thousands of Ethiopians alive for a few
hundred years.
They say that things come in bunches, and in the mid-sixties
we found ourselves going to a lot of these affairs, one after the other, and,
before we knew it, we even had to start planning our own. Although I can safely say that I don't regret
the marriage, the wedding was a different story altogether.
I'm told that people had a great time, but, as far
as I was concerned, I felt less like I had a wedding and more like a wedding
had me! Although it was a modest affair by local standards, there were still a
number of highlights
and a fairly large cast of supporting characters.
The rabbi who married us also happened to own the
catering hall, and, seeing him in operation both Jewishly
and as a businessman left a bit to be desired. Although the memory is a bit
blurry from distortions of alcohol and time, one of my favorite scenes involved
sitting in a small sideroom with Marianne before the ceremony. The
rabbi/entrepreneur dragged in an old Jewish man with a beard who proceeded to
read a long Hebrew document of some kind. He read it like he had attended a
Hebrew Evelyn Wood course, and, we had no idea about what he was talking about
or why. When he finished we found out that he had been reading us our marriage
contract.
We rented our formal wear from a local rental shop.
We picked the clothes up right before the wedding, and, sure enough, my clothes
didn't fit right, and there was a button missing from my pants. The man behind
the counter told us that he really couldn't do anything for us, but he felt
confident that my vest would be able to cover-up the missing button. Some of
the other garments weren't particularly clean of free of blemish, but it was,
basically, a take it or leave it situation. There was no time to look
elsewhere, so it became the only game in town for us on that particular day.
Of course some of these botched-details were to be
expected, so it paid to just try to relax and be mature about the whole thing.
But it was tough, and we continued to feel irritated and ripped-off whenever we
became aware of our blemished clown outfits.
One of my most vivid memories was the scene in the
store, after the wedding, when we returned the formal wear. My father, a pretty
good-size guy, threw everything down of the floor, including the Hamburgs, and
jumped up and down on them while yelling at the man that they were now a hell
of a lot cleaner than when he had given them to us in the first place.
I'm told the ceremony itself was, actually, very
nice, and from what I can piece together, it probably was. But, whenever people
want to punish me, all they have to do is to threaten to bring-out the slides
from the wedding. Marianne looks radiant, but I have the numbed look of a human
sacrifice.
When we entered the dining hall to be greeted by
the band and our family and friends, we were introduced by the band leader.
"Here they are the new Mr. and Mrs.
The photographer was another major torturer. I was
already very self-conscious about dancing with my new bride in front of all these people, but,
every few steps, the photographer kept getting us to stop, and pose, and smile.
In thinking about it, the first dance at my wedding was, actually, with the
photographer. But I didn't quite fall in love with him.
Even though
he was obnoxious and intrusive, we figured that it would be worth it. We wanted
to have those cherished memories captured through the lens of a master, so it
was worth a little inconvenience on our part. Unfortunately, however, his lens
had jammed, and his artistic sense had seemingly vanished. None of the pictures
of our friends came out, and many of the others were cockeyed and poorly
balanced. A baboon shooting randomly into a room would, actually, have done
just about as well, and would not have been nearly as intrusive.
One of my final memories involves my late
father-in-law arguing over the bill with the rabbi/caterer. He was feeling
really ripped-off about something, and it might not have been his imagination.
Tragically, a few years later, the catering hall burned to the ground.
Although some of these experiences might
have been colorful or even humorous, their cumulative effect really wasn't.
They seemed to be feeding both sides of my Jewish ambivalence almost
simultaneously. The conflict seemed to be boiling-down to the personal and
ethical aspects on the one hand, verses the religious and cultural aspects on
the other. On the positive side, I continued to feel socially comfortable and
safe with my people, and I preferred to spend my time with them. I still had a
much greater sense of confidence in them when it came to personal qualities
like kindness, understanding, and basic honesty.
But, my attitude towards the rituals and practices
was another story entirely. In my mind, they continued to be associated with
embarrassing displays of excess, and a fairly meaningless tradition. It had
little to do with modern life, and was certainly not worth living for or dying
for.
But, apparently, no matter what you thought about
its basic worth, it wasn't a very easy tradition to walk away from. The bond was,
apparently, cemented by something a lot stronger than simply some Jewish guilt.
Somehow that just wasn't enough of an explanation to account for such a
powerful connection. Our feelings about our Jewish identities ran surprisingly
deep, and they couldn't just be explained-away by some quick throw-away lines
by a Jewish comedian.
In the early 70's I had to sit through my nephew
Steven's Bar Mitzvah up in
It all, finally, got to me, and I had to leave. I
just had to get out of there, before I started screaming. I walked out in
search of some fresh air, and tried to clear my head. On top of being angry and
upset, I found the whole thing mind-boggling. I couldn't, for the life of me, figure-out
why we went through all of this trouble to hand down this particular heritage
to each successive generation? What was the need for this inter-generational
relay race? My nephew could just as well have memorized an operetta, why did he
have to learn a haftarah? And why, did all of these non-practicing parents
suddenly become obsessed with the idea of putting-on this meaningless kind of
production. It all seemed so hypocritical and empty.
As my stay at De Witt Clinton was drawing to a
close, I had to start thinking about what I wanted to do with myself, and,
although, I really wasn't sure why, college looked like the smart choice. Word
still had it that if you stayed in school you would, probably, get a better
job, so, for that reason alone, it seemed like the thing to do. High school had
already given me some valuable training in learning how to function with
delayed gratification, so maybe I'd be able to handle it. There were also a few
social pressures to consider. By choosing not to attend, you ran the risk of
achieving the social desirability level of a leper.
The campus had some imposing gray stone buildings
just like they did out at
As for the
students, it was really quite the progressive scene. Many of them looked as
though they had just returned from helping Castro win the revolution in
Although the buildings were old, the campus itself
didn't seem to radiate all that much in terms of a sense of tradition. You
didn't get the feeling that you were walking through any hallowed halls. The
great tradition that
Unfortunately, some of the star players
from that team were later implicated in a point-shaving scandal that made a lot
of money for the gamblers, but gave college basketball a tremendous
black-eye. And, for the basketball
program at
Since I loved the game as well as the idea of some
possible recognition, I decided to try-out for the freshman team. At that point
I had grown to 6'2",
which was a foot taller than I had been as a sophomore back in high school.
This time, however, I managed to make it, and I even wound-up starting in the
back court. The whole thing was like a dream come true. The coach was a guy
named Jerry Domershick, who kept everyone loose and happy, and the team
responded well. I really enjoyed the whole experience, and my ego loved it when
I was, eventually, lumped-in with some of the bright prospects for the varsity.
Of course, given the varsity's record, anybody with a pulse, probably, would
have been considered a bright prospect.
Between the schoolwork and the basketball, it made
for a pretty demanding routine. When practice was over, I would walk quickly to
the station, ride home on the train, and eat a little dinner. By that time you
could be pretty tired, and it would be hard to concentrate on your studies.
The following year I just managed to make the
varsity as one of the last men on the squad. I realized that I wasn't much of a
threat to Jerry West and Oscar Robertson, so I was stunned and delighted just
to make it. As time went on, however,
this initial sense of gratitude gradually started to wear-off. After putting-in
all of this time and effort, I wanted a little more playing time.
My coach was Dave Polansky, a dapper little fellow
whom I experienced as Napoleonic. Through the magic of our combined negative
chemistry, I wound-up being transformed from a basketball player into a basket
case. I developed a totally negative attitude, and became terrified about
missing a shot or making a mistake in a game. Basketball could be a pretty
psychological game, and, what little confidence I had was rapidly beginning to
evaporate. Needless to say, it was taking some of the fun out of it for me.
So there I was, a pretty
deadly jump-shooter, who had now become afraid to take his shot. The coach
would usually only put me out there for my shooting in the first place, but I
knew that if I missed, he would, probably, figure that I was cold that night,
and would bench me for the rest of the game. If I didn't put-up any shots I wouldn't miss, but,
then there really wasn't much of a point for me being out there in the first
place, and, I would, eventually, be taken-out.
It was one of my first exposures to the wonderful
world of knots, double binds, and vicious cycles, and my frustration and rage
built steadily over the next few years. I stewed constantly, and, most of the
time, found myself just going through the motions. My enthusiasm for the game
that I had once loved became
almost non-existent, and my resentments could barely be
contained. I'm sure they leaked-out in some pretty passive-aggressive ways too.
Coincidentally enough, I became one of the first white basketball players in
the city to wear a goatee.
My brain was
turning into a playing field, with all of these unconscious forces holding a
scrimmage of their own in my emotional system.
Looking back at it now, it seems pretty obvious to me that I was doing a
fair amount of acting-out, but, at the time, I just felt like I was muddling
around in the dark. I couldn't really see where I was getting stuck, or how I
could try to get out of it. Pathetically enough, growing the goatee was
probably my clearest attempt at expressing myself,
but, as a personal statement, it was woefully indirect and ineffective.
Essentially, I had become trapped by my own
desperate need to hang onto my identity as a basketball player, but I was
starting to get white knuckles in the process. I was a ballplayer, it was what
I did best, but, in
And, this identity had become such a major part of
my self-image that I felt like if I let it go, I would run the risk of feeling
like a nothing. In retrospect, I probably should have seen a psychologist, but
I didn't think of it at the time, even if I was a Psych major. I'm also sure
that it would have been much too threatening to me anyway. At some level I
think I wanted to stay in the dark a little while longer. At least that way I
could still keep my ballplayer identity as a security blanket.
But, in all fairness to myself, I guess I wasn't
totally in the dark. Eventually, I did start to gain some understanding about
why I felt so trapped, and why I seemed so incapable of walking-away from a
situation that had, clearly, become intolerable. On the positive side, this crisis really
stimulated a lot of personal introspection and soul- searching, that was,
ultimately, for the best. It helped me realize a few things about myself, both
as a ball player, as well as a person.
One of the things that I realized was that it was
the "game" of basketball that I had loved. At the core, there was an
artistic or creative center, that gave the game an
essential inner beauty. Touching it, even momentarily, would be like lightly
brushing into joy, delight, and perfection.
In the world of college basketball, the game had now
been turned into a competition. A player was supposed to have a burning,
burning desire to win, and a killer instinct to help carry it out. I came to realize
that a big part of my problem with the
coach was that I really lacked that killer instinct. It just didn't seem to be
part of my temperament, and it wasn't particularly easy for me to summon it up.
As a matter of fact, I was only able to reach that level of frenzied
competitiveness if an opposing player would give somebody a cheap shot or would
say something really obnoxious. Then the adrenaline would kick-in and I'd be
more than ready to kill.
But most of the time I really would have been just
as happy to choose-up sides and play a game just for the fun of it. I often
thought that the games would be a lot more interesting that way but, to a lot
of people, particularly coaches, this attitude would be seen as pretty flaky
and, probably, even downright treasonous. This kind of thinking might be nice
if you were in nursery school, in a mental hospital, or under the influence of
LSD, but, in varsity athletics, it was poison. The value on the paramount
importance of winning was not to be seriously questioned by anyone who wanted
to be thought of as normal in our sports crazy society.
Polansky had correctly sensed my lack of
killer-instinct, and, understandably as a coach, he wasn't particularly fond of it. As
a result, I found myself playing about as often as Halley's Comet.
The View From The Bench
On the positive side, sitting on the bench gave me
another great opportunity to study people and to reflect on life. It was
similar, in a lot of ways, to sitting in the newsstand, except that we didn't
get to look at as many commuters or alcoholics. Most of the time we'd just be
checking-out the crowd or evaluating some of the cheerleader talent, but
sometimes our minds would really veer-off, and we might journey-off into other
realms of reality.
During by sophomore year, for example, we were
playing an away game at Fordham. Their coach was Digger Phelps, who later went
on to coach at Notre Dame. He was an excellent coach, and they were heavy
favorites. We knew that a win here could help make our whole season, so we
really wanted it badly.
It was a surprisingly close game, but, in the
middle of all the excitement, my mind started to really drift-off. I found
myself noticing all the priests and nuns who were cheering-away for the home
team. It was a little intimidating, and I found myself wondering if they really
did have any heavenly clout. If they did, I couldn't imagine why they would
ever lose, especially with all this clergy pulling for
them. I found myself starting to see the game as some sort of religious
struggle between the Jews and the Catholics, and, on that particular night, we
beat them in a major upset. The story of Chanukah was coming to life right in
front of me. A small group of Maccabees were defeating the mighty oppressors.
I would often find myself getting philosophical
during our games against
The Show Must Go On
Although it's hard to pick a favorite, I think my
junior year had to be the worst. I was barely managing to hang-on as a
ballplayer, and despite all the practice, my skills, actually, seemed to be
deteriorating along with my eroding self-confidence. Most of my energies seemed
to be going into brooding and stewing about the basic lack of playing time in
my life. All in all, things were looking pretty bad, but they were about to
start looking a lot worse. Darkness was coming, and not just for me.
It started after a particularly tough loss on a
cold winter night. We showered and dressed, and dragged ourselves out of the
warm lockeroom, and into the bone-chilling cold. A few of our guys were going
out for some ice cream with their dates, and they invited Marianne and myself to come along.
Not being in a real sociable mood, I decided to pass. I was just hoping
for a little
peace and quiet.
As the group was heading-off campus, they were hassled by some guy in a car who was making crude remarks
about one of their dates. Alex, our
captain, who was already pretty steamed about losing the game, told this guy
what he could do with himself. But, apparently, he didn't want to listen to his
advice. At the next intersection the car came at them, and ,
and one of our players was hit, and dragged up the street. It all went-down
rather quickly, and when it was over, Mike Schafer lay dead in the street.
Only a sophomore, Mike was probably the sweetest
and most talented guy on the team. Of all the guys in the world to be cut-down,
it really shouldn't have been him. His death seemed so utterly senseless and
tragic, and, to me, it was further proof that the world was, in fact, a totally
insane place to be.
Later that night, the scene at the police station
was like a madhouse. Family members and friends were giving statements and
trying to console each other. Probably as a result of all the stress and
commotion, Alex's father dropped dead from a heart attack right at the station.
The deaths and the double funerals that followed
left us in shock. But, unfortunately, they fit in, all too easily, with the
rest of the violence that seemed to be sweeping our country. J.F.K. and all the others had now been joined
by two lesser-known victims in the human shooting gallery of life.
On top of the tremendous shock and grief, the
funerals themselves didn't sit particularly well with us. The eulogies were
done by a rabbi who didn't seem to know either the deceased or their families.
Of course, even
if he had, his words would have offered little in the way of immediate comfort
anyway.
But the show, of course, must go on, and,
macho guys that we were, we played-out the rest of the schedule. Alex, in his
intense grief, dedicated the season to his father and his friend, and he became
totally obsessed with his mission. He tried to carry the whole team on his
back, but, sadly, he just didn't have the strength or the talent to do it. We
understood what he was going through, but we wished that he could ease-up a
little bit, and maybe even pass-off once in a while.
There's nothing like death to help put things into
perspective, and to us, as ball players, it became a constant struggle to find
meaning in playing ball or winning a game. It was hard to want to kill the
other team when you just got back from a funeral. In the scope of things did it
really matter if we beat
The Great Race
In addition to hanging around gyms and going to
funerals, I also had my life as a student to contend with. On the whole, I
didn't find my studies to be inherently fascinating, or particularly engaging
for that matter. I can safely say that I was unable to appreciate what I was
learning in the classroom.
When I entered
But, even though I still had a few remaining
journalistic aspirations, I tried to be practical and consider a few things
like supply and demand. In that respect Psychology seemed a lot more promising,
even if I didn't know that much about it yet.
My Introductory Psychology class was taught by a
fellow named Gerry Lucas. I sometimes chuckled to myself about whether or not
he knew who the famous Jerry Lucas was. Jerry had
been a great center at
He was also a practicing psychoanalyst in
Visions of being completely seen-through, or having
every last detail of my life analyzed, started racing through my brain. I guess
I was still pretty naive, and thought that analysts could see through anyone
since they knew all the inner secrets of human behavior. Sensing my discomfort,
Gerry suggested that I just pull up a chair instead.
My most outstanding professor at
My Abnormal Psych class was also a memorable
experience. My professor was a Dr. Smith, who certainly seemed to have a good
feel for the subject matter. He used to bring us on field trips to mental
hospitals, and have us observe him as he would put an entire variety pack of
psychotics through their paces. He would ask them about their lives and their
thoughts, and give them ample opportunity to display their pathological wares.
Some of the cases were pretty pathetic, but this first hand glimpse into their
lives gave us a much richer perspective than we were getting from our
textbooks.
But, clearly, Dr. Smith's greatest contribution to
my education had to be when he revealed to us that "life was essentially a
race between physical and mental illness." If one didn't get you,
apparently, the other would.
Even if it had only been an off-handed remark,
apparently it managed to strike a chord. His words caused me to momentarily
stop writing and look-up from my notebook. Maybe he really wasn't going to test
us on this one, and maybe he was just trying to get a reaction, but his theory
did, unfortunately, seem to jive with reality. As a matter of fact, it was
jiving particularly well with the reality of hit and run homicidal maniacs and
funerals that I had been running-into lately.
On the other hand, if life really was just a race
between physical and mental illness, who would you root for? And, as a theory of
life it offered little in the way of inspiration or
purpose. As for Dr. Smith, I'd have to rate mental illness as the slight
favorite.
I would be remiss in not mentioning my Experimental
Psych class with Dr. Gertrude Schmeidler. Dr. Schmeidler was one of the first
psychologists to seriously study ESP and other psychic phenomena, and, for
political and academic reasons, she needed to keep these interests discretely
in the background. Unfortunately, she wasn't completely successful in these
efforts, and was referred to as "The Witch" in certain circles around
the department.
We didn't use animals for any of our experiments,
thank goodness, so we always seemed to be out beating the bushes for human
subjects in the cafeterias and the streets. For some strange reason, we somehow
felt better about experimenting on them than we did about experimenting on
rats. We even used human subjects in salivary conditioning experiments. Unlike
Pavlov, who got to use a dog, we had to weigh human saliva that had been
absorbed by cotton balls which our subjects kept in their mouths. It was a
wonderful way to meet people.
Outside of the classroom many of us were starting
to get involved with political protests and sit-ins. One of our first
demonstrations was against the Woolworth’s store in
It was exciting to be caught-up in a larger
movement for social action and human betterment, but it also felt a bit
strange. We really didn't know if it would work, or even how it should work for
that matter. It was still the early 60's, and it was still all pretty new to
us. We would be getting a lot more experience during the rest of the decade.
Cross
Country
During the
summer of l963 we went off to look for
My friend
Paul and I decided to drive cross country. We made the trip in his brand new
Mercury Comet convertible. It was one of the first good compact cars on the
market, and it would be the perfect vehicle for the trip. Our plan was to make
it to
We were so
anxious to make good time, that our first lunch stop
wasn't until
As insignificant as it may have seemed, the hamburger episode was really
starting to leave a bad taste in my mouth. I was beginning to feel like an
alien. Who were these people? Sure, they looked human enough, but what other
strange things did they do that we didn't know about? Some strong second
thoughts were starting to kick-in. It probably didn't help that we had driven long
and hard, and were still passing through endless miles of unscenic
turnpike.
Paul was a
maniac behind the wheel, putting-in mile after high speed mile with no
discernible drop in his energy level. He would have made a great long distance
truck driver, but he also had some of the highest SAT scores of anyone around,
so it was, probably, better that he became a college professor.
Paul's shift
behind the wheel usually lasted twice as long as mine,
and I'd worry about his alertness. He never liked to admit to being tired. I
remember one long, hot stretch of road, running across the endless cornfields
of
Luckily, at
that very moment, Paul must have sensed something too. At full speed he
swerved-off into a motel driveway which seemed to appear almost miraculously
out of nowhere. He did this intricate maneuver just as he was about to
pass-out. Apparently, it was time to stop for the night.
The Badlands
of
It had taken
us a few days of hard driving to get this first taste of Western wonder, but it
whetted our appetites for more. We couldn't wait to get to our next destination
- The Rocky Mountains. My aunt and uncle from
Paul and I found the driving on the
high mountain passes a little too hair-raising. I could barely stand to open my
eyes, particularly when I was the passenger. I wanted to do all of the driving
myself. Although the scenery was, admittedly, magnificent, it never really
compensated for the anxiety that came along with it. I just kept thinking that
it was a very long way down to the bottom. The
We journeyed
next to the
Totally
unsympathetic to the cowboy's plight, Paul and I,
became instantly intrigued with the idea of taking-on the same challenge
ourselves later that summer. It might have been too tough for a couple of
We enjoyed
the rest of the scenery as we passed through the American Southwest. The great
expanses of desert terrain were punctuated for us by the images of depressed
and impoverished Indians, particularly around
Upon arriving in
We also took
a drive down to
Although we
enjoyed most of our sight-seeing, we eventually grew a little tired of playing
tourist. We settled into more of a comfortable routine of going to the beach
and doing a lot of body surfing. We
loved swimming in the clear water of the Pacific, we
never wanted to come out.
As the days
passed, we found ourselves thinking about that lean and leathery cowboy and the
Paul and I
probably knew about as much about hiking and desert survival as a Navajo Indian
might know about where to find a good corned beef sandwich in the
The hike was
eight miles down and eight miles back. It was a steep trail with what seemed to
be an infinite number of switchbacks. There was high altitude to contend with,
and there was also the incredible summer heat.
I had only
taken long pants, and, as the heat intensified, by about 9 O' Clock in the
morning, I regretted not bringing along any shorts. The trail was red, dry, and
dusty, and the aroma of dehydrating mule pee was our constant companion.
As though it weren't enough that they were ruining our trail, we also
wound-up having a number of close encounters with these giant animals that
proved to be a little tense. Whenever a mule train would come by we tried to
stay to the inside, since there weren't any guard rails on the outside. The mules
also wanted to stay to the inside, and they usually won. It was a long way down
to the bottom, and they didn't always find your body right away.
We were
getting really tired by the time we got down to Plateau Point. This was where
the mules took their break before heading back up to the top. Paul and I were
starting to get kind of envious. We also wondered what they were getting for a
snack.
Paul decided
that the mules just might be onto something, and figured that he'd be happy
just make it back at all. He hated to give-up on the challenge, but it wasn't
worth risking his life for it. He gave me some of his box lunch and wished me
well. As I watched him head slowly up to the rim I started to feel incredibly
alone. Here it was, the height of the tourist season in one of our most popular
National Parks, and almost nobody was down here. Luckily,
every once in a while, someone would pass me on their way up. Most of
them had spent the night on the canyon floor. Seeing these occasional passing
strangers kept me from freaking-out entirely.
As I continued my solitary journey to the canyon floor, I started to
feel like I was going back through time. Each step in my descent carried me
closer to the beginning. I passed silently and effortlessly through progressive
layers of geological history. I felt like an honored guest, who was graciously
being allowed a momentary glimpse into an eternal process that seemed both
timeless and incomprehensible. The canyon was shifting and changing, but time
was standing still.
Silence was
becoming to the canyon. I reached the
As I sat
there I thought I heard the roar of a mountain lion in the distance. Being from
the
I couldn't
really see how I would be able to make it back. It was a difficult eight mile climb up to the rim. I was
tired and scared, and the toughest part was yet to come. Whatever confidence I
had left was beginning to erode a lot faster than the canyon walls.
Picturing the mountain lion hot on my heels, and some ice water and
chocolate waiting for me at the top, I pushed on. With each passing trail
marker it became clear that my pace was only about one mile per hour. The heat
and altitude were really starting to take their toll, and, in my weakened
condition, I'd be lucky to even make it back in eight hours. It was disheartening to
climb for hour after hour, in the blazing sun, and still not be able to see the
rim.
Luckily,
during a stop for some water and self-pity, help arrived. I was overtaken by a
man and two women who were hiking-up after spending the night at Phantom Ranch.
We joined together for the rest of the climb back. It was such a relief and
comfort to meet-up with some other human beings. My spirits were given a
tremendous lift. Even more fortunately, the man turned-out to be an ex-Marine
who had been trained in desert survival. He was able to find us things like
cactus fruit that we could eat along the way.
When we
finally staggered to the top my legs were starting to spasm. Even though I was
in relatively great shape at the time, the climb had almost done me in. I was
completely exhausted, and dying for a drink of water and anything to eat. Like
something out of a bad Road Runner cartoon, I used my last ounce of strength to
stagger into a snack bar near the rim. Although it was empty, the kid behind
the counter just needed to dry a few more glasses before he could take my
order. It was a real sick joke.
To say that I had leg cramps and intense pain throughout the night would
be a bit of an understatement. But, incredibly, once I started to move around
again the next morning I felt almost normal again. Not wanting to miss any
opportunities for a new experience, I somehow got talked-into going horseback
riding, and, almost immediately I realized it was a big mistake. By the end of
the day I hated my horse with a passion.
As the summer
was drawing to a close, we planned our return trip from
We
finally burned-out on scenery as we were passing through
The West had
made an indelible impression on us. It was all that we had hoped it would be.
Wide-open, beautiful, unspoiled, and uncorrupted, it looked like a great place
for a new beginning
City of Brotherly Love
When I got
back from my
During that
final year, I found myself getting particularly resentful about the road games.
Even if we didn't have to travel great distances to play at some of these other
schools, the trips now seemed like major intrusions on my schedule. The idea of
spending hours riding on a bus just to be able to sit on a some wooden bench or
folding chairing in the middle of nowhere, was really
starting to get to me. I guess a bit of the magic had worn-off.
Further
aggravating all of this was a painful realization of just how much time and
energy this nonsense had been taking away from my studies. I had foolishly
devoted the last few years of my life to running around in shorts for countless
hours, for no apparent reason. In a sense, I was now on my academic death bed,
and as I reflected back on my life at
Word around
the Psych Department had it that you couldn't do ANYTHING in the field of
Psychology without a Master's Degree. Given my grades and the fact that I
continued to use
I set-up a
meeting with my advisor to talk about which, if any, programs I should consider. Even
though he seemed to know what he was talking about, he clearly gave me some bad
advice. The program that he had recommended, actually turned-out to be very
selective, and I had, virtually, no chance of ever getting into any of them. In
fact, I would have had a better chance of getting an acceptance if I had just
taken the application fees and dropped them into a sewer.
The advice that my advisor had given me had been so remarkably poor that
it made me question the whole area of academic advising and counseling. I
hadn't really given it too much thought up that point, but, now I was coming to
realize that some of these well-dressed and well-spoken professionals had so
much credibility that they could easily screw-up the lives of countless
students. They dispensed whatever bits of wisdom they may have possessed, in a
way that demonstrated little respect or appreciation for the person who was on
the receiving end. These characters were being paid a lot of money, and they
weren't even bothering to listen. The whole thing reminded me of the scene in
"The Graduate", when Dustin Hoffman was advised to get into a career
in plastics.
After the
initial flood of rejection letters, I frantically started looking around for
something that resembled a Plan B. All I could come up with were two possibilities.
The first was
I rented a
depressingly small room in a bad part of town. The only thing cheerful about
the house was the picture of Jesus in the lobby. It was something that I wasn’t
used to seeing on my walls, and it made me feel even more like an alien. The
other tenants in the house were mostly medical students, who studied constantly
and really didn't have much time to socialize.
It was a
short ride on the subway down to the campus, but, it was in such a frightening
part of town that I began to long for my days in Spanish Harlem. There was so
much crime and racial tension in the air that the police had started to patrol
the subway trains with German shepherds. But it was hard to feel very safe, even with all this
beefed-up security.
It was a
painfully lonely time as well, almost like serving a sentence in jail. I eagerly looked
forward to the weekends when I could take the train back to
While I was
immersing myself in slum living, I somehow managed to get myself involved in a series abusive relationships with the washers and
dryers at the local laundromat. They always seemed to
be malfunctioning and taking your quarters. And, to make matters worse, there
never seemed to be an attendant around to help you, probably because the only
one who might have felt safe there would have been Charles Bronson. Anyway, one
night I finally had enough, and, in a fit of rage, I maniacally twisted the
lids off a row of washing machines. It was a senseless, violent crime, and it
brought me pitifully little satisfaction.
After a hard
day at the laundromat, you could work-up a tremendous
appetite. My skills as a chef would have to be rated somewhere between Minimal
and Dangerous, but, fortunately, there were a lot of little restaurants and
cafes in the neighborhood, which served cheap, home-style meals.
For me, the
two best things about
Back in the
classroom,
On the first
day of registration, I found myself on line next to two other new students, Ken
and Ruth. We became instant friends, and a few years later, they even got
married. We were all studying Psychology, even though none of us necessarily
knew what we wanted to do with it. Ken was thinking of possibly going into
Industrial, Ruth seemed to be interested in working with children, and I had no
idea although I was leaning towards Social or Experimental. Throughout the year
we all kept each other motivated and on task. Our efforts paid-off, and we did
well.
It was during
my first semester in the program, that I signed-up for
a Theories of Counseling course with Dr. Harmon Burke. It was my first in-depth
exposure to counseling and therapy, and I found it to be pretty interesting
stuff. As I sat in his class, there was something about Harmon Burke that kept
striking me as unusual. I couldn't really put my finger on it, until one day I
realized that the reason he was unusual as a Psych professor was because he
wasn't strange. As a matter of fact, he seemed to be a genuinely nice guy, with
a great deal of personal warmth. Running into a relatively
normal psychologist in those days seemed almost as unlikely as accidentally
stumbling over the Hope Diamond.
We talked one
day after class, and got to know each other a bit. He told me that he split his time
between teaching classes and doing counseling over at the university's
counseling center. At the time I didn't really know anything about counseling
centers, and I hadn't even been aware that we had one on campus.
Later that week he had me come by while he gave me an overview of the
entire operation. After the tour, he invited me into his office, and let me
listen to a tape of one of his counseling sessions. I remember that It sounded very different from a normal conversation, very
strained, slow, and somewhat stilted. One person was doing most of the talking,
and I soon found out that that was the "client". Looking back at it,
I'm impressed with just how psychologically unsophisticated I really was at
that stage of my professional training. I was kind of a late entry into the
world of counseling and therapy, and my powers of comprehension reflected it.
Dr. Burke also suggested that it might be
interesting to sit-in on a T-Group. These were unstructured groups in which the
participants could develop greater sensitivity and awareness about human
relationships. Being a paranoid from the
Risk-takers
that they were, they also let me see a client after a while. The director of
the counseling center had a friend whose daughter needed to be seen, and, for
some reason, she set her up with an appointment to see me. Since I had received
no formal training in counseling, I felt like they were really throwing me in
way over my head. Needless to say, I was
totally panicked about the session. One of the last things I remembered was
escorting this poor, unsuspecting, human guinea pig, into a counseling office.
We were both about to be sacrificed for the sake of behavioral science.
Like a
traumatized accident victim, mercifully, I can't seem to recall anything about
the session itself. To this day, I have no idea what her problem was, or what I
might have actually said during our time together. I probably just faked-it by
trying to sound slow, and stilted like the voice I had heard on Dr. Burke's
tape. I hoped I didn't tell her to apply to the wrong graduate schools.
But, I guess
it went well enough. The director's friend was still talking to her, and she
even offered to write me a letter of recommendation if I ever needed one. As it
turned out, I'd be needing more than one, and I'd be
needing them pretty soon.
If I was
thinking about staying in the field of Counseling Psychology, a masters degree wasn't going to be enough. Now, word had it
that you couldn't do ANYTHING without a Ph.D. They always seemed to be raising
the stakes. As far as the job possibilities were concerned, it made a lot of
sense to stay in school. It also seemed like a much better idea than escaping
to
Remembering
the hatchet-job by my old advisor back at
Even if I wasn't over-confident, it felt like I, actually, might have
some choices. My hard work seemed to be paying-off. Strangely enough I now had
excellent grades, good test scores, and some enthusiastic letters of
recommendation. I was, actually, amazed that I had performed so well in such a
demanding program. I still wasn't a real scholar by
Checking the mailbox every day became an
ordeal of terror. The verdict on my future might show-up at any time, without
any warning. Someone out there was deciding my fate, and I didn't know who they
were, what they were really looking for, or when they would decide.
U.C.L.A. responded almost immediately. They
sent me a rejection letter via airmail. I didn't know whether to be flattered
or even more insulted. A short while later, I received a
phone call from one of my heroes in the field, Dr. Robert Carkuff
at the
But
Marianne and
I were married in June of l965, and we moved back to
But,
when we showed-up to move-in, the place looked a lot worse.
There were teeth and plaster things all over the refrigerator, and a pizza with
a nasty case of gingivitis under a chair in the living room. Dirty dishes were
piled-up in the sink, and crumbs, bugs, and bodily fluids were in all the wrong
places. It was, certainly, a depressing way to start-off married life.
Outraged, we
carried all this garbage out to their storage bin and mixed it in with their
clothes and other possessions. It was hard to believe, but these were guys who
were, actually, going to be working inside the human mouth. They would be
allowed to handle sterile instruments, and get paid big money. It was a truly
horrifying image, and we hoped that they'd wash their hands real well before
they saw their patients.
It was all
kind of funny. Here it was, the first time that either of us had lived in a
brand new apartment, and it was so utterly depressing. The fact that it was
shoddily-built and sitting in an angry black part of town didn't really help.
The whole scene reflected decay, from the teeth to the city. The City of
We were ready
to move-on and take our chances with the unknown.
We packed-up
a pretty good-sized U-Haul trailer, hitched it to the back of our Chevy Bel Air, and set-off for
As we neared
After a brief
stop on campus to sign some forms and pick-up our keys, we headed over to our
new digs. Our housing complex,
We unlocked
the door and went in for the grand tour. For a brief moment I must have lost my
bearings. I felt like I had accidentally stumbled into some sort of an
experiment on human perception. Something really odd was going on here. Either
I was nine feet tall, or the rooms were minute.
But,
unfortunately, this was no optical illusion. The kitchen was, in fact,
pathetically small, taking-up only part of a tiny hallway. It would have been
absolutely perfect for Ken and Barbie, but, unfortunately, Ken had applied to
the wrong graduate schools.
We, actually,
almost didn't notice the kitchen, on our first walk-through. What we did
notice, however, was the hot water heater. It seemed to be taking-up half the
apartment, and seemed to be living in one of the nicer rooms.
Even more
upsetting to us was the refrigerator - there was none.
The university was supposed to include one with the apartment, and, now this!
We started to panic. We didn't have any extra money, so how would we be able to
buy a refrigerator? And, if we bought it, where would we put it? Immediately,
we called the housing office to give them a piece of our mind. They suggested
that we try looking under the counter near the sink. We were stunned, but, sure
enough, there it was, with barely enough room for a tray of ice.
So, we did have a usable refrigerator after-all, and the apartment was
certainly livable enough. It would, probably, do. Actually, it would more than
do. Other than being a little on the small side, it was, actually, a pretty
nice place. Through the picture window
in our living room, we could see plenty of sky and plenty of greenery. There
were some beautiful old trees, and plenty of well-kept grassy areas. That
reminded us, we hadn't met the neighbors yet. We'd, probably, get that chance
later that evening, probably around midnight, when they'd all be dropping-by to
burn a cross on our lawn.
Much to our
relief, this never happened. We were, instead, so warmly welcomed by our
neighbors, that their friendliness more than made-up for the cramped quarters.
A great feeling of camaraderie had already started to develop, and it would
continue to grow. We were all in the same boat - young, struggling, and facing
tremendous academic and financial pressures. Coming from a foreign country like
There were
about a dozen apartments in our building, and we had a pretty good geographical
mix. Some of our neighbors were from big cities like St.Louis,
Needless to
say, they all had funny accents, especially when compared to New Yorkers. But
great friendships developed never-the-less. People were always dropping-by to
chat or to have a cup of coffee or a beer. There was an easy flow and
continuity with each other's lives that was precious. From going down to the
river, or going over to The Minute Inn for some eggs,
There were
some extremely resourceful people in the
We were
introduced to the wonderful world of food lockers. We'd buy things in bulk,
like sides of beef, or frozen vegetables, and store them in lockers that we'd
rent at Columbia Ice and Storage. It saved us a lot of money, but, sometimes,
it could get a little creepy in there. The lockers were big enough to hold a
frozen body the size of James Arness, and I wasn't
anxious to make any accidental discoveries. If I was alone, I'd also worry
about being locked-in and freezing to death while searching in vain for a rump
roast.
Columbia Ice and Storage was also like a Club
Med to us. A visit to our locker offered us a moment of blissful relief from
the hot and muggy
Besides their
resourcefulness, there were a number of other qualities that we came to value
as well. Some of these qualities might become apparent through simple, day to
day, living, but others might only come to the fore under much more dramatic
circumstances.
You could see
it, for example, when it came time to respond to a natural disaster. You might
be sitting comfortably at home, on a rainy night, listening to the radio, when
a call would come-out for volunteers who were needed to help fight a flood that
was threatening a nearby town. Before you knew it, hundreds of volunteers would
be out there, getting drenched, slogging through mud, and hauling sandbags.
There was something so striking about the way they all pulled-together for
this. Something told you that this was the way it was supposed to be done.
It hearkened
back to an earlier
Our friends
Alan and Joanne lived downstairs. The two of them were very concerned about
social issues, and had returned to school, from the Bay Area, to study Social
Work. Particularly revolted by the rampant materialism in our society, and our
lack of sensitivity to the environment, they tried to live simply and decently,
and to affect change through example. They were into developing alternative
life-styles, and had a strong affinity for things like geodesic domes and
composting. Somehow they managed to be idealistic yet hysterically funny.
When they
finished at
Alan and
Joanne were way ahead of the pack. They had to be the first couple who actually
ate organic food and tried to recycle their waste. They followed their
intuition and their interests, and, as a result, became involved in some pretty
innovative things.
Among other
things, they started a free university, designed to enrich the lives of senior
citizens and other neglected members of our society. But my personal favorite
had to be when Alan opened-up his "therapeutic garage" in
To this day,
it's remarkably easy to picture our building in
Like pairs of
animals on Noah's
Betty and
Jake lived around the corner in a nearby building. They were Canadians who had
come down to
If Jake had
shown-up at Alan's therapeutic garage, they would have had some interesting
material to explore. Some of it would bear directly on the fact that Jake
seemed to possess many of the essential qualities that you would look for in a
good clinician.
From the
condition of the car itself, for example, Alan would have realized that Jake
was very meticulous and careful in his work. The fact that he spent a lot of
time rubbing saddle soap onto his leather seats might indicate that he was
guilt-ridden, or possibly even perverted, but, since he was from
Alan might
also have noticed that Jake paid careful attention to both the interior and the
exterior of his car. He was, obviously, not just concerned with his image. The
inner, personal human qualities also seemed important to him. All in all, Jake
was demonstrating some signs of being a pretty authentic kind of a person.
There was some congruence here, he wasn't just hiding
behind a superficial facade.
Like an
ambivalent client, the MG could be pretty unreliable at times, and it wasn't
always that user-friendly. But, despite some of these obnoxious, negative
qualities, Jake remained steadfast in his commitment to his vehicle. Sometimes
the car would even betray him altogether, and balk at the idea of going on a
particular journey. Jake might have had a perfectly pleasant destination in
mind, but the car might just decide that it would rather avoid the whole thing
and not do any work that day. Jake might be upset, but he would never even
think of rejecting it, or writing-it-off as hopeless. He remained remarkably
accepting, and full of unconditional positive regard for his MG. Even if it
wouldn't start now, Jake remained positive in his outlook.
Eventually
he'd get it rolling again. With renewed faith in the inherent worth of his
automobile, Jake would once again put on his tweed driving cap, and go tooling
around on the back roads down by the
Walt was also into sports cars. If I remember correctly, he was kind of
partial to bug-eyed Austin Healey Sprites. If that car's bulging headlights
pointed to anything in Walt's character, it was probably the quality of wisdom.
Like a wise old owl, Walt was a shrewd observer of the human scene. He and his
wife Sylvia were from
On the home
front, they were both pretty solid too. Walt and Sylvia had an unusually small
and sickly son who needed all sorts of surgery to correct some major birth
defects. But they never seemed to complain, or feel sorry for themselves even
though they were facing much greater hardships than the rest of us. Somehow
they were able to keep their spirits up, even through the really discouraging
times. To us, Walt and Sylvia stood as a testament to the grittiness and
determination that we loved in our
Pete and Brenna also became our friends. They were both Clinical
Psych students, and we later shared a two family house with them on the other
side of town. It was in that house that the four of us got our first real taste
of what it would be like to be parents. They were only puppies that we were
raising, but they, probably, gave us a pretty good idea about what to expect
from our children someday. Through our dogs, we were also given a sneak preview
of the kinds of neuroses that would probably be popping-up in our kids someday.
Our dog was very sweet, but kind of wimpy, and theirs was very energetic, but a
little too aggressive.
The only
doggie door to the yard was downstairs in Pete and Brenna's
house, so we'd usually let Meechee out by sending her
down the stairs through our common door. Late at night, Pete would frequently
send himself up the stairs, through the very same door, in search of peanut
butter or other goodies in our refrigerator. All in all, it seemed like an
equitable arrangement.
In all
fairness, Pete really had a bit of an edge on the rest of us when it came to
parenting experience. The year before we had moved to
One of Pete's
responsibilities was to take care of the chimps and make sure that their
diapers got washed every week. In those days, people could drop their clothes
off at the laundromat, and have them done. An
attendant would take your basket, and wash, dry, and fold your clothes for you,
all for a very modest charge. Pete always liked to bring the diapers to the
same laundromat. After months of silent anguish, one
of the attendants finally asked him if everything was O.K. with his baby. She
just didn't like the looks of those diapers. It might have been the twigs, or
the strange shades of green, but something just didn't seem quite right about
them.
Just across
the way from the laundromat was The Minute Inn. They
should probably put a picture of it in the dictionary next to the word
"diner". We'd often drop by late at night for some eggs, and deep
conversation. Other than the good food, the main attraction for us was the
short-order cook.
It was hard
to take your eyes off him as he magically juggled large numbers of egg orders
simultaneously. Sometimes we were a little tired or a bit tripped-out
ourselves, but we just couldn't get over this guy. And, it set-off all sorts of
philosophical discussions. There we were, in the middle of the 60's, so, of
course, a lot of our conversations would be about growth and
self-actualization. We were intrigued about these things, but they were kind of
elusive concepts to us. We all wanted to self-actualize, but we weren't exactly
sure about how to do it, or what it actually looked like. None of us had been
to
But,
apparently, here it was, seemingly embodied in the most unlikely form of
someone slinging hash down at The Minute Inn. We were pretty sure that we were
looking at someone who had self-actualized, someone whose level of mastery had
transcended the art itself. Totally present in the "here and now", he
had become the unique individual that he truly was. Unmistakably, this was
someone who had found "his thing".
But, since he
was stuck somewhere in the back of the diner, and not exactly on center stage,
you might not even notice him. Lost somewhere in the shuffle of chicken-fried
steaks, and side orders of toast, he would be all too easy to miss. You also
had to be receptive to seeing it, and that wasn't always easy. What made it
particularly difficult was the fact that this guy was in a fairly low status
position. He wasn't a teacher or a consultant, and he wasn't peddling his
wisdom in seminars or workshops. He was just slinging hash, and slinging it
very, very well.
On the
surface, he may have just been cooking-up an order of scrambled eggs and hash
browns, but, at a deeper level of reality, he was at one with the eggs, at one
with the hash browns, and at one with the universe, standing calmly in the
center of the cyclone, doing his thing.
But before
you get the mistaken idea that everyone in
For every weirdo seeker-type in town,
there were a hundred others who did normal, red-blooded, American things. At
the end of a tough week, they sought to achieve a state of consciousness that
was a lot closer to blotto than it was to nirvana. Their tastes ran more
towards smoking a few Marsh-Wheeling cigars, chewing a few Slim Jims, and
downing a little Jim Beam. Your basic six pack of beer would also do nicely,
especially a six pack of Coors. In those days they didn't sell Coors anywhere
East of Kansas City so it was considered to be an “imported” beer. All in all,
their tastes might not have been terribly sophisticated, but sophistication
really wasn't their primary concern. They weren't terribly burdened about
keeping-up that kind of an image.
Not too far
from the chimp laundromat and the Minute Inn was
Uncle Clem's Liquor Store. For all we know, the laundress in question may have
had to go over there for some kind of a sedative. Uncle Clem's was well-stocked
and well-used, and it had more than its share of local color. From the
customers to the jars of pickled eggs and pig’s knuckles, you knew you were in
While you
were paying for your beer and Slim Jims, you couldn't help noticing the picture
on the calendar that was hanging behind Uncle Clem's counter. It showed a
lovely full-color pastoral scene of a horse standing in a lush, green field.
The calendar was compliments of a local stud farm, and, below the scene, the
caption read - "It's our pleasure to serve you."
This cultural
plunge into the heartland of
Be it out of
utter disbelief, or just plain morbid curiosity, Marianne and I became regular
viewers of their show. Our favorite Tunemaster was
the piano player, who invariably hit the wrong notes whenever the camera would pan-in
for a close-up. It was almost like a voodoo doll to him.
Although it
was quite unintentional, The Tunemasters probably did
a lot to inspire over-confidence in any musician who happened to be tuning-in
at the time. If these guys had actually made it to TV, anything was
possible. The Tunemasters
also exposed their viewing public to some songs that they might normally not
get a chance to hear. One of our favorites had to be their rendition of,
"I'm Using My Bible As A Road Map".
While The Tunemasters were singing away in their relative innocence,
darker forces were beginning to brew in the world of music. Psychedelic rock
was starting to slowly make its way down Interstate 70. The most fitting song
for our years in
Parker Hall
Of course, my
primary purpose in coming to
Although we
were warmly welcomed by the Psych Department and the counseling center, it was
still a very high-pressure situation. The department had only accepted twenty
five new students that year, and, only two of us were in Counseling Psychology.
Most of the other students in the Counseling Psych program were going through
the
Shortly after
our arrival on campus, we were told that we would all be competing against each
other. At the end of the year we would be ranked, and a cut would be made. Some
of us would have to go. I had mistakenly believed that my acceptance into the
program represented a little more security than that, but, apparently, they
wanted to play hard ball. But, even though it was intensely competitive, it all
worked-out. Pretty much the whole class did well, and no haphazard cuts were
made.
During my
entire four year stay at
I was Wayne
Anderson's graduate assistant during my first year in the program, and for the
next two years I was an intern at the counseling center. During my final year I
was given some additional experience in training and supervision. All in all,
it was a well-rounded experience, and it proved to be a great place to learn
your craft.
In contrast
to the over-crowded programs at City and
One of the
things I came to value most about the program was, the continual opportunity
for informal learning. This felt a lot more valuable to me than what I was
getting in the classroom. One of the major locales for this informal learning
was down in the coffee room in the basement of Parker Hall. It was the scene of
some extraordinarily profound and sometimes quite humorous conversations. Staff
members and interns would always be staggering in and out between sessions, and
catharting about this that or the other thing. There
was a dartboard hanging on one of the walls, and it had to be replaced
frequently. The work could, sometimes, get emotionally-demanding. People would also hang-out upstairs in the
observation rooms. Most all of us were very immersed
in our work, so we'd always be trying to pick-up a few tips or give a few to
someone else. One of your fellow interns or supervisors might follow your work
with a particular client over the course of a few weeks or even a few months.
This kind of continuous in-depth exposure put them in the rare position of
being able to offer feedback that was, actually, useful. Such thoroughness, and follow-through fit-in well with the whole
program. They cared about your professional
development, and they were more than willing to invested
the time and effort.
Some of us
would, frequently, have our lunch over at Pooch's, the old pool hall, a few
blocks away from campus. It was where we would go if we needed to get away from
it all. It was the scene of many a major debriefing.
Pooch's was,
truly, an amazing place, a classic slice of Midwestern Americana. As you walked
through the front door, there was a bar and grill on the left, and a long row
of snooker and billiard tables running the entire length of the pool hall. The
walls were lined with yellowing pictures of old
Even though it was pretty close to the university, it really wasn't your
basic college hang-out. The characters who came in
from the surrounding countryside were your basic plaid shirt and overalls set.
To them, a London Fog would sound a lot more like a weather report than a
fashion statement. One of the regulars had a steel hook instead of a hand. He
was pretty tough to beat. Even when he was facing the pressure of an important
shot, his hook would never tremble.
And then
there was the rack man. Absolutely huge, he looked like King Kong Bundy, and,
definitely, knew how to rack balls. There was only one rack in the house, and
it was his. Whenever you finished a game, you just yelled-out,
"Rack", and he'd be there. It might take him a minute or two, but it
probably wasn't a particularly great idea to try to rush him. As a matter of
fact, it might be the last thing you'd ever do. Eventually he'd get there, slip
the change into his apron, and be on his way to the next table. The rack man
didn't say much, but his imposing presence kept rowdiness to a minimum.
The place
served some good bad hamburgers. Something about them fit in well with the
general ambiance. So, across the board, it was a really great place for a quick
escape into a radically different world. It was just what you needed after a
heavy session. It let you get back to basics for a while.
A number of
other opportunities for informal learning were built into the program as well.
We had a regular series of evening meetings that were alternately hosted by
Paul King and Bill Chestnut. We'd meet in their homes, and it gave us a chance
to explore things in a much more relaxed and non-judgmental atmosphere.
Paul, a
master therapist from
Besides opening up his home to us, Paul did a
lot of other little things that made us feel very
appreciated. I can still picture him sitting in the Director's Office over at
Parker Hall. He'd usually be leaning back in his chair, with his feet up on the
desk, talking on the phone in that thick Kentucky accent of his. Over his front
door was a chart, the size of a small billboard, and, posted on it were each of
our names, and an arrow indicating which academic hurdles we had finished and
which ones we still had left. If anyone called with a job opening, Paul could
just look up, and, at a moment's glance, would be able to tell who might be
available and when.
Just outside
of Paul's office was a map of the
At Bill
Chestnut's house, the fireside conversations would focus more on issues in
supervision and training.
Art and Helen
The two
persons that had the greatest impact on me during my stay in
Separately or
together, Art and Helen are both very hard to capture. I could say that they
were rare individuals, but that really doesn't tell you very much. One place to
start might be with one of the things that seemed to make them rare, and that
was their strong inner drive to seek the truth. In order to do this they
attempted to explore and experience just about everything. Direct, first-hand
knowledge was valued in the 60's. It seemed wise to find-out things for
yourself. There was a basic distrust of authority in those days, which was
reflected in one of the popular slogans of the time - "Never trust anyone
over thirty." Although Art and Helen were both over thirty themselves,
they still fit in well with this philosophy.
In order to find truth, it was felt that
boundaries needed to be stretched and tested, and scrutinized. In those days,
people were trying to do this in their own lives, and they often looked to us,
the psychologists, to lead the way. We were the high priests of the growth
movement, even if we didn't always know what we were doing.
Those were
the days of "Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice", and, in the world of
counseling and therapy, new ideas were bursting onto the scene, and challenging
the status quo. Seemingly all at once, a myriad of new forms were being
created, designed to help break-down defenses and help people grow. Encounter
groups, marathon groups, and open marriage were all very much in vogue at that
time. There was a great sense of adventure surrounding all of this, but it also
made for a lot of craziness. You never knew who would say what to whom, and
everyone seemed to be falling in love in unpredictable and painful ways.
Within this
historical context, Art and Helen approached their personal and professional
lives with a strong value on risk-taking, authenticity, and personal integrity.
They were eager to integrate many of these new ideas from the human potential
movement into their own work, and they were also testing them on the home
front. Like many others, they were trying to develop more satisfying and
meaningful relationships, and, in the process, roles and facades would
sometimes be abandoned, and the limits of authenticity would, sometimes, be
severely tested.
Like true
explorers, Art and Helen didn't always know where they would land, or what they
would find. It was an approach that required a lot of trust in your own
intuition and feelings. From our perspective in the 90's, it seems like a
pretty crazy or foolhardy way to conduct your life, and, in many ways, it,
probably was. Things are a lot more conservative now, particularly with regard
to different approaches to therapy and group work. We've all become a little
too aware of the price you can pay for being that much of an adventurer, and
know all too well that along with the excitement and discovery, can come
damage, chaos, and pain.
But, out of
some combination of ignorance and idealism, limits weren't as valued then as
they are today. As a matter of fact, even worrying about limits in those days
was considered to be in bad form. Limits were thought of as
"hang-ups", and, as such, were just barriers to our own personal
growth. They were there to be transcended, overcome, or worked-through. The
only check or balance in this whole process was the test of whether or not
someone got "hurt". The general idea was that people could do there
own thing as long as it didn't "hurt" anyone. Of course, this was
always a little nebulous and ill-defined. Sometimes, even when someone actually
did get hurt, they might be blamed for "choosing" to feel hurt. There
were a few manipulators in the human potential movement, and occasionally they
would re-write the rules for their own convenience.
Art, who
wasn't one of these manipulators, was one of my early supervisors, maybe even
my very first one. I was immediately impressed with his ability to analyze
people and situations in a way that was thorough yet very non-judgmental. He
was extremely patient, and blended a strong intellect with a great sense of
respect for others. He seemed to have an unusual sense of compassion for the
misfits of society. Maybe that was where I came in.
Art quickly
put me under his wing, and became a mentor. Intuitive guy
that he was, he must have sensed a common bond - we were both perplexed and
bewildered by many of the same things. We spent a lot of time together,
particularly in the summers when we would conduct practicums
for Employment Service Counselors from around the state. These were people who
had been working out in the field for a while, and were being brought-in for
some training in some of the more current approaches to counseling. The
practicum met everyday for about five or six weeks, and it could, sometimes,
get pretty intense. We'd role play, go over tapes, give a lot of feedback, and
discuss just about everything they wanted to bring-up. Art was extremely
well-versed in different approaches to counseling, and he had a remarkable
ability to analyze sessions from a number of these different frameworks. He
also, somehow, managed to work-in concepts from anything from jazz and science
fiction to Zen. Art definitely knew how to run a practicum, and, among other
things, I watched him like a hawk.
Particularly
during those summers, the two of us could always be found discussing some facet
of therapy, growth, or mental illness. Apparently, there was a lot to explore.
Conversations would usually carry-over into the pool hall during lunch, and
often into the night when we might get together socially. We were immersed in
our work, and, even if it would sometimes drive us crazy, we both found-it to
be infinitely stimulating.
In spite of
all this lively dialogue, Art was usually a pretty quiet and reserved kind of
guy. There also seemed to be some substantial pain under the surface. Maybe it
was his furrowed brow, but it just didn't seem like he was at peace with
himself. When you got right down to it, as a matter of fact, Art seemed pretty
bewildered about counseling, and quite perplexed about life in general. For
better or for worse, he was in touch with all of this, and it seemed to be
causing him a fair amount of strain.
Even though
he may have had a great deal of personal expertise, the field itself seemed to
be giving him a lot of trouble. Be it counseling,
supervision, or consulting, Art always seemed to have some really mixed
feelings about doing any of them. Although he was considered to be extremely
competent by others, he himself had his doubts. The nature of the work was also
a big question to him, and there was something about the whole profession that
seemed basically dishonest.
Like many of
us, he often felt like an impostor. Maybe it was the whole doctor-patient type
of set-up that bothered him. It seemed to put the client at a distinct
disadvantage, in a very one-down position in the relationship. On the other end
would be the "doctor", who would often hide behind a professional
facade that, all too often, implied a much greater knowingness than was
actually there. Maybe it was the lack of answers, or maybe it was the abundance
of games, it was hard to say, but sometimes it could all just seem like a bunch
of empty jargon. Take away the psychobabble, the speculation, and the
professional trappings, and you'd pretty much be left with nothing. Sometimes
it was a strain to see clothes on the emperor.
But, for
whatever the reason, Art's underlying discomfort created a constant strain that
made it increasingly difficult for him to maintain any of his professional
roles. He was really much too aware to relax.
Marianne and
I would, occasionally, keep him company while he was packing for a consulting
trip over in
At that very
same moment that Art was picking-out just the right outfit, miles away in Kansas
City, people who felt right at home in suits and ties were eagerly awaiting his
arrival. They enjoyed working with him, and loved the way he trained them. But,
as far as Art was concerned, he was dreading it. He was going there under
duress, and he, literally, had to push himself out the door at times. As he
pointed the car due west on Interstate 70, he braced himself for his landing in
the "Straight World". It, clearly, wasn't one of his favorite trips.
The one place
that Art really did seem to fit-in comfortably was over at the Boone County
Auction, where he was one of the regulars. Almost every Friday night, year in
and year out, you could count on Art to be there. Surrounded by a colorful
group of locals who looked like extras from the "Dukes of Hazard",
Art seemed to be totally in his element.
He knew all
the signals, cues, and subtleties. Like sizing-up a new client in an intake
interview, Art tuned-in pretty quickly to psychology of the various players.
He'd usually have a pretty good idea about who he'd be going up against that
night, and how much it might take to out-bid them. He knew about their
weaknesses and passions for certain kinds of merchandise.
Even outside of the auction, Art always seemed to be wheeling and
dealing. If he could get a bargain on something, even if he didn't need it,
he'd often grab it anyway, and file it in his backyard and in the back of his
mind. Eventually, he'd try to catch the right time to sell, and then bring it
back to the auction. With all this wheeling and dealing, the furnishings in his
house might best be described as rotating stock. You never knew what you were
going to be sitting on, where it might be in the house, or if and when you
would ever see it again.
Art was also
quite at home when he was reading or working around the yard. An avid reader,
his literary tastes ran towards the off-beat, and particularly towards science
fiction. He felt that if you really wanted to know what was happening now,
science fiction was, probably, one of the best ways to find out.
Out in the
yard, Art might relax by hauling bricks around from one part of the yard to
another. He wouldn't be building anything in particular,
he just liked to move them around, kind of like the furniture in his house. It
seemed to give him something tangible to do, and maybe it gave his head a
much-needed rest. Hauling abstract concepts around the office all day could
really get to you after a while, so, hauling bricks seemed to give him a nice
change of pace.
There was also something else that seemed to be getting to him. When it
came to writing his doctoral dissertation, Art had one beauty of a mental
block. He had been granted numerous extensions by both Psychology and
Education, and, after about sixteen hundred years, he had finally run out of
deadlines. Art had designed and conducted a number of perfectly acceptable
research studies, but, he could never quite bring himself to finish any of
them. The years would pass by, all too quickly, and he'd still have no
doctorate to show for all his efforts.
What he did
have to show for it, however, were some terrible migraines, and it was hard for
me not to associate them with his unfinished dissertation. Whatever common
doubts we may have shared about our chosen profession, the headaches seemed
like a pretty stiff price to pay for them. I made it a point to not leave
Art's wife,
Helen, was an extremely competent therapist and supervisor, in her own right,
and, went on to achieve a great deal of professional recognition. Available to
herself and to others she was a great personal mentor. We were very close
during our stay in
Sooner or
later, students in these graduate training programs often wind-up as someone
else's client. They usually recommend the client experience as a way of
becoming more effective as a counselor or therapist. Seeing what it's really
like in the other chair can help you improve your ability to empathize with
your clients, and to gain a greater appreciation of the entire counseling
process. But, these were the more idealistic reasons. In point of fact,
however, the work itself has a way of, sooner or later, driving you into
it.
I think I
must have chosen Helen because of her soft-spoken, gentle style. I figured that
she would, probably, provide a safe, and relatively non-threatening experience
for me, and, in many ways I found this to be true. I had never experienced
anyone who listened as deeply or as attentively as she did. She was incredibly
understanding, accepting, and patient, yet she was also good at confronting you
and keeping you honest. There was a nice balance of Yin and Yang.
It was quite
a powerful thing to be able to experience such unconditional acceptance coming
from another human being. It helped me move more deeply into my self, but I
didn't always know what to do with the feelings that all of this was eliciting.
Helen was so good at what she did that it could, actually, get overwhelming at
times. It felt so safe that it eventually became unsafe.
So what were
the bottom-line things that I learned from the two of them? What was it that
had made them so special as mentors?
The answer
may be a little surprising, but I would, probably, have to say that what really
made them so rare was their underlying sense of humility. It was this quality
that really seemed to be a key to everything. It helped them to be relatively
non-judgmental and accepting, and it helped to free them up to really listen
effectively. They didn't have to maintain a confident professional facade of
some kind, they were secure-enough to risk looking incompetent. They were there
to help you, not just to protect their image or their own sense of security.
Going hand
and hand with all of this seemed to be a genuine inner strength and confidence
that enabled them to explore what their clients actually needed to explore.
They were, somehow, able to travel through the client's emotional world without
having to hang onto a lot of preconceptions. Their security came more from an
inherent sense of faith in the whole process. You didn't necessarily know where
you'd be going, but you figured you'd, probably, be O.K. anyway.
As they
traveled through inner space, they didn't need to go on the tour bus. They were
more like backpackers, who traveled light and kept very flexible in their
itinerary. And, in doing so, their travels became adventures.
Art and Helen
also tended to treat people like the unique individuals that they, actually,
were. Most people, particularly professionals, just seem to pay lip service to
this idea. In point of fact, treating people like individuals can really be a
difficult and extremely threatening thing to do.
But the
common thread cutting-through all of this still seemed
to be this quality of humility, and, sometimes it was hard to find the middle
ground. For Art, his humility was almost a detriment, and he was probably so
humble that he eventually had trouble functioning at all as a professional.
Helen, on the other hand, was able to go forward, and eventually achieve some
national recognition. As for me, I always identified a lot more closely with
Art on this one.
Altered
Even in the
relative isolation of Central Missouri, we were becoming well-aware of the
Purple Haze that was clouding-up over
The Summer of '67 marked a
As crazy as
things were starting to get in
We went to the Filmore Auditorium to see one
of Bill Graham's rock concerts, and, sure enough, the psychedelic poster art
and hippie clothes were all there. On the way in, someone in a granny dress
gave us an apple to munch on. It was a little hard to digest. Once we got
inside, the smoke was pretty thick, strobe lights were pulsating, and amoebas
and other oozing psychedelic visions were quivering across giant screens.
Quicksilver Messenger Service and a few others supplied the music, and my right
ear would never be quite the same again.
Periodically
over the next few years, I fantasized about moving-out to
Even though
we were a long way from what was happening out in
All of these
opposing forces had set-up a rather tense and paranoid situation, but our
friends John and Mary, eventually, provided the solution. Mary was your basic
free spirit, and one of the first liberated women that we had run into. John,
on the other hand, was kind of a psychopath, but, more importantly, he was also
a medical student who had even more to lose than we did. So when they invited
us over to get stoned with them, it seemed like a pretty safe place to do it.
Among other
things, we trusted that John wouldn't want to risk a potentially high-paying
career as a dermatologist. John, actually, wasn't all that interested in
diseases of the skin, it was just that he figured that
nobody would ever wake him up in the middle of the night because of an acne
problem. He still needed a little more work in becoming a more compassionate
healer.
John had also
been giving me a lot of static lately. He thought that psychology and
psychiatry were pretty feeble things to study, and, as a man of science, he
thought the whole mental health thing was a total scam. Sometimes he'd tell me
about all the things that he would tell his patients if they ever came to him
for help with some of these personal problems. He'd make sure to give them a
big dose of reality, and tell them that they were all crazy. More out of
irritation, I, half-kiddingly, told him that he had a
bright future as a "reality therapist".
John, of
course, had no such plans for himself, and was avoiding his psychiatry rotation
as long as he possibly could. But, fact being stranger than fiction, he
eventually enjoyed it so much that he decided to become a psychiatrist himself.
Of course, he moved out to
Anyway, as
our story continues, John and Mary invited us over to share their new discovery
- marijuana. To further feed our paranoia, they were living directly below a
policeman who was their upstairs neighbor. This certainly enhanced the
forbidden nature of our clandestine drug activities. Even though we were about
to do something that was being done in thousands of homes all across the
country, we still felt like we were
pulling-off one of the greatest capers in the history of the world.
We huddled
ever so quietly on the floor. The lights were dim, the shades were drawn, and
"Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" was played at a level that
would be barely audible to a wolf. Within a very short time our perceptions
were altered. The range of our experience was definitely being let out a few
notches, and the sights and sounds were all quite fresh and new. Hearing, with
exquisite clarity, the footsteps of the policeman upstairs as he made a late
night trip of his own to the bathroom was almost more than we could take, and,
when he flushed we thought we'd bust a gut trying to hold-in our laughter. We
felt like we right inside the pipes.
The level of paranoia remained extremely high throughout
For some
strange reason, The Tunemasters were passed over when
it came to choosing the evening's entertainment. Scheduled instead were The
Sound Farm,
Although this
wasn't a particularly original idea, we decided to get stoned before we
went-off to the concert. One of our early psychedelic discoveries had been that
music sounded really great when you were high, so this seemed like the time to
do it. Of course, we tried to act normal
and "maintain" for the evening, since we were certain that we were
just about the only ones there who had tripped-out, and we were paranoid about
being discovered.
You could feel the undercurrent of anticipation in the auditorium. All
in all, it was a big night for
The M.C. came
out and greeted us with the screaming question, "Is everybody
stoned?" And, with that, the lid blew-off the entire auditorium, and we
were all released. A very large cat had been let out of a very large bag, and
everyone roared and laughed, as they started to take a fresh look at some of
their supposedly straight neighbors. There was a rush of recognition as we all
realized that we weren't alone. We weren't the only ones blowing our minds.
Everyone was doing it.
After that
landmark event, the times began to change. People started wearing peace signs
and Buddha medallions. Black light posters, strobe lights, psychedelic music,
hair, Nehru jackets, blue jeans and leather craft all became part of the scene.
Our entire consciousness was being changed, and along with it our language,
style, and heroes.
Although drug
explorations in those days would typically progress from marijuana on to LSD and then
through other psychedelics, we pulled-out of this progression fairly early
thanks to our friend Tom. Tom was a Clinical Psych student who had gotten
heavily into LSD. Unfortunately, he had taken a little too much for a little
too long, and had, basically, fried his brain. He hadn't come from the most
stable of backgrounds, and this LSD binge had really finished him off. It was
quite sobering to all of us.
I remember,
vividly, his last visit. He was out of the hospital, but not really himself by
any stretch of the imagination. When we said goodbye I told him to take care of
himself. He gave me a really pathetic look, and, barely restraining his tears,
whispered that he was doing the best he could. He didn't sound or look very
hopeful.
Thanks to
Tom, drugs had rapidly lost their appeal.
Aztec Sacrifice
As the end was drawing
near at
I think the 60's kind of
wore everybody down, so not much of an explanation is really needed about
that part of it. As far as my chosen profession was concerned, however, it was
looking more bizarre and chaotic all the time. Personally, I had reached the
end of my rope with encountering, psychedelicizing,
fantasizing, risk-taking and journeying to inner
space. And, having all of these "real" relationships was getting a
little too real for me. Yes, it had all been really interesting and exciting, and it was a great
learning experience, but enough already. I had seen the show, and now I just
wanted to stay home for a while.
It was a frightening thought, but, I was
coming to the realization that I had, apparently, dedicated the last
nine years of my life to becoming a quack. I had absorbed a body of knowledge
that had very few facts, and too much diverse opinion. It was hard for me to
keep buying the excuse that we were a young science, so we didn't have all the
answers yet. If I could have seen even a few answers, I think it might have
been reassuring, but, as far as I could tell, we were being sent-out to save
the world with Play-Do and magic markers. And, on top of this foundation of
insecurity, I found the work itself to be extremely draining and agitating, and
highly questionable for everyone concerned.
In spite of all this, I
still had a warm spot in my heart for it. I guess it just kind of gets into
your blood, kind of like leukemia. And, to be sure, it was not without its
rewards. The work with my clients and supervisees was incredibly engrossing,
and infinitely challenging to all aspects of your being. It was, after-all, a
wonderful thing to be able to invest yourself in another human being, and,
actually, managed to help them with their lives. If and when it worked, it
seemed like a great use of our time.
We, basically, had all
the makings for a great conflict. I was, in a profession that I barely
believed-in, and, even after all these years of study and practice I wasn't
even really sure what it was that we, actually, did. But, whatever it was, I
was well-trained in it, and apparently I did it well, even if I didn't feel
like it. Oddly enough, from what I could tell, it was also the only thing that
I was qualified to do. When it got right down to it, I knew how to play with my
pipe, nod my head, and ask a lot of questions that normal people would be too
embarrassed to ask.
Almost
every position I could think of seemed unappealing, and that, probably, wasn't
the greatest attitude to have when you were starting-off on your professional
life. But, given that, I felt that my best bet would be to try to stay in a college
counseling center. If nothing else, I liked working with college students, and
there would also be plenty of variety with opportunities for teaching and
supervision. And, last, but not least, there would also be plenty of time-off,
and it looked like I'd be needing it.
I applied to the
It was still winter, and
I had to fly-up through
As bad as the weather
was, the interviews were even worse. They put me through two straight days of
stress interviews. I was probed and queried by everyone who had ever had even
the slightest connection with the counseling center. There were groups and
groups of them, one right after the other. All in all, it was mega-unpleasant.
I had been getting pretty
sick and tired of having to act like a trained seal even before I had shown-up
at
So, it was two down and
one to go. I still had my last application in with
The town seemed even more
depressing than usual. Compounded with the usual bad vibes, was the intense
anxiety over the job market. Everyone was trying to look cool, bright, and
positive, but, under the surface, there was a thick layer of anxiety and
depression that you could cut with a knife. Just like in poker, a lot of the
players were bluffing.
There were so many
applicants, and so few counseling center jobs, that it looked pretty
discouraging. Taking an unconfident look at the interview schedule for
Much to my surprise, Earl
reassured me that he did remember my application after all. He also remembered
the nice things that Paul King had written about me in his letter of
recommendation. This was all so unexpected and heart-warming that it made my
day. Even though it was hard to believe, maybe I wasn't just another resume
after all. And, to top it off, Earl invited me up for an interview that very
afternoon.
Over lunch I managed to
raise my anxiety level and lower my expectations. Although Earl had lifted my
spirits, how could I really expect anything much to come out of this? I had no
inside tracks, and it was a very competitive job market. I knew no one who was
connected in any way, shape, or form to
Arriving at their suite,
I was immediately stunned. As ridiculous as it may sound, I had never seen such
tan psychologists before. Some of them had been out playing tennis and they
were still in their shorts. It was throwing me for a real loop. The
psychologists that I was used to always had that pastey-white
and creased-tweed look, so who were these guys?
As I
was trying to get my bearings, I noticed that one particularly intense-looking fellow with gray hair
was starting to stare me down. It was Jack Graham, the resident Gestalt
therapist. He was tan, but he
wasn't smiling, and he was beginning to make me nervous. After
some introductions, we started the interview, and, just my luck, Jack
volunteered to ask the first question. I guess he thought he might as well
start-off with something simple. He looked me straight in the eye and asked me,
"What do you think of nude group therapy?"
It was such a startling
question that it sent me into a state of shock. I couldn't believe they were,
actually, conducting nude groups on campus. Then again, it was
Since I had already been
humbled, I decided I might as well play the rest of the interview straight. In
an unusually candid way, I shared some of my doubts about my own interests and
abilities, and told them that I didn't know if I would really enjoy doing
counseling, or if I even believed in it anymore. Even if it was a job
interview, it was still the era of genuineness and authenticity. In those days,
it wasn't necessarily fool-hearty to speak the truth.
Despite the shaky start, I still felt pretty good about the interview.
If nothing else, they, certainly, had a pretty good idea of who I was and what
I was about, the rest would have to be up to them. When I later got offered the
job I felt particularly good about it. I liked the fact that they knew what
they were getting and they still wanted it anyway. It took a lot of the
pressure off, and helped me feel a lot less like an impostor.
All in all,
Above all, It was important for me to be comfortable with the people
I'd be working with, and this was, certainly, the case at
I think an important
factor in my hiring was that they were looking for someone who was young, and
capable of relating to the college students of the day. In that respect, at
least, I was tough to beat. I was only twenty six, had glazed eyes, and plenty
of hair. What more could they want?
I
remember my arrival on campus in the Fall of '69. I
was processed by the Personnel Department, and assigned an office by Don
Harder, my Dean. He told me to make myself comfortable and give some thought as
to how I wanted to use my time. It was all so overwhelmingly flexible. We could
use our time in just about any way imaginable as long as it benefited our students
in some way. These guidelines, however vague, fit in well with the prevailing
philosophy of the times - Do your own thing as long as it doesn't hurt anyone.
But, all this freedom was, actually, a little hard to enjoy. It was all so
loose and unstructured that I found it almost paralyzing. Looking back at it, I
think I could have, probably, used a little more direction.
But, I was set. I had my
own little office in the
No sooner had I settled
into my new office, when, out of the blue, I received a sudden dose of reality
that made my life even more confusing. The first anti-war protests were
starting to break-out on campus, and, apparently, just having an office in the
All this freedom that I
had been given in defining my own job, was starting to
flush-out some of the conflicts that I, myself, had brought into the situation.
As might be expected, I didn't know very much about the
These days, it might
sound like a bit of a luxury to be entertaining questions about personal
meaningfulness, after all, it was just a job. They were paying you, and giving
you medical and retirement benefits, so, certainly, they didn't owe you
personal meaningfulness on top of all of that.
But, in those days, it was an important consideration. We wanted
everything to be as meaningful as possible, especially our relationships and
our jobs. That's why a lot of disenchanted people were dropping-out, in search
of alternative life-styles, that would be more personally fulfilling, and
better suited to themselves as individuals.
As for me, the question
of meaningfulness, somehow, seemed crucial in all of this. Partially, this was
because it was very important for me to do well in my new job, and, I figured
that the more meaningful my work was to me, the better my chances would be of,
actually, doing it well. But, beyond all this, a more basic reason was that I
was afraid I had completely lost the ability to fake-it anymore.
After all those years of
doing tricks in grad school, the trained seal was ready to slug somebody. Throw
one more ball at me to spin on my nose, and I really couldn't guarantee what
might happen next. I was losing my patience, and it was going to take a lot
more than raw fish to mellow me out. Of course, you usually don't value this
kind of an attitude in a new employee, so it seemed wise to avoid situations in
which it might come out.
Given all of this, I
figured the best bet would be to stick
with some of the basics - counseling, group work, and a little supervision,
but, since I was the new kid on the staff, I also figured that I should try something
a little more innovative, so I started a Psychomat.
The Psychomat
was a special room where people could come and be "real". Someone had
tried it up in San Francisco, so that was more than enough reason for us to try
one at
The whole thing was
really in the true spirit of experimentation, but I was personally glad when
the experiment was finally over. For the most part, it gave people something
new to talk about, but that was about it. Otherwise, the whole thing was,
basically, quite bizarre and exhausting. Trying to facilitate a number of
different encounters simultaneously was a ridiculous idea, and it really took
its toll on me. All in all, it was, probably, a nice bit of risk-taking, but a
lousy idea.
The Psychomat
did, however, seem like a good metaphor for our new lives in
The new relationships
that we were now establishing just didn't seem to compare to what we had
given-up. On the other hand, it wasn't only people and places that we had left
behind. Like many others of our generation, we had left behind the idealism and
bonding of the 60's as well. Somehow, it had all been knocked off-center by a
crashing intrusion of adult reality. Whether we liked it or
not, the 70's were now fully upon us.
In a sense, these painful
separations were almost like a series of mini-deaths, and the losses were
really starting to pile up. We never seemed to be recovering from them either.
Each one seemed to knock us down a little further, and there was less and less
resilience with which to bounce back. For us, nothing seemed to be replacing
our comfortable adventures with Art and Helen and their close circle of
friends.
Then again, maybe this
was just adulthood. Maybe you really did have to give-up a lot more than we had
thought in order to become responsible adults in this society. But, if the
essence of adulthood involved more and more sacrifices in the quality of our
lives, it was a very frightening prospect indeed.
And, beyond all of this,
beyond any considerations that may have been related to the process of aging, I
think we may also have been paying a hefty price for going through too many
major life transitions in too short a period of time. We had left
Settling In
We started out in a
rented house in
Amid all the changes and
transitions that we had been going through, it was, really, the birth of our
first child that, far and away, had the greatest impact on us. And, the effect
seemed to run a lot deeper than just making it difficult for us to go out to
the movies. For me, personally, Samantha's birth had a profound effect, and it
was really the thing that sent me into a prolonged period of silence and contemplation.
I knew perfectly well
that people had babies all the time, but somehow, my daughter's birth forced me
to come to grips with life itself. It started, I guess, with trying to
understand just what a baby, actually, was, but it escalated tremendously from
there.
Seemingly, she had come
out of nowhere, and landed in, of all places, Cardiff-By-The-Sea, and, for some
unexplained reason, she now found herself living in the house of a terribly
perplexed psychologist and his remarkably normal wife. Obviously it could be a
real crapshoot out there.
What exactly was this new
living creature who was suddenly in our midst? She, clearly, had her own
personality, and, in no time flat, had single-handedly transformed us from a
couple into a family.
The calm and isolation of the beach at
In trying to understand
what a baby, actually is, you are almost forced to get in touch with the bigger
picture of things. Somehow, it seemed, a baby needed to be understood within a
larger context, and, as I tried to come to grips with all of this I just
couldn't seem to figure anything out. Everything just seemed so overwhelmingly
incomprehensible to me.
Another of the big adjustments that we were now facing had to do with
living in suburbia. Even though we were, technically, living in a small beach
town, it, actually, felt a lot more like a suburb. We were geographically
isolated from the rest of the faculty, so there wasn't that much contact with
people from work, and we were finding little in the way of a sense of community
up in
Maybe it was suburbia or
maybe it was just being in
On the other hand, we
didn't accept it all that gracefully. We questioned it, as a matter of fact,
from the very beginning, and even during that very first year we seriously
considered dropping-out entirely. We even went to look at some land up in
Looking out over the
rocky hillside, I tried to picture myself tending the flocks, raising
vegetables, and being peaceable. I tried and I tried, but I just couldn't
picture living out there. I kept wondering what I would possibly do with myself
out there in the middle of nowhere. Sheep ranching seemed to be a bit on the
slow side too. We didn't want life in the fast lane, but this didn't even seem
like a lane. Maybe it would look more appealing in a few years, maybe when we
were about eighty or so.
And, even if it was more
of a mellow script, it still seemed a little too purposeless and empty. It,
actually, seemed more silly than idealistic. Maybe psychology wouldn't prove to
be my thing, but I was pretty sure it wasn't going to be sheep ranching either.
As appealing as a return to simplicity, and this promised sense of community
may have been to us, it was just too big a leap for us to make. But, even if it
had been a much smaller one, it just wasn't the right move for us to make.
For some reason, finding
a sense of community has always been difficult for us, and, in many ways that
holds true to this very day. Even during the height of the '60's we never
really managed to fit-in very well with any particular group or subculture. In
those days, we felt like we were too freaky for most people and not freaky
enough for others. As the years passed by, it evolved into more of a general
sense of alienation. We just had trouble fitting-in.
Our involvement with the
And then, there was
always the common bond of athletics. That always seemed to help a bit when it
came to a sense of belonging. I was still playing a little basketball in those
days, and I became friendly with a guy named Johnny Martinez over at the
schoolyard. We played a lot of ball together, and, eventually I wound-up
playing with his industrial league team at the Del Mar Fairgrounds.
Our sponsor was St. Leo's
Church, and I always felt a little funny putting on that jersey. The team was
predominantly made-up of Mexican blue-collar guys, but we also had a deaf mute,
a professional football player, and myself (whatever I was), to round-out the
squad. The wives and girlfriends would all be there cheering for us in the
stands, and it was nice to be re-acquainted with the fact that basketball was
still a game that could be played for fun.
Being part of the team
gave me something of a feeling of camaraderie, and it helped us feel a little
more at home, and a little more rooted in our new community. Other than this
minor sports connection and our involvement with Sandy Hill, there really
didn't seem to be anything else that was helping us feel less alienated. As far
as the basketball interest was concerned, it was much too limited. It was
putting me in touch with a pretty nice group of guys, but once we were away from
the court, there really wasn't all that much to talk about. Beyond basketball I
really didn't feel like I had that much in common with them. None of them
seemed to be planning a trip to Esalen, and I wasn't
quite ready for Miller Time.
Actually, the seeker-types
were around too, and they were even playing a little basketball, but they were
playing a little further to the south, down in
They
were a pretty nice group of guys, and they were, certainly, an interesting
group to play with. Just the thought of ten therapists playing a full court
game, could, probably, conjure-up some pretty interesting images. To their
credit, they were trying to balance-out their emotionally and intellectually
draining lives back at the office. The games were friendly, and played strictly
for fun, but, whenever the ball went through the basket it ran the risk of
landing on a self-actualizer.
Being surrounded by so
many of these
One of the things that
continued to strike me was just how great an influence they all seemed to have
on other people. These were the leaders of the human potential movement, the
people who were blazing the trail for the rest of us. They were out there therapizing your son, actualizing your wife, and flooding
your bookstore with self-help books. They were, in a sense, instructing us
about what good relationships were supposed to be like, and how we should be
living our lives. Even if they didn't like too many "shoulds”
and “oughts", that in itself was a significant
value that they were imparting to others.
Yet, at best, and
sometimes not even very often, they were just regular, semi-normal guys, whose
lives and relationships weren't always that high or exemplary. And, not only
that, but they were also borrowing heavily from one another, and using each
other's lives as material for their own work. From what I could tell, this
seemed to be creating some kind of an incestuous in-breeding of humanistic
ideas, and the rest of us would be out there waiting to hear from them.
As crazy as it sounds,
just living-in or writing-from places like
But, I guess, like any
other movement, the growth movement needed to have it's
own Meccas, and, not surprisingly, a lot of them
seemed to be located right here in
As far
as growth centers were concerned, the big one, the granddaddy of them all, was,
of course, up north at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, but down south we had our own hotspots, particularly
around
Of course, some of you
might be asking yourselves about what they were actually doing in places like
that, but that would be a subject for another book and, probably, another
author. For now, let's just say that people would go to these places for
workshops or retreats, and would be able to experience just about everything
that was coming down the pike in terms of new approaches to human growth. And,
of course, they would be surrounded by others who were doing the very same
thing, so , in a sense, the fun just never seemed to
stop. Even if you were disappointed with your own particular workshop, there
was always the chance that you'd get lucky and come home with a new lover.
Back
in the early days of the growth movement you might have chosen a workshop on
sensory awareness, where you would expand your ability to appreciate things
through your senses. One popular exercise of the day involved learning to
develop a deeply attentive relationship with an orange. Actually, I might be
exaggerating a bit, but not as much as you might think. In the exercise, group
participants would each be given an orange and would be asked to get to know
everything about it. After about fifteen minutes, all the oranges would then be
put back into a basket and you then had to try to pick-out your orange from the
rest of the bunch. The whole thing may sound a bit frivolous, but some of the
emotional reunions were really quite touching.
Other standard fare might
include exercises like a trustwalk, where you would
be blindfolded and led around by a caring partner, or you might be asked to
close your eyes and fall backwards into the waiting arms of your group members.
That one was always one of my personal favorites!
So, just like on
"Little House on the Prairie", we were surrounded by pioneers.
They were living all around us, particularly up in the hills around
Admittedly, it was,
sometimes, hard not to be envious. I wouldn't have minded a small following of
my own, maybe even a few therapeutic groupies who would want to get to know me
deeply, and who would be waiting anxiously to receive my latest profound
insights about life. On the whole, however, it was hard to envy them too much.
In truth, I found many of these experts to be somewhat disappointing. Many of them,
in fact, seemed a little too unique, and, frequently, they were a little too
self-centered and pretentious. Some of this, of course, might have been due to
our proximity to
In trying to size-up some
of these characters in terms of their personal and professional credibility,
certain questions seemed like natural ones for me to ask. First and foremost,
was the question of "personal fit". How well
did their theories actually work for them, personally? How healthy were the
doctors? How sane were the psychologists? And how healing did it actually feel
to be around the healers?
And, for me, the general
answer seemed to be - not very. For the most part, these were people who always
seemed to be struggling with chronic dissatisfaction. Many of their
relationships were fleeting, or just plain screwy, and, even when things were,
allegedly, going well, they always seemed to be working-something-out, or
working-something-through. And, their kids often seemed miserable and lost,
even if they hadn't been allowed to play with war toys.
These were the
self-appointed high priests of the growth movement. They made big bucks, and
were often charming and articulate, but they were starting to make me really
nervous. All in all, they seemed like good people for me to avoid. Withdrawal
seemed preferable to the damage that some of them could, obviously, dish-out.
And, last but not least,
they just didn't seem to have all that many answers. I might have been pretty
lost myself, but at least I was starting to like some of my own questions.
Meanwhile, back at the
office, I was trying to develop my own counseling style, and the dizzying
variety of therapeutic approaches wasn't helping my mood any. In those days, a theory that had been
developed in someone's garage last weekend, might be
as well-thought-of as something that had been around for a few thousand years.
Sometimes I would
mentally scan the other offices in our building, trying to picture what was,
actually, going on in each session, and, it was pretty obvious to me that no
two people were using the same approach with their clients. Variety may be the spice of life, but this
was ridiculous. Everything couldn't possibly work, but what didn't? These
approaches all seemed to have a certain amount of credibility, so there wasn't
much that you could dismiss easily.
One person was
Non-Directive, another Gestalt, another Existential, and another was doing
primal screams, which, I might add were a little disconcerting to hear. It was
all getting a little too nuts. There was just no way that we could all be
right. Maybe my clients needed to scream more or theirs needed to scream less,
but something was off someplace.
Some of
my colleagues were also starting to get to me. As I watched them go through
their own processes of personal growth, I found myself getting a bit irritated at them. One
of my colleagues, the one who was doing the primal screams, had a personal
break-through into obnoxiousness that I thought would do me in completely. At
some point, she, somehow, became overwhelmed with the discovery that "her
time was valuable", and, for some unexplained reason, she just couldn't
seem to get over it.
I knew it was the era of
"healthy selfishness", but I just couldn't stand hearing about it all
the time. Let me get this straight, your time is valuable? No kidding? So,
great, maybe she had even stumbled upon a universal truth of some kind,
terrific, but couldn't she have kept it a little bit more to herself! Mercifully, she overdosed on growth,
dropped-out, and became a cook in a spiritual commune up in
Another colleague who
wasn't going to help me feel any more stable or secure was my friend Dick. I
used to commute into work with him from
Trying to find myself,
either personally or professionally, in this type of an environment was turning
into an immense challenge. Things were not only constantly changing, but they
also weren't even what they had appeared to be in the first place. The whole
thing left my head spinning.
Even relationships that
you'd expect to be relatively normal didn't seem to be working-out all that
well either. A tidal wave of divorce rolled through the staff in the early 70's
and knocked everyone for a loop. We knew it was
Wherever you looked, it
seemed like everyone was feeling trapped in the wrong lifestyle, the wrong
body, or the wrong relationship, and there was an underlying sense of intense
desperation in all of this. People were reaching-out for something, for
something that they didn't have, and they wanted it desperately.
And people would trust
their own intuition and feelings to guide them through these major life
transitions. They would try to stay in touch with their needs, try to be true
to themselves, and hope for the best. And, frequently they turned to us, the
psychologists and counselors, for help in all of this. We were the experts,
but, unfortunately, our profession was in such a state of flux that it almost
matched the turmoil that these people were experiencing in their own lives. It
gave us a lot of empathy with them, and they felt comfortable talking to us
about these things, but we really didn't seem to have that much to offer. We
had a gigantic arsenal of techniques and a lot of confusion. Basically, we were
armed and dangerous.
Part of our problem, of
course, had to do with boundaries and limits - or the lack of them. After years
of stretching them, overcoming them, or just plain ignoring them, there wasn't
much left for us to hang-onto. Situations became extremely difficult to
evaluate, and it was hard to tell where to draw the line on just about
anything.
As we negotiated these
frequently treacherous waters, we were forced to come back to a pitifully small
group of guiding principles to help get us through. We were supposed to try to
get-in-touch with ourselves, stay as aware as possible, trust our feelings and
our intuition, and try to be true to ourselves. Last, but not least, we were to
remind ourselves of the fact that everything was pretty much O.K. as long as it
didn't hurt anyone.
These, it seemed, were
the basic assumptions and touchstones that people were using to help guide them
through some of the major choice-points in their lives, and, we as therapists
were drawing from the very same ones. There were, however, a few problems. Not
only was the list kind of short, but it also wasn't even particularly useful.
When it came right down to actually trying to implement some of these
principles, it could get incredibly vague, elusive, and relative. It was a heck
of a way to run an airline, and, personally, when it got right down to it,
there just didn't seem to be any rules or limits to really hang onto.
Actually, I take that
back. At one point, we, in fact, did run into a limit, and a definite limit at
that. It happened back in the days of Masters and Johnson. It was right after
the staff had been given some training in learning how to treat sexual
dysfunction. Some of the approaches that Masters and Johnson had developed made
a lot of sense, but we really weren't all that sure about which of them would
fit-in well with the type of work that we were doing at a state-sponsored
college counseling center. One approach, in particular, involved the use of
sexual surrogates to help clients overcome their sexual difficulties.
Since we always tried to
be at the cutting-edge of our profession, we thought it might be a good idea to
try to establish our own pool of sexual surrogates who would be available to
help our own
So, over the course of a
few long lunch hours, a group of us made the rounds at some of the local
massage parlors down on
Don Neuman, who had the greatest expertise in treating sexual
problems, was chosen to do the talking for our group. Unfortunately however,
Don tended to stammer a bit when he was under stress, and his halting style of
speech tended to make the girls even more suspicious than they already were.
And they, of course, were already pretty suspicious to begin with, and not
particularly eager to incriminate themselves in front of unknown authorities.
After all, the sign out front had only mentioned massage. Nothing had been said
about sex, and that would have been pretty illegal anyway, whether it had been
said or not. Understandably enough, the girls kept asking him what he was
really trying to say, and what it was, exactly, that he wanted from them. The whole
thing was, basically, a comedy of errors and paranoia. It was nuts.
When Don Harder, our normally accepting dean,
heard about what we had been up to, he, basically, freaked-out. In a bit of a
departure from his usually non-judgmental style, he told us in no uncertain
terms to drop it immediately, forget about it completely, and not to mention it
again to anyone.
So, there it was, we had
finally managed to hit a clearly-defined limit. For me, personally, it was
actually a tremendous relief, to know that something actually wasn't O.K. After floundering in the gray
seas of humanistic relativity, this was really quite a refreshing change. It
was good to know that everything didn't go after all.
The
relief, however, was only to be temporary. It was much too little and much too
late, and, most importantly, it wasn't nearly deep enough. And, to top it off,
the limit that Don Harder had supplied for us really had a lot more to do with
politics than with truth. The decision
had, basically, been made for political reasons, out of an understandable
concern with our public image, and the subsequent effects it would have on our
funding. As far as the question of sexual surrogates was concerned, it was
still very much up in the air. But, whether they were O.K. or
not, it really didn't matter. What was clear, however, was that the
political climate wasn't right for it, and that was the primary basis for
making the decision.
So there I was, still trying to figure-out my
profession, and the things that seemed to be defining it were politics,
popularity, and fads. Here we were, working with human lives, and our work was
being defined for us by what people were asking for, and how it would look.
And, to make matters worse, these things seemed to be changing all the time. We
were more like a restaurant than a science.
There was nothing in our
profession that seemed sacred or unchangeable. One minute something was in, and
the next minute something would be out. One minute something would be
considered pathological, and the next minute it would be considered simply
someone's choice of lifestyle. Everything seemed to be up for grabs, and the
whole thing was looking more and more like a three ring circus.
Sometimes it would all
get to me, and I'd risk telling someone just how unsure of myself I was really
beginning to feel. I'd tell them that I felt like I didn't really know what I
was doing, but it was hard for them to really hear me. Usually, they'd try to
be reassuring. No matter what I thought, apparently they thought well-enough of
me and my work, and they trusted that my intuition would, eventually, pull me
through.
Understandably enough,
they probably thought that I was just sharing a few doubts, or being a little too self-critical.
Ironically enough, even the doubts that I was sharing with them probably seemed
like signs of intelligence and sophistication on my part. Not only was I seen
as modest about my abilities, but now I was even viewed as sharp enough to
raise some very interesting questions. Since I was doing all of this with a
Over time, their lack of
empathy became very frustrating to me. Apparently, no matter what I said or
what I did, they just couldn't seem to appreciate just how ignorant and lost I
was truly feeling. And, it was a tough feeling to be carrying around with you
through life. Whether you were a therapist or just someone slinging hash down
at the Minute Inn, it could be a real burden.
As the years passed by, I
moved my way along through the system. Despite my massive doubts and
uncertainties, I was valued, promoted, and tenured. I was as good as the next
guy, or, possibly, just as bad. I was just doing my thing, and that seemed to
be fine with my fellow healers. There was no system of counseling or therapy
that I was applying in any semi-coherent way. I relied mostly on my intuition,
and spent most of my time flying by the seat of my pants. It was a tough way to
fly, and it would have been nice to have a pilot.
Although I didn't think
it was possible, I became even more withdrawn professionally. I now avoided
conferences, workshops, and presentations whenever possible, and the only
people I even thought about trusting were my clients. Given the state of my
fellow professionals, I wasn't going to take anyone else's word for anything.
My uncertainties kept
gnawing away at me. They continued to be too hard to explain or too hard to
understand. And, they were getting to me more and more with each passing year.
No Stories To Tell
So, the years are ticking
away, and I'm still walking on the beach and pondering the universe. I'm
carrying a new kid around in my backpack, but still carrying around the same
old jumbled thoughts in my head.
My kids were starting to
get a little older now, and, as they did, I found myself becoming increasingly
aware of other fathers. Whenever I would see a father with his child, it always
seemed to get my attention, and, for some strange reason, I found myself taking
particular notice whenever I would see them telling their kid a story.
Sometimes the stories involved important lessons about life, but, at other
times, they were just stories about the good old days, and the people and
places that had been left behind. And, sometimes, when I would be listening-in
on one of their stories I found myself getting envious.
I was struck by their
enthusiasm about what they were saying. There was a confidence there, a sense
of positiveness about life, that
I just didn't see in myself. As for me, I was only too happy to read books
about
As time went on, I found
myself thinking more and more about this. At first there were just a few
nagging thoughts, but, later there were a lot more of them. At first the
thoughts were confusing and quite perplexing, but, after a while, they got a
lot clearer. What it was coming down to was the growing realization that there
really were no stories that I wanted to tell my children about life. Other
fathers may have had lots of them, but, as for me, I had no stories to tell.
And there was something
about having no stories to tell that was making me feel pretty awful inside. I
wasn't exactly sure what it was, but it was strong enough to make me want to
balance it off with some of the positive things that I did have to offer them
as a father. At least I loved my kids, and was basically dependable. I didn't
traumatize anyone. I wasn't like the guy who had left his kids playing out in
the street while he sat at the bar near Van Cortlandt
Park. And some fathers, even some in my very own profession, didn't always have
such great stories to tell either. Sometimes their kids would get to hear the
story about why Mommie and Daddy wouldn't be living
together anymore, and why Daddy was going to be moving-in with that younger
woman he had met at that retreat up at
Obviously, I had some
good qualities as a father, so why was I worrying about something as silly as
having no stories to tell? Why wasn't I worrying a little more about their
academic future or about how much financial security they would, actually,
have? Surely, as a state employee, these would have been much more realistic
things for me to be worrying
about.
But, after a lot of
soul-searching, and many walks on the beach, it became painfully clear to me
why I would actually worry about something as ridiculous-sounding as stories.
The answer was that stories were, essentially, about life, and, deep down
inside, I was feeling so absolutely terrible about life itself, that there was
virtually nothing I wanted to tell my kids about it.
I wanted to be able to
tell them something nice and simple like, "Welcome to Planet Earth, have a
nice life, here's what you're supposed to be doing while you are here." I
wanted to be able to tell them something positive, and, as a father, I wanted
to be able to offer them some guidance. But I was lost myself. I didn't know
where we had, actually, come from, what we were supposed to be doing here, or
where, if anyplace, we would be going next. Or why.
For the most part, all I
was able to see was chaos, pain, and ineptitude. To make it even more
confusing, there also seemed to be a lot of beautiful things mixed in with it
as well. I had some good friends, and there were people and places that I had
grown to love, but it was all bitter-sweet at best. And, to make matters worse,
I was becoming acutely aware of just how bad I was feeling about bringing
children into a world like this.
I felt particularly bad
about bringing them into a world that didn't make any sense. And it was
bothering me all the more because I loved them. I didn't want them to be
subjected to all of the pain and bad endings that the world had to offer. On
the other hand, I did love them, and it was hard to think about sending them
back to the factory. Wherever that factory was, it was another one of those
things that I couldn't really comprehend.
Little hope or guidance
seemed to be coming from the Existentialists. Although these were the folks
that we heavy thinkers were supposed to be turning-to when considering the
larger issues of life and death, I found them to be even more depressing than I
was. They asked a lot of good questions, and they were, certainly, quite
articulate, but they didn't really seem to be all that wise. They were also a
little light in the answer department. It was probably fortunate that they didn't
devote themselves to writing books for children.
When they talked about
the need to give
meaning to one's life, it seemed to imply the setting-up of some
sort of "working illusion" for yourself. Deep down inside you would
know that it was probably false, but you would try to act as though it were
true. But, even if I was confused and depressed, it seemed to me that when you
got right down to it, life was either meaningful or it wasn't. Somehow, it
seemed, you shouldn't have to manufacture your own meaning. On the positive
side, at least the Existentialists seemed to be struggling with some of the
larger questions about life.
Apparently, my daughter
also knew how to ask a few good questions herself. One of the high points in my
growing existential despair occurred when she asked me, out of the blue one
day, about what happens when a person dies. She was only about five at the
time, and was certainly asking a very legitimate question, but, unfortunately,
it was one that I was totally unprepared for.
I remember getting really
anxious about it when she asked me, mainly because I really had no idea about
what to say. I don't even remember what I might have told her, but the
important thing in all of this for me was that she had, apparently, hit an
existential nerve. Thanks to my daughter I became a lot clearer about what I
was really worrying about, and it included life and death, and everything in
between.
It's Good To Have Plans
In case I wasn't confused
enough, I started to teach a three unit class in Life & Career Exploration.
This fits in nicely with every bad joke that has ever been made about a
teacher.
I teamed-up with Buzz
Webb, one of our career specialists, who had taught the class before. If
nothing else, it was certainly a topic that I was interested in. I was
intrigued with the possibility of teaching a class on life itself, and, somehow
it seemed particularly relevant to college students. Actually, I was more than
intrigued. When I first heard that the course was being offered, I was, actually,
quite stunned. I couldn't believe that any of my associates were really
qualified to teach such a thing.
But, much to my
amazement, Buzz and some of the others really did seem to know what they were
doing. I was impressed with their confidence. Maybe they were just like all the
people back on
As it turned out, we really
didn't actually teach people about life itself in these classes, even if some
of that might have been implied in the course title. The class itself,
actually, involved more in the way of personal explorations into some of the
key dimensions of life. We spent quite a bit of time exploring our students’
personalities, their interests, their goals, their fantasies, and their
self-concepts. Most of the participants found it to be pretty interesting, and
they particularly enjoyed the opportunities for sharing and feedback from their
fellow students. Frequently they even developed a greater appreciation for
themselves and others.
Guiding us through all
this was one of our favorite basic assumptions at the time,
that the more you knew about yourself, the better-off you would,
ultimately, be. This increased self-awareness, it was thought, would,
hopefully, translate into making a better life in everything from careers to
relationships.
Towards this end, we were
able to draw from a seemingly endless collection of exercises and techniques
that had been growing-up around us. All of them had been designed to facilitate
self-exploration and self-awareness, and, if nothing else, the field had become
very well-stocked. Unfortunately, however, it was all kind of a hodgepodge.
Taken together, the exercises didn't even have the coherence of a patchwork
quilt. There was nothing particularly well-organized, systematic, or
well-integrated about them, and one exercise didn't necessarily have all that
much to do with the next. If they ever had been sewn together, there would,
certainly, have been more than enough squares to make a quilt. But, in fact,
they hadn't been sewn-together. They were just kind of randomly-scattered over
your body, and they might just miss a few places. Ultimately, your warmth and
comfort might be very much up for grabs.
Then again, maybe we professionals,
weren't necessarily looking for all that much coherence. Maybe we were just
happy to be armed with a few more techniques. We hadn't had all that much to
hang onto for a while, so all that new technology was not without its appeal.
And, for our purposes, some of our new toys seemed to be working very well
indeed. They could be quite engaging, they stimulated a lot of discussion, and
they kept everyone busy. In our Life and Career classes we borrowed freely from
them, and added a few of our own.
A typical exercise might
involve having them construct a "Who Am I" list. The students would
be asked to answer the question, "Who Am I?",
ten times, and list their responses on a sheet of paper. Their lists might
include things like a "human being", a "student", a
"woman", and the like. Then, they might be asked to rank-order them,
and decide which ones would really be most essential to their own sense of
identity. Which ones could they take-away and still feel like they were still
themselves? Sometimes we would put them into a mild hypnotic state, and have
them do another list of ten. Their lists would usually be shorter, softer, and
a lot more cosmic, like "I am".
There were a lot of other
cosmic parlor games as well. Sometimes we'd put them into a mildly altered
state and have them imagine themselves oozing into and exchanging bodies with a
partner in the class. They would then get a chance to spend some time as the
other person, and be able to compare life as themselves with life as their
partner. Almost like psychological disc-jockeys, we'd try to put together an
enjoyable and well-paced show. We might follow an "oldie but goodie"
like going over an interest test, with something new on the charts like losing
your identity by merging with a plant.
One of the things that I
really liked about having all these exercises was how they would help structure
the class time for my students. I was able to keep them busy, involved, and
distracted, and still be able to keep the heat off me, personally. One of the
most threatening things I could have imagined would be in having to teach this
particular class as a lecture course. As a matter of fact, I could probably
have finished my entire lecture series on life in about five minutes, and I'm
not sure what I would have done with the rest of the semester.
Over the span of a few
years I developed quite a collection of techniques. I must have had about five
billion hours worth of self-exploration exercises at my disposal. I had enough
to keep these people exploring themselves from here until forever, but, even
though I was well-armed with techniques, I still found myself getting
increasingly anxious.
With each passing
semester, I felt more and more like an impostor, with less and less to say all
the time. Who was I do be offering a course on life? Personally, I really
didn't know very much about it. Oddly enough, I didn't really feel like the
university itself had any business offering a course on life either. Something
was telling me that the subject matter was a little beyond its realm of
expertise.
During the last few
painful semesters, I figured that I should at least try to broaden and elevate
the subject matter a little bit and bring it a little more in line with the
awesomeness and complexity of life. So one of the things I started to do was to
play them some tapes from Ram Das. My class was able
to hear him as he described his transition from a Jewish, acid-head
psychologist at Harvard to a spiritual seeker in
A Strange Way To Earn A Living
The erosion continued
back in the office. My depressed clients were starting to take me down with
them, a little deeper all the time. Black was winning over white, and my few
pathetic answers were no match for the overpowering despair.
At the end of the day,
I'd find myself just kind of limping away from the office, and dragging myself
home. Part of this, I'm sure, was from some of the emotional burn-out that
comes with this type of work. But, most of it, however, seemed to be tied-in
with the painful realization that I had nothing to offer anyone, and, this
brought along with it, an intense sense of futility about counseling and about
life itself.
The strain of impostorhood had combined with the futility of
helplessness. Deep down inside, I kept coming to the realization, that there
was nothing I could really do for them. I could let them talk, I could let them
air it out, and I could try to understand it, but that was about it. We had
been trained to understand that this would be plenty to give a client, but
somehow, it just didn't seem like enough. I felt bad for letting them down,
even if they didn't feel let down.
People, frequently in
pain, were turning to me for help with their lives, but, after all my years of
training and professional experience, I felt like I had nothing of substance to
really offer them. As far as I was concerned, I had only succeeded in mastering
the art of saying "I don't know" in a thousand different,
well-disguised ways. I had become skillful at throwing things back onto the
client, so they could try to come-up with their own answers. It was a thousand
variations on "I don't know, but what do you think?"
This was cute for a
while. At first, it even seemed quite noble-sounding, kind of democratic in an
anti-authoritarian kind of way. But, as the years passed by, it was all just
turning into a bunch of empty games. It was client vs. counselor, competing in
verbal gymnastics, and we were inventing our own events. There was no punchline, just more questions.
And we, as counselors, were supposed to be
"values neutral" in all of this. As we struggled together with all
the emotional complexities of life, your opinion was as valid as mine. It was
your life, so, obviously, you were the one who needed to find your own answers.
We were all unique individuals anyway, so my answers, even if I had any,
wouldn't really fit your situation. I was essentially just a facilitator in
this process of self-discovery. I would help you find your own answers from
that wise place deep within.
Everything was all so
relative and situational. If I even had an opinion, it probably meant that I
was too biased in the first place, or not respectful enough of the other
person's potential for insight, change, and growth. I was supposed to be an
expert, but, somehow, I needed to deny my expertise for the sake of my client.
Luckily there wasn't all that much expertise to deny.
In a lot of ways, it was
like working at
Client
and counselor were just fellow traveling companions on the road of life. So,
even if I happened to be the one with the office, my client's opinion was
thought to be as valid or even more valid than mine.
Of course I got paid for it and they didn't, but that was a mere technicality.
In a sense, it was almost like democracy in action, but not quite. Even if
therapists talk about learning so many valuable lessons from their clients, I
never heard of any of them, actually, paying them for it. What would happen if
the patient actually sent them a bill for the insights they had given
them? Psychotherapy has been referred to
as "the purchase of friendship", but, I was beginning to think of it
more as Rent a Friend,
a most peculiar friend.
Needless to say, it was
all getting pretty jumbled and confusing. Fragmentation and disintegration were
quietly working-away upstairs. My usual ways of looking at things, my basic
rules and assumptions, just didn't seem to be cutting-it any more, in
counseling, and, probably, in life as well. Things just didn't seem to be adding-up, and my concepts were having less and less to do
with each other all the time.
And, along with this
deepening disintegration came an even stronger sense of despair and depression.
Whatever remaining enthusiasm I may have had for new ideas and answers was now
pretty much gone. I just really didn't want to know anything else about
someone's profound new insights. They just didn't mean anything anymore, and
they were starting to sound like complete gibberish.
If I heard someone giving a presentation on
psychology, therapy, or personal growth, they might as well have been talking
Greek. I could appreciate the fact that they were articulate, and still had
that aura of knowingness about them, but it just sounded like a bunch of empty
psychobabble. Someone could have been reciting nonsense syllables, and I would
have gotten just about as much out of it. My professional body of wisdom had
now been completely transformed into mega elephant caca.
It was hard to want to take notes or sign-up for more of the advanced training.
But, despite this
painfully negative attitude, I was still coming to work, and my work was as
meaningful or meaningless as anything else that I could see. And, even if it
was killing me, there was still something compelling about it. Maybe it was
just a rationalization, but it still, actually, seemed like counseling could,
somehow, be helpful to somebody. Even if it was simply just to listen and to be
there for another human being, there was something that seemed good about that.
I'm not sure why, but in
those days I often asked myself if there was someone else that I'd rather see
parking in my spot, using my office, and seeing my clients. And, as lost and as
confused as I was, I really couldn't think of anyone else that I'd rather have
in there. So, as far as the rest of my fellow professionals were concerned, I
didn't trust them any more than I trusted myself. I guess I felt like I was as
good, or as bad, as the next guy.
But it did seem like a
really strange way to make a living. When it came right down to it, was I
really making a living just by dodging questions?
Rear View Mirror
So, I guess, it really
was a strange way to make a living after all, but just knowing that wouldn't be
nearly enough to keep me from going down the tubes. Depressed, perplexed, and
continually astonished, I was getting even more confused than ever. Of course,
the more confused and disoriented I became, the more respect I seemed to be
getting from my peers. For some strange reason, they seemed genuinely pleased
with the job that I was doing, and, sometimes, much to my horror, they even
sought-out my counsel.
Although it was,
somewhat, reassuring to be treated with this kind of professional respect, I
was still painfully frustrated by their apparent lack of understanding. Clearly
they had no idea what it was really like for me to walk around feeling this
way, and, it made for a tremendous sense of alienation and resentment on my
part. The very fact that they were still treating me like everything was O.K. was further evidence
to me that they, simply, hadn't been paying attention.
But, even if my friends
at work weren't tuning-in all that clearly, some of their instincts still
seemed like they were in the right place. If nothing else, they had at least
tried to be accepting, reassuring, and supportive in whatever ways that they could.
At some level, I think I was even a little relieved that they couldn't
empathize with me completely. I think I was afraid that what I had might have been
contagious.
Anyway, as long as I'm
talking about some of these well-intentioned ways that we have of responding to
another person's pain, I should probably mention one in particular that has
always seemed terribly over-used in our profession. For the most part,
counselors and psychologists always seem to be hyper-alert to signs that a
person is being too self-critical or too hard on themselves. Over the years I
have often been impressed by just how sensitive we as a profession seem to be
to this particular theme. I would even venture to say that, for the most part,
it's really our favorite operating assumption, and, in many ways, it has become
so well-ingrained in what we do that it almost blends completely into the
background.
As a matter of fact, I'll
take it a step further, and say that, in a sense, it almost defines our
professional roles for us. Given this particular view of what is usually wrong
with our clients, our job then, basically, becomes that of being nice - much
nicer and much more accepting, in fact, than their parents or other repressive
authority figures in their lives. We invite them in to heal in Mr. Rogers’
Neighborhood, and, even if this wimpy, ultra-accepting, and values-neutral kind
of stance wasn't what your client, actually, needed, it was still hard to want
to risk breaking-out of it.
Working within this kind
of a framework, a large part of our job, it seemed, came down to helping our
clients get off the hook. Since the problem was that their expectations were
too harsh or unrealistic, the obvious solution was to make them more realistic
by lowering them. The
assumption was that you were basically O.K., and you just didn't
realize it, so if you lowered your expectations and learned to accept yourself,
things would go a lot better for you. Of course, there was a certain amount of
truth in all of this, but I think we over-did it a bit, particularly in the
60's and 70's.
For me as a counselor,
there was a tremendous amount of strain in having to play this accepting,
values-neutral kind of role with my clients. It would have been a strain for me
even if it had been working well.
So, anyway, there I was, trying to be a nice,
non-judgmental kind of a guy, and it just didn't seem to be enough. My
depression continued to build with each passing day, and I usually came home
completely wiped-out and feeling like nothing was making very much sense. I
noticed that when I got into my car at the end of the day, I'd even have to
readjust the rearview mirror. Apparently, I was getting so burdened or
beaten-down at work that I was, actually, getting shorter.
At the end of the year
I'd usually be a complete basket case, but, after about a month of summer vacation
I‘d usually start to feel a little better, and might even be able to manage a
smile or two. But, clearly, I was running on empty. There was no hope, no
enthusiasm, and no great ideas to lift me up.
A Pilgrimage to the Land of the Really Mellow
I was in the middle of a
telephone conversation with my friend Kent, a psychologist up in Northern
California, when, almost as if on cue, he started to tell me how much he had
enjoyed a George Leonard workshop that he had recently attended at Esalen. The workshop was on "Energy Awareness",
and he thought that if I only had one workshop to choose, that this would be
the one for me.
I tried to pump him for a
few more details, but he was hesitant about telling me too much about it.
According to
Given the source, it was,
certainly, worth considering. And how long could I continue to postpone my
first trip to Esalen, anyway? After all, it was still
the
After miles of steep
drops and hair pin turns I finally arrived at Esalen.
Almost immediately I felt very intimidated. Everyone seemed so mellow, so real,
so self-actualizing. I was, obviously, in heavy company. And where did they get
those clothes? All that great-looking denim, paisley, and
leather? All those open-collared shirts, all that cotton? Were there
specialty stores for guru garb? Which ones were the leaders? Which ones were
the hottest on the circuit? Which ones had the most groupies willing to share
the here and now for some intensity and enlightenment? And how did they all get
so comfortable with nudity and organic vegetables?
The whole thing was so
overwhelming that I just couldn't seem to relax. I was even too anxious to
check-in at the desk, so I just paced and paced for what seemed to be an
eternity. Quietly and very self-consciously I kept circling the perimeter of
the grounds. Maybe, at some primitive level, I was hoping to change the
territorial feel of it all. I wanted to make it feel much more like my own home
turf, but I didn't really know how to do it. A dog or a coyote would have just
put it's scent in key places around the grounds. But,
as a human, I just couldn't think of how to leave my scent and still be suave
about the whole thing.
On the positive side,
with all that hiking around I was, at least, managing to see a lot of the
grounds. And they were certainly spectacular grounds at that - forests, the
expanse of
As I strolled past the
organic vegetable gardens about two dozen times in a row, I found myself
thinking back to our years in
There were a few other
contradictions as well, and they were reflected in our choice of magazines. We
subscribed to "Ms." and "Playboy"; and "Better Homes
and Gardens" and "The Mother Earth News"; all at the same time.
Looking back at it, our mailman was probably in the best position to spot some
of these early warning signs of potential conflict, but he missed it. He missed
it badly.
But,
enough about my past associations with organic produce. Maybe I
was just getting a little delirious from all that pacing around the grounds.
Sooner or later I'd probably have to check-in at the desk and face the music.
But, in truth, Esalen really did seem like a
wonderful place to be an organic vegetable. To be able to grow from seed to
salad bar without leaving the grounds had to be a peak experience for any
vegetable. And they did really seem to be thriving here. They all seemed so
fully-functioning. I guess they had just about everything they could have
possibly needed - plenty of clean ocean air, plenty of organic compost, and
plenty of fertilizer from all that Gestalt work that was going on around them.
Keep Your Eye On Your Ions
George Leonard was there
to greet us at the door of our meeting room. Of course we had to remove our
shoes upon entering. It's funny, I hadn't realized
that we were so close to
On the way in I couldn't
help noticing a machine that was quietly humming-away near the doorway. I was
told that it was a negative ion generator, and, apparently, it was hard at work
generating negative ions. These ions, I was told, would have a positive effect
on the flow of energy in our room.
Suddenly, I had this
brief, horrifying thought that I had finally found it. This was the missing
piece in my life - a negative ion generator. And it had all been so very
simple. It was just a matter of putting more positive vibes into your
environment in order to have a much happier existence. At this point it all
seemed to be entirely possible.
Looking back at it, this
was probably true, although perhaps at a symbolic level. We do, in fact, seem
to generate a lot of what goes into creating our environments. We make our own
beds and we have to lie in them. But, of course, it would take more than just a
simple technological solution like a negative ion generator to accomplish this.
Wouldn't it?
As the ion generator
quietly did its thing, George gave us an introduction to the workshop. He told
us that we would be doing a weekend of "energy experiments." For some
reason, I had a little trouble picturing just what that was going to be like.
Maybe this was going to be a little too strange for my tastes after all. Maybe
this might not be such a bad time to bolt. Maybe I could still get a refund.
But, even if it was a bit
strange, the atmosphere did seem pretty comfortable. It didn't feel like your
typical group experience. George didn't even have the participants introduce
themselves to one another, and, as a matter of fact, he didn't even tell us
what energy experiments, actually, were, but somehow by continuing to label
them as "experiments", he helped us keep an open mind about the whole
thing.
Apparently, there was no
shortage of energy experiments out there either. I wasn't sure which planet
they had all come from, but, wherever it was, there were, definitely, plenty of
them. We focused on a number of different types of energy, including the energy
flow that was in and around our bodies. We also learned how to sensitize
ourselves to different
types of attitudes and images, and the effects that they could have on these
energy flows.
The
importance of a person's attitude about life, for example, was vividly
illustrated in the experiment with the swinging gate. Basically, it involved
making yourself into something akin to a swinging gate, and trying to sense the
attitude of each person as they passed through you. You would stand there, with
your arm straight out at your side, level with your shoulder, and close your
eyes. When you felt someone hit your arm as they passed through, you would
swing it open like a gate.
The people walking
through were supposed to adopt one of three different attitudes. Their minds
would either be thinking about something in the past, the present, or the
future. Your job, as the gate, would be to try to guess which particular
attitude they had. In doing this you couldn't really depend on your normal
senses, because your eyes were closed, and they were walking very quietly, on a
carpeted floor, in their bare feet. The whole thing really brought home the
point of just how much of an effect a person's attitude can really have on themselves
and the people around them. As might be expected, the "here and now”
attitude felt the best to everyone, even to the swinging gate.
We also spent quite a bit
of time learning how to become more relaxed and centered in our movements. In
doing so, we were able to see first hand just how much unexpected strength one
could achieve by maintaining the right mental image and attitude. In some of
the experiments, like the "unbendable arm", we were able to
experience the paradox of actually having much greater strength by letting go
and being more relaxed and centered than we would have had if we had just
relied on physical strength alone. Probably none of this would be too startling
to individuals who were well-versed in hypnosis, Yoga, or the martial arts,
but, to me, it was a real eye-opener.
And, after all those
years of sitting behind a desk and wallowing around in the intellectual and
emotional aspects of life, I was finding it particularly refreshing to finally
be immersed in something that was a lot more physical and spiritual in nature.
Apparently, this was no accident. George and his wife believed that the next
great revolution in consciousness was going to come about through physical
education. Of course, at the time, it sounded like a pretty absurd thought.
Flashing back on some of my old gym teachers and coaches I couldn't possibly
imagine how they were going to be leading a revolution into higher
consciousness. But, the Leonards proved to be
surprisingly prophetic. In the years that followed, we went through a national
jogging craze, complete with runner's highs; and bookstores became flooded with
works on the Zen of tennis and the inner game of golf. The whole area of Sports
Psychology also seemed to open-up during that time period.
As it turned-out, many of
the energy experiments in our workshop had come from the Japanese martial art
of Aikido, which George had been studying for quite some time. The workshop
itself, had, apparently, focused on more of the magical and cosmic dance-like
qualities of the art as opposed to the self-defense angle.
All in all, I was most
impressed, and, one of the things that was really
striking me about it was that it actually felt good - possibly even healthy. It
was growth and yet, somehow, it was, actually, fun. It gave me a lot to think
about, and I couldn't quite figure-out how I could, be feeling this good just from doing this
particular set of experiments. The whole could, obviously, be greater than the
sum of its parts.
On top of all of this, an
unexpected degree of comfort and camaraderie seemed to be developing amongst
the participants. Remarkably, the level of group cohesiveness seemed a lot
higher than in many of the other groups that I had participated in over the
years. Even in groups which had specifically sought to create an atmosphere of
safety and sharing, there hadn't always been this degree of personal comfort.
Yet now, ignoring many of these interpersonal aspects almost completely, the
comfort and cohesiveness seemed to be developing anyway.
Seeing how comfortable we
all were with each other made me question some of the more hard-hitting,
confrontational techniques that we had been using at work. In this workshop it
seemed as though we were
achieving better results, and in a much more gentle and playful
manner. Maybe any shared activity would
do the trick. Maybe people could just bake bread together or go fishing, and
that would do it. It made me wonder about where recreation and entertainment
ended, and psychological work began.
Interestingly enough,
George also seemed to be using some of the very same psychological concepts
that we had been using in counseling, but he was using them, of course, in more
of a physical way. You wouldn't expect a concept like "empathy" to
pop-up in the martial arts, but it was there. In the Aikido movements that
George had shown us, we learned to put ourselves in the shoes of our attacker,
and to be able to see the world as he did. By putting ourselves in the other
person's shoes, we were able to disappear completely as a target, and in the
process we no longer viewed them as an attacker. Energies and images were
magically blended and transformed, and you were, somehow, left feeling calmed
and centered.
It was all so dance-like
and flowing, so magical and playful. It was all so full of wonder. It presented
a striking contrast to the type of empathy training that we had been doing at
work. By comparison, that seemed so heavy and serious, and so needlessly
constricted. In essence it was the tight-lipped ministerial look vs. the spirit
of Zen monks at play.
I Think I'm Turning Japanese, I Think I'm Turning Japanese, I Really
Think So
As soon as I got back to
As it turned-out,
Ben didn't exactly use
the lecture method. In fact, he was a man of very few words. After putting us
through some warm-ups, he would usually give us a short demonstration of a
particular art. As he demonstrated, Ben would use only a small number of very
well-chosen phrases to describe what we were watching. We were to try to keep
them in mind as we practiced with our partners.
The class itself was
always a great workout, and there would always be a lot of laughter and
amazement as we pinned people on the mat, or sent them spinning into the padded
walls. We always felt a lot more energized and balanced, and genuinely excited
about the new things we had been learning. In its own way it was very
therapeutic, and, in many ways it seemed a lot more therapeutic than therapy.
Aikido was also a "discipline", and,
as such, it had a lot of internal consistency. There was, actually, a right way
to do something and a wrong way as well. There were proper attitudes that
needed to be maintained, and improper ones that needed
to be avoided. There were very real skills that could, actually, be acquired,
and skills that could be observed and measured. And you could also, actually,
feel the progress that you were making. It was an art that engaged and
challenged your entire being.
And Ben, himself, was
impressive in his own right, both as a person and as a teacher. Beyond his
demonstrated mastery of the art itself, it was also obvious that he took great
delight in it. He radiated a certain sense of calm enthusiasm, and yet he
remained unusually humble. And, what seemed even more unusual was that he,
actually, seemed to be trying to stay humble. He always seemed concerned with
minimizing his own sense of self-importance.
Many of these qualities
were reflected in his approach to teaching. In stark contrast to myself, here
was a teacher who actually knew a lot more than
his students. Every so often, I'd be reacquainted with this fact when I be paired-off with him for a demonstration. I'd lunge at him
or swing at him, but, before I knew it, Ben would have me gently, but firmly in
his grasp. He would hold me there, magically suspended in a comfortable, yet
very out-of-balanced position, while he explained what he was doing to the rest
of the class. Every once in a while he'd look me in the eye, and smile. We both
knew that any given moment he could drop me onto the mat, and spin me around
like a human phonograph record. There was such a feeling of inevitability to
all of this. I was meeting an irresistible force, and it would just be a matter
of time. Eventually, he'd smile one last smile of delight, and finish me off.
I'd be left unhurt and amazed, and literally high from this brush with
perfection and mastery.
And Ben himself seemed as
astonished about all of this as you were, maybe even more so. Whereas you might
be more impressed by his remarkable skills, Ben seemed more amazed by the art
itself. There was a profound sense of awe for his art, awe and delight. In the
presence of such awesomeness, there was something very fitting about his
personal humility and inner stillness.
Absolute silence itself
would have been even more becoming. A lecture at the
Refreshingly enough, Ben
also assumed most of the responsibility for the student's learning. If a
student wasn't doing well, Ben would question himself first, and try to
figure-out how he could instruct him in a more effective manner. This seemed
like an embarrassingly rare attitude for a teacher or a professor to be taking
these days. There wasn't all this pointing the finger at the student or at
anyone else, and, there was no talk about resistant clients or students who
were just too unwilling to learn.
In matters of learning,
Ben took the bulk of responsibility. He was strong enough to take the heat, and
he was O.K. with that. After all, the buck had to stop somewhere, and it might
as well stop with the teacher. And he didn't become overly self-critical about
any of this. He wouldn't allow himself to be brought down or discouraged. There
were just certain conditions of life that you had to realistically accept,
certain obligations and personal responsibilities.
Although this doesn't
speak particularly well for higher education, I'm virtually certain that Ben
was much too wise and humble to ever be granted tenure at a major university.
There just wasn't enough ego.
As for myself, Aikido
wasn't giving me all the answers, but I was, certainly, getting a lot out of
it. On the other hand, it really hadn't promised me any answers in the first
place. In the catalog Aikido had merely been listed with the other courses in
Physical Education, so for a gym class I really had no complaints.
As a matter of fact,
Aikido had, actually, delivered much more than it had promised. And that was
really refreshing in a time in which my fellow professionals were packaging
prescriptions for happiness that were falling woefully short of the mark. It
was nice to be pleasantly surprised for a change. The confusion and despair
were still there, but I felt a little better. A small ray of sunshine had
worked its way in.
The Way Towards Oneness
As much as I had been
immersing myself in the martial arts and Eastern thinking, I found myself never
really associating it with anything particularly spiritual. I, probably,
thought of it less as a spiritual discipline, and more as something that was
just kind of nourishing, calming, and uplifting. Looking back at it, this was
really a great feat of mental gymnastics or self-deception on my part, since I
had even seen Aikido once defined as "the way towards oneness with the
Great Universal."
But, apparently, I was
quite capable of twisting or distorting just about everything in order to make
it fit into my usual ways of looking at things. Even if I was miserable, I
wanted to be able to keep a perspective that I was familiar with. I was very
attached to it and protective of it. Even if it was killing me, I wasn't going
to let go of it without a real good fight.
The mental gymnast in me
must have been getting a real good work-out when it came to making sense out of
someone like Ben. I assumed, for example, that Ben was such a humble person
because Aikido was such a difficult art to master, or possibly just because he
was Japanese. It never really occurred to me that his humility might have been
tied-in with a very spiritual view of the world.
But, at the same time, I
was finding it increasingly difficult to make sense out of life with my usual
ways of looking at things. The gymnast was getting really tired of distorting
things, and, even with a bunch of new tricks, he couldn't stop the accelerating
erosion of my personal defenses. Like plutonium gnawing its way through cheap
lead, a deep sense of existential despair was slowly leaking-through the
protective layers of my consciousness.
Just my luck, one of the
hot professional topics in the early 70's was death and dying. This was all
turning into some sort of a sick joke. I hadn't even come to terms with most of
the issues from my life planning classes yet, and now, all of a sudden, there
were new questions about death and mortality that needed to be
worked-through. And, this was one pop quiz that I really felt totally
unprepared for.
Following sex, in the
seemingly endless parade of concepts that were being released into the wild,
death was the latest to be let out of the closet. In some circles,
unfortunately, some of the very same ones that I overlapped with, people were
starting to attend things like death and dying workshops. Watching the Knicks get killed by the Celtics was one thing, but what
was all this about? Death and dying workshops? Are you
kidding? Was there a lab? Having to think about death, from a personal as well
as from a professional standpoint, was really putting me dangerously close to
the edge. I felt like I was only a hair away from losing it completely.
In this state of mind, I
happened to take a trip up to
Through some uncanny sense of cosmic
bad-timing, my friends had just come back from a death and dying workshop, and,
in my particularly pained emotional state, I really couldn't handle it very
well. On top of getting in touch with just how much I had been missing them,
all my other doubts and insecurities decided to act-up at the same time. How
could I be so out of everyone's league? I couldn't even handle the life
planning classes, and now here they were, obviously, moving-up to a higher
league, complete with workshops on death and dying. I felt like one, big, very
out-of-touch failure. Either I should have failed kindergarten, or something
crazy was going on here! How did they become so knowledgeable about life and
death when I knew nothing about either of them?
Through the entire visit,
I felt pained and irritated, and hopelessly out-of-it. I found myself resorting
to a lot of sarcasm and adolescent humor about their death workshop, and this
didn't really help their mood any. Apparently my strong reaction really
concerned them, and we hashed things out. Eventually, we were able to get to
the bottom of it when I found myself, finally, blurting-out that I was upset
because I hadn't really come to terms with life yet, much less with death.
I really heard myself
when I said it, and the remark rang true. It dawned on me, with a remarkable
degree of clarity, that I really hadn't come to terms with life yet, at all. It
was a revealing and pregnant comment, and there would be more to come.
House
For
As the cosmic noose was
slowly tightening around my neck, we happened to be living in
But, anyway, this was
still the 70's, and we your basic suburban nuclear family with two kids, two
cars, and a new tract home in the newer part of Del Mar. It wasn't exactly like
Old Del Mar. It was physically close, just over the hill as a matter of fact,
but it was really a lot nicer over there. They had left a lot of the old trees,
and hadn't put in too many sidewalks. The ocean and the racetrack were down
there too. As has been expressed so eloquently on many of the local license
plate frames, Old Del Mar was "where the turf met the surf".
Anyway, as our story
continues, one Saturday morning I was sitting in my family room, reading the
"Surfcomber", when my eye caught an ad for
an interesting-sounding house right in Old Del Mar. We really weren't looking
to move, but the ad sounded so intriguing that I immediately drove down there
for a look. The
house itself was somewhat modest, but it was nestled in a natural amphitheater
with a spectacular view of the ocean. There were no sidewalks, just windy roads
and plenty of old trees. This was your basic ideal fantasy location for a psychologist.
On a much larger scale, it was almost like some gigantic Jungian sand tray that
had sprung to life right before my eyes. All in all it demanded consideration.
As I gathered a few more
details, it was starting to look more and more like what they used to call a
real "mixed bag". Although the location was terrific, and the view
was spectacular, the house itself wasn't in such great shape. Essentially, it
was your basic "fixer-upper", and it would, probably, be thirsting
for a lot more cash in the not too distant future. And, to make matters even
more complicated, the house came complete with the seller, who wanted to stay there and rent
back the small guest quarters. In keeping with my interests in Eastern
disciplines, the seller also happened to be a local yoga teacher with a
reputation for being somewhat of a space cadet.
So, apparently, this
wasn't going to be a simple, clean-cut kind of a deal. There were lots of
complications, and a real mix of pro's and con's. All in all, it had all the
makings of a giant values-clarification exercise, and, apparently we were being
timed. Even though it had just come on the market, houses in that neighborhood
could move very quickly, particularly if they were a bargain, so we wouldn't
have all the time in the world to be thinking it over. Houses and lives always
seemed to be in constant motion where the turf met the surf.
A bit like a wild beast
coming home from a kill, I rushed home, grabbed my wife, and took her down to
look at the house. Our minds raced around wildly as we discussed whether or not
we could afford it, and whether or not we should go after it.
Trying to be somewhat
rational about things, we began by looking at some of the positives and
negatives, and, almost right off-the-bat, it all started to get pretty strange.
We started by weighing the fact that our kids already had good friends in their
present neighborhood against the fact that the new neighborhood had the ocean
view, older trees and spectacular sandstone rock formations. Needless to say,
these were difficult comparisons to make, and, it was only the first in a
series of bizarre comparisons that we would be having
to make in the future. Whether we liked it or not, we were going to have to
figure out just what our priorities really were, and it was all getting very
confusing.
For a long time I had
thought that Old Del Mar would really be a great place to live, but now, when
I, seemingly, had the chance to actually move there, I was surprisingly
hesitant. That particular fantasy was just feeling kind of flat to me now, and,
much to my surprise, that particular dream just didn't seem to be very
important anymore.
It's funny
how, sometimes, a seemingly simple decision can precipitate a major life
crisis. On the surface, this was a decision that dealt with buying and selling
a house, but, it, actually, went a lot deeper than that.
Sufi Cosmic Mass
So, there I was still on
the edge and racking my brains trying to make a decision. I was comparing
things that were almost impossible for me to compare. and
my head was, literally, spinning from trying to figure-out my priorities.
As luck would have it, we
had scheduled-in a distraction. That very Saturday night we had plans to go up
to
The Sufi Cosmic Mass
would, actually, be an unusual event for us to be attending. Actually, in those
days, just about any event would have been an unusual event for us to be
attending. We were living a fairly
isolated existence, kind of cocooning-it in
The fact that we would be
attending a mass or a spiritual pageant of some kind was also very much a
departure from our normal routine. As a rule, we avoided churches, synagogues,
and just about anything religious or spiritual in nature. They seemed like
blind alleys, or psychological crutches for people who, for some reason,
couldn't think clearly enough for themselves.
As far as the Sufi Cosmic
Mass was concerned, I was going pretty much out of curiosity, on John Wood's
very strong recommendation. John had been drawn to some of their writings and
practices, and had become very intrigued with them. Occasionally we'd read some
Sufi tales together, and try to figure-out what they were all about. As
stories, we found them to be most unusual to say the least. They seemed to
tickle some deep, unknown region of the brain, far away from anything cognitive
or verbal. The tales also seemed to have some wisdom and humor in them, but you
could never really put your finger on just what they were really trying to say.
Maybe, I figured, seeing them first hand in
Once inside the
auditorium, we found a large brown envelope waiting for us on our seats.
Instead of containing a program for the evening or possibly even something that
might explain who the Sufis, actually, were, the envelope was filled with
flyers and hand-outs from a wide assortment of religious groups, including some
very screwy-sounding ones. I couldn't really figure-out what all these
hand-outs had in common, other than some loose thread of religious connection.
Checking-out the rest of the audience, apparently,
wasn't going to help me come-up with any conclusions either. The range of dress
seemed even wider than the range of hand-outs in the envelopes. People were
dressed in all kinds of different clothing, ranging from square to hip, cheap
to expensive, and simple to complicated. Not only
couldn't I tell what the Sufis were about, but I really couldn't even say
anything about what they, actually, looked like.
A rather sizable mountain
had been constructed in the center of the auditorium. The mountain had seven
levels, each of them representing a level of awareness that one needed to reach
on the way to the top. The mass followed the leaders from all the major world
religions as they made their way up to higher and higher levels. The background
music was quite eclectic, and shifted radically to match the particular
tradition of each religious leader.
Circling around the
mountain were the Whirling Dervishes. I had always thought that that was only
something they just called hyperactive kids, but, apparently, there were,
actually, some Dervishes out there, and, apparently, they really liked to
whirl. Like wheels, within wheels, within wheels, within wheels, they just kind
of whirled and whirled their way into higher consciousness. The dancing and the
music just kind of blended and flowed together in a way that defied
categorization. The whole thing was actually kind of pleasant, and,
particularly for a religious pageant, it was fairly non-offensive.
What, probably, shocked
me the most about all of this was that I had, actually, managed to sit through it. For something spiritual or religious, it had, actually,
been kind of O.K. It hadn't been all that long ago, in this very same city as a
matter of fact, that I had been unable to sit through my nephew Steven's Bar
Mitzvah.
I had
never before even semi-seriously considered the credibility of anything having
to do with God or religion. It all seemed so dated,
primitive, and superstitious, and yet, here I was, finding myself undeniably
enjoying a religious pageant. For a brief moment I almost had an urge to
join-in with the dancing.
Values Clarification
Meanwhile, we still had a
real estate decision to make about the house in Old Del Mar. My insides had
been churning around from the very beginning, and now the Sufis had made
my brain into a Whirling Dervish of its own. Add-in the other complications,
and we weren't finding it easy to figure out our priorities.
We, actually, spent a lot
of time discussing whether or not we could pull this deal
off. Hardly anytime was spent on whether or not we should. And, through all this thinking and discussion, I was
starting to get some very strong anxiety attacks. They had been much milder and
extremely rare in the past, but that was all changing now. They were now
becoming daily events, regular visitors with intimations of dread, death, and
imminent chaos. Terror seemed to be hovering just around the bend.
Sometime during the
middle of that week, we were hashing it over with our friends Bernie and Ginnie. Bernie, a research doc, was a pretty off-beat
character, but he could also be quite rational and clear-headed when it came to
making decisions. So we took him over to the house for a look, and a read on
the situation.
Later that night he offered an opinion. He
said that it was, probably, going to strike us as very simple, but, to him, it
all depended on just what we really wanted. If we wanted it, the house was
great, but, if we didn't really want it, then we shouldn't mess with it, since
there were just too many complications. In Bernie's opinion, it was, probably,
a good deal, but he was really a lot more concerned that he hadn't been hearing
us talk about what we really wanted out of all of this.
Simple or not, he was right. Although, on the
surface, Bernie's opinion didn't seem all that profound, it really cut-through
a lot of the clutter. And, what did we want anyway? Moving into that
neighborhood had always seemed like one of my dreams, but, maybe I really didn't
want that anymore.
Here I was, having the
chance at my dream home, yet finding myself pretty unexcited about the whole
thing. It made me question just what my dreams, actually, were, or if I even
had any anymore. All too quickly, it started to hit me that there was nothing
more that I really wanted. There was nothing that seemed all that important
anymore. The house, the neighborhood,
they really didn't matter. Nothing seemed to matter.
Almost instantly, and
with frightening clarity, it struck me that nothing really mattered to me
because life itself simply didn't matter.
Everything was just crap. There was just a lot of craziness, pain, and
senseless suffering followed by death. Love, innocence, and beauty just made it harder to take. It
just made no sense.
I was finally starting to
get in touch with my basic attitudes and feelings about life. For all these
years, I had looked at life as futile and random. It was an overwhelmingly bad
scene, a horror of pain and meaninglessness.
And now it was all coming
to a head. Anxiety and despair were the feelings that had long-accompanied this
view of life, but they had been numbed, and muted, and stuffed. But now,
however, as my viewpoint was getting all too clear to me, these feelings were
kicking-in with tremendous intensity. It was pay-back time,
it was the psychologist's turn to get in touch with his feelings. And he wanted
out.
And, as if this weren't
enough, he had the distinct impression that there was something else gnawing
its way through his defenses, and he wasn't really anxious to find out exactly
what it was.
Vanity
That Friday afternoon, as
the sun was starting to set, it all started to go. It was in the Springtime, at the end of my sixth year of work.
I was sitting alone in my
living room, and the feeling of dread started to come over me. It was a lot
stronger than it had been all week. As it descended upon me, something started
to tell me that, "You don't understand what
you are much less who you are. You don't understand life. You
don't understand death. You don't understand anything."
And with that, the roof
caved-in. The entire feeling of terror started rushing-in on me. Just a moment
ago I had been experiencing the greatest anxiety that I had ever felt in my
life, and now, it was snowballing from there. I had no frame of reference for
this. I had no idea what was coming down.
There was a feeling of
desperation. I began to feel like I was trapped in my own body, and I needed to
break-out. I was going to lose control and I was trapped. These weren't normal
feelings for me to be experiencing, they were all very new and unbelievably
intense. I had no idea what was happening.
I had a split second of
awareness when I realized that I was in something major and unpredictable. It
was so strong and so unpredictable that I became terrified of losing control. I
was afraid that I might hurt someone or do something crazy. It seemed vitally
important that I get out of the house as quickly as possible.
I bolted out the door.
All I could think of to do with myself was to get down to the beach where the
waves would be noisy, noisy enough to drown-out my screams. I jumped into my
car and drove over the hill to the beach. It was a miracle that I could even
drive, much less get there. I was totally disintegrating.
As I was
driving over the hill. I felt like I had reached an existential dead-end.
Given what I could see of life, I couldn't go on any further. If this was all
that life was, it made no sense, and I'm going to die. I cannot see beyond this,
and my vision of reality is killing me.
I had a tight feeling in
my chest, and, mentally, all of my concepts were breaking-down, and jumbling-up
in my mind. I was in blind pain and blind terror, and it just kept getting
worse.
As I was disintegrating,
the concept of vanity entered my thoughts. It was a word
which I had really never used, or even thought of before. But now it was
flooding my thoughts. I was struck by the realization that my life had clearly
been in vain. Vanity was such an unusual word for me to be using, and now it
was, suddenly, the only thing I could think of. Why was I changing my
vocabulary now? It would still be another year or two until I read
Ecclesiastes.
I was locked in blind
terror. I was in the grip of something so intense and immediate that, clearly, it had me. I couldn't label anything,
I simply couldn't call anything anything, so I didn't
even have the ability to realize that I was terrified. I was gone. I had no
resources left of my own.
I crossed the railroad
tracks and arrived at the bluffs overlooking the ocean. I looked around for a
brief moment, and saw that the area was completely deserted. Here it was, a
beautiful Friday afternoon, the sun would be setting soon, and there was
absolutely nobody around. Nobody was getting stoned or walking their dogs. It
was empty, and I needed it to be.
I climbed down the trail
and got to the pounding surf. Things were still snowballing rapidly, getting
worse by the minute. Although I wouldn't have thought it to be possible, I kept
breaking-down and disintegrating even further.
I tried to scream. There
was still a tiny remnant of psychologist left in me that was telling me to go
with my feelings. I don't really remember if I actually screamed or not. I
remember trying to scream, but I don't know what really came out.
It may have been a silent
scream, but that didn't seem to work, I was still falling apart. In an ever so
brief span of time I also tried to cry and even to throw-up, but nothing could
stop the spiraling terror or
disintegration. Nothing was bringing relief from these horrible
feelings. I was choking to death on my vision of life. I was at the end of my
rope.
I sat down on a flat rock
ledge and started to do my deep breathing from Aikido. I was hoping it would
take the edge off. Like never before, I was really concentrating of my
breathing. If it was ever going to work I was hoping it would be now.
I imagined myself
drawing-in energy from over the horizon. I pictured it flowing in and out with
my breath as I concentrated on centering myself. It seemed to take the edge
off, but only slightly. I now only felt 99.9 percent broken-down. I think I had
my eyes closed. I was afraid to open them.
I started to open my
eyes, hoping it was going to go away, but it wasn't going away. It was holding.
Holding at a level of infinite terror. I felt
suspended, a hair away from dying.
There was also a split.
Somehow, I had managed to get so centered that I detached from myself. I found
myself very calmly observing that I was completely broken-down. And that itself was unnerving.
Who was watching whom?
Who was minding the store? Where was "I" in all of this? It was an
experience similar to that described by persons who had been clinically dead
and yet were able to watch themselves from above as
they lay motionless in their hospital beds. They calmly observed all the
frenzied activity below them in the hospital room.
At that point a clear
calm, crystal clear voice comes cutting-through all of this chaos and
disintegration and says, "You know surrender is in order." Like
"vanity", "surrender" was another word that hadn't been
part of my normal vocabulary. But, apparently at some deeper level, I knew what
it meant. Deep down inside this all made perfect sense to me. It was something
that I really had no need to even think about. There was nothing to debate.
Something simply went-off within me, and it was "of course." It was,
actually, well beyond a "Yes".
Yes" was like an extra affirmation that really would have been
redundant.
At that point, there was
a flash of white light. It lasted for only a tiny fraction of a second. I felt
almost as though I were like a television set, and someone had momentarily
changed the station. And I, obviously wasn't the one
holding the remote control.
There was a mystical
glimpse, an ever so brief revelation into the underlying unity of all things.
It was something that really couldn't be put into words, a perception that was
beyond words and categories.
My eyes had been opened.
I was now seeing clearly what I had not been able to see before. It was as
though a light had been turned on in a room that you had not even realized was
dark. It was an "Aha" experience - a realization that the world was
clearly not the way that it had seemed to be. It was nothing like I had
imagined it to be. The veil of illusion had been briefly pierced. I had been
given a totally different perception of reality.
I found myself saying,
"Thank you, thank you I know it's just a glimpse and that more surrender
is called for." There was a sense of tremendous relief and thankfulness as
my vision of reality was given some expansiveness, some breathing-room. But the
shock of all of this had also knocked me for a loop. I felt totally up-ended,
and I was frightened about the voice that I was hearing and what it was saying.
It was a tremendous shock
to my system to suddenly realize that Someone was
running the Universe, and running it with exquisite control, awareness,
sophistication, and utter fairness. What
had seemed so chaotic and random actually had an underlying perfect order to it
all. And there was a complete awareness of everything.
My entire identity was
also changed. It was overwhelming to suddenly realize that I, along with the
rest of the Universe, also wasn't who I had appeared to be. It's quite a shock
when something turns out to be different than you thought, but when that
something is you, it can be overwhelming. My whole
version of reality had just been stood on its ear.
I looked out at some
sandpipers that were running around on the beach. I remember feeling so
incredibly close to them, like we were all connected to each other. There was a
sense of oneness with the entire Universe.
But I was still terribly
disoriented and terrified. Even if this was making perfect sense to me at some
deeper level, I was still frightened about what was happening to me, and I just
couldn't figure any of it out. I struggled desperately to get my bearings. Is
that it? Is it going to go away now? I
still had the incredible tightness in my chest.
At that moment the voice
came again. It was a crystal clear voice. It, once again, cut through all the
chaos in my mind and said, "It's time for you to walk in the water."
I found myself immediately getting-up and walking-out toward the ocean. Again,
it was something that I really didn't have to think about. There was no need to
be hesitant. At some level, this too made perfect sense.
Through it all, my
intellect was still trying to grasp what was happening to me. What ritual was I
going through? I had the shocking realization that I might have known what was
happening if I had paid a lot more attention to that religious stuff. Of
course, in truth, I had paid about as little attention as I could. It seemed as
though what was happening to me was really a Christian kind of ritual, and that
added to my fear and bewilderment. But, I'm failing miserably at comprehending
any of this with my intellect. It was all well-beyond
my ability to understand. Never-the-less, I was still heading-out toward the water.
As soon as the bottoms of
my feet touched the water, a feeling of love, energy, and radiance coursed
through my entire body, from the bottoms of my feet to the top of my head. The
pain completely disappeared from my chest, and I physically experienced a
burden being lifted from my shoulders. I hadn't even been aware of carrying a
burden on my shoulders, and now it was being lifted. Tears of joy came to my
eyes, and, at that moment it became pretty clear to me that there really was a
God.
And, along with that
recognition, everything else was also set into its proper perspective. Along
with everything else, I too was brought to an understanding of my place in the
scope of things. It was a staggering realization, well beyond humbling in its
impact. As it swept over and through you, its utter awesomeness was so
overwhelming that it, literally, negated your own existence.
With this undeniable
recognition that there, truly, was a God, I myself became instantly redefined.
Along with my illusions about the world, my illusions about myself were being
shattered. In this new light I was brought to the unsettling realization that I
too wasn't whom I had appeared to be. In place of
whatever my old identity had been was now the acute awareness that I was a
"creature". I had been created or fashioned by an extraordinarily
sophisticated Creator.
And once you become so
acutely aware of the fact that there is a Creator and a creation, this
realization immediately brings with it a definition of who you are, and what your
relationship is to be with each other. Like the pot, suddenly being placed in
the awesome presence of The Potter, I felt incredibly vulnerable. I was in the
presence of Someone who had known me completely, inside and out, Someone who
had, actually, fashioned me - both my body and my soul; and had kept me hidden
from myself for my entire lifetime. And, in the process, He had also stayed
hidden Himself, as he quietly maintained perfect control and awareness of
everything in the entire Universe.
Along with the incredible
sense of relief, these realizations also sent a tremendous shock wave rippling
through my entire being. Part of this came in the painful acknowledgment of
major mistakes and missed opportunities. I became acutely aware of the fact
that I might have done a few things differently if I had known the way that
things really were.
I felt like I had died
and had been reborn. And, since I was around to be experiencing all of this,
apparently life and death also were a lot different than I had imagined them to
be. Clearly, they too were well beyond my limited abilities of comprehension.
In my relief and joy I
started to skip through the water. Even though I felt so absolutely different
and disoriented, the sense of relief was still tremendous. Yet I still wanted
to understand. Even as I skipped, I kept trying to comprehend what was
happening to me, but I just couldn't grasp it. My intellect was stumped, but my
soul was dancing.
There was music. At one
point I felt as though I had been lifted-up to a higher level where there was
constant music and songs of praise. I could barely identify the actual songs
that seemed to sweep through in one gigantic rush. I distinctly remember
hearing a fleeting moment of Jackson Browne's "Rock Me On
the Water". I believe that I heard
it for the first time at that moment. It wasn't until some time later that I
was, actually, able to sit down and listen to it on the radio.
As I continued to skip
along through the shallow water, I found myself thinking or saying something
about the kids. That had been a large part of what had set-me-off in the first
place. The voice came again, and said, "Children are your blessings. Love
them."
"Blessings" was
another word that had never been part of my vocabulary. In fact, the only one I
could remember using that word was, actually, my mother-in-law. That also
startled me.
I felt a fleeting need
for things to be even clearer. I wanted to know more about blessings and about
how to show love. I wondered if or how I needed to change my life or my
lifestyle, but there were no more messages.
Even though I had
previously denied the importance of the spiritual aspects of life, it was now a
whole new ballgame. Even if I had never believed in that sort of thing, I
clearly realized that I had gone through some sort of a spiritual transition.
It was clear that I had surrendered to God.
And these were all new concepts for me.
I went home and told my
wife that this really unusual thing happened to me at the beach. It seemed as
though I should mention it to her. Of course she became terribly frightened. It
probably reminded her a lot of "Invasion of the
Body Snatchers", except this time she was living it.
I was scared too, but I
knew it wasn't a movie. It was pretty clear to me that I had to re-orient my
life in some major way. There was a definite feeling that it was time to get
back to the drawing board. My previous blueprints, sketches, and plans about
life were obviously way off.
And I was already
starting to terrify my loved ones.
Initial Realizations
I experienced a
tremendous sense of relief just knowing that there was a meaning to life. The
degree of that relief was truly amazing. Just knowing that there was a purpose
to it all was almost enough. It almost didn't matter what the purpose actually
was, as long as there was one. Finding out the details could come later.
I also felt tremendously
relieved that my intuition had, actually, been correct after all. That awful,
gnawing feeling that had been telling me that I really didn't understand
anything, and neither did my profession, was now clearly validated. It may be
somewhat difficult to appreciate, but this confirmation of my lack of
understanding really brought with it a great sense of relief. It really was true after all - I really
didn't know anything. My intuition had been right.
Something else that
struck me almost immediately had to do with the place of man in the world.
After getting even some small sense of the awesome degree of perfection, power,
patience, and awareness that there was out there, I couldn't really figure-out
why God would even bother with man. Why would He bother
creating and sustaining human life? We,
clearly, seemed like such unnecessary trouble and needless aggravation. But,
despite our staggering ingratitude, craziness, and meanness, apparently, we too
had our place and purpose in the larger scope of things, although I understand
there might have been some second thoughts around the time of Noah.
I also thought a lot
about the incredible spiritual light that I had glimpsed. In a way it made me
feel as though I were a candle standing next to the sun. I existed, with a tiny
flame of my own, but, surrounded by a light of such great magnitude, it was as
though I didn't exist. The light had overwhelmed my existence to the point of
negating it almost completely. Under a light of that power and intensity, my
existence seemed like a mere technicality.
This was a thought that
would continue to plague me for quite some time.
Toddler
Needless to say, I felt
extremely high during the whole experience, and for the next few months as well.
As time passed, however, there was to be a progressive drop in my level of
consciousness.
But, initially, I was
like a newborn. All of my perceptions were fresh and new. They were so new, in
fact, that it made for a tremendous amount of awkwardness whenever I would try
to function in what had previously been my normal world. My usual routines
weren't that usual anymore.
It was particularly awkward to walk around
looking so radiant, centered, and happy. Probably for good
reason. I didn't trust people to be able to distinguish between
spiritual happiness and blatant insanity, and, I didn't want them analyzing me, or
trying to figure-out why this man was smiling.
At work I didn't really
know what to say or how to act with my clients or with my colleagues. I wanted
to tell them that everything was going to be all right, but, of course, that
wouldn't have done any good. I would have been seen as terribly unsophisticated
and, probably, out and out crazy. On a college campus, in particular, raging
optimists were usually seen as lacking in intelligence, and were often thought
to be out of touch with reality.
So I decided to be a
little cautious about all this. I decided that I shouldn't just smile at my
clients and tell them that it was all O.K. At this point, part of the problem
was that I couldn't really give them a very coherent explanation about why everything was O.K. I could have told
them that everything was really O.K. because Someone
out there was running the universe, and, the good news was that it wasn't me,
or I could have told them that there was a perfect wisdom, competence, and
awareness behind all of Creation including themselves.
If they would have let
me, I could probably have gone on to tell them that the world really was a lot
different than it appeared to be. It was, in fact,
infinitely better than it appeared to be. It was only the thinnest of veils
that separated us from this reality, and that veil could be pierced.
The best solution then
would not involve becoming a client or a patient. It would, instead, be better
for one to learn a spiritual discipline, and go about seeking real wisdom about
life. In this way, you would raise your level of awareness, make better
choices, and use your time wisely while living on planet Earth.
Of course I didn't really
say any of these things to anyone, since I never really cared all that much for
ridicule or rejection. Also, why say things that weren't going to be heard.
There were all too many snappy comebacks to be drawn from. They would say,
"Well how do you know?", and remind me that
whatever works for you is fine for you.
"There are different strokes for different folks, and I don't need a
crutch like religion to get through life. I'll find my own truths, ones that
will work for me."
Hey, I could plead, it
was through no credit of my own that I knew anything that you didn't know. I
just wasn't as strong as many of you. I just fell apart, and a bit of wisdom
was graciously given to me. It was the only thing that could have bailed me out
at that moment. And, even with these few certainties, I still don't know all
that much. I just have some sense now of what's right and what's not. Maybe
it's just possible that I know something that might be useful, I had, after
all, touched Truth, however briefly.
Realistically though, the
reactions would, probably, never be quite as cruel or critical as the ones I
had been dreading. Those were probably just some reactions that I myself might
have given as a sophisticated, open-minded, humanist. In truth, the actual
reactions that I did encounter were much more understanding and much less
judgmental. But, I was going through such a major reorientation that it seemed
better to be safe than sorry. I felt as though I had just been hatched, and I
didn't know what the rules were yet. How was I supposed to be going through
life?
Although I may have been
feeling terribly awkward and uncertain about how to act or what to say, people
were, apparently, still picking-up something very strong and very positive from
me. I was emanating something. In fact, sometimes they'd even get kind of high
just by brushing near me as we passed in the hall. As my wife can attest, this
stopped happening after a while.
In the initial days of my
return, I also found myself inadvertently bringing hope to a number of
spiritual seekers. Ironically, I found myself lifting their
spirits even though I had been hoping that they would be able
lift mine.
Even though I was feeling
so spiritually high, I still had tremendous fears of the unknown. Many of my
perceptions seemed to be almost leaping from the pages of a Carlos Casteneda book, and, to perceive things in that kind of an
altered way while still trying to function in your normal routines can be
particularly disconcerting.
Trying to describe what
it was really like to walk around with these altered perceptions is a little
difficult. It may have had some of the same elements as a series of acid
flashbacks, it's hard to say. At some level I, clearly, knew what things were.
I knew what to call them, and I knew about them, but there was an almost
constant hint of the illusory nature of what I was looking at.
I might pass a Mexican
gardener, for example, and I knew that I was looking at a Mexican gardener, but
I also knew that it really wasn't just a Mexican gardener that I was looking at. I
could label things correctly, but I didn't take them for granted. Some of this
must have had to do with a new-found appreciation for things, but there was a
lot more to it. There was also a new-found respect for just how thin the veil
was that was separating illusion from a deeper, and more basic underlying
reality.
Even waking-up in the
morning was now a stunning experience. Where had I really been that night while
I was sleeping? It seemed utterly amazing to me that I would wake up as Steve
in the very same bed in which I had gone to sleep. It all seemed so miraculous
to me now, and I was taking nothing for granted
Normal things also became
quite strange. At one point I tried to watch some sports on TV, but it had
become almost totally meaningless to me. It just seemed like a bunch of guys in
different colored uniforms, running around, for no apparent reason. For an
ex-athlete and fan, sports had now gone from just about everything to virtually
nothing. Now they were just running around, bumping into each other, bouncing
this, and throwing that. I could have been an Eskimo housewife watching her
first football game on TV
Although it might initially
sound like a bit of a reach, the whole sports thing reminded me very much of a
scene from the movie "Blow Up", in which the audience at a rock
concert was left to fight over a guitar that the lead guitarist had just tossed
into the crowd. The fellow who finally came up with it wound-up just tossing it
away a few minutes later. Something that had been so passionately fought for
and lusted after, had now become a mere throw-away
item.
My awkwardness around
trying to function with this level of awareness eventually started to get me
down. It probably sounds a lot better on paper, but in terms of day to day
suburban living, it wasn't all that cosmically cute. Fortunately, my
environment gave me a tremendous amount of help in lowering my consciousness,
kind of a reverse boost. In a matter of months it helped bring me down towards
what we consider to be normal.
I particularly remember
the commercials from MacDonalds and Burger King. For
some reason they had the greatest ability to lower my consciousness the most in
the shortest amount of time.
Burger King would tell me
to "Have it your way." Why were they telling me to have it MY way?
That wasn't true at all. I had been having it MY way my whole life, and it didn't work. Why were they trying to confuse
everyone?
MacDonalds would
tell me that I "deserved a break today." Why was that? I had already been given a very
large break already, and, only recently, have I started to appreciate the fact that I
get a break just by being allowed to live for another day. At this point, I
wasn't even taking it for granted that I would get up in the morning and find
myself where I was the night before, so one of the only things I really knew
for sure was that I really didn't deserve a
break today. And I didn't even want to consider the possibility.
With each commercial, my
consciousness ratcheted downward. We were swimming in a sea of lies, and,
clarity was diminished with each lie that managed to find its way into our
consciousness.
Reflected in all of these
perceptions was a dramatically-enhanced sense of appreciation for the
miraculous in everyday life. Children were supposed to marvel at these everyday
wonders, but adults were supposed to be beyond that sort of a thing. An adult
expressing too much child-like excitement about common, everyday things ran the
risk of being seen as terribly naive and probably a little crazy.
As colorful and fresh as
this all may have seemed, it was really quite disorienting. It was a difficult
level of awareness to go to the mall with, or anyplace else with for that
matter. Even with friends and neighbors things were getting kind of bizarre. I
was reluctant to talk with anyone. My perceptions were too new and certainly
not in keeping with my age and position in life. My smile was hard to explain.
I was afraid that it might look a little too much like the smile of a Moonie,
and I wasn't really in the position to reassure people that it wasn't.
Besides wanting to avoid
ridicule and rejection, I also felt very protective of my state of consciousness.
Even if it was awkward, and out of synch with the majority, I still wanted to
keep seeing things clearly. And to do this, it seemed like I needed to protect
myself from too many outside influences.
All in all, it seemed
like a good idea to pull myself out of circulation for a while. It probably
wouldn't really matter all that much anyway. It would only be a matter of time
until I would have to drop out of society completely. It was more of a question
of where I would be going. Given my fondness for Eastern spiritual disciplines,
the most likely script that I could see involved going-off to
There was no way that I could possibly stay in
So I quit working a bit
early that semester. It seemed hopeless to try to carry-on professionally.
Interestingly enough, I found myself feeling remarkably calm around my clients.
The usual stresses just didn't seem to be there anymore. The whole situation
just wasn't particularly threatening. I had just died
so what were they going to do to me?
But I also realized that,
at this point, I was really far too disoriented to trust myself with my
clients, so I took some sick leave. There was, of course, some irony in all of
this. Here I was, clearer than I had ever been in my life, but I couldn't really
perform my professional duties.
Suburban Seeker
I felt quite certain
that, somewhere out there, there were some rules or guiding principles that
needed to be strongly considered. And, whether I liked it or not, that was very
much in the province of religion and spiritual discipline. After all these
years of personal negativity and avoidance, I now needed to find out just what
they had to say for themselves.
For some strange reason,
my attitudes about religion seemed to be shifting tremendously. Maybe there was
something about getting my ego obliterated that made me a little more
open-minded about the whole thing. And, not only was I now more open-minded
about religion, but I also seemed to be evaluating it in a very different
way.
Now, when I looked at the
wide array of religions and spiritual paths, I seemed to be noticing some
different things about them. Since my experience on the beach, I found myself
paying a lot more attention to their similarities, rather than to their
differences. In the past, I had always assumed that since there was so much
disagreement among the different religious traditions, this was certain proof
that none of them really knew what they were talking about.
But, now, I was starting
to see many more of the common threads. There were still differences, of
course, but now I viewed them more as different paths to the top of the
mountain. There seemed to be a lot of legitimate paths, I just needed to find
the right one for me.
But first, I needed to
try to find a teacher, someone who knew what was going-on on planet Earth. I
knew they were out there somewhere, probably even somewhere in
And, I can't say that I
wasn't tremendously apprehensive about all of this. As I began my search, I
felt quite intimidated by the fact that I was, basically, a spiritual rookie.
This would be my first look at major league pitching, and in
Even for a seeker of
wisdom, it seemed like I would be coming from a pretty unusual place. I was
feeling a tremendous desire for comfort and safety. I wanted to feel a lot less
alienated in all of this. I was very much hoping to find-out where the group of
me was so I could join-up with them as quickly as possible. But, if I couldn't
find a group, a wise individual would, probably, do for starters. There had to
be someone out there who could understand what I had been through, and be able
to guide me along the right path.
Even though I realized
that there were a lot of choices out there, I really didn't know how to
initiate my search. For openers, I wasn't even sure about what I had just been
through. Even though I had read some things about mystical experiences over the
years I was still a bit shy about attaching that label to it.
I decided to start with
John Wood. If nothing else I figured that he'd be able to hang-with my story.
As a good Rogerian, there was also a pretty decent
chance that he wouldn't reject me, so I sought him out. He listened attentively
to my rather lengthy story, and his reactions were, basically, very positive.
They were so positive, in fact, that they startled me and took me very much
off-guard. Although he wasn't able to
fully appreciate what I had been through, he felt that, on the whole, it
sounded like it was a good thing for me personally. John found himself feeling
genuinely happy for me.
It might sound a bit funny, but I had almost
completely lost sight of the fact that what had happened to me was, actually, a
good thing after all. I had become so lost and bogged-down in my new set of
worries and insecurities, that I had managed to lose a
lot of my perspective on all of this. Part of the problem for me was that the
prospects for change seemed so utterly overwhelming, and filled with so many
potential losses, that it was easy to get discouraged.
My whole life seemed to
be up for grabs, including the people in it, and, I was so alarmed about this,
that I found myself dwelling much more on the death than the rebirth, and on
the losses rather than the opportunities. Some of this negativity, of course,
was probably habit. I guess that after so many years of cynicism and
negatively, it was hard for me to reorient myself as an optimistic. Faith was
also an incredibly new concept.
So, all in all, it was
good to be getting this reminder from John. It helped me to realize that, in my
discouragement, I had completely lost my perspective. In truth, there was
undeniable good in what had happened to me. I had been the recipient of an
extremely kind and gracious act, and, this was something that I needed to try
to keep in mind.
There was one other thing
that I came away with from my conversation with John - I decided that my
experience, probably, qualified as a mystical one after
all. Maybe in accepting this, it would help me narrow things down a bit as I
went on with my search.
My conversation with John
had actually worked-out a lot better than I had expected, so I decided to risk
talking with a few more people. Maybe some of them had read some books or found
some teachers that had been helpful. After making the rounds, I wound-up having
some pretty good conversations, and I even wound-up with a few books to get me
started. The range of books that people had found helpful
was, apparently, pretty wide, and some of them seemed like they might be a
little off the mark. Somehow, I had the feeling that "Jonathan
Livingston Seagull" really wasn't going to take me where I needed to go.
I found myself
settling-on a number of Eastern works such as "Autobiography of a
Yoga" and "Cutting Through Spiritual
Materialism". There was also a Sufi book that looked like it might cover some
of the basics - "The Purpose of Life".
As I made my way through
the maze of books and conversations, I started to learn a few things about my
spiritual tastes and preferences, and there were more than a few surprises. For
one thing, even though I had thought of myself as extremely open-minded in my
search, I found myself rejecting virtually everything with a Christian
orientation. This seemed particularly curious in light of the fact that my
experience on the beach had seemed so very Christian to me. Yet, although I
couldn't really explain it, I found myself with no desire whatsoever to explore
anything on that particular path. For some reason it just seemed like a closed
door to me.
The
At one point, however, I
did manage to come pretty close. I found myself almost being able to dial the
number of a Sufi master that John had recommended. But, I just kept picking-up
the phone and putting it back down again. I felt like I was trying to summon-up
the courage to ask the prom queen for a date. I also hoped it wasn't too much
like those people in the alcoholism commercials - the toughest call I'd ever have to
make. But, for whatever the reason, I never made the call.
I hate to go out on a
limb, but I was sure starting to look ambivalent about all of this. I was
taking a half a step forward and then two steps back. One thing I did know for
sure was that I was in no mood for a psychologist or psychiatrist. At the most,
all I might hope for from them might be a little empathy. But I was wary of the
labels they would put on my feelings and experiences. I didn't want to be
understood within a psychological framework.
To me, I was clearly
dealing with spiritual experiences and religious issues, and I wanted to be
understood within that frame of reference. Yet I also had a basic distrust of
the clergy. Given all these conflicts and contradictions, who was ever going to
be able to qualify? How was I ever going to find this wise or holy person that
I knew I had to find?
Just having to go through
this process was a very humbling experience. Karma and cosmic humor being what
they were, I was now being forced to seek-out the very people whom I would
naturally choose to avoid. But beggars can't afford to
be too choosy, at least not forever. Clearly, I was still very much in need of
some spiritual guidance. I didn't enjoy feeling so lost and disoriented, and I
was wreaking havoc in my family. And, I was also acutely aware of being
observed. It was all too clear to me that there was no place in the universe
for me to hide even if I could figure out how to get there, so it behooved me
to not waste too much time.
Reborn
To Shop
As I ventured-out in
search of a spiritual guide, I proceeded rather cautiously and conservatively.
For my first conversation I decided to play it pretty safe. I met with one of
the campus ministers, who had a reputation as a very kind and decent fellow. He
was attentive, friendly, and seemed like a genuinely good person, but, almost
immediately, I realized that he just wasn't going to have much to offer me. For
whatever reason, the spark just wasn't there. Actually, he was a little too
bland for my tastes. He reminded me a little too much of some of the Rogerians that I had been trying to get away from lately. I
hate to admit it, but I think I was a little more in the mood for someone who
was much more of a fanatic.
Maurice Friedman was next
in line. He had been teaching in the Religious Studies Department at
He welcomed me warmly
into his home, and listened attentively to my story. But, as we talked, I
realized that this too was going to be a stop along the way. Although he was
writing about the Hasidim, it turned out that he really wasn't a Hasid himself.
For some reason this seemed like an important distinction to me, even if I
really wasn't sure at that point about just what a Hasid actually was. But, on
the whole, the conversation was very helpful, particularly in helping me get a
clearer idea about what I was really looking for in my search.
My first real stop at a
religious institution was at the Self-Realization Fellowship in Encinitas. It
was located on some magnificent grounds, high on the bluffs overlooking the
ocean. For years I had stopped at the discount gas station across the street,
so the center was a pretty familiar landmark to me. Sometimes I'd glance around
while I was filling up my tank, and wonder about what they were doing over
there.
Apparently, their
particular approach was based on the teachings in "Autobiography Of A Yoga".
Small world that it was, it had been one of the first books that I had
read after my experience on the beach, and, over all, it had struck me as being
spiritually profound. But it also gave me some problems. I was uncomfortable with
most of the traditions and language, and, was unable to really resonate with
them. They may have been just a little too far removed from my own personal
history and background.
But, even if I had a few
mixed feelings, the Fellowship still seemed like it would be worth checking
out. Using my usual approach, I walked around the grounds for a quite a while,
and anguished about whether or not to go in. It was almost like an instant
replay of the indecisive pacing that I had done up at Esalen,
but this time, maybe because it had been a much shorter drive, I just decided
to leave.
Was I turning into the
Morris The Cat of spiritual seekers? Was I being a bit
too finicky for my own good? Maybe not. I think it was
more that I was just working hard at the process of elimination. Eventually, if
I eliminated enough false leads, my path would, probably, get clearer.
Think of Nothing
My next thought was to
seek-out my Aikido instructor. That was another one that I debated for a while.
Was he, I wondered, an enlightened being or just a gym teacher?
After reminding myself once again that Aikido was "the way toward
oneness with the Great Universal", I figured that it might be worth a try.
Maybe I had just come through a brush with the Great Universal myself. But it
would still be really embarrassing if he were just a
gym teacher and I was asking him about the meaning of life. On the other hand,
I sensed that he knew something.
I asked Ben if I could
talk with him after class, and he said that would be fine. He didn't ask me
what it was about. After the class we sat on the mat facing each other. We each
had our big toes crossed under us. He was wearing his white jacket and black
skirt which indicated his mastery of Aikido. I was wearing my blue belt which
indicated that I needed something to keep my gi
closed.
Like a scene out of the
television series "Kung Fu", I was now face to face with the
smiling Japanese master. I asked him if he knew anything about spiritual
matters. He smiled and laughed warmly.
He proceeded to tell me
some stories about being on the road with Tohei, the
great Japanese Aikido Master. I was beginning to get a little dismayed. We had
never really talked before, yet he hadn't even asked me about what was
bothering me or what I was looking for. What poor listening skills, I thought
to myself. This was, certainly, not a classic way to conduct a counseling
interview. He wasn't even giving me an opportunity to express myself or to talk
things out.
He just kept telling me Tohei stories. Tohei this and Tohei that. He told me that Tohei
used to tell him that if someone took 3 pennies from your pocket, someone would
eventually take 3 pennies from his pocket. This is a terrible mistake,
I thought to myself, this wouldn't even make it into a bad martial arts movie.
Even though I really
didn't see much of a point, I decided to try to be polite and hear him out. So
I just sat there, and tried to live through it. Much to my surprise, I noticed
that I was starting to feel a lot better. Although I hadn't said very much, for
some strange reason, Ben seemed to know where I was coming from. His stories
seemed to be speaking to me.
But, from a counseling
standpoint, Ben certainly wasn't giving me any classically empathic responses.
Carl Rogers himself was only a mile or two down the road, in another part of
Ben instructed me to go
out into the fields to meditate. I was to sit in a certain way, breathe in a
certain way, and try to think of nothing. I was O.K. with the sitting and
breathing part, but he hadn't really taught us just exactly how to think of
nothing. On the other hand I really hadn't given it very much thought
myself.
So I went out into the
fields, out by Rancho Santa Fe, in a wide-open area of arid, brown hillsides. I
was basically alone. Every so often, there would be a glimpse of a Mexican
worker somewhere in the distance. It reminded me very much of a scene from a
Carlos Casteneda book. Carlos Casteneda
meets Kung Fu.
Like some sort of a psychedelic factory
worker, Hi Ho Hi Ho it was off to work I'd go. Every morning it was off to the
fields to sit and breathe and think of nothing. It made for a pretty full day.
And being from the
I might have been getting some small awarenesses of some kind, but it wasn't really enough to
keep me going. After a number of days of this, it was becoming pretty clear to
me that this too wasn't going to take me where I needed to go. Even though I
was sure that I was doing the meditation incorrectly, I decided not to go back
for more instruction on the method. It just seemed not to be the way.
Ben had been the person
with the closest resemblance to a spiritual guide, and now he just didn't seem
like the right one. But, I still felt a strong need for a guru, or spiritual
teacher, and I couldn't see any other likely candidates.
After Ben had been
eliminated, I started wallowing around again in discouragement and self-pity.
Poor me, there I was, I had died, yet I was still very much on the spot.
Someone was watching my progress from above. They knew every move I'd make or
didn't make. I knew it was time to do something, but I didn't know what it was.
I couldn't pretend that all of this had never happened. I despaired of never
finding anything, and being stuck at this place forever.
The born-again Christians
on the cover of "Time" magazine or on television, all seemed so
radiantly enthusiastic and full of faith. Yet, here I was, just kind of
schlepping along and feeling sorry for myself even after all these acts of
Divine grace. Those other born-agains seemed to know
what to do, and they didn't seem to have such major trust problems with their
Savior.
I guess there was quite a
bit of humor in all of this. It seemed a lot like a cartoon in "The New
Yorker" about some
Herring and Dust
I find myself at the
kitchen table staring blankly at the Yellow Pages. Maybe it was time to let my
fingers do the walking. Maybe my fingers would have a little more luck than I
was having. So, half- heartedly, I start looking under the
letter "R" for "Religions" and "Religious
Retreats". Maybe there was a monastery out there somewhere for
people like me, maybe even right here in
A quick scan of the page
leaves nothing that's standing-out. My eyes drift across to some of the other
headings like "Refrigerators and Freezers", and "Rehabilitation
Services". Some of those listings
seemed like more viable options. Maybe it wouldn't be such a bad idea to have
myself frozen into a human popsicle for a while until
they found a cure. Marianne would probably like that one a lot. Or, maybe, I
should just check-in for a little rehab and let them fuss over me for while.
I hadn't really been
expecting all that much from the phone book, but I still managed to feel
disappointed. I seemed to be running-out of options, appealing or otherwise.
For whatever reason, Christianity seemed like a closed door to me, and the
Eastern religions seemed much too alien, even if they made some sense. Given my
level of motivation, I was surprised that none of these paths had opened-up.
Given this massive lack of enthusiasm on my part, I started to get the idea
that maybe I wouldn't be going-off to
Observing this strange
yet pathetic search through "The Phone Book of Life", my wife offers
a suggestion. "Why don't you try something Jewish?",
she asks.
"Give me a break,"
I shot back, " THAT I know is a bunch of crap. At
least these other religions haven't worked-me-over personally. I just can't
believe that there's anything there for me.
The only thing that we
had been celebrating, if that was the right word for it, was Chanukah, and we
were only doing that so our kids could keep up with the other kids who were
getting presents for Christmas. But, even though it sounded crazy, maybe it was
something for me to consider. And, come to think of it, it really wasn't that much
crazier than any of the other options I had been considering lately. They had
all been kind of embarrassing choices that I normally wouldn't have been open
to. If nothing else, the search was, apparently, making me a little more
flexible in my thinking. I just didn't know where to draw the line between
flexibility and insanity.
But, if nothing else, I
had to admit that it was, certainly, a new line of thought. So maybe I should
talk to a rabbi. I guess that's who it would be - a rabbi. But
which one? I really didn't know any of the rabbis in
For some unknown reason,
the listing for Chabad House caught my eye. I didn't
know exactly what it was, but I knew they were near the campus. Something in
the back of my mind told me that they might be more spiritually-inclined than
some of the other places in town, but I really wasn't sure about that.
Basically, I was starting off pretty cold. I knew next to nothing about the
religion, it's different branches, or who was who in
the local community.
The time seemed ripe for
another ambivalent phone call. With tremendous apprehension and minimal
enthusiasm, I dialed-up Chabad House. Just my luck, a
Rabbi Zelig Rivkin answered
the phone. "This is Rabbi Rivkin can I help
you?"
He was probably just being polite, but, given
my current mental state, I found myself giving his question a tremendous amount
of thought, a lot more, I'm sure than he was expecting. And the more I thought
about it, the more confused I became. I just had no idea of what he meant by
his question, and, even if I did, I had no idea how to really answer him. I
found myself wishing that he had given me the question in multiple choice form:
a) Could he help me?
b) Could he help me?
c) Could he help me ?
d) Could he help me
e) b
and c
f) All of the above.
One of the things that
had really thrown me off about his question, was that
he was now asking me the very same thing that I was eventually hoping to ask
him. But now, here he was, jumping the gun, and asking me the very same
question. And how could I really have an answer to such a question,
particularly now? We hadn't even met, so
it was, obviously, much too early to ask. Not only that, but it was the wrong
person that was now asking the question. If anyone, it should have been me.
Luckily he hadn't asked me something really complicated like whether I
preferred plastic or paper.
I almost felt a little sorry for him. I was
only stuck here talking on the phone to some guy with a weird name, but, this
poor guy was being punished just for being a little too polite to a
half-deranged and desperate psychologist who was disoriented enough to be
taking his question so literally.
I thought it best to
drop-back and try to explain my situation, but it only got worse.
"Look", I said, "maybe it would be better for me to come down
there, and try to talk with you in person." I asked him if that would be
O.K., and he responded in a heavy
So, I drove down to Chabad House and went in to visit Rabbi Rivkin.
First of all I see that he's ten years younger than I am. Here I am, a
professional person, and now I'm going to have to talk with some
unsophisticated young kid.
And not only did this guy
with the Brooklyn accent not sound like a wise man, but, with his looks, he
would, probably, even have a rough time getting an internship with us. He had
kind of an ugly looking beard, pale skin, some pimples, and a black coat. The original party animal. He looked familiar to me because
I had seen him walk by on a number of occasions, and, I'd usually cross the
street to avoid him. I wished I had been able to be a little more unconscious
about it, but he was much too Jewish-looking for my tastes and comfort. To me,
he represented the superstitious and the ignorant. And what kind of a
Anyway, here he is, in
living black and white, and here I am, talking to him. I go through the whole
basic story, and tell him, pretty clearly, what I had been through and what I
thought I might be looking for. I risked telling it to him straight, and felt
that it was important not to play too many games.
In
stark contrast to places like the Self-Realization Fellowship, there was
nothing particularly tranquil or lovely about the immediate environment. It
looked a lot like what it actually was - an abandoned fraternity house that
hadn't quite been fixed-up yet. There were no floral displays or gently
trickling fountains to soothe your soul. As a matter of fact, there wasn't
really much of anything to soften things. Instead of the warmth of cedar or
redwood, there was plastic-looking paneling covering the walls, and
glass-fronted bookshelves. And, instead of oriental rugs, there was worn
commercial carpeting. There were banquet tables covered with Formica to sit
around, and instead of the smell of fresh air or incense, there was the smell
of ashtrays and old books.
The rabbi kept
interrupting me - another great listener!
"Are you Jewish?" he asked. I told him that I thought so.
"Is your mother Jewish?" O.K. You're Jewish.
Go on with your story." Aside from
these periodic interruptions, he really didn't say too much. I had no idea what
he was thinking. I did. however, plan to find-out
shortly. One thing was for sure, so far he wasn't demonstrating all
that much in the way of empathy. But, I was at the end of my rope, so I didn't
let some of these glaring deficits bother me too much. And, as I had learned
from my conversation with Ben, I should be careful about jumping too quickly to
conclusions. Sometimes the empathy was there, even if it didn't seem to surface
immediately.
So, forgiving creature
that I was, I proceeded to tell him this whole gut-wrenching tale. I tell him
about the upheaval that it's causing in my family, that my wife thinks I'm a
Martian, etc. I felt certain that I was telling him an epic tale of personal
and spiritual adventure, one, I was sure, that he
didn't get to hear every day.
At the end of this
lengthy, personally uncomfortable narrative, it seemed like a good time for a
few tests. "O.K.", I asked, "So what do YOU think about all of
this?" As I asked I prepared myself for fight or flight.
His response was
memorable, and, certainly, one that I would not have expected from a perfect
master - "Vell it heppens."
"You know," I
say, "I've just been telling you this long, very disturbing story and all
you can tell me is that IT HAPPENS! I
say some pretty outrageous thing at work, but I wouldn't have the gall to tell
that to one of MY clients!"
"Vell
it heppens", he said, this time a little more
emphatically.
"Who are you and
what is this place? Are you a Hasidic rabbi? "
I barely knew what that
was even if I was answering my own questions. Like millions of others, I had
read the Chaim Potok books
about the Hasidim, but for some reason I wasn't fully connecting those thoughts
with who I was actually talking with at that moment. My mind was ready for the
Olympics in mental gymnastics, with a specialty in self-deception.
"You guys are the
Jewish mystics aren't you?", I continued.
"So does that mean that if I'm Jewish and just had a mystical experience
that I'm supposed to be talking to YOU." My voice
trembled in semi-astonishment on the word “you”.
This is getting pretty
bizarre, I thought to myself. Am I one of them? Am I one of these strange
people that I myself would cross the street to avoid? And
what about this rabbi? He couldn't be THAT high a person. I bet this guy
even eats meat. I bet he doesn't even sit in a cave and fast.
All in all, this
certainly wasn't living-up to my idealized notion about what a spiritual guide
would be like or should be like, for that matter. In that respect he really
wasn't even close.
What was really funny
though was that, as we talked, It started to dawn on
me, that for the very first time, I felt undeniably Jewish. I didn't know what
it meant, but I couldn't truthfully say anymore that I wasn't. As bizarre and
frightening as this might seem to me, maybe I should be talking with him after
all. Maybe this, actually, was the right place for me to be. There was even a
bit of undeniable logic in all of this. After all, I WAS Jewish and I DID have
a mystical experience.
Never one to make
anything easy I attacked him and tested him a bit more. It wasn't all that
planned on my part. At some level he had still been genuinely irritating me to
no end. I asked him why he was smoking Larks. It seemed like a strange brand
for anyone to smoke, let alone a holy person. If his body wasn't going to be
treated like a temple, the least he could do would be to try to smoke some
better-tasting cigarettes!
"Look", he
says, "I think you're Jewish. You know?" Possibly there was a little
something in the way that I was breaking his hump that might have given it
away.
"Since you're
Jewish", he continued, "there may be
something in Judaism that you might respond positively toward. So before you
rush-off and explore something else, you might want to find out what this stuff
is really all about. People don't usually learn what it's about just by going
to
Clearly, I was a Jew,
and, certainly, a Jewishly-ignorant one. We had,
apparently established my identity earlier in the conversation, and there was
absolutely no question in my mind that I qualified as ignorant. Although I
wasn't wild about the line of thought, the rabbi's key points were all starting
to make a lot of sense.
He asked me if I would
like to work with him. I got the feeling that he pictured something a little
different than Gestalt therapy. I told him that, in all honesty, I was pretty
hesitant and skeptical about the whole thing. On the other hand, I should
probably give it a chance.
It Ain't Chopped Liver
So, that summer, we did a
little learning together. We studied some Torah and some "Tanya". The
latter being a work that had been written a few hundred years ago in
My lack of knowledge
about the Torah was truly staggering. For starters, I didn't even know what the
Torah actually was. About all I knew about it, in fact, was that people,
usually little old men, carried the Torah Scroll around during the service, and
kissed it as it passed by. But what the Torah actually was, and how it actually
fit-in with the spiritual lives of the Jewish people was a black hole of
personal ignorance on my part. On the positive side, I also found out that even
if you knew, it was still all too easy to forget.
Embarrassingly enough, I was even a little hazy about the difference
between Moses and Charlton Heston. Part of the
problem here was that religion, per se, had never had the slightest credibility
to me. So, in my mind at least, these biblical stories were essentially nothing
more than a bunch of fairy tales. They were just a collection of myths and
legends that were popular because they gave us a false sense of security about
life. Some of them, I figured, like "The Ten Commandments", were good
enough to make it to the big screen. Given this attitude, it was little wonder
that Moses and Charlton Heston kind of blurred
together somewhere in the back of my mind.
Eventually, I was brought
to the understanding, that one of these men was a prophet, who brought down the
commandments on Mount Sinai, while the other was an actor, who brought up the
profits for Cecil B. DeMille and
As I learned a little
more and began to build-in a few spiritual practices, a number of other things
also began to fall into place. In a step by step fashion, a new cognitive
framework was gradually being constructed. This time, however, I was building
upon an entirely new set of basic assumptions about the way the world really
operated. Hopefully, it would help me make a lot more sense out of life.
Whereas in the past, I had looked at things almost exclusively in non-spiritual
terms, I was now starting to develop an understanding of life from much more of
a spiritual perspective. My old ways of looking at things had cost me dearly,
so this time, I hoped, I'd be building on a much stronger foundation.
As time went by, more of
these spiritually-based concepts slowly wound-up being validated. And,
little by little, they began to build upon one another. Eventually they became
better integrated with each other, and worked their way into the entire
cognitive system.
This may sound a little
obvious, but the fact that these concepts were actually making sense, was
critically important to this rebuilding process. If they didn't make sense or
have a good fit with reality, it would have been difficult to go on from there.
But, in general, they sat well with me, and, for the most part, I found them to
be highly compatible with the brief dose of wisdom that I had been exposed to.
I was particularly
impressed with the way these concepts fit with one another. Each of them seemed
to have an exquisite degree of internal consistency, and, when combined, they
were able to form a framework that hung-together very well. And I really liked
the building materials that were being used. They seemed to be of the very
highest quality. And the structure that they had formed wasn't just cold, hard,
and logical. Rather, I found it to be infused with a great deal of warmth,
humor, and light. And, at the heart of things, there seemed to be a profound
inner core of truth.
And, with each of these
realizations, there came a steadily growing sense of personal validation about
the correctness of my chosen spiritual path. Much to my surprise, I even found
myself feeling a bit less perplexed about things. Even though I was still very
much in the middle of a tremendous personal upheaval, I was,
never-the-less, able to make a lot more sense out of life. I could actually
feel myself building on a more solid foundation, and using concepts that had a
much better fit with reality. These concepts were proving to be quite useful. Useful enough, in fact, to help give me a much broader perspective
on life itself. And this was something that had been long overdue.
Like one of the three
little pigs, my house had blown over far too easily. As a matter of fact, at
the moment, the rubble was looking a little too much like
The whole process was,
really, kind of interesting. Some of the realizations that proved to be most
helpful to me, might, actually, seem a little surprising. They may even sound a
bit unimportant or possibly even a little out of sequence, but, they actually
resonated quite well with my own inner sense of spiritual truth. There was a
harmony with what I had been allowed to know.
So, through it all,
through this entire process of re-evaluation and reassessment, I continued to
use my mystical experience, as a major touchstone. Although verbally I was
still unable to explain or describe just what I had glimpsed during that ever
so brief moment of clarity, I did, however, have a pretty good idea about what
clashed with it. In a sense, a radar detector had been implanted deep within
me, and it seemed to be working very well.
Some of my logic may seem
a little unusual, but, for what it's worth, it was the kind of logic that I
found myself using at the time of my greatest personal clarity.
They say that writing is
most legible on a clean sheet of paper, and, in that respect at least, I think
I qualified. In one brief moment on the beach, the magic slate had been wiped clean.
Jewish Martyrs
One of my first
considerations was on Jewish martyrdom. For the first time in my life, I began
to really think about the staggering number of Jews who, over the centuries,
had willingly given-up their lives in order to hold onto the Torah. They
remained steadfast even if it meant persecution or death.
Over the course of
history, it has also been clear that the Jewish people has,
all too frequently, been labeled with a large number of negative qualities.
Depending on the time and the stereotype, we have been seen as being just about
everything from greedy and materialistic to unethical and dishonest. Sometimes
we have been the ones to label ourselves, but all too often, we have been given
these labels by the other nations of the world.
But, with all the real or
imagined faults that have been assigned to us, the Jewish people has typically
not been seen as lacking in intelligence or adaptability. Even our greatest detractors
would probably have to begrudge us that. In light of this consideration, as I
thought about the Jewish martyrs, it seemed pretty unlikely to me that they
would want to suffer or die for anything that seemed worthless or
insignificant, including a religion.
As I thought about all of
this, I also felt very strongly that a religion worth dying for would be a
religion worth living for. If it were, in fact, that precious, somehow it
shouldn't just be a casual thing that can be discarded for the sake of comfort
or convenience. I found myself thinking in strikingly black and white terms
about all of this, but somehow, a semi-true
religion would be a terribly strange thing to practice.
Fitting-in with all this
were some thoughts about others who seemed to pay a price for their beliefs.
Reflecting back on some people whom I had read about, or had even met
personally, it seemed like those individuals who seem to have some kind of
wisdom, are often no strangers to distinctness, separateness, or persecution. Wisemen, across many different spiritual traditions, often
tended to stand apart from the mainstream, and have often been ridiculed or
oppressed accordingly. In a sense, it seemed to come with the territory.
Although there were all
too many Jewish examples, there were also plenty of others as well. For one,
there was the image of Ben, my Aikido sensei, who might be thought of as
dressing funny, and not particularly eloquent or with-it. Even the Beatles sang
about "The Fool On The Hill."
Next Year In
There were a number of
other historical considerations as well. I may have been one of the last
persons to realize it, but the very existence of the present-day State of
Israel is truly a miraculous thing. And, on top of this, it doesn't just exist.
It is presently being inhabited by Jews who, amazingly enough, were now living
there after being away from their homeland for a few thousand years. This, you
would have to admit, was, certainly, a long time to be gone from the
neighborhood.
Generations of Jews, who
had only known life in exile, had come and gone, yet, the spiritual and
cultural traditions continued to be handed down from one generation to the
next. And, through all this, the hope still remained alive that, somehow, maybe
next year they would be in
It was simply
mind-boggling to think about. Even after being scattered around the globe for a
few thousand years, they had somehow managed to retain their distinct identity,
and return to their land. And a return to one's homeland after such a lengthy
absence was really quite unheard of in the entire history of the world.
If the New York Yankees,
for example, had gone away on a two thousand year road trip, what do you think
would happen to the team and to the fans? Would their ancestors know that they
had been descended from Joe Pepitone? Who would
remember what baseball even was? Actually, there probably would be a few
constants. Even after two thousand years, through some karmic quirk, Billy
Martin would probably still be getting fired and rehired every year by George
Steinbrenner.
But, as far as the Jews
were concerned, this was certainly one long, tiring stretch of away games to be
playing. There were new stadiums to adapt to, countless national anthems to
learn, and, being on a lunar calendar, there were numerous scheduling conflicts
to face. And, of course, you could always count-on the hoards of hostile fans,
and the many rigors of life on the road.
And, to make their return
even more impressive, the Jews clearly didn't accomplish any of this through
military might or by winning any popularity contests with the other nations of
the world. As a matter of fact, people had tried to blot us out for centuries,
and, miraculously, have continued to fail. There were, certainly, some great
tries, however.
But,
through it all, we still survived. Life was never made so bad for us that we
couldn't survive. And, on the other hand, life was never made so good for us
that we would disappear completely through assimilation and intermarriage. A
number of years ago, "Look Magazine" did an article about the trends
and statistics in Jewish assimilation. The odds were clearly stacked against
Jewish survival. Yet today, the Jews are still around, but it's really hard to
find a copy of "Look". Ironically, they were the ones who went out of
business, but the Jews didn't.
There was no way, I
realized, that Jewish survival or the return to the
"Am Yisrael Chai" - After all
these years, The Jewish People are still very much alive and kicking. If you
can understand this, you can begin to appreciate how a lot of other things
might be possible.
Rules and Regulations
There were a number of
other noteworthy realizations that came about primarily as a result of working
with the rabbi, and having the chance to watch him in action. As we studied
together, we moved along slowly, usually taking it line by line, and word by word.
Not only did this prove to be an effective way to learn, but it also gave me a
perspective on how the rabbi actually went about thinking things through. And,
as I closely observed his process of personal logic, it became increasingly
clear to me that the rabbi was, actually, very far removed from some of my
existing stereotypes.
Instead of the irrational
and superstitious religious fanatic that I had been expecting, he was, instead,
surprisingly rational and learned. The more we worked together, the more
impressed I became with his intellectual abilities and general level of
scholarship. Fittingly enough, he seemed to possess some of the ethical
sensitivities that you would hope for in a clergyman, but there was a lot more
that went along with it. Somehow, he had managed to combine some of the keen,
rational-legal thought processes of a lawyer, with some of the psychological
savvy of a good counselor or therapist. And, on top of this, he seemed to have
a good working knowledge of a number of different languages as well as a pretty
good understanding of the sciences, particularly as they applied to Jewish law.
So, basically, this was a
person who seemed to have a really well-trained mind. In my opinion, it was a
mind that compared quite favorably with those in academic circles, yet his set
of basic assumptions about life were radically different. When it came to
personal humility and faith in life, the rabbi seemed a little further along
than the typical college professor. It would be difficult to imagine someone
like my abnormal psych professor, for example, dancing joyously at a Hasidic
wedding. Instead, he'd probably be off somewhere, sipping a drink, and stewing
about life being a race between physical and mental illness.
On the whole, I very much
admired this tremendous faith and positiveness that
he had towards life. You could see how something like that might be
particularly appealing for the broken-hearted. The fact that
he was observant, and very enthusiastic about being observant, didn't really
hurt matters any. Certainly, this was a guy who didn't seem to be taking
his religion casually. As a matter of fact, in a number of key areas, he was
actually very black and white in his thinking. To him, something was either
kosher or it wasn't.
The rabbi also seemed to
be using his time wisely. Apparently, there was a lot to learn and a lot to do.
It might come as a bit of a shock to Cecil B. Demille,
but there are a lot more than just ten commandments to
worry about. For a traditional Jew it was, actually, more like six hundred and
thirteen, and, the rabbi ran after them all. Instead of seeming like a burden
to him, they were, instead, joyously pursued. I couldn't help noticing that
this was a little different from my usual attitude of schlepping and worrying.
It has always seemed to
me that a religion was a true or false kind of thing, and, if it were true, why
not be gung-ho about it? In my mind it couldn't really be true and false, or
partially true. It just couldn't be both. It's
practitioners could certainly be imperfect, and have their fair share of human
foibles and blemishes, but, it seemed to me, that the basic body of its wisdom
along with its guiding principles about life should, somehow, have an internal
consistency and an eternal usefulness.
I think I had always felt
that way, I just happened to suddenly change sides in mid-stream. In the past,
I had also been an all or nothing kind of guy when it came to religion, and,
was very much whole-hearted in my rejection of it. I viewed it as an outdated
bunch of superstitions and old wives tales, and treated it accordingly.
Life working in the funny
ways that it sometimes does, I now found myself in the
position of being a lot more open-minded about the whole thing. Now I was
yearning to find something that I could accept whole-heartedly, and be able to
embrace fully. I had blown-over like a house of cards in a strong wind, so the
idea of something that had a solid foundation and enduring worth was,
certainly, appealing.
There
were other aspects of the rabbi's attitude that I found myself appreciating as
well. I liked the way he was fitting himself into a structure instead of
structuring something just to fit him. He was working on fitting-in with the
rules, instead of picking, choosing, or modifying the rules to make them
convenient and palatable to him. This made a great deal of sense to me at the
time, even if it was an overwhelming prospect to me personally. I had never
thought that I would want to follow any rules much less six hundred and thirteen
of them.
Rules, I feared, would
cramp my style like a bad necktie. Obviously, they would interfere with the
enjoyment of life. And, to top it off, these were also spiritually-based rules, which would be very difficult for others
to appreciate. Doing "my own thing" was one thing, but now we're
talking about implementing some practices that would make me so different that
it put me very much at risk to ridicule and rejection.
By most standards it just seemed so terribly uncool. Almost by definition, "cool" people, at
least in the circles that I was familiar with, tried not to needlessly burden
themselves with rules. They listened, instead, to the sound of their own
drummer. If you had to follow all these rigid, lock-step rules, whose drummer
would you really get to listen to anyway? And, what would happen to
individuality and personal freedom?
In many ways, I had done
my own thing and had lost. Frank Sinatra may have done it "His Way",
but as for me, that approach had taken me right down the tubes into
overwhelming personal despair. Maybe along with Burger King, Frank too might be
a little off the mark about this one. Instead of having it my way, maybe it
would be worth my while to try to follow a discipline for a
for a change.
In light of a concept like spiritual
"surrender", it also seemed fitting to consider doing a few things
that didn't already fit neatly into my existing lifestyle. It seemed like a
pretty good bet that somewhere down the road I'd be doing a few things that
might be personally inconvenient. From where I was sitting, spiritual surrender
seemed to be one of the major common threads cutting across a wide variety of
spiritual traditions, and, in many ways, it seemed like it was the only game in
town.
Tefillin
As luck would have it, I
wouldn't have to wait all that long for something awkward and personally
inconvenient. In one of our first meetings, Rabbi Rivkin
introduced me to tefillin, the set of black leather
boxes and straps which are worn on the head and arm during prayer. And to
someone like me, they certainly needed an introduction. Somewhere in the back
of my mind there were some vague images of Jews wearing tefillin
at the Wall in
But, even if they weren't
exactly sweeping the country, they had, in fact, been faithfully worn by
countless generations of observant Jews. throughout
our history. A few years later I would hear someone tell me that the greatest
collection of tefillin could be found in the waters
of the Hudson River near
But, apparently, there
were still a few sets left, and, much to my horror, Rabbi Rivkin
was now taking a set out of a little velvet bag. I immediately went into a
state of shock thinking about what had finally become of me. As he lovingly
explained what they were, and carefully showed me how they were to be put on, I
became almost fried in my own self-conscious. I felt like the whole world was
watching. It had finally come down to this. The psychologist was finally
meeting infinity.
With all the delight of
someone being recircumcised without an anesthetic, I
listened as the rabbi continued his explanation. Apparently the boxes and
straps had to be positioned in certain ways in order to form certain powerful
Hebrew letters on your skin. There was supposed to be tremendous symbolism and
mystical significance in all of these little touches. But, in my mind, I might
as well have been playing with a rabbit's foot, rosary beads, or any other
religious props or paraphernalia that you could think of. None of these were
particularly meaningful or comforting to me in any way, including tefillin. One would probably be about as good as the other.
Probably except for tefillin. Somehow, they just
seemed like the strangest
of the strange. Yet here I was, allowing myself to put them on.
"Congratulations," he exclaimed,
"You've just been Bar Mitzvahed!" He was
serious. The fun just never seemed to stop. Since I was legally a Jewish adult,
slightly above the required age of thirteen, and it was my first official
mitzvah, congratulations were in order.
For understandable
reasons, I became momentarily disoriented. Not only was I a little old to be having
a bar mitzvah, but nobody was handing me savings bonds or fountain pens. And
there wasn't even a caterer in sight.
The rabbi instructed me
to put on the tefillin every weekday morning and to
begin reciting The Shema. This was the traditional
declaration of Jewish faith in the One God. Much to my relief, I had, at least,
heard of The Shema before. I had even remembered that it was supposed to
be recited as you were dying or being led to your death. Hopefully that
wouldn't be happening later that day. He gave me my little Shema
pamphlet, and a set of "loaner" tefillin,
and sent me on my way.
Needless to say, the next
morning I felt tremendously self-conscious as I went about putting-on tefillin for the very first time in my very own suburban
home. I felt like everyone in the neighborhood, including my family, was
watching and listening to every last detail. Pictures, I was sure, were being
beamed back to earth, with both Walter Cronkite and Ted Koppel trying to
interpret the events.
I carefully locked the
door and made sure that everyone would be staying out of the room for a while.
I'm sure the kids would understand. I was just kind of wrapping myself up in
some sort of a black leather web, kind of like a Jewish Spider Man. Daddy, you
see, wasn't out for his usual morning walk. He's just busy strapping leather
boxes on himself. And are the boxes empty? No, of course not.
Sewn inside the little boxes are tiny, little pieces of parchment, on which a
scribe has hand-written key passages from the Torah. Nothing unusual there!
And, yes kids, he is talking in there, it's not your
imagination. And, yes,
that's right, there is nobody else in the room with him. He
talking with some sort of invisible force in the universe, kind of like
Luke Skywalker did in "Star Wars". It's a little hard to explain,
but, basically he's just kind of wrapped-up in leather boxes and straps, and
talking to himself. Surely you wouldn't find anything strange about all this,
would you?
But, even with all of
this intensely paranoid self-consciousness, I still managed to put the tefillin on and say the blessings and prayers. And, as I
stood there, my concentration was broken as I was startled to notice myself
automatically rocking back and forth and swaying rhythmically. If I didn't know
better, it almost seemed very similar to the way that Jews moved when they
prayed. And, it had been most unintentional on my part. I was truly amazed by
this, it seemed almost instinctive. It was almost as though the Jew within me
was being released through prayer.
As they days went by, I
noticed a definite progression in my attitude about putting on tefillin. It went from:
- This is really bizarre,
I hope nobody sees this! to
- Well I guess I might as
well put them on before I get rolling. to
- Boy, I really feel
funny if I don't put them on before I head-out into
the world.
Even if was only a
crutch, it was, apparently, a pretty good one. But it really went a lot deeper
than that. Each time I went through it I felt noticeably better. There was
something tremendously stabilizing in all of this. In a way, I felt like what I
was really doing was anchoring myself in reality. I was reminding myself or
refreshing my memory as to which end was really up. I felt spiritually
strengthened, and better able to meet the day. There was a lot of work to be
done out there, and there were plenty of complexities,
distortions, and wishful thinking that could complicate the job. The clearer I
was, the better it would be.
Windex
I also began to notice
that the more Torah I studied, the more clear-headed I would feel. It was
almost as simple as that. Like some kind of cosmic Windex for the windows of
your soul, it would, somehow, manage to remove the everyday build-up of
smudges, dust, and debris, and your vision wouldn't be quite so cloudy anymore.
It was fortunate that I
was still high enough at the time to stay aware of the cause and effect
relationship in all of this. For a number of different reasons I'm not always
that clear anymore. But, at that point in my life, not only would I usually be
clear-headed and spiritually strengthened from my learning, but I would also
feel tremendously relieved as well.
The clarity of thought
itself was the reinforcement. Like some sort of cosmic biofeedback, it brought
with it a tremendous sense of personal confirmation that I was somehow on the
right track or, at least, somewhere in the right ballpark. It was a feeling
that had been noticeably missing after my conversation with the campus
minister, for example, or when I was pacing back and forth on the grounds of
the Self-Realization Fellowship. Looking back at it, I was probably getting
just as much guidance before, but I was too busy feeling bitter about some of
the blind alleys that I had been running into. Now, as I was,
apparently, "getting warmer", I could feel the guidance coming from
above. It was a tremendous relief to be narrowing down the search.
Although I realized that
I was, finally, in the right ballpark, I was also acutely aware of the fact
that I didn't really know the rules or how to play the game. Certainly, I
wasn't overconfident about my ability to hit major league pitching. Some good
coaching probably would have helped, but I was having more than a little
trouble trusting The Manager and His coaching staff. I was still a little
confused about what I needed to do in order to be successful at this level of
spiritual competition, and, to make matters worse, there seemed to be a lot of
people running around claiming to be coaches. I needed some guidelines for finding
some guidelines.
Guidelines
After my experience, I
really wound-up racking my brains trying to get a perspective on the whole
issue of spiritual guidelines. In trying to get my bearings, I began with a few
basic assumptions that I felt pretty confident about, and went on from there.
As touchstones in this I found myself coming back to what I knew from my own
direct experience, combined with some of the things that I had learned about
the nature of the Divine Personality. Although I didn't administer any
personality tests, I could, never-the-less, deduce a few things from His
actions.
Starting from square one,
from my own direct mystical encounter, it was undeniably clear to me that there
was a God. This was something that was no longer open to debate. It was
virtually the only thing that I knew with absolute certainty, and, as a matter
of fact, I was much more confident about His existence than I was about my own.
Although virtually all of His actions were beyond my realm of
comprehension, and sometimes even ran against my own sentiments, I certainly
had to acknowledge His expertise and His benevolence. In my own particular
case, for example, I had, clearly, been the recipient of a gracious and
merciful act. It seemed equally clear to me that He, almost by definition, has
the best interests of the world at heart. And, even if He didn't
have our best interests at heart, I really wasn't in a position
to argue with that kind of power and sophistication. The very fact of His
existence almost simultaneously defines what is good. And, for a resident of
the universe, it was really the only game in town, and, as I learned a little
more about it, it actually turned-out to be a pretty good game after all, even
if it didn't really need to be. From what I could tell, it seemed like the
Commissioner's Office really had a tremendous amount of discretionary power in
all of this. The game, it seems, could certainly have been set-up in a number
of different ways. It really didn't have to be enjoyable, or even fair for that
matter.
As I began to spend a
little time familiarizing myself with the official rule book, I began to get a
better idea about the object of the game as well as some of the ground rules.
From what I could tell, it seemed pretty clear to me that the main objective or
purpose in life was, basically, a spiritual one. It
seemed to involve devoting a fair amount of time and energy to acquiring
wisdom, refining one's character, and trying to do some good while you were
here.
From what I had seen from myself and
others, this essentially spiritual nature of our purpose in life doesn't really
seem to be all that obvious to people, particularly to those living in our
particular culture. If they do, actually, have a grasp on this, they, certainly,
have a funny way of showing it. This was one boat that I had obviously missed
myself, and missed rather badly. I certainly didn't suspect this before my
experience, and, even to this day, it's something that I almost constantly
forget. One of the
problems is that there's just so much going on in this game that it's hard to
even know what you should try to keep your eye on. A three ring circus is a lot
simpler by comparison. It truth, it's all too easy to lose sight of the
rules or to even forget why you were playing the game in the first place.
Reminders of just how
elusive and forgettable this spiritual purpose really is can sometimes come in
funny forms. Every once in a while I'll find myself stopped at a light next to
a hot-looking pick-up truck. Usually it's been lifted and
customized with things like alloy rims and oversized tires. Sometimes
there'll be a sticker on the window of the cab - "He Who Dies With The Most Toys Wins".
I could be wrong, but
somehow that doesn't strike me as representing a terribly strong spiritual
orientation towards life. Comparisons can often be dangerous, but I like to
think that, even at my worst, I never managed to get quite that confused or
materialistic. On the other hand, I probably managed a few things that they wouldn't
stoop to either. Also, I hate to admit it, but, the sticker is usually on some
pretty sharp-looking trucks.
But, perhaps I'm
digressing. The light turned green and the truck is gone, leaving me in a cloud
of dust, so maybe I should continue on with my line of thought.
As I
was saying, if the purpose of life was, basically, a spiritual one, the odds
are that we would probably have been given some clues or guidelines to follow
since, if nothing else, the purpose isn't always all that obvious. If there
were no clues or guidelines, it would all be a rather hit or miss kind of
affair. We would be left on our own to learn through some haphazard process of
trial and error. And having people grope around, completely in the dark, while
expecting them to learn valuable lessons in some imaginary Classroom of Life,
would seem to be, if nothing else, tremendously inefficient. Milton Bradley at
his worst wouldn't even design a game this poorly, much less Someone
with an infinitely higher degree of intelligence and sense of fair play.
On top of this, you would
also need some guidelines just to minimize some of the damage to one's self and
to others. Somehow, it would seem needlessly cruel and punitive to have people
bumping into each other as they groped around in the dark. To then hold them
responsible or accountable for their actions would make the whole thing into
some sort of sick joke.
A little contemplation on
human nature itself, would also seem to offer living
proof of our need for such guidelines. Man, it would seem, already has his
hands pretty full just with himself. Along with his limited knowledge, he is
faced with all too many powerful drives, feelings, and instincts. At the same
time, he has managed to develop a rather uncanny ability to rationalize just
about anything he does. So, given this particularly dangerous combination, it
would be difficult to trust his feelings or intuition to be reliable guides
about proper action. Basically, if nothing else, the poor guy does look like he
could use a little outside help.
And, if there is any
Divine mercy or compassion out there in the universe, one might expect some
sort of help to be forthcoming. If nothing else, if there is any sense of fair play out there, people
should at least get a chance to look over the rules. So, at least the way it
was looking to me, judging by man's needs as well as the nature of Divine
justice and mercy, it seemed pretty likely that these guidelines were out there
somewhere, and were, somehow, accessible to human beings. The question then
becomes more a matter of which particular form these guidelines should take.
I remember thinking that
it would make a great deal of sense if these guidelines would, somehow, be
given to man in a very understandable and usable form. Why go through all the
trouble of giving someone a gift that they can't use, or a life preserver that
would only pull them under and drown them?
Or why would you send it in a form that might be personally overwhelming
to the recipient?
And, over the course of
time, people, both individually and collectively, seem to have been overwhelmed
in this very manner. When the Jews were receiving the commandments on
On the whole, I found
myself noticing quite a few of these parallels between my individual experience
and the experiences of the Jewish People as a whole. In truth, I probably
generalized quite a bit from my one direct spiritual experience, but, it would
be hard not to. I couldn't help noticing how I had been treated personally, and
what that might have been saying about the way we are cared for by our Maker.
If God had treated someone like me with such undeserved kindness, for example, I
thought the odds might also be pretty good that other inhabitants of the earth
might be treated in a similar manner.
I also felt pretty sure
that, somewhere along the way, contact had also been made with someone else
other than myself. If I had been the only person in
history to have this kind of religious experience it would be a pretty
frightening thought. So I felt pretty confident that there had to have been
others. Given the high probability of all of this, religion in general was
starting to have a lot more credibility.
Take My Manna, Please
There were a few other
noteworthy things that I came upon in my readings which sat well with me at
more of a personal or human level. In general, they had less to do with
religious or philosophical considerations, and more to do with the way human
character, human experience, and human emotion were
portrayed.
For the most part, these
things were presented in a way that fit well with my own life experience, and
my own understanding of human nature. There were a few key descriptions, in
particular, that really seemed to click for me, either because I identified
with them personally, or because they just fit-in-well with what I had seen of
life. Each click of recognition, helped me feel a
little more confident about my newly chosen spiritual path.
One good example of this
had to do with the way Jewish heroes and characters were portrayed in the
biblical texts. Instead of being presented as larger than life "super
heroes", they were shown, instead, to be very, very human. Although many
of them showed tremendous spiritual strength and understanding, they still made
their share of mistakes. And these mistakes and weaknesses usually weren't
hidden of covered-up. Sometimes they were pointed-out in a soft or indirect
manner that might avoid embarrassment, but that was also good to seen. Even
that might drive-home a lesson about trying to be more sensitive about possibly
embarrassing someone in public.
To me, this more balanced
or more realistic presentation made these texts a lot more palatable, and much
more believable. It also made them a lot more useful. Instead of being
bombarded with propaganda or with a giant publicity campaign about the Jewish
religion, you were, instead, given something to learn from and try to apply to
your own life. If nothing else, you could learn a lot about human psychology
just by analyzing some of these biblical personalities, and seeing how their
strengths and weaknesses influenced their own behavior and character
development.
You could also learn a
lot about your own psychology through reading things like The Book of Psalms,
for example. In my own readings I found myself encountering a number of things
that really seemed to echo my own experience. Through this process of recognition
and identification, I began to appreciate the fact that many of my feelings
were a lot more universal than I had previously realized. In fact, they had,
apparently, been experienced by countless others throughout the course of human
history. Understanding this gave me a welcome feeling of relief, and made me
feel much less alienated and alone.
And then there was the
tremendous rush of recognition that came when I finally found my people. It
came to me when we were reading about the Jews being led through the wilderness
after their exodus from slavery in
The WASPs might have said
something like, "Well Jim, I've simply had about as much of this as I'm
going to take!"
Other groups might have
starting fighting with each other, or may have even decided to hire a hit man.
But not the Jews!
"Weren't there
enough graves in
This guy had to be an
early forerunner of the latter-day Catskill comedian - "Take my manna,
please!"
This book might be
thousands of years old, but I know these guys. These are my people - a Nation
of Comedians.
Negotiating the Mitzvahs
As part of the deal for
agreeing to become the "Chosen People", the Jews were given a total
of six hundred and thirteen positive and negative commandments to follow.
Regulating virtually every aspect of your life, they provided a structure for
you to follow through which you could learn how to act properly, how to elevate
your character, and how to use your time and energies wisely while you were
still living on Planet Earth. If I was looking for opportunities for spiritual
surrender, apparently, I was in luck.
And the mitzvahs weren't
just to be performed in a perfunctory manner either. To be done properly, they
needed to be performed at the right time and place, along with the proper
attitude and intention. Each opportunity for a mitzvah was seen as precious.
Sometimes it would only present itself once, and then it would be gone forever,
so timely action was essential. All in all, this was a spiritual discipline
with a very behavioral approach to life. In a world designed for action, there
was a lot to do. We could always plan on resting later, on the other side of
the finish line.
For a
person coming from a totally non-religious background, it was, obviously, going
to be a tremendous challenge for me to work my way up to such a high level of
observance. And, given my level of religious ignorance as well as the delicacy
of my family situation, I knew I couldn't incorporate all of these practices
into my life without making some really big waves. In many ways, it made a lot
more sense for me to try a more gradual approach, but moving ahead in more of a
step by step fashion also proved to be difficult. And, it wasn't exactly
fostering peace and harmony on the home front, or anywhere else for that
matter. As a matter of fact, it seemed like just about everything I did or
didn't do in the way of religious observance, managed to create some sort of
tension or conflict. Borrowing a line from Gary Shandling
when talking about his love life, "this just didn't seem to be good for
anyone."
So, even with some pretty
strong motivation on my part, negotiating the mitzvahs was far from a smooth
and easy process. Part of the problem was my own unique blend of religious
ignorance and religious arrogance. After all the years of doing my own thing
and trusting my own feelings, it was hard for me to let go of that way of doing
things. Like a lot of other people, I still wanted to feel like I was in
control of my own life.
But I also realized that I needed to keep
pruning-back my amazingly resilient ego, and try to move ahead spiritually.
And, as far as that was concerned I found myself becoming increasingly
frustrated with my lack of progress. I was also beginning to feel much too
isolated. The more I seemed to learn, and the more I seemed to practice, the
more it seemed to alienate me from the rest of the family. It was a trend I
didn't particularly like.
Somehow, in order to
create a few less problems and conflicts, it seemed like a good idea to try to
work the rest of my family into some of this. If nothing else, I wanted to
reduce their terror about my becoming a more observant person. I was scared
enough about those prospects myself, and everyone's
terror seemed to be feeding-off everyone else's. I was scaring so many people
that I began to incorporated it into my identity. When people screamed, and I
realized that they were screaming at me, I also wanted to hide from myself.
So, basically, I knew I
had to move ahead, and if it were at all possible, I wanted my family to be
able to come along with me. And, as these became more important goals to me, Chabad started to look more and more like a difficult place
for me to realize them. As I imagined myself continuing at Chabad,
I could also picture losing my family in the process.
For an individual coming
out of a mystical experience it was one thing, but for the average family it
was another thing altogether. To them, and probably to a lesser degree even to myself, Chabad represented a
spiritual step that was much too large for us to take. Like a strong shot of
gin, the hasids were a
little too undiluted in their Jewishness for our
comfort. They were much too different for us to feel safe with. Real or
imagined, they represented a symbolic threat to the stability of our family,
and that was more than enough reason to shy away.
So, even though I was
grateful to Chabad for bringing me into the right
ballpark, and getting me started with some learning, it looked like it was time
to be moving on. Personally, at that particular point in my life, it just
didn't seem like the right place for me to be. With the ever present threat of
change and uncertainty hanging over my head, I found myself hoping that I
wouldn't have to become one of them in order for me to fulfill my particular
purpose in life.
I had already been
through a lot of sudden and dramatic changes, and I wasn't anxious to
experience too many more. I wasn't eager to jeopardize any of my few remaining
sources of personal stability, especially my wife and my family. The cosmic rug
had already been pulled out from under me, and even though I had miraculously
landed on my feet, I still hadn't forgotten what a close call it had had been.
I figured my best chance
would, eventually, be with the Orthodox, but for the time being, I was hoping
for something a little less drastic-looking. The Conservative and Reform
branches seemed like long shots, but they were still pretty tempting. They
offered me a chance to at least appear semi-normal for a little while longer,
and they would spare my family from the threat of massive changes. At some
level this was all pretty tempting, even if, in my heart of hearts, I knew it
was just a bad case of wishful thinking. If nothing else it showed just how
desperate I was to win a few points with the family.
Although they might have
been my fantasy ticket to a more normal existence, in truth, I found myself
feeling incredibly intolerant and critical of these more liberal branches of
Judaism. Far from being accepting and open-minded about them, sport that I was,
I basically felt like they had no legitimate right to exist. Luckily for
everyone I wasn't running the universe.
On the other hand, it
would really be a bit of a stretch to see these approaches as fitting-in well
with a concept like spiritual surrender. There were too many concessions to
convenience and modern life. They seemed to emphasize doing things that made sense to you, like keeping kosher for reasons of
health as opposed to doing it more out of purely spiritual considerations.
Traditionally, this is viewed as a little too finicky and dangerous for your
own good.
Although I still have
some trouble with them, after years of making more than enough mistakes of my
own, I've come to the conclusion that we're, probably, just screwing-up in
different ways. Given what they know, they're probably doing more with it than
I'm doing with what I know.
All in all, these
approaches, probably, made lot more sense at more of a social or community
level than they did at the spiritual level. All of them were important.
Meanwhile Back At The Ranch
Although I may have been
getting more spiritually focused myself, I really wasn't doing all that much
for the rest of my family, particularly my wife. As a matter of fact, from the
moment I returned home from the beach that Friday afternoon, and told her what
had happened, things would never really be quite the same again between us. For
Marianne, my experience and its subsequent impact had the emotional effect of a
tidal wave. The initial hit was deep and damaging, and the ripples continue to
this very day.
Ironically, my healing
and the way I dealt with it, actually managed to traumatize my loved ones, and,
even after all these years, the wounds have never really healed completely.
They remained, instead, frozen in time and covered-over by layers of fear,
reasonableness and compromise. There were just too many feelings of hurt and
betrayal. They would not be easily forgotten.
My wife had seen me bolt
out the door an anxiety-ridden agnostic, and return, a few short hours later,
radiating all sorts of light and spiritual energy, and talking incoherently
about revelations and death-rebirth experiences. Needless to say, being on the
receiving end of something like this must have been a tremendous shock to her
system.
When I came through the
door I was still so tremendously awe-stricken and disoriented that I could
barely put any of it into words. I barely
knew what to think, much less how to, actually, convey it to anyone else. I
can't really imagine what I might have, actually, said to her, but, whatever it
was, I'm sure it was enough to cause her grave concern. Looking back at it, it
was, probably, a poor time to say very much, particularly if I was looking to
have any credibility.
But, for the most part, I
wasn't really as concerned with that as I should have been. Even though I was
pretty disoriented, I was still feeling tremendously excited and relieved. In
many ways, in fact, I had never felt better in my life. Physically and
spiritually I felt completely healed, and my breathing was incredibly calm and
deep. My color was also radiant and wonderful, and my eyes were clear, probably
clearer than they had ever been. And my vision was even clearer.
But, whatever relief and positiveness my experience may have held for me, they
became almost immediately overshadowed by the obvious alarm it was creating in
my wife. Rather than wanting to take notes or open a holy shrine, she instead
must have prepared herself for fight or flight. Certainly she'd have to be
strong and remain in control. After all, who else would be able to step in and
maintain the stability of the family? Her husband, obviously, wasn't going to
be the one to do it. He was busy becoming some sort of a religious basketcase. He, clearly, wasn't functioning any more, and
there was no telling when or if he ever would be.
So although, in some
ways, my search may have been over, my wife's problems were only just
beginning. Her life had suddenly been turned-into a bad version of
"Invasion of the Body Snatchers", and she hadn't asked for any of
this. Someone had, obviously, taken control of her husband's mind and body, and
although he may have looked a lot like Steve, he obviously wasn't the Steve
that she had come to know and love. She wanted him back, and she had no idea of
where he was or if he would ever return. That thing from the giant pod had,
somehow, replicated him, and had done something horrendous to his emotional
system.
For all intents and
purposes my wife had suddenly been widowed, but, in many ways, this seemed even
worse. She couldn't just bury me, go through her grief, and get on with the
rest of her life. Instead, through some cruel twist of fate, she was now forced
to live with a zombie doing mitzvahs.
The situation was a
natural for generating feelings of suspicion and betrayal, and, although she
initially reacted with concern and worry, it probably didn't take all that long
for her sense of betrayal to kick-in. Looking back at
it, her sense of betrayal may have come first, and most of it was probably
pretty unconscious. Mine came a little later when I realized just how much she
wanted me to go back to the way I had been. In her heart of hearts, she just
kept hoping and hoping that all of this would soon wear-off and go-away.
To my continued
astonishment and horror, she kept wanting the "old" Steve back, but,
I knew that was impossible. To me, it was pretty clear that the "old"
Steve had gone about as far as he could go. He had given it the old college
try, but he had finally reached the end of the line, and would never be quite
the same again.
But, I was so caught-up
in the intense immediacy of my own situation that I failed to appreciate just
how difficult this must have been for her. In my present condition I was about
as far from being objective as I could possibly be, and, as a result, I managed
to feel tremendously shocked and offended by her reactions. Her feelings of panic
and betrayal terrified me even more and escalated my own feelings of panic and
betrayal. This was my wife! Why was she acting this way? After all our years
together I thought that she should just trust me on all of this. Why would I be
making any of this up, after all I had been totally anti-religious ever since
she had known me. What did I have to gain by any of this, I wasn't a
missionary?
I had turned her life into "Invasion of
the Body Snatchers", but she had returned the favor. I felt like the guy who
had seen them delivering truckloads of giant pods. I
knew we were all in tremendous danger, but no one would believe me. I hit a
level of frustration that was beyond belief. At times I felt like I was
screaming from inside a sound-proof booth.
Help In The Gray Area
Things got to the point
where all we seemed to have in common were our fear of change and our mutual
sense of betrayal, and, as .a common bond, that was really a tough thing for us
to build on. All too often, we found ourselves on opposite sides, pulling for
different things. My steps forward were seen as steps backward, and my steps
backward were seen as encouraging signs of normalcy and health. My break-throughs and insights about life were treated like figments
of my imagination. I wanted to hold onto them forever, but she hoped they would
all go away. We had become adversaries instead of partners.
My frustration and rage over this was
tremendous, and it continued to grow, and this, in turn, made me seem even more
unstable to my wife. It offered her further validation for her already
substantial fears and suspicions. I found myself feeling bad about myself too.
Far from feeling like some kind of spiritual hero, I felt a lot more like a
criminal. There was a deep sense of shame and guilt for subjecting my family to
this kind of torture and terror. These were my loved-ones yet I seemed to be
bringing them nothing but unhappiness.
As a
couple we had reached an impasse, and we realized that we needed some help.
But, we were stuck in the gray area between psychological and religious issues,
and it was hard to figure-out who we should turn to. As for myself, I was in no
mood for a psychologist or any other mental health practitioner. Even though I
was still, technically, one myself, I just didn't trust their ability to handle
spiritual issues without reducing them into psychological terms. This was
counterbalanced by my wife's apprehensions about the rabbinate, and the clergy
in general. She had difficulty understanding how a clergyman could be unbiased
in the area of religion, and it was hard to disagree.
We made a few attempts at
rabbinical counseling, but these ventures proved to be unsuccessful.
Unfortunately for everyone, the Chabad rabbis managed
to offend my wife almost instantly. In all fairness, it probably wouldn't have
taken all that much to press the wrong buttons, but they were pretty young,
and, not particularly well-trained as counselors. As a result, they managed to
put her on the defensive almost immediately. In attempting to open her mind to
the idea of Jewish observance, they wound-up in a heated debate about the
relative merits of different lifestyles. Understandably enough, my wife felt no
need to justify her lifestyle to anyone else, let alone people who seemed, to
her, to be religious fanatics. She felt like she was basically a good person,
and felt no need to apologize for the way she led her life.
The unfortunate
defensiveness that all of this elicited quickly brought down the curtain on
that particular avenue of help. But, we decided not to give-up on rabbis altogether. There were just too many Jewish issues
tied-up in all of this to risk moving out of the rabbinical sphere altogether.
So we sought-out a few other rabbis who, we hoped, would be more moderate in
their approach to religion.
But, they too, didn't
seem to have what we needed. On the whole, we found them to be very bright,
well-spoken, and extremely cordial, but, when it came to actually helping us
with our own particular situation there were some problems. Ironically enough,
these rabbis seemed much more sensitive to the psychological issues than they
did to the spiritual ones. In comparison to the Chabad
rabbis, for example, they were much more savvy about
pastoral counseling, but they seemed almost completely lost when it came to
actually working-through some of the religious issues. For spiritual advisors
they seemed unusually perplexed about spiritual things.
Looking back at it now, I
have a much greater appreciation for just how difficult we must have been for
them. Even without all of the delicate religious issues compounding everything,
the relationship itself was in a terrible state of disrepair. We were barely
talking with each other, were easily hurt, and extremely well-protected around
each other. As a couple, we would have been a challenge for any helping
professional, regardless of their background or level of training.
And, we weren't exactly
in the most clear-headed, objective position about all of this. We were
operating, instead, out of a perspective that had become constricted by our own
sense of panic and desperation. We were under pressure, and it showed. We
desperately needed some answers, maybe even some magic ones, and we were
extremely discouraged and frustrated when we didn't seem to be getting any.
And, we weren't really in a position to see much beyond this.
But, even though some of
our expectations may have been unrealistic, it still seemed like some of the
rabbinical advice was lacking in genuine understanding, particularly when it
came to the spiritual issues. Some of it was also delivered with what seemed to
be a terrible sense of timing, sometimes, seemingly, out of synch by months or
even years.
Some of their responses
were also given at a level that seemed very different than the one we really
needed help on. I remember telling a rabbi about how my family was falling
apart and, basically, I was told to come to shul,
bring the family, have a little wine, a little cake, and so on. This might have
been a good idea and some nice sentiment, but it was something that neither of
us could relate to at that particular time in our lives. The rabbi was,
probably, thinking of us more in terms of people who needed to re-involve
themselves in the Jewish community. This, probably, assumed a little too much
in the way of a Jewish background on our parts. Apparently, we had failed to
convey to him just how ignorant and out-of-touch we, actually, were about
Jewish rituals and customs. He didn't seem to appreciate that we were, basically,
starting from square one.
Even though we hadn't
sought out any psychologists, we wound-up working with a Conservative rabbi
who, ironically enough, proved to be more helpful at a psychological level than
he was at the spiritual level. He pushed for some better communication between
the two of us, and, to a certain extent, did some things that were helpful and
therapeutic.
I wasn't nearly as
grateful about that as I should have been, but there were too many other
frustrations and disappointments. One of the most exasperating aspects of
dealing with him was the seeming absence of a spiritual orientation to life. He
seemed more religious than spiritual, and this confused had angered me even if
I wasn't all that clear on the difference myself. Part of my education, it
seemed, would be to learn that all clergymen weren't necessarily
spiritual.
At one point I became
particularly frustrated with the lack of answers and spiritual guidance and
direction, and the rabbi sensed that he wasn't living-up to my expectations. To
my surprise he defended himself by telling me that it seemed like I was looking
for a guru and not a rabbi.
I remember pointing to
the sign on his door that said "Spiritual Advisor" and, with great
hostility, asking him just exactly what the sign meant. "Can you advise me
spiritually or do you just plan Bar Mitzvahs?" It probably sounded a lot
like the fellow complaining to Moses about being taken into the wilderness to
die.
I'm sure that none of the
rabbis enjoyed my intensity, confrontiveness, and
general hostility. I was, certainly, no bargain for them. Looking back at it,
the expectations that we had for them were really much too high. What we really
needed, it seemed, was help on a number of different levels simultaneously. We
needed help as a couple, and we also needed help in finding a spiritual teacher
and a supportive community to help us move ahead Jewishly
And, even though these
rabbis were highly educated people, they weren't necessarily sages or wisemen. They were just human beings like the rest of us,
and they freely admitted this to us. But, as harsh and unreasonable as this
sounds on my part, it bothered me that they admitted this so easily. Their
admission of human fallibility seemed almost like a cop-out for their lack of spiritual
understanding.
But, even with all the
frustration and disappointment, I think that in a funny sort of a way, we
actually got what we were looking for. We wanted to get away from religious
zealots for a while and we did. And, we were looking for moderation, and we got
exactly what we were looking for in that department. Looking back at it now, it
almost seems like I was setting all of this up to fail. In my heart I had to
have known that these moderate voices really made too many concessions to convenience.
At some level I knew that it was only the Orthodox who really approached their
religion like a true spiritual discipline. An idea like "spiritual
surrender" would be an alien concept to these moderate, yet
reasonable-sounding voices.
But, maybe I thought that
I was buying a little time for us, and a little more credibility for the Jewish
religion. These rabbis and their congregations were a lot more like
"normal" people to us even if they were a bit conservative. And they
were fine for who they were, even if they weren't what we ultimately needed.
So, even though some of their responses may have been disappointing, they were
appropriate to the level of observance at which they were holding.
For Marianne and myself, maybe these were just some necessary steps along the
way. It would have been much too big a jump into something more heavy duty.
Even if he wasn't a "guru", the Conservative rabbi, in particular,
really did help us on a number of levels. For one thing, he helped us do some of
the psychological work that we needed to get out of the way before we could
really start dealing with the Jewish issues, and he also helped us get a more
palatable introduction to the world of services and rituals. The
kids. in particular, really liked to go there on
Friday nights. They started to get into the rhythm of it all.
As far as getting help in
resolving some of the Jewish issues, we, actually, wound-up
having our best luck with a psychologist who, humorously enough, also
happened to be black and a woman. After a number of unsuccessful attempts at
rabbinical counseling we still had so much left to resolve, that we just had to
keep looking for help. But, between the two of us we managed to eliminate just
about everyone possible because they were biased in one way or another when it
came to religious issues. The field had narrowed-itself-down to the point where
Marva was the only person we could agree on whom we
both respected and who also might be neutral on Jewish issues.
Working-through some of our Jewish issues with a black woman
psychologist turned-out to be a pretty interesting experience, and I'm sure she
learned a few new things about the Jewish people in the process. Like the
rabbi, she also focused a lot more on the emotional issues rather than the
religious ones. With some tremendous patience and perseverance she was,
eventually, able
to get us to the point where we could at least let down some our defenses and
start dealing with each other in a less hostile way. As our communication
slowly improved, we were able to develop some better understanding and a little
common ground. Apparently the psychological issues needed to be addressed first
before we could even think about getting to the rest of it. This would be a
good lesson to learn.
Another thing that proved
to be helpful was a Marriage Encounter weekend. It’s
goal was to make good marriages even better, but we went anyway. We spent a lot
of time writing-out our feelings and sharing them through exchanged notebooks.
The relatively non-threatening format helped us cut-through some of our regular
destructive patterns. All in all, we found it very much worthwhile, and we kept
our Marriage Encounter sticker on our car for quite some time.
Black Sabbath
Looking back at it, one
of my major mistakes was in not integrating these new religious practices in
much more of a gradual and thoughtful way. In spiritual growth just as in many
other areas of life, slow and steady usually wins the race, but, unfortunately,
I didn't realize that I had the luxury of very much time. Although I knew that
God existed, and I had a sense of His awesome power, I really didn't know all
that much about His character, particularly when it came to things like
patience and mercy. My relationship with Him was still very new, and I found
myself severely underestimating just how much compassion there, actually, was
out there.
It's
funny, but I kept running into people who were very envious of my direct
religious experience. After struggling with their own faith for so many years
they envied my absence of doubt. But, comparisons like these were, obviously,
dangerous to make. The grass wasn't always greener once you got to the other
side. They didn't seem to realize that, in many ways they were underestimating
the value of some of the things that they already had that I didn't. I may have
had a piece that they desperately wanted, but they, in turn, had some pieces
that I probably could have used a lot myself. In fact, I found myself envying the
faith and courage that they were able to show. Somehow, they were able to trust
life in spite of some of their spiritual doubts and uncertainties. To me, this
was something that seemed truly admirable. I, on the other hand, apparently,
needed to take a peek at the answer sheet in order to make it through the rest
of the test.
But, apparently, everyone
is running his own race, and, as far as I was concerned, I was starting from
the somewhat unique position of having no doubts as to God's existence, but plenty
of doubts as to the true nature of His character. I lacked the faith and trust
of even the simplest of persons, and, far from being relaxed and trusting about
how I would be treated and judged, I found myself, instead, extremely
panic-stricken and paranoid. Far from being gracious and inspiring, I found
myself, instead, being rather bitter and wretched.
Jewishly, when
they talk about having a "fear of God" they mean it more as a sense
of awe and reverence. I, undoubtedly, had some of that, but I was also running
around like a chicken without its head, trying to avoid punishment. But, given
my particular frame of reference, that too was, actually, very understandable.
In my mind at least, there was a very strong likelihood that, at any moment, I
would be struck down by lightning, or by whatever else might be hurled-down at
me that happened to have my number on it.
I
assumed that since I had no doubt as to the way things really were, that I really had no excuse for not becoming an
observant Jew, as quickly and as perfectly as possible. Others, with their
doubts and uncertainties would have the luxury of being able to dabble. But, as
for myself, after my sudden head-on mystical encounter, I didn't have that kind
of a luxury. I was all too intensely aware of the fact that here was an
all-knowing and extremely powerful force out there, that
knew that I knew. And, I couldn't really pretend that I didn't know either,
particularly at first, although, over the years I, actually, got a lot better
at it.
My progress in moving
ahead Jewishly was also
strongly affected by the fact that I really had no idea about what I was,
actually, doing. Many of my ideas about
what it took to become a religious person were quite infantile and unrealistic.
I had no idea about just how much effort, learning, and discipline, actually,
went into it. Sadly enough, my staggering degree of personal ignorance about
all of this was, probably, an accurate reflection of just how little thought I had really given to
it over all those years.
But, for those of you who
like to know that there really is justice out there, you'll be relieved to know
that I did, in fact, pay a pretty steep price for my ignorance. Floundering in
my in my own self-imposed darkness, I found myself doing things improperly,
quite often terribly out of sequence, and, almost always with the wrong
attitude or spirit. I almost made a career out of putting the cart before the
horse, and it wreaked havoc on those around me.
In my futile attempt to
become an instant hasid, I
found myself worrying about things like violating the Sabbath by accidentally
turning-on the tiny lightbulb inside the refrigerator
whenever I’d open the door instead of worrying about the fact that I was almost
completely clueless about how to really observe the Sabbath in the first place.
And all of this rather uncharming obsessiveness
was also driving my family crazy.
Further compounding the
problem was the fact that I still had much too much faith in my own judgment,
much too much for my own good. Even though I was negotiating my way through
brand new territory, and had no teacher or supportive community around me that
I really trusted, I must have figured that I could still somehow work around
these things. I may have died, but, somewhere inside, the 60's psychologist was
still very much alive and well, and still very much full of groovy advice. He
was still there, reassuring me that, even when it came to my own spiritual
growth, I could still trust my feelings and intuition to guide me.
So, be it out of a need
for control, a fear of trusting anyone, or simply out of bad habit, I found
myself still wanting to do it my way. Only now I had a new job - I was acting
as my own rabbi, and managing to give myself some pretty lousy advice in the
process.
Part of the problem in
figuring out how to pace myself was that the Chabad
rabbis had seemed a little too afraid about telling me to slow down.
Understandably enough, they were reluctant to tell me anything that might lead
to me violating Jewish Law, but this seemed to put everyone in an awkward
position. People at that level of observance were extremely careful about their
words and actions, and that kind of watchfulness really doesn't loosen you up
very much. How could I do things at my own pace when they were scrupulously
observing every last detail in the Code of Jewish Law.
If nothing else, fear of sin could get pretty contagious. So between their
fears about saying it and my fears about believing it, it was tough to get any
clear answers about how much to, actually, slow down.
One of the only
guidelines I remember running into was the idea of trying to maintain
"Shalom Baiyis" (peace in the home). But
when it got down to specifics, and trying to, actually, put it into practice, I
found the concept to be very elusive, and almost as vague as the concept of
trusting your intuition. There was another Baal Teshuva
who was also studying with Chabad at that time,
although he was a lot further along than I was. He already had the black hat
and the mannerisms and was also studying psychology. I knew that his marriage
hadn't survived his sudden return trip to Judaism, but he didn't seem to have
too many hot tips about Shalom Baiyis either. It made
me very nervous to think that I would lose my family and just wind-up with a
black hat as a consolation prize. I tried to keep him in mind as an example of
what could happen if you pushed too hard.
One thing that was really
tough to figure out was what to do about observing the Sabbath. The rabbis
couldn't really help me very much here either. Ethically, they couldn't very
well tell me something that might lead me to violate Jewish Law, like, “Drive
to shul for the next four months and then when you
feel more comfortable move into the neighborhood.”
I would be there for
services on a Saturday morning to try to start learning something about my
religion, but my presence there, even as a rookie,
felt like a violation. Just as an aside, I couldn't help noticing that an all
too common question, even to newcomers such as myself,
had to do with how you got to shul that day. You
might barely know the difference between Moses and Charlton Heston,
but, somehow, there was a message that you were expected to walk to shul, and, definitely, not to drive.
Even a friendly question
about where I was from or where I lived fed my self-consciousness and paranoia
about being discovered. If I told them that I, in fact, lived in
For whatever the reason,
it quickly got to the point where I just felt too uncomfortable about driving
on Shabbos. I decided to stay home and not go to services,
at least that way I wouldn't be violating all the laws. So, even though I was
living twenty miles from an orthodox shul, and still
knew, virtually, nothing about how to really observe a Sabbath, I still figured
that I could do my own thing. I had no idea about how to follow the service,
but apparently I wouldn't be able to find out. Could I drive for while, learn
about it, and then do something later about moving closer to the Jewish
community, or what? Apparently, no clear answers were forthcoming.
But, even if I had to do
it in a vacuum, somehow, I figured, it would still be possible. So I stayed
home and held my own service on Saturday mornings, and managed to achieve new
spiritual lows for myself and for my family. In my ignorance and isolation,
away from any community, I said my prayers alone, without singing, and worried
about the lightbulb in my refrigerator. And, for some
strange reason, I didn't quite get high, refreshed, or regenerated. Instead, I
just became nervous, pained, and up-tight, and my family became acutely aware
of this. If this stuff is so great, they rightfully asked, how come your still
so miserable.?
I became a living
testimonial to the folly of putting the cart before the horse, and it wasn't
helping me win any popularity contests. For me at least, ignorance wasn't
bliss, particularly over the long run. It really wasn't even close.
In my wretchedness and
isolation I drove them out of the house. Rightfully, they fled. I had botched Shabbos and sent them fleeing into Shop-Us.
Teach Your Children Well
Jewishly, we are
taught that an ignoramus can't be a righteous person. No argument here! I was
basically an ignoramus who knew it, yet I was still trying to turn-on the rest
of my family even if I was really in no position to do this.
I introduced them to my
own unique blend of religious uptightness. Shabbos
became a day of don'ts rather than some sort of a spiritual high. So did a lot
of other things. Eating out became a problem, as did soccer games. Apparently,
if you really love your child you'll show-up at the soccer field, religiously,
every Saturday morning so your five year old won't get
a complex.
Many years later I
realized that my primary focus should have been on working on myself. If this
turned out to have a positive or inspiring impact, so be it. In many ways, this
attitude kind of parallels the role of the Jew in the world. We are supposed to
be a light to the nations, but we don't do this through proselytizing or
crusading. Instead, we are to try to live our lives at such a high ethical
level that we become an inspiring model for others to emulate.
If I had stayed within
this gameplan, it would have minimized a lot of the
damage. Most people, I found, weren't waiting to be clued-in by me or anyone
else, and, I should have known that better than anyone given my particular line
of work.
A lot of other things were
awkward as well. At a social or interpersonal level, I didn't have a great deal
of comfort around observant Jews. Virtually all my friends were not religious,
and most of them were not even Jewish. I also kept my distrust of the clergy,
as some of these early rabbinical contacts had done little to help me become
more trusting. Thank goodness, over time, I started to meet and learn from some
truly excellent rabbis. As
Even though Judaism is a
family-based religion, community activities are critical in the life of a Jew.
This meant dealing with services, so called "organized religion", and
just being around other fellow members of the tribe. And, all of this took an extremely long time
for me to get used to. I didn't like sermons, and I had an extremely low
tolerance for pomp and ritual.
Although many of Moses's prayers were short and to the point, apparently,
that didn't always sink-in with some of the rabbis and cantors. Services,
particularly on Sabbaths and holidays could turn-into real tests of endurance.
There's a big difference between being led in prayer, and watching a
performance, and I couldn't always take-it. I developed a lot of resentments about unnecessary showmanship. It
was particularly painful
to watch people who showed-up once a year at the high holidays,
hoping for a little inspiration, getting turned-off by some ego festival or
heavy-hitting financial appeal.
Individuals,
adults as well as children, who weren't already steeped in the tradition and
totally committed themselves, sometimes had to really reach-down deep inside themselves for some extra motivation just to be able to get
through some of this. In order to be able to learn and grow Jewishly, there was a need to educate one's self to the
point that things could be appreciated. Even things like the basic service, for
example, could not really be appreciated without an education.
In my case I also had to
deal with what I was going to teach my children, and what I would encourage
them to get involved with Jewishly.
I didn't want to be authoritarian about it, and tried, in my own way to be
considerate and sincere about it. But by own fears and ignorance didn't make it
easy. Among other things, I was afraid of not doing it, doing it wrong, and not
knowing how to do it correctly.
There were many conflicts
that came about in trying to be encouraging, protecting, and perfect. I had
particular difficulty in recommending activities that I, as a motivated person,
were finding hard to take myself. I hesitated to recommend things that seemed
insincere or uninspiring, but, on the other hand, there was little in the way
of purity in the world, and waiting for purity could mean waiting one very long
time. As much as I wanted to, I found that I couldn't really protect anybody
from hypocrisy and couldn't guarantee that a particular experience would result
in an unbelievable "high."
Of course I still had
some strong desires to "save" or enlighten my family. I knew enough
to try not to take-on the rest of the world with this effort, but I should have
really given-up completely. This need,
wherever it was coming from, was almost completely useless, offensive, and
destructive. If I needed to "save" anyone, it was myself.
Adding to my already
minimal personal charm, were new constrictions on our lifestyle. Eating-out at
restaurants and at other homes became awkward and problematical. Travel on Shabbos and holidays needed to be worked-out, and it just
wasn't smooth. I was surprised to find-out just how much expressions of love
and enjoyment are bound-up with things like eating and drinking. Turning down
an unkosher meal would quite often be interpreted as
rejection.
And, what were we to tell
the children about where they should eat, and what they should eat? How pushy
should a parent be? How much should be left to individual choice and
preference? These were topics of many a heated debate.
Family members all wanted
to assert their individual freedoms and yet this too might elicit guilt
feelings and additional conflicts.
Family members also loved one another and wanted to keep peace and
harmony if at all possible. I also didn't want to be a policeman or private
detective when it came to food or anything else for that matter. In one attempt
to cope with all of this, a strategy was developed wherein my son would be
careful about what he was eating when I was around, but, when I wasn't
around he would eat what he wanted to eat. This wasn't exactly the atmosphere
or attitude that any of us wanted to see.
Finding my own level, and negotiating through the mitzvot
continued to be difficult. I still had my competing fears. If I was too strict
I would put-off or drive-away the rest of the family, but, if I was too
flexible I might look like a hypocrite, or someone who was just plain
inconsistent or erratic. It went on like this for years.
Round Peg in a Square Hole
To our credit, at least
we wanted be consistent about things. We wanted to practice what we preached.
Eventually we decided to try to connect with some part of the Jewish community
in
Since Chabad
was now an uninviting option for the rest of my family, we decided to try Beth
El in
The rabbi was very perky
and peppy, and the congregation was small, friendly, and growing. We started to
attend as a family on Friday nights. It was basically O.K., and the kids, in particular,
seemed to enjoy it. They enjoyed getting candy from the rabbi, and learning
some of the songs.
Saturday mornings I would
be there without the rest of the family, and, although the services were
pleasant enough, I wasn't finding them particularly satisfying or nourishing.
I'm still not really sure why that was.
As my hopes for a
"normal" life seemed to be vanishing, I started to experience intense
morbid despair during the services. I remember having fantasies about leaping
through the plate glass window in the synagogue, and wondering what kind of a
reaction it would get. It was like something out of "Harold and
Maude" Fantasies about suicidal gestures, of course, seemed unbefitting to
the nature of the Sabbath day.
I was getting the sinking
feeling that this "reasonable" choice of synagogues wasn't going to
do the trick either, even if, on the surface, it would have made things a lot
easier. So much for wishful thinking about minimally
disrupting our lives.
When the Beth El thing
didn't work-out, living in
Something had to give,
and shortly after the walk, we made a difficult, and, seemingly, crazy
decision. We decided to uproot the family and move-away from everyone's favorite
place,
It was a difficult and
risky move, but we did it. The rest of my family had very few complaints about
Healing
From The Healing
I found myself listening to a lot of talk radio,
apparently I was avoiding music. At the time I chalked it up to the music of
the 70's, but, looking back at it, it's obvious that I was simply avoiding
music. I also stopped playing my guitar, and going to the movies. The movies, I
felt, really manipulated your emotions, and life already felt emotional enough
for me. Sports had also become pretty meaningless, particularly as a spectator,
so I just spent a lot of my free time reading and brooding.
I also made sure that I avoided the beach at
As the years
went by, I continued to feel caught between a number
of different worlds, and there was nowhere to land. The cool, mellow people
that we had previously associated with were now uncomfortable for me to be
around. They were still into a lot of the same things, although Yuppiehood was starting to make a few insidious inroads
into their lifestyles. But, as for me, and probably the rest of the family, we
continued to have trouble fitting-in with any group or community.
I, certainly, didn't qualify as "mellow"
anymore, I wasn't even remotely close. Instead of doing my own thing I had now
become uptight and religious, and, even without all that, I felt like I had
become just too weird for every ones tastes. Some major adjustments had to be made,
and they weren't going smoothly.
Eating out became even more of a problem. I
couldn't really go over to someone's house for dinner without having to give
some long, crazy-sounding explanation about Jewish dietary laws or the lunar
calendar. I was playing by a different set of rules and assumptions than the
rest of the kids on my block, and the personal fit was still very uncomfortable
for me. Part of the discomfort was the fact that I still wasn't doing things
properly, and I knew it. So bringing up the whole topic of mitzvah observance
put me in touch with my own inconsistencies, and face to face with my fears
about the future. In my mind, if I kept changing I would lose everything, and
if I didn't I could be used for cosmic target practice.
When it came to mingling and socializing there was
always a problem about what I could eat that would be Kosher, or when we could
even get together to eat in the first place. It seemed as though I couldn't
make any plans without some discussion about scales and fins, or milk and meat
combinations, and, even when all of that was ironed-out, I was still uptight
about what someone might surprise me with.
Normal people usually got together on Friday or
Saturday nights, but, there I was, on a different calendar and cycle. Like some
sort of Jewish Werewolf I was compelled to follow the cycles of the moon. I
also needed to plan around Shabbos, and, depending on
the length of the days at different times of the year, that could get a little
tricky. In the winter we could go out on a Saturday night, but in the summer we
would have to wait until pretty late in the evening. So it was tough to catch a
Saturday night movie or to make other normal plans.
Everything was becoming so involved and cumbersome
that, out of my embarrassment and self-consciousness, I avoided giving the
explanations myself. By default, the job fell on my wife, who was good at
smoothing things out. So, like some sort of cosmic custodian or public
relations expert she got to explain Steve to the masses. It had to be about as
gratifying as being a spokesman for Exxon and trying to explain the oil spill
to the local fishing villages. It was, unquestionably, a terrible job for my
wife to fall into, and, she, understandably, resented it. Interestingly enough,
Marianne was also aggravated by my lack of pride in my Jewish practices. Even
though the Mitzvah Monster was wreaking tremendous havoc in her life, she still
at least wanted me to be proud of what I had chosen to do. And,
in her mind, part of that involved being able to explain myself to others.
But, the pride and self-confidence just weren't there for me. I was still
struggling with feeling so different, and I continued to feel terrible about
the strain that all of this was all placing on my family.
And I still didn't fit-in all that well with the
religious ones either. At best, I felt like a rookie. My knowledge of the
routines and my level of observance left a lot to be desired. In many ways, the
same is true today, but I've gotten a lot better at rationalizing it to myself.
Anyway, as it turned out, I found myself in all sorts of new social circles,
and dealing with people whom, in my previous life, I normally wouldn't have
sought-out. By my usual standards, many of them seemed frighteningly
conventional. Sometimes I wondered if they had even heard of the 60's, much
less lived through any of it. On the surface at least, they seemed to have
spent all their lives living in comfortable suburban settings, getting the
right degrees, meeting the right life partners, and observing the right
holidays. I still had my distrust of polyester, even if I didn't fit in well
with my old crowd anymore.
My occasional ventures out into the arenas and
circuses of life were mainly for show. Even if my heart wasn't into it I needed
to show people that I was still normal and that I did normal things like
playing poker with the boys and going to a movie every once in a while. So,
when I could, I pushed myself to mingle with the other fun people. Flexible guy that I was, I would even consent to going out to a
play every two or three years, but it wasn't always a rewarding experience.
As luck would have it,
on one of these madcap adventures about town, we just happened to bump into
some old friends from my previous existence in
"No, not really", I replied.
It just kind of popped out of my mouth, surprising
me and drawing one hell of a quizzical look from my wife. It was a stunningly
odd thing to hear myself saying. If nothing else I, at least, always tried
never to lie, yet there I was giving him an answer that sounded like an obvious
untruth. The more I thought about, however, the more I realized that it,
actually, did have a strong ring of truth to it. It felt true, even if really
wasn't. To make myself even more charming I didn't really give him an explanation. It
was a real conversation stopper, and in that sense it really served me well.
But it was, actually, a
very good question, and great food for thought. Was I still working as a
psychologist at State? Well, technically I was still at State, but my identity
as a psychologist had, apparently, been so obliterated that I no longer even
thought of myself as one. As an occupational label it now had completely lost
it's aura of coolness and knowingness for me. It was now such a complete
embarrassment that I disidentified with it almost
completely. He might just as well have asked me if I was still robbing banks,
or beating my wife. To me, Psychology was that bogus profession that screwed
everybody up during the 60's and I was ashamed about my association with it. I
thought of myself now more as a "counselor", it had a nicer ring to
it. It had a lot less status too, but at least I could say the word without
feeling like a total impostor. Of
course, through it all, I continued to want to be paid like a Psychologist!
So, even though I had touched the truth, and had
been the envy of truth seekers everywhere, I still felt bad. And, it was an
across the board kind of thing. Personally, professionally, and even
spiritually, I was a long way from healthy. And, as the years kept ticking
away, I kept stuffing it all back in. Even though I had a pretty good idea of
what was under there, I still wanted to keep it down and at a distance. Feeling
intensely meant feeling out of control, looking unstable, and losing
everything.
A wall of distrust was built-up, keeping the rest
of the world at a safe distance. And, just to really
be on the safe side, it kept everyone out, regardless of who they were or what
their intentions may have been. And that included my family. I trusted them to
not abandon me, but not completely. Regardless of who it was, it didn't really
feel safe for me to come out and play.
But we pay a price for
everything. In my frustration and fear around selling myself as a normal,
clear-headed kind of guy, I found myself, instead, taking on some of the
dreaded characteristics of an authentic, card-carrying paranoid. In a festival
of self-fulfilling prophecy, everyone's worst fears were now being confirmed,
and everything I tried to do about it seemed to be backfiring. Terrified of
myself, and even more distrustful of the world, I swallowed and stuffed the unexpressed
hurts and resentments that were constantly building-up. Smoking and food
helped, but eventually storage became a problem.
On the surface things looked like they were being
kept together, but the pain was leaking out and a lot of people seemed to sense
it. Just my luck I had to be surrounded by all sorts of sensitive and caring
types. My family, my colleagues, and even some of my clients seemed to sense my
pain, but they really didn't know how to respond to it. They also sensed my
desperate need for nurturance and comfort, but their offers were all rebuffed.
They correctly sensed that no human being should really be walking around in
that kind of pain, but nothing they could do would penetrate my defenses. With
offers of comfort and understanding some of them tried to take it away from me,
but I wouldn't let them near it. I'd kill them first, and luckily I was able to
convince most of them that it wouldn't be worth it.
To compensate, I went through my hyper-masculine
stage, my Clint Eastwood Period. In my counseling work I became much more
cognitive in my approach. I reacted strongly against the wimpiness
of the Rogerians, both Carl and Fred. There had to be
room for a little more testosterone in the counselor. We needed counselors who
were a lot less soft, passive, and agreeable about everything. It was time for
some good old masculine guidance for a change. I had a "NO WIMPS"
sign on my office door, and made sure that I continued to avoid listening to
music.
But, it's hard to go on like that forever, and, as
luck would have it, some funny things began to happen to me. For one thing, my
clientele started to change.
Like a lot of other professionals I found myself
working more and more with victims of violence and abuse. Victims of incest,
alcoholism, and toxicity, they all seemed to be coming out of the woodwork at
once. The A.C.A. (Adult Children of Alcoholics) movement was starting to go
strong, and my caseload was reflecting it. And the bad part of it was that they
were starting to get to me.
They had such brittle facades, and you could sense
their pain under the surface. The work was slow, but tremendously rewarding,
and, from time to time, you got to witness their re-entry into the Land of the
Living. Sometimes it was hard not to cry.
I also felt like I was more in my element. These
were people who needed some help, and these were problems that were worth
struggling with. And, even more astounding to me, some of my skills and talents
were actually useful in this endeavor. I was being challenged as a professional
and as a person, and I responded to it and grew.
As time went by I began to feel a lot more alive
and worthwhile, I even cried a little. Clint Eastwood was slowly being done-in,
but it, somehow, felt healthy. Layer upon layer was being scraped-away, and I
could now feel pain again. And, not only didn't I crumble, but the quality of
my work was actually getting better, a lot better. I was proud of my clients,
and I was proud of me, and I loved working with them.
There was one client in particular who sensed my
pain. Every once in a while Nicole kept getting glimmers that I was a lot more
like her than she thought I realized. But I hadn't been abused or raped. Sure,
like millions of others I had to pay a lot of tolls on The Garden State Parkway,
but I don't really think that that qualified me as a rape victim. I had come
from a stable family, so I couldn't really see what she was talking about. But,
in a funny sort of a way, I knew that she was right.
Although I couldn't make that
bridge into my conscious awareness, apparently that was to come a little later
in the unexpected form of a folksinging intern named
Dana. Dana was my intern, and we were both enjoying our work
together. I felt well-used as a supervisor, and that was becoming a rare
experience for me. Although she was facing all the rigors of a doctoral program
she was still taking some time to do an occasional folksinging
gig down at a local coffee house. After declining a few invites to come-down
and hear her sing, I decided to chance it. It was time for my annual outing
anyway, so maybe it was time to take a chance.
Drowsy Maggie's was in a store front down on
As soon as Dana began to sing I immediately started
to cry. I just couldn't listen without crying. Like sadistic, heat-seeking
missiles her songs were all getting to me. I didn't want to feel anything that
intensely, but, apparently, I had met my match. I fought it, but I
succumbed.
For the next few weeks things seemed to grow a
little tense between us, but it was hard to put your finger on it. The staff
had heard about how great Dana was, and invited her to sing at our staff
Christmas party. She invited me to break my twelvestring
out of semi-retirement and join her for a couple of songs. I reluctantly agreed.
We practiced a few times the week before the party,
and, for some reason, we both seemed a little testy. It took us forever to finally agree on two
songs. We settled on "Desperado" and "Vincent", but the
edginess continued. I knew that I was uptight about performing in public, but I
was pretty unaware of just how afraid I was of the music. They were both
beautiful songs, and I really didn't want to break down and start crying in
front of everyone. Dana, on the other hand, had brought her own set of fears to
the situation. She liked me as a person, and respected me as a supervisor, but
now she was becoming increasingly afraid of being known and judged by me. She
was afraid of being rejected for who she was and how she lived her life.
Apparently, we both had
a lot on our minds, and it was starting to show. Right before we were supposed
to go on Dana came up to me and told me that something was really bothering
her, and she needed to talk. She thought that it could wait a while, but the
tension just felt awful to me. I told her that, whatever it was, we should try
to get it ironed-out right then, and she agreed. She told me that she was
afraid that if I really knew her that I would reject her. I told her that I
never would.
The following week, as we were listening to one of
her counseling tapes during supervision, I inexplicably found myself crying
again, and I became confused and embarrassed. We really hadn't been talking
about anything all that emotional, and yet I found myself crying, and I had no
idea why. And, it also seemed like a pretty inappropriate thing for me to do as
her supervisor. Instead of giving her feedback, or identifying issues that I
thought she needed to work on, I just found myself crying and I didn't know
why.
I was being flooded by a deep sense of sadness, and
I had no idea about where it was coming from. But Dana seemed completely
comfortable with it. She was very comforting, and I let her be there for me,
even if I never allowed myself to do things like that. After all these years,
it finally felt safe enough to cry. And at a very deep level I sensed that
safety. And I was relieved.
Over the next few days and weeks I became aware
that I had a lot of crying to do. My sadness, apparently, had its own agenda,
whether I was ready for it or not. And, although I hate to "need"
anything, I needed her to be with me while I went through it. So we made a
deal. Whenever I felt like I needed to cry I would call her and we would go sit
on the beach together.
So Nicole had been right. I was like them after
all. Even though my experience on the beach at
So, over the next few weeks, I mourned my losses,
and I felt my fears, and I got back in touch with just how scary and
overwhelming it had all been for me. And, for the very first time I was able to
fully experience the intense fear of abandonment that probably prevented me
from feeling all of this in the first place.
And, as I looked back on it, it became clear to me
that the whole process had been slowly unfolding over quite a few years. It
became obvious that I had been sent all the right clients to help me grow and
heal, and that I had been given everything that I needed. And it had all been
orchestrated with such exquisite precision and timing. Slowly
but surely, emotional layers that had been covering a wound that had never
fully healed, were being slowly scraped away, and I had barely realized it.
Sometimes healing can come in some unexpected
forms, and in some unexpected ways. And sometimes we even need help in the form
of another human being. Dana was right there for me, mainly just listening to
me, comforting me, and not judging me. We both knew that this was not classic
supervision, but we also knew that it was profoundly O.K. We were from different
times, and had been leading radically different lifestyles, but we had some
important work to do with each other and we each knew it, unquestionably.
My victimized clients had softened me up, and now
Dana had moved in for the final kill. But she wasn't killing me. It was only my
defenses that were crumbling. As far as
I was concerned I was re-entering The Land of the Living. I was feeling things
again and it felt all right. The pain was being released and I could breath a little more easily once again. My Macho period was
over, and Clint Eastwood was being transformed. Yin and Yang were combining
into a new blend. It was finally safe to feel things again, and it was deeply
O.K.
I think that somewhere deep inside I must have
given up any hope of finding emotional safety and comfort. I felt like it would
probably never be safe to land anywhere, ever again. But there it was, in the
form of a folksinger, even if that was a tough one to explain. I couldn't
explain making appointments with a younger woman to allow myself to cry on the
beach. The whole thing scared the hell out of each of us, but we were totally
comfortable with it. We intuitively trusted the process.
And a poet was being released from deep within me.
For the first time in my life I had a profound need to express myself in
writing.
"I didn't know that I trusted you until I
found myself crying."
Epilog
We're living in
So, when they ask us what part of town we're living
in we make it a point to tell them that we live "out near U.C.S.D."
By not mentioning the trigger words "
The hacienda and the big yard are history now.
We've exchanged it for a townhouse with a small, but lovely backyard. No more
cactus, boulders, aloes, and rednecks. It's lawns, eucalyptus, and power
blowers for us now, a little taste of
Little Debbie no longer spends hours stalking
lizards out in the
I don't really know what it is, but they have to
have the slowest or most trusting birds in the world living out here. They make
it almost too easy for Little Debbie. And there doesn't seem to be all that
much competition coming from any of the other cats either. Most of them have
probably been declawed or are just too phobic to go out and hunt. They probably don't have to
either. If they get hungry they probably just order out.
Our townhouse is very comfortable, although it has
very little character compared to the house we left behind in
It's a young and growing
community, built around a young, and psychologically-savvy, orthodox rabbi.
There's a nice mix of people, and most of them are still trying to find their
way up the ladder in terms of their own spiritual growth. The shul is only three years old, so there hasn't been much of
a chance for political infighting to develop yet. Above all, learning and
spiritual growth are strongly encouraged. Even the rabbi makes sure to protect
his time so that he can continue to learn, and it pays-off for everyone. It
feels healthy to me here, and I like it.
It's also been great getting back to the beach, I guess I'll always be an ocean person. And I'm still
going on my beachwalks, and pondering life. I usually
listen to music on my Walkman, but now it seems to distract me from my
feelings. Some things never seem to change.
I usually start out down by Scripps or