Occam’s Razor

Why be happy?

Money cannot buy us love, the Beatles told us. Apparently, it cannot make us happy either. At least that is the conclusion of this article in today’s Washington Post.

A wealth of data in recent decades has shown that once personal wealth exceeds about $12,000 a year, more money produces virtually no increase in life satisfaction. From 1958 to 1987, for example, income in Japan grew fivefold, but researchers could find no corresponding increase in happiness.

I feel like the sirens should be wailing. Adam Smith should be rolling in his grave too. Could it be that our capitalist society is built on a foundation of sand? Wasn’t the whole purpose of gaining wealth for us to be happier? Would most of us really be happier, or at least as happy, grubbing at some minimum wage job and living in austere surroundings than we are in our McMansions with three cars in the driveway?

I am thinking of a man I see regularly where I work. I see him when I go home in the evenings. He is on the ground floor and he is pushing a wide broom across the tile floors. “Have a great evening sir,” he says to me without fail, with a big happy smile on his face. He is utterly sincere and the content sound in his voice is impossible to fake. Just down the hall a bit there is the guard I usually see in the morning as I enter our building. He is always exceedingly pleasant. He could even be described as perky. He is such a morning person. He greets me with a sincere, “How are you doing today, sir?” I always mumble something polite, but I just do not feel as full of life as he does. After he checks my badge, he tells me “Have a wonderful day,” and it is clear that he means it too. I say the same to him, and while I mean it intellectually, I do not feel it in my heart. I have other things on my brain other than how wonderful this guard’s day turns out. I head upstairs to my office to slog through a hundred or so emails. He hangs out in the lobby, checks badges and makes light conversation with the many people coming in and out. I have been admiring him for his contentment and wholeness, characteristics I still lack after 49 years. For this modest security guard also has something of a following among the women in the building. He flirts with them and they flirt back. He walks with a skip in his step. It is not that he is especially handsome; he is middle age like me. I suspect I make at least three times what he makes a year. Am I as happy as he is? I doubt it.

So here I am with my six figure income. Why am I not happier? I have been to Hawaii and enjoyed it immensely. In two days, I fly off to Paris with my family. That will make me even happier, right? I will have experienced more of this world. I do not know what kind of vacation, if any, the broom pusher in the lobby at work will be getting this year. I imagine pushing the broom is just one of two or three jobs that he is shuffling. I have time to exercise after work and even to blog. I hire people to cut my lawn. Maybe his idea of downtime is going to church, or bowling with friends. Yet, I must, I should be happier, right? Ain’t necessarily so.

I often ask myself, is this it? While I will not get into details, I realize we spend a lot of money in my family trying to make ourselves happier. For example, there is mental illness in our family. We do the modern things to improve the situation. Certain unnamed family members may or may not be on antidepressants and may or may not be talking regularly with therapists. Would we have been happier if we had less choice and opportunity than we do? Was our pursuit of prosperity the very thing that led us to having more unhappiness in our lives? Consequently, is this why my family now needs frequent consultations with mental health experts?

I appear to have all the things by which one measures success and happiness. I have a wife and daughter who love me. I have a job I truly enjoy and which fully engages me. I have a comfortably sized house that is well maintained and keeps appreciating in value. My nest egg grows every year and after talking to my financial adviser last week, I know it will grow even faster in the future. I myself earn more than twice the average national household income. Yet what fixates me is not what I enjoy about life, but those things that really should not matter at all. You might say I spent thirty percent of my time obsessing about the five percent of my life that I feel is out of kilter. I cannot be happy unless I am happy all the time. Otherwise, some part of me remains miserable. Otherwise, my life feels cheapened and not optimized somehow.

Perhaps happiness comes from letting that five percent go. Perhaps happiness is simply a state of mind. Perhaps it comes from the willingly suspending disbelief. Instead, I am fixated on what might happen. If someone earns $12,000 a year, he likely does not have any health insurance. Yet according to this article, he is as happy as I am. Yet for some illogical reason I feel I must be happier because I have health insurance and they probably do not. If they get seriously sick, they are in serious financial straights. They can even die. I am more likely to hang around. So I will be alive to do what? I will still probably do what I do now, and keep spending thirty percent of my time obsessing about the five percent of my life that is not optimized for my personal happiness.

The angels are whispering to me, “To be happy, let it go.” Let go of that five percent. It is beginning to dawn on me that the reason I obsess on the missing five percent is that all my life I have been in a Darwinian struggle for survival. Survival of the fittest is hardwired into my brain. I cannot escape from this pattern because it is integrated into my character the same way my irises have always been blue. However, improving the odds of my survival does not necessarily make me happier. It should make me less anxious. It is more likely to make me neurotic. Perhaps that is the reason my family spend so much money on doctors and therapists. Yet improving our odds of surviving will not keep us from dying in time either. However, there may be some illusionary satisfaction from keeping the wolves outside the gate. The happiest people though seem unconcerned that there may be wolves at the gate.

Yes, it was Paul McCartney who crooned, “Money can’t buy me love”. Moreover, didn’t he just turn 64? Didn’t this song suggest that no one could really love him when he turned 64 because at that age he was old and therefore unlovable? Well, maybe Linda would still love him had she survived. Is it just coincidence then that now at age 64 we find in the news that Paul divorced his baby doll wife? Heather Mills now has a reputed ten million pounds from Sir Paul to help her find happiness somewhere and with someone else. Presumably, her happiness no longer takes the form of spending time with a rich senior citizen.

I do know who is happy though. It does not appear to be Sir Paul, and it is not me at least for a significant chunk of my day (although logically I should be very happy). Whom do I know who is happy? I see him many days pushing a broom. Yet for the life of me, I do not know whether such happiness is worthy of aspiration, or delusional. Survival of the fittest may not actually make me all that much happier, but human history suggests that maybe it is a worthier aspiration.

July 3rd, 2006 at 10:00pm Posted by Mark | Best of Occam's Razor, Philosophy | no comments

Requiem for a Feline

(If you have Windows Media Player or can listen to a Windows Media Audio (WMA) file, please click here and listen to this music (8.6MB) when reading this entry.)

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness - that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what - at last - I have found.

Preface to Bertrand Russell’s Autobiography

When I blog, I try to let words express the depth of my soul. Sometimes I come close, but words can never quite capture my feelings. Nothing that I can say in this entry can quite express how I feel right now, although the philosopher Bertrand Russell’s quote above comes close.

I used to poo-poo the notion of angels. Not anymore. Sprite, my cat of 19 ½ years of age who was put to sleep Sunday night, was an angel. He was a special angel sent by the cosmos just to me to provide me comfort, solace and love through two turbulent decades of my life. Sprite was simply love wrapped in a feline form. The depth of his love for me was focused and boundless.

Anyone who has had a pet knows how attached you can get to them. However, some pets are singularly extraordinary. That I was fortunate enough to have him as my pet means that there is either is a God or I am the fortunate recipient of a random act of the cosmos.

Mark me well. I know how people with pets can love them dearly, as I certainly loved Sprite. Nevertheless, Sprite’s love for me was extraordinary and far beyond what I even imagined was possible in my life. During the stresses of life that would have pulled apart ordinary men, Sprite was there for me. His love was like a thousand watt light bulb. He radiated his love on me in such high megadoses I was able to pull through my challenges time and time again. He did it without saying a word, except for an occasionally silent meow. He did it by looking at me intently with his devotional wide eyes and purring contentedly on my lap. He gave all he had and more for 19 ½ years. He would have stayed with me forever had his body allowed it. However, even with a cat with such a gentle constitution, death could not be postponed forever.

Sometime during the last week, Sprite’s intestine became perforated. He developed peritonitis. The twice-daily pills, the daily yogurt, the special cat food and the laxative which kept his symptoms in check lost their efficacy. By Sunday, he had no more appetite and could not even drink from his water dish. He found refuge behind the couch. I coaxed a couple spoonfuls of yogurt into his tummy, which were quickly thrown up.

It was time to visit the emergency veterinarian. I prayed of course that we were not to taking him in to be put to sleep. However, the X-rays revealed the sad truth of a cat who had given all he could give. The perforation could be seen easily, and his kidneys were enlarged and his stomach extended. It is unlikely that surgery could correct the problem. He had worn out. There was nothing to do but spare him further misery by putting him to sleep.

Sprite was quiet but attentive when we wrapped him in a towel and took him into the car. It was evening. He did not fuss in my arms at all. He looked wide-eyed and with wonder at the streetlights, the signs and the stars. He was calm. It seemed to me that they were a comfort to him. Perhaps they were a distant memory of wherever he was before he arrived in this world. While my wife drove, I gently stroked his face. Underneath the towel, somewhere there was a small but consistent purr.

Sprite left this life with dignity and unflinchingly. We held him in a blanket, looked at him intently and stroked him. I told him again for the millionth time how special a cat he was. He truly was the best cat who has ever lived. Gentleness and love expressed the character of his soul. He watched us with his wide eyes, seemingly hearing every word we were saying although we knew he was deaf. He was not afraid but was comforted that we were there for him. The narcotic he was given freed him of his pain.

“Dad, there is no more I can give you,” is what I heard him say in my head. “Sprite, we will meet again, sometime and someday, and in some other life,” I said to him quietly, tears streaming down my face. “And then once again you will be on my lap, and I will stroke you and pull back your bat-like ears and you will be purring contentedly. I love you, son.”

It was my wife and the veterinarian who actually put him to sleep. I could not find the strength for that final act. Simply seeing the euthanasia tube in his paw was hard enough. He watched my wife intently during the euthanasia, half shut his eyes and was gone. He went peacefully, which was right. In addition, he went embraced in love.

We will meet again, best friend and soulmate. There is no way I could begin to repay the love you lavished so consistently on me for so many years. I thank you for your gift nonetheless. I know we will be with each other again. For now my love, au revoir.

March 28th, 2006 at 10:30am Posted by Mark | Best of Occam's Razor, Life 2006 | 6 comments

In the Nursing Home

When my time comes to depart this earth, I want it to be unexpected and swift. I want to be doing something innocuous like reading the paper one moment then be instantly dead. Is that too much to ask? Perhaps in the afterlife I would regret my decision. Perhaps I would have wanted closure. Perhaps I would have wanted one more opportunity to tell my family how much I love them. Perhaps, just to be on the safe side, I would have wanted time to call a priest over and make a final confession, just in case all that Catholic mortal sin stuff is true. (”Bless me father, I have sinned. It has been 32 years since my last confession or even went to church.”)

However, if I reach the point where I cannot care for myself I will most likely be like my mother and end up in a nursing home. Her nursing home is probably better than most. Renaissance Gardens at Riderwood is, if nothing else, a clean and attractive place. It helps to be in a new building. The lobby is broad. The windows are plentiful. The receptionist smiles. The floors shine. They had better. Because nursing home living here is not cheap. It runs about three hundred dollars a day, plus expenses.

I blanched when my father told me the price. I remember being shocked to pay $700 a month for day care. Nevertheless, three hundred dollars a day? That is over a hundred thousand dollars a year! I had best take out a long-term care policy right now. College is but a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of slowly fading from this world.

For that kind of money, I would expect more amenities. But the reality is that when you are in a nursing home you cannot appreciate amenities. You want the basics. My mother gets a hospital bed, a small closet, a nightstand, a sink and her own bathroom. She gets a call button that summons an aide. With luck, he or she will arrive in a couple minutes. Of course, it often takes much longer since you are likely in a queue. One resident next to my mother’s room still has the power of the human voice and he is not afraid to use it. “Nurse!” he bellows on and off during the day, very loudly until he gets attention. It makes my teeth rattle. Fortunately, my mother does not seem to notice the noise.

She is however sensitive to light. Even in a room with a northern exposure and with the blinds drawn, the light is still a trial. Therefore, the lights in the room are usually off. However, her door is typically open, so lights from the hospital-like corridors usually bleed through.

There is no such thing as privacy in a nursing home. Generally, she needs help for everything. Help into bed. Help out of bed. Help to the toilet. Help getting off the toilet. Help into her wheelchair. Help getting out of her wheelchair. Help putting on her shoes or slippers. Help brushing her teeth. Now she often needs help eating.

I have been visiting her around noon so I am often there for lunch. When you have a group of people and about half cannot feed themselves, you end up with one aide for every two or three residents in the dining room. This nursing home has a nice dining room. It has tables with linens, cloth napkins and real silverware. Each resident gets a printed menu with the choices offered. There is a cafeteria line on one side of the room but the residents do not wait in it. Instead the aides do, fetching food for the residents. About a third of the residents cannot feed themselves. My mother has reached the stage where she cannot eat everything on her plate by herself. I had to tear apart her chicken so she could eat it. Salad is increasingly challenging for her. She cannot easily get a full fork full of salad, so I find it is easier for me to feed her a forkful at a time.

Despite the table linens, despite a pleasant staff, despite decent but unexceptional food I find the dining room a dispiriting place. The woman sitting next to my mother is a recent stroke victim. She cannot speak but she can sometimes grunt. It is hard for her to tell people what she wants. In addition, the last time I was there it was hard for her to get attention. A plate of food was put in front of her but due to her stroke she could only reach the left side of her plate. She gave me a nod when I asked her if I could cut up her food. She looked grateful and sad at the same time. She must have had plenty she would like to say, but no way to articulate it. I kept up one side of a conversation, and held her wrist a few times to let her know I cared.

Others sit in front of their meals with vacant stares. The meals arrive in stages. It may be ten minutes or more before the next item appears. Only a few talk or even want to talk. With a few exceptions, they do not appear to know each other’s names.

It is summer but the day is neither too hot nor too humid. I take my Mom outside into the garden. It is a nice garden with a flowerbed and an artificial waterfall. Even with her sunglasses on it is too bright for her. We find a shady spot and admire the flowers. For a while, I can take her mind onto other thoughts. She identifies a few types of flowers that I cannot name. I am glad to see that she retains a good memory.

We pass by a room (it is Sabbath) where a Jewish worship service is in progress. Only a few of the worshipers appear to be residents. Family and members of local congregations fill out the service. In another room, we pass by a dozen residents arranged in front of the television. Rhett Butler and Scarlet O’Hara are talking but no one is watching. Two thirds of the residents are asleep in their wheelchairs. The rest are looking blankly at nothing.

Such mild activities as a ten-minute trip outside are still taxing for Mom. After lunch, she wants to rest. With the help of an aide, we get her into bed. As she naps, I sit in a chair and try to read a magazine in the poor light. I cannot concentrate on it. Instead, I concentrate on her breathing. Every breath seems an effort. I wonder, does she need oxygen? About the time I am figuring that out she awakens. Moreover, she is anxious. She is suddenly upset about her bowels not moving. And she is convinced the nurse’s aides hate her because she so often requests to use the bathroom and nothing happens. I talk to the nurse on duty. He assures me that no one minds how often she calls. Nevertheless, later when I talk to my Dad he says that some of the aides have given her a hard time in the past. It is hard to discern what is true and not true. My mother does not always seem to be totally there.

My mother’s PSP condition has progressed to the point where she can no long read. Nor can she watch TV. She can take short naps of thirty minutes or an hour at a time. Otherwise she is awake and in bed. Unless there is company (my father pays twice daily visits), there are only her thoughts for entertainment. Otherwise, her days consists of three meals (usually in the dining room), physical therapy, dressing and undressing, and often-unsuccessful visits to the bathroom - all with assistance.

I do not know what passes for her thoughts during these long and lonely hours. I would hope she would be remembering pleasant parts of a challenging but often rewarding life. However, it seems she is more focused on her present than the past. And the grinding reality of nursing home living is her present. Days become increasingly difficult, frustrating and laborious to get through. If her life were a movie, you would expect the scene to fade to black. Instead, every day life slowly diminishes. This is her reality of dying.

When she dies, I do not think it will happen in a moment. Rather she will gradually slide into oblivion. Some part of me hopes this happens sooner for her rather than later. And I suspect that she agrees.

July 13th, 2005 at 09:00pm Posted by Mark | Life 2005 | no comments

More Thoughts on Love

Why do we love others? Why do we want to feel loved? These are seemingly simple questions with answers that I believe are more complex than they seem. As you might suspect I’ve been pondering love and the meaning of love recently. I’ve actually written about it before. Our angst filled need for love is pervasive. What are ninety percent of the songs on the radio about? Love. Why do we marry? Usually we do it for love. Why do romance books sell more than any other kind of book? Because we enjoy the addictive feeling of a romance and because we know that in real life passionate love is fleeting.

It strikes me as odd that with so much need for love there seems to be so little of it. Or perhaps there is plenty of love, just not enough to keep up with demand. The need for love can be insatiable. It can be a craving. It can be an addiction. If you have ever been fortunate enough to be loved in a way that is meaningful to you then you probably have experienced the crushing feeling when it is withdrawn. Withdrawal from a love relationship can be so painful that many of us will endure relationships that are not loving at all, but offer the illusion of love.

The latest book which has me thinking about love is Harville Hendrix’s well known book Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples. Hendrix talks a lot about projection, but it was Sigmund Freud who invented the term. Psychological projection happens when we project onto our spouses and significant others our own dark sides that we cannot acknowledge. It’s a bit humbling for many of us to realize that the roots of our romantic conflicts are unresolved issues from our childhood (usually centered on our relationships with our parents). According to Hendrix we are usually attracted to those people who on an unconscious level we realize can help us work through our inadequacies. Generally we sell ourselves on the illusion that our significant other can complete us. It is harder in our romantic haze to see the reality of the person our lover actually is. We know intellectually that our lovers are flawed human beings like ourselves. But it is more intoxicating and certainly more pleasurable for us to believe they fit into us as if they were a perfect puzzle piece.

It is tempting to generalize and suggest that all these love songs have the purpose of regressing our feelings back to our infancy. There was a time when we were truly one combined entity with our mother. In this context love seems not mystical and instead seems like a form of adult thumb sucking. Since we detached from our mothers and realized the world is a complex place we can’t help pine for those moments of intimate connectedness that we did have very early in life. In reality they don’t come again in the same way in adult life unless we accept the illusion that they have occurred. And that illusion seems to be one manifestation of this nebulous entity that we call love.

According to Hendrix many of us do so poorly in our love relationships because we unconsciously use the love patterns that worked for us in infancy. If our spouse isn’t giving us what we need we can imitate what worked for us as a child: cry and mother will come. Crying is not the usual tactic used by adults to get their lover’s attention, but we do it unconsciously in similar ways. We snipe at each other. We withdraw sex. We cut lovers off emotionally. We engage in passive aggressive behavior. Naturally these strategies don’t work very well. The problem is exacerbated rather than worked through.

Yesterday I spent about an hour with my mother, who was in the hospital. My poor mother is 85. Her affliction, Progressive Supranuclear Palsy is reaching a chronic stage. Her home will no longer be the apartment she shared with my father, but likely a nursing home. She requires more care than a 78 year old man can manage. To say the least my mother is having a difficult time accepting the reality of her condition. I could see her rage in fine display last night when I visited. Of course her congestive heart failure exacerbated her symptoms. Her sodium level was likely low and that made her a bit forgetful and a touch paranoid. But the pain from her six broken ribs was real enough. She was a hurting woman who could not begin to care for herself. She let it all out on me. No one had come for hours. She was starving. She needed to be turned because her back hurt. She was dying of thirst. Her half eaten dinner belied sincerity. It didn’t seem that I could do much to make her feel better.

Or could I? I did what I usually do when I visit her in the hospital. Ministers call it “the presence”. Mostly it involves active listening. For me it also involves holding her hand. And stroking her face. And telling her in a calm voice that yes we really do love her. And getting her some water to take care of her thirst. And seeking the aid of her nurse to help move her on her side.

But she also expressed her belief that she was a bad and flawed person. I told her we all have good and bad sides of ourselves. None of us are perfect. Eventually she calmed down. After a while she became embarrassed with her behavior and said that she would be a “good girl”. The heat compress on her ribs helped too. I realized that she may be 85 but she too was working through painful issues from her childhood. I pointed out the many good things she had done, including raising eight wonderful children. In the first days of her marriage she also tended day and night to her mentally ill mother while taking care of her infant daughter.

What I did was reconnect her to her past. I offered a mental balm of sorts. I moved her toward a feeling of oneness with the people in her life. In some sense it was a role reversal. She played the child. I played the parent. Of course her parents are long dead. But she still has the need for that feeling of intimacy that she had during her fleeting infancy. (She was one of 12 children.) I helped her connect with that feeling.

What is love? I believe that love is the force that makes us realize on an emotional level that we are not alone. I believe that love demonstrates that everything that is meaningful in our lives is in the context of a relationship. No wonder for most of us our worst nightmare is to be bereft of family and friends. We do not come into life alone but arrive physically attached to our mother. Nor should we leave this life alone. We need the comfort of meaningful relationships throughout our lives. We are social animals. We can see what happens if you are bereft of friends. At best you become weird. At worst you become the Unibombers or the Jeffrey Dahmers of the world.

Love is about positive emotional connectedness. As autonomous beings we cannot force love. We can only grant it or receive it. It is nothing more than the honest expression of “I acknowledge that you are important to me” and “I may be unworthy because I am not a perfect human being, but I embrace that you care for me anyhow.” Arguably love would not be needed at all if we were perfect.

By its nature then love is destined to often be elusive. But it draws much of its power and meaning from being so elusive and fleeting. Surviving in our modern world is often difficult and full of complex choices. Despite the trappings of modern life we still live in a world of predator and prey. How extraordinary marvelous then that the harshness of life can on occasion be pulled aside and we can feel the power of intimate connectedness and compassion. That is why I believe at its root that love feels so magical.

June 18th, 2005 at 08:24pm Posted by Mark | Best of Occam's Razor, Sociology | no comments

A salute to real love: Charles and Camilla

I find it hard to believe I am writing this entry. Few people care less about royalty than I do. But there is something about this whole Charles-Camilla thing that deeply irks me. So I’m just going to get it off my chest.

Today Prince Charles wedded his sweetheart of thirty-five years, Camilla Parkers Bowles. You would think that people would be happy that after thirty-five years Charles is finally marrying the woman he loves. But you would be wrong. Most of the people I talk to who have an opinion about the future king of Great Britain are very anti-Camilla. I hear words like ugly. Dog faced. No Diana. She seems to be blamed for the breakup of Charles and Diana’s marriage. She’s perceived to be a home wrecker.

Maybe it’s just me but I don’t get it. First of all to call Camilla dog faced is really unkind. In fact she is not ugly at all. No, she does not have the good looks and grace of the late Princess Diana. Few women do. But one thing is for sure. Unlike the relationship Charles had with Diana, Charles truly loves Camilla. Not many of us would pursue the same woman for thirty-five years! If there is a scandal here it is that the unasked-for constraints imposed on future kings mean that many princes and princesses often have to marry people they do not love.

In fact the purpose of Charles marrying Diana had nothing to do with love. If love happened it was incidental. It had to do with an aging prince being prodded by mother to marry so the monarchy would around for future generations. To be blunt what the future king of Great Britain needed was a virgin. And not to impugn the character of English women, but hot looking and poised virgins from upper crust families are not exactly in great supply. Why this obsession with virginity? Apparently in the days before DNA testing could establish parentage, having a virgin bride was the only way to ensure the royal genes were carried on to the next generation. There was also the obvious concern that the king or queen would not contract sexually transmitted diseases like syphilis, which was quite common through much of human history.

Camilla, alas, failed to qualify in the virginity department. Charles spent three years dating her and wanted to marry her, but she was off the list of royal marriage partners because she was not a virgin. Also, apparently there were concerns that her blood wasn’t blue enough. Charles could either be a future king and marry a proper British virgin, or could abdicate, marry the woman he loved, disown pretty much everything he knew, and earn the lifelong antipathy of British citizens. What a Hobbesian choice.

When he went into the Royal Navy without proposing to Camilla, she decided to marry Andrew Parker Bowles instead. But apparently the love Charles and Camilla had for each other was stronger than their marriages. In Charles’s case, Charles and Diana not only slept separately, they spent most of their marriage living apart from each other. It seems odd to the rest of us that a woman as beautiful, intelligent, poised and talented as the late Princess Diana would be so spurned by her own husband. What it amounted to was that Charles didn’t love Diana. He loved Camilla. And so there were the affairs as each side tried to be people they were not and tried to project love they were not feeling.

The impression I get of Prince Charles is that he is not a man of much depth. Yes, he is a fairly superficial and shallow person. I don’t hold it against him. That’s just the way he is. In that sense being married to a woman of charm and grace like Diana was the equivalent of trying to put a square peg in a round hole. And perhaps that is the cause of the hostility toward Charles and Camilla by much of the British people. Charles tried but just couldn’t play the script he was given. He loved another woman.

And now finally thirty-five years later, with the royal genes passed on in the proper manner to Harry and William, he is now officially married to the woman of his dreams. Camilla may not be glamorous but clearly Charles dotes on her, and Camilla loves Charles. So why aren’t more people happy? Why all the hostility?

How many of us have to spend thirty-five years waiting to marry the person they love? Of course on the grand scheme of things their relationship is nothing but a piffle. But on a minor scale it is something of a personal tragedy.

I would hope that Charles’s future subjects might take this opportunity to consider that their sovereigns are human beings like anyone else. They should not have to go through life projecting a false version of themselves because of hundreds of years of tradition. Why put special constraints on any human being on who they may or may not marry? This is not the 12th century. A simple DNA test can confirm parentage if that really matters, which it does not.

Charles actually has my sympathy. I feel for him being under the thumb of his snooty mother Queen Elizabeth. Here is a guy pushing sixty and he still has to kowtow to his mother. And his mother, who should love him, can’t be bothered to attend her own son’s civil wedding. Her coolness toward Camilla is well known. Rather than celebrate a marriage that is so obviously right for both of them she looks down her long royal nose at her own son for not being quite the prince she wanted him to be.

Camilla is no Princess Diana but she is not ugly. If my wife looked like she does at age 57 I would be more than content. Let’s face it women who are attracted to Charles are not attracted to him because of his good looks. I hope now that Charles and Camilla are finally married they can enjoy many years of bliss together that were needlessly denied them. But somehow I suspect that as long as Queen Elizabeth is alive it will be anything but that. So I salute Camilla for her courage in marrying Charles in spite of his weird and dysfunctional family. Most women would have to say no to dealing with such weird and toxic in-laws. That Camilla would stand for it suggests she loves Charles for the person he truly is. And actually I salute Charles too for marrying the woman he loves even though his mother disapproves. It doesn’t seem like courage but in the weird world of the royal monarchy what he did required a lot of courage.

I would recommend that in order for the happy couple to stay happy they should spend as much time as possible together and as far away as possible from the Queen.

April 9th, 2005 at 09:46pm Posted by Mark | Politics 2005 | one comment

My Best Friend the Cat

Maybe this will sound a little pathetic but my best friend is a cat.

Okay, I’m not the most sociable critter in the world but I am not entirely friendless. Nonetheless I think I can say without hesitation that the best friend I will have in this life is 11 pounds or so and is currently curled up on my lap. His head is partially buried in one paw. He lies where he always lies on my lap, with his head on my left thigh and his paws nestled up toward my belly.

His name is Sprite and he’s been my best friend for at least 16 of the 18 years he’s been alive. We bonded shortly after he and his sister Squeaky came home from the Doktor’s Pet Center in Tysons Corner, Virginia in January 1987. In the beginning our relationship was a bit challenging. He had claws and he used them instinctively. This frequently meant his jumping onto my lap and embedding them in my thigh. For about a year I would not let him on my lap until I had first a blanket on my lap.

So Sprite required a little training but he was as good a pupil as a young cat could be. I wanted a lap kitty but at first he was a bit skittish around people in general. So I petted and praised him all the time, and made sure I gave him extra affection when he was on my lap and not sticking his pincers into me. He still gets it wrong sometimes. Fortunately I am now better at keeping his nails trimmed so it is less of a problem. As a kitten he could not sit still for nail clippings.

In fact Sprite and I are now perfectly bonded. We understand each other intuitively. I know exactly where to stroke him to make him happiest. He knows instinctively when to sit on my lap and when to leave me alone. When he wants to sit on my lap he only rarely demands to be on my lap. Rather he petitions very politely. He comes next to me and I hear the roar of his purr motor. I look down and see his wide glass-like eyes petitioning me. I can hear him in my brain: “Can I please sit on your lap, Daddy?”

When he was younger and more agile I would slap my hand on my thighs a few times and he would normally understand the signal, jump on my lap and move into the lap position. At 18 though he has cataracts. Only occasionally can work up the courage to jump on my lap. Sometimes he succeeds and sometimes he doesn’t. When he misjudges he falls awkwardly back and I have to catch his fall. Fortunately he has me well trained. I look down and coo, “What’s the matter sweetheart?” and he gives me a silent meow. And I pick up his 11 pounds and awkwardly put him on my lap. He of course has to move into his special snuggle lap position. And there he settles in for a long couple hours of purring, sometimes sounding like a motorboat engine. At other times his purr is barely perceptible. His eyes open half wide most of the time. He gives me a look of complete and utter adoration. But after a while he seems content just to bask in my warmth and love and enters a dreamy sort of trance-like state, not quite asleep but not quite awake either. He seems hypnotized. The longer I stay on my chair (I am usually in front of the computer) the more he likes it. It breaks my heart (and his) sometimes to have to get up to attend to other things.

Sprite knows to trust me completely. I will never deliberately hurt him and when I stroke him I always stroke ever so gently. I stroke over his bat ears and they twitch with an autonomic response. He likes a scratch under his chin or along the side of his face. I can play with his paws and pull on his nails and he doesn’t mind. He just purrs louder.

On rare occasions he will let me give him a belly rub. He likes any form of affection but it is still difficult for him to be that vulnerable in that way. He doesn’t usually mind being picked up and dragged around. And he’s quite unusual in that he doesn’t mind being cuddled. I can pick him up like a baby and cradle him in my arms. It’s a bit uncomfortable for him but he does enjoy it, and his little purr motor cranks up to high volume.

We should let him sleep on the bed with us now that his sister is gone but we maintain the habit of having a cat free bedroom during our night hours. Nonetheless I often find him on the bed when I retire, waiting for some last minute petting and stroking. If I read in bed he will come right up in my face. Sometimes I have to push his rear down to tell him “That’s close enough, son”. And I do call him “son” all the time. I don’t have a son of my own. I have a daughter I love very much, but it’s too late to have a son. He will have to do.

And what a great son he is! He likes whatever I am into. But he also knows when I’ve OD’ed on his presence and will find a nice corner to go to sleep in.

Sprite has always been an indoor cat. He gets out on the screened in deck when the weather is nice, but is never let out to the wild. He was neutered young so he never lost his childhood voice. But he doesn’t speak much. He believes in the silent meow and the use of Bambi eyes to get his needs met.

He loves us all dearly but without a doubt I am his favorite. He misses me when I am gone. He waits for me to arise on the landing outside our bedroom in the morning, and lately has been greeting me with an almost anguished “Yeolp!” It’s a sort of “I missed you! You’ve been gone so long!” along with some confusion from being a senile 18-year-old cat.

And he may be 18 but he is doing wonderfully. You’d be hard pressed to find a cat his age in better health. His coat droops a bit but he is amazingly youthful. He is as soft as he was as a kitten. He has become a very mellow cat. He is not a complex creature. He does four things. He eats. (He doesn’t mind dry food, but likes wet food a couple times a week for variety.) He sleeps. He poops. And he sits on our laps. That’s it. Mostly these days he just sleeps. He’s an old but beloved kitty.

Still, he seems so completely bonded to me that he often feels like an extension of me, and I of him. It’s like we’re one unit, not two. I have read some books that suggest we don’t bring all of our soul energy with us into a life, and that some remains behind. I have heard that some souls actually spread their energy out into two or more lives at the same time. I don’t know if I take any of this seriously, but I am so completely bonded with Sprite that I have to wonder if there is something to this. Perhaps part of me came into this world as a cat simply to keep me company. Yes, it sounds nuts but at the moment this seems wholly plausible. It fits my Occam’s Razor test: it seems the simplest and most plausible explanation because, yes, we truly are that well integrated. It is sort of supernatural.

Sprite just got a checkup. I now worry at every checkup that they will find something dreadful that means his days as my soulmate and best friend are soon to be over. But the vet says he is doing fine. He can’t see too well but he sees better than most cats his age. I can’t think of anything, even the loss of a parent or sibling, that is likely to leave me more emotionally traumatized than when Sprite dies. Some part of myself will be gone.

But if there is an afterlife he will be waiting for me patiently and he will be back on my lap again. Something like death cannot keep us apart forever. I think on some level we have always been together and always will be together. All I know is I love him dearly and I am so grateful for the 18 years we’ve had together. Every day I have left with him is precious.

January 30th, 2005 at 09:00pm Posted by Mark | Life 2005 | one comment

Healthy Love and Mental Health

I’ve been doing quite a bit of reading on mental health issues over the last year or so. Maybe my life is unusual in that I believe I come in contact with more people with mental health problems than most people. Or perhaps I am overly sensitized to mental health issues. But the more I learn about mental health the more I believe that the majority of us have persistent or chronic mental health issues.

A lot of us don’t seek treatment. The usual coping mechanism seems to be to ignore mental illness or just chalk up its miseries as part of the price of being alive. Some of us develop coping techniques so we can keep these issues contained in some relatively safe spot. Occasionally they pop out, often during periods of stress, to show us they are still around. Clearly for others mental health issues are so chronic and debilitating that their whole lives are filtered through the suffering and pain of their mental illnesses.

I went through a period of mild depression a couple years back. Unlike lots of people I sought treatment. For months I had no idea what was going on. I didn’t even recognize the symptoms within myself. But eventually I figured out that crying at my desk for no logical reason and enduring persistent low level headaches for weeks at a time meant something was out of kilter. It seemed strange to find myself in a psychiatrist’s office, and stranger still to be spilling my guts to a therapist. But it seemed to work for me. Within six months I was off the drugs and felt relatively back to normal. In that sense I was fortunate. My depression appears to have been situational and limited in time and scope. But I had enough of a taste of it to develop empathy for those with much more chronic mental illnesses. It also made me realize that the scope of the problem is huge and our response to it as a society is less than adequate.

It is clear from my reading that the causes of mental illness are still hard to pin down. There appears to be a genetic predisposition toward depression for many people. But it is not clear if it takes events for depression to be manifested, or whether people can get depressed solely due to a predisposition. I do believe that a lot of depression has its roots in how we coped with difficult times in our lives. And I am increasingly convinced that much of these stresses have their roots in early childhood. But they have receded so far in memory that we have no recollection of them.

I have been curious of late why good people stay with people who are toxic to them. Why on earth would a woman who has been physically and emotionally abused by her husband cling to him and say that she can’t live without him? My reading suggests that it may be a result of addictive attachment hunger issues from our early childhood.

I think this is true with me and might be one of the reasons I suffered from depression. It is also one of the reasons I have been either so naive or idealistic when it comes to romantic love. I want to believe there is someone out there who is so in tune with me that we play off against each other perfectly. This ideal person (presumably a woman) can play me like a piano, and I can play her the same way, and life is somehow a continuously pleasant buzz instead of a series of challenges and harsh realities that it often is.

I know that when I was born I was one of three boys in diapers that my mother was shuffling at the same time. As a parent who struggled through nurturing one child I know how difficult child rearing can be. I can’t imagine doing it for three young and active boys at the same time, not to mention two older girls that my mother also was mothering in 1957. In her biography my mother fessed up. I came along at a time when she was mentally and physically exhausted, and quite likely depressed (although she has never admitted to being depressed). While she loved me as any mother would love a child, she was overwhelmed with work, stress and motherhood. I was very much a “time-shared” baby. I know I didn’t get the amount of mother time that children typically get. I probably picked that up even as an infant and it affected me in some powerful ways. Although adolescence is a natural time to pull away from the parents, I pulled away particularly from my mother. The issues were I thought overly excessive Catholicism and conformity, but I now suspect that these were but catalyst issues. The likely real issue was simply that I had not gotten the quality time from my mother than I wanted as an infant or growing up and I resented it. It wasn’t until I was a teenager that I could do something about it. And unfortunately when I struck back I did it in a mean and vindictive way.

Part of my coping process until that time had been to play the “good son” role. I endeavored to be the peacemaker in a family of 10. A large family is, by its nature, a boisterous, sometimes rowdy, and always loud place. When the noise and the perceived mayhem got too bad I withdrew to my room and tried to shut it out. I latched onto my father, whom I perceived as calm and gentle mannered, unlike my rather temperamental mother. But my father also got to work with civilized people in clean and modern office environments eight hours a day. My mother was a housewife. Mothering and parenting was a 24/7/365 occupation.

As an adult I suspect I seek that which I felt I was sufficiently denied as an infant. Growing up I likely wanted to feel like I was one with my mother, and I wanted to feel special and utterly cared for by her. An inevitable part of growing up is learning to detach from the mother and confront the world alone. I was probably detached way too soon for my liking. Missing that attachment I seek it now in my marriage. But the reality is that marriage is not a supplicant relationship where I get the love I need from an authority figure. It is a relationship of equals where my responsibilities to provide love are as necessary as my wife’s obligations to me.

So my notions of how romantic love should be (shared perhaps by the majority of people in my country) are probably naive also. It is probably counterproductive and unhealthy for me to seek that sort of bonding in a marital relationship. We need to realize that we are seeking the unattainable. More importantly, if it were attainable, it would be unhealthy.

Still, for many of us adults this lingering attachment disorder echoes through our adult lives. My hope is that I have channeled these longings in appropriate ways. I have tried to have a consistent loving and nurturing relationship with my daughter. And yet sometimes I wonder if I have gone too far in the nurturing the relationship as a reaction to my attachment disorder. Since my daughter is now fourteen she is going through a natural and necessary process of pulling away from me. I wonder if I was perhaps too much of a micromanager of her life. I wonder whether I should have trusted and empowered her more earlier. If I had, would she be a more functional young adult? I don’t really know but my gut says “yes”.

It would have been smarter to know and understand this before she was born. I would have changed my parenting strategies a bit, I think. I will be upset to learn if in spite of my best efforts my daughter spends her adulthood affected by similar attachment disorders.

If so Rosie, please forgive me as I forgive my mother. I did the best I could.

January 12th, 2004 at 09:47am Posted by Mark | Philosophy | one comment

Some Thoughts on Love

All we need is love, the Beatles told us. But in my experience giving and receiving the quality of love we desire is a darned hard thing. Why is that?

Perhaps it is because to get the love we need we have to honestly present ourselves to the world. How can someone give you the kind of love you need if you present a false picture of yourself to them? If you can’t show the world who you truly are then all you can do is hope that someone will provide the kind of love you need by accident. Consequently the quality of love you receive may directly correlate to your ability to be vulnerable with other people.

And of course it is darned hard to be vulnerable. Most of us arrived as adults by becoming actors of our own lives. It often reaches the point where even we get confused and find it difficult to tell if the version of ourselves that we present to the world is fake or the genuine article. I see this in myself. In the business world I play the role of a hard working, no nonsense type of employee. I sometimes feel I am this way, but I’m not sure it is genuine. I think it is driven by fear: fear of being unemployed. I have known the depths of unemployment and low wages, and it is a miserable experience I do not want to recur. So I have learned to survive by projecting the values I think other people expect to see. Doing so on a daily basis and so routinely often makes me think I really am this person.

But this is probably just one aspect of me. I also find myself wanting to goof off more and more as I age, and it’s harder and harder to play this role unless I feel engaged in the part with the other actors in my life. On some level I sense we are all faking it. My boss and his boss are projecting values that they are committed to their careers, but on another level I sense it is bogus. They too are wearing masks. We are all wearing masks. We are all imposters.

And I’m clearly not all that great at being vulnerable. This is an aspect of myself I continue to work on, but with only limited success. I have learned that being vulnerable means you are easily open to assault. And emotional assault can be the worst form of assault.

I feel I lavish love on my wife and daughter, but I also often feel like I am not doing it right. One should give out love with no expectation of return, but it often feels like I give out way more than I receive in return. I think the kind of love I try to give them is what they want to receive, but I often feel uncertain. As my daughter matures she doesn’t need the father who read to her every evening any more. As my wife ages it often appears that she gets the kind of love, or at least appreciation, that she desires more from her friends than from me. I often feel like they understand her a lot better than I do and perhaps that’s why she spends so much time with them.

On the other hand I also have assumed that to truly love someone you want what is best for them. So if my wife gets a lot of the attention she needs from her friends, providing this is the kind of attention she needs rather than wants, I don’t feel terribly upset. I’ve never believed that one should get love only from one source. But I do wonder sometimes if I truly love my wife, as I do, why others appear to be so much better at tickling her fancy than me. Why can’t I see, integrate and respond to those aspects of her that others seem to be able to do so easily?

I have a friend who shall remain anonymous (but she knows who she is) who wants someone find someone that totally “gets” her. Some part of me thinks that waiting around for this person is a lot like waiting for Godot. At best you can hope that some combination of people will “get” you in divergent ways where you feel this appreciation and love. But sometimes I run across couples who truly seem to me to be so well integrated that I tend to put aside my skepticism and think “These two people are soul mates. They were meant to be together.” I get that feeling about my sister Lee Ann and her husband Rick. I can’t imagine two people who complete each other better. I can’t imagine them divorced. Neither, as best I can tell, was totally the person they were meant to be until they found each other and fell in love. Now they are so integrated they truly seem one entity sometimes. It’s no longer Lee Ann and Rick, it’s Rick/LA.

I dearly love my wife and daughter but when I look at Lee Ann and Rick I feel they have set a standard I will never be able to achieve in my marriage. I give myself some solace by wondering if such utter integration with each other is unhealthy. I know on an instinctive level though that I will never realize what they have for each other in my own marriage. I am more than a little bit envious. But I wonder: do they really feel complete? Or is something missing? Is it perhaps because they live life with such modest expectations that their relationship succeeds so well? Have I set for myself a standard of love so high that no one could possibly meet it quite the way I want?

I don’t know. But it seems a standard devoutly to be desired.

I have had two occasions in my life where I felt someone “got” me in a special and unique way. One happened seven Christmases ago when I opened a present from my wife and there was a first edition Palm PDA handheld computer. I kept up on technology and had some idea of what these things did, but I had never used one and didn’t even know I would want one of these things. I took it out of its box, started playing with it and within a couple days I was so utterly tickled by the present that to this day I doubt Terri will ever be able to give me a gift that will touch me quite the way that little electronic gizmo did. Was it just a hunch that she had, or did she really know me THAT well? Maybe I don’t want to know. But it was a home run outside of the park sort of present.

Another occasion happened about four years ago when I finally connected with an online friend in real life. Among other things we both had a passion for theater, musicals in particular, and we connected on a shared interest in the musical Les Miserables. She gave me with a CD of her favorite musical, The Secret Garden. Okay I thought, I’m sure it must be good if it comes on her recommendation. But I had seen the movie on TV and it didn’t do much for me. I remember taking it to work a couple days later and putting it on for a spin while I worked on some boring documents. It wasn’t very long before I was closing the door to my office. Tears were actually streaming down my face. There are lots of wonderful musicals out there, of course, but for whatever reason this one totally knocked me for a loop the first time I heard it. Maybe it was coincidence, maybe not, but I felt touched in a way I have only felt a few times in my life. It is still difficult to listen to it without tearing up. I’m not entirely sure why it affects me this way but it clearly touched something in my inner core.

I’d like more experiences like these two in my life, but they are by their nature few and far between. I can’t help but think though, wouldn’t it be a wonderful world if we could all feel this kind of special touch from not just our intimates but the world at large. I have nary a clue, though, on how to get there from here.

December 22nd, 2003 at 09:21am Posted by Mark | Best of Occam's Razor, Life 2003 | 3 comments