The Bay Area Ridge Trail June 25, 2023

Previously in these pages, I’ve mentioned my determination to hike the entire Bay Area Ridge Trail, a string of dozens of hikes (totaling 400 miles) that traverse the vast network of peaks circling San Francisco Bay. I was resolved to complete the loop before I turned 70. 

A few things you need to know about the Bay Area Ridge Trail. First, you can’t through-hike the whole thing, as you might do on the John Muir Trail in the Sierras, by unfolding a tent at the end of the day. Second, the trails lie within big, unpopulated public lands, remote from public transportation depots. Third, cell phone service is spotty at best, so Uber isn’t going to help you. Conclusion: a car shuttle is imperative! If you are going to attempt the Ridge Trail, you will need a dependable hiking buddy who is willing to drive all over the Bay Area.

I started my adventure more than a decade ago with my dear friend Barbara. Barbara was a speedy walker and game for anything. She is thin and gazelle-like, and I could barely keep up with her, though she is fifteen years my senior. We were both very busy, still working, me with an active teenager too, but over the course of two years, we managed to make it through all of Marin and Sonoma counties – about twenty glorious hikes – before we stopped. Barbara was getting a bit older, and I think the rigor of locating the designated site, walking ten miles, and then shuttling back to the car was wearying her. Our endeavor worked for Marin and Sonoma counties because Barbara lived in Marin, but going forward, I realized I needed to rope in a replacement. 

But who? Reluctantly, I had to hit the pause button. I had plenty of hiking buddies, but no one with the kind of stamina or ambition that BART required, given the length of the average hike, the logistics, and the overall commitment. Years went by, when suddenly two friends – Yang and Kevin – moved back to the Bay Area. We did a few hikes together, some out in Point Reyes, some in San Francisco, and I sniffed opportunity. I pounced, “Wouldn’t you like to take on the Ridge Trail with me?” To which they gamely responded, “Yes!” 

And so for the past three years, we have been pursuing our shared goal. We pick a Saturday or Sunday well in advance and plot out exactly where and when we will meet. On the appointed morning, I set my alarm, often leaping out of bed before sunrise, gulp down my coffee, pack my lunch, stash a few bottles of water into the backpack, engage Siri for my map app, and I’m off. If I’m lucky, I’ve remembered to take some Advil for the pain in my aging hip. Our goal is to meet in the terminal parking area as soon as possible to secure our car spot, then to shuttle to the second parking area for the same reason. In all of this time, remarkably, we have always arrived within a few minutes of each other, even though we live in very different locations. That is dependability. 

During 2020-21, we completed the hikes on the Peninsula. I have to say I was not prepared for how magical this was! So many redwood groves, with soft needles underfoot and such fragrant surroundings! And yet, at the same time, the sadness in seeing the stumps of the old-growth redwoods, axed for the construction of San Francisco. The season of ‘21-‘22 was dedicated to the South Bay, which was quite an adventure, with trails as far south as Gilroy and a few disconnected peaks, such as Mt. Umunhum and Mt. Madonna, requiring some additional automotive hop-skipping. Closer to San Jose was a trail with Mission and Monument Peaks, which were surprisingly popular. Still, they were spectacular; as we did them in the spring, the hills were green and flooded with wildflowers, not to mention a lot of gophers. After that, we pivoted to the East Bay. At this point Kevin got a puppy, a yellow lab named Ten-Chi (meaning Heaven and Earth), so he had to drop out of the trio. By about May, Yang dug in her heels and said no more hiking until at least October. “Too hot!” 

The atmospheric rivers of ’22-’23 delayed our re-entry, but we started up again this spring, sloshing and suctioning our way through some incredibly muddy trails in Contra Coasta, Solano, and Napa counties. In May, we scheduled three back-to-back hikes in Calistoga, including the fabulous Mt. Saint Helena on an absolutely clear and cool day, a fitting ending to our mission. 

I wanted to celebrate, but there was just one snag: an unhiked route through the San Francisco Peninsula Watershed, inaccessible unless guided by a PUC volunteer. We had been registered for this 10-mile hike in April 2020 but were thwarted by COVID. I had given up on this segment altogether, as the PUC website never seemed to list it again, but Kevin persevered. In late June, he discovered an opening, and there I was, ready to check off the final segment of this long journey. Yang informed our ensemble that this was my last hike, and as we got to the final gate, the group burst into applause. 

And there it is! A remarkable journey for me, made even more meaningful and memorable by sharing it with friends. Yang and Kevin still need to complete the Marin and Sonoma trails, and I’m hoping to be by their side, every step of the way.

The Pills, the Puzzles, the Pebbles March 15, 2023

I snapped closed the little “S”-for-Saturday lid on my translucent pill dispenser and thought, “There goes another week.” 

I think this every week. Week after week…month after month…year after year. 

But my pill caddy isn’t my only reminder of weeks gone by. My other is the rotation of puzzles I do on a weekly basis.  The dailies in the NY Times and the fabulous Two not Touch in the print addition, the online Wordle (followed by commiseration with my daughter Annie), the Spelling Bee, and Easy Sudoku, with the goal of completion within five minutes. Tuesdays and Thursdays I find myself delighted and confounded by cryptograms, also in the NY Times (sometimes in need of consultation with my buddy Julie). Thursday is heaven-on-earth “puzzle day” – I leap out of bed, grab the coffee, and get started! First out of the gate, appearing at 7am Pacific time, is the Wall Street Journal killer Sudoku, which cycles through 4 stages of difficulty in as many weeks. By 8am I receive an email with the cryptic crossword called “Out of Left Field” by my friend Josh Kosman, and by mid-to-late afternoon the WSJ publishes its fiendish crossword contest – a meta puzzle that causes my buddy Mike and me no end of head-scratching and a dose of delight or despair, depending on the week. Then there is the WSJ Saturday variety puzzle, which actually appears late in the day on Friday, and occasionally Mike sends me a National Puzzlers League cryptic crossword when we seem to have some extra time. 

Recently I re-read Aging as a Spiritual Practice by Lewis Richmond, a Zen priest. In it, he talks about an acquaintance who estimated how many more weeks he had to live, based on actuarial tables, and filled a large jar with pebbles equaling that number. Then, each week, he removed one pebble and placed it into another jar. He could see the accumulation of time slipped by and the steady diminishment of life remaining. I’ve made a little calculation for myself, as I’m approaching 70 and actuarial tables indicate I should make it to 87.6. That’s about 936 pebbles from now. 

The pills, the puzzles, and the pebbles: finer grained than a birthday, these mark the slow but inexorable march to life’s end.

To Write is to Taste Life Twice March 14, 2023

And now I come belatedly to this year’s January resolution, the unexpected confluence of two seemingly disparate streams of activity during 2022.

The first flow came in the whoosh of golf. Golf is a game I had learned from my father, who played it on Saturdays with his neighborhood buddies. He would have loved for me to take it up, but golf was a bit too slow for an adolescent, and who wants to hang out with their father, anyway? Still, I acquired a basic understanding and figured I’d get serious about golf someday, like when I retired. That day finally happened when I lost my teaching job last June.

As it happens, my friend Laura has been in the throes of a golf obsession during the past year. She started to take workshops and lessons at the McGinnis Park course in Marin, inviting me along. Over the summer, I became hooked, too. I am a pretty serious person (duh!), and I quickly realized that for me, one important key to golf was intention: where do I want my ball to land? “Intention” felt extraordinarily powerful to me, so I decided to choose it as my “word” for 2023.

Meanwhile, a second current spurted from writing, or more accurately, in having something published. During the summer of 2021, sandwiched between teaching an Immersive and teaching Bio2, I began to explore the origin of a movie made at Stanford med school. It was a crazy cult film, produced in 1971, using choreography to illustrate protein synthesis, set to the beat of the psychedelic “Protein Jive Sutra”, and staidly narrated by Paul Berg. I had first seen the movie in grad school and later showed it to my students, coincidentally within a few days of its semi-centennial. I had often wondered how this kooky “molecular happening" came to be, and over the summer I managed to discover the surviving participants, to interview them, and to produce a manuscript, which languished on my computer for more than a year.

With the onslaught of atmospheric rivers in December of 2022, golf ended (as did my ceramics class at College of Marin). With nothing better to do, since I was no longer teaching, I dusted off my document and sent it to Stanford Medicine magazine. And they bought it. Literally!

Here, at last, is the merger of the two tributaries that flowed into my pool of 2023 resolve: the intention to keep my eye on the ball, as it were, specifically, to return to writing and to try to publish some of my work. Once I made that decision, I felt yet another surge of inspiration from "savoring the good". I decided to write a memoir about my year of teaching high school, to bask in the joy I felt for the subject and the students. How I will manage to merge science and story remains to be seen!

Anais Nin said, “To write is to taste life twice,” and that is exactly what I intend to do.

The January Resolution, Redux March 11, 2023

In July, I posted “The January Resolution” regarding last year’s determination to grapple with my recurring bouts of depression. I mentioned a bit about my experiences with depression as well as my quest for a skill set that would allow me to hold depression at bay in the future. While I mainly described the meditation-based cognitive therapy approach of Zindel Segal et al., I failed to talk about another aspect of my inner work that has proven to be just as important to my well-being: soaking in the good. 

Here I turn to the little voice in my head from Rick Hanson, a local psychologist who has a wide online presence. Rick combines neuroscience with Buddhist meditative practice in a way that is accessible to me and to his many followers. One of Rick’s sayings is that the brain is “Velcro for bad and Teflon for good”. What he means is that in our evolution, it is imperative for survival that we be alert to potential harm, but we pay less attention to the rapture all around us.

To this end, over the summer, I started to devote attention to this particular aspect of cognition. I recalled Laurie Santos talking about “savoring” the good things in our life (posts in 2020), as well as the profound effect that the movie About Time had on me (post in 2014), namely its thesis to live each day twice, once with all its ups and downs, and second simply relishing the experience.

Recently I’ve noticed that when people ask how I’ve been, I find myself surprised to say, “I’m doing really well!” and to actually feel that way. What a change for me! In the throes of depression, it is nearly impossibly to feel joy. 

In the end, I have come to view my commitment and my process as a kind of recovery, just as I have watched my daughter go through recovery for addiction. Like her, I need to be vigilant on a daily basis. The reality is that life often has setbacks that trigger sadness; I have learned that I can acknowledge that sadness yet not let it automatically morph into a depression. As people age and especially as people live alone, they become more vulnerable to depression. As I am both old and have lived alone for a decade, now is the moment to resist my proclivity for a downward spiral. Would that I had done this sooner.

The Compliment January 31, 2023

In the past month or two, I found myself to be the recipient of unexpected compliments, and I was surprised and also quite delighted to hear them. It all started, I think, at Christmas dinner at Marcia’s house. Marcia and I met each other 50 years ago in an engineering graphics class at Penn State. We became friends and then roommates both in college and in graduate school at MIT, and we had married and migrated to California at about the same time. During dinner, Marcia mentioned to the group that I was the best mathematician she knew. I nearly fell out of my chair. It is true that I used to be very good in math, but surely Marcia herself is equally gifted or has known others who must have surpassed me. I was deeply humbled and also so grateful to be acknowledged in this way. 

Then last week at Bach Choir practice, the new soprano sitting next to me learned over not once, but twice, to say, “You have excellent posture.” “Oh, thank you!” I twice replied. I then discovered she is a Pilates instructor, which made the complement all the sweeter. 

As readers of the blog might know, I am an Athena, and one of my mini-goals in life was to encourage (or should I say “pester”) my dear friend Jeannette until she got her will in order, which she finally did. The other day she said, “Jane, I have to thank you for really pushing me to do this – it is such a relief.” 

Giving and receiving praise is such a delightful human activity, and I was kind of startled by my response to all this. Is it possible that I’ve been receiving such compliments all along, but that I’ve been too low to really appreciate them? My online neuropsych and Buddhist guru Rick Hanson claims that we humans are “Velcro for bad and Teflon for good”. Perhaps all this work I did in 2022 to develop new stability, including to savor the good, has enabled me to be a better recipient of others’ generosity. Bring it on! I’m ready to hear it! 

And a coda: Last night, at rehearsal for the Marin Symphony, I whispered to the singer next to me, “I’m really enjoying sitting next to you. You are keeping me on track.” As we gathered our belongings at the end of rehearsal, with tears in her eyes, she said, “Thank you for telling me that.”

The Pull of a Pet January 10, 2023

In January 2022, as part of my new-year musings, I resolved to get a dog. The year came and went, and still I have no dog. 

I had made this resolution mainly to boost my spirits. After my tuxedo cat Pogo had died in 2021 (on my birthday, as a matter of fact), my loneliness became more acute. Bringing a dog into my life, I reasoned, would augment my health, well-being, and circle of friends, not to mention provide a good home for a rescue animal. 

More than a decade before that resolution, when Annie was still in high school, she and I had adopted a five-month old puppy with curly black fur, floppy white paws, and a sweet pink tongue. Her name was Daisy, and we were both thrilled. 

I had only a week with Daisy, though, before I faced the agonizing decision to return her to the SPCA. On the plus side, she was smart, well-trained, and agreeable. We enjoyed our walks, and I got to know my neighbors. Daisy was good on-leash and off-leash at Crissy Field, running into the Bay and returning to me when I called her. And she sat patiently outside the window of a coffee shop when I met friends. 

But, as puppies do, she had a bit of a chewing problem. Day 2 she chewed a shoe. Day 3 she chewed a table leg. Day 5 she chewed the window shades. All of that was to be expected. But on Day 6, she chewed Pogo. 

Well, maybe not “chewed” exactly – and here I will give her the benefit of the doubt – maybe she just wanted to play. Pogo and Daisy tumbled down the stairs in a chaotic and noisy embrace, and as soon as he got the chance, Pogo ran out the back door and didn’t come home till the next day. It seemed that this relationship was doomed, so back to the SPCA I went, with Daisy and Annie. I was in full-scale bawling mode when I told the staff that I had to return her, but they gently replied that a man in Oakland had been calling every day to see whether Daisy had been returned. As so, sadly I relinquished my little friend, and I’ve been remorseful about this decision ever since. I was already in love with her. 

So, what’s it going to be for 2023? Will a little pet enter my life again? I surf the humane society websites, I even visit them in person now that COVID conditions are relaxed. But still, how can I make this leap. I have every excuse, and no excuse. It is a leap of faith, and I’m going to need someone to push me.

A Matter of Trust December 12, 2022

This year, I have been thinking a lot about trust. My musings began when I endeavored to process an unsettling trend in one of my relationships. My jaw literally dropped when it hit me: I can no longer fully trust this person. It wasn’t a willful or malicious act on the other’s part, perhaps just thoughtlessness or a side-effect of aging, but the realization was a punch in the gut even so. 

Last May, my trust was also betrayed by the school I was working for, when I discovered I was to be replaced by a new hire on the very last day of the spring semester. I felt exploited, and devastated. 

Trust is an essential element to the health of our lives, both personal and societal. It is the security blanket that allows us to function, to love, and to explore. We take it for granted that clean water will flow from the tap, that our husband will be there when we come home, and that our COVID vaccine will work. Is it any wonder that our society is shredded, when our leaders say anything to ensure political advantage, yet say something different when that advantage disintegrates? 

I started to realize how important trust is to me and how I had taken trust in others for granted. As a girl, I trusted my parents completely. I trusted “the system” to be fair, that if one worked hard, one would be rewarded with a good education, a decent job, a safe place to live. I also found myself thinking about relationships that were beneficial for me and fostered trust, specifically those with my teachers. Yes, even at my advanced age, I rely on teachers to stimulate me, on an almost daily basis. 

Take my online voice teacher, Julia Nielsen, whom I’ve been tuning into on a weekly basis for two and half years. She is extremely knowledgeable. She is non-judgmental. She endlessly encouraging. And she shows up, twice a week and then some, prepared and engaged. I trust her with my voice, without question. 

Then there is my online mindfulness guru, Rick Hanson, whom I’ve been tuning into for more than a year. I trust Rick. I know that there will be a jewel in his weekly JOT (Just One Thing) as well as comfort and inspiration in his Wednesday meditations. I know that each time I come away from his writing or talk, I will feel refreshed and have another little nugget to chew on. 

Finally I come to my current art professor, Jason Dunn, who teachers ceramics at College of Marin. I had been aware of Jason for some, and though ceramics wasn’t high on my list of art disciplines to delve into, I knew he was one of the best art teachers at COM. Now, I’m just emerging from three months of clay building and glazing, and yes, I trust Jason completely. He is there for us everyday, cheerful, knowledgeable, experienced, and supportive. 

Surely we can all name moments when we’ve been stunned by a personal betrayal. How does one regain trust after that kind of insult? Is it even possible? It is a “one-foot-in-front-of-the-other” kind of thing, a slowly knitting of a wound. The process will always leave a scar, but perhaps we can function with it anyway.

What if... August 10, 2022

It’s said that as we get older we spend more time looking backward than forward. We reflect on people we’ve loved, happy times we’ve shared, places we’ve been, but with all that sweetness comes also the bitterness of loss, injury, or disappointment. 

From time to time I look back upon the choices I’ve made, not necessarily to applaud or disparage them, but to understand them, and maybe, if it’s not too late, to learn from them. Sometimes I even drift into “what if…”. 

This all came to mind again when I read a New Yorker article entitled “In Another Life” by Joshua Rothman, who takes us on a literary “what if” through Henry James, Tolstoy, Sartre, and a variety of poets. 

For me, most of life has just been following the scent that led me, and there were very few decisions of seemingly deep consequence to be made. Of course I would go to graduate school, even though I recall having a very attractive job offer from IBM. Of course I would marry the man I loved. Of course I would move to California, why not have an adventure? 

But there was one decision that I have come to regret, or at least to question many times: When Annie was still young, I was offered the position as head of an Institute, indeed an entire research enterprise, in Melbourne, Australia. It was an incredible opportunity, but it came with financial repercussions, as an American, and familial challenges, as my parents were aging. I made the decision to stay – to keep a good and stable job and to not abandon my sister with the full responsibility to care for our parents. 

I can’t say that I would have been “happier” in Melbourne, but I can imagine that Annie might have better weathered her adolescence there. And for that reason alone, knowing what I now know and what she and I have experienced, I can’t help but think life could have been so much better if I had chosen a different path.

The January Resolution July 6, 2022

As I’ve mentioned before, since I retired I have had the luxury in early January of a break in the action. This has given me the benefit of a little time to rest, to reflect, and to redirect. In past Januarys, I’ve joined Al-Anon, committed to making a boundary with a someone I cared about deeply, Marie Kondo-ed my papers, clothes, and kitchen, taken a happiness course, and weaned myself off an anti-depressant. This January, I decided to take this anti-depression idea one step further: to vow to never again fall into that black abyss. 

I have never had a depression serious enough to plunge me into a hospital, but I have suffered four times in my life in what I refer to as “situational depression” – something happens in life that poses a great challenge and great sadness, leading to the debilitating mood disorder of depression. In a depression, for those of you who haven’t really experienced it, it is almost impossible to feel joy. Now think of spending maybe 15% of your life this way. What a complete waste of a perfectly good life!

(Just for the record, my low points were in graduate school, which seemed interminable, when my first husband decided he no longer wanted to be in our relationship, when my second husband died, and when my daughter was in the throes of addiction.) 

In January, I vowed to end this cycle. My friend Jeannette referred me to an online lecture by Zindel Segal, a Canadian Clinical Psychologist who, with two partners, developed a mindfulness-based cognitive therapy approach to preventing depression, based on the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn. Segal describes how having once had an episode of depression, the neurological pathways are primed to transform sadness to depression once again. And so the task of the patient is to be more in touch with the pathways and to develop strategies to divert or blockade them. 

Segal’s ideas resonated for me. They are a variant on the old Buddhist saw “pain is everywhere, the suffering is up to you”. Yes, sadness is everywhere, but maybe the depression part is optional. How could I develop the mental attitude and skill set to deal with this monkey on my back? 

I bought the group’s book and workbook, enthusiastically plunged into the daunting daily commitment to meditations of varying types and durations and less daunting tasks of reflections. Segal et al. argue that we ruminate to try to intellectually pull ourselves out of depression – wow how true! – but instead we should just relax into the pain, recognize it as pain, but learn to absorb it through awareness and practice. They refer to it as “being brain” rather than “doing brain”. 

I wish I could report that I have transformed my approach or attitude or capacity or something like that, but the truth is that I have no idea. Several times, I have certainly caught myself dipping into that black ink, but managed to pull myself back out fairly quickly. I’m half-way through the year and a bit frustrated that I haven’t had the epiphany I expected. Maybe I’m a little sad, too, but I’m trying to be much kinder to myself. Maybe when the next challenge in life meets me, I’ll be able to ride the tsunami with a better perspective and a little more equanimity.

The end of school June 29, 2022

As excited as I was to take on a teaching job in the fall, I’m now that bummed that the job no longer exits. I was delighted to be offered an opportunity to work half-time teaching advanced biology at a private high school in San Francisco this year. Though the experience had its issues, for the most part it was pretty wonderful. It checked all my boxes: community, intellectual challenge, purpose, and structure. I had a feeling I would also fall in love with the kids, and this I did, in spades.

Perhaps, I thought, after all this struggling and questing and COVID, I had actually found a path that would sustain me for the foreseeable future. I was ready to repeat for at least a second year. After all, they say the first year of teaching is the most challenging, especially when one has to develop the entire curriculum. But that was not to be. The administration decided to replace me with a full-time teacher.

I found out that I would not be renewed on the last day of school. I have a lot to say about this experience, the highs and the lows. But for now, I’ll focus on two things:

First, what an incredible opportunity to delve more deeply into a topic that underlies all of life: evolution. Indeed, I invoked evolution as the lens for the entire year. I guided the students through elements in the periodic table, through water and small organic molecules, through amino acids, lipids, carbohydrates, and DNA. We went from spontaneously formed lipid layers with bits of RNA in hot vents in the deep sea, to extremophiles on our planet and the search for astrobiology on others. We considered how the remarkable advent of photosynthesis led to increase oxygenation in the atmosphere and the consequent burst in more complicated life forms dependent on mitochondrial respiration. We went through Darwin’s (and Wallace’s) argument for evolution, from the geological observations that preceded them through selective breeding of domesticated plants and animals. We discussed how science and creation stories rooted in religion should not be co-mingled. We looked at protein structure and gene structure and how the two-fold process of gene duplication and mutation gives rise to the vast repertoire of RNA and protein molecules and ultimately to the diversity of life on earth. We watched the evolution of the coronavirus in real time. We learned about human genetics and diversity through our own experience and analysis.

Second, the students themselves were amazing. I had juniors and seniors who had lost 1/3 of their high school experience to COVID. They were behind on their social development, some desperate to be with others, some afraid to. They were behind in their academic benchmarks from a year of zoom and a general droop in learning goals. As days turned to weeks and weeks to months, we got to know each other and to trust one another. They learned that I had a pretty high bar, but also that with some effort they could clearly surpass it. They built up not just knowledge, but learning skills and confidence. As masks came off in the spring, I saw smiles on even the most withdrawn students. We had undergone our own little evolution together.

Which makes it so much tougher to let go, to accept it as just one experience in a lifetime of many.