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.