SHE COULD HAVE HAD IT ALL

THEME: TAKING A LEAP

All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without benefit of experience. ~ Henry Miller

I get temporarily popular every time a celebrity overdoses, suicides, or runs into some sort of ditch. Given my therapy background, people want to hear my attempt to explain such behavior. With Whitney Houston’s death, the question seems to be a three-parter: Why couldn’t she 1) kick that Bobby Brown aside, 2) get clean and sober and stay that way, and 3) get back to singing like she was supposed to?

There is an angry question lurking just below: How could she have a gift like that voice and squander it? 

As I sit here I contend with dueling earworms.  With Whitney singing, “I will always love you…” and Adele belting, “We could have had it all…” it’s hard to think. But I’ll take a crack at it.

I will stipulate that the behavior of an addict is incomprehensible to the normal bystander. Broken promises, lies, financial ruin, lost jobs, fractured relationships, and all the rest render the addict irresponsible, weak, pathetic, and stupid in the eyes of others. Their behavior looks and feels intentional.

The people who care about them eventually need to take a step back to save their own sanity. Into that space, especially with celebrities, others who don’t actually care about them step in ready to take part. Plus, anyone in the vicinity who shares their affliction helps to keep it going. It is a powerful system bent on its own continuation, and might help explain Bobby Brown’s continued presence in Whitney’s life. Whoever sent him away from the memorial service at least made a point.

But how does the addiction take a death grip on an otherwise capable, even exceptional, person like Whitney?

I have a laundry list of explanations in my head, cobbled together from years of observing and theorizing. Pick your favorites.

*One theory says that all the addict wants to do is chase the exquisite pleasure of his or her first time. Maybe, research suggests, the pleasure that an addict gets from using his substance is on a whole different level than most people would experience. The problem is that the pleasure is never to be found again.

*Addicts describe their disordered thinking as if they are constantly spinning, which only allows them to encounter reality occasionally on a brief fly-by.

*Some describe finding that the first time they ever felt normal was during their first use. Later, many can feel normal only while under the influence. Worse, as they become physically addicted, to not use becomes painful due to withdrawal symptoms. It is no longer a matter of pleasure, but pain.

*Once life becomes too painful to face, drugs and alcohol provide escape. Pain can originate with losses, or failed expectations, or runaway expectations, or the depressive effects of the chemicals, or a hundred other sources. Once an addict finds his way to oblivion, it becomes a regular destination.

*Addiction is a disease that takes charge over the body, mind, and spirit. It makes the decisions, dictates the feelings, and drives the behavior.  The individual is no longer a person with free will, but more like a host to an aggressive parasite.

*What goes on is an expression of cellular changes, the interaction between brain chemicals and receptors, that expresses itself in egregious behavior.

*Outside influences of people, places and things can start things up, keep the process going, or encourage relapse. Bobby Brown and the music industry come to mind.

*The individual hasn’t done enough “research” yet to become convinced that the problem is unmanageable and that therefore entering recovery is necessary. Denial slips into and out of place. The lucky ones hit bottom in time.

*Finally, it is indisputable that the addict misses a lot, being under the influence and possibly in a blackout for many crucial experiences. What they can’t remember is not part of their experience, and therefore does not motivate them toward change.

Those ideas and theories form a mudball of cause and effect. They may all be true, or not. They certainly make clear that there is no one simple answer.

If it’s hard for me to understand, it’s even more incomprehensible to the addict. And no one is more disappointed in the addict than he or she is. They wish for normalcy. But achieving it in the face of addiction is a big order. It requires large doses of knowledge, support, and hope. The longer the track record of failure, the less accessible those become.

Meanwhile, the addiction offers its own gifts: immediate pain relief, oblivion, escape. Whether the addiction seeks to chase the sublime or escape the intolerable, it’s an ironic struggle. While the body and mind duke it out in a private battle, it cannot be won without outside help, practical or spiritual, or both. How to make that happen remains a mystery for many.

Maybe we should confine ourselves to other question: Do we have gifts we are squandering? At least we can do something about that.

CBH 02/11

MY BRAIN ON FREDDIE MERCURY

THEME: GOOD INTENTIONS
I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be. ~ Douglas Adams

Sometimes I wake up with a song in my head. Often the tune quickly dissipates, like the last wisps of a dream I can’t hold onto, fleeting and forgotten. I may recognize it as part of a commercial jingle (“1-800-588-2300 Empire”) that I hear all the time, or a line from a familiar song (like “This Land is Your Land” which I heard the other day). Its unimportance helps it go away.

But other times, the song stays with me all day long and into the next. My blood seems to pulse to its rhythm, and the words run like a news crawler in my brain, no matter what else I’m doing. When it finally lets up a couple of days later, it’s a relief.

Usually I know exactly where it came from, and that it’s my own fault. It follows a binge of sorts, like when I play the Leonard Cohen Live In London concert album intending to hear “That’s How the Light Gets In” just once, you know, to check on the lyrics and remember exactly how he said it (“Everything has a crack in it/That’s how the light gets in,” that perfect line). My good intentions are then overrun by a need to hear the whole thing, and try to place myself back into the concert I heard at the Chicago Theater a couple of years ago, a better-than-church transcendent night.

And then I play it again, and a few more times over the day, until I have worn a groove into my brain that sleep won’t erase.

But it isn’t just Leonard. My periodic visits to You Tube to see Freddie Mercury and Queen’s Live Aid set, which pundits call “the greatest live performance of all time,” set me off too. Just this fall, I commemorated the 20th anniversary of Freddie’s death by viewing the entire Live Aid performance, let’s just say, more than once.

But then I woke up to an exhausting, sweaty full-tilt version of “Radio Ga Ga” first thing in the day. I’d prefer to listen to Freddie when I invite him, not when he just decides to show up. I guess the truth is that since I invited him in the first place, it’s just that he never left. All right, more truth. It appears I can’t stop my binges once I start. Like all addicts, I believe I can control my conduct, but also like all addicts, I can’t control the consequences.

But it’s not all disturbing. Today I woke up to Temple Grandin, the autistic brilliant animal scientist portrayed by Claire Danes in the movie of the same name, belting out “You’ll Never Walk Alone” during the scene of her college graduation speech. A few days before, it was the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations,” which transported me back to my college dorm room when everything was ahead of me.

My friend Lorraine helped direct my attention to all of this. She seems to have a related and more mysterious version of this song phenomenon. She wakes up every day with a different song in her head, but not one she can pinpoint a connection to. The day we had lunch, she reported that Leon Russell’s “Delta Lady” showed up, not that she can remember hearing or particularly liking it. Her preferred playlist –Beatles, Eric Clapton – never appears and she wonders why. She is on the case, and has learned that this condition has a name, involuntary musical imagery, sometimes called musical imagery repetition or MIR.

Well-known prestigious scientific journal Wikipedia reports research showing that 98% of individuals experience this phenomenon, which it prefers to call earworm. Apparently women find that it lasts longer for them, and are more irritated by it than men.

Clearly, I have a touch of that too. I don’t know where “Good Vibrations” came from for instance, except that I must have a vault in my brain where all rock and roll tunes and lyrics from the sixties and seventies are stored.

I realize now that I was warned of trouble of this sort early in life by one of my favorite childhood stories. Robert McCloskey, the Make Way for Ducklings guy, wrote two Homer Price books, a series of stories about small-town boy Homer and a peculiar bunch of friends and relatives. In one, his Uncle Ulysses installed a shiny new jukebox with changing-color lights that cast a mesmerizing glow on his “up and coming” lunch counter. A mysterious stranger came in, installed a new song on the jukebox, and disappeared. Customers were entranced by the song, but then could not get it out of their heads, no matter what they did. Worse than that, they could not stop singing it. Soon, the entire town was afflicted. (Lyrics: “In a whole doughnut/There’s a nice whole hole/When you take a big bite/Hold the whole hole tight…”) The ultimate solution (spoiler alert) was to go to the library and consult the wisdom of Mark Twain. Why Twain? Because in an essay, he had posed the dilemma of getting something stuck in your head and not being able to shake it. Lorraine and I and Wikipedia are not the only ones to ponder this.

I’m sorry to include this last issue, in case it brings to life some buried demons, but Homer got me thinking about the songs that I take pains to avoid completely, lest they re-infest my brain. First, and worst, Disney’s “It’s a Small Small World” (“It’s small world after all/It’s a small world after all/It’s a small world after all…” until you want to scream). Then there’s Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life” (“to give me hope to carry on/You light up my days and fill my nights with song” – that’s for sure). And, affection for Julie Andrews aside, there’s “Do Re Mi” (“Doe a deer, a female deer/Ray a drop of golden sun…”) ad infinitum. Maybe there are bad song receptors in the brain that bind with such “doggerel” (Twain’s word) and won’t be extinguished.

In fact, maybe that’s the message. While I go around thinking I’m in charge around here, my brain is doing plenty on its own. It plays the songs it wants to hear, thinks the thoughts it wants to think, and lays down its own pathways, at least until I catch on and try to get it in line. Until then, I guess I have a soundtrack all my own, even if I’m not the one holding the baton. 

CBH - 01/12

WRITING YOUR WAY HOME

THEME: HOME
I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself. ~ Maya Angelou

By day, it was a typical conference room with moveable tables and stackable chairs. By night, or at least this night, it became a salon, a home away from home. The tables made a cozy U-shape, so everyone could see and be seen. Table cloths covered each, and antique-style lamps shed soft light. Plates of sweets and coffee took up the table near the door. Wordless music played quietly in the background.  The words would come from the dozen women who filed in, late because there was childcare trouble – too many kids with too many needs, more than had been expected. The chaos of resistance and misplaced toys and unfamiliar places took its usual toll on both mothers and kids. New childcare recruits were summoned to help, and we could begin.

These women looked tired. They had all experienced domestic violence and were finding their way out, either through shelter or education and counseling or groups for moms and kids. They had children to care for, jobs to find, homes to make. Homes that would be safe.

Each one seemed to exhale as she entered the room and looked around. Some wandered to the other end of the room to see the art exhibit that had been produced a couple of years before by another group of women, and their children. Others went straight for the tables and a few minutes of solitude. A frisson of anxiety hung in the air. Each had volunteered to be here, and we, the organizers, had implied certain promises: Come, write, tell your story. It will do you some good; and if you choose to share, what you write will help others understand.

Karen called us to order, offering words of welcome and assurances of confidentiality. She introduced John the facilitator, a writer himself and teacher of writing. He first went around the circle and asked each woman to share her past experiences with writing, which varied from lifelong journaling, to nothing since middle school, to college creative writing classes, to songwriting. He listened, asked questions, used their names. His message: No matter what you have or haven’t done about it lately, you are a writer who deserves a place at the table.

Meanwhile, the rest of us organizers sat in an outside circle, checking our watches and tapping our feet. We started late, Childcare ends at nine, Let’s get them started our brains chattered. It turned out that John was getting them started.

He played a video that his high school students had prepared for the occasion. A succession of students read poems they had written in his class. Each line began with “I remember…” (a prompt that was originated by artist and writer Joe Brainard in 1975 and is often used in writing circles.) Some of the poems were lighthearted, some painful to hear. The students modeled honesty and courage.            Meanwhile, through his conversation, John was busy establishing himself as a safe and peaceful man who had respect and appreciation for his wife. More exhaling.

We’d given each of them a nice journal, but when it was time to write, most requested the copy paper we had stacked in the corner. More space? Easier to crumple and discard? Anyway, they wrote in silence, right away, I remember…. The music clicked off in the middle. No one noticed.

John called time about 25 minutes in.

“Now, who would like to share?” he asked.

There was an immediate volunteer who read her recollections of childhood summertime, her grandmother, and fireflies.  Another followed with remembrances of high school, another on the births of her children. The reminder was clear – these women were far more than domestic violence survivors. They had lives beyond trauma.  

As each read, the rest listened intently. They laughed together. As each finished, she received a thank you from John. As time passed, the volunteers came more slowly. The tone changed. Imbedded between the fond memories started to appear darker and deeper things. The poems began to speak of red and swollen eyes, and wishing to turn back time, and feeling like an outsider even at home. Vivid details appeared, the kind that people focus on to escape the intolerable, a red flower pot, rainbows of light on the rug.

The room transformed again, from writing salon to sacred space, where the truth could be told in safety.

When John brought the evening to a close we asked everyone to evaluate the experience to guide us for the future. They wanted more writing, more participants, more chances. They wanted us to share the project with colleges, museums, radio audiences, Facebook, schools, libraries, and online.

We asked everyone who would be willing to share her words to let us make a copy to keep. Some did, others almost did but held back at the end. Some wanted to expand their piece and turn it in later. Now a box sits in the office labeled Our Story Project, locked for privacy but open for submissions anytime day or night.

They left to pick up their children with goodbyes and thanks. The organizers stayed to deconstruct the salon and turn it back into a meeting room so it could host a breakfast for donors in the morning. We didn’t need to deconstruct the evening. It was a success and there would be more.

We were just about done with the cleanup – the leftover cookies were packed for the next day, the lamps and cloths and power strips set aside for pickup by the volunteers who had supplied them, and the tables were rearranged into a breakfast-friendly layout.

One of the organizers came back in with a message from the child care staff.

“I don’t know what you did to those women in there,” she’d said, “but do more of it. They were completely different people when they came back to get the kids. They were smiling and calm. It was like they’d all had massages.”

 Another transformation. We had invented the first writing spa. Come. Make yourself at home. Think of only yourself for a couple of hours. Express yourself. Find out you are not alone. Be heard.

I’ll let you know when and where you can read their words.

CBH - 12/11 

WHAT PHOTOGRAPHS CAN DO

THEME: REMEMBRANCE
She glances at the photo, and the pilot light of memory flickers in her eyes. ~ Frank Deford

My father is 14 or 15 in the photo, posing with the big band he helped organize in high school. He wears two-tone saddle shoes, neatly tied. They look new. The photo has been hanging on my family picture wall for 15 years waiting for me to really look at it. I finally did.

In any old picture, the first thing I notice is the shoes. They hint at normal life, intimate suggestions of routine and circumstance. As I study his picture, I imagine him tying them on that morning, and wonder what was going on in those minutes: was he bickering with his sisters; what breakfast smells wafted upstairs; what was on his mind?

His eager and confident face hitches my heart. He has no idea that he is almost halfway through his life already, or that he will find a great love and have a child. Or that he will die suddenly and not be able to finish what he started.

It was around 1930 then. The Depression was two years old. Across the world in Germany, where his family originally came from, Adolf Hitler was winding up ten years of speech-making, positioning himself to head the Nazi party. My father doesn’t know about that either, sitting there holding his saxophone.

                                                                 *****

I climbed down off the bus into a busy parking lot lined with busses. Leaves crunched underfoot. It was a cloudy October day toward the end of our tour of Central and Eastern Europe. We waited behind a group of children chattering as they trailed their teachers though the gate.  They quieted as they put on the hearing devices their docent handed out, and filed out the back door, leaving room for us. Auschwitz was a busy place.

Our docent was Magda, a compact blonde woman with a lined face and matter-of-fact manner. She must have been a child in the era she would tell us about, if she’d been born at all. She led us under a gate with a sign proclaiming, “Arbeit macht frei,” which translates “Work sets you free” or “Work brings freedom.” This cruel and ironic legend was used at the entrances of all the Nazi camps except one. It seemed to promise the Poles, Jews, gypsies, handicapped and others who the Nazis determined to eliminate that there would be a way out.

                                                                        *****

The next picture on my wall shows some of my husband’s ancestors, captured in a formal family tableau, wife seated, husband beside her, adult children and their offspring lined up stiffly on either side.

The seated woman is Seraphina Studer Ruder, whom my daughter discovered when she did a family history project in middle school. Next to her is Fridolin, her husband. The names that bring smiles to our lips didn’t seem to cheer them up any. They both look pretty grim.

They’d left Germany in 1855, missing Hitler by 34 years, to settle in a German Catholic enclave in the middle of Illinois, and set themselves to farming.  They posed for this picture about the time Hitler was denied entrance into art school in Vienna, for the third time.  Had they stayed, would their children and grandchildren have been drawn into Hitler’s plans? If he’d been accepted into art school, would there have been any plans?

Hints about their lives jump at me. Their chairs rest on a rumpled shag rug. Her shoes, partly hidden by the nap, are petite and worn. His are dress shoes, well-used and scuffed. That morning for the picture, I imagine they put on the best they had, knowing they were laying down a record for those of us who would follow. It must have been a hard life with little leisure, in flat farmland that must have compared poorly to the hills and mountains of their youth. 

                                                                        *****

Magda led us to a long row of tidy red brick barracks, with a guard tower at the end of the road. Barbed wire ringed the area. She explained that the barracks had been built several years before the war for the Polish military, but turned out to be tailor-made for the Nazis’ purposes. Some buildings housed small numbers of SS troops, others crammed in hundreds of prisoners. We entered the first building, noting the terrazzo steps worn down in the middle by thousands of feet.

Large black and white photos hung on the walls, illustrating Magda’s talk. They captured the arrival of families, who stood together in ragged lines, children clinging to their parents’ knees. Their clothes are mussed, their shoes dusty, their faces grimy. None of them knows what is ahead, that soon they would be separated, men from women, children from mothers. Their faces are stunned and unknowing; exhausted people who couldn’t imagine the unimaginable.

We are told that the photos were taken in secret by two SS officers.  Their motivation is unknown. I prefer to think that they were moved to preserve proof of what they couldn’t stop. Their action allows the 1.3 million people who visit each year to better take in what happened here. Without the photos, it would be impossible to believe.

We climbed the steps to the second floor of the barracks. Magda explained how prisoners were herded from here to the basement and told that finally they would have a shower. They were told to leave their suitcases and remove their glasses, clothing, and shoes to retrieve after they’d bathed.

Once the “shower room” door was locked, primitive gas canisters were dropped through chutes in the ceiling and minutes later, all were dead. Their bodies were transported to the end of the row of barracks to the new crematorium, by Jewish prisoners who were spared in order to carry out this duty. Back in the barracks, belongings were gathered up and stockpiled.

She led us to a series of large rooms. Lights were low. On each side was a huge glassed-in case, floor to ceiling. The first was filled with suitcases carefully labeled with name and address as if they would be needed again.  Thousands of wire-rimmed glasses filled another.

Behind the glass in the next room sat an enormous pile of shoes, everyday necessities turned into horrific trophies. No one spoke in the room.

We came next to the children’s window that held toys and baby blankets, and a mountain of kids’ shoes, turned every which way as if scattered at the front door after school. To look at one pair was to imagine its owner, so we looked away. We filed by, eyes brimming.

The last pictures were of the liberation of Auschwitz in March 1945. Many Nazis had fled by then, marching hundreds of prisoners into the countryside. Soviet liberators ushered emaciated survivors in striped uniforms down the path we had just walked on. Some prisoners looked directly at the camera. Had they dared to expect this?

                                                            *****

On my wall, the post-war pictures begin. In a four-generation snapshot, my toddler husband sits on the lap of Fridolin and Seraphina’s son, his Buster Browns dangling. Parallel pictures from our two families stand side by side, showing two ex-soldiers, glad to be back to normal life, neither knowing what is to come.  

My husbands’ parents laugh, barefoot at a well pump, holding him high. Sixty-some years later, they still laugh together. Mine lean into each other, dressed for a night on the town. My mom wears a sophisticated career girl ensemble and high heels, my dad a business suit, all shine and polish. I would be along in a year or two, and he would be gone a couple of years after that.  

Whether caught up in waves of history, or in private tragedies, it is just as well that we can’t tell what is coming. But it is a gift when we have pictures to hold the moments still where we can visit them, for remembering or trying to understand.

CBH 11/11

A Happy Story about Borders?

THEME: WHAT A CHARACTER
Who you are speaks so loudly I can’t hear what you’re saying. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

It seemed like a nightmare. Borders on Michigan Avenue was closing? Where would I go to have a tea and look down on the Water Tower park at throngs of shoppers? What would I do when I could no longer browse the crazy assortment of off-brand books in the basement, or look through the ironic Christmas cards on sale in January, looking for the perfect ones for next year?  Where would I find another store with such character? If this iconic location could fail, what did that portend?

Soon there was an announcement. False alarm. It wouldn’t close after all. Phew! That was close. But the fear had been planted.

Months later, the worst came true. They would all close, even the suburban one I had been going to since my kids were small and I was brand new to the area.

I visited the wake for my dying Borders three times. The first time, facing only 20% reductions and abundant piles of gift items I couldn’t relate to, I tried but couldn’t find a fitting remembrance.

The second time, I bought a travel book for an upcoming trip to Europe and was out the door without even trying to find the perfect goodbye. A prickle of guilt followed me. As book prices climbed in recent years, even though Borders remained my psychological home, in reality I had often defected to the local used book store, and of course, amazon.com where I could buy new or used whenever I had the whim.

The third time, the discounts were up to 60 to 80%. The pile of unrelated-to-reading items had grown. The lap robes, tote bags and stuffed animals posed the question: Did the store go down the tubes because they lost focus and invested in items that no one would buy? Or because of defection by people like me? Or was it that they didn’t jump on the e-book bandwagon fast enough? Or all of them?

In the Psychology and Self Help sections I found some gems – Altered Egos, The Brain that Changes Itself, The Power of Story. Finally, something worthy to remember Borders by.

The checkout clerk was unreasonably cheerful – she was losing her job and I was the one who was sad?

On my way out, I passed a large sign, a letter from the store manager. She thanked customers for 20 years of loyalty, and reviewed some of the good times we’d had over the years. She apologized to the author scheduled for a book signing in October after the store would be closed. She asked customers not to worry about the employees, who were stocked with happy memories and would surely land on their feet.

Below the sign sat a stack of cards. “Please leave us a message. What did this store mean to you?”

I scribbled something about my kids growing up there, and me too. And good luck. And I’d miss them. And I was sad.

As I drove away. I wondered how the supposedly evil big conglomerate that was going to mean the death of the small independent book store – remember the plot of You’ve Got Mail? –  morphed into a refuge, with cozy reading corners and coffee, not to mention play space for kids, that felt like home?

I talked with friends from other places who’d said their own goodbyes to Borders with similar regret. Until I talked to my friends Linda and Van.  Every Sunday they have a ritual – they trek to the Borders in the Quad Cities, listen to music, enjoy their coffee, browse newspapers, pick up a book or two,  rain or shine.

They figured their fate would be the same as the rest of us, until their creative store manager Kit Whan heard about Books-A-Million, the third largest bookselling chain, expressing an interest in acquiring some Borders sites. She decided it should be hers and started a campaign. 29,000 letters and emails later, Books-A-Million brass stopped in to see what all the fuss was about. They signed on and offered employment to any interested Borders employees.

So they will live happily ever after, with any luck, although I am sure there will be a certain adjustment period. Instead of a nightmare for them, it became a dream; as if the lover who just spurned you fixes you up with a new guy, not as handsome or familiar, but definitely promising. I hope it works out.

A happy postscript: Books-A-Million is taking over 13 other Borders locations, bringing happiness to other lucky duck communities. The rest of us will just have to grieve for a while. Then we’ll have a big decision to make: are we going to take up with that Barnes and Noble guy, the buttoned-up corporate one who lacks the warmth and personality we’re used to, the guy we wouldn’t give a glance to before? A tough decision that.
CBH - 10/11

MY DREAM, MY BOOK

 THEME: DREAM ON

Dreams are illustrations. . .from the book your soul is writing about you. ~ Marsha Norman

Here was my dream. I would write a book that would change the world. It would be about personal narrative, the story that each of us tells about our own life. For a while there, the working title was If Your Life Was a Movie, Would You Go to See It?

“No, too trivial,” said the writing teacher. “This is an important topic.”

Second working title: What’s Your Story? How the Story You Tell about Yourself Makes All the Difference.

“No,” said the writing teacher, “Wordy and repetitive.”

Time for a new writing teacher.

Back to my dream: the book would trace the various inborn traits and early experiences that we use to invent our sense of self and the story that comes out of it.  Everyone who read it would create a coherent version of their life story. They would make connections between where they came from, what experiences life threw at them and how they survived, or didn’t. It would be a selfhelp book that actually helped.

The book would be the capstone of my therapy career. For all those years I sat in a chair in a room, helping my clients wrestle meaning out of the crises of their lives. I had to have learned something and this was the way to offer it to a much wider audience than the one at a time one I was used to.

The point is not mere navel-gazing. Once you know your story you can change it, which is what therapy is all about. Researcher James Pennebaker has demonstrated that writing about trauma bolsters both physical and mental well-being. So I asked my clients to journal in between sessions. I would sometimes receive a thoughtful and cogent account of how the current stresses fit in with the flow of life.

More often I would get pages that rambled through raw emotion, blame, self-help slogans, and self-recrimination. I’d hand it back and ask for a second step: highlight the 5 most important sentences, bracket any wild and irrational statements so we could set them aside, and start to figure out what this episode means in your life. Then we would work on answering some questions: Does this remind you of anything? On your best day, how would you prefer to handle this? What stops you from doing that? Whose voice do you hear in your head giving you counsel, and is that voice to be trusted?

It was to be a simple book, a tool for the reader to use on his or her own messy life, kind of a California Closets for the mind and heart. Surely people would jump at the chance to sort through their own life stories and put them in order.

But then my own messy life intervened and I never finished writing the thing, though I do have three successive richly imagined formats filed in a drawer where they can help no one. They heckle me from there, shouting muffled accusations of “slacker!” If they were in charge, they’d give me an Incomplete on my career, and one more term to finish what I started.

Maybe I need to open that drawer. I think in the absence of my approach the world has gone a bit mad. We now have a spew of completely unprocessed minutiae spraying at us every time we turn on the computer or the smart phone or the iPad. The me, me, and more me enthusiasts inflict their me-ness on each other and all bystanders on a daily (or minutely) basis through Facebook, (which knows more about you and your buying habits than you do), Foursquare (which lets you log every single place you went today), and Farmville (that reveals that people you previously thought well of are living pretend lives as farmers instead of reading serious biographies or playing tennis like you thought they were). 

Is no one interested in stopping for a moment to tease out meaning from all that? Anyone?

Apparently Facebook is. Their new Timeline approach builds a history of what you have ever posted and what can be learned from any of the 7 million sites and the apps you use. It’s certainly nice that they care, but all that data isn’t going to help you when it comes to deciding how to make the best life. Like those undigested journal pages, it just churns out an overwhelming volume of raw data, all equally important.

There is a reason why you have a prefrontal cortex and Facebook doesn’t. Your cortex allows you to prioritize, weigh in your values, perfect your unique vision, and stake out your little patch of territory that no one else can stand on. It helps you recognize you.

If I got serious and started up again today on the book, I figure I could finish in nine months or so, you know, like gestating a baby without the morning sickness.

Just think, I could advertise my new baby on Facebook, and if only a fraction of the 800 million Facebook members gave it a try, I would be in the pink, speaking to an audience far bigger than I could dream. Now that I think of it, there would be something bewitchingly subversive about using their methods to meet my goals. 

Stand back. I’m going to open the drawer and see what flies out. Just send in my meals. I’ll be busy making my dream come true. It’s who I am. 

CBH - 09/11

MY THREE DAYS AS A CUBAN

THEME: HEAR NO, SEE NO, SPEAK NO, YOU KNOW
"Shall I tell you what the real evil is? To cringe to the things that are called evils, to surrender to them our freedom, in defiance of which we ought to face any suffering." ~ Lucius Annaeus Seneca

          The email fairly screamed: Please take it down. You could be placing people at risk. Give us time to look at it first.

            Uh oh.  All I’d done is set up an online chronicle of my trip to Cuba.* I had to do something with the barrage of images and stories that woke me up every morning, to the Afro-Cuban beat of the music that followed us everywhere and then followed me home.

            As a courtesy, or maybe nagged by a vestige of the paranoia that hovers in the Cuban air, the first thing I did was send the link to my two tour leaders. And received this alarming reply.

            I had plenty of stories to tell. We arrived the day after the 50^th anniversary of the Revolution. Banners with Fidel’s likeness proclaimed its success. Our bus ride through Havana suggested otherwise. Dilapidated buildings, streams of vintage U.S. cars, and stacks of post-Revolution fortress-like apartment buildings lined our path to the Parque Central Hotel. We passed Revolution Square where officials once corralled tens of thousands of Cubans, some accounts say upwards of a million, to stand in the Caribbean sun to hear El Lider’s six-hour speeches.

            It sat empty today, a vast parking lot of a space. A tower, 358 feet of revolutionary fervor, rose in the center.  A tan office building that bordered the space on the right was decorated with a five story high metal sculpture of Che Guevara’s head. It seemed a high honor for an itinerant revolutionary who left Cuba after only six years for greener pastures in Bolivia, where he was executed after that revolution failed.  Still, his image is everywhere.

            We checked into our hotel, a replica of an older European hotel, with mahogany furniture and heavy draperies. We drew them open and gasped. We call it a slum; they call it normal.  Welcome to Cuba, the land of the-emperor-has-no-clothes.

            Before our departure from Miami, our tour leaders had given us just two pieces of advice:

1) Do not use the word “humanitarian” in front of the Cuban airport officials. They officially don’t need any help, and it might complicate our entry into the country to suggest that they do.

2) Watch the tour bus driver. Even though he claims to speak no English, he could easily be fluent and spying on our official tour guide Celia, an engaging single mom. If so, he would be ready to turn her in if she spouted any anti-regime opinions.

            Other than that, they were circumspect. Listen, they told us, talk to Cubans, observe, explore, and draw our own conclusions. At the end of the trip, they would be curious to hear our impressions.

I closed the email and reached for the phone. My tech person took down the site, and I waited for the verdict. In the few hours the site was up, who might have read it? Travelers and ordinary Cubans did not have access to the Internet, but such a state must have people monitoring chatter like mine.  I worried. I couldn’t sleep. What if something I said was turned against Celia? I felt watched. And controlled. And afraid. I comforted myself that I had taken care to change her name, and never identified the tour or leaders. Could they track them down anyway? What had I done?

            My worry took me back to what I’d learned about Fidel and his death grip on the country. He started out with the pure-sounding intention to overthrow the cruel and corrupt dictator Batista in order to create a fair society after centuries of exploitive rule. Once in power though, he leaped in another direction and announced that he was a Marxist. He took over private property and threw out foreign businesses. Affluent Cubans couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Cuba became the place where everybody gets the same and nobody gets much.

            To convince the rest of the populace to go along with the plan, he instituted public executions by firing squad, on TV for easy viewing, of people who disagreed. Here was a new incarnation of the powerful and bloody oppression they were used to, only this time it was of their own. Which brought me to my central – and very American - question:  how could this last after 50 years of disappointment?  Where was the protest?

            The answer was in the brilliance of that death grip. Each block has an official to monitor the compliance of the citizens. Children earn kerchiefs for learning devotion to the State, which helps get them into the best schools. The best jobs – like those in the tourist industry – go to favored loyalists. The lively black market is a back door operation that most participate in, but does not openly challenge the status quo. The whole structure of Cuban society was tilted, so that the balance of power stayed unbalanced.

            Finally, I got the call. Both of them were on the line. They liked the site. They were glad the trip made such an impression. They’d never had anyone go to such lengths to document a trip. And they were grateful for my willingness to alter it if need be.

            Their greatest concern, they explained, was for Celia. If one of her tourists left with a poor impression of Cuba, she would be blamed. I removed a few details, renamed a few other characters we’d met to make her more difficult to identify. The site went back up, and I exhaled, free again from censorship and worry.

            This final episode of my Cuba experience ended with a three-day taste of life as Cubans live it every day.  Now I watch with interest through the eyes of Cuban bloggers, and news reports of recent reforms.  Cubans can now have some types of small businesses, a million people are being removed from the State’s payroll. Cubans are promised the opportunity to travel. For our part, American travel restrictions are lifting, with brand new licenses being granted to tour companies for more than just humanitarian trips.

            It is change in its infancy, but maybe this time real change can come without a revolution and all its promises, but with gradual evolution of freedoms that allow more for more, instead of less for everyone. And eventually, the freedom to say what you see.            

*www.cubacurious.com

CBH – 08/11