Musings & Meanderings

Dusty Cohl died yesterday, and much of my day has been suffused with memories of him. Of the many people I rarely see any more, largely isolated as I am by physical disability, Dusty was one of the few I have often and truly missed.

I see him on the terrace in Cannes, where the inspiration for the Toronto Film Festival was born and nurtured. He’s wearing the hat, and toying with one of the beloved cigars he missed so much in later years. His magnetic and magical charm is irrepressible, infusing the gathering with whispers and waves of inspiration. This charm lives on, flowing like a pure mountain spring from an elemental source. Its sound deepens occasionally, heavy with a lifetime of experiences, but it is never poisoned or blocked.

I see him with Joan, the strong and beautiful woman he loved and shared his life with. Their dynamic could fill volumes, deeper and richer than an entire festival of the films they both loved. My arms ache to give Joan a hug, even knowing that it could barely acknowledge her loss or provide much solace, but still wishing to pay tribute to both of them, to their certain knowledge that every expression of caring matters.

It is a weekday morning, several years ago, and I’m meeting Dusty for breakfast in the deli where he held court for so many years. The day has dawned gloriously, with a crisp morning chill being gradually dispersed by a vigorous sun in a perfect azure sky. It is the closest approximation possible in Toronto of a perfect Cote D’Azur morning. We meet, both look outside, and without discussion Dusty asks for service on the empty patio. The morning chill is still resisting the powerful sunshine, making the brilliant light sparkle like diamonds. The sparkle matches the wit and intelligence in Dusty’s eyes, even as we catch up and he tells me about a life that’s slower, about rhythms of aging. His words melt away in the gathering warmth, evaporating like the dew, and what remains throughout our meal is the vitality and joy that was Dusty, brimming with pleasure at the astonishing panoply of life and ideas which surrounds us.

Of the many splendid things with which you gifted our lives, Dusty, I have most valued your honesty and integrity. Au revoir, mon ami.

During the weekend, I was temporarily laid flat by, apparently, a flare up of inflammation starting at the nerve roots at the site of my spinal surgery. Despite the fact that I’ve lived with constant pain since 1980, there are always new levels which can take my breath away. Much of that impact has to do with the element of surprise, and also of not knowing whether an unbearable escalation is temporary, permanent, or even the beginning of something worse. Having a root canal without anesthetic, after my surgeon had watched me have an allergic reaction to each of the numerous unrelated anesthetics he’d tried on me, was easy in comparison to being ambushed by unexpected and unending pain.

We can learn to endure and accept astonishing levels of pain. Of the thousands of people that I’ve known and worked with over the past 27 years, barely a handful were cognizant of my having any health problems at all, even when they had been told that I did, and even when they’d seen me during the few years when I needed a wheelchair to get around. In the past, I found this baffling, and interpreted it as meaning that I should keep my physical disabilities a secret. This practice has worked well enough for most business dealings and non-intimate relationships. My pain isn’t me. It is one part of my private self. However, this also means that, for me, the potential for close relationships with others is limited by having to find people who can both learn to interact comfortably with someone they know is in severe pain, and who can delineate between a particular handicap and the rest of the person bearing it.

In fact, many people prefer not to know and can’t cope with even the idea of a ’sick’ person. Others invoke a mechanism which relegates any ‘invalid’ to the sidelines for the benevolent sounding purpose of convalescence. Go away now, dear, and come back when you feel better. My saddest observation is of others with some physical handicap who have internalized a view of themselves as ineligible to participate, or who have adopted elements of either victimhood or martyrdom, or both, in an unhealthy co-dependent response to those around them. My most inspiring observations are of the opposite cases, where individuals learn to accommodate a physical handicap, including pain, and manage to use all their skills and abilities which are unimpaired to a fuller extent even than most perfectly healthy people do. These people often develop native abilities far beyond the norm, and also far beyond a threshold of simple compensation. They can become extraordinary first because they have to, and further because of realizing that they can.

So, having a number of hours over the weekend to indulge my fondness for popular fiction, I should have been reading a Lincoln Rhyme novel, from the series by Jeffery Deaver, which features a brilliant detective who also happens to be a paraplegic. Instead, I read the ending of Scott Turow’s Ordinary Heroes. Although I would read anything written by Scott Turow (I’d add a brief on tort law to my bedtime reading if it was penned by him), I’d hesitated to buy Ordinary Heroes when it first came out. A son’s insight into a father’s memoir recounting a personal experience of WWII did not sound congruent with my recent personal challenges and state of mind. By their nature, such memoirs, real or fictionalized, tend to include agonized personal responses to pain, death, and sometimes torture. My reading this book at all is a measure of Scott’s ability to tell stories about flawed people in a flawed society without ever discarding an abiding faith in humanity and in the miracle of life. The book ends with an emphasis on the extent to which we invent our own lives, celebrating the triumph of free will juxtaposed against even the most powerful external forces.

Pain comes in many forms. Beginning as the age of 9, I learned about loss, abandonment, abuse, and surviving entirely on one’s own. Most physical pain cannot compare to what such lessons can inflict. In my personal journeys, which have ranged across an environmental gamut from gutters to palaces, I’ve seen many who didn’t survive. I think of people whose hands I held against death who died anyway, and of those who, for one reason or another, were simply unable to surmount their personal challenges. More often, I think of those who did and accomplished things that others, with far more advantages, were unable to, of people who endured and dismissed handicaps of every sort, physical and non-physical, reaching ever forward to invent themselves and the lives they believed they deserved.

Any ordinary person can do extraordinary things. I really believe this, and belief, of course, is the only requirement.

Clay Shirky recently posted a brief message on achieving balance between arrogance and humility as a function of successful design. Arrogance and humility are powerful words. Our definitions of them vary as widely as do our definitions of success. In the commentary, I came across a suggestion to replace the word ‘humility’ with ‘empathy’. My first thought was that perhaps the author was misinterpreting the intended meaning of humility in the post, associating it with humiliation instead of with being humble. How differently we define these things!

To be humble, in my understanding, is to acknowledge ourselves in the context of God (secular or otherwise), of all life, including human life, of our universe, including all that is knowable to us and all that is not. Humility is not a denial or denigration of self, but rather a means of unity with a whole greater than any one of us. Although it is a concept taught as a virtue in many religions, it does not require a theological framework from any one, or any religion, to be understood.

Empathy is a more modern concept. It is the idea that you can do more than observe me and try to deduce something about me. By empathizing you can supposedly feel what I feel. Is this possible? Can you understand me well enough to feel what I feel? If you can, does this mean you can think as I think? That you can understand my motivations, actions, and responses in the same way I do? The answer to all these questions is no. Even a ‘psychic’ does not profess to achieve more than occasional and limited forays into the mind or soul of another.

So is empathy merely a buzzword? A useful term for opportunists? Did you believe Bill Clinton when he looked into the camera and said, “I feel your pain?”. Is it possible that this word is misused and that it can represent a concept of value which is generally not well understood?

In my view, empathy is a form of intimacy, not in the Biblical sense, or in any metaphysical way, but on an emotional level. The empathy may have a basis in familiarity, but it is intimacy which makes it true empathy.

You watch your child, rushing forward with an eager face raised high, stumble on an obstacle, and you experience the fall on a visceral level. I have had a similar experience watching an athlete go down. My imagination expands as far as my experience and knowledge allows. If, for example, I’ve heard the crunch of tearing cartilage in my own joint, my memory can instantly supply the sound. From my knowledge, I can also supply enough personal understanding of the person with whom I am empathizing to contextualize in time. How it feels to fall unexpectedly related to age, previous falls and injuries, how long it will take to heal and forget. Layers of meaning … an entire tapestry of past present and future context.

Empathy for strangers, especially those with whom we do not personally identify, on some level, is really very rare. It is difficult to do unilaterally, because strangers are, more often than not, entirely discomfited by the intense observation required. The projection of intimacy of any sort can be frightening. People who have a talent for it usually learn to keep that talent hidden, and to only reveal it in specific circumstances, usually presented as prescience or acumen.

There’s a less intense, and therefore easier, level of empathy, which is limited to a very specific context based on similar circumstances. We may both be parents of small children and recognize the commonality of what this demands of us each day. We may attend the same school or work for the same employer or be the same age or share the same cultural background, and so on. Empathizing in limited and contained ways with a peer group is natural for most of us. Empathizing with strangers is not.

Empathy, which can give us a valuable understanding of one another, is not a socially passive trait. On the opposite face of empathy is respect. We need respect as an active social trait in order to co-exist peacefully, and we need empathy to co-exist happily.

I believe that we can be highly empathetic without arrogance but not without humility. Arrogance, however, supports not only unshakable belief in knowing what others want, but also claiming the right to decide for them. That is, considered closely, a breathtaking claim to some of us. To decide for others through leadership based solely on arrogance is only possible through the use of force. To decide for others based on the humble understanding that their lives have at least the same value as our own, is to make a contribution of which we can be proud.

If a sense of humor is one of your coping tools, Jennifer’s post is a must read.

All of it ends up wrapped in so many memories, in timeless moments and confidences and love.

On some days the memories roll backwards, so here’s a little boy story:

My younger son attended church with his grandmother on Sundays.
One day, when he was 5 years old, he and I were in the car on our way somewhere.
Apropos of nothing, he suddenly said,

“You know, Mom, that there are really only 2 important rules in church.”

“Oh? What are they?”

“The first one is that you have to love and honor your mother.”

…sounds pretty good so far…

“What’s the second one?”

“The second one is that you have to go to the basement to smoke.”

Just over a week ago, I received a letter from my GP that he is shutting down his practice. Add me to the list of millions of Canadians without basic medical care. I actually haven’t had that for a long time here, but that’s in the lap of cynical and burnt out doctors, which is another post altogether.

No, you can’t simply find another GP here. Their practices are all closed. Patients are told to contact the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons. The College maintains a list that is always out of date by at least 6 months. Patients get the list, which has hundreds of physicians names on it, only to be told by every office they call that the practice has been closed for many months now. The College, by the way, advocates for their peers …the physicians and surgeons. No one advocates for the patients. Supposedly one can write to the Minister of Health.

As recently as 10 years ago, if you went to specialists, any one of them could direct you to a good GP. Today they all shake their heads and say, “Not any more”.

After receiving and trying to digest that news, I next faced this blog going into meltdown. It was shut down for several days, due supposedly to a server migration that made the mess worse. Some hosts should not be offering Linux on Apache combined with open source packages that they don’t know a great deal about.

The upshot is that I have a new host and re-installed yesterday. Some data, such as categories, didn’t survive the import, so it will take a few days to get through the archives.

If you get pinged from one of my old posts …again… please say that you forgive me!

Now I’ve also lost my voice, although I can whisper. The best thing I can say about this is thank goodness it went after I made my new hosting arrangements, and now I have a ‘voice’ again for musing and meandering on things that matter much to me.

WordPress …je t’adore. It is better the second time around.

BlueHost makes a big difference too. Installing and setting up the second time around has been so much easier I feel like I’ve moved to another planet. I even got everything validating within hours yesterday. I’m sure there’ll be new twists and quirks to deal with, especially as I add plugins, but the past month has also proven to be a great learning experience.

If you’re a returning reader, thank you for your faith.
If you’re in Toronto, do you happen to know a GP with good hearing?