Showing posts with label survival. Show all posts
Showing posts with label survival. Show all posts

Monday, September 5, 2022

The Living

Tragedy struck in 1922, shortly after my grandfather's family had migrated by wagon train from Texas to Oklahoma. The seven family members who died that one horrific month, exactly a century ago, are buried together in a small cemetery in a rural town near where my mother grew up.

As many as 10 family members came down with typhoid fever, including my grandfather who was just a boy at the time. The survivors recalled desperately "turning from one sick bed to another" as they tried to comfort and care for those who were ill.

The person who looms largest in my mind here is my great-grandmother, Mary. The seven people who died that month were all her children and grandchildren. 


My great-grandmother Mary, in the white dress, circa 1912.
My grandfather was not yet born when this photo was taken.

I try to imagine myself in her shoes. I try to fathom the cataclysmic loss she suffered in such a short period of time. The sheer scale of it makes the mind reel.

I wonder how she survived. I don't mean surviving typhoid — I mean how did she go on living after such a personal apocalypse? How did she not die of grief? How did she not lose her mind? 

I asked my aunt Nova, the family historian, how she thought her grandmother managed to go on. 

"She didn't have any choice," Nova replied. "She had all those other kids and grandkids to look after."

"I can't go on. I'll go on," the existentialist Samuel Beckett wrote in his novel The Unnamable. So that's it. You go on because it's choiceless. Death will have its way with you, but so will life. You rise from the ashes, pick up the nearest spoon, and use it to put food in the mouth of the next hungry child, sister, husband, friend.

I exist today because typhoid failed to kill my grandfather, and because of my great-grandmother's resilience. A full century later, hundreds of people in my extended family exist for the same reasons. Babies are still being born today on this family tree. We are the living, and the ones who are yet to live.

For the rest of her days, Mary never went back to the cemetery where her seven children and grandchildren were buried. I don't fault her for that. She didn't want to forget about the loved ones she had lost. But I suspect that the wounds in her soul were so deep — unfathomable even for her — that to risk reopening them would have been too much to bear. Others around her, including my grandfather, needed her to go on, and that was the only way she could.

Saturday, August 9, 2014

On Meditation and the Future of Humanity

Do you find it unpleasant to be alone in a room with your thoughts for just 10 minutes, with no smartphone or other distractions to keep your mind occupied?

Apparently, most people do.

A recent article by Kate Murphy in The New York Times examined how excruciating it is for the average person to simply be alone with their own thoughts. Citing a study published in the journal Science, involving 11 experiments and more than 700 people, Murphy writes that "the majority of participants reported that they found it unpleasant to be alone in a room with their thoughts for just 6 to 15 minutes."

Even more alarmingly, in one of the experiments, "64 percent of men and 15 percent of women began self-administering electric shocks when left alone to think."

I ask you to pause for a moment and consider the implications of that: A vast swath of human beings find it so incredibly unpleasant to be alone with their own thoughts that they will resort instead to shocking themselves with painful electric currents simply to have something — anything, even something unpleasant — to redirect their attention.

Most of the time, we don't have to go to such extreme lengths to avoid introspection. That's because we never bother to go there in the first place.

As a society, we've become masters of staying busy all the time, always distracted and plugged in and entertained. We never have a moment to think, and when we do, we are programmed to reach for a familiar device or an activity or an experience to fill up the empty space.

"Our habitual tendency is to always be busy, doing something, changing something, or cultivating something," says the 17th Karmapa. "Therefore when somebody asks us to just relax, to just be natural, it is very difficult for us to actually understand how to do that."

Watch your mind closely the next time you step into an elevator and the door closes. During those 20 seconds of in-between space, in which nothing much happens, how strong is the impulse to reach into your pocket and check your mobile phone? Or is it already in your hand?

Murphy speculates that the reason we find it so unpleasant to be alone with our thoughts is because, given the opportunity, our minds tend to veer towards darkness: we begin to ruminate on our worries, our frustrations, our fears, our doubts and existential questions. Left to our own devices, we begin to make contact with our shadow, and our shadow is naturally something we experience as unpleasant because it is (by definition) composed of all the things we don't want to think about.