The Short Version

“If I could just find someone who cared about me, I would be happy.” I don’t think that belief was conscious, but looking back, it seems that for much of my life I acted as if it were my guiding light. I also seemed to believe that if I cared about someone else, they would reciprocate, and so  by some strange logic I was attracted to women who needed very badly to be cared about. Unfortunately, it turned out that such women could never be truly convinced that I cared, or that I would continue to care, and in their insecurity, they were never able to care about me.

There has been an evolutionary advantage in seeking out relationships with our fellow creatures—species that do leave more offspring. We have this impulse in common with all social organisms, from ants to antelopes.

The evolutionary advantage is real, and the emotions that have evolved to propel relationship-seeking are real, but we human beings have also evolved language, which we can use to think about and understand our predicament in ways that other social animals cannot. We can imagine a future in which our needs are not met, and our real troubles begin in this imagined future.

We cannot free ourselves from the needs of our bodies, or from the programmed pleasures that guide our behavior. We can’t stop breathing, or taking in nutrients. Sugar will taste sweet, no matter what we think about its nutritional value, and orgasm will thrill no matter how we regard the complications its pursuit gets us into.

As long as we have bodies, we are stuck with the realities of bodies. We can be injured. We must breathe, eat, shit, piss, and rest. Our ability to imagine the future means that we can anticipate our needs and make arrangements to satisfy them—this is good. It also means that we can imagine the failure of our plans, and it is the imagined possibility of failure that begets the search for security.

If we can find some kind of short-term security, we are lucky. There’s a roof over our head, food in the fridge, and no one is trying to break down the door to get in. But life on this planet is uncertain: the person we hoped would cherish us forever could be smitten by someone else; a fire could burn down our happy home; and ultimately, death awaits each of us.

The inherent uncertainty of life can lead to a great deal of anxiety and unhappiness, but it doesn’t have to. Oddly enough, with all the unpredictable possibilities stretching out before us—and the impossibility of preparing for even a fraction of them—there is one thing of which we can be absolutely certain, and that is uncertainty itself.

I chuckled when I finished that last sentence, struck by the humor of our situation: blessed with the ability to imagine the future, we are cursed with the uncertainty of our imaginings. Our imagination fuels our anxiety, and the only reasonable respite from this anxiety is to become comfortable with uncertainty.

Uncertainty is, after all, our constant companion, so we might as well befriend it. None of us can predict what kind of thought or memory our brain will bring to consciousness in the next moment, let alone next week. I am constantly amused by the parade of memories that my brain produces without any obvious stimulus, with no apparent purpose. “Where did that come from?” my brain asks itself, and then gets on with washing the dishes after a moment of smiling wonder.

By paying attention to the moment-to-moment surprises blossoming in our heads, we can get comfortable with the idea of not knowing what’s going to happen next. Life can become a perpetual surprise party, with each of us the honored guest.

With enough practice, we can develop a very tentative attitude toward all our plans for the future, with a resulting lack of distress when they are altered by unforeseen circumstances. We may also come to find humor in our unrequited yearnings for security and certainty.

We can learn to enjoy our relationships without expecting them to save us from insecurity. We can enjoy all the pleasures the body offers without dreading their inevitable end.

Our hunger for that which does not exist can fade away.

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Come On In II from Norman Bearrentine on Vimeo.

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I have never seriously qualified for the label, “kinky,” but in the last few months I have acquired a kink in my penis, formally called, “Peyronie’s disease.” The cause is unknown, and it often corrects itself in a year or so. In my case it doesn’t cause any sexual embarrassment, since I haven’t been laid in over three years and have no intention of trying to get laid—I don’t want to complicate my wonderfully simple life—but I must admit it was a little disconcerting when I first noticed it.

The umbilical hernia provoked the same, “What the hell!” reaction when I noticed it, slight as it is, and it is potentially more troublesome. It’s a little uncomfortable if I brush over it in a careless way, although careful probing is painless, but it could get catastrophically worse. I’ll probably get it fixed at some point; the biggest impediment being that I would have to forego exercise for some time afterward.

Either of these conditions can occur at any age, but the fact that they heralded the arrival of my sixty-fifth birthday may have contributed to my recent consideration of “age issues;” the subject of the video in the previous post. I’ve already quoted, somewhere, the old Chinese saying, “If you don’t deal with the issue of life and death, at the end you will be like a crab thrown in boiling water, kicking its legs in all directions.” I’m not kicking, but my age has brought to mind the general condition of human beings; specifically, the limitations of conscious thought.

Eve took me to dinner on my birthday and had them put a candle in my dessert, which provoked a conversation with neighboring diners, one of whom asked, “So what’s it like to be sixty-five?” to which I gave the abbreviated answer appropriate to that situation. But it started me thinking about the impossibility of summarizing one’s life, whether you’re talking only about the current situation, or about the whole length and breadth of a life from birth to the present.

In summarizing the present, I could list all my values, beliefs, preferences, tastes, opinions, etc., along with my physical circumstances: address, weight, height, possessions, itches, ailments, etc., but the catalog gets so extensive that it becomes impossible to comprehend what kind of forest would include all those individual trees. When you consider that each of those factoids can provoke a cascade of feelings and memories which, to be understood, would require a foray into the history of my relationship with that area of experience, you realize that every thought about who we are is tied to everything in the universe through an endless web of causation. Conscious thought is incapable of encompassing such a vast wealth of detail, and so we settle for superficial labels which don’t come close to the total reality of our situation.

Given that situation, is there a satisfying way to cope with the reality of what we are? I have found a point of view that works for me, which, in one way or another, I’ve been writing and talking about for years as it evolved:

At any one moment, our conscious thought is the result of our brain’s sifting through its vast reservoir of experience for what seems relevant to present circumstances. As those circumstances change, different aspects of our history are summoned to provide a way of reacting that would hopefully be efficacious.

Each brain’s algorithms for sorting and summarizing continue to evolve, and each new experience can alter those algorithms. We are, and always have been, a work in progress, and in idle moments, our brains shuffle through our experience for ways that they might improve our adaptation to the world.

Most brains don’t understand their own workings. They have been taught by an uninformed culture that whatever appears in conscious thought has a very special reality. If a person feels sad, for example, the culture says that that feeling should be taken seriously. That sadness is very real; it is a fundamental part of who one is at the moment and defines how one should proceed.

However, if a brain comes to understand its own workings in the way I’ve just described, something magical happens: it realizes that the current conscious thought is the result of internal processes that are not available to conscious scrutiny. The brain doesn’t know the details of how sadness came to be the feeling of the moment—although the fact that we are social creatures means that it will try to develop a plausible explanation to share with friends—but the informed brain knows that sadness is only one of many possible reactions to its present circumstances. With a slight tweaking of the algorithms, a totally different reaction could come to the fore, and sadness would fade into the background.

With that understanding, a brain can tweak its own algorithms in real time!

Example: One possible reaction to my current age and physical condition is sadness. My brain could focus on the joys of my youth during periods of physical robustness and sexual abundance, could calculate the odds of my ever achieving such states again, and sadness could result from those calculations.

Alternatively, it could focus on the times, even in youth, when I was ill or disabled, when sexual fulfillment was either unimaginable or was accompanied by drudgery, sturm und drang. Juxtaposing those memories to my present circumstances could give rise to exuberant bliss.

My brain realizes that it has options, that the “reality” of current feeling can shift in a heartbeat simply by refocusing on a different set of parameters. For most human beings exuberant bliss is more pleasant than sadness, and my brain has learned to see sadness as a signal to shift its focus to produce the more pleasant result. Your brain could learn the same trick if your life provides it with the necessary tools. Good luck!

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A Rainbow on the Rice Pot—Life is Good

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