Out in the cold with a toy snow shovel
So, what’s our fare for today? What’s going on with you. Your Seahawk girls’ cliques are tormenting one another with betrayals and treachery and you’re one of their victims. Or you’ve snagged the cutest guy in the class and they’re all jealous. Aren’t we wonderful! Yes. My fair ladies swooshing across the stage in their Pygmalion gowns, scheming and conniving behind beatific smiles and glittering tiaras.
And you fawning over all of them. I’m a naif. Fooled by the parted, painted lips and tiaras. Fascinated by Taylor Swift’s career and imagery, thinking her some kind of goddess when she’s just a talent working with other talents to make an impression. I shouldn’t be fooled but theatrics done right get me anyway. We girls are having our way with you. Like the lyrics say, “I’m all for you, body and soul.”
You have no idea what’s going on with me. Yes. All kinds of possibilities and I can only guess. Close friends I’m in touch with daily aren’t begging me to return to Colorado but it’s on my mind. What? Around 20-25 years ago a solitary kid knocked on my door Hallowe’en night trick or treating. Dressed in cheap, one-piece skeleton pajamas. Took a handful of candy from a bowl and as soon as the door closed I was instantly overwhelmed with love for him. I almost fell to my knees. Where was this? Boulder. Rebecca’s and my trailer.
Love for him? What for? I never really understood. He was the age and same build as my son Owen when his mother took him away. The other day he showed up again. While I was taking a break and my mind was wandering. A little boy out in the cold, caught in a snowdrift holding a toy snow shovel. Dressed in winter clothes with a hood, so he wasn’t exposed to the elements. Exposed instead to abandonment. Neglect. And when I looked sympathetically into his face to comfort him what I saw was innocence and vulnerability. The face of emotional deprivation. So affecting that it jerked me out of my reverie into grief, like what happened in Boulder. I choked up, broke into tears.
For the boy? For a child. The abandoned child in me but in everyone, because there’s so little we can do for one another. Because so often we do nothing, and all around us and within us are children out in the cold, emotionally equipped with nothing more than toy shovels to survive with. It’s heartbreaking.
Did you comfort him? I gave him warmth, because that’s what we all need. Empathy is warmth, and we’re so good at depriving ourselves of it. My Presbyterian-Calvinist forebears. Religious people with their bibles and sermons and hymns. Preaching self-reliance as though warmth were its opposite when self-reliance is a joke without it.
When I arrived here nine years ago, the first thing I tried to do was be a source of warmth for my granddaughters. We needed it? All kids need it. It was instinctive. But you especially. Why? Something in your environment. Cold and hard, that no amount of warmth could soften. It drove me away. All the way back to Colorado, if only in my mind. Because that’s how much I love you and the child with his toy shovel. How much I can’t bear to be around the cold and the snow, the neglect, without wanting to do something about it. To replace an unbearable feeling with empathy and warmth. Before the cold and hardness, and now time, take you and the child away forever.
Cornelius Martin Sullivan
Help me understand. I was attending summer session at Andover in 1951. This was to bring me up to speed after a mediocre education in public grade school, and a guy shows up in my life. Like no one I’d met before. Cornelius Martin Sullivan. Another student who would have joined my class of ’55 except he didn’t. What happened? He ran around the track and had a seizure. Life over, just like that. The first casualty of our class that nobody but me remembers.
Why do you remember him? He was probably Boston Irish. ‘Irish’ then meant Catholic, and Catholics were the emotional opposites of Calvinist-Presbyterians like me. I’d never met a personality like his growing up in Greentree. “Cat-lickers” were looked down on. When I started my career in Boston I got on well with Boston Irish politicians. I was drawn to their warmth. Couldn’t get enough of it. Cornelius was my first taste of Boston Irish warmth. It gave the two of us a natural connection. He seemed to know me. Understood the suppressed feelings beneath my Calvinist exterior and easily, naturally related to the person within.
I’d had no experience with a connection like that. Couldn’t recognize it but instinctively took to it. The memory of it has lasted to this day. So now I can appreciate it. Had he lived he could have become my first real friend. In a way I loved him. I was out in the emotional cold and he was a source of comfort. You miss him. Yes. The personal warmth that comes from the heart. Easily and naturally.
Calvinism was built into Andover’s story. When I entered my Spartan dormitory room for the first time that fall, after he died, it was devastating. Bad enough that I was torn from my childhood; now I had a daily dose of physical coldness to put up with. The warmth of friendship would have made all the difference, but he was the only Cornelius Martin Sullivan. There were no others, and he was gone. I was the child with the toy shovel. All I could feel was aloneness and neglect. It was awful.
The pose of infallibility
Anyone in that position has my sympathy. You’ve had my sympathy from the start, being in the presence of that hardness. Needing warmth. And it feels awful not knowing. Not hearing your voice even though minds don’t need bodies to connect. You’ll always need warmth and nobody better than a Granddad to provide it. We belong together. It’s an affront to nature that we aren’t.
It’s all I’m used to. The way it was for me. I thought this is just the way it is. You’re OK with the way things are, but maybe it’s just because that’s how they are. The Hallowe’en boy and the child with the shovel are my reminders that something isn’t right. Some part of us – some part of life – isn’t being attended to. It’s being neglected, left out in the cold. Emotionally abandoned. And we’re fooling ourselves to think that this is OK and nothing bad will come of it. It’s radically wrong, begging to be fixed.
We need empathy. And we’re depriving ourselves of it. All in the name of ‘strength’. What do you mean? There’s no big picture out there with a know-it-all who has all the answers. How do you know? Doesn’t ‘God’ have the big picture? Know everything? The ‘answer’ assumes that everything is in a state of paralysis. No movement. No change. Therefore nothing new to learn, nothing more to know. Is this a place where we would find life? Love? Creativity? Don’t these things imply learning and growth? Movement, evolution, and change? The only place the big picture and Mr. Know-It-All exists that I’m aware of is arrogance. The state of mind that says No to questioning and being questioned.
Hamlet’s famous soliloquy brought us “To be or not to be? That is the question.” Concerned about the consequences of avenging his father’s murder when, if he were concerned about Self-Awareness instead, he would bring us “To question or not to question?” For “That is the being (or not being).” This had better be good. Personalities come with mindsets. The personality-mindset combination that says No to questioning and being questioned is all in with the know-it-all and its make-believe big picture. Where all is answer and none is question. A pose since the whole thing is preposterous. The pose of infallibility.
The enslaver
The Pope? I heard about that. Like the Pope and any dictator who claims absolute authority and condemns anyone who questions it. The prototype that infects the psyche of this personality-mindset is our friend, the know-it-all. The phony ‘precedent’ that legitimizes an absurdity: a ‘being’ who’s above questioning. Nobody and nothing is above questioning. The Church says it’s OK. It isn’t OK. Above questioning is one of the properties of make-believe’s know-it-all / big picture. Foolishness, a fantasy. That never was and can never be. Not-being. Yes. Not to question is not to be. Not-being is very not OK.
When poseurs claim infallibility, when arrogance assumes immunity from questioning, they’re aligning themselves squarely with not-being. With everything opposite to Love and Life, Evolution and Creation. Like what? Like neglect and stunted growth, fear and distrust, jealousy and resentment, hatred and revenge. Think any scary image from Hallowe’en, when the ghosts of the dead are risen from their crypts. Laughable make-believe, isn’t it? Except that in the mind of the know-it-all above questioning it’s not funny. It’s seriously dehumanizing.
Personality-mindset combinations that don’t succumb to one big answer nonsense assume, logically, that movement requires direction and direction requires questioning. Questioning that can’t be any help unless it’s helped by Guidance. Guidance from where? From the way things are in the absence of one big answer. And that would be from everything opposite to make-believe’s unmoving, uncaring crypt. From differentiation and empathy. Faculties of Mind that figure things out with feeling. With Guidance that can provide direction because it has values and knows the difference between right and wrong.
Where there’s only answer and a know-it-all there’s no need for questioning or for functioning either. From the sources of Movement and Caring. Order and Direction. Functions that come with purposes and causes, possibilities and ideals. All the faculties we associate with ‘Mind’. A friend, inclusive and sharing, who’s at work and play and takes delight in our being part of it. Part of something happening that’s spontaneous and creative, illuminating and liberating. Self-Awareness aware that it doesn’t have all the answers since the way things are is Movement and Change. Alive with questioning. Relatable.
Not an arrogant, infallible know-it-all, motionless and useless, having no function. Unthinking and unfeeling – neither mind nor being. Unrelatable. Nothing happening that’s willful and possessive, dark and addictive. The self-unawareness of answers that’s willed itself to be unaware of Movement and Change. An enslaver whose idea of ‘relationship’ is enslavement.
The flip side of questioning
Hamlet’s ‘non-being’ assumes infallibility, the power to rule over other lives. The collective personality-mindset of ante-bellum Southern slave owners who precipitated our Civil War. Who arrogated the power not only to rule other lives but to sacrifice them to their ‘cause’. Make-believe’s cause of the know-it-all and its big picture with all the answers. Impossible to over-estimate the lengths to which this mindset will go to have its way.
Why? Because in the absence of the mythical one answer everything is open-ended. Needing direction. Needing Guidance, and therefore being open to questioning. Questioning the who, what, when, where, why, and how of the way things are. Because the way things are is always in flux. Always subject to Movement because of the functions behind it that can’t be still. Love and Logic, Spontaneity and Order, Energy in the Now. Relationship within Mind and between Mind and its extension, the Character and Integrity of Free Choice that gives Creation its Meaning and Worth. Where we come in, because our metaphysical Self – who we really are – is here in our world to learn its function, Free Choice, through us. ‘Here’ but not here, because if this is a training exercise it must be an illusion. With the ‘realism’ of a hallucination where minds ‘see’ what’s not there and can’t see what is here.
We must be able to question the way things are. To examine ourselves. To look into the mirror and get a straight, no-nonsense answer. It takes learning and resolve. It takes character.
Once training begins in a dream state the flip side of questioning comes into play. It must, or the stage performance we’re part of would have no plot. The building of character and integrity from the bottom up against the onrush of hierarchical corruption. The flip side of questioning? What could it be? Not self-questioning but self-defeating. The familiar psychological phenomenon we call self-sabotage. Another way of characterizing make-believe’s know-it-all one-answer big picture. A preposterous idea that can only lead to its own destruction if taken seriously.
Which in the hallucination it is. Dismantling Democracy here and around the world. Dismantling civilization. Everything that stands for Sapiens progress, until we’re back to tree-dwelling and living underground like vermin. Until the inevitable mass extinction, under way now. To the self-defeater it makes no difference. The object is the end to all Movement. Paralysis. The end to Life.
The Psyche within
Sounds cataclysmic. To say the least! But in the realm of ideas it’s just a contradiction. That can’t be allowed in Reality. Opposing thoughts within the same one Mind can’t co-exist and allow Mind to function. They can seem to co-exist within the extension of Mind whose function in Creation is Free Choice while it’s in training. While it’s in a state of self-unawareness. The state we recognize as unconsciousness. Dreaming or hallucinating. States of illogic commonplace here on Earth. Irrationality. The swarm of insects with which otherwise rational minds must contend. To relate. To survive. The swarm of each other getting in our way. Of ourselves getting in our way. Contradictions.
Self-defeating when instead of choosing Movement toward Self-Awareness predatory instinct wills the human animal backward toward the black hole of paralysis. Our animal brain. The amygdala. The organ of self-sabotage that comes along for the ride in unreality. Prodding us to get back to questioning.
To the necessity of questioning the way things are. Our identity and role in shaping it. That is, if we care to be done with self-inflicted suffering and start thinking for ourselves. Instead of being manipulated by our own mistaken identity. A reverse mirror-image reflection that’s afraid of mirrors. A shadow that’s afraid of its own shadow. Because the mistaken idea that it is can’t be. Can’t exist. Until questioning this nonsense restores Self-Awareness that isn’t its reverse-reflection.
With help from Guidance. The Psyche within that connects all of Life, Love, and Mind. Known for empathy. Warmth.