TEDMed - Challenge #35

See the top 20 challenges identified at TEDMed.  (Robert Wood Johnson Great Challenges Program)


One that didn't make the top 20, but which really connects to my experience and interest in fostering alternative living communities is this one:

...an overlooked problem, “Many people wouldn’t know there was an epidemic of loneliness,” said Jacqueline Olds, advocate for Challenge #35, The Epidemic of Isolation and Loneliness, and Associate Professor of Clinical Psychiatry and Harvard Medical School. It’s been gradual but marked, said Olds, who shared the statistics that 20 years ago people used to have an average of three confidantes they could talk to—now, as a nation, we’re down to an average of one. Loneliness and isolation are linked to a wide range of diseases and undesirable health behaviors, from depression to self-neglect and more. Some solutions could include getting doctors to ask about loneliness as a vital sign, and putting out a national media campaign to educate about the ill effects of isolation.

More on Olds:  

Dr. JACQUELINE OLDS’ research includes the effects of social isolation and helping people become more connected in relationships. In addition to her teaching and clinical duties, she has authored three books with her husband, Richard Schwartz, M.D., including Overcoming Loneliness in Everyday Life and The Lonely American: Drifting Apart in the Twenty First Century, and is working on a new book about connections made in major life transitions like retirement, bereavement or geographical moves. 

So much for social media providing a bulwark against the Bowling Alone view of the world that Robert Putnam described!

Ariadne's cord

Started a lecture series, The Great Ideas of Philosophy (2nd edition) with Professor Daniel N. Robinson.  The prof starts the series with the tale of Ariadne.  I had not thought of this story very deeply, but coming fresh from a day as a hospital chaplain, found myself engrossed in the use of it as an expression of life review.  Stated simply, we find our meaning by retracing our steps.  

Ariadne was so in love with Theseus that she defied her father to give him a golden cord that would guide him back through the labyrinth.  (She also gave him the blade that was used to slay the Minotaur at the center of the labyrinth aka a slaying that will yield freedom from primal desires.)

To find ourselves, to grow and evolve, we need to take the time to make sense - to review what we have done and to see who we are.

So what or who is the love that gives us the cord?  What is it we slay?

As a chaplain it seems an apt metaphor for the opportunity the emerges to help someone in life review.  What is slain is the hardened idea of I (see post on  Uchiyama).  In the recounting there is broadening to where it seems we all walk this wide path together - myriad individual actions dissolving into a more universal truth.

At least that is my current experience of this myth!

___________

In the same intro lecture Robinson calls myth a tool for civic coherence - helping us to relate to each other and to our past.  Philosophy, by contrast, more destabilizing, seeking not to enshrine a POV but to seek out truth.

Claiming that mythology and philosophy do, however, set out to answer similar questions, Robinson notes three overarching areas of questioning:

1. knowledge (how do we know anything)
2. conduct (how do we live, assuming we can know our options reliably - and the assumptions made here determine our ethics), 
3. governance - how shall we live together (what are the political realities available to us so we can resolve conflicts at the level of conduct)

Robinson contends that responding to these questions was first handled heroically, i.e., via myth embodied by persons and communities as in the Upanishads and the Illiad and the Odyssey.  Philosophical consideration was a later development.

All I could think: Is this why I have so loved myths and the art of storytelling?

Should be a fun lecture series!

Owning my own view

So as I debriefed from a patient encounter, my supervisor challenged me to say something that would get him to think / see things differently?  The answer was that I could offer something from my point of view.  

I felt equivocal about that answer, saying I often feared it was imposing me on you (aka my story being imposed on the patient /client). 

Upon reflection, I see it is the only thing I really can do, especially in a 'new' relationship.  I  don't know another's experience and intellectual orientation.  But neither do they know mine.  The only thing I could reliably offer that might offer a new perspective or challenge IS something from my point of view. 

I don't think I quite embraced this truth before. The risk remains that someone would say - no, that is not so, but they can't really refute my perception, just offer to amend it.  

And what my Zen practice tells me is that a universality of experience is more likely to emerge than is difference: at core we hold the same existential concerns, and we all have the same habits of mind that avoid suffering, deny impermanence, and cling to difference.

Here's to owning my own view!  

Life-and-Death by Kosho Uchiyama

I have read this poem at a bedside and have thought of it often, forgetting it is written by one of my favorite teachers!  Posted here so I can find easily!

Life-and-Death by Kosho Uchiyama

Water isn't formed by being ladled into a bucket

Simply the water of the whole universe has been ladled into a bucket

The water does not disappear because it has been scattered over the ground

It is only that the water of the whole universe has been emptied into the whole universe

Life is not born because a person is born

The life of the whole universe has been ladled into the hardened "idea" called "I"

Life does not disappear because a person dies

Simply, the life of the whole universe has been poured out of this hardened "idea" of "I" back into the universe

What does it all mean by Thomas Nagel

I know I quoted him earlier this year.  Found my notes on the book.  Here are some more juicy bits:

If God is supposed to give our lives a meaning that we can't understand, it's not much of a consolation. 

The idea of God seems to be the idea of something that can explain everything else, without having to be explained itself. 

If God and his purposes are offered as the ultimate explanation of the value and meaning of our lives, that precludes asking 'What's the point of God.'

 If live is meaningless there is no point.  It wouldn't mater if I didn't exist at all, or if I didn't care about anything.  But I do.  That's all there is to it.  Resisting this is a compulsion to take ourselves too seriously.  We want to matter to ourselves from 'the outside'.  (this is the impetus for many ambitions)  

If we can't help taking ourselves so seriously perhaps we just have to put up with being ridiculous.  Life may be not only meaningless but absurd.