don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?”
March 8
“Angry Loner”
Newspaper headlines chose those two words to describe Cho Seung Hui, the mass murderer at Virginia Tech. I recall that the acquaintances of Lee Harvey Oswald described him with the same two words. The two boys who ravaged Columbine had earned the same epitaph. Going it alone is risky business. The first thing the Bible pronounces “not good” is aloneness.
There was a popular book published in 1961 titled A Nation of Sheep. It criticized those who swallow uncritically whatever the authorities—presidents, parents, and preachers—feed them.
Our pride revolts at being called a sheep. Sheep are not known for being smart. They just go with the flock. Sheep-like passivity and docility in humans lead to wars and all manner of ills. Americans value independence and self-sufficiency. We imagine ourselves tigers and lions and eagles and such—almost anything but sheep. But one day, sooner or later, life puts us in touch with, like it or not, our essential sheepness. It may come in the form of a diagnosis, a marriage crisis, a parenting crisis, a job loss, or a death. Then we suddenly realize how frail, weak, defenseless, shorn—sheeplike—we really are.
Support groups like Alcoholics Anonymous have grasped the importance of being in a flock. The first step in their twelve-step program is to admit powerlessness to control or fix or manage their lives on their own.
We need a flock to include and enfold us, to accept us as we are, to draw us out of our autonomy. We need a flock that can allow us to ventilate our self-loathing and dissipate our anger. As the Yale boys put it in their Whiffenpoof Song: “We’re poor little lambs who have lost our way.”
Do I hear a baa?
March 9
How does suffering shape us? There are two leading theories.
One is represented by Somerset Maugham, British author, writing about what he witnessed as a medical student: “Suffering did not ennoble; it degraded. It made men selfish, mean, petty and suspicious. It absorbed them in small things. It made them less than men.”
The other point of view can be summed up in three succinct sentences from three experts on suffering:
Friedrich Nietzsche: “What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.”
Ernest Hemingway: “The world breaks everyone, and afterwards many are strong at the broken places.”
Helen Keller: “Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it.”
Think of Patrick Henry Hughes, born with multiple anomalies—scoliosis, no eyes, inability to walk, and arms that cannot be straightened. Patrick began playing piano at nine months. He played trumpet in the University of Louisville marching band and became a virtuoso pianist and vocalist. He was a “straight A” student in his college classes.
How do we understand a Patrick Henry Hughes and his response to suffering? First, Patrick chose his family well! His mother, father, and two brothers have an earned “A” in family. They bathed Patrick in affirmation, support, and encouragement all the way. What if Patrick Henry Hughes had been born into another family, a family that for whatever reason did not believe in him or did not know how to help him? We do not want to go there.
And then there is Patrick’s indomitable spirit. Smiling, he insists that he is “just an ordinary guy living my life.” He prefers to think and talk about “abilities” instead of “disabilities.”61 No family, however wonderful, can dictate spirit. The child alone holds those controls.
Suffering is no match for the dynamic duo of “A plus” community and “A plus” attitude.
March 10
On his sixty-first birthday, trial lawyer Clarence Darrow wrote:
I once thought that when the time should come that I could no longer play ball there would be nothing left in life . . . I used to wonder what people could do to have fun after they were twenty years old; then I raised it to twenty-five; then I raised it to thirty. I have been raising it ever since, and still wondering what people can do for pleasure when they are old. But we are there with the same old illusions and the same old delusions, with fantasies promising us and beckoning us; with castles that we begin to build, never stopping to think whether these castles will be finished; we get our satisfaction and we kill our time listening to the voices and building the castles.62
In Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants a man in his nineties says: “Age is a terrible thief. Just when you’re getting the hang of life, it knocks your legs out from under you and stoops your back.”63
He elaborates:
You start to forget words—they’re on the tip of your tongue, but instead of eventually dislodging, they stay there. You go upstairs to fetch something, and by the time you get there you can’t remember what it was you were after. You call your child by the names of all your other children and finally the dog before you get to his.
I think both the aging Clarence Darrow and the fictitious man in Water for Elephants speak truth. Age is a terrible thief “just when we’re getting the hang of life.” But we had best go into life’s final chapter “with fantasies promising us and beckoning us.” It is better not to stop building those castles—whether we finish them or not is outside our control and largely irrelevant.
I am all for being realistic about old age. Notwithstanding, season reality with a little hope. Getting old is like eating cabbage—it goes down better with a little salt.
March 11
The ten-point scale.
It has become a common measurement in our time. Medical people ask: “How would you describe your pain on a ten-point scale?” If I assign my pain ten points, that means it is unbearable, the worst pain I have ever felt. The aim of the scale is to quantify a subjective experience.
That may be a fair way to speak of how much we enjoy or dislike a movie or how delectable or disgusting we find a casserole. Maybe the ten-point scale is also useful in putting life’s experiences, especially negative ones, in perspective.
Several days ago a little old lady backed into our new car and left a big dent in the driver’s side. She was at fault, her insurance will fix it, no one was hurt, and we are left with an unsightly car door for a week or so before I drop it off at a body shop to be repaired. I assign that a two. In the course of human events, it was so minor—a minuscule annoyance, an inconvenience, a flea bite—a one or a two.
I think I would give ten points only to a situation of utter devastation and hopelessness. Seeing my family herded into a gas chamber to be exterminated would be a ten. I think I would give a nine to a member of my family being raped or murdered or completing suicide. I might survive it, but I would go forward broken, nursing an almost unbearable wound in my heart forever.
My point is that many of us overreact to life’s stressors. We “catastrophize” (psychotherapist Albert Ellis liked to say) over life’s dented doors.
And yes, my family tires of hearing me ask: “On a ten-point scale, how many points should you give that?”
March 12
Whatever we think of Tiger Woods’s philandering and his public confession of guilt or Paula Dean’s public apology for using racial slurs, one thing on which we can agree is the one thing their business associates had foremost on their minds: “How is this performance going to affect the Tiger Woods (or Paula Dean) brand?”
Gatorade, AT&T, Nike and other companies once bet over $100 million annually that the Tiger Woods brand—greatest golfer in world history plus all-around nice guy—would make them more bucks.
Brand, when I was growing up, was something a cowboy put on a cow. Cowboys seared their