Schizoaffective

 Imagine a magical ball being used as a football at a large, outdoor athletic center. It is a normal football—oblong and brown. Now imagine it being thrown out of bounds and onto the baseball field. Immediately upon landing, it transforms into a white baseball with red stitching. The players there pick it up and pitch it and hit it and do what you normally do with a baseball. That is, until someone hits a homerun and knocks it onto the soccer field, where it transforms immediately upon landing into a soccer ball. The players kick it and head it as they do with any soccer ball, because it has become a soccer ball. Utterly. That is what it is now. And then someone kicks it out of bounds to the golf driving range. There, the ball becomes small and white and dimpled. A gold ball. And it acts just as you would expect a golf ball to act, because it is a golf ball. Utterly. Do balls behave like this? No, of course not. But we do. I find myself and others utterly transforming ourselves, on...

 "To me, freedom is choosing to respond attuned to fate, so the moment can blossom in its full richness, reaching with fate's power into the past and future, and throughout all space." I ended last week's blog post with this sentence. This week, I am going to explain it fully. We'll begin with the notion of "freedom." I was arguing that true freedom has less to do with ego-based choices than is often claimed. Instead, freedom is responding to all that is around me in a given moment in an attuned manner. What are free people attuned to? Paradoxically, they are attuned to fate. I am using the word "fate" in a manner that does allow for some choice. By "fate," I am thinking of all that impinges on a moment: history, current events, biology, biography, climate, and so on. Most all of this is well outside our conscious control, and even outside of our knowledge purview. There is no way to grasp all that goes into the possibility of a momen...

by Jay Paul   What am I going to make of being schizoaffective? Certainly, I don't choose to wallow in self pity and self negation, mirroring the greater society's poor opinion of people in my category. I want to contribute what I can; specifically, I would like to contribute what I can from the openings provided me by my very schizoaffective. Yes, schizoaffective is horrible and horrifying in many ways. But it also reveals aspects of experience that would otherwise stay hidden. It is a view from terrific loss, when seen from the conventional notion of success, but it is a unique view that offers a lot to humanity. Schizoaffective has taken so much from me. I had a respectable middle-class career, and that is no longer. In fact, my career, prep school teacher, was not even the career I had trained for. I'm a Ph.D. in English, and when I went to grad school in the late 80's, professorship looked like a promising career. The G.I. Bill Ph.D.'s were going to be retiring...

 When things are difficult for me, I can tend to get down on myself. I blame myself wholly for my predicament, thinking that I was completely and utterly responsible for it. As this happens, I try to remember what the 13th century Japanese monk Dogen counseled: treat yourself as you would a baby. By this he certainly didn't mean to infantilize yourself and act childish. Instead, he was suggesting we treat ourselves with tenderness, affection, and understanding. We don't judge babies. We respond to them according to the needs of the moment. Ideally, we always do that with tenderness, affection, and understanding. I need to remind myself of this because I, like a lot of people, assume I have more control over my life than I do. I judge and blame myself for feelings and actions that stem from circumstances I never formed. For instance, I could have anxious feelings because of my biology and genetics, my personal history, current events, and even my relation to the natural world. C...

Meditation is in vogue. Various people representing divergent interests frequently tout its health benefits. I have no doubt that there are benefits to meditation, but that is not why I do it. At this point, I feel I do it for the same reason I breathe: it is part of my make-up and the way I am in the world. I meditate frequently: twice a day, 50 minutes a session. That's 100 minutes a day on my chair. The type of meditation I do is called "shikantaza" and is based in Zen. I simply sit quietly, and when a thought or feeling comes up, I notice it, acknowledge it, and let it go. Sometimes, of course, I get caught in my thoughts and daydream for a while. When I notice I am doing this, again, I acknowledge it and get back to just sitting, noticing thoughts, and letting them go. I have meditated off and on my whole adult life, but I only got truly serious about it in early 2019. Soon, I was meditating twice a day for 40 minutes a sitting. I became quite devoted to meditation a...

As I get older, I dread winter more each year. I am now 55, and it all comes down to one big worry: slipping and falling on the ice. I have visions of myself cracking a hip or twisting an ankle. I sometimes even worry about hitting my head.  The strange thing is, it's been years since I slipped and fell on the ice. I remember once when I was in my early 30s, I was walking to the bus stop to go to work, and a thin layer of snow covered a slick spot on the sidewalk. My legs flew right out from under me, and I landed on my back, the wind knocked out of me. But in the subsequent years, I didn't worry about slipping and hurting myself as much as I do now. Getting older has made me feel my vulnerability more.  I have always been vulnerable. I could have cracked my head open when fell onto my back. But I didn't feel this vulnerability as I do now. When I was younger, I just assumed nothing bad would happen; I assumed away many of the dangers of this world. I imagine most of us do....

by Jay Paul   finding myself to also be a great raven soaring over a rolling field of long grass and wildflowers and a few isolated trees with great canopies a family walked on a trail mown through the grass the father a young bearded man pushed a baby buggy and the pretty young mother walked along   suddenly realizing that man was me 25 years ago with my now adult daughter and ex-wife in a scene that never happened but is representative nonetheless because we all did love each other in our limited and limiting ways and things did seem open to vast possibilities   then seeing myself as raven floating in the sky and realizing I am also a constellation of a great bear high in the sky behind the blue veil of sky I am a bear constellation watching a soaring raven who is also me watching a man who was me a quarter century ago   this could go on who is watching the great bear perhaps the moon there is no end to the multiplication of selves across space and time   and ...

 After last week's post on the nature of the interrelatedness of what we call self with other people and even things, I got to thinking about memory. What is it, and how does it work? In particular, I was interested in how memory interacts with the present moment. Before addressing memory, we need to establish what the present moment is. This is not easy. The present moment seems to be composed, for the most part, of anticipations, of ways of organizing toward a conceptualized and hoped-for near term future. For instance, if I am having a genial conversation with a friend, I focus on how to keep the geniality and friendliness flowing. I anticipate conversation topics that may amuse or entertain my friend. I anticipate topics that may comfort her. I pay attention to how what I am saying impacts her so that I can adjust, if needed, my tenor and emphasis. This is all toward keeping the conversation flowing into the future. I can sense her doing something similar in response to me. The...

When I go looking for my self, my own personal "I," all my own, I keep finding other people. For instance, I am right this instant sitting in front of a computer typing in this blog post. Why can I do this? Why, because I can type. Why can I type? I can type because about 40 years ago in a business class in high school Mr. Moran taught me to type.  So who is typing this? me or Mr. Moran? or both of us? I am not sure of the answer to this question. Certainly, my fingertips are making contact with the keys. So on the surface, I am typing. But this typing is wholly dependent on my having learned how to type, which is Mr. Moran's doing—in that strange windowless room with 35 other students banging away on manual typewriters. I went looking for my self and found Mr. Moran and my fellow typing students. And what am I typing? I'm typing words. And where do the words come from? I don't remember my first words, but I imagine I spoke them to my parents. I assume I learned l...