Learner therapist (29)…… The One and the game(s) of intimacy

 

 

Learner therapist (29)…… The One and the game(s) of intimacy

Torrey Orton

March 6, 2013

 

Only you can make this world seem right…

The Platters, 1953

Intimate aspirations

This resonant anthem to love has a popular culture life of great resilience and duration. Its underpinnings are the Western romantic vision of another (the One) who will perfectly reflect our own imagined goodness as a person – somewhat as the good-enough-mother does with unconditional love for her children. Perhaps the spiritual anchor is the One God, perfect in all respects, who we are encouraged/told to aspire to. Psychologically these may be the same foundation in different dress(es).

Here’s a thought for beginners on the life road to a coupled future of one kind or another: the One you are looking for, believe exists out there and cherish as “who I am meant to be with” cannot be ‘found’. He/ she has to be co-created, jointly built over years of shared work in  marriage, partnership or cohabitation  -  something exclusive for some large percentage of a life’s time. The happiness research is on my side here. Among the happiest people in industrial cultures are old people in stable relationships of long duration. Modernity has been attacking that paradigm for a century or three. The One is a cheap, cosmetic imitation, but just about all there is on offer…oh, I forgot religious fundamentalists’ straitened marriage gates.

How do you become a One?? You can’t. You can be deemed the One by another and you’ll know if he/she tells you, though that’s unlikely because to do so would reveal the perilous state of the relationship: still being measured up for the suit of engagement according to standards which are both wholly transparent (the public ones imagined by all to be what they are straining to attain) and totally private in the judge’s suite of fantasy needs.

There’s no One...many could do

The imagining of the One is a defence against the uncertainty which is one major feature of intimate living. It is fired by the blind energy of infatuation – one of the few life emotions which is best savoured at its finish.  But, “maybe we aren’t meant to be together” comes to the aspirant’s mind. An expression of powerlessness… being in the hands of fate(s). If the fit isn’t perfect the game can’t be played?? But if you don’t play how can you know the game.  One aspirant confronted the M sex columnist (Sunday AGE, March 3, 2013 pg. 6) with:

…Then a man I really liked said he wanted us to be “friends with benefits” because “how else can you find ‘the one’? Now if I meet someone I think, “another one to treat me badly”.

She was not a beginner; rather more a culture warrior tired of the fight with no finish. How commonly are variations of the ‘friends with benefits’ path to relationship wholeness traded on as the married or partnered future recedes into the faint light of the biological clock’s hands??

Accessorise – everything can be verbed and what can be buffed can be matched. But can it? What is the central theme, colour, shape, sound, smell which defines everything else in the One package as accessories. How would a beginner know? By buying matching sets from approved providers of recognised One costumes…those available in financially appropriate versions… so the One is ultimately democratic. You can put them on and still not know where / who you are.

The inner One

Yourself as the One is expressed in “that person” who you do / do not want to be. E.g.  “I don’t want to be that person who….”;  “I don’t want to be that person in the anger position” – the disempowering judgment against expressing strong feelings to others. We can only wonder what the boundary within her between “too extreme” and the rest of her life might be for Anna Guy.

“…But actually hurting anyone or killing someone, that was just too extreme. I didn’t marry that person. I didn’t know that type of person. I wouldn’t have thought I’d choose that type of person…”

Anna Guy reflecting on her husband having recently been arrested for murdering her brother. THE SATURDAY AGE, GoodWeekend Jan. 19, 2013

The public One

The One has history. For example:

… from the mid-18th century onwards, and particularly with the advent of Romanticism, a different problem presented itself: the glorification of the suicidal person as a romantic hero. In 1774, Goethe published the literary sensation, The Sorrows of Young Werther, the story of a painfully earnest young man, tortured by unrequited love, who ends up shooting himself. All over Europe, other young men started to dress up in yellow trousers and blue jackets, following Werther. They also began to imitate the manner of his death, and Goethe's book was banned in several countries. The roots of the poisonous connection between suicide and the romantic hero began to form at the very same time as the development of modern celebrity culture.

There's no shame in suicide. And there's no glory, either

Giles Fraser  The Guardian, Wednesday 30 January 2013

 

Branding as the pursuit of a corporate One. You have arrived when your company name is the generic name for the product – e.g. Hoover for vacuum cleaner, Kleenex for tissues (USA), etc. The individual person equivalent would be iconic (see archetypes) male and female, a brand changing roughly with the fashion cycle (30 years for Ray Ban aviators, for an instance of a cycle). For archetypes try the gods of old (Viking or Greek identities) or the One God, promoted by the competing owners of its serial revelations, in whose image we are made and always fail to live up to…So what’s left are celebrities. Brand names change a bit more quickly than they used to.

And there’s the ‘history’ of the latest One which solves all previous failures to solve the fat, addiction, ageing...problems. The only resounding evidence for most of these is that they fail, One after another, yet the failures never cease to promote themselves as the One of their respective domain. Fat comes to mind as the most resilient loss-leader of self-improvement fantasies. How many of these are still in play: the Atkins diet, the Mediterranean diet, the Dukkan diet, the 5-2 diet (the latest, latest diet)? Such Ones are also known generically as “the real deal” or “real thing”, out of which spins an unending breeze of real “real things”.

Borderlands – there are ‘bad’ Ones, too

Two weeks before the Australian Open opened in January , on a billboard at the corner of Punt Rd and Swan St. in Richmond facing towards the Tennis Centre, I saw “Don’t be ‘that guy’ at the match”, the drunk and disorderly one in the photo front and centre. Interestingly, on reflection he was scarcely the model D and D type; more drunk and sleepy, foolish, clean cut kid who just went too far for his own system – that is, the wrong one to bother fearing.

In a similar vein, there’s Madison Eagles reflecting on her lady wrestler self-image. She says there’s a joy in being a ‘bad’ One, and that there’s a market for it, proven by her winning ways on the professional mat.

“I’m just drawn to being that horrible person everybody hates and I really enjoy it…”

Madison Eagles, “the Punisher”, 28 yr old woman professional wrestler in TheAGE GoodWeekend Jan 19, 2013

What’s the psychology of this: Do you get a whole picture and then seek items to compose it - a vision thing rather than a tick-a-box thing? The closest to becoming One thru your own efforts is to acquire socially approved features (kardashianisation? Beiberfication?) of the look. It’s not surprising that ours is an age of body dysmorphias and binges. The One is a deeply evaluative and moral construct (ethical…maybe, maybe not) of cardboard thickness.

Another e.g. - “get the garden you’ve always wanted...” Imagine how you would get to recognise the garden you’ve always wanted. How does it get “populated” with plants, pathway(s), vistas…?? Can you choose these components when your source of taste is already set by exposures well before you are choosing such things…much as choice for junk food is primed almost irremediably by junk food childhoods intentionally designed to bond you to junk …?  Can you find a human partner in the same way?

The Game of relationships in a world of Ones

 

The Game has two objectives: to determine who would want to be your One and to determine if they are suitable to be your One. A dilemma leaps out. The other’s desire for you (thru which you feel their want to be your One) and their suitability (thru which you send your desire for them) are mutually confounding variables, as psych researchers would say. Want clouds perceptions of suitability making it difficult to have confidence in your judgment of either variable. This brings us to the Game.

The accepted practices in the Game are to be found in the commentary (gossip?) of interested same sex others about your relationship progress. Sophisticated players draw on the resources of the target sex as well. Everyone knows the rules, with a leaning towards their own sex interests. But do they work in finding a suitable One? Well, if the national relationship failure rate (40+% for marriages) is any indicator, no. And this does not count the myriad of failed efforts which many go through on the way to the supposedly committed versions, both binding and bonded, etc. And we rely on co-gamers to shore up our judgment of the process of discovering whether a possible One wants us and is suitable. There’s a book in the Game, as in the One.

Where to for any one, but especially therapists?

… While the date is ultimately unimportant, what is important is the arrival of systems that support rapid reconfiguration of every aspect of human life, from our work structures to our family lives to our political processes. To trans-form means to change the shape of (of what? … everything). Because a significant portion of the entire human family is now interconnected in real-time, the transformational era can take an opinion in Shanghai and within weeks it could dramatically influence purchasing behaviour for certain products in Reno. Our collective attitudes, behaviours, energy, and spending now constitute a complex, global and fundamentally chaotic school of fish. Or perhaps more apt, a flock of Taleb’s black swans.

“The Transformational Life” – Rob Smith on Integral Life.com 18/02/2013

This sounds like the culture of the One on steroids, where it has become loosened from its mooring culture of origin trappings and converted into a globally portable cloth (among those cultures with a ‘middle class’, defined as anyone with enough disposable income to look at adverts of wannabe approved self-presentation).

Why does all this matter for relationship therapists? Because, if this scant analysis is somewhat right, the conditions for relationship consistency, reliability and certainty are declining, perhaps at a rate well beyond our capacity to adapt. The breakdown rate is one datum. The start-up age is another. The single living rate for over 30’s, especially women, is another. Should increases in family violence rates count as another??

What does it mean to help patients navigate this world, be they 20 or 50. I have ones across that spectrum struggling with the challenge to be someone’s One and find a suitable One, too.

Stay tuned.

 

Learning to act right (33)… Engaging HoGPI strategy with anger

Torrey Orton

Feb. 25, 2013

Anger into energy…

A major change of direction is often upon us before we know it’s happened. We find ourselves facing into the wind instead of back to it…So it seems to be with me and the HoGPIs at the Fertility Control Centre (FCC). I adopted a treat-them-as-they-treat-patients attitude 8 months ago. I explicitly disregarded them and did not speak to those I had spoken to before, restricting my speech only to moments of their ‘bad behaviour’ – their daily-repeated breaching of the Melbourne City Council public harassment regulations. That’s the amount of time they gave to each passing patient.

When I wrote of my anger struggles 8 months ago (http://diarybyamadman.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/learning-to-act-right-26-my-rage-and.html

I was at the start of my attempt to influence HoGPIs with disregard. They, the errant HoGPIs, carried on as before, harassing with indifference and impunity.  My anger continued, somewhat reduced by attending to not being angry – the CBT solution. This internal strategy worked a few hours of each week’s time on the line at the FCC, only to be overwhelmed by the more outrageous examples of harassment. These moments still spark a perilously vertical rise in my pulse and pressure at the sight of an already crying woman and her bewildered male companion being set upon by the harpies of heaven.

Two of my FCC Friends – Marty and Charles – took a more assertive approach to the HoGPIs over this period, stepping up more pre-emptively to their actual harassing. Need for an intervention was relatively predictable because the most persistent harassers were 4-6 women, usually present on any given morning in ones and twos. Patients arrive in discrete pairs with lots of time between one and another. I could not do this so pre-emptively as they. Proximity to the offenses pushed me outside my self-control range in a flash.

Anger in retreat

My anger started to recede three months ago when I heard the outcome of the HoGPIs efforts to have a security guard charged with assaulting one of their number. They were unsuccessful. My anger receded further over the intervening months since as I formulated an approach to data gathering which offers a prospect of shutting the HoGPIs down to some extent and a way to be (more) effective protecting patients.

In some trial rounds of data gathering with voice-over video (where I comment on what a HoGPI is doing, her name, the time of day and date) of specific HoGPI transgressions has produced two results: an immediate HoGPI shame reflex and withdrawal from the behaviour, and a secondary threat of possible legal action. There was only one patient query about the videoing, which was easily answered.

Engage or disengage?

But it is not so simple: engage or disengage. Feelings come in different intensities. My anger varies with circumstances, which I still do not understand well or engage effectively. For example, one of the interesting things about the HoGPIs is their aversion to personal accountability for their public actions at the FCC. Aversion appears in self-veiling in different ways. The religious wear trench coats; the laity are trenchantly nameless. Neither provide their names easily, or ever so far. Two examples here - http://diarybyamadman.blogspot.com.au/2013/01/learning-to-act-right-32-unveilings.html

They do not provide their associations – professional, social, familial, avocational – easily, or at all, if asked. And, yet, they see themselves fit to attack others (under the veil of “helping” or “counselling”) about one of the most individual challenges in life…the continuation of it...or not. Their aversion is intrinsic to their single-issue strategy. Anything more personal is always a threat to the consistency and firmness of a single objective – removing abortion rights period. I’m reliably told by some among them that keeping it pure is part of the playbook for many HoGPIs.

Seeking their names, affiliations and vocations is not easy. They are hiding and my approach is a threat and their hiding is a threat to me and patients.  Upshot: an angry request from me. Effect: even more likely withholding by them. And so on. Personalising our relationship is one pathway, maybe, to breaking through the single issue veil. It’s hard to see 3D persons as iconic figures of evil. The generic example of this is the incapacity of those close to serious misbehaviour to actually see it or predict it – the family which stays together, blames together.  Anger’s not a helpful starting point. On the other hand, it provides energy for action in pursuit of what I see as patient justice. A difficult mix to get right.

The sinner-prospect identity, TBC

There is another dynamic at play in the FCC front yard. It goes something like this, I think: HoGPIs see patients through the anti-abortion lens only, so every patient who appears is identified as a prospective sinner to be saved. Their identity for the HoGPIs is sinner-prospect TBC (to be confirmed, by their response to the HoGPI offer of counselling or help). No other aspect of the individual is relevant. Keeping irrelevant the factors which could personalise the patients out of the sinner-prospect identity is central to sustaining the HoGPIs own identity as perfectly justified in any efforts the make – that is, harassments in particular. HoGPIs perform this fantasy maintenance trick by only presenting to the patients what they perceive – the sinner-prospect – with no question about the actual circumstances which bring patients to the FCC. Patients feel this perspective.

 It also helps sustain the idea that patients cannot be any more distressed than their identity as potential sinners already makes them. Normal psychology of stress doesn’t even get into view. Maybe when I get a better grip on my stressors, I’ll get better at increasing the HoGPIs’. Tracking my actions and their effects on me and HoGPIs will come next.

Stay tuned.

Learning to act right (31)… When is a counter-attack ethical

Learning to act right (31)… When is a counter-attack ethical
Torrey Orton
Jan. 9, 2012

I look forward to the views of St James Ethics Centre on the ethics of our proposed action described below. At least, some generic guidelines for our thinking so far would be useful. I will be approaching Ethi-Call, the Centre's telephone ethics consulting service for an opinion of the following strategy when they re-open in a week. This article is still in draft at this posting.

I write on behalf of a loose assemblage called Friends of the Fertility Control Clinic (FCC), numbering around 6-8 volunteers who appear solo or in pairs at least 4 of the 6 mornings a week the clinic is open. We support patients arriving between 7:30 and 9AM who are being challenged by Helpers of God's Precious Infants (HoGPIs). The HoGPIs' view is that they are offering help to pregnant women who are, in their own views, being harassed by the HoGPIs.


Proof of the patient perception lies in two facts: almost no patients ever take up the help offer (as reported by the HoGPIs themselves) and, two, once the patients pass by the first offer they are subjected to various degrees of continuing verbal harassment (as defined technically by the Melbourne City Council by-laws, which is also harassment by our standards and, we believe, the standards of most of society). The HoGPIs have on passive display materials which can only be called provocative for patients and partners. Their view is that they make no contribution to patient distress because patients are already distressed – a simple, but self-serving ignorance of the psychology of stress (it is cumulative!).


We have been supporting patients for 18 months now. The HoGPIs in some cases have been protesting for 20 years at this site, or another. We are on a first name basis with the principal actors of the HoGPIs, though none will take responsibility for leadership on the site. The regular HoGPI participants number about 10, with daily numbers varying from 4 to12. The most persistently aggressive of their number are women. Patients do not know they are usually being covertly filmed by one HoGPI and their daily numbers recorded manually, all assumed to be seeking abortions. The HoGPIs do not know which patients are coming for abortions and which for other fertility control help.


Apart from our presence, which patients spontaneously thank us for, we support by actively pointing out when HoGPIs have stepped over the technical harassment line, usually saying to the offending HoGPI, "they said 'no'". Sometimes some of us step between patients and protestors after that line has been crossed and accompany them to the clinic entrance. The pattern of events under discussion occur on a public footpath bounded on one side by the property line of the clinic and overseen by a security guard each day (one of whom was shot to death 10 years ago by a protest-associated gunman; no one in the clinic has forgotten that this is a possible end game of their professional commitment).


Our commitment to patient support is based mainly on the need to reduce patient stress. I am professionally committed to this as a psychologist and psychotherapist. Others of the Friends have their own reasons, but reducing patient stress is always the starting place for our actions. Therefore, any actions we undertake to inhibit, moderate, or deflect HoGPI impacts are judged from a patient stress reduction perspective.


Our actions are largely seen by HoGPIs to be an inhibition of their freedom of expression. They seek legal redress for our perceived indiscretions, e.g. being supposedly "provocative" by pointing out the connection between their anti-abortion line and the Church's clear anti-contraception and anti-gay positions, plus its present difficulties with systemic paedophilia. We are prompted to remind them about the latter difficulty when a regularly appearing priest adds his contribution to the patient experience as he surveys the clinic entrance from 6 feet away: "protect your child." They call the police when offended. This results in no reportable offenses being found.


We have made efforts to assist the HoGPIs to increase the effectiveness of their first offer to patients so that there would be greater uptake potential and less added stress for patients. These efforts have been documented, discussed and refused consistently. Two of their number attempt to discourage the more flagrant misbehaviours of their colleagues.


The HoGPIs are absolutely certain about when life starts and finishes. From that position they judge others' positions as right or wrong. The source, and authority, of their position is the Catholic Church's published positions on said issues, available for all to see on their website. From their point of view, no one has the right to any other position. Hence they label as "murderers", including by implication patients, those differing with them at the FCC. They do not extend to non-believers the democratic consideration we extend to them as our starting point in opposing them – that they have a right to say what they want. We do not oppose their offering help, but we are "going to hell" for opposing their excesses.


Liberal democracies judge that everyone has a right to their claims, but not to ones which endanger the dominance of liberal democratic values – i.e. freedom of thought and its assistant, speech. At the gates of the FCC these two values clash quietly for the four groups of participants: patients and families, Friends of the FCC, security guards and HoGPIs. And so, we have the central challenge for Friends and HoGPIs – the challenge of enforcement of regulations which establish and manage the borders of free speech and offence. No one in enforcement wants to be involved with this highly irregular terrain. The last place the police and council officers want to hear from is the FCC footpath.



We know that the HoGPIs will vigorously defend their perception that they are not harassing the patients, just trying to help them…to the point of claiming, as one did recently when she was haranguing a couple who had turned away from the offer of help, that she was just "speaking to herself" in mouthing the standard accusative mantras at users of the clinic's services.


Now it's time for a new step. Remember the context, in brief, is this: 6 days a week the already emotionally charged patients of the fertility control clinic are confronted by anti-abortion protestors whose behaviour clearly offends them to the point of tears in many cases and outbursts of rage in a few. These patients are entirely within their legal and moral rights to use the services of the clinic.


This will be a more confronting step, at least from our viewpoint. Confronting for us is the fact that we have to become much more systematically attentive to HoGPI misbehaviour in order to push the Melbourne City Council / police authorities to enforce their own rules of public behaviour – notably the rules against public harassment.


So we are committing to a persistent data gathering campaign by live video to clearly document HoGPI transgressions against the law of harassment, and three other recurrent invasions of patient privacy. These three are:

(1) 'gang tackling' approaching patients in pairs or trios with the effect of partially blocking their normal progress along the footpath;

(2) chasing patients from many meters down the footpath, sometimes as far as 100 meters from the clinic so that their approach to the clinic is punctuated by the continuing presence of protestor(s); and,

(3) corralling patients in their cars on arrival so they cannot easily get out.

Harassment data is the most difficult to collect because it requires close video with audio which is highly likely to be more confronting for patients than HoGPIs.


This project, once agreed by all stakeholders on the FCC side, will be clearly advertised to the HoGPIs, as have been all our other initiatives. That is, we are trying to work with democratic values of openness and transparency in a context where they are not shared by the 'opposition' in the name of their right to free expression.


Torrey Orton
AHPRA Reg. No. PSY0001120138
11 Wertheim St
Richmond, Vic., 3121
Australia
Mob. +61 (0) 419 362 349
Skype - torreyo

Learner therapist (21)……Fate, destiny, choice and hope

Learner therapist (21)……Fate, destiny, choice and hope
Torrey Orton
July 31, 2012

 

Some words for a wounded patient….

 

Forethought:

"…an object is defined by its nature. In order, then, to design it to function properly – a vessel, a chair, a house – one must first study all of its nature."

Excerpted from Bauhaus Principles at Bauhaus Archive, Berlin, Germany 230712

 
This principle can be applied to people. We are just organic "objects" endlessly in search of our nature (well-being?), which it seems difficult to agree on, either with ourselves or others. The initial stages of instructing students at the Bauhaus included a year of free-association, follow your inclinations and intuitions exploring of the nature of materials in their own right, free of prospective uses (in making objects).
This stage can be usefully thought of as play. Trouble with adults is they often have to be taught how to play in this sense. The Bauhaus was erased by the incoming Hitler government's early efforts to ensure no-one learned anything officially unapproved (and a few dozen other prohibitions as well, of course!). Even some Bauhaus students were probably relieved. Serious playfulness is tiring and challenging and disturbing to the accepted orders of things.
So what? Often enough to warrant writing this, a patient shows up with a major trauma of long duration and intensity – the kind which renders them repeatedly wondering why did this happen to me and elevating their pain by declaring themselves responsible in part for it, by feeling guilty about it!! In fact, I have such an issue arise about once a week and similar ones are working in the background with many more patients a week. In a way, people who show up for therapy think they have to fix themselves, not that others have to fix themselves. They sometimes come around to the latter view after a while, often quite a while.
To have hope of recovery from their injuries, some intrinsically positive signs are helpful, along with some acquired capabilities effective in keeping further trauma at bay. The latter are most important; the former are among the way stations to recovery. Without a good defence, hurtful patterns are recreated in dysfunctional present social, vocational and intimate relationships. To achieve such defensive capabilities often requires placing the bad part of one's life aside enough to appreciate the positives, or at least potentials and possibles through which one can get to decisions to move towards new probables.
Finally, to make a choice which implements a personal policy with some hope of meeting the requirements of the situation often, in turn, requires courage. The courage both pushes back against the lingering forms of the original hurts and counters the fear that stepping outside of one's relationship comfort zone(s). Simple so far, but often stepping out into the world of new, safe relationships requires letting go of some of the defences which helped one survive the original trauma(s) – usually a somewhat rigid personality structure which provided, and continues to provide, an internal and external space for development, but not for the next life stage development! This capability is assertion, going on the offensive….
I am aware that the terms destiny and fate cover overlapping grounds, often being used for the same aspects of life by many people. The reason for going into this is that part of a recovery, or a life, is a sense of its wholeness – a sense which does not come from techniques and skills alone. Wholeness has to do with ones place in the world, ones meaning in the world and meaning to the world. Fate, destiny and hope with courage is existing language for this level of self.
I think of the fated part of ourselves as what we are born with: our internal orientations, temperament, biological potential and so on, our gifts so to speak, plus the externals we arrive into: our family, social class/status, ethnicity and general surrounding socio-political-economic conditions. These externals are our givens. We can make no claim for our worthiness arising from our various inheritances. What we can claim is that we worked on our inheritance virtuously. We tried. This brings us to destiny.
I think of our destiny as what we choose to do with those gifts if we can get a chance to develop them, or how we respond to lack of opportunity to do so. Destiny is the chosen part of our lives, what we can answer for. We can be judged for our destiny, but not our fate. My various inheritances gave me a starting place and certain destinies I have never pursued. Many of those inheritances are absences of discernible capability. Maths comes to mind unless it's the intuitive kind that's good for guessing dinner tabs without calculating, but not for building or analysing at all! My brothers got the usable types.
Other inheritances are life opportunities arising from our fate which give us a head start in certain directions which may also be false. It can take quite a while to work out what part(s) of our fate are most important to us. We are often actively discouraged from taking on certain gifts. Especially those in esoteric activities like dance, writing, singing, playing, theatre, and painting are areas with a known likelihood to produce barely sustainable lives of noisy desperation.
That such gifts exist is powerfully attested by the numbers of would-be musicians, painters and writers who persist with their aspirations for love of them. They certainly can't be doing so for money. These gifts are also where fate and destiny overlap most clearly: not being able to / allowed to pursue one's calling(s) is experienced as a failed destiny by many; pursuing successes in the forms that are socially rewarded but personally inappropriate may be to accept ones fate rather than seek ones destiny.
In the end, from where I am now in my destiny, the question of worth cannot be answered by what good I have done, but how well I tried to do whatever it was I was trying to do. Put differently, being successful comes in many forms, the most important of which are the least visible. It cannot be the case that the basis for self-evaluation is "success" in any of the vaunted senses our commercialised reality daily espouses. Many lives never get a chance to be successful in those terms and so they cannot just be worthless, can they?!
Most religions recognise this explicitly and devote much of their energies to reducing the toll of various inequities on life chances. However, their pretending to Caesar that his success is most honourable, and welcoming all the little caesars into their fold while encouraging the less fortunate to interpret themselves in the mould of the caesars, who for all their success seldom get enough recognition in their own eyes for their achievements….this latter path is the one that guts religions from within. It needn't gut our patients.

Appreciation (45) – Age 69, or 70

Appreciation (45) – Age 69, or 70
Torrey Orton
May 7, 2012

"Happy first day of your 70^th year …"

…Jane said on the way out this morning, by chance reminding me I'm going to write about the latest fact of my aging. Now this is not new, neither as subject of my blogging (though not usually an Appreciation) nor a context factor of increasingly inescapable presence to me. After all, I've had two major hospitalisations in the period between January 10, 2011 and Dec. 19, 2011, with a minor due in the next month to replace a declining pacemaker. This last will be only 30 minutes of locally anesthetised open and shut, plug and play shoulder slicing. Peanuts for health care. Scarcely a day in the hospital.
But I'm aware that being 69, and coming up to the marker day yesterday, is a benchmark for me most notable for its neighbourhood to the real marker of 70. Why real? Well it feels like the entry point to old age.
I couldn't say to a couple of friends why 69 seems so strange to me …like being unremarkable because it is only the entry's forecourt or a life step's set off point and so escaping its due notice for being what happened before the main event - a look at the real thing, the peak of 70. As so often with life, I, like my patients, fail to notice the facilitating precursors to my benchmarks - achievements or failures – and so miss the benchmarks occasionally.
I'm not doing what the aged/elderly/old are supposed (in my historically determined mind) to be doing. I'm seriously involved in four activities of hope: confronting the HoGPIs* at the Fertility Control Clinic (actually, hope humbling), writing about that activity and anything else I can think of that refuses to go away (hopeful) and doing 20+ hours a week of one-to-one therapy (actually effective to a reassuring extent – hope rewarded). I can't remember the fourth one, though as with all fading memories I have the memory of once having thought it!!
With all this, what's to worry about? Only the unfinished business of getting a guaranteed escape clause if the lights come down. Pre-emptive euthanasia is not available here.
Statistically I've another 10 yearsish. And the things which give me hope and/or challenge it, will be around as much from now on as they have been up til now. If I look at this fact from Charles' point of view my real life has only just begun, since I am a beginner at street struggles (the FCC defence), a novice at writing (blog) and an late life pro at therapy. Maybe I'll discover the missing fourth activity of hope. What's not to learn? At least what I think I'm supposed to be needn't constrain what I become.
Happy birthdays to you, too.
*Helpers of God's Precious Infants

Views of life-death

Views of life-death
Torrey Orton
Feb 18, 2012

Note: this piece is the first in the life-death series, the second of which was published here on April 17, 2012. This one was composed out of three separate posts two-three years ago. It sets the problem subsequent life/death posts will address. It was published on the Kings Tribune website on the date above and in the magazine's march 2012 issue.

"You're driving down a road in the desert, and the engine suddenly stops. .. no Pep Boys, no Auto Club to help. Whether the road continues is of no consequence. It has ended for you."

This is Edward Schniedman, dead at 90 in LA, predicting his own death's nature. While death is death, what it means seems to be a matter of opinion. Even what it is seems so, too. So, I offer some views of death as my contribution to the debates and discourses about death.


I have a stake. I'm old enough (68) to know that I'm nearer the end of my term than its beginning. I've outlived my father and his father by 4 years. I'm pretty clear I want to die when I want to, if I can, and have taken steps to encourage that possibility.


I share this view and intent with my wife. We've signed the necessary papers to ensure that the 'life support' technologies are turned off, or left off, if we're incapable of being consulted. Some things stand in the way of complete confidence they will be turned off, mostly others with other meanings to death, who may want not to accept what I have legally decided. Their meanings of life give different tones to death from mine. Some of those differences are catastrophically confronting for people like me. This is the terrain of naturally fundamentalist thinking in fact, not merely in faith or theory. The resurrected are only seen in faith tracts and films. How can I understand this better, and maybe them, too?


The purchase of assuredly effective means to end my life cleanly, with minimum clean-up required of any others is, however, not legally available. I do not want to count on under the counter substances with uncertified contents, etc. I would be happy to engage with a variety of safety requirements, especially ones aimed at ensuring the drug(s) cannot be accessed by anyone other than me. This would require a regime somewhat like the Swiss one portrayed in the Pratchett video. For a local perspective, see the Victorian branch of Dying with Dignity FAQs here.


Some initial takes on life-death

These views on life-death are undertaken with wonder at the difficulty of the task of making sense of death, and life. The counter point is my emotional wrenching by the uncertainty of fulfilling my preference for choosing my own death time, as much as that is possible. These are matters where perspective is nearly all in the struggle to give judgment a sustainable foundation. Here are some first takes. They do not pretend to be complete.


There is my notion of a 'good death'. Dying on one's own kitchen floor or over-night in bed, as one of my parents did, qualifies for this label. In some pre-modern societies there was an understanding that one's time had a limit and making way for others was both necessary and honourable. Another 'good death' may be that at home with more or less extended periods of relatively painless decline and social intimates present continuously on the way. The fact of dying attracts moral attentions of every imaginable sort.


The climate for dying

Second, we have the increasing squeamishness of late modernity about any perceived damage to the self, driven by an implicit assumption that we can be protected from all imaginable dangers (see some of the submissions to the Victorian Royal Commission based on assumptions that the actual 2009 bushfire conditions could have been foreseen and planned for comprehensively).


A handmaiden of this aversion to the material tribulations of everyday life is the philosophy of 'nice'. Be nice; don't trouble others; adjust your thinking and feeling to not confront anyone, even unintentionally.


'Nice' has been enhanced by the actions of the damages lawyers and the health marketing fraternities. The latter sell hopes of endless life and instant recoveries (you deserve a lineless face or pot-less gut as much as you deserve a Gucci or a Ferrari) from the costs of living (obesity, wrinkles, varicosities and lost hair among them).


The lawyers sell (actively marketed these days) reprieve from perceived slights to soul and self which have been legally or administratively excluded from polite discourse. Defence against bullying grows into defence against anything "uncomfortable" like a different perception of our workplace worth from our self-perception – the foundation of performance management, or learning! Warnings of the dangers of overhanging limbs and maybe fallen rocks compete with trees for attention on our highways.


So, we are not to see death or damage in public. My ex-countrymen – Americans - take this even further by banning the showing of those dead from defending the country. The Pratchett video mentioned above received 800 objections to the fact it showed, without flinching or inflating, the last breaths of the patient's life! In case we might be overwhelmed by reality, our TV stations all prepare us for possibly disturbing images.


Nor should we even speak disturbing images. Our public servants are trained (I assume; why else this tortured rhetoric and toneless, robotic delivery by cops and docs and pols?) to say anything but 'dead', 'body' or similarly explicit language. Rather we are given 'the deceased' who 'passed on' (just to somewhere else?) or more grimly 'passed away' (finality is acknowledged), or, more evasively, just 'passed' (like a train in the night?). Yet all are considered "tragedies" that befell "victims" (with the exception of publically recognised crims and malefactors) in print, on screen and in the mundane discourse of our neighbourhoods.


Demographics and politics of life-death

The demographics of life-death are this: a few (about 20 %) of the electorate in Australia are prepared to fight (to the death?) to preserve the right of every conception to come to term and every adult to be constrained from dying on their own terms, assisted or not. This 20% achieve a larger electoral influence than their numbers warrant because the total field of voters is finely poised between the major parties. Small factors shift small margins in finely poised electorates. Electorally true and ethically incorrect.


The facts of death – who, how many, when, but not often how or why – are available daily, along with births. With one exception: suicides, successful and attempted, are seldom reported unless unavoidable and even then only implicitly (notably death by train). So the fact that we begin and end are matters of public record, presumably because enough of us are interested to warrant the use of space that might otherwise be sold for ciggy and alcopop ads. We cannot meaningfully speak of death or birth separately without being in denial of the absent partner – we are living-dying beings; we live for a while. However long we do, it never amounts to how long we have not existed. Hence I talk of life-death.


In addition, the boundaries are a bit suss on both ends. For example, where does IVF fit with naturally occurring conception; similarly where does life support machinery fit with naturally occurring death. Notice that neither of these options is available to the poor anywhere. Some of the poor some places do have the chance to sell a part of their biological resources to the rich (comparatively) elsewhere, giving them a surrogate participation in others' longevity. As the Everest example below highlights, human rights are easily over-ruled by specific disabling circumstances, plus variations in courage (or, as I'd have you think, variations in need for martyrdom, which is just a label for a split-second decision). This is also the land of everyday hospital triage under disaster conditions.


A program of explorations

I hope, after building various views of life-death, to arrive at a place where fully rounded treatments of life-death issues can more often be achieved. To do so would mean, for example, considering all specific issues in the context of the materially and socially enabling factors through which any resolution is constructed. In other words, to use consistently the biopsychosocial construct on which some evidence-based medicine attempts to stand for all life-death matters.


So here are some views of life-death to come in this series. The first I have elaborated a bit to give a sense of the material argument. The other six are skeletal images. The order is not assured, nor are the topics guaranteed as stated. I'll be learning as I go and that may change my overall perspective and the features in its view. Reader suggestions welcomed!


Extreme sports and....the permeability of rights in pursuit of meaning – some examples:

Cathy O'Dowd's Rewind 1999 piece in Sunday Life (24 May '09, pg. 30; Melbourne) included a report of her passing by a dying woman on the north face of Everest. "The general public don't get this: they think, 'As long as she's alive, you can't leave'. But they live in a world where you can call the police or an ambulance. You can't do that on Everest."

 

High risk sports - like sky diving, paragliding, bungee jumping , base jumping - have been around since lion-baiting was the entry price for manhood in sub-Saharan hunter-gatherers.

 

In Australia we have our own sport: binge drinking - specialty of the young and younger olds, with death dealing potentials and fulfilments every weekend. These are called "tragedies" when they are merely excesses of youthful riskiness.

Beginning of life and ...rights to life. The IVF opportunity and challenge


'Normal' end of life and... is death for embracing or defeating?


Martyrs, those who serve and the costs of justifiable violence


Suicide attempts, successes and failures...irretrievable meaning statements


Choice – what can we really choose, how much should we choose?

 

Near deaths - insights from those who passed over and back again.



 

Life at the edges of death: Extreme by choice

Life at the edges of death: Extreme by choice
Torrey Orton
April 11, 2012

 
TJ's trials by near death – not his wish, his fate …

 

He was falling backwards into a bottomless glacial crevasse, joined by high tensile rope to three other climbers - two in front and one behind him. He stopped falling with a jerk after 15 meters of free-fall, only to be yanked into free-fall another 15+ meters as the porter behind him was pulled into the crevasse with him and dropped the length of the safety rope past him. The rescue commenced by the front two dropping separate ropes down to be buckled onto their safety harnesses.

 

But his hands were frozen on his safety rope, and soon started literally freezing as the wind-chill took the ambient temperature to -20C. He tried but failed to convince his right hand to let go and grab the new line…it took an hour to get through from brain to the hand, which effortlessly resisted loosening its catatonically traumatised grasp. Finally he and then the porter were hauled up.

 
This is a true story and it is not the source of TJ's primary nightmare. When TJ showed up in therapy he was wracked nightly by hourly wakeups snapping him upright in bed, as if at the end of that drop again, staring into a blank space in his memory of the events...part of which he could not recapture. This was turning sleep into a drama he'd never enacted before in his life. He wondered if they would stop, and then what it all meant anyway.

 
High risk sports like sky diving, paragliding, bungee jumping, BASE jumping, monster wave surfing, and cave diving have been around since lion-baiting was the entry price for manhood among Rift Valley hunter-gatherers. But with extreme sports participants can always choose not to play on any given day, while lion baiting was a must do for entrance to adulthood. It was work in its time. The difference between extreme outcome occupations and sports is this: workers do not get to choose whether to 'play' or not; if their shift is on, they're in play. Their story is for another day. The story of willing self-endangerment is today's.

 
3 Questions


I'm trying to figure out who are the audiences for this story, what is the objective and what is the narrative? First, the audiences I'm seeking here come in two brands: the fearful, look-young brigades (both young and old) who are the market for eternal youth treatments and preparations, and the fearless experience seekers who climb any mountain in search of a peerless cliff to rappel or jump, even better for the possibility or certainty that no one will be there to pick them up if this jump/fall is the one too far! Both groups are death defying in different ways. The bulk of my possible audience is judiciously discriminating choosers of appropriate lives and life activities – or so we may think we are. We may be death avoiding, too.

 
Second, the objective of this undertaking is to create perspective on this most central subject – the meanings of life/death. As there are many lives, there are many deaths. Dignified dying like dignified living is certainly not assured even for those most endowed with means and rights. Yet dying, like birthing, we share with all organic creation; these are the events where we leave and re-join the non-human. Dust to dust and all that…

 
Vulnerable awareness


Third, the narrative is vulnerability. A fault line of appreciation runs through these audiences: are they aware or not of their vulnerability to fate? My impression is that a major life stage, sometimes called midlife, is marked out from the preceding stages by this awareness. Much of its drama is fired by efforts to deny or avoid the awareness that we will all die. Few step up to embrace it comfortably. Some get to embrace it early, like TJ in the crevasse at age 21, which gives meaning to "having maturity beyond one's years". Often we do not choose the risk we find ourselves taking. TJ knew of it beforehand, but not in the sense he now does.

 
To embrace our vulnerability might lead to shifting our life focus from what we do to how we do it: to value ourselves for the manner of our efforts more than success. This opportunity comes sharply into view when the amount of future before us is growingly likely to be less than the past behind us. My age, for example.

 
Some psychologists tell us we can't reliably choose about much. That small much apart, the rest of our lives is contained in the largely self-programmed grip of habits. We choose from within their confines. But it would seem we should be better about choosing death-defying activities. Maybe we learn what they are by approaching them so close we can hear the breath of death, feel its power, taste its dryness…Or, maybe we seek death-defying activities because we can't quite hear or feel or taste ourselves in our normal living.

 
The normal is, after all, somewhat boring. We know how to do the normal things, what the risks are, what value we get from them. Like our cat, we cannot always resist climbing that bit higher, reaching that bit further, straining that bit longer…and if we do, we often have some other humans, as does the cat, to come along and catch us falling. In fact, we have whole systems devoted to just that: emergency crews (the extreme occupations) for every clime and consideration, as long as there are enough of us risk-takers around to afford the service.

 
Why some sports cannot be extreme…


There's a difference within this sports and extreme occupations. There are risky activities which are contained from start to finish within supervised rules – professional team ball sports of all types. Among them there are differences in the degrees of intentional violence spread across from minimal contact soccer games to high contact footballs and ice hockey. The latter is distinguished professionally by having the boundaries of legitimate danger policed by designated enforcers whose lifespan is shortened by a regime of concussions which start in high school play. This may be the boundary between normal contact sports and the extreme ones – the level of death threat allowed by the rules.

 
One-on-one struggles are more sharply framed to confront participants and observers with near death on the hoof. There's cage fighting ("mixed martial arts" for those who prefer a façade of discipline to a parade of punishments), whose objective is nearly death, as is boxing's. Or try Muay Thai for cultural variety and the pleasure of seeing small guys work hard without a covering of chemically promoted bulk.

 
And there are machine-mediated entertainments where death is possible but not intended - the various car and motorcycle racing formulas with a terminal smash just around the corner, or a fence jump to carry away a few spectators to boot. Long distance sailing competitions (Sydney/Hobart) can be deathly dangerous. But, after losing, seasickness is usually the worst result.

 
In Australia we have our own freelance sport: binge drinking - specialty of the young and younger olds, with death dealing potentials and fulfilments every weekend. These endgames are called "tragedies" when they are merely excesses of youthful riskiness. They seek, and achieve, meaning by "just having a bit of fun" (also the excuse-de-jour for public sexual harassment, racial vilification, bullying…), confirmed by their reports of having missed whole chunks of the fun they had – blacked out, but still standing. These are not extreme sportsters, though often the clients for extreme outcome occupations – police, security guards, paramedics …

 
Nor are those going into warzones for work – reporters, aid providers, observers – who die at greater rates than the extreme explorers, but not so high as alcohol/drug supported road kills. Theirs, the warzone workers, are respected deaths with damages for respectable reasons, though most of us may see them as extreme, too. Theirs is another realm of meaningfulness, also at the boundaries of life, whose purpose is clear. Just the price is high and we may dispute the appropriateness of paying it for one or another story.

 
So, back to TJ.

 

His worst nightmare snaps him upright in bed with a start five times a night – the same start every time: he feels the avalanche coming and can't remember it hitting him. The rest is history; it's unavailable to memory.

 

He was thrown, along with his three climbing partners, down the mountainside. Out of the tumble one landed on top of the snow mess. He started the recovery process, digging the other three of them out after a few hours in the snow – long enough for TJ to experience acute claustrophobia. Another first for him.

 

Two hours later he started the trek down the mountain and onto an ice field, following more or less in the steps of those in front, knowing that probable death could be a few feet off the marked path…but he forgot and slipped into a review of his just passed resurrection from the snow, precursor to the hourly shocked upright awakenings from his sleep…and he fell backwards into a crevasse….

 

And so, what's the purpose of his life? The hourly flashbacks had dropped from hourly to once nightly, assuming the shape more of questions than images.

 
Partly a response to these questions has to include their meaning for TJ's others…that is the meaning his life has for them and what his life does for their meaning. Another part of a response lies in the boundary between living and not: how much can we choose to live, rather than just take living as it comes? And how much does he, or anyone, need to try to live by testing themselves near the edges of death, in order to feel that they have lived as well as they can?…and so, too, others may feel they have as well, too, by drawing energy, direction, validation from his efforts as has happened publically in the Jim Stynes story lately.

 
These will all be particular answers; the questions remain universal general. One constraint on questions and answers is that some meanings cannot be created and sustained without the live possibility of failure. Limits cannot be set without exceeding them. The ultimate excess is death. This is the stuff of story, the material of literary practice past and present. Real stories which illuminate out potential by stretching the limits may also seem to be more fiction than fact – how can anyone be so good, or bad?

 
Next: Extreme outcome occupations: those who may die for us – police, firies, soldiers, and their commercial and volunteer colleagues. Do we care enough about them as they are caring for us??

My 50th boarding school reunion bio

SINACCORD
                

11 Wertheim St., Richmond, Victoria, 3121, Australia

Tel. (+613) 9428-7462 FAX (+613) 9427-8174 Mobile +61 419 362 349 E Mail - torreyo@ozemail.com.au

 

June 29, 2011

This is what I submitted as background info in me for attendees at our 50^th reunion May 12-14, 2011. I thought I'd post it because it captures a certain present self-assessment and history that isn't covered by topical posts but probably affects them in more and less subliminal ways. The pic's a bit out of date, so I dropped it…

Taft School Class of '61 Bio for Torrey Orton

I am leading a life I have mostly chosen, missing some things on the way that being less devoted to choosing would have given me. Much of it has been composed of things I never thought of, nor knew of, at Taft - living in Melbourne (35yrs), Beijing (2yrs), Shanghai (1.5yrs) and Paris (1.5yrs) for starters. Some has been planned like becoming a psychotherapist and organisation consultant in my 50's. As a result of meeting Jane by chance on a hot July, 1970 NYC afternoon, I started learning deeply that there are other worlds than the American one(s), whence an eventual change of citizenship couched in the Melbourne body of my life.

 

Much of this life has been an exploration of different worlds, inner and outer, prefigured by a helping professions orientation which was emerging at Williams and confirmed in 5 years of HS teaching, and alternative school and commune building in New Haven, moderated by 2 years of a Yale philosophy Masters over 1965-72. In the following 40 years I only once slipped outside the helping life to run a bank IT systems project 1989-91 – but even then it was an HR system.

 

The bank was merged-over by a neighbour and I got an unexpected redundancy package jump start into consulting, which was where I meant to go next anyway. My consulting has always had an organisational focus and in intercultural flavour, with a personal development infrastructure (I started a small psychotherapy practice in tandem with consulting). This combination produced my second biggest adult learning experience – partnering and coaching a Chinese partner in a start-up in Shanghai from 1998 til now. The third was living in Beijing in 1981-83. The fourth is a toss-up between fulltime therapist and part-time blogger for the last two years...taking both seriously, but not enough to step up or out a quantum jump. Maybe it's time to go back to aikido.

 

Jane has been accompanying me and being accompanied by me since that July afternoon in International House at Columbia Univ. The commitment to things Chinese has always been her lead. My following there has acquired its own momentum and valences, while adding my therapeutic and organisational tones to hers. She stepped into the retiring time of life 2 years ago by launching a career-topping innovation in Chinese language teacher education, with about every complexity I can think of!

 

My first biggest learning will probably be what emerges from here on. One theme is rehabilitation of public life, which I have blogged for two years with special interest in ethics and public discourses about difficult issues – climate, science, thinking while in danger. Another is living in reach of mountains and water, which will be in 3 month French chunks since we both seem likely to work til we drop, more or less. If I could give up worrying about the world it would be simpler; I cannot.

 

The great unknown is resilience. I've just been reminded this month (January '11) that I'm as prone as any to surprise attacks on the body personal – this time acute pancreatitis. 8 years ago a slow heart beat dropped me in a street. The beat has been picked up by a pacemaker since then. Along the way I enjoy more aspects of life than ever – many only accessible through the windows of age!

 

January 30, 2011

www.diarybyamadman.blogspot.com

6 Views of death (3) – ‘Normal’ ends of life: the self-extermination challenge.

6 Views of death (3) – 'Normal' ends of life: the self-extermination challenge.


Torrey Orton


Oct.1, 2010

My life / death view: I am sure I have a right to live and die in as much as I can choose to do so. I did not choose to be born, but choose everyday to stay alive. I'm aware that I may not get to choose when to die, but I certainly will die. The same cannot be said for my birth; it was not certain. Like my birth, my death will be in the hands of others in some respects, the least of which, from my point of view, will be cleaning up afterwards, just as it was for my birth.

I deal three days a week with younger people (20's to 40's) who think /feel their lives are not worth living for various amounts of time, with regular recurrences and typical shared origins in excruciatingly inescapable traumas. Also typically, they have self-administered palliative problems (addictions) and often have irregular employments, housing and similar signs of fragmented lives. Quite a few sustain professional presences of great sophistication and substantial achievement. I have no trouble believing it's too soon for them to go. How successful I am in conveying that conviction into self-affirmation is a session by session challenge.


…unlucky not to die well.

 As for myself, on the other hand, I am quite sure I want to have the choice of dying when I see fit. That means dying before my natural time, possibly. That I may die as I write will do fine as my time, should it be so. It's a ponderous decline into multiple incapacities, worst of all a mental decline, which I will choose to avoid if I can. Given diagnoses of certain kinds, I would initiate a process of self-extermination, I hope. That 'hope' expresses my awareness that I may not be strong enough, which I may get a chance to test, if I'm unlucky not to die well. Next to a lingering death, a failed effort at pre-empting it is my greatest fear. I'd like some certainty in my own hands. Either this will be legal – e.g. running a car into an immovable object – or, at the moment, illegal by amassing a sufficient quantity of appropriate medications.


I do not have the time to read much of what's written in the so-called 'debate' about euthanasia. I don't really care about much of the detail, or to make arguments in detail which I am intellectually competent to do. I have patients to care for and other things to think. Not to write at all on this is dangerous and part of me knows that the fools in the religions and the politics of late capitalism and post-modernity are likely to lock away pre-emptive opportunities I am as certain I deserve as they are I do not. That's the making of rages, and even the fools I just mentioned must know these are growing day by day, just maybe not in the minds of people like me.


Natural right to choose…

 I know I have a natural right to self-extermination, but not a legal one here in Australia. There are those who would say I have no natural right, either, but they do not check their assumptions about the sources of right, being stuck in a system of presumptive answers which is historical, not 'natural'. This system is the Abrahamic religions of the Book. I really do not mind their believing what comes with allegiance to The Book, including endless to-the-death struggles about whose version is correct, true or The Word. I am amazed that a profoundly clear truth, like that the religions propose, should produce so much distress for believers, but not amazed enough to want to help them out by adding myself to one of their ranks. How could I choose?

"But our right to choose is important and is too often deliberately forgotten or conveniently ignored by those who evangelise around "the right to life"...." .Geoff Gallop, in The AGE 28092010.

The Australian politics of life-death are this: a few (about 20 %) of the electorate in Australia are prepared to fight (to the death?) to preserve the right of every conception to come to term and every adult to be constrained from dying on their own terms, assisted or not. The latest pro-euthanasia figures are 76% in favour. The 20%ers get a larger electoral influence because the field of voters is finely poised between the major parties and small factors shift small margins in the most finely poised electorates. Electorally correct and ethically unfair


Fundamentalist convictions

 So what part of the anti-euthanasia arguments are just tactics to cover fundamentalist convictions? Such tactics might be expressions of moral outrage, pseudo-scientific or "evidence-based" facts and ad hominem assaults demonstrating other non-believers' attitudes descend from character faults or notional immoralities.… Where such tactics do not work there are only implacable demands or refusals on offer.


An example of apparent evidence-based arguments is Dr. Ruth Gawler in TheAGE, Letters 29/9/2010. In a self-described backflip on euthanasia, she notes that cancer patients "initially … are often confused in their thinking." She doesn't say anything about what happens to the initially confused after some work. Competent cancer treatment like the Gawlers provide must help clarity, among other things. Viz- people who start confused do not have to remain that way.


She adds to her evidence against euthanasia that population issues make getting clear about good reasons for dying unlikely. This is an argument carried by her professional status, not any clarity of fact or causal connection.


Because we can do it…

 Underlying the pro-life argument is a scientistic lie – that unnatural efforts must be made to preserve lives – at the beginning or the end of the life span, and in some cases before it (IVF) because we can do it scientifically. I don't think this is what the gods recommended in their times. Once again there was a sad letter pleading for families to let their elders die when ready and to do the legal homework to minimize useless resuscitations. (TheAGE 29/9/10).


This reflection yields another: that there may be a need to achieve something for my life in / thru my death, a clarifying of the moral ground…which invites a recollection of possible causes for choosing to end life, eg.: (1) to save the life of another; (2) to prevent a useless decline into a terminal outcome; (3) as a weapon of struggle (martyrdom); (4) to save precious resources for others (cousin of #1, but with no specific other(s) in mind or view).


Two self-destructions

 Finally, let's notice a matter of origins. There are two self-destructions: the Greek one and the Roman one. Euthanasia, the good death, is Greek; suicide, the bad death, is Latin, as are its familiars matricide, fratricide and patricide. But a death by one's own hand is self (sui) killing (cide), whatever the labeling. Some deaths we choose to label nicely and others not. The choice is a discrimination between those with an acceptable rationale and those without one (in the eyes of some others). I don't know that the Greeks and Romans differed that much on matters of life and death. The choice is moral, not factual of course, leaving aside the problem of determining if a death is by accident or intent.


A song comes along with this thought – "Suicide is painless.." and reminds me of the absurdity of life and death, except when we can give meaning to it. Generally the meaning achieved by making our own choices exceeds that by following others' choices for us. Perhaps the worst situation is that where making meaning seems impossible but action is required which only produces absurdity. There's a literature around this dilemma. Yossarian, where are you? Slaughter House 5, Catch 22, Mash...

Being here (1)…. Everyday moments of pure choice

Being here (1)…. Everyday moments of pure choice
Torrey Orton
April 30, 2010


As so often, out of sleep came a new theme – being here. This is not new in world history or local practice, but it is new for me to notice moments of everyday life that may be what the proponents of presence are referring to. Here's the first.

 

To wake or not…

These days I sleep with increasing lightness, a movement encouraged by my growing awareness that sleep's end is coming each new day. I often wake 30-40 minutes ahead of the alarm, which itself is inconstant, having different settings from day to day. My therapist would tell me therein lies my own inconstancy of sleep and be right but irrelevant to my emerging points now.


Two points
These points are: one, should I rise, or not, so much in advance of the alarm? And worse, two, should I rise at the moment of the alarm's bzzz, bzzz if I have slept up to the alarm's sounding? These two moments have the same challenge under different conditions. The first has more time than the second. Its space for thinking is bigger and so, strangely, more confusing. I can consider more options. The more space the more attraction for awareness to fill it, to populate it. I often do not seem to have a choice not to populate it.


Once the populating begins - often about subjects like this post - thoughts arise out of the upper depths of consciousness. These usually are structured thinkings about currently occurring work issues. And more strange, the material that populates it is often a comfortable fit with my overall low level of general arousal – I can contemplate a very precise thing for some minutes; an argument (an account) about it flows naturally. They follow their own path to an appropriate, usually transferable, conclusion. I make notes about them for use later. In the process I have decided for less sleep and more awake for the day.


An everyday moment of pure choice?
The second condition's time is 5 to 8 seconds I think. The boundaries are the distance between the bzzz, bzzz initiated conscious awakeness and turning the alarm off. This opens the door on a very slight possibility- that I will not get up just then – in which exists for some seconds a suspended state, a present but not engaged state that may be being here. I have to be quick or else I'll sink into blogthought diversions.


My day's rhythm is set in this moment since the underlying question is 'how pressing is my day?' arising in the dome of my awareness of the total substance of it – a global forecast of stressors without distinctions among them. I imagine this dome as a mini-me version of a lava dome (see Mt St Helens, USA) in an active volcano.


A pressing day…
This moment is a critical one for my taking control of the new day, or more likely for my being taken control of by it!! With a moment's being here comes the position, space or location in which to interrupt the naturally occurring flow of my whole system. At high stress times this matters, since automatic stress response habits engage to reduce potential stress before it is felt consciously…and so blocking me from certain realities altogether.


My first try seldom reaches the intended target
In the reflection created by the above excursion, I am aware that even trying to capture such a moment of apparent being here is a fraught enterprise. The word formation and deployment processes drive the experience out of range…making it impossible to capture the thing. Maybe I will get better at this with practice?? We'll see I hope. Getting better at it would mean my being able to use clearly, for example, 'position', 'location' or 'space' to characterise a "here".