Finding Oneself

Finding Oneself

    My earlier post on cremation drove more than a few readers away, which is understandable for each of us have things that we simply don't want to see, hear or read about...the killing of animals, torture, pain, someone seriously ill and likely to die.  At those moments, our compassion runs strong and we wish we could help; and at other times, we simply don't want to know partially because it might just change our lives or our choice in what we decide to eat or not eat.  And sometimes, it is because we feel that some subjects are simply taboo, as author Caitlin Doughty discovered in writing her book; death is just one subject that many people just do not want to hear about.

    But the reality is that we will all perish.  A little over a century ago, the average lifespan for a person was living until the ripe old age of 60; in days before that, making it until age 45 in the wild, wild west was considered quite an accomplishment.  Jump back to the heyday of the Roman Empire and many died before 38...so in one respect, we've come a long way.  Perhaps future generations will indeed live until 100, especially as medicine shifts from treating a disease to preventing one and rebuilding the body (an especially good lecture on the discovery of stem cells in bone and cartilage repair, and how ouir thinking of medicine might change, was presented by cancer researcher,  Dr. Suddhartha Mukjerkee on TED: Many of you might not know this, but we happen to be celebrating the hundredth year of the introduction of antibiotics into the United States.  But what you do know is that that introduction was nothing short of transformative.  Here you had a chemical, either from the natural world or artificially synthesized in the laboratory, and it would course through your body, it would find its target, lock into its target -- a microbe or some part of a microbe -- and then turn off a lock and a key with exquisite deftness, exquisite specificity.  And you would end up taking a previously fatal, lethal disease -- a pneumonia, syphilis, tuberculosis -- and transforming that into a curable, or treatable illness.  You have a pneumonia, you take penicillin, you kill the microbe and you cure the disease.  So seductive was this idea, so potent the metaphor of lock and key and killing something, that it really swept through biology.  It was a transformation like no other.  And we've really spent the last 100 years trying to replicate that model over and over again in noninfectious diseases, in chronic diseases like diabetes and hypertension and heart disease.  And it's worked, but it's only worked partly... Now, antibiotics created such a perceptual shift in our way of thinking about medicine that it really colored, distorted, very successfully, the way we've thought about medicine for the last hundred years.  But we need new models to think about medicine in the future...there's a popular trope out there that the reason we haven't had the transformative impact on the treatment of illness is because we don't have powerful-enough drugs, and that's partly true.  But perhaps the real reason is that we don't have powerful-enough ways of thinking about medicines.

    Perhaps we will live much longer...but eventually, we will die.  Even famed author Erica Jong in her recent novel, Fear of Dying, writes: As you get older, the losses around you are staggering.  The people in the orbits come closer and closer to your own age.  Older friends and relatives die, leaving you stunned.  Competitors die, leaving you triumphant.  Lovers and teachers die, leaving you lost.  It gets harder and harder to deny your own death.  Do we hold on to our parents, or are we holding on to our status as children who are immune from death?  I think we are clinging with ever-increasing desperation to our status as children.  In the hospital you see other children --children of fifty, of sixty, of seventy-- clinging to their parents of eighty, ninety, one hundred.  Is all this clinging love?  Or is it just the need to be reassured of your own immunity from the contagion of the Moloch ha-moves--the dread Angel of Death?  Because we all secretly believe in our own immortality.  Since we cannot imagine the loss of individual consciousness, we cannot possibly imagine death.

    One possibility, however, is that of being indispensable.  Sometimes we feel this at a job, and sometimes in our home (who will take care of...? what will happen to...?  who will handle...?).  But way back in 2007, Alan Weisman tackled this subject in his book, The World Without Us, and it wasn't too glamourous.  As one reviewer in The New York Times wrote: In even the most heavily fortified corners of the settled world, the rot would set in quickly.  With no one left to run the pumps, New York’s subway tunnels would fill with water in two days.  Within 20 years, Lexington Avenue would be a river. Fire- and wind-ravaged skyscrapers would eventually fall like giant trees.  Within weeks of our disappearance, the world’s 441 nuclear plants would melt down into radioactive blobs, while our petrochemical plants, “ticking time bombs” even on a normal day, would become flaming geysers spewing toxins for decades to come.  Outside of these hot spots, Weisman depicts a world slowly turning back into wilderness.  After about 100,000 years, carbon dioxide would return to prehuman levels.  Domesticated species from cattle to carrots would revert back to their wild ancestors. 

    Part of this fear of sorts, a fear of the unknown, might be simply because many of us don't know ourselves and our place in the whole scheme of things.  There may be answers out there but perhaps we don't want to spend the time learning, or in some cases, even listening to the questions.  Thus, it was fascinating to discover not only one person who was well aware of this, but was among a generations-old group that was also well aware of their place.  The world "outside" had little meaning because what was important was right here, right now, the way it had been, and if he had any say about it, the way it would be for generations to come.  To visiting tourists, such an idyllic land and lifestyle seems attractive, at least for the few moments it takes to snap a few pictures, daydream about getting away from their current job to be here, and then jumping back into the car for the next sight...but to actually live that lifestyle, uh, no.  But for this man, it isn't a matter of the hard work or the getting away or the buzzing technology of cities nearby...this is simply his calling, what he was meant to do, what he was meant to love, as his father does, as his grandfather did, and his relatives before them.  No questions asked, and no grumbling...this was contentment.  He knew his calling and there was no need to "find" anything.  This was simply life.  And for him, that's just what it was...life.

    Next post...finding oneself, as if you needed to even look.