Voices

  Sometimes one can stare down a path or walkway and hear a small voice that tells you that you shouldn't go down there; one might call this intuition or a gut feeling, but often it is just a tiny whisper that is loud enough to hear internally but soft enough to let you make the decision.  Sometimes this leads to unexpected and perhaps negative outcomes as when predators take advantage be it a salesperson selling a timeshare or someone just takes advantage of your trusting nature.  And as one ages it seems that these voices or feelings begin to grow a bit more protective; something as simple as checking our a new club or restaurant or country becomes like a piece of Velcro that leaves you stuck in a rut and unwilling to try many (or any) new adventures.  Danger Will Robinson.  But are those your "real" voices or just ones you've made up because you're scared?  So where's the middle, that frission that excites us just enough to discover new things, even if it is as simple as leaping across a chasm or jumping off a ledge into the water.  Some people don't check beforehand (part of the excitement) and don't make it or suffer serious injury or eath with reckless abandon, while others make it all the time.  Those who perish in the effort we often reflect or justify by saying that they died "doing what they loved."  The gamble is part of the excitement, even if the stakes are winner-take-all.  But for many of us, the willingness to risk it all grows dimmer as we age; this certainly isn't true for everyone by any means and those who are still braving it in their later years are admirable.  Live every moment, there's no guarantees, life is short.  In a quote from Scientific American on the rising life span in the U.S. it was reported that: One set of risk factors --behaviors and metabolism-- influences life expectancy much more than the other main categories: health care access and quality, and socioeconomic status and race.  But then other studies are showing something quite different, such as the report from the medical journal The Lancet which concluded that income inequality in the U.K. decreased your life expectancy by 10% at the extremes (richest vs. poorest).

    So overall how are we, as humans, changing?  One indicator might be coming from those crash test dummies (and no, not the band) which are used to test the safety of the vehicles we ride and drive.  Those dummies are not cheap said a piece in Bloomberg Businessweek, often coming with a price tag of up to a cool $1 million per dummy.  And the dummies are growing heftier, reflecting the growing size of those riding in today's cars and SUVs.  Said a piece in Science Daily: ...in frontal crashes, obese drivers tend to "submarine," or slide under the lap belt; their lower bodies are also poorly restrained because their lap belts have much more slack.  As a result, they suffer more severe lower-extremity injuries at a much higher rate.  So as the piece asks, what other factors might be reflected in designing these new sensor-filled dummies?...a baby, an elderly person, five teens, people facing backwards in a driverless car?   One surprising factor cited by a U.K. study might be that the income inequality happening worldwide is also changing us internally as well as externally, said Scientific American, with a partial list showing changes to our brain, circulation, metabolism ("Cells throughout the body have reduced responses to insulin, and abdominal fat increases, leading to diabetes"), reproduction and our chromosomes ("a kind of premature molecular aging").  But then that is all simply our limited viewpoint of how we change because we should admit, said another piece in the same magazine, we can't imagine any other form.  Asks linguist Sheri Wells-Jensen: ...we have words for "left" and "right," "straight ahead" and "back" -- kind of in four directions, which is correlated with human body symmetry.  but if we had three hands, would we have "left," "right" and, uh, "the other hand?"...we need to start thinking outside our box.

    There's a belief in many societies and religions that the universe is always talking and that everyone of us can hear it if we just listen.  Of course, we may cast this aside as being ridiculous or as something better left to people with mental problems or split personalities.  But what is that intuitive feeling that sometimes appears?  To be honest, I haven't paid much attention to such thoughts until recently when "voices" came to me on two occasions as I drifted into that pre-sleep world of quieting inhibitions and beliefs and faced a question-answer period in my head, a time when you wonder if you'll get better or what's next or why did that happen or how are you going to make it until tomorrow...that chatter that sometimes just won't shut off.  But on these two occasions there was something different.  In one I wondered what, if anything, happens when our life ends; do we see our loved ones, do we just plunge into darkness, do we review our life's journey and if so for what reason?...all age-old questions.  And so I tried imagining colors and spectrums changing, lines devolving into spaces and forms and images as vivid as the Aurora Borealis (one of the things I often love to do in this state is to purposely change the colors I'm viewing, to imagine yellow if I'm seeing purple, to change the brightness or shape of those initial images when you first close your eyes and are ready to quickly drift off).  But it was during that particular time of doing that image imagination that a "voice" calmly asked "what if what happens is something beyond your imagination?'  The conversation went on and on but basically it came down to one...not one thing but just one.  Would I see my aunt or mother?  Of course because I was them.  There was no separation of me and the rest of this planet and the rest of the universe...of life itself.  Everything was one.  Could I imagine that?  The ant or the atom, the massive black hole or the grain of sand...it was all one, just as I was, not apart but a part.  For me, it was oddly peaceful as if being lullaby-ed to sleep.

   Then a few days later, again about to drift off, I inhaled a piece of saliva and began choking, that automatic spasm response when a piece or food or liquid enters your airway.*  Of course the spasm settled just enough that I could take a small gulp of air, enough for me to realize that I wouldn't pass out and that the spasm would soon pass (which is always a relief); but it was in that moment that once again this calm "voice" appeared and quietly, almost too quietly, said: And it can all vanish just that quickly.  Perhaps this was because of my (still) cleaning out old files, or my worrying about growing older and my thinking of my mother/s passing, or the wild swings of the crazy financial market, or my wife's seemingly always sore hip, or our friend's new baby, or who knows what.  Perhaps that swirl of clutter and goods and worry was just that, a combined swirl.  And indeed, everything I held dear --be it people or animals or life or possessions-- could disappear just like that.  You can't take it with you, pehaps even in defiance of that Buddhist phrase that all you take when you die is "your state of mind."

    Oddly (to me), both "voices" were calm and almost measured, and have not appeared since (or before), at least not in that form.  An opening essay in TIME talked of "the surprising joy of old age:" Psychologists, anthropologists and other investigators have long been intrigued...that old age is often a time defined not by sorrow, dread and regret but rather by peace, gratitude and fulfillment...Life can be a series of experiential typhoons, both good and bad --falling in love, falling out of love, marriage, divorce, new job, lost job-- and every one of them feels overwhelming at first.  But there are only so many Category 5s that can be thrown at you before you realize that the clouds will eventually part and you'll probably be left wet but standing.  This is not to say one age is better or more content than another, or that one age group envys one more than another for we are all individuals and some are happier and some are not; but hearing such "voices" brought me a calm even if it was just me talking to me...perhaps my brain had moved on and decided that this was what I needed to hear, internally, my own semi-conscious self offering a bit of advice.

   My friend visiting mentioned that he is not, in general, a positive person, a view which belies his genial personality.  But his point was that when presented with a news report or a gossipy tale of a neighbor he finds it easier to lean to the negative or skeptical side vs. the positive outlook.  This was echoed by The New York Review of Books in reviewing two books on optimism, one author blaming: ...our misperceptions on an “overdramatic” worldview, and he identifies ten habits of thought that contribute to it.  One is a “negativity instinct” that leads us to notice unpleasant things more than pleasant ones, and which results from three main factors... Bad news is loudly reported and memorable, whereas incremental improvements tend to be neither.  We misremember the past as better than it was.  And we feel that it is unseemly to dwell on the good when so much is bad.  But there really is quite a bit of uplifting news, from a story of former single mom Stephanie Land working as a maid to make ends meet, who changed course when a blizzard trapped her inside and she began writing (you can read her new book, Maid), to the difficult struggle to just "keep on keeping on," as told by war reporter D. Parvaz jailed in an Iranian prison and how one crying mother snapped her out of her "why isn't the world listening" frustration.

    When my friend said that he wasn't really a positive person I chuckled at first but then thought that in today's world, his view might be reflecting our majority view in general.  The news generally begins with disasters or accidents or injuries, the tabloids are sinking back into their original format of sensationalism, the things that "catch" our eyes are now more negative, even as positive and uplifting stories abound; seeing the uplifting movie gives us a good feeling as we exit but how many of those are there and how difficult a sell is it for the producers (what, no violence or action?).  It's not that difficult to change our viewpoint, although it is generally more difficult than we imagine.  There are people and movements taking incremental steps, the cab drivers and the caretakers, the farmworkers and the single parents, the trash collectors and the waitresses...Gandhis all.   Often the changes comes slowly and can seem frustratingly slow.  But as Wendy Schaetzel Lesko said (she heads a project to gets teens involved in making policy changes): If you ever think you're too small to be effective, you've never been in bed with a mosquito.  It doesn't take much.  A change in attitude, a change in outlook, a change in oneself simply by reading and watching and talking and opening up.    In a world of chatter out there, you just may find that something else is talking, and has been for awhile...and it may be as simple as just taking the time to hear what that new voice has to say.


*If you are not actually choking on something (such as a piece of food) but have just inhaled the wrong way as when water splashes into your airway unexpectedly, there is little you can do other than to let the spasm fade by remaining calm which we all know is easy to say but difficult to do when that gasping for air seems life-threatening.  If you happen to be experiencing this aspiration often, then there may be other issues involved, said the Cleveland Clinic.  Check with your doctor.

P.S.  One a side note, you readers may have noticed a change in several features, especially those of you with Google+.  Turns out that while Google is making changes to this blogging platform, readership is way down overall and the "Blogger" feature itself (and thus this blog) may disappear into the nether world in the very near future, said a piece in TechCrunch.  This decision will be entirely up to Google but I did want to give you readers a heads up in case one day you find the entire thing gone and wonder what the heck happened...times are changing, evolving, moving on, perhaps to our liking or not.  Quite simply, it will be something that would be out of my control...on my end, comments and other features are now gone so apologies there if your voices have been suddenly deleted (not by me), although it would appear that the "comment" feature is still there...if you leave a message and it doesn't appear you can still leave comments at the original email of: notesfromabearsjourney@gmail.com.  Thank you all and I'll throw in my hope that some of this will stay around for a bit longer...I'll keep you posted.