Something Old, Something...You

    The other day I happened to catch a couple of things that were unlike anything I'd seen or heard before. Derek Delgaudio's movie recreation of his off-off-Broadway play (which ran 552 times) featured such a heartfelt exposure of his life, but more importantly an awakening of the importance of each person, of how different each of us are and how we identify ourselves; what we think of our lives.  For the paid attendees, it required only one thing of them...to pick a card (hundreds were hanging on a board upon their entering) that asked "I Am" followed by a word.  The choices were all over the map, from architect to ninja, and from introvert to idiot (yes, that card was picked).  Some took it as a joke, but many would find that this was a serious play, a chance to discover yourself as the play went on.  Tears fell, some became visibly shaken, others simply marveled at how this could be happening.  How could one person make an entire audience peek so deeply into their own personal lives and yet leave caring about others as well?  His site summed it up by simply saying, Identity Is An Illusion.

    The other thing for me was a rebroadcast of a Moth presentation by Cynthia Riggs, author of more than a dozen popular mysteries but as she quickly points out, her very first book was published when she was 70.  Her tale begins of an almost cryptic romance that started in her 80s, tattered pieces of old paper towels, each filled with codes and yellowed with age (but still readable) arriving in her mail.  Then came the manganese nodule and a return address which consisted only of geographical coordinates.  One listen and you will quickly realize that this is no ordinary love story.  Sixteen minutes to make you laugh, cry, marvel and renew your faith in humanity.

    Somehow I needed both, to see and to hear, and to renew.  Along with my missing friend starting to fade from my daily thoughts, his new journey well underway and inevitably mine soon to follow,  my wife and I have been watching a series of films that depicted life a bit too realistically, each film extremely well acted and well written and featuring stars both in their waning years and those yet to come: Hope Gap (divorce after a nearly 30 year marriage), Other People (a gay man dealing with his family and dying mother), The Escape (a young mother in an overtaxed and abusive relationship), Ordinary Love (breast cancer), The Midnight Sky (regrets).  We didn't intend to have such a series of admittedly bleak films enter our lives...but they did.  Call it fate or coincidence, or just a wake up call to tell us that life is not quite the same for everyone.  It was if we were suddenly being reminded of characters in Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere which one reviewer described this way: After stopping to help an injured girl on the sidewalk, London businessman Richard Mayhew is ripped from his perfectly average life: he is suddenly unrecognizable to everyone he knows.  Richard must track down the girl in London Below, the menacing and magical city that exists underneath his own.  His quest shines a light on the plight of those who fall through the cracks of society.

PAINTING by Robert McCurdy, part of an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery

    Sometimes when walking the dog, I am so concentrated on his enjoyable absorption of smells that I almost tune out the cacophony of cars and trucks filled with skiers anxious to make it to the mountains as if knowing that their already quite late.  I don't think much of their rushed speeds or noise, the thought of a tire or accidental bump sending a car hurtling my way being completely foreign to me, even if the busy road is just 50 feet or so away.   Yet I remember witnessing such a scene, a car gunning up a hill and likely not realizing how large the 4-lane intersection was, accelerating even more as the light turned yellow. Unfortunately, by the time it reached the actual intersection the cars waiting in the other direction (their light now green) were starting to cross.  The brakes slammed on but it was far too late, the racing car clipping the first car and flipping onto its roof as gracefully as a Hollywood stunt, a feat that now sent it spinning out of control into oncoming traffic.  Glass was everywhere and cars in all directions just froze as if to take in all that had happened.  For me, the lead car on the opposite side of it all, it was something I saw in extreme slow motion, the clip, the flip, the spin, the oncoming cars trying their best to avoid the strangely familiar-but-not object heading their way.  Then, it was over.  Time, vision, speed, all returned to normal...just like that.

    This stayed in my mind, even if it happened years ago, this illusion of sorts, of time and perhaps as Derek Delguadio says, our identity.  As an ad from (of all places) the giant firm of Proctor & Gamble stated in its support of starting a dialogue between our biases towards race: How are we to respond when we are shown over and over and over that our lives do not matter?  Our lives matter.  And when your life matters, you have power.  Couple that with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a controversial condition linked to head trauma that a piece in the Washington Post said is: Linked to aggression, depression, suicidal thoughts, impaired judgment, impulse control problems and dementia...the "controversial" label comes because tests to confirm it can only be conducted and proven after one has died.

    So what is real and what is illusion?  What if someone told you right now that your view of the world was wrong.  So asked National Geographic in running a quick info check: most of South America lies east of Florida (true); most of Africa is north of the equator (true); Brazil is larger than the continental United States (true); Greenland is 8x smaller than South America (also true).  Here's another, this time from the Global Democracy Index, a report from The Economist: Just 22 countries, home to 430m people, were deemed “full democracies” by the EIU. More than a third of the world’s population, meanwhile, still live under authoritarian rule.  Wait, one-third of the world's population is ruled by autocrats or dictators?  Then came this from STAT: "If lung cancer in never-smokers were a separate entity, it would be in the top 10 cancers in the U.S.” for both incidence and mortality, surgeon Andrew Kaufman of Mount Sinai Hospital in New York told STAT’s Sharon Begley.  Sharon died of complications of lung cancer on Jan. 16, just five days after completing this article quoting him.  She was a never-smoker.  Worldwide, 15% of male lung cancer patients are never-smokers, she wrote, but fully half of female lung cancer patients never smoked.  And women never-smokers are twice as likely to develop lung cancer as men who never put a cigarette to their lips.  To emphasize what was said, nearly 50% of females with lung cancer have never smoked, and if ranked, lung cancers among non-smokers would rate among the top 10 cancers.

    It can boggle the mind and stun us into inaction, all this what's real and what isn't, what is or isn't within one's control, what can little ol' we do to change anything?  Hakai featured an excerpt from environmental scholar Elin Kelsey who said: I often give public talks and no matter where I am in the world, I begin by inviting people to share how they are feeling about the environment with the person sitting beside them, and then, if they are willing, to call out some of the words that capture these feelings.  I have done this hundreds of times, and every time, the answers shock me.  When I look out at these audiences, I see bright, healthy, relaxed-looking people who have somehow found the time to come to a public lecture.  Yet their answers convey an unnerving level of grief and despair: "Scared, Hopeless, Depressed, Numb, Apathetic, Overwhelmed, Guilty, Paralyzed, Helpless, Angry,” call out the voices.  Whether the room is filled with adults, university students, or kids as young as grade three, whenever I ask, the words remain the same...When my student said, “I am hopeless because the state of the planet is hopeless,” she believed that to be true, and I felt sad for her suffering.  But I also saw her statement as an example of just how taken for granted and powerful the mindset of doom and gloom is.  She described both her hopelessness and the hopeless state of the planet as nonnegotiable fixed facts—as reality.  The vast scale, complexity, urgency, and destructive power of biodiversity loss, climate change, and countless other issues are real.  Yet assuming a fatalistic perspective and positioning hopelessness as a foregone conclusion is not reality.  It is a mindset, and it’s a widespread and debilitating one.  It not only undermines positive change, it squashes the belief that anything good could possibly happen.

    First place winner Jake Mosher said of his award-winning photo in the recent National Wildlife competition: To me, the Milky Way is one of the most beautiful things in the sky.  And if I can frame it over something as beautiful as the Yellowstone River with fog, people will gain a whole new idea of a place they may know during the day but have never seen at night...Despite today's bad news and division, there's still magic all around us.  I think both Cynthia Riggs and Derek Delgaudio were trying to show the same thing, that within this world and within humanity --indeed within each of    us-- there is still beauty and magic all around.  Take the time to watch the show or listen to the podcast, and see what you think...or discover.

Photo: Jake Mosher, Fog over Yellowstone, NWF