Shluffen

One of the features of my insomnia is that I sometimes wake up with a word on my lips like a fragment of a dream, and it keeps repeating itself like a song for the hour or two it takes for me to fall asleep again. And sometimes the word will divide like a cell, and two words will then repeat themselves, then three words, and you get the picture—a symphony of mental distractions that can keep me awake far longer than the brief surfacing into semi-consciousness that healthy sleepers experience. Last night, the initial word was facacta, which spawned altecocker, which led to meshugganah. Perhaps it was my unconscious offering an orchestral salute in Yiddish to my Jewish roots in recognition of Yom Kippur.

The Know-It-All

I just finished a very silly book called The Know-It-All, about a guy who reads the Encyclopedia Britannica in order to become the smartest person in the world. It was a bit of a slog, but there were a couple of passages (out of nearly 400 pages) that struck me.

A fable recounted to the author by a family friend: "This [Middle Eastern] potentate called a meeting of the wise men in his kingdom, and he said, 'I want you to gather all the world's knowledge together in one place so that my sons can read it and learn.' The wise men went off, and after a year, they came back with twenty-five volumes of knowledge. The potentate looked at it and he said, 'No. It's too long. Make it shorter.' So the wise men went off for another year and they came back with one single volume. The potentate looked at it and said, 'No. Still too long.' So the wise men went off for another year. When they came back, they gave the potentate a single piece of paper with one sentence on it. A single sentence. You know what the sentence was? The sentence was: 'This too shall pass.'"

An excerpt from the encyclopedia entry on Tolstoy referring to Anna Karenina's brother Stiva: "Stiva, though never wishing ill, wastes resources, neglects his family and regards pleasure as the purpose of life. The figure of Stiva is perhaps designed to suggest that evil, no less than good, derives from the small moral choices human beings make moment by moment."

Fourth anniversary

It is my daughter C's birthday—she's 19—and a kind of birthday for me too. Four years ago on this day, I found the tumor that turned me into a prematurely aged gray-haired androgene and sent me on a path into a dark forest filled with spooks and shades. I'm in a clearing now, enjoying the light of health, dancing with NED (no evidence of disease), as they say. But I know that the next visit to the doctor, the next blood test, the next MRI could send me back into the woods.

My daughter's celebrating her birthday with her friends. My birthday is a quieter affair.

Sleepless in Manhattan redux

Lately my chronic insomnia has reached a new peak. Unless I take a pill, sleep is a four-hour deal for me, with another four hours spent trying to calm my panic about various worries. In the past when I've had a worsening of my night life, I've tried to rest my mind by focusing on something soothing, something going right in my life. But lately there is not a whole lot of that. Of course, it's all in how you look at things, but with two sisters-in-law with cancer (head-and-neck and uterine), a brother with colon cancer, a close friend with late-stage uterine cancer, a son with real estate woes, a daughter with a penchant for out-of-control spending and a lawless approach to curfews, frail parents (my mother just had a grand-mal seizure last night) a continent away, a job situation that looks direr by the day, cats that throw up and smear excrement—there's no place pretty to look. Except for Other, snoring peacefully beside me. If he would just stop snoring ...

Yoga bliss

It's hard to explain to skeptics the deep visceral appeal of yoga, how it's different from ordinary exercise. Today my wonderful Sunday yoga teacher put it in broad terms. "When you do the stair master, you try to zone out," he said. "But in yoga, you try to focus fully on your body and your breath."

He described the physical practice of yoga as laying down impressions, so that each time you enter into a pose or sequence, you move deeper into it. And because you are fully focused on your body and your breath, the impressions are engraved in your mind as well.

So as you walk the path of yoga, you're not just following it, you're laying it down as you go.

Use it or lose it

I got a little shock about a week ago, when my physical therapist (whom I like a lot) gave me my walking papers and said I should proceed on my own with the exercises he'd given me. "I'll continue to improve, right?" I asked, since I'm still in a lot of pain at night from several herniated disks, and I haven't returned full tilt to yoga. "Yes," he said, "but you really need to adjust  your expectations and focus on maintaining rather than progressing. After all, you're well ahead of other people your age in terms of what you can still do." What! Are they even allowed to say such discouraging things?

His well-meaning comment cast a pall over my week. Would I never be able to do, say, the peacock? Or the turtle? Or any of the other poses that keep me up at night figuring out how precisely to approach them? I know yoga is not about the physical practice. But the physical practice provides some wonderful thrills, and I'd hate to forgo them. 

Then I read two very encouraging pieces of research: one from the journal Skeletal Radiology, suggesting that for runners, "continuous exercise is protective, rather than destructive" to knees; and the other from the New England Journal of Medicine, suggesting that weight training, once thought to trigger lymphedema in breast-cancer patients who had had lymphedectomies or radiation, actually helps prevent lymphedema. 

These studies aren't precisely at odds with my PT's comment, but they threw me into a much better frame of mind, one that allowed me to return to yoga feeling I was engaged in a healing practice rather than a pointless one.

Mia's World

Every once in a while when I'm rolling along in what I assume is a shared reality, I suddenly discover that I'm all alone in Mia's World, not hanging with all the people inhabiting the real world. For instance, Other and I, along with C sometimes, have been going to B Island for a dozen years. There is no running water, no electricity, no landline-phone service, no television, no stores, no cars on B Island. We cook, eat, swim, kayak, read, sleep, hang out with friends—and that's about all. Without the ability to shop on a daily basis, a dramatic transformation takes place: consumer cravings slip away over the course of a week or two. Much as dirty begins to feel clean and isolation begins to feel cozy, having nothing begins to feel like having something special. This is one of the key experiences of being on the island—the sense of contentment that flourishes when the cravings disappear. I assumed this was what everyone was going for.

But! I suddenly realized that we do-withouts are in the minority. Most of the regulars on the island have boats—and drive them much as suburban landlubbers drive SUVs. Landfall—with its stores and cars and other conveniences—is just a rev of an engine away. So, what exactly are these other folks savoring about the island? Everyone is passionate about the island, so there is some magic that they're responding to. But what precisely is it?