Day 2741: Troubling Questions

What troubling questions are on your mind, here and now?

My troubling questions include:

• What do I do about the realities of white supremacy?
• How do I deal with the realities of the coronavirus?
• Why is wearing a mask a political issue?
• What does the American flag even mean these days?
• How will we know when (and if) to euthanize our cat Oscar, who has cancer?
• Why am I so worried about making mistakes?
• Should I go back to being a vegetarian?
• Why is it so difficult to wait?
• Why is it so difficult for the human mind to stay in the present moment?
• Why are people so concerned about their image and how they appear to others?
• Why is it that when life is more difficult,  people often feel worse about themselves?
• Why are trauma and abuse so often multi-generational?
• What do you do when you suspect a friend or colleague is having a mental breakdown?
• Does power corrupt and does absolute power corrupt absolutely?
• What is going to happen to nature as the world keeps warming?
• What kind of world is my 22-year-old son going to live in?
• Should we try to protect those we love from pain?

Do you see any troubling questions in these recent photos? (And is that a troubling question?)

\\\\

If you have any troubling questions about why I have slinkies in my office, see this very early blog post.

Jennifer Eberhardt answers troubling questions about racial bias in this excellent TED talk:

Unquestionably, that is a very important video.

Circling  back to the image that inspired today’s title …

… here is the live studio version of “Cloisonné” from Album Raises New and Troubling Questions by They Might Be Giants:

 

Feel free to raise new and troubling questions or answer any question in a comment, below.

Thanks to all who took the trouble to read this “Troubling Questions” post today, including YOU.

Day 1711: You could be at work now

Yesterday, on my drive into work, I saw this sign:

I know that sign was trying to sell me something, but I read that sign differently. I realized I could be at work now if

• I had left much earlier or
• I was working on other things, like solving world problems,  while I was sitting in traffic.

Actually, I AM at work now.  I’m working on this blog.  My thoughts, which go everywhere — into the past, the present, and the future — are at work, also.  Sometimes that thinking work is exhausting, especially when I get worked up.  I’m working on that.

Are you at work now?   You could be.

Let’s see if my latest photos work today.

 

All those photos were taken at work except for one, which was taken on my way into work.  It doesn’t  take much work to notice those Slinkies at work in my office.  People at work bring me slinkies because I work hard at explaining that human progress is like a coil (including a slinky).  We work on similar problems over and over again,  seemingly going in circles. No matter how hard we work, it can feel like we’re not making progress. However, if we work on it, we’ll notice that we’re always moving up. Each time we work our way around over similar territory, we have more wisdom and knowledge.  It takes work to incorporate that wisdom, but I’m working on the belief that it’s possible.

If you want to work your way to another post about how human progress works which I worked on during the first week of this blog, that works here.

You could be at work now listening to this tune that I enjoyed on my way to work yesterday (which includes a reference to slinkies). I think Mark Winkler does nice work.

My cats are at work now

… but neither of them plays piano. Yet.

Maybe Oscar’s working on that.

You could be at work now on a comment, you know.

Working thanks to Mark Winkler, slinkies, cats, pianos, and humans, especially those who are working on reading this blog, here and now.

 

Day 1104: Getting around

Getting around to my WordPress statistics page, yesterday morning, I noticed that the daily stats about my blog readership were getting around to some surprising numbers. There’s no getting around how odd these numbers were, as follows:

1. There had been only ONE visitor to my blog,
2. the blog had been viewed  THIRTY-THREE times, and
3. the THIRTY-THREE  views were from the United States, New Zealand, Puerto Rico, Canada, United Kingdom, France, India, Belgium, Hong Kong, Kenya, Romania,  Switzerland, and Germany.

When I was getting  around to leave for the day, I got around to check my WordPress statistics one more time  and there was still only ONE visitor and now SEVENTY-SEVEN views from even more locations around the world.

Wow. That one visitor of mine was really getting around.

Now I’m getting around to asking you this question:  Were you my single visitor, yesterday morning?  And how did you manage getting around to all those countries AND reading my blog that many times?

Now I should getting around to showing you the photos I took yesterday, as I was getting around to (1) a pacemaker clinic appointment at one major Boston hospital,  (2) my work at another major Boston hospital, and (3) home. Because I’d finally gotten around to getting orthotic supports for my feet two days earlier, it was noticeably easier getting around by foot.

One of yesterday’s photos inspired me to title this post “Getting Around.”  If you get around to guessing which photo that is, I hope you’ll be getting around to sharing that guess in a comment.

 

 

Because I was on “Quick Response” at work  yesterday, which involves getting around the huge Primary Care Practice  and responding whenever a patient needs the support of a psychotherapist, I got around to taking only one photo at work, which I’m now getting around to showing you for the second time:

Despite being on Quick Response yesterday, I got around to hanging up that getting-around double helix a patient had gotten around to giving me earlier in the week. If your mind is having difficulty getting around the significance of those going-around coils, here‘s a post I got around to writing my  first week of WordPress  blogging (when I had at least four visitors, judging from the comments there).  If you get around to reading that earlier post, please get around to letting me know.

Finally, I’m getting around to ending this post, with gratitude to all who are getting around as best they can, including you!

Day 688: Multiple times

It’s time for me to write my daily blog post!

It’s the 688th time I’ve done this.

I wonder how many more times I’ll write one of these?

Every time  I have a thought like that last one, above, I think  of time running out.

The time between my finishing that last sentence and starting this one = approximately two minutes.

Swarn Gill, who has commented on this blog many times and who has not visited for some time (I think the last time was here), often thinks and writes about time. I haven’t visited his blog for some time, either, but I just took the time to do that.

I wish I had more time to visit Swarn’s excellent blog and other ones here, too.

In the time I spend as an individual and group therapist, I invite people to give less time to guilt and shame. Many times, I’ve told people “You’re doing the best you can.”  However,  I continue to spend time having those feelings (although less time than I used to).

This reminds me that when I spent time yesterday writing a blog post, I did not include any time for music. I’m making up for that, today, times two.

(“No Absolute Time” by Jean-Luc Ponty is absolutely here on YouTube now.)

That’s the second time I’ve referred to that tune in my posts.

I’m going to include this next “Time” song two times.

(Live version of “Time Out of Mind” found this time here on YouTube)

(Steely Dan spent a lot of time in the studio creating the original version of “Time Out of Mind.”)

Is there time for you to comment, perhaps telling me your favorite song about time?

Today, I won’t have time to walk to and from work, listening to music, because I need to get to parent-teacher conferences at my son’s high school, on time. The first meeting starts, according to them, at

12:10:00

I wonder what that says about my son Aaron’s school’s concept of time?

Last year, around this time, I spent a lot of time thinking, feeling, and writing about November 22, 1963, the exact time when

• John F. Kennedy was assassinated and
• I got my first heart surgery and cardiac pacemaker, at age 10.

This year, that time will not be out of mind for me. However, I know my experience will be different, this time around.

Each time we go around and over old experiences, we do it differently.

Absolutely, I invite you to take the time to read this post, about that. People tell me, all the time, that “The Ascending Coil” a/k/a “The Spiral” helps them heal and grow.  (The last time I heard that was yesterday.)

Yesterday, I was not thinking about writing a post about time, until I heard both “Time Out of Mind” and “No Absolute Time” during the time it took me to walk away from work.  Nevertheless, before that time, I took the time to take these photos:

I took the time to snap that last picture when I thought that beloved time-keeper was broken, because that was NOT the correct time. It was the third time, since the time change this month, that clock had stopped.

Not for the first time, I felt fear: was my time with that wonderful clock over and done?

When I got some down time, I was able to make some changes to that clock.

I wonder what time I’ll see on its face when I walk into my office today?

It’s that time, dear readers:

Thanks for taking the time to visit here, today.

Day 280: No Worries, Part Deux

Exactly 39 days ago, I wrote a post called No worries. If I do say so myself, it was a good post.  And other people seemed to like it, too.

What are you waiting for?  Go check it out by clicking on that link above.  I’ll wait.

Back?  Okay.

Yes, I wanted to re-visit that post today, because, frankly, during the past week, I lost track of the lessons of that post.

In other words, I’ve been worried.  My mind has been doing this:

Even though I believed it, when I wrote 39 days ago, that worry doesn’t help us,  I still circled back into worry, this past week.

(Psssst! If you’ve ever lost track of a previously learned lesson, see another previous post — called “The Ascending Coil” —  for a perhaps helpful “reframe” of the perhaps unhelpful concepts of “backsliding” and “losing ground.”)

So where was I, before the aside in parentheses?

Oh, yes, I was going to re-cap some facts, to explain why I “backslid” into worry last week:

1. Last week, I was surprised by a new development with my unusual heart. I went into atrial fibrillation, where I will most likely stay, for the rest of my life.
2. As a result of #1, I will need to take medication (to counteract the increased risk of stroke) for the rest of my life.
3. When unexpected changes happen, my first reaction is often to  catastrophize — a cognitive distortion I seem to share with many other human beings.  (For definitions of catastrophizing and other common cognitive distortions, click here.)
4. While I actually like certain kinds of surprises (e.g., I’d LOVE somebody to be clever enough to succeed in surprising me with a party, some day), other kinds of surprises make me cranky.  And when I’m cranky, I tend to worry more.

I think those four reasons, above,  are enough to explain why it sucked to be me, last week.

Actually, I don’t think it actually sucked to be me, at least not completely.  In ways, it was wonderful to be me, last week.

I’ve just always wanted to say that:  “It sucked to be me.”   And I haven’t said (or written that) before, until now.

Okay! I don’t know about you, but I‘ve gotten a lot out of this blog post,  already, including these benefits:

1. I got to boss around my readers, insisting that they look at a previous blog post I’d written,
2. I got to brag about that blog post,
3. I got to brag about the fact that I’m so smart, that people have tried and failed to give me surprise parties in the past,
4. I got to use the term “It sucked to be me” for the first time and, in general,
5. I got to  complain about my week.

That last point reminds me of a favorite movie quote (at 1:00 in this two-minute clip):

If you had trouble hearing that quote at the one-minute mark,,  Dr. Walter J. Kornbluth (played by Eugene Levy) said this:

What a week I’m having!

But you know what? I hope I’m not spoiling anything for anybody,  but by the end of the movie “Splash,”  Dr. Kornbluth (as well as all the other characters I cared about)  had No Worries.

And I feel safe in saying, now, that I’m back to No Worries, too.

Thanks to Eugene Levy, Tom Hanks,  everyone else who collaborated on “Splash,” other creative collaborators everywhere,  and to you, too, for reading today