Retirement in the Mix: Resisting "Gone": February 2015

Saturday, February 21, 2015

On not losing the sky

On Friday, before the weekend snow storm started blowing in, I went with a friend to the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge, where I’d never been. To tell the truth, I’ve never felt drawn to this place, despite its handy proximity to Denver (and to a slightly lesser extent, to Boulder) and its reputation as home to a range of wildlife. My strongest association to the arsenal comes from my childhood, when I remember it as a sort of mysterious place where important wartime activities occurred—though I never knew what sort of activities those were. Then I remember a period when they were pumping waste into the ground, and Denver suddenly experienced a rash of small earthquakes. My mom told a humorous story of being in a sort of … um … compromised sitting position and getting, in her words, “jostled” from her throne by one of those small tremors. The next thing I recall was the plan to clean up the arsenal, and then tales of eagles and deer making a home there, along with other winged and four-footed creatures.

When my friend suggested a trip to RMA NWF, I was more than willing because I’ve been hankering to get outside, having been cooped up by my lingering orthopedic miseries. My friend, with whom I’ve walked many, many miles over the years, was game to make it a mostly-driving and light-walking outing, so off we went. Sure enough, we saw flocks of assorted species of ducks on the lakes, lots of red-tailed hawks, a couple of harriers, a slew of magpies, a kestrel, many mule deer and a few white-tail deer – and other stuff I’m not recalling now. We also heard a lot of meadowlarks, whose lovely liquid song always signals the arrival of spring for me. Every year, my heart smiles the first time I hear it, even as I realize I’d forgotten to notice its absence over the winter.

But maybe best of all, we saw a blue, prairie-wide sky, saw sky and clouds reflected off of lakes, felt the breeze in our faces and watched it in the grasses and cattails. I hadn’t realized just how much I’ve been missing the wonderful, complicated Colorado sky. I’ve written here before about how much I love this sky, and this blog is splattered with sky pictures in assorted hues. Still, like the meadowlark’s song, I hadn’t realized how much I missed it until it was there, above and all around me.

Then, serendipitously, today’s New York Times carried an article called “What If We Lost the Sky?” This article was prompted by a recent report by the National Research Council exploring the possibility of “geoengineering,” artificially changing Earth’s climate—especially techniques for cooling the climate through artificial means. Among these would be introducing aerosols into the sky to reflect back some of the sun's radiation and thereby reduce the incoming heat—a strategy that might turn the sky white. The idea of fixing through human intervention what we’ve broken by human intervention carries a whole host of promising and frightening implications, which I’ll save for another time. But the title of this article really caught my attention, took me back to Friday’s excursion and then to many other days and nights beneath gorgeous skies.

What if … ?

Although some folks might turn immediately to practical questions prompted by the notion of messing with the sky (what would that do to agriculture?), I was especially struck by a different question raised by this article: the question of awe. It turns out that some folks have studied the importance of awe in our lives, that sense of feeling connected to something much larger than ourselves, of being a (small) part of the vast cosmos. It seems that this experience of awe is especially evoked by the sky—in fact, a clear starry night sky, the Milky Way arrayed overhead, is sort of the prototypic source of that feeling. Awe may also come in moments viewing the ocean, the Grand Canyon, the open rolling prairie, the mountains, and more. But the sky seems to be the premier source of awe.

Maybe this is what I’ve been missing, I thought. Not only the fresh air and scenery and the wide sky, but that sense of vastness, with me tiny in its presence. Interestingly, this research has also shown that the feeling of awe may be an antidote to egocentrism, may form a foundation for our connection to others and our commitment to our collective well-being. Hmm. Maybe I’ve been short on that, too.

So, it seems that the clear recommendation for our individual mental health and the collective good is simple: spend some with the sky. If you’re interested in taking on this project, you can warm up to the task by watching a short video embedded in this article, which shows 365 days of hour-by-hour videos of the sky over San Francisco. Nice. Nice music, too.

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Monday, February 16, 2015

The view from the other side

A couple of weekends ago, we went to the annual Creating Change conference put on by the National LGBTQ Task Force, in my opinion, the grassroots heart of the queer rights movement. At the conference and since, I’ve thought a lot about how rapidly and how dramatically the movement is changing. I’ve also been reflecting on what it’s like to be more an appreciative observer than an active participant in the energetic directions I watched unfold there. And this train of thought, in turn, reminds me of my recent intention (largely successful) to look differently on the expansive life behind me from the perspective of the foreshortened one ahead.

In case that sounds a bit morbid, let me elaborate. Hopefully, with succinct clarity.

Lately, partly because of some persistent orthopedic problems, I’ve found myself slipping easily into regret for all the things I know I can’t do any more—and fantasizing, in an admittedly neurotic way, about all the things I fear I won’t be able to do any more. I’m enough of a psychologist to know that this sort of preoccupation isn’t going to help much of anything. So, I’ve been trying—with greater or lesser success—to transform my regret into gratitude. As I’m reminded of things I can’t do, I try to focus my thoughts and feelings on the pleasure I’ve gleaned from all the years I could do those things. This seems so simple as to be trite—but it has actually helped a lot. I have spent many happy moments recalling past adventures with great pleasure—an experience that would be nice enough if it happened against a neutral background, and it’s really wonderful happening against the alternative of moping regret.

So, I’ve been thinking about this reframing as I’ve pondered my response to the conference. First, let me tell you a bit about Creating Change. During the conference, some very engaged, very vocal, very dedicated folks basically claimed the conference stage and the attention of about 4000 people in the name of causes about which they were passionate. The first such event happened during the opening gathering, when a large group of trans activists spoke for about half an hour about the need for the movement to recognize the dire plight of trans people, especially trans women, especially trans women of color, who are being murdered at a terrifying rate and largely outside public awareness. Or even the awareness, they pointed out, of people in this progressive wing of the LGBTQ movement. The next morning, another large group—this time people from Ferguson, joined by other people of color—similarly claimed the stage and our collective attention for a large chunk of time, this time with a plea for the movement to pay more attention to the plight of people of color, especially (but not solely) queer people of color.

In each case, the conference organizers granted them time and space, uncontested. In fact, subsequent speakers, including the mistress of ceremonies (comedian Kate Clinton) and the ED of the Task Force, thanked them for demanding our attention. (As an aside, can I tell you how great it is to be affiliated with an organization that so totally walks its talk, that actually wants to be held accountable, that wants to grow with the movement?) But the protests were only one part of Change. There were also workshops on all manner of topics from intersex identity through inclusionary language and strategies for responding to anti-LGBTQ rhetoric to the role of faith in queer lives and of queer people in communities of faith. And then there were the colorful, performative gatherings in the lobby, the excited greetings and comfortable chatter among folks who likely can rarely be so open about their identities and their preferred manners of being in the world.

In all of these—and, in fact, throughout the conference—the buzzing energy of young LGBTQ people was rich and commanding. For one thing, they simply have more energy! Heck, their masqueerade ball was just starting about the time I crashed for the night. But beyond that, they are so alive with the enthusiasm of being relatively new to the movement, of being in a place where they could be fully themselves, whatever that means, surrounded by people who will accept that. A place where their voices were actually being heard. I, on the other hand, was aware that I wasn’t part of that energy—much as I respect and delight in it. My days of being at the leading edge, the surf in front of the wave, are (comfortably) behind me. This is partly because of changing priorities, movement fatigue, the physical realities of my particular aging trajectory, and likely a bunch of personal peculiarities. But it’s also because I’m simply not that wave. I’ve never been and will never be a queer youth coming of age in 2015, an era of same-sex marriage and growing emphasis on trans issues, diversity, and intersectionality. That experience—the experience they’re having that is constructing the movement and their place in it—is not an experience I’ve had. For me to presume that my particular take on the meaning of the movement should somehow shape its direction now, in a moment so startling new, would be, well, bizarre.

That's not to say that old people like me (and the many others who were there … although definitely not as many as the young people who were there) have nothing to offer. That, too, would be a misrepresentation of the vibrancy and depth and texture of this movement. But it is to say that this time is youth’s turn, youth’s wave, not ours. They are the ones who will live out their lives in this shape-shifting movement and in this world so ambivalent toward their realities. So, instead of bemoaning how the movement has “passed me by,” I choose to take pleasure in their joy in this moment and mine in recalling my time in the heart of the movement—and that includes lots of years of feeling like my cohort was hot stuff. Moments as a queer lay person and a queer professional when I felt like what I was doing would matter, big time. Now, other folks get to have that feeling—and they can do it partly because we did, when it was our turn.

None of this is to say that I can’t be actively involved, still productive in moving LGBTQ equality forward—just as I can continue to have life adventures, if in a different way. Heck, I contribute to a weekly radio show on these issues, I occasionally do professional writing about them, and in my daily life, I still talk and write about these topics at the drop of a hat. But the edgy stuff I saw at the conference—including the protests, but also the creative self-presentation, the linguistic complexity, the comfortable ease with things that still feel awkward to me, all of that—is theirs, not mine. And I’m fine with that.

For me, part of taking pleasure in my life is recognizing that the struggles of old age—or any other age, for that matter—come with a flip side. I’m not talking here about the silver lining school of aging. I don’t mean (only) that growing old has its merits and its particular strengths, although I do think that’s true. Instead, I mean that even the flat-out losses of aging can be signals for joy, cues to recall and celebrate the things that I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing in my life. I would never have noticed that I can’t backpack for days in desert canyons any more or travel hundreds of miles through the mountains by bike if I’d never done it. And I would never notice that the queer movement has wonderful new, sparkling treasures to reveal if I hadn’t been involved enough to be at this conference and notice the remarkable changes we’re now witnessing. Considered this way, recalling those now-past experiences isn't sad; instead, it lets me smile through them again, gives them another spin in my mind, invites another spark of joy. It's like a bonus ride.

Sometimes I think the view from this side is so expansive because it lets me see the other side, my younger years, with such heightened clarity and gratitude. A fringe benefit of watching the movement grow, right on past me, bearing the mark of its generations of forebearers. Knowing I've been there, too.

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Tuesday, February 3, 2015

Grounded between good and evil

“The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being,” wrote the Russian author and historian Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Mary Chapin Carpenter expanded on that pithy statement in her song “A Dream Like This,” written for the “Dead Man Walking” album:

We’re neither light nor darkness

We’re neither night or day

We’re neither kind nor heartless

We’re neither lost or saved

We’re neither still nor moving

We’re neither held or free

Oh to be so human

Oh to be

We all want to—maybe even dream that we can—transcend that often-fine line between good and evil, harboring only good, or at least only good intentions, in our hearts. But if we look carefully and consider honestly, few among us would deny that less noble impulses sometimes creep in. Solzhenitsyn and Chapin may have something here.

That line between good and evil has been much debated in the public sphere of late. The recent dispute about the meaning and merits of the film “American Sniper” has inspired lots of thoughtful people to examine what it means to celebrate an “authentic American hero” who killed a record of number of people during his tour in the Middle East, and by doing so, saved countless lives of American service members and of local civilians. Or to denounce the glorification of killing, even (or especially) by one of our own. To honor the warrior, perhaps especially because he was subsequently murdered by a vet he was trying to help, or to insist that war is rarely glorious and that these wars have certainly not been. An interesting piece in the New York Times encapsulates the arguments about this film between “hand-wringing lefties and chest-thumping righties.” It’s worth a read, and you’ll find it right here.

Left unaddressed in most of this is the complicated urge to claim that both arguments can be true—or, correlatively, that both can be false. The line between good and evil runs through the heart of this nation just as it does through each of ours.

A similar ruckus, which has simmered for several years within the American Psychological Association, my own professional org, has recently spilled out into the mainstream media. In this case, the issue is the participation of psychologists in torture—in the originally denied, later acknowledged, and subsequently forbidden program of torture enacted against “enemy combatants” held at Guantanamo and several “dark sites” around the globe. If you haven’t followed the story of some psychologists' role in this, you’ll find a pretty thorough overview of it in this New York Times article.

This controversy, too, pits “good” against “evil.” Early revelations of psychology’s apparent organizational complicity several years ago inspired many to withdraw from the association in protest. Then, as now, many people insisted that psychologists’ participation in the program of “enhanced interrogation” violated psychology’s core ethical principles, not the least of which is the ancient medical dictum to “first, do no harm.” Others insist that psychologists’ participation in interrogation ensured that prisoners would be treated humanely and that their well-being would be of primary concern. How much worse would it be, these folks asked, if there were no one there who understood such issues? In those early years and even since this controversy reached the public sphere, these claims and their advocates have failed to convince those representing either position of the rightness (the righteousness?) of the other.

Left largely unaddressed here, also, has been the possibility that both positions are justified in some sense, and both are flawed, that neither side can know all the things that the other side knows, that even knowing everything about everything, one can be left ambivalent about such complicated issues. That the line between good and evil cuts through the heart of this discipline as it does through each of ours.

Oh, it’s easy enough for each of us to be sure that she is Right and the “other side” (as if it were that simple) is Wrong. I made that very claim when I resigned from APA in protest over the organization’s failure to confront this issue directly, and I remain convinced that my decision was right. But what do I know—and what do I not know—from my safe and comfortable vantage point as a concerned but distant observer? What would I think if I were actually there, in the actual mortal battle or in the position of making decisions that would determine the fates of countless people?

How can I possibly know what I would know with great certainty then?

I had thought about this occasionally over the years, even though I was clear that snipers are not my heroes and torture is not OK. And then I was reminded how simplistic my absolute conclusions might be when I saw a play by George Brant called “Grounded.” The play has just one character—a woman pilot who leaves her position flying fighter jets in the Middle East to have a child. Back in the States, she finds that despite the joy she takes in her marriage and her daughter, she misses flying terribly. Well, actually, she misses the sky and the feel of flying. So she re-ups and gets assigned to a base in Nevada, where she will fly drones long-distance all day, 7 days a week. She’ll technically live with her family, but that possibility quickly morphs into added stress as she tries to live two very disparate lives—think loving and gentle vs. intentionally lethal. During the day, she “flies” drones by watching a screen and manipulating a stick that guides a drone over the desert 7500 miles away. By night, she sees her daughter and husband briefly and sleeps. The commute across the desert—a different one, to be sure—is her only break between those two lives.

Early on, although she’d deadly bored with “flying,” she is pleased, even jubilant, at opportunities to take out “guilties.” Then she starts noticing body parts flying from the blasts. Slowly, initially subtly but increasingly blatantly, her world begins to unravel. She is less sure, less committed in her work as a long-distance warrior, more disconnected and distant from her nearby family. She searches, painfully, for some sort of solace, maybe even some resolution to this impossible dilemma she faces: killing “guilties” by day and nurturing a family by (brief) night. Especially when the bad guys turn out to have body parts, and then friends, and then families. I don’t want to tell the whole story in case you get to see it. (Watch for it! I would go again, and then again in an instant if it returned.) It’s just that it all comes together—or apart—as she confronts this awful dilemma of finding both good and evil in herself, in her government’s actions, in her enemies, in the world.

I saw the play at the Dairy Center in Boulder, where the pilot was played by Laura Norman, who occasionally performs with the Boulder Ensemble Theater Company. She was just extraordinary in her depiction of this woman—her early thrill at flying, her delight in her new family, her begrudging move to piloting drones, and her gradual descent into … what? The line between good and evil. As one reviewer wrote, Grounded “lets no one off easy… Clap all you want—and you’ll want to clap a lot—but the game stays with you.” The game stays with you.

None of this makes a sniper a heroic figure for our children or torture an acceptable strategy in my mind. But I have to consider the likelihood that reality is not as simple as my mind.

A fuller rendition of the Solzhenitsyn quote above goes like this:

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

I imagine that if he saw Grounded or read about the flap surrounding American Sniper or APA’s now-public turmoil, Solzhenitsyn would be stroking his beard and nodding, knowingly.